Growing up, I spent every summer at a youth church camp in the Thumb of Michigan. It was a formative place for me, and I still have close friends that I made in the dust-covered, mud-puddled campground there between a cornfield and a dairy farm.

Every year, camp was capped off with a bonfire where we sang songs, shared what God was doing in our lives, and made smores. And every single year, there was a long line of kids throwing CDs into the fire while the leaders admonished us on the dangers of secular music.

Not necessarily all secular music, mind you, but the evil stuff. Y’know, the kind that would let evil thoughts into our brain and get us to abandon Jesus and turn to devil worship, or something similar. I never brought my CDs with me to camp (you weren’t supposed to, hello), but I do have a distinct memory of returning from camp one year and deleting all of the Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock I had downloaded on Napster (that was probably a good call actually, but not for spiritual reasons).

It wasn’t just church camp though—the youth room in my home church had a chart on the wall with Christian bands you should listen to instead of these evil secular bands. Concern over the music kids listened to was a constant thread in the culture around me, as Focus on the Family and Family Christian Bookstores and HM Magazine warned us to be ever vigilant.

As I’ve grown up though, I’ve discovered that a lot of the wicked, demonic bands I was warned about weren’t actually demonic. More than that, some of them weren’t even that evil—or evil at all.

Here are the most misrepresented musicians.

Black Sabbath

I was originally introduced to the Godfathers of Heavy Metal as the original devil-worshiping rock and rollers. Their albums were filled with demonic imagery that could make its way into my soul. Ozzy even called himself The Prince of Darkness! He bit the head off of a bat that time!

So imagine my surprise when I listened to Master Of Reality for the first time and heard the lyrics to “After Forever:”

Could it be you’re afraid of what your friends might say
If they knew you believe in God above?
They should realize before they criticize
That God is the only way to love

I ran to the lyric sheet to see if I was crazy or if Ozzy Osbourne was telling me I needed to make Jesus Christ my personal lord and savior. And I was shocked that it was the latter.

Because despite the dark imagery, the members of Black Sabbath were all Christians. Geezer Butler was particularly devout, and when they were accused of being Satanists, he wrote the above lyrics. And while “After Forever” was far and away the most overtly Christian thing they ever wrote, much of their work speaks of evil as a cautionary tale. It makes its way into most of their albums, but Master of Reality is the most overt—even if it does open with a track about weed.

And as it turns out, a lot of classic metal bands were actually Christians. Tommy Ayara of Slayer is famously Catholic and does the whole Satanist thing as a joke. Iron Maiden wrote “Number of the Beast” after one of them had a nightmare about the book of Revelation. But, given most Evangelicals’ capacity for irony, it makes sense that they’d miss the point.

Nine Inch Nails

Growing up as a Christian kid in the nineties, Nine Inch Nails was a looming specter. In fact, there was a large NIN logo etched onto the wall of the dorm at church camp that freaked me out all the time. And when the youth leaders would bring up examples about how much secular music glorified drugs and violence and sex and whatever else, Reznor & Co. was usually the first band they brought up. I think maybe a third of the CDs that were burned at these campfires were The Downward Spiral.

It took me a long time to even want to listen to Nine Inch Nails as a result. In fact, I only intentionally listened to them for the first time in the last couple years. And while, yeah, there are a few lines that I probably wouldn’t have been mature enough to handle responsibly as a youth, I didn’t find all that much that was inherently offensive. There was plenty of the drugs, sex, and violence I was warned about, but it was hardly glorified.

In fact, when I finally listened to The Downward Spiral myself, I was surprised to find that it was actually pretty close to the themes of Ecclesiastes. Throughout the record, the narrator indulges his impulses and seeks money and fame thinking that he’ll find something worthwhile therein. Instead, it’s all emptiness. The closest he gets is when he breaks his own isolation to be intimate with someone else, which in turn brings him “closer to God.”

Even “Heresy” (which, yeah, I’ll give that to you if you feel uncomfortable singing along with the chorus) isn’t as much anti-God as it is an attack on abusive church leaders. And in that regard, I actually find a lot to agree with?

The Smashing Pumpkins

As a kid, I was always told that the Smashing Pumpkins were the angriest, noisiest, most aggressive band around. Listening to it would create a feedback loop of angst until you were too angry to function. Anger would swallow up all of your other emotions and make you violent. And I was content to go on not listening to them based on this warning.

Then in high school, I was in a music class where we took turns bringing in songs for analysis. One day, someone brought in “Tonight, Tonight.” It instantly shattered the mental image I had made of the band. Angry? It was about the most uplifting thing I’d ever heard! Noisy? There were strings! Aggressive? It felt like a hug!

The Pumpkins would become one of my favorite bands, and today are one of the bands I go to when making a mix for my wife. I even put “Disarm” on my church’s preservice playlist. Do they have some angsty moments? Of course. Do they get noisy? They’re a big reason almost every guitarist has a fuzz pedal. But these flavors are tempered by a warm emotional heart that fills me with joy.

