Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock
To an outsider the entire concept seems doomed to fail, starting with the rock. Here’s a musical form aping a secular style whose lifeblood is venality and sin being shackled to a religion–most often an evangelical strain of American Protestantism–that abhors not only sin but in a lot of cases that kind of music. According to most of the players interviewed in Andrew Beaujon’s new rock-critical-cum-sociological study, Body Piercing Saved My Life, even the fans understand that most of it sucks.
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Bazan doesn’t describe himself as Christian anymore, but he still plays Christian rock festivals, where he takes time during his sets for Q and As with the audience. He wants, he explains, to evangelize, but from the other side, to encourage sheltered fans to question their insular subculture and explore the world around them.
