The divine ascent of the Christian-coded male pop star

Vox

08-07-2025

writes about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they're considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
'We wanna thank God for giving us the grace to give him a little glory in this building tonight,' rapper-slash-country hit-generator Jelly Roll said onstage in May at the 60th Academy of Country Music Awards. The speech came during an exultant performance of his collab with Shaboozey, 'Amen,' which features the chorus, 'Somebody say a prayer for me / 'Cause the pills ran out and I still can't sleep.' The song details a religious devotion earned through a struggle with darker forces. 'Even a crooked road can still get you home,' Jelly Roll concluded.
Jelly Roll might seem like a surprising mouthpiece for this kind of preachy moment, but the song is a hit even outside the country bubble. In a recent article for Christianity Today, musicologist Kelsey McGinnis identified the work of artists like Jelly Roll, Brandon Lake, and Thomas Rhett as 'barstool conversion rock,' a notably masculine form of music that sits adjacent to contemporary Christian music (CCM).
But that subgenre is far from the only religiously tinged music — created by everyone from devout evangelicals to open agnostics, from country artists to rappers — climbing the charts today; a number of pop songs are likewise courting the divine. Benson Boone's 'Beautiful Things,' which arguably functions as a direct-appeal to God, was a ubiquitous bop for most of 2024. Alex Warren's 'Ordinary,' a love song that easily doubles as a Christian worship song, has slowly climbed the charts over the past few months to become one of 2025's biggest breakout hits (it's currently No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100).
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By establishing an industry-leading sound and a distinct identity, in a time of increased polarization around religion, Christian-coded music has finally broken containment and conquered the airwaves.
Christian rock has been around for decades. What changed?
Thirty years ago, evangelical and secular culture were very much divided, says culture writer and religious historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez. 'There was a much more cohesive, and even in many cases, all-encompassing Christian culture [for] kids raised in the 1990s,' she said. 'It was possible to be completely insulated from secular culture. … I certainly grew up with the understanding that top 40 music was evil.' Christian radio, Christian record labels, and Christian bookstores all functioned as gatekeepers, vetting everything they passed on to consumers.
'There was a lot of money to be made in distinctively Christian merchandise,' Du Mez said. 'But of course, it wasn't presented as a business. It was presented as ministry and as evangelism.' It was also often considered hacky or trite. 'The kind of joke about Christian culture is that they just copy what's happening in secular spaces and then produce things of lower quality,' Du Mez said.
Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding echoed this. Christian contemporary music used to sound like 'whatever's happening in pop music, five years too late,' he told me. A fan of a secular band could usually find a Christian equivalent and listen to that instead, guilt-free. Like other guilt-free treats, it might not quite hit the spot — but for decades, many Christians eschewed the pleasures of mainstream media, even as their own art trailed behind it.
Christian pop, however, was not the only form of Christian music available. There was also church worship music (also known as praise music). Worship music gained traction in the late '70s and '80s, when seminal CCM songwriters like Rich Mullins modernized the classic Protestant hymnal structure by combining it with the aesthetics of modern Black gospel, emphasizing a soaring, anthemic rock chorus that everyone could sing along to. This structure has come to define praise music ever since.
In the '90s and early aughts, as megachurches and Christian conferences exploded in popularity, along with their concert-like worship services, worship music took on increased cultural significance. This music was meant to be sung by church congregations, intended to invoke or encourage religious euphoria, even conversion. It took a basic pop-rock style and imbued it with spiritual ambiance, codifying a big, church revival sound.
Then came the rise of the internet. The increased interconnectivity of diverse communities, the subsequent explosion of the smart phone and social media, and the demise of the cultural mainstay that was the Christian bookstore all meant Christians found it much harder, if not impossible, to totally isolate themselves from the rest of the world.
