What else to call the new CD from Christian industrial rocker Eowyn, Silent Screams, which borrows its title from the famous anti-abortion film once screened in the White House by Ronald Reagan? Eowyn wants to be the evangelical P.J. Harvey but comes off more like a polite Alice Cooper. What’s significant is the sharper edge of new “CCM,” contemporary Christian music, entertainment for those evangelicals who want to be in the world but not of it, and also as much like it as possible. For the rest of us, such music is a barometer — and the weather ahead, if Silent Screams is any illustration, is far stormier than the new moderation promised us by mainstream media. The coming Christian rock is better music and filled with fiercer politics than drippy old CCM (“contemporary Christian music”). Take as another example Flyleaf, touted this month as a “breakout band” in Rolling Stone. Last time Flyleaf made Rolling Stone was in a story I wrote about the fundamentalist youth movement BattleCry, as hard right as religious group in America.

In the earnest, cautious voices of high school freshmen who’ve just learned new facts, they rattle off Luce’s statistics back at me with as much certainty as they join Lacey Mosley, the lead singer of Flyleaf, in her arena-shaking tribute to Cassie Bernall, the “martyr of Columbine.” The killers pointed a gun at Cassie and asked her if she believed in God, and seven years later, 4,000 kids scream, “SHE – SAID – YES!” The official investigation concluded that she didn’t, but when I mention this to a couple of chaste teen lovers, they shrug. It doesn’t matter. “I think she’s a symbol,” says the girl, an honor student from a liberal family who has come to Acquire the Fire for the first time, at the behest of her boyfriend.

But a symbol for what? A defiant faith? Permanent culture war? That’s what Luce would have his followers believe, but when I speak to Mosley, she tells me she related to Cassie Bernall not because she’d ever been held at gunpoint by evil secularists, but because, like Luce, she grew up hard, very hard, until she found a faith that promised not answers but an end to questions. That’s the meaning of a battle cry: Turn down the volume, and what you have is a statement that leaves no room for discussion of any kind. Luce’s BattleCry gives kids a concert, a T-shirt and a conviction, a universe as broad as the consumer culture it’s meant to replace. That is, a very small world, after all, a cramped little country in which there is not enough room to be either lost or found, only “saved” as a static condition. BattleCry, a distillation of teenage anxiety and ambition, also functions as a sort of antidote to adolescence, a cure meant to fix a generation in a permanent state of “counterrevolution.”

Don’t get me wrong — I actually appreciate Flyleaf. I sat down with lead singer Lacey Mosely for an hour after the show, and she struck me as, well, an artist — that is, not an evangelist. Perhaps a naive one — she decried Jerry Falwell’s belligerence even as she headlined events for BattleCry leader Ron Luce, endorsed by Falwell and distinguished both by his more stylish aesthetics and his even more militant theology. Still, I couldn’t help liking Lacey — theological consistency shouldn’t be demanded of rock stars, especially sweet, tragic, kind of fucked-up ones. I edited out my comparison of lead singer Mosely to Bjork only at the insistence of a secular — and more musically sophisticated — Bjork fan at the magazine. Bjork’s the better artist by far, but Flyleaf is the band that makes kids pump their fists in the air. That’s the point: the new Christian rock is strong enough to punch through the secular/sacred divide. That’s what it was made to do.

–Jeff Sharlet