Interesting article! Especially coming from The New Yorker...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...christian-rock
...Many historians trace the birth of Christian rock to the release, in 1969, of "Upon This Rock." It was an inventive concept album, by turns fierce and sweet, that was the work of a stubborn visionary named Larry Norman—the founding father of Christian rock. Norman, who died in relative obscurity, in 2008, has often been viewed as a tragic figure: a gifted and quirky musician who inspired a generation while alienating his peers and, at times, his fans. In "Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?," the first biography of Norman, Gregory Alan Thornbury tells a more triumphant story, portraying Norman as a genius and a prophet, clear-eyed in his criticism of what he sometimes called "the apostate church."...
...By the late sixties, when Norman emerged, the rise of rock had already inspired what Tom Wolfe once called "one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time"—the hippie movement, with its eagerness to remake society. Wolfe saw this as a faith-based enterprise, and many of its participants would have agreed; their dominant theology was not atheism but mysticism, in its many forms. (In 1967, one popular evangelist warned young Christians to shun "the gospel of LSD.") A small band of enterprising pastors, many in California, sought to convince the hippies that Christianity could be every bit as transformative as its more exotic counterparts. Arthur Blessitt, the self-proclaimed Minister of Sunset Strip, mimicked the conspiratorial patter of an eager drug buddy: "If you really want to get turned on, I mean, man, where the trip's heavy, just pray to Jesus. He'll turn you on to the ultimate trip." Blessitt and others found surprising success, setting up storefront ministries that inspired a nationwide wave of Jesus-fuelled coffee shops and Christian group houses, which tended to be communal but not, for obvious reasons, coed. This decentralized revival became known as the Jesus Movement, and its participants as Jesus People—or, less delicately, as Jesus Freaks....