The disturbing underbelly of the Christian music business

Telegraph

17-07-2025

You may have never heard of Michael Tait. But the 59-year-old musician from Washington DC has been a kingpin of America's Christian music scene since the 1980s.
In a career spanning five decades, Tait has had 50 number one singles and 10 number one albums in the Christian charts, sold 18 million LPs and won four Grammys. Tait has prayed on stage with President Trump and his 2011 hit God's Not Dead became an anthem for the Maga movement. The singer's fame and power in the multi-million dollar Christian music industry is hard to overstate.
You may also be unaware that Christian music is booming right now. Spotify streams of so-called Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) – that's pop, rap, R&B or guitar music with faith as its lyrical mainstay – have hit record highs, with growth of over 60 per cent in five years.
To illustrate, a bluesy ballad released last November called Hard Fought Hallelujah by US singers Brandon Lake and Jelly Roll – 'God, You've been patient/ God, You've been gracious,' go the lyrics – has garnered the largest ever number of weekly streams for a song released by a Christian artist (6.8 million). It has spent 20 weeks in the main US's singles chart while, in the UK, Hard Fought Hallelujah is still number one in a chart compiled by Stoke-on-Trent Christian radio station Cross Rhythms. The accompanying Brandon Lake album reached number 30 in the UK downloads chart last month.
God, evidently, rocks. And yet the genre's biblical growth could be torpedoed by the biggest scandal since CCM emerged as a cultural force in the late-1960s. A recent investigation by Christian website The Roys Report accused Tait of grooming and sexually assaulting three men, all aged 22, between 2004 and 2014. The two-and-a-half-year investigation by journalist Jessica Morris, which involved interviews with over 50 sources and was published on June 4, opened with the words: 'It's been called Nashville's worst-kept secret.'
In an Instagram post titled 'My Confession' six days after Morris's piece ran, Tait shocked observers even more. He admitted that the reports of his 'reckless and destructive behaviour', including drug and alcohol abuse and sexual activity, are 'sadly, largely true'.
For two decades, Tait wrote, he 'at times, touched men in an unwanted sensual way'. He called it a 'sin' and said he'd been leading a double life, adding: 'While I might dispute certain details in the accusations against me, I do not dispute the substance of them.'
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A post shared by Michael Tait (@michaeltait)
Things didn't end there. Three days later the Guardian published a second investigation, accusing Tait of sexually assaulting more men, two of whom believed they were drugged, and engaging in inappropriate behaviour with others. Within days, The Roys Report published a third story in which a woman accused Tait of drugging her and watching while she was raped in a third-floor Fargo, North Dakota hotel room in 2014. Tait has not responded to these later accusations. The Telegraph approached him for comment.
The allegations have shocked the Christian music world to the core. 'I hope the CCM industry crumbles. And f--- all of you who knew and didn't do a damn thing,' wrote an incandescent Hayley Williams of Paramore, a rock band who supported Taylor Swift on her Eras tour and some of whose members grew up around Nashville's Christian music scene.
'How many stories like this from this VERY small corner of the music industry will we hear before we realise that capitalising on people's faith and vulnerability is the 'sin',' Williams also wrote.
Speaking from Australia where she lives, Morris, the journalist behind the original Roys Report article, tells me that her investigation is drawing comparisons to a previous high profile entertainment industry scandal. 'Sources said to me that this is the 'Me Too' of Christian music,' says Morris, referring to the 2017 viral campaign against sexual abuse and harassment that took off following abuse allegations against the all-powerful Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein, currently in prison. People were initially afraid of speaking out against Weinstein for fear of never working again. 'That was one of the reasons [my sources] were so scared to speak up – not because they wanted to do the right thing, but they knew that if this didn't pan out, they could lose their career.'
Rather than comparing Tait to Weinstein, though, Morris compares him to 'Michael Jackson in terms of status, celebrity, power and influence.' Given the persistent abuse allegations against Jackson, it's not a comparison that fares much better.
'Monumental' is how Morris sums up her investigation's impact. 'I don't want to overstate that because I knew this was a big story. But even I was shocked,' she says. People at her 'tiny' local Christian radio station near Melbourne are even talking about it, such is Tait's stature.
To understand the shockwaves this story is having, you need to understand how big Christian music is and where it came from. At the dawn of rock and roll in the 1950s, pop music was routinely dismissed as sinful by conservative religious groups, who saw themselves as defenders of the nation's morality.
Even Elvis Presley, who had a spiritual upbringing, was branded 'morally insane' by a Des Moines reverend in 1956 for his on-stage hip-swivelling. But as the 1960s progressed, so-called 'Jesus Music' grew in popularity among hippies. Unlike older forms of religious music like gospel, which had its roots in actual church services, Jesus Music was a deliberate melding of Christian lyrics with the radio-friendly pop and folk music of the time. The blend proved useful: rather than building walls between the secular and the sacred, religious groups realised that co-opting trendy sounds was a useful way of spreading the word.
