This month's Sojourners cover story on "Nashville's new groove" is essentially another Derek Webb profile masquerading as a very, very late, redundant trend story. The argument is that Nashville-based Christian artists are more interested in promoting social justice than ever before, a conclusion presumably based on the fact that Derek Webb is more interested in promoting it than before. Now, of course, we like Derek Webb a lot. But his own words in this very magazine go a long way toward showing why, well, sorry Sojourners, but this tune is anything but "new," and using Derek Webb to illustrate it is kind of the oldest trick in the shift-in-Christian-music journalism book.

I wrote a story for my college magazine back in early 2005 about the shifts in the Christian music industry; the conclusion was that many artists were uncomfortable with the industry's Christian/secular divide and were applying their faith to broader theological issues and social causes. I quoted Kate Bowman, who wrote about that in a 2005 Christianity Today piece. In March 2007, USA Today did a story on "artists want you to get to know Jesus better—and not necessarily through messages provided in mass media or houses of worship." It starred—you guessed it—Derek Webb. In a November 2007 interview with Patrol (here and here), Webb said exactly the same stuff he says in the Sojourners trend piece. All of that to say that just about every angle of the Derek Webb evolution has been covered. I like what he has to say, but I've heard it quite a few times already.

Furthermore, none of the presumably "new" fronts of Nashville musicians' ministry are really all that new. "More recently, many Christian artists in Nashville have championed child sponsorship through groups such as Compassion International," the story explains. Oh? How recently? Because I'm pretty sure those child sponsorships were pushed at every major Christian show I saw during my adolescence. I even signed up for one, at a 4HIM concert in ... 1997. And social causes? Jennifer Knapp did hands-in-the-dirt social work in Central America throughout her all-to-brief 90s career. Point of Grace counseled abused women throughout theirs. Jars of Clay founded the HIV/AIDS organization Blood:Water Mission in 2002. These were all happening as far back as a decade ago. In fact, when have Christian musicians not cared about so-called social justice?

What Sojourners is really seeing is the late stages of a fundamental shift—the one I and others were writing about back in 2005 and before—in Christians' understanding of subculture, politics, artistry and ministry. It's all different now. But it's been different for a while, and trend stories usually come out, like, when some people still don't know about the trend.