On a recent broadcast of The Paul Edwards Program, I asked Jay Swartzendruber, the editor of CCM Magazine, if he and his staff had arrived at a philosophical definition of what Christian music is or isn’t:
It’s a very difficult thing. For one thing – Christian music – we’ve really made it this thing where it’s a genre in our industry and if you look at it honestly, Christian music is not a genre. It’s a description that we use to describe music made by Christians in all kinds of genres, from hip-hop to jazz to hard rock to soft pop, and so it’s not really a genre. If you want to call it a genre, then it’s the only one defined by its lyrics, which is a really odd thing. And we can’t say truthfully that we’ve defined it by who’s making it because what about all the Christians making music that aren’t distributed into Christian bookstores. So we’re saying, “It’s Christian worldview music.” It’s music that has a biblical worldview of life reflected in the lyrics and created by believers.