I have been a fan of Christian rock and metal music since shortly after my conversion to Christianity in the early 1990s. I even played in a small garage band for a few years before going away to college, and today I use AI to create (and sometimes re-create) my own Christian metal songs. The process behind all that is beyond the scope of this document.
Throughout the history of Christian rock, and especially Christian metal, one thing that’s remained consistent is that there are always those in the body of Christ who oppose it. It’s natural that the secular metal scene would be hostile to Christianity and therefore Christian metal - after all, the secular anything scene hated Jesus, and He warned us that if we loved and followed Him, the world would hate us, too. So opposition from the world is no surprise. It’s the opposition from the church that is both surprising, and, in my opinion, in need of correction.
In this essay, I will review some of the arguments I’ve heard over the years against Christian metal, and try to address them in a coherent, logical, and above all, scriptural way.
The argument I hear most often is that rock and especially metal music are inherently worldly, or even Satanic, by nature, and therefore the Christian should avoid the styles themselves. They argue that Christian rock and metal are basically the same evil, secular stuff, but with “Christian sprinkles” on top. The idea here is that using these styles with Christian lyrics is “conforming to this world,” and the Christian should, instead, “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” Romans 12:2.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s address it point by point.
Taking Romans 12:2 in context, Paul is not talking about aesthetics, styles, or cultural forms. He’s talking about values, mindset, ethics, and morals. The ‘conforming’ he warns about is allowing the world’s system of values, or lack thereof, to reshape your thinking and pull you away from Christ and Godly living. While lyrical content can and does have that effect, it has done so regardless of genre, and since long before rock and metal existed.
Historical examples of believers taking cultural forms and consecrating them abound.
The early church borrowed heavily from Greek literary forms and philosophical concepts to express its theology. An example of this can even be found in scripture, in the first chapter of John’s gospel.
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God .... and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us .. " John 1:1,14
John uses the Greek word “logos” for “the word” and it’s a concept borrowed directly from Greek theology. Sure, the Greek religion had its gods: Zeus, Apollo, Athena, etc., and the Titans before them. But, the eternal, un-created origin of everything, even of the gods themselves, they called “logos” - the word. John uses that foreign cultural concept to show that the God of Israel is that eternal, supreme over all the other gods, creator of all things, and that same God became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.
Bach, the revered classical composer, used the same styles, idioms, and musical constructs as his secular peers for his church-sanctioned sacred works as well as a smattering of secular compositions. The Psalter of Geneva went even further, using forms and styles from popular French bar songs, and sometimes even copying the same tunes and melodies while merely applying different lyrics.
John Wesley’s brother Charles, who wrote over 6,000 hymns, set many of them to popular musical forms of his day - a practice so controversial it prompted the famous observation, often attributed to William Booth of the Salvation Army, “why should the devil have all the good music?”
Martin Luther did the same, writing “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” in the vigorous vernacular musical style of 16th century Germany rather than in the established liturgical forms of the Roman Catholic church he’d left behind.
Reaching back to the Old Testament, we see that Miriam, at the Red Sea, picked up a timbrel and began to sing “Who is like Yahweh among the gods?” in a form likely recognizable from her surrounding culture. She took the contemporary music of her day and consecrated it to Yahweh, creating what would later be known as “The Song of the Sea,” and an integral part of the Exodus story and the word of God itself. Exodus 15:20-21
This sort of thing is exactly what Paul was talking about when he mentions the renewing of the mind. You take everything you love - including your music - and say “This belongs to God now.” Christian rock and metal is exactly this - it is not conforming to the world, it’s transforming it with a new way of thinking. It’s Romans 12:2 working as specified.
This argument is usually made based on the origins of the genre, especially against metal music. My first response to this is that God is the creator, and the devil merely perverts and seeks to corrupt His creation. I would say that the devil did not create metal, God did - and the devil perverted it. However, opponents will point to some of the pioneers of the genre like Elvis Presley for rock and Black Sabbath for metal, etc. They will note that rock music, in its beginnings, leaned hard into themes of rebellion against authority, hypersexuality, etc., and suggest that God created music and then the devil warped it into rock and metal.
