Charlie Peacock’s memoir drives deep into evangelicalism’s historic twentieth-century turn
Roots and Rhythm: A Life in Music by Charlie Peacock. Eerdmans, 2025. 389 pp., $32.99
A real renaissance is hard to come by. No birth is easy, let alone a rebirth. But that’s what American evangelicals experienced—that’s what they accomplished—from the mid-twentieth century through the opening decades of the twenty first: renaissance.
Joel Carpenter describes the initial stirrings of this vast movement, in the aftermath of the 1925 Scopes Trial, with a classic evangelical metaphor. It’s featured in the title of his book: Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (1997). But another quarter century past that book’s publication a different vista is possible. It was not just an awakening that took place. It was the start of a century of flowering—the rebirth among evangelicals of inquiry, discovery, and expression on a broad scale.
How broad?
In 1956 Christianity Today, under the editorship of the philosopher, theologian, and journalist Carl F. H. Henry, was launched in Washington D. C. as an evangelical journal of opinion speaking into the public square. Within a decade it had exceeded 100,000 subscribers and achieved a national and international presence. It marked its ten-year anniversary with the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, a precursor of the Lausanne Movement, whose first international congress took place in 1974.
By then the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) was in its early stages; over the next decades it would grow from a small circle of institutions to more than 170 colleges and universities with eleven million alumni and counting. By the end of the century a phalanx of evangelically-based professional societies, most with their own journals, was regularly gathering thousands of members. Some had been established in the early years of Carpenter’s “awakening”; others followed decades later—Christian Medical and Dental Associations (1931), American Scientific Affiliation (1941),Conference on Christianity and Literature (1956) Christian Legal Society (1961), Conference on Faith and History (1967), Christians in the Visual Arts (1979).
Expansion of a more commercial nature was taking place alongside these developments. The evangelical publishing and music industry, worth millions of dollars by the 1980s, had by the end of the century begun to push into mainstream markets. In music, such movement was dubbed “crossover,” symbolized most famously by Amy Grant, whose 1991 Heart In Motion was nominated for a Grammy for Best Album. The Grand Rapids publishing house Eerdmans, Dutch Calvinist at its base but featuring a broad range of Christian writers (including many self-consciously evangelicals), was producing books that were reviewed in mainstream publications and assigned in universities at large. And of course evangelical scholars and writers were by then publishing in increasing numbers with university and trade presses.
In 2000 one of the nation’s leading intellectuals, Alan Wolfe, announced that a new moment in the long history of this strangely central, strangely marginal American Christian tradition had arrived. His October cover story for The Atlantic summed up his judgment: “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind.” James Turner, a historian at Notre Dame, had rung in the year before in the venerable Catholic journal of opinion Commonweal with a similar conclusion: “Something To Be Reckoned With: The Evangelical Mind Awakens.” While both scholars warned of troubling levels of foundational weakness within the tradition as well as the movement, both acknowledged impressive levels of achievement and promise—in infrastructure, cultural production, and social extension.
It seems fitting, in retrospect, that in 2004 one of the leading scholars of the renaissance, the historian George M. Marsden, won the American historical profession’s highest award, the Bancroft Prize, for his biography Jonathan Edwards: A Life. It seemed to confirm Wolfe’s and Turner’s analyses. That the award came in the middle of a run of three American presidents—Clinton, Bush, and Obama—who were themselves shaped by one facet or another of the American evangelical tradition seemed to speak to the maturing force and deepening influence of the movement.
As it was occurring, this renaissance raised enough hope to leave some participant-observers (in a familiar dynamic) in a state of frank disappointment with its fruit—most famously Mark Noll in his 1994 cri de coeur The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. A retrospective retort of the glass-half-full variety might point out that in 2007 the Washington Post anointed Michael Gerson, an alum of evangelical Wheaton College (where Noll spent most of his career), a columnist—after Gerson had served as one of George W. Bush’s chief speechwriters. There was (arguably!) no scandal in that.
To be sure: So far as renaissances go, this one was modest. It bore in flagrant ways the limits of its own history and times. The evangelical tradition is a species of high-tech, low-church, all-too-gnostic Protestantism. Accordingly, its twentieth-century renaissance was democratic in key and capitalist in genre. These are not conditions to spawn transcendent visions and symphonic wonder.