In 1969, Texan musician Larry Norman released an album called Upon This Rock, which came to be known as the 'Sgt Pepper of Christianity'. In 1972 Norman released probably his most famous song Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music, an Elvis-like boogie in which he sang that 'Jesus is the rock and he rolled my blues away.' A new industry was born.
In 1978 Jesus Music became codified as Contemporary Christian Music with the launch of CCM Magazine. The broad genre covered everything from Christian rock and R&B to, later, Christian hip hop and heavy metal. Evangelical record labels proliferated, some sprouting from so-called megachurches – vast churches with huge congregations and social or educational activities beyond plain worship.
One such label was Bethel Music, which released music by congregation members or preachers from California's Bethel Church, a literal ministry of sound. Spurred by Christian radio stations (there are an estimated 2,400 in the US today), the genre mushroomed. In 2003, Billboard magazine launched the Hot Christian Songs chart, giving CCM its own weekly music chart.
In recent years popular religion's growth has been supercharged by social media influencers and reality TV. Bishop Jakes, the founding paster of The Potter's House of Dallas megachurch, has 5.9 million Instagram followers. Over on TikTok the 'Tradwife' aesthetic, which celebrates traditional gender roles, has tens of thousands of videos by gingham-clad wives about how to live in traditional domesticity.
A recent reality TV smash has been The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, about a group of Utah-based TikTok influencers navigating religious expectations with the constructed reality of their drama-filled lives. Here in the UK, Rev Chris Lee has been dubbed 'the viral vicar of Instagram' due to his 162,000 followers and 60-second sermons.
At the same time, Christian themes are increasingly seeping into mainstream pop. Benson Boone's Beautiful Things – a hit around the world in 2024, 2.3 billion Spotify streams – contains the line 'I thank God every day/ For the girl he sent my way'. And Alex Warren's inescapable Ordinary, which was a UK number one for 13 weeks this year, references the Lord, angels, holy water and Heaven's gate. 'At your alter, I will pray/ You're the sculptor, I'm the clay,' Warren sings. Neither he nor Boone, raised Catholic and Mormon respectively, are CCM artists. But they could be.
An integral part of this world was Tait. In 1987 when in his early 20s he co-founded the wildly popular Christian pop-rap trio DC Talk, who released five albums and looked like MTV stars. They disbanded in 2001 and Tait toured with his solo band, also called Tait. In 2009, and to significant fanfare, he was announced as the new lead singer of Newsboys, a pre-existing band who'd released albums such as Hell Is For Wimps and Boys Will Be Boyz. Tait's first full album with Newsboys, 2010's Born Again, reached number four in the mainstream US album chart, sharing the top 10 with the likes of Eminem, Justin Bieber and Sting. As Morris says, millions of Americans' 'entire faith experience has been built around this man's music'.
So, yes, his scandal has dumbfounded the Christian music community. The fallout has been rapid and widespread. Tait actually quit Newsboys in January, the day after a TikToker outed him as being gay (although Tait didn't mention this post on announcing his departure). Following the June revelations, Newsboys were dropped by their label Capitol Christian Music Group, part of the world's biggest record label Universal Music Group.
The vast Christian radio network K-Love said it was 'resting' playing songs by Newsboys and CD Talk. And the Svengali behind Newsboys, Wes Campbell, resigned from the board of the influential Gospel Music Association after he was accused of allegedly covering up the Tait allegations, something he vehemently denies (Campbell and his family have also been hit with a separate lawsuit by a Tennessee pastor).
Some in the industry, like Paramore's Williams, have spoken out. Darren King, former drummer of Mutemath, a band with roots in alternative Christian music, said he believed that someone could only engage in Tait's 'level of predation' with a 'team of helpers' who spent their time cleaning his reputation and suppressing criticism. Still, many people don't want to talk about it. The Telegraph approached a dozen Christian artists, record labels, radio stations and magazines in the US and UK asking for comment on this story. None wanted to speak. You get the feeling that shock and incredulity remain the dominant emotions.
The big unknown is whether this story will permeate beyond the CCM world. Christian music symbolises a wholesome and God-fearing side of America that, crucially, occupies a great chunk of the political spectrum too: the 'religious right'. Just look at that Trump photo, taken during an Evangelicals for Trump event in Miami in 2020. Christians made up 72 per cent of the US electorate and gave 56 per cent of their vote to Trump in 2024, according to research by Arizona Christian University. If Christianity is undermined by the CCM scandal, what impact might this have on politics? It's too early to tell.
As far as Morris is aware, no police charges have been levelled against Tait (although I have seen a police report about the alleged Fargo incident in 2014). But she says there's more bad stuff to come from across the CCM sector. 'This is probably the biggest part of it […] Now I'm trying to work quickly to get to the next part because I've had so many new leads come forward honestly,' she says.
What the Christian music industry needs to do, she says, is to put in place 'policy and procedure' to stop people of influence from abusing their power. 'I took on this story not with the hope of dismantling an industry – I don't want that – but with the hope of maybe bringing more accountability and light to it,' says Morris. It sounds like things are going to get darker before that light arrives.