But is this really the case? I think we can all acknowledge that metal and all its sub-genres naturally evolved from rock and roll, which itself became popular around the 1950s. But where did that all come from? Who were some of the earliest architects of heavy, distorted, aggressive rock music? You had artists like Little Richard, who was a Pentecostal preacher’s kid who wrestled his whole life between gospel and rock. The blues tradition that fathered rock was saturated with the Black church. The loudness, the emotional intensity, the call and response - these didn’t come from Satanism. They came from African American Christian worship tradition filtered through cultural experience. So no, rock did not come from the devil - it came from an oppressed Christian people expressing their pain and desire for freedom and equality. It wasn’t until later that others perverted it into the ungodliness cited by the opponents. Now, let’s take a look at where all this opposition to rock music started.
Before “rock” or “rock and roll” became popular terms, the industry used the label “race music” for the unique style that, at the time, was produced primarily by black musicians. These included fast-paced gospel music that you’d find in traditionally black churches, blues, and what would eventually become rock and roll. These were not voices of rebellion against God - they were the voices of an oppressed people expressing their longing, not only for worldly freedom, but also for the Kingdom of God. If there was a spirit of rebellion present, it was a good rebellion - against the institutions and worldly powers that sought to enslave them.
It’s no coincidence that the early “rock is evil” voices had significant overlap with the segregationist voices in 1950s white American Christianity. When artists began to make “black music” accessible to white people, and young people started enjoying and listening to it, a panic ensued that wasn’t purely theological in its origins. Rather, it was nothing more than old-school Jim Crow era racism. What these people were condemning as Satanic was largely African American Christian worship expression morphing into a new form and making its way into the minds of their children.
Now, this does not mean that everyone who holds the “rock is evil” view today is a racist - there are many who hold it in good faith, having inherited it without examining its cultural, racial, and historical roots. But, the point stands that the argument against rock music was never purely theological, and we should be honest about that moving forward.
Opponents of Christian metal will occasionally present a more complex version of the “worldly origins” argument and suggest that, contrary to my assertion that God created metal and Satan perverted it, metal is, in and of itself, the perversion. I’ve previously argued that this is not the case, but lets revisit that claim briefly. What if it was actually true, and metal did originate as a spiritually tainted thing? Critics will point to the pioneers of metal, often mentioning bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest and their heavy use of occult and Satanic themes as evidence of this tainted origin argument. To be honest, it’s difficult to argue against - those bands did, after all, do all of those things and more. That is, if we set aside the actual origin of rock, which I expounded earlier.
Even so, that doesn’t mean that Christian metal inherits that spiritual stain. Consider numerous counter-examples outside of the musical realm.
The most glaring one is probably the now-beloved symbol of the cross, with which we adorn our churches, our holy texts, our homes, and even our bodies. The cross didn’t always represent redemption and salvation. It was originally a symbol of death and ultimate humiliation. The cross was an instrument of terror inflicted on the Jewish people by their oppressors, the Roman empire. If you managed to get yourself crucified, it was the ultimate disgrace and humiliation to be endured, aside from being an agonizing and horrific way to die - and the Romans made it that way on purpose in order to maximize the suffering of the condemned.
Yet today, the cross is the most important symbol of Christianity. God took that symbol of ultimate evil and said “yeah, this is mine now.”
Further, if we are going to throw out musical creativity based on sinful origins, we’d have to get rid of a lot more than just rock and metal. Classical artists like Wagner, Liszt, and Mozart were the Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Judas Priest of their time - the only difference is they didn’t have electricity, really. Give Vivaldi an amp and a distortion pedal, and you’d get something to rival modern metal, easily. These guys and their music are all revered today as genuinely holy and blessed, yet in their day, they went on tours, had groupies (especially Mozart - like .. wow), and often died drunk and broke after a life of unbridled decadence. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it should.
Again, reaching back into the Old Testament, we can see a similar thing. The word selah, found all over the Psalms, is widely believed by scholars to be a musical notation borrowed from the surrounding pagan culture. Israel consecrated to Yahweh what pagans used to worship Ba’al and their other gods, and Yahweh didn’t seem to have a problem with it at all.
