American Protestant churches are home to so-called music ministries, which consist of one or more music ensembles that provide accompaniment for congregational singing. These music ministries explictly welcome both men and women, and indeed, both men and women volunteer in great numbers to sing and play in ensembles such as church choirs, orchestras and praise bands. There is an evident gender diparity in the leadership of these ensembles: men overwhelmingly predominate as leaders of church music ministries. In addition, as I will argue in this presentation, church music ministries enforce a sexist double standard that applies to the volunteer musicians. Leaders never say that women are held to a different and higher standard than men, and may not even be consciously aware that they are maintaining a double standard; in this sense, the double standard is disguised. Rather, church music leaders argue that singers must be confessing Christians, but instrumentalists need not be. However, because of the deeply gendered context of American Protestant churches - where women are much more likely to sing, and men are more likely to play instruments – women musicians are generally required to meet a spiritual standard that male musicians are not. This presentation is based on interviews of twenty-five American church music leaders, and contributes to the burgeoning scholarly investigations of Christian church musicking by ethnomusicologists (Myrick and Porter 2021; Stueuernagel 2021; Mall, Engelhardt and Ingalls 2021; Ingalls, Reigersberg and Sherinian 2018).

In 2004, multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens released his fourth full-length album titled "Seven Swans." Shot through with swooning, whispered vocals and lush banjo-centered arrangements, Stevens and producer-collaborator Daniel Smith were among the first artists riding what Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings jokingly called the "banjo wave" that followed the release of the Cohen Brothers' folk-noir classic "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" in 2001. But among the folksy indie rock at the time, Seven Swans was notable for its overabundance of confessional evangelical Christian language. Especially among teenagers and college students at the time, the album, along with similarly devotional tracks from his previous release, made Stevens into the leading musical voice for a new expression of Christian faith. Worship leaders began to incorporate Stevens's songs into their setlists and his spare Americana-inspired arrangements became standard in youth gatherings and campus ministries.

In the years since, the banjo has continued to chart a course outward from this epicenter, working its way into ever-new corners of popular and evangelical religious music. On the one hand, Stevens and his music came to epitomize what Brett McCracken called "hipster Christianity," which encouraged a studied, eclectic approach to Christian culture marked by aloof upper-middle-class white smugness. But in other ways, Stevens represents a kind of shadow side to Bush-era evangelical grievance politics. In this paper, I draw on recorded exemplars and new personal interviews with musicians to explore the banjo's symbolic role within on-going intra-religious negotiations around whiteness, masculinity, religiosity, rurality, and sincerity in evangelical worship.

When a new ideology or cultural practice is introduced into a society, it evolves from foreign to local—a natural process of contextualization or syncretization. This can be seen in an African context where Christianity and its musical traditions were introduced and have evolved to the point of becoming part of the local African identity (Krabill 2013; Kidula 2013). In this paper I will follow the evolution of Christian Deaf song as I have observed it over the past 30 years in Spain: it follows a pattern described by Krabill in his study of indigenous African hymnology. Deaf Christian song in Spain began with sign-for-word interpreting in a hearing church, followed by more skilled and adaptive interpreting, then using the same songs in an all-Deaf environment without sound. Later new songs were created in a similar style, and then, composers began experimenting with songs that exuded a distinctive Deaf flavor. Finally, these songs were shared at international conferences and workshops. I examine formal changes such as adjusting and regularizing rhythms, adapting the dynamics of the signing to fit the feel of the song, and altering discourse structures. I touch on the incorporation of drums or other auditory inputs that can be felt (and often heard) by the Deaf audience, and I discuss how the new expressions reflect a visual rather than auditory focus, including elements adapted from theatrical genres.