'Sometimes that's just what they are and what they do. Sometimes that's their truth.' — -Todd Nathanson, YouTube music vlogger
This increased interaction with the secular world both coincided with and fueled the erosion of the Christian music industry, which also meant that the centers of distribution and influence for Christian art changed. Now, instead of getting Christian music mainly from Christian radio and CCM artists, many Christians began to encounter it most regularly through their weekly Sunday worship service — which offered not 'pop music, five years too late' but worship music.
Now, musical artists who grew up in the church, hearing worship music week after week, were also hearing and interacting with secular music and culture. They could more freely mix and learn from different musical styles. And soon, instead of merely following behind pop music, Christian music instead helped spawn an enormously influential offshoot of its own sound — via the biggest band of the 21st century.
Harding identified Coldplay as the through line between all that aughts Christian worship music and songs like 'Ordinary.' In a 2019 Rolling Stone interview, band frontman Chris Martin, who was raised Christian, spoke of being influenced as a child in the '90s by church music — by 'these beautiful, big songs.' That bigness, Harding said, is crucial to what came next. Specifically, Harding said, Coldplay's 2005 hit 'Fix You' popularized a song structure that's now ubiquitous among today's faith-adjacent pop music.
'Start infinitely small,' he said. 'You're down on your knees praying to God.' As it unfolds, 'You can see the whole cathedral around you. You're starting to have this divine experience.' That 'infinite build' structure of 'Fix You' now infuses the work of a huge number of highly successful artists of the '10s and '20s — think Arcade Fire, Imagine Dragons, or any number of 'stomp clap hey' groups — and is still featured by Christian-associated artists like Benson Boone and Alex Warren. Whether intentionally or not, their music has incorporated the vibe of a Sunday worship service, and that vibe is shaping the industry's sound rather than following it.
This musical wave may have emerged, however indirectly, from Christian culture, but it's managed to transcend the awkward resonances of a post-Hillsong Justin Bieber, mid-spiral Kanye West, or the Creed Cruise.
Where we are now: Masculinity, politics, and hollering to God
As Christians lost the ability to isolate themselves from the secular world, they also started to see value in interacting with secular culture.
Du Mez suggests that whereas before, Christians intentionally isolated themselves from the mainstream, in the current era, some are increasingly willing to accept and embrace secular influences because they increasingly conflate Christianity with a right-wing social and political agenda. Thus secular media and products that are not distinctly Christian, but which nevertheless reflect or promote their shared social and political values, are finding welcome among Christians who might otherwise disregard them.
'It's not always compatible with what most people would understand to be core Christian values or theological tenets, but if it hits [certain] masculinity talking points, if it provides an attractive vision of throwback femininity or even retrograde femininity, then it's embraced by these spaces,' Du Mez said.
This new and evolving embrace of secular messaging arguably explains why so many Christians are warming up to (and pushing up the charts) country and rock artists who, despite referencing Jesus here and there in their lyrics, would once have been viewed by them as morally dubious. This contradiction serves as the essence of barstool conversion rock: moral messages coming from spurious messengers. In writing for Christianity Today, McGinnis marries barstool rock to both country music and to 'a web of crisscrossing cultural threads, including conservative politics, party culture, and evangelicalism.' While this subgenre overlaps with the much-discussed wave of 'bro country,' it adds a layer of respectability via an appeal to faith.
If each of these songs involves a reckoning between the singer and God, 'even the reckoning is performed.'
Indeed, what unites all of these songs across a broad sonic range is their confessional stance, as well as the performance of raw vulnerability from each male artist — a trait that modern men, especially ones steeped in a culture of conservatism, often have difficulty accessing. At the nexus of Jelly Roll's gritty but spiritual collaborations and Morgan Wallen exiting Saturday Night Live for 'God's country' resides a desire for something deeper than just the average dirty-booted drinking song. In so many of these songs, the singer aims to find a way to express his own weakness, a familiar cry among isolated white men that contributes to these songs' popularity.
