On Shame

MxPx was my gateway band

I didn’t realize Christian music was so generally bad until I started driving myself to high school and switched the radio from my mom’s oldies station to the “bad” station: KROQ, 106.7 FM.

I quickly fell under the spell of artists like Rage Against the Machine, Sublime, Green Day, and Weezer. What I couldn’t articulate then was these musicians felt honest.

MxPx was my gateway band in junior high. They were Christian adjacent. Punk rawk, not entirely punk rock. They sung about having crushes and feeling awkward in high school. Their albums were sold at the Christian bookstore in town so my parents automatically approved my purchases. As a student of Christian education systems K-12+ MxPx built me a musical bridge to the outside world.

I remember as a teen when it was announced Amy Grant left her husband.¹ Her albums left our family’s record collection. Keith Green got to stay. That lamb across his shoulders, and an untimely death inevitably leading to less opportunity for a scandal, bought him a lot of Christian leeway. I’m certain if I hadn’t converted to The Cranberries, Jennifer Knapp would have been long lost to me as well for other Christian culture ‘reasons.’

Cover art for Keith Green’s album, “Songs for the Shepherd.”

The bands on KROQ drew me in for their unfiltered honesty. Artists sung about despair and beauty. I found few false pretenses in the bands I gravitated towards. Truth telling may be a Christian virtue, but I found it more often on the radio than in the Christian bookstore.

DcTalk members may have been Jesus freaks but band mate Michael Tait confessed in 2025 to some pretty illicit² behavior. He left his role in the Newsboys due to what came out that prompted his confession.³

It seems like Christian artists aren’t allowed to be in the messy middle; no becoming allowed. To be a “Christian artist” is to be arrived on the other side of your sin, whatever flavor that may be. The culture of evangelicalism in the west broadly has no tolerance for people on journeys, wrestling with God, or in dark nights of the soul. Once you have arrived to the other side then you’ll be welcomed into the arms of the Christian art-sphere.

There’s room for a whole other essay here on Puritanism’s impact on this evolution, but I’ll save that for another day.

When it came out in an interview post Move to Bremerton release that MxPx front man Mike Herrera smoked cigarettes back stage after a show⁴ I had a 15-year-old existential crisis. He was my safe bridge and my age appropriate crush (Toby Mac was sadly too old for me). I could not compute. I was so distraught I wrote the band a letter asking them to rethink their smoking decisions. Oh, my teenage hubris!

But here’s the thing: Once I crossed that punk rawk bridge, and had the privacy of a car with a sound system, I never went back to the Newsboys or the Supertones. Instead I found Radiohead, Hole, and Nirvana. You could say I found an Oasis.⁵

I was living in the messy middle. I was living through a devastatingly hard time. I went to the artists who could hold that complexity; to artists who shared those experiences. I was drawn in by artists who did not attempt to fix my pain or explain it away.

Loss and grief want to be witnessed. Shame does not permit such a luxury.

On the heels of attending The Glen workshop in July I picked up a recommended read, “To Show and to Tell” by Phillip Lopate. In it he wrote:

So it is that remorse is often the starting point for good personal writing, whose working out brings the necessary self-forgiveness (not to mention self-amusement) that is necessary to help us outgrow shame.

Many Christians bypass self-forgiveness. The CTA in evangelical churches is to pass that buck to Christ — after all He paid the tab on your sin ticket. Listen somewhat carefully and you’ll notice this theme in most “Christian music.” But this spiritual bypassing prohibits growth.

And this lack of growth allows shame to fester, which begets more shame and less growth. Jesus forgave you. Here’s the kicker: You have to forgive you, too.

What gets missed in this process is the ability to walk with Christ through our shame, to self-forgiveness, and hopefully to one day write a public essay about asking your favorite band in junior high to stop smoking, too.

I can’t wait to see what you make.

1. https://medium.com/belover/the-shaming-of-amy-grant-3f8327c36803

2. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/29/michael-tait-christian-rock-star-sexual-assault-allegations

3. https://www.ccmmagazine.com/news/michael-tait-steps-down-as-lead-singer-of-newsboys-after-15-years/

4. The band also wrote about it in the track, “Circumstance.”

5. Drop an island emoji in the comments if you made this far and are old enough to get the joke. 🏝️