But democracy and capitalism have their value, so far as renaissances go. Democracy inclines us to consider people very, very closely, after all—people in perennial need of rebirth. And art and learning require no small economic dimension. A certain kind of renaissance was possible. Even a ranch house can have its charm, for a time—if the right owners show up.
Charlie Peacock was such an owner. His memoir helps us see and sense more of the inner and outer history of recent American evangelicalism—and America itself—than even a prepared reader might expect.
Who is Charlie Peacock? At the beginning of his tale he recounts something he overheard his daughter say to a friend who was trying to figure out who her dad was. “Is he famous?” the friend asked. “No, just well known,” was the daughter’s reply.
She wasn’t lying. Although Peacock assures us that he is keeping namechecking in check, by the end of the book the number of contacts and friends and connections and acquaintances and conversation partners and bandmates and colleagues he mentions is nearly overwhelming, ranging from uber-celebrities like Bono, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Herbie Hancock to ordinary stars like Vince Gill, Al Green, and Norah Jones, to Christian figures like J. I. Packer, Eugene Peterson, and Frederick Buechner, to music industry legends like Ahmet Ertegun, T Bone Burnett, and Bill Graham—and dozens more (Alison Krauss, Wayne Shorter, Katy Perry, Gary Snyder, Al Kooper, Merle Haggard, David Brooks . . .). Peacock has more than just rubbed shoulders with culturally significant figures—he has worked shoulder-to-shoulder with many of them.
This entourage of companions is a sign of three signal qualities of Peacock that become unshakably clear through his story: talent, moxie, and longing.
Peacock—born Charles Ashworth, in 1956—grew up in Yuba City, California, forty miles north of Sacramento, where in the first third of the century his relations had migrated from Louisiana and Oklahoma. His father was a musician and music teacher, and Peacock, an aspiring songwriter, singer, and pianist, ran hard in the same direction. He immersed himself in the local variant of the counterculture, and by age fifteen his dad was driving him four hours south to L.A. to drop off tapes of his music at David Geffen’s Asylum Records.
So far as religious experience goes, as a twelve-year old Peacock had experienced evangelical conversion. But he was more profoundly inspired by the likes of Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac. “Kerouac revealed a God-hauntedness that far exceeded my own,” he writes. Kerouac’s sense that we must be “mad to live”—which Peacock translates as “seamlessly integrated with God, people, place, and things without ever being less or more than human”—shaped him deeply. By his early twenties, he says, he had become “something like a walking comparative religion class, with the figure of Jesus always in the shadows.”
Meanwhile, Peacock’s talent and drive were attracting attention. Immersed in jazz and drawn to pop, Peacock was a perfect candidate for the New Wave experimentalism that remade pop in the late seventies and eighties. He was a student of John Coltrane and a follower of Miles Davis. Davis, he writes, provided “the headship” of his maturing artistic philosophy. “His preference for risk and his confidence that it would produce previously unheard results were absolute magic to me. He became my organizing principle, the blueprint for casting my musicians and keeping my productions unique.” Working on both the performance and production sides, he wandered from show to show and studio to studio, looking for the breakthrough that seemed so near.
But instead of a breakthrough he found himself breaking down. Married to his wife Andi at age eighteen, by age twenty-five, he recalls, “I had used everyone in my life for personal pleasure, ego, and gain. I had declared myself free and found myself in bondage.” On his pilgrimage as “a full-time spiritual tourist” he had sought “transcendence.” But what he needed was “real-time earthbound rescue,” from alcoholism and drug abuse and more. He began to consider Christianity anew, and when in 1982 a saxophonist with whom he was playing brought Christ’s gospel to him in a fresh way he suddenly experienced deliverance and relief. “In a fraction of a second I knew love more completely, more extravagantly than I’d ever known it. I felt mercy.” But it was not just experiential. It was epistemic. “Then I knew. I knew more than I could tell. I was experiencing a kind of awareness I had no prior experience with or words to describe.”
It’s instructive that just after Peacock describes what he calls this “renewed confession of faith in Jesus” he proceeds to a discussion of the philosopher Michael Polanyi by way of two evangelical scholars who later became his friends: Steven Garber and Esther Meek. Garber is a graduate of Geneva College, one of the founding members of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (and where I’ve taught since 1999). And it was from Geneva that Meek recently retired as a professor of philosophy. As Peacock made his way into the revived evangelical world, his own renewal was quickened and deepened.
