Christian music has been around since Christianity (Matt. 26:30). By the way, in the dictionaries I looked in, hymn didn't specify any genre. Changes to the style of music has been met with resistance since nearly that time, too. Christian music used to be accepted as normal, and listened to right along with other types of music. Fanatics helped drive it out of mainstream acceptance.
Before the 1920s, most people accepted Christian music as a normal part of listening. In 1925, things-Christian suffered a severe blow through the Scopes Monkey trial. This was a case where Christian fundamentalists demanded that John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, stop teaching evolution. The case went to the Supreme Court and the fundamentalists, seen as fanatics, lost the case. This was a big victory for the liberals/agnostics/atheists.
Soon, most things which had Christian connections fell out of popularity. The idea that religion is a private matter and should be kept that way, took over and for many years, very few voices spoke out for Christianity. At the risk of raising hackles and stomping on toes, I'm going to say, for the sake of convenience, that that which is not for Christianity must be anti-Christ. Yeah, I know there's lots of neutral stuff, but that's not the point here.
Look around and listen around. Whose voice is most popular: Christ or Anti-Christ? Consider: magazine displays, TV, radio, billboards, movies, advertising and so on. Unless you're one of the few folks who aren't much exposed to popular culture (and you ARE on the internet), almost all media is geared toward earthly things: sex, greed, vanity, hedonism, violence, sensationalism, humanism and so forth. When most people DO see something Christian, if they don't sneer at it or ignore it, they think, "How quaint," or "How naive." Due to the loud voice of Anti-Christ, a Christian sub-culture has grown up. If you're aware of it, you know it's alive and quite well.
The Christian sub-culture has been around since at least the Scopes Monkey Trial. Not long after the trial, Gospel music began to get popular. It was condemned by fanatics as Devil-music due to the fact that it was a blend of Christian lyrics, and night club-associated jazz and blues. Blends of worldly and sacred were, and still are, called Satanic by far too many people. Such condemnation is old stuff. Way back when flats were introduced to the musical scale, they, too, were called too radical for the sacred chants of the monks. Such historical trivia will have to wait for next month's article. Eager acceptance of new things by the Christian world is rare, at best.
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