Will Stockton is a Professor of English at nearby Clemson University where he directs the department’s graduate studies . He’s written about Shakespeare and Milton and is completing an English translation of the Mexican poet Sergio Loo.

I was familiar with Stockton’s 2017 book, Members of His Body, but when I saw that Stockton had co-written a book on dc Talk’s Jesus Freak for Bloomsbury’s acclaimed 33 1/3 series, I knew I had to read it. After finishing it, I knew I had to talk to him about it.

In our conversation, Stockton discusses the kind of feedback the book has received, the complexities of evangelical Christianity, why writing openly about his sexuality and loss of faith actually left him in a better mood than writing about Shakespeare, and how the music of dc Talk is more than just a guilty pleasure.

Jonathan Sircy: What kind of reception has the book had? Is it doing the work in the world that you want it to do?

Will Stockton:  As with any project, academic or non-academic, most of the feedback you get comes at the beginning. It comes through editorial feedback, from readers’ reports, or through people writing you emails soon after it’s published. And, of course, most of the publicity happens at the beginning too, which is to say, there’s definitely been a tapering off of feedback.

Most of the feedback has been positive. One of the reasons your e-mail intrigued me was because you were the first Christian feedback that I had received. Most of it has been from former Christians or non-Christians. If you look on Amazon or Goodreads, you see former evangelical and now out gay people saying they identify with it. Others don’t like the book because it doesn’t offer a making-of-Jesus-Freak history. And then other people cast the book as a kind of LGBT screed against Jesus Freak, which it’s not. So, that feedback comes in three different forms.

Is it doing the work in the world that I want it to? I have no idea. I really don’t know because there’s not that kind of constantly open feedback. I realized a couple of years ago that I write for myself. I do projects that I want to do. Feedback is great, and interacting with other writers is great. But writing is mostly a solitary venture. Not to sound narcissistic, but first and foremost I do it because I enjoy doing it, if that makes sense.

JS:  Well, you figured out a way to do it with somebody else! Was this the biggest project that you’ve tackled with somebody else as a co-writer?

WS: The even bigger project was after the Jesus Freak book. We followed that up really quickly with a volume of a large number of 33 1/3 writers who each wrote short essays. There’s about sixty essays in that volume, and that was a massive editorial project. I’m not sure I would ever take on something like that again. That was a bigger sort of editorial and time-consuming process.

D. Gilson is my best friend, and we work really, really well together. We’ve written together before, and he’s somebody who for years I have traded work with. It was a fairly painless process. We worked out earlier how we were going to divide the book up when we outlined it, so we had a road map going in. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do.

JS: How old is the idea for the project?

WS: It is about five years old at this point.

JS: In the “Colored People” chapter, D. Gilson is pretty clear about identifying a moment where he started looking at dc Talk’s music critically and thinking about writing about it. He brings the song into a class, and everybody skewers it. Now some time has passed, and he’s able to identify what they were pointing fingers at and offer sort of a generous reading of the song too.

Do you have a comparable moment, a moment where you thought, “I know I’m going to write about this music, not just enjoy it”?

WS: He talked me into it! I’m trained as a Renaissance scholar, so to do something outside of that took some coaxing.

I don’t have a moment comparable to bringing “Colored People” into a class and having it skewered.

For a long while, CCM [Contemporary Christian Music] got slotted into guilty nostalgia pleasure for me, especially after I lost my faith. I spent so much of my career writing about Shakespeare and Milton and things that have absolutely nothing to do with music or contemporary Christianity.

I became more willing and more interested when I wrote my second book, which was kind of about the history of marriage and it decided turn towards religious studies in a way that my first book, which was very psychoanalytically focused, wasn’t. I got more interested in thinking about contemporary Christianity as something that I might be invested in writing about and something I had a personal connection to worth exploring, but it was definitely a process of evolution.

For a long while, CCM [Contemporary Christian Music] got slotted into guilty nostalgia pleasure for me, especially after I lost my faith. I spent so much of my career writing about Shakespeare and Milton and things that have absolutely nothing to do with music or contemporary Christianity.

I would never have brought “Colored People” into a college class. I think by the time I was in college, I was savvy enough not to do that.

JS: So D. Gilson’s background is Pentecostal and yours is Baptist. Did that sort of denominational difference matter to how you approached the music? Did you see different flavors of the Protestant tradition in America working itself out in the way you read the music?

WS: Honestly, no. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that when you’re a teenager especially, denominational flavors of contemporary Protestantism are mostly lost on young people. I can’t claim much knowledge of how young people experience contemporary denominational differences today, but even though I attended a Baptist church—in hindsight, the spirit was recognizably denominational—we would have considered ourselves Christians first, ideally non-denominational. The basic thing that holds the faith together is a belief in the salvation and power of Jesus Christ, and everything else is secondary, so when you identify that way, everything else kind of falls to the wayside.

A difference between Pentecostal and Baptist would not have registered to me any more so than the difference between Baptist and Presbyterian would have registered to me.