To this day, I think Evangelicals heard the line “God is empty” and overreacted.

The Cure

I often look back at pictures of my mom in 1984 and wonder how I didn’t get into the Cure until I was an adult. Part of the blame has to rest on the various spiritual leaders in my life warning me that the 80s Icons were sadness incarnate. They made depressing music for depressed people. Listening to the Cure was a surefire way to empty your life of God’s joy and give into despair.

Does the Cure make sad music? Undoubtedly—sometimes cartoonishly sad. Sometimes beautifully so. But they’ve also released some of the most joyful music I’ve ever heard. “Just Like Heaven” alone should be enough to throw a brick through the argument like a glass house.

But even when they do indulge their sad side, their pain is usually from a place of deep love and idealism. Not only that, but studies have shown that listening to sad music can release comforting hormones, making you actually feel better.

Maybe the church leaders were just afraid all the boys would start wearing lipstick…

Thrice

Alright, this is a tricky inclusion, because I don’t think I ever heard a youth leader talk about Thrice. And also, Thrice is kind of a Christian band? While some members of the band are nonreligious, lead singer Dustin Kensrue never shied away from his own faith.

But that didn’t stop the Focus on the Family chart in the back of my youth room from including them on the evil secular side with Thursday, Glassjaw, and others. And as rumor has it, when a representative from Focus on the Family spoke at the church Kensrue was leading worship at, he also mentioned Thrice by name as he listed the evil secular bands they should all be avoiding.

Just goes to show you how useless the Christian/Secular paradigm is for evaluating music.

Pink Floyd

The funny thing about evangelicalism’s warning of secular music is that most of it seems to be directed at more contemporary music. Older music is generally regarded as being safe. Even if the Rolling Stones are singing about the sexual assault of a slave girl, that’s fine because it’s an old song, and our dads liked them as kids.

However, that didn’t stop some of my youth leaders from singling out Pink Floyd. According to them, Pink Floyd would turn us all into drug addicts with their constant glorification of illicit substances. After all, they’re so weird.

But while many a bong circle has been inspired by The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd themselves largely abstained from mind-altering substances. The big exception here, of course, is original lead singer and guitarist Syd Barrett, whose psychedelic drug use would lead to a severe mental breakdown. The rest of the members were largely scared off the stuff. Even so, the association with drugs still follows the band—much to Roger Waters’ chagrin.

Come to think of it, it’s funny that the Beatles were never targeted with similar warnings, despite being far more open about their own drug use.

Rap Music

Now, this one is pretty broad, because it was a broad warning. I don’t remember too many specific artists being mentioned (except for Eminem probably). The main message was just that rap music was bad. There was cussin’ and drinkin’ and druggin’ and sexin’ and gang violence galore, so you should get rid of your rap CDs before you turn into gangsters, er, “gangstas” yourself.

This isn’t to say there aren’t valid concerns with the content of many rap songs. But the blanket dismissal of the genre passed down to me from various spiritual leaders lacked any sort of intelligent discussion.

Instead, in hindsight, it seemed to carry a pretty hefty undertone of racism—whether they meant it to or not. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they just wanted to keep the kids in their care safe, but many of the concerns about rap music feel very similar to concerns about integrated schools during the Civil Rights Act.

As I Lay Dying

While all the other bands might as well have carried bright flashing warning signs around them, As I Lay Dying was offered up as a wholesome alternative. Plus, they were heavier than a lot of the metal bands we were warned about, and what’s better than moshing for the Lord?

Well, hindsight is 20/20, and our perception of AILD has definitely shifted a bit after vocalist Tim Lambesis hired a hitman to murder his wife. But that’s not the only damning mark against them. After being arrested, Lambesis claimed that As I Lay Dying may have started as a Christian band, they pretended to still be Christian long after they lost their faith, leveraging their spiritualism for more record sales.

According to Lambesis, they weren’t alone. He didn’t mention any names, but he claimed that only ten percent of the Christian bands they toured with were actually earnest in their faith.

Admittedly, it’s a good marketing strategy. When a Culture War is waging and one side is encouraging kids to buy metal CDs from bands that belong to their side, that can lead to a huge boon in album sales. While even nonreligious parents are ambivalent at best to their kids listening to Korn or Slipknot, the entire Christian media machine is actively pushing Christian music into kids’ Discmans, and the parents are happy about it.

I don’t mean to indict every Christian band here. Certainly, there were artists who were earnest in their beliefs. But I have a very hard time trusting the motivations of the Christian music industry as wholly benign. For instance, I wonder how much of a take Focus on the Family got when someone bought a CD from the Christian side of their ubiquitous charts.

Suffice it to say, viewing the entire music landscape under a binary of Christian or Secular doesn’t make for the most informed lens. But that’s another article.

What about you? What bands were you told were wholly evil but ended up being not that bad? Drop a comment.