Hopefully you’ve heard our new episode in which we reveal our DC Talk Personality Test. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first I should comment on the two episodes that came out before that- our mini-series on purity culture.
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Purity culture is one of the most examined aspects of evangelicalism of the 1990s-2000s, but we felt its connection to pop music wasn’t being centered often enough. Leah’s research for her book (God Gave Rock & Roll To You or GRRTY) came in handy here. She’d spoken with Nikki Leonti, Devi Abraham and Joshua Harris for the book- and included their stories in it. So we knew the broad contours to expect when conducting our interviews, but we ending up uncovering new aspects of their experiences they hadn’t shared before.
Nikki’s harrowing story of joining a tour as a 15 year old with no chaperone or practical sex ed showed the extreme consequences that can hit women when purity culture goes awry. But it was also interesting to hear who showed up for her when the industry abandoned her in her time of greatest need: John and Dino Elefante paid her rent and Russ Taff offered a non-judgemental shoulder to cry on. It was also unexpected to hear how deeply she loves CCM even now, when she’s collaborated with everyone from Carrie Underwood to Lil Nas X to Tyler The Creator. CCM won her heart first and nothing else can fill that place- not even America’s Got Talent. Her 2018 Reunite CCM concert was a deeply felt love letter to a genre she was shut out of because of her pregnancy.
Devi Abraham has examined purity culture very thoroughly in her podcast Where Do We Go From Here? I will admit I haven’t heard every episode of her podcast, but I would be surprised if she had shared the whole story of her college journalism that exposed the fact that some students at her Christian college were having sex outside of marriage. The consequences of publishing that story (on Parents’ Weekend, no less) were extreme- her college’s president upbraiding her about not having “a teachable spirit” seem extreme from my vantage point.
Then we come to Joshua Harris, the lightning rod of purity culture and life after deconstruction. His story is very well known, but I feel we added important context to the way ideas wrapped in music can propel people into more and more extreme positions and ideologies. The True Love Waits rally he attended in Washington DC (full of CCM performances) pushed him to adopt the more extreme position of eschewing dating in favor of courtship. I realized in making the episode that Josh’s book had influenced the culture I entered in 1998 at Wheaton College. Let’s just say that it seemed everyone was confused about how to interact with anyone you might be attracted to.
Now, finally, our DC Talk Personality Test. If you would like to take it yourself, you can here. For the podcast episode, it was a big format breaker for us. The entire episode was unscripted, though we did edit the raw tape and add music clips. Our guests are veterans of chat formatted podcasts: Kevin T Porter of Good Christian Fun and Jason Kirk of Vacation Bible School (and Shutdown Fullcast, a college football podcast) and they really brought it. We’ll try to have them on future episodes to share more narrative based stories.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these episodes. There are four episodes left in season two of Rock That Doesn’t Roll. After that the podcast’s fate is murky. Hopefully we’ll know more about that soon. In the meantime, we could use all the help we can get finding more listeners. Tell a friend, leave a review, hire a skywriting plane.
On Monday I’m going to the Pedro The Lion show in Chicago and distributing these flyers (with the band’s permission).
Feel free to print these and leave them in a public place, too!
Thanks for listening-
Andrew