When I saw moustachioed pop sensation Benson Boone play a show in London last year, the pop star performed the best of his pedestrian midtempos last: his religiously ecstatic hit, “Beautiful Things”. It was inevitable that his UK No 1 track would be saved to leave the audience with a lingering sense of catharsis. In the song, Boone depicts himself as a simple man on his knees, praying to the divine. As the music builds to a holy drop, he belts out: “I want you, I need you, oh God / Don’t take / These beautiful things that I’ve got.” Cue a dramatic backflip, a Boone trademark at this point. (But really, how else can a man demonstrate religious fervour if not by launching himself into the air from a dangerous height?). The mostly reserved congregation went wild.
Faith-pop, sung by faux-ordinary guys desperately appealing to God, is the dominant sound in Top 40 music right now. TikTok star Alex Warren has just scored the longest-running UK No 1 this decade with “Ordinary”, a cinematic, “take-me-to-church” number full of heavy-handed Christian metaphors. “You got me kissin’ the ground of your sanctuary / Shatter me with your touch, oh Lord, return me to dust,” he croons on the chorus. The almost-as-ubiquitous gospel-tinged radio hit “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims was one of the biggest tracks of 2024 and remains one of this year’s most-streamed and bought. The addiction anthem may not explicitly mention God stuff (bar the aside that “the devil’s knocking at my door”), but – through its themes of surrender and brokenness – reads clearly as Christian-coded.
Elsewhere, the “Good News” singer Shaboozey and hitmaker Jelly Roll collaborated on stomp-clap-hey anthem “Amen”, which has them literally “on my knees begging” for prayers to save them. When they performed together in May at the 60th Academy of Country Music Awards, Jelly Roll told the audience, “We wanna thank God for giving us the grace to give Him a little glory in this building tonight.” Both artists have leaned into the vaguely religious to much acclaim over the past year or so.
And Justin Bieber’s just-released, gospel-powered R&B project, Swag, is his most overtly churchly release to date. He’s always spoken openly about his faith – remember when his gospel EP dropped during Easter Weekend 2021? Or his Hillsong Church era, where he was always seen hanging out with that celebrity pastor? – but the entirety of Swag positions Bieber in the role of public penitent. Here he’s still on his knees, but now he’s making it clear that only God can redeem him. On the grainy recording “Glory Voice Memo”, we overhear his heavenly vocal runs; it feels intimate, confessional, and steeped in the warmth of hope. Bieber remains, by most metrics, the biggest male pop star in the world. To millennials and older Gen Z, he’s also still cool – as well as a card-carrying, God-worshipping, incredibly outspoken Christian.
Maybe Christianity, in its own confused, hyper-capitalist way, has been cool for a while, though. Kourtney Kardashian has been sharing devotional prayer posts on her Instagram Stories while simultaneously shilling diet pills. Christian influencers preach family values while building monetisable brands on TikTok. And it’s everywhere in modern cultural pockets, from the edgelord inanity of New York’s Dimes Square scene, to wellness communities, to manosphere-adjacent influencers such as Russell Brand. Within pop, though, this religious strain doesn’t seem to be emerging from a totally cynical place. Many of the artists in question have genuine religious roots: Boone was raised Mormon but left the faith; Warren and Bieber are Christian; Swims’s grandfather was a Pentecostal minister; Jelly Roll and Shaboozey appear, based on interviews, to both be Christian.
Their listeners, too, are open to a religious conversation. Much has been made of the decline of Christianity over the past few decades, but it’s still a dominant force. According to the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study from Pew Research Center, 62 per cent of Americans are Christian, while in the UK, just under half still identify as Christian. Gen Z in particular seems to be reaching for God: recent data showed the number of young churchgoers in the UK had quadrupled.
Christian curiosity might be behind the boom in faith-pop too: after all, these aren’t the kind of overtly faith-based tracks that have always been foundational to American music culture, or come rippling with cringe. They aren’t straight gospel, and they’re not Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) – listen to Lauren Daigle, Brandon Lake or Josiah Queen if you’re that way inclined – either. Instead, this new wave of middle-of-the-road faith-pop simply gestures toward those traditions. You can hear it in the tremulous reverb, the gospel-inspired chord progressions, and the ecstatic builds that define many of these songs. They’re universal and familiar; you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all. But even if they sound like faceless appeals to the lowest common denominator, there’s no denying this formula creates huge, emotionally resonant pop moments. Maybe a song doesn’t need a face when it’s just a conversation between its singer and God.
Few could have predicted that we would end up here. It’s a world away from 2019, when Kanye West – another serial repenter – seriously encountered God. His Sunday Services, private worship gatherings led by Ye himself, brought Christianity back into mainstream music and gave the religion’s stiff, politicised image a fresh lick of paint – even if many of his fans found his sudden pivot to Jesus off-putting at first.
Faith-pop only grew more popular from there, in tandem with the broader advances of conservatism in music lately. Anything remotely futuristic was phased out in favour of everyman folksiness courtesy of Noah Kahan, The Lumineers and Shawn Mendes. We saw mainstream pop stars go country, digging into a genre rooted in nostalgia for American tradition. That Charli XCX’s Brat went so stratospheric last summer was, I think, in large part because it revelled in narcissistic individualism, at sharp contrast with all that po-faced longing for a simple life. It was its own kind of worship music for people who pray in club toilets.
What these faith-pop songs have over conventional folk or country is their generic euphoria, which is perfect for any of life’s emotional peaks. Whether it’s “Beautiful Things” or “Ordinary”, they work in real life and online: soundtracking break-up recoveries, wedding dances, glow-ups, last reps at the gym, whatever those videos are where people cry in the car. Warren knew exactly what he was doing when he dropped an alternate music video titled “Ordinary (Wedding Version)” – which was made up of footage from his nuptials to wife Kouvr Annon. It’s all intergenerational content music made to sound profound. And to some, it is.
This trend doesn’t feel like it’s slowing down, either. If anything, it’s accelerating because Christianity has gained a new lease of life. It’s probably a moot point to mention that the religion has been repoliticised of late, aligned with right-wing politics, traditional values, and efforts to strip away women’s rights in the US. This shift in pop isn’t totally apolitical either. How can you listen to all these men repenting in pop songs and not think about how masculinity itself is reckoning with its place on the global stage, and across tech and politics? As long as people continue to pay to see Benson Boone backflipping, or an everyman type say he’s sorry, the hits will keep on coming. For now, it would seem as if God is on their side.
