“To me, Christian music is propaganda.” David Bazan simultaneously shrugs and nods when he says this, as though stating the obvious. Bazan’s career makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the relationship of Christian music to the secular world. Having grown up an evangelical Christian, he and his friend TW Walsh began releasing records under the name Pedro the Lion in 1997. The songs dealt openly with complex themes about Christian faith and appealed to a big audience of religious kids, many of whom had been raised in a church culture that explicitly forbade them from listening to non-church-sanctioned records.
Though Pedro the Lion records had all the sonic hallmarks of 1990s indie rock, the band’s Christian fans had likely never heard anything like it before. Here were stories of doubt and struggle that didn’t resort to standard Christian tropes. No doves. No “Awesome God.” No altar calls. Pedro also attracted a significant secular fan base that may or may not have been aware of the faith component of songs like “Whole” or “Big Trucks”…