This isn’t to say that these origins are actually good things - they’re not. This is to say that they don’t matter. Origin doesn’t permanently determine the nature of a thing, or the value of an idea, or the spiritual qualities of music, writings, or people.
Creativity is, basically imago Dei - the image if God in which we ourselves were created. Even when it comes from horribly sinful people, God is still the one doing the creating. Redeeming those creations like classical, rock, and metal music and re-consecrating them back to God their creator is not a perversion - it’s a picture of the Gospel itself at work.
At one point, I heard a counter-argument to all of this that I’ve said so far, saying, “oh, but there is such a thing as inherently ungodly music!” The author cited Exodus 32:17-18, which reads:
Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting.
'There is the sound of battle in the camp', he told Moses.
Moses answered him:
'No song of victory is this sound,
no wailing for defeat this sound;
it is the sound of chanting I hear.'
[Exodus 32:17-18, Jerusalem Bible]
They point to the idea that Moses recognized the ungodly music and chanting coming from the camp, specifically without hearing the words being spoken, and he recognized it as such. Therefore, the reasoning goes, there are manners of chanting or styles of music that are ungodly themselves, regardless of the lexical content. Moses is said to have somehow recognized a spirit of ungodliness in the chanting, apart from any other context.
However, this argument is taken blatantly out of context. If we read the whole chapter, starting from verse 1, we get a different story that I will paraphrase here:
The story takes place at the foot of Mount Sinai. While Moses had gone up the mountain to meet Yahweh and receive His commandments, the people grew restless. Moses was taking a while, so they decided “well, forget that guy” and had Aaron, Moses’ brother, make them an idol of a golden calf, which they then began to worship.
Back on the mountain, in verses 7-10, Yahweh tells Moses what has happened - that the people have fallen away and are worshipping an idol. So, when Moses hears the sound, he already knows it’s bad. Not because the sound itself had some supernatural ungodly quality or tone to it, but because God had already warned him ahead of time. To use a modern analogy, if someone were to tell me they’re listening to a Mayhem record, it would be no stretch of my abilities at all to assume that all the songs were going to be about Satan and would sound like they were recorded in the bottom of a garbage can. It wouldn’t be because I somehow recognized the beat as Satanic, but rather because I know that Mayhem prided themselves on their overt Satanism.
Further, we don’t know the actual style of music Moses heard, but we can also be pretty sure it wasn’t metal or rock. Moses simply called it kol anot - the sound of singing or answering back and forth. Since we know next to nothing about what was actually heard, it becomes very difficult to map this onto any modern styles in order to call them “ungodly,” especially since there are Psalms that also used the kol anot or call/response paradigm, eg: Psalm 24:7-8:
Gates, rise your arches,
rise, you ancient doors,
let the king of glory in!
Who is this king of glory?
Yahweh the strong, the valiant,
Yahweh valiant in battle!
[Psalm 24:7-8, Jerusalem Bible]
The Exodus 32 argument falls flat once we realize that, long before he heard any sounds, Moses knew what was going on and that the situation was ungodly and evil. Moses’s discernment was simply situational awareness. Their sin wasn’t in the music, it was in the idolatry. The same Hebrew word kol anot[1] used in Exodus 32 to describe the idolatrous worship, along with related words like ranan[2] and zamar[3], also appears throughout the Psalms in the context of righteous worship of Yahweh. The issue wasn’t the sound they were making, it was who and what they were worshiping with it.
[1] kol anot (כל ענות): “the sound of answering/responding” or “the sound of antiphonal singing” - that call-and-response structure.
[2] ranan (רנן): to shout for joy, to cry out, to sing loudly with a ringing sound. It carries a sense of exuberant, even piercing vocal expression - not quiet reverent murmuring. It’s used all over the Psalms in contexts of enthusiastic praise.
[3] zamar (זמר): to make music, to sing praise, specifically often in the context of playing an instrument while singing. It’s actually the root from which the word mizmor - meaning Psalm or song - derives. So when you see “A Psalm of David” in your Bible, that word mizmor is zamar’s offspring.
Bill Crossley is a Christian metal musician based in Detroit, MI. His catalog is available at death-astonished.com.