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.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Protestant church experienced a revival of congregational singing, drawing heavily from Russian-language worship traditions and Western contemporary Christian music translated into Russian and Ukrainian. During this time of renewed religious freedom, Russian and Ukrainian languages coexisted in worship, with translated songs offering accessible expressions for a newly energized faith community. However, the creation of indigenous Ukrainian worship music was largely overlooked. In the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the Protestant church is now re-evaluating this borrowed worship tradition. With increasing national emphasis on Ukrainian language and identity, churches have begun transitioning entirely to Ukrainian-language songs. Many now critique Western worship imports (e.g., Hillsong, Elevation) as theologically and poetically inadequate to express the grief and resilience of a suffering nation. In response, Ukrainian Christian leaders and musicians are initiating a movement toward songwriting rooted in local theology, language, and aesthetics. Ethnodoxology-based training and graduate degrees are emerging to support this cultural and spiritual shift. Based on the researchers’ experiences and interactions with Ukrainians from before and during the war, this presentation explores the early stages of this movement and offers theoretical insights for contexts where worship and identity are being reimagined in response to conflict and cultural transformation.

The Syrian Christians of Kerala, one of India’s ancient Christian communities, trace their origins to the evangelization of Thomas the Apostle. During the colonial era, European missionaries sought to reform this community by vernacularizing the Syriac liturgy. Through printed hymnals and catechetical formation, Carnatic music, the classical tradition of South India, was integrated into Christian worship. In post-independence India, the Church institutionalized this practice through competitions that promoted Carnatic compositions and trained generations of musicians. Building on scholarship on vernacular Christianity and South Indian classical music, this paper traces the trajectory of Carnatic music among Kerala’s Christian communities, examining continuity and change in its adaptation across colonial and postcolonial contexts. While Carnatic music is often framed as an exclusively Hindu art form, this study shows how Christian composers and performers reshaped it as a vehicle of devotional expression and communal identity. In contemporary India, this tradition faces renewed tension as hate campaigns target performers of non-Hindu Carnatic compositions, reflecting Hindutva ideology that seeks to define classical music within a Hindu framework. By historicizing Christian encounters with Carnatic music from colonial translation to contemporary resistance, this paper challenges assumptions about Indian classical music as religiously bounded. It demonstrates how Christian musicians navigate cultural and political pressures while continuing to create and perform, offering a model for understanding how minority communities inhabit and transform majoritarian musical traditions. The study contributes to ethnomusicological debates on music, religion, and cultural nationalism while foregrounding sound as a site of devotion and contestation in modern India.

This presentation considers the notion of post-secularism as a lens to study Christian Indigenous song in Brazil—specifically the repertoire and practices of Paiter-Suruí Christians—through critical reflection on my fieldwork experiences and research process. The continuance and resurgence of multiple religions worldwide as well as debates over the place of religion in scholarship has led scholars in diverse fields (e.g., Habermas 2008, Milbank 2006, Asad 2003) to explore post-secularism as a concept to describe how secularisms and religions interact. Though the disciplines of anthropology and theology presumably developed in opposition, recent scholarship details how the Enlightenment project structured both areas of study (Larsen 2014; Robbins 2003). In doing so, this research helps account for the frequent marginalization of Christian expressions, especially in scholarship on expressive culture in non-western, post-colonial and Indigenous contexts (Dueck and Reily 2016; Engelke 2014). This tendency is prominent in writings about Suruí culture, which describe their “traditional” rituals and shamanic singing at length, but largely ignore expressions of their Christianity (Pucci 2011). Yet my fieldwork engages with a large body of Christian worship songs that are composed and sung in Suruí and based on their traditional musical practices. Given the import of these songs to Suruí Christians and following calls for theologically engaged anthropology (Mittermaier 2025; Lemons 2018), I argue that post-secularism can facilitate frank conversations between scholars of varying beliefs and ultimately allows a fuller understanding of not only how and why Suruí Christians sing, but also how they can be fully Indigenous and Christian.