It was in college studying Milton that I figured out what Calvinism was, and then I realized, you know, predestination is actually a thing and there are people who believe in it and there’s a biblical basis for thinking this way. All of these sorts of really complicated theological matters that hadn’t occurred to me in tenth grade came to the fore, and I start to realize that Protestantism has different factions and those factions have real theological differences. None of it registered.

JS: Music is really, really important to the Pentecostal tradition, and it’s going to signify really differently than in the Baptist tradition. A lot of the conversations I see my students having is about traditional versus contemporary worship. The music that dc Talk plays on that album—moving from rap to more like mid 90s alternative rock—that was something that was up for debate in certain churches.

I wondered if there was a focus on contemporary music or worship music in your church.

WS: There was in my youth group. I think it’s fair is fairly safe to say that my church itself was split between fairly and traditional main Sunday services and a very contemporary focused ministry, which I think is not atypical. CCM was very much a part of our youth group experience. I had I came up with dc Talk and Newsboys and Jars of Clay and Audio Adrenaline. I think I was right after the sort of 80s debate about whether this was a legitimate form of ministry and a legitimate form of witnessing or whether it was kind of playing into the devil’s hands because rock and roll music belongs to the drugs and the east and what have you. I think it largely missed all that.

It was never an issue with my family either. My mother and my father both were always encouraging us to listen to CCM, to think about Christian alternatives to pop bands. Again, finding out that was a controversial issue was something I had discovered. You know, that there had been this big debate starting in the 40s, 50s, 60s, about whether Christianity should move into more contemporary musical forms. None of that occurred to me as a teenager. I thought it was one of the ways Christians engaged the world and formed a culture.

JS: One of the brilliant things the book does is look at the videos alongside the music. Were you consuming the videos at the same time?

WS: No, and that’s because my parents didn’t have cable and they very heavily restricted our TV watching. I did not watch music videos. I’ve never been a music video person. So that was all D, who grew up on music videos. I did not. Even music by mainstream bands I liked like the Smashing Pumpkins, I could sing you their catalog, but I couldn’t tell you what the videos looked like. I could hear the “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” eight times a day on the radio driving in my car. But I had no way to see the video.

You know, that there had been this big debate starting in the 40s, 50s, 60s, about whether Christianity should move into more contemporary musical forms. None of that occurred to me as a teenager. I thought it was one of the ways Christians engaged the world and formed a culture.

JS: The way I discovered dc Talk was because of their first video, which was for a song called “Heaven Bound.” That’s the way we discovered them. I had not seen any of the videos you wrote about! My mom’s reaction still is that Toby McKeehan can really dance, because, for her, dc Talk is the “Heaven Bound” which unfortunately stuck Kevin Max in front of a keyboard.

The only instrument in all three videos is an acoustic guitar that Michael Tait’s got in the middle of “Colored People.” They’re boy band videos. I feel like “Between You and Me” is a Seal song.

WS: That is a great analogy.

JS: It’s like somebody just listened to “A Kiss from a Rose” several times, and then wrote “Between You and Me.”

WS: I don’t why that it occurred to me. That’s a great analogy.

JS: Maybe it’s just the political climate we’re in, but it seems like the exigency for going back and looking at this music is even more heightened in the year of our Lord 2019, the era of Trump.

WS: Why?

JS: Well, the discussion that comes out of the election in 2016 is that it’s evangelicals who voted en masse for Trump. The numbers bear that out. The “Colored People” chapter especially feels like it’s trying to do political work in the aftermath of that election, and that involves engaging with the popular music evangelicals produced.

So, there’s an element of the book that feels like it’s intervening in politics, but there’s a part of the book that feels very much like you’re trying to, in a Freudian sense, mourn over your last faith rather than like being trapped in melancholy with it. Does that make sense?

You’re responsible for not just the “Jesus Freak” chapter, but co-writing the “Between You and Me” chapter too. When you when you go back and read this book, does it feel political? Does it feel personal? Where does it fall?

WS: There’s a lot there.

It feels more personal than political, to the extent that you can kind of separate those two. As you as you’ve noticed, the “Colored People” chapter was D’s chapter, and D. is very personally invested in defending American evangelicalism against easy dismissals. That’s sort of knee jerk gesture, which is everywhere in academia, is something that he finds personally overly simplistic and a reduction of the church’s often extremely complicated and multifaceted engagement with race relations. For him (and for me too because I endorsed the chapter!), it is a place where the personal meets the political.

My engine was first and foremost the personal. We weren’t thinking of Trump when we wrote the book.

At the risk of being super reductive in the name of being anti-reductive, both D.  and I exists in, for, lack of a better word, secular academic environment where Contemporary Christianity, evangelical Christianity especially, is considered monolithically aligned with the forces of political conservatism, which is sort of monolithically aligned with the forces of white nationalism and white supremacy. And these are all sort of monolithic forces, which we must reject. And there are plenty of people who have grown up in the church who will also engage in that sort of wholesale rejection of the tradition.

But for us, it’s far more complicated than that. As I said, the traditions of Christianity are quite diverse. It’s sort of academic gesture we perform. This monolithic narrative needs to be complicated, so that’s what we’re trying to do.

I did have an experience where I played “Colored People” for one of my fellow Shakespearean friends just for fun. He was just horrified, which is kind of symptomatic of a general reaction that most people have when white people stand up and declare themselves to be colored people.

But I know as a teenager, I experienced that song as a profoundly anti-racist gesture. To think about ourselves as fundamentally human and think of race as a secondary characteristic—by the way, that’s totally a notion I still endorse—I thought that was profoundly politically generative.

AS I SAID, THE TRADITIONS OF CHRISTIANITY ARE QUITE DIVERSE. IT’S SORT OF ACADEMIC GESTURE WE PERFORM. THIS MONOLITHIC NARRATIVE NEEDS TO BE COMPLICATED, SO THAT’S WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO DO.

JS: That’s the brilliance of reading the videos alongside the songs, It blew my mind that the guy who directed the “Hurt” video also directed “Jesus Freak.” And D. Gilson’s point is that “Colored People” is clearly responding to “Losing my Religion.”

From the beginning, were you committed to that kind of generosity, or was that where you ended up once you started writing?

WS: The book is a love letter. I like the Freudian analogy to mourning. Both of us really enjoy dc Talk and take that music seriously. I don’t think we would write the book otherwise. I mean, I’ve never written anything about something I’ve hated.

You use the word “generously.”  I would just say we wrote “honestly” and in a complicated way with what was going on and the way I experience it experienced it then.

JS: One of the ways I knew the book was good was that it made me want to go back and listen to dc Talk, which is something I hadn’t done in a while. Your book is conceptually generative, but I think it’s sort of aesthetically generative, too. You’re giving a better reading of the music than I think even people in Christian circles who dug the music would have given. Many of them thought, “Oh, this is clearly a rip off of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But you argue that it’s actually doing something redemptive!

WS: Well it is a rip-off, but it’s not only that, right? To say that it’s a rip-off is to cut the narrative off at the beginning.

JS: Did you know this was 33 1/3 book when it started?

WS: We knew it was a short collaborative book. I’ve loved the 33 1/3 series for a long time. So, I’ve done a lot of reading on it.

JS: Was there a version that had a chapter on “In the light”?

WS: It was briefly talked about.  You only have 30,000 words! D.  and I had a twenty-minute discussion about “In the Light.” It got cut ultimately because even though that’s a good song, it’s a cover song. It didn’t kind of provide the nice logic that “Between You and Me” did. But I adore that song. It’s an amazing cover.

JS: Is this the most open you’ve been about your spiritual life in writing? Is there some other writing you had done prior to this that sort of paved the way for this? The epilogue talks about shame. I wondered if you were worried about writing this openly your faith or in a way that wasn’t immediately condemning, given the response you had from the Shakespearean to “Colored people.” Had you written about your spiritual life before?

WS: No, only in highly Sublimated way, but I wasn’t worried. It would never have occurred to me that people would respond negatively to it. Now that you put it that way, I wonder why I wasn’t sufficiently paranoid.

JS: You’ve written your second book. It was for Fordham University Press, so it was legit, but it was also a more personal project. At that point, the Jesus Freak book hadn’t come out yet. Now you’ve written this book. Was there a purposeful desire of yours to find a non-academic venue for your work?  

WS: I understand your question, and I have a long answer.

I realized something at the end of writing Members of His Body. This sounds strange given my profession, but I really hate academic writing, and I often don’t enjoy reading it. I read it as a chore. There are books I really love and scholars who I model my prose after and whose work I will eagerly devour. But 90 percent of it is difficult and not fun to sit down and work through.

And I personally get in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mood when writing academically.

No one was more eager for me to finish the second book than my husband or my kid. You find yourself being a terrible father, a terrible partner. You’re just going around the house yelling and getting pissed off at the stupidest things, and it’s because you’re fixated with this crux of an argument on Page 16 that in the grand scheme of things no one’s going to know about. But I get so hyper-focused on my argument about Othello that the rest of my life suffers. I know that’s the way I get when I write.

So, when I finished Members of His Body, I stepped back and I was like, “I’m never doing this again and never writing an academic monograph again. My husband doesn’t deserve it. My son doesn’t deserve it.”

I personally get in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mood when writing academically.

Writing the Jesus Freak book where that basic restriction of absenting yourself from the argument freed up my attitude and made the project go a lot more smoothly. I started writing more creative non-fiction. I wrote some essays about parenting a foster kid. I started moving into translation work and translated some books from Spanish. I’m trying to move out in different directions. Whether I’ll write another academic monograph, I don’t know.

I think a lot of that has to do with the sort of horrible person while composing that book. But I wasn’t that person while composing the Jesus Freak book because I was more forthrightly personal.