Part One

People would like the music issue for churches to go away.  They can take various avenues to accomplish this, one of which is by making musical style a Christian liberty.  A progression (or regression) occurred to get here.  It started a long time ago.

Regression of Musical Style

One, many musical styles are sinful, wrong, and rejected, so distinguishing between the sacred music and profane music, accompanied by belief in objective meaning of music and objective beauty.
Two, revivalists pragmatically use popular music forms to attract a bigger audience for apparent numerical success and this blurs the distinctions between sacred music and profane music.
Three, even though professing Christians keep a breadth of difference between what is godly and ungodly in musical style, they shrink the margin of difference and make musical style an instrument for numerical growth.
Four, people question the objective meaning of music or objective beauty, advocating relativist aesthetic value.
Five, successors of revivalism, Charismatics, originate Charismatic worship music that confuses feelings caused by musical style with a spiritual, ecstatic religious experience.
Six, lovers of popular or rock musical styles conceive of rock music and begin a contemporary Christian music (CCM) movement, imitating Charismatic worship.
Seven, Christianity divides on the issue of musical style with those rejecting the CCM movement marginalized as religious fundamentalists.
Eight, larger, more popular evangelicalism accepts CCM and rejects objective meaning of music or objective beauty, categorizing musical style as a Christian liberty.
Nine, most fundamentalists stop preaching and warning about CCM, leaving very few to no churches standing against sinful musical styles.

What Influences Liberty for Musical Style

If musical style is a Christian liberty, then musical style cannot have objective meaning.  Musical style must be meaningless, even if musical style is extremely important to church leaders and attendance.  Both good scriptural and natural arguments exist that say that music can be moral or immoral.  Musical style isn’t neutral.

The progression toward the acceptance of all musical styles happened in increments, but that did not debunk or undo the original arguments for objective meaning of musical styles or objective beauty.  In many ways, like a lot of other issues of application of scripture, professing believers capitulated for various reasons.  The less a church is against, the bigger it can become, what many would call a big-tent approach.

Churches that still rejected popular or rock musical styles were smaller and became even smaller as more churches accepted any and every musical style.  The numbers translate to perceived success, including monetary.  Success begets even greater success because success attracts even more people.  Older church members see churches losing young people over musical style.  Like has occurred many times in church history, the older generation concedes to the younger.  The question is not, does it please God?

Sinfulness of Musical Styles

According to scripture, no one has liberty to sin (Romans 6:1)?  From reading 1 Corinthians 6-10, the section on Christian liberty, more guides liberty than just whether something is sinful.  The Apostle Paul takes the Corinthians through a gauntlet of considerations to determine what is right to do.  Most evangelicals have just ignored this particular aspect of Christian liberty.  They focus on whether something is permissible and not whether it could cause someone to stumble or fall (1 Corinthians 8:9-13, 10:12).

If a musical style violates a biblical command, then it is a sin.  What could someone consider from scripture as to the sinfulness of many musical styles?

1. Think on that which is lovely (Philippians 4:8).
2. Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul (1 Peter 2:11).
3. Be not conformed to this world (Romans 12:2)
4. Deny worldly lust (Titus 2:11).
5. Worship God in the beauty of holiness (Psalm 96:9).

Disobeying any of these is sin.  Since music is itself its own language, another factor is “corrupt communication,” which Ephesians 4:29 forbids.  That verse doesn’t give any specifics as to what corrupt communication is.  Like these other verses, people must apply the verse.  Most of the Bible requires application in order to live what God said.  This includes music.  When someone applies the Bible in a rightful and even historical manner, he should conclude the sinfulness of most musical styles.