Encounters with influences such as Garber and Meek began to happen immediately. While he was still chasing what he describes as “the oxygen-deprived but glorious pop music summit,” he found himself in the company of the same west coast Christian communities whose music and faith had not long before drawn Bob Dylan, along with Dylan’s sometime bandmate T Bone Burnett. In the 1980s Peacock became a pivotal member of a Sacramento ministry called the Warehouse that aimed to bear Christian witness in the broader pop arena via its own overachieving label: the edgy “alternative” Exit Records, which had a distribution arrangement with A&M. Peacock produced his own album with Exit (which I’ve written about here) along with the work of other artists. He created videos, opened for the likes of Chris Isaak and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and released a solo album with Island Records, all while being represented by the legendary Bill Graham. And he waited.
The wait eventually took him away from California to Nashville, where at age thirty-three he and his family decided to recenter their work. Here he fell into another matrix of reemergent evangelicalism. If it did not lead to the exact commercial or critical breakthrough he’d hoped for, it did prove to be the move he needed. He produced dozens of albums in the “Contemporary Christian Music” industry (and eventually beyond), founded with his wife Andi an influential nonprofit called Art House America, and worked his way into the general Nashville scene, recording his own albums, playing venues like the famous Bluebird Café, writing Amy Grant’s top-five hit “Every Heartbeat,” composing music for television and movies, starting his own label (re:think), writing books. His well-known-ness grew, culminating in 2013, when he produced three albums in the Entertainment Weekly Top ten country albums of the year—for Holly Williams (granddaughter of Hank), The Civil Wars (with whom he had won two Grammys in 2012), and the Lone Bellow.
Along the way he founded the Commercial Music program at David Lipscomb University (a member of the CCCU), and spent a year with his wife studying at Covenant Theological Seminary, where Andi would take an M. A. in Theological Studies. Their two children have followed the same trail: Molly Nicholas has made a career working in development at Nashville Public Radio; Sam Ashworth and his wife Ruby Amanfu are both Grammy-nominated artists.
It all amounts to considerably more than a glimpse of the renaissance, from the inside, moving out: Peacock participating in (and helping to create) the base of various predominantly evangelical institutions and initiatives, from which he extended himself into broader movements and networks—including, to take one dramatic example, his pivotal role in creating the Nashville hub of what would become Bono’s “One Campaign.” A gathering in 2002 at Charlie and Andi’s house for that end culminated with Bono picking up a Gibson J-30 acoustic and leading the group in the Jesus Music anthem “We Are One in the Spirit.”
Peacock describes himself as “an autodidact, polymath, musician. An artist”—of which his memoir bears ample witness. He leaves the reader with a profoundly refreshed sense of what words like creativity, vision, beauty, and providence mean. His approach isn’t chronological but episodic and thematic, flowing from the center of his memory down passageways linked by music and faith. To go back and listen to Peacock’s early, richly confessional songs, now with a fuller sense of his life itself—there’s a taste of heaven in that, in witnessing redemption giving shape to time and its winding, unforeseeable ways. We, on this trail with him, go (as one of his songs has it) “riding into wonderland,” seeing just how entwined past and present are. In recent years Peacock has returned to his jazz roots (including an album that features John Coltrane’s son Ravi on sax). He composes the book in like fashion, with “jazz-like improvisation and tangential riffs.” It leads the reader to an unanticipated temporal reorientation.
As a longtime Peacock admirer, I had been expecting—and hoping for—the ordinary artist’s tale: a carefully woven chronological story featuring reflection on the thinking behind particular albums and songs, and Peacock does deliver some of this. But he’s far more interested in something else: a story that decenters himself and so recenters us, chapter by chapter, by showing the extent to which we fundamentally live through and for each other, and through and for the places to which God has moved us. “Providence is God going ahead of a person or persons,” he writes, “preparing the way for future eventualities and interdependent connections with place and people.” Through this grace we become “fully human”: “a person alive to a healthy relationship with God, his people, the land, all that is in it.”
If such formulations leave the impression that Peacock has been communing with Wendell Berry, he has, as numerous references in the book reveal. In the course of my own work on Berry I was startled one night to come across a song on YouTube called “Wendell Berry in the Fields at Night.” It was—to my astonishment—the production of one of Peacock’s jazz ensembles and