Music critic Craig Jenkins (of Vox sister site Vulture) told me he thinks Boone's 'Beautiful Things' succeeds at this project. 'Emotional, searching pop-guy songs will absolutely never lose steam,' Jenkins said.
Boone, who is no longer a practicing Mormon but does not drink or do drugs, is an interesting case, especially in his aesthetics. With his spangled jumpsuits and mustache/mullet combo, he's somewhere between Elton John and Morgan Wallen. 'The signifiers all feel very queer, but the presentation is like, lacrosse player crushing it in glee club,' Jenkins said.
Jenkins questions if Boone is 'carelessly laundering stuff that used to be edgy into a teetotaling package that is just coincidentally very palatable for the most crotchety sensibilities,' or if his choices are more intentional. He ties Boone to post-punk creatives like Panic! At the Disco's Brendon Urie and The Killers' Brandon Flowers, who like Boone were both raised as Latter-Day Saints. This cacophonic whirl of musical antecedents reads like someone who's going through a familiar post-adolescent Mormon journey of working out his identity beyond his family, church, and childhood.
Todd Nathanson, creator of the YouTube music vlog Todd in the Shadows, emphasizes that the authenticity is part of the package. 'You don't want to be too cynical about this because Alex Warren is an actual practicing Catholic, and you can't expect someone to not let that inform his music,' he said. 'Sometimes that's just what they are and what they do. Sometimes that's their truth.'
The other key to understanding this music is that while so much of its appeal is its perceived authenticity, its strength also lies in its ability to market a version of traditionalism that feels inviting, rather than alienating.
Though artists like Boone and Warren may not bear much sonic affinity with Jelly Roll or Wallen, thematically they all share an ability to express a yearning for the identity of a masculine, working-class hero, eschewing delusions of grandeur for a smaller life. These songs seem to pair images of modern masculinity with visions of a traditional lifestyle, tailored to appeal to audiences that don't often find themselves reflected in pop music except through working-class anthems. Think of John Mellencamp's admonition that 'I can breathe in a small town,' paired with Warren's vow to 'make the mundane our masterpiece.' These lyrics are tropey, even trite, but they're effective in breathing new life into old populist narratives.
The video for Warren's 'Ordinary,' for example, sees him pursuing a chastely styled woman (played by his real-life wife) with all the apparent wonder of a schoolboy seeing a woman for the first time. It's both a bizarrely infantilized version of masculinity and a highly romanticized, extremely traditional view of love. It's also hugely popular.
'There's a synergy of thought in bro spaces that aren't religious and ones that are,' Jenkins noted, with 'treatises on how Your Woman should dress on both sides of the coin.' In an Alex Warren video, that vision of femininity isn't so threatening.
Nathanson also points to artists who dabble in faith-adjacent themes, like Hosier and Noah Kahan, as proof of the marketability of this traditionalist message. 'That kind of music is just doing very well right now,' he said — so well that other artists might be trying to gain a large market by adding 'a couple of 'Gods' or references to heaven.'
'A lot of people see that type of proselytizing as a quick way to gain influence and a quick way to gain access and a foothold and an audience,' Nathanson added.
'Rugged and questioning is lucrative posturing in deeply weird times,' said Jenkins, who's more cynical than Nathanson about the end result. If each of these songs involves a reckoning between the singer and God, he notes that 'even the reckoning is performed.'
Beyond any cynicism, there are complex social messages to parse in this new space. For one, it's perhaps ironic that the regressive male codes of stoic masculinity that leave these male artists seeking outlets of expression are frequently heavily reinforced by the same Christian culture they're trying to find themselves within.
Ultimately, Harding stresses the reality of a new conservative audience making its mark on the charts. 'I think that there's something that's really connecting with people, and I think that probably has to do with a lean toward tradition and representations of masculinity, which are currently at loggerheads in our world,' Harding said.
Whatever it is, he says, people really must like it. 'I always believe that things that pop off do have an actual resonance,' he said, 'because it's so hard to make a hit.'