Anglophone evangelical Christianity has witnessed a profound exodus over the past two decades, with one estimate putting the number at more than 25 million in the USA alone (Gushee 2020). Some members of this cohort of mostly white, politically liberal young adults—often dubbed “exvangelicals”—have abandoned organized religion altogether, while others have migrated into myriad other forms of historical Christianity. But often shared across these trajectories is a particular distaste for the industrial machinery of contemporary praise and worship music. Christian popular culture and worship music, in particular, is a conflicted carrier for markers of political identity and social position and may also be tied to ongoing spiritual and familial trauma. But perhaps because of this spectral presence, it often continues to loom large in the exvangelical imagination. In this paper, I examine two case studies—American songwriter David Bazan and the Australian rock band Gang of Youths—in an attempt to understand how even those explicitly rejecting contemporary worship music are continuing to feel its push-and-pull.

Aiding my analysis is the theoretical concept of metamodernism—a term coined by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker to describe an aesthetics of oscillation “between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity” (2010). Metamodernism in both form and content helps elucidate the multivalent relationships to music within my case studies and unveil an ongoing hauntology of worship music even amongst those who have left the faith behind.