A couple of years back, I dragged my agnostic husband, Brian, to a Calvinist megachurch. Calvinist means God preselected a few humans for salvation and the rest for eternal torture. We sat there for an hour, goats among the sheep. Brian’s reaction? “That was the best indie rock I’ve heard in a long time!”

Christians have a love-hate relationship with popular music. I came of age during a hate phase. Rock was diabolical. In my generation, Alice Cooper, missionary kid, played out his parents’ fears about rock music, chopping up baby dolls and screeching about necrophilia while dressed as a 17th Century witch. Having dabbled on the enemy side of a fantastical spiritual war that supposedly encompasses us all, he now attends an evangelical mega in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In his youth, Alice had to choose between edgy rock and Jesus. By contrast, my nephew (raised by the same woman who raised me on Swan Lake—my mom) spent his teen years consuming a steady diet of Christian heavy metal. Mom’s complaints were focused on aesthetics. Matthew’s beloved “screamers” were distasteful, but not dangerous. Heavy metal had been co-opted. Instead of sketching daggers and bones dripping with stylized blood like secular metal fans, Matt could draw hearts and crosses dripping with stylized blood—and that was ok.

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