I know I’m perhaps overloading on the serious blogging lately (who’da thunk?), but I seemed to have missed a pretty important story that seems worth discussing. That would be the news that CCM changed its name from Contemporary Christian Music to Christ. Community. Music., with promises to expand their coverage to “Christian worldview” music that includes, for example, Sufjan Stevens, The Fray, and Mary J. Blige. Basically, the same sort of thing Relevant is already doing. So it would seem that I, forever the enemy of fencing off Christian music as its own genre, would be quite pleased with such a development?

Well, yes and no.

I’m not quite sure what to think about this. I mean, I dislike the fact that a huge Christian music industry exists, period, and CCM has until now been the sort of state newspaper of that industry. So opening things up to the point that Sufjan is acceptable subject matter is definitely a step in the right direction. It’s also, I would imagine, a necessary marketing decision: the fact can’t be ignored that young evangelicals don’t listen to Christian music all that much and typically don’t bother with magazines that cover it exclusively. I’m not sure I know a single person who reads CCM, indicative of the shrinking of what used to be their bread-and-butter demographic.

While I’m pleased to see them embracing the Christian music industry’s penumbra, something about the idea of “Christian worldview music” just grates on me. I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with a magazine that sorts through the teeming masses of musicians and serves up the ones who address the world from a Christian worldview; it seems that many Christians are always looking for a trusted Christian source to tell them what they should listen to, watch, etc., and they appreciate the service CCM does (or will be) doing. But something within me continually resists that sort of thing. “Christian worldview music,” despite what I’m sure are CCM ’s best intentions, smacks of a new brand. A new-and-improved version of the same distinction/”genre” that musicians and fans alike are trying to move away from. The wider scope allows CCM to benefit from the success of artists like Sufjan Stevens, but it also instantly associates him with the “faith brand.” And that’s not what Sufjan, or most serious musicians for that matter, are about. Individually, he’s a follower of Christ. Professionally, he’s a musician who wants to be appreciated because he makes great music. At CCM , even in its newer, more “relevant” incarnation, you are generally more appreciated for being a popular, successful Christian than you are for being a great musician.

Why does American evangelicalism have this overwhelming tendency to establish brands, labels, and distinctions? Why do we need special magazines to point out to us which musicians share our worldview, especially when the music is all the same? Why is our Christianity somehow incomplete without superstars that we can claim as “our own”?

David Sessions is the editor of The CCM Patrol.

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Previously in Not So Fast: We mediated a puff-piece war between CCM and JesusFreakHideout over Sanctus Real’s “I’m Not Alright.”