O Lord, Thou kens what zeal I bear, when drinkers drink, an' swearers swear, an' singin' there, an' dancin' here.Robert Burns, Holy Willie's Prayer (1785)
A pearl is one coat of nacre laid over another coat of nacre laid over a single piece of grit, and the animal keeps coating for as long as it lives, so that what finally comes out of the shell is round, smooth, hard and worth money. Nobody who owns one ever cuts it open to look at the grit. The case against heavy metal was assembled in exactly that order, and the coats went on for thirty years.
The Louisiana broadcaster who spent the middle of the 1980s telling a Sunday audience Arbitron put at 2.1 million a week what was buried in their children's records was Jimmy Swaggart, whose own ministry published his case against rock in 1987 as Religious Rock 'n' Roll: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. None of it stayed in the pulpit. Over the decade that followed, the objection stripped records off the racks of small town shops, closed municipal halls to bands already booked into them and heaped sleeves onto bonfires in car parks.
What the pulpits did belongs beside the committees and the courtrooms, and where it sits in the story is set out there. The organised religious objection is a separate operation with its own products, its own distribution and its own balance sheet, and it did damage the courts never managed, though not in the places most people assume.
Christian anti metal had a product line
This was never only preaching. The objection came to market as books sold through church bookshops, as seminar tickets, as cassettes of those seminars copied and passed along exactly the way the bands' own demos travelled, and from the end of the eighties as video cassettes that ran for two hours and were shown in church halls on borrowed television sets to rooms of teenagers who had been driven there by their parents.
The Minnesota brothers who turned the objection into a touring circuit that ran for years were Steve, Dan and Jim Peters; it was Steve and Dan, writing with Cher Merrill, who put the case into print for the St Paul publisher Bethany House as Why Knock Rock? in 1984, then worked the halls with a slide projector and a stack of sleeves.
The cheapest item in the range travelled furthest. A tract is a comic book of a few pages that costs almost nothing to print and is designed to be left behind on a bus seat or a launderette bench, and the American publisher behind two full titles aimed squarely at rock music, Spellbound? in 1978 and Angels? in 1986, in both of which a band's success is arranged offstage by demons, was Jack T. Chick. Almost nobody who received one had asked for it.
The objection came to market as books, seminar tickets and cassettes, copied and passed along exactly the way the bands' own demos travelled.
What the sermons could actually reach
A hall's booking diary is a sheet of paper, and a sheet of paper is the softest thing in the whole trade. The steel in the roof, the seats bolted to the floor, the ring main under the stage and the bar stock in the cellar all stay precisely where they are while one telephone call from the right office takes a date out with the corner of an eraser, and the band that was going to play it finds out from its agent.
That is where the money actually went missing, because a great many American arenas and civic halls are owned by a city or a county rather than by a promoter, so a council that will not licence a show does not need a law, a court or an argument about the First Amendment. It needs a majority on a Tuesday evening. The record shows a scatter of these decisions across the middle of the 1980s, and the pattern is local every time.
San Antonio went furthest of the cities that legislated: its council voted seven to three in November 1985 to bar anyone under thirteen from a concert the city judged obscene unless a parent came too, and to make it a crime for the promoter, not the band, if the door let them through anyway.
The other pressure point was the rack. A chain that decides not to stock a record removes it from the only shop within twenty miles of a great many American towns, and through the second half of the decade the campaigning ministries pushed hard on precisely that lever, with results that are easier to find in the trade press than in any sermon. Airplay is a harder charge to prove. The refusals there came mostly from formats and consultants rather than from pulpits, and the difference matters.
The bands answered on record
The Birmingham singer who had spent eight years as the movement's favourite exhibit, and who answered it in 1988 by writing a song about the preacher rather than about the preaching, was Ozzy Osbourne. "Miracle Man" opens No Rest for the Wicked on a riff from Zakk Wylde, then twenty one years old and on his first record with the band, and its subject is a televangelist caught out. It is not a defence. It is a verdict returned.
Two years later the objection got a second answer, and this one went into the British singles chart. The East London band that put a song about television evangelists out as the first single from No Prayer for the Dying in 1990 was Iron Maiden, and "Holy Smoke" is a fast, plain, almost cheerful piece of writing that treats the whole apparatus as a trade rather than as a faith. The video was filmed on a farm. The point was not subtle.
Both songs were written after the ground had shifted under the accusers. The Assemblies of God suspended Swaggart in February 1988 over a prostitution scandal, then expelled him that April when he refused the restricted ministry the suspension required, and every band that had been named from his pulpit was still touring the following summer.
The believers got it from both sides
The sharpest edge of all this was turned on the bands who agreed with the preachers. A Christian bookshop was the movement's own redoubt, and a number of them refused to stock Christian metal records on the grounds that the music was tainted whatever the lyric sheet said, which left bands like Stryper arguing with two audiences at once and welcome in neither shop. Beyond dispute, that argument was lost by the people who started it. The records are still in print.
The bands with no faith to defend simply carried on. A practitioner of this trade in 1986 could expect a picket, a leaflet under the windscreen wipers in the car park and a local news crew filming the queue, and the standard response, worked out early and never improved on, was to say nothing at all and play the show.
What is left of it
The machinery never really went away; it moved. When Slayer released Christ Illusion in August 2006, the Mumbai-based Catholic Secular Forum objected to the cover art and to the lyrics, and that October EMI India recalled every copy in the country and had the stock destroyed, the same three step operation as 1986: pressure applied to a distributor, a decision taken in an office, a product removed from a shelf.
What the thirty years never produced is a single documented casualty of the kind the sermons promised, and the closest the accusation ever came to a body was a claim about the music and self harm that is taken apart under the heavy metal and suicide myth. The bookings came back. The bands outlasted every one of the men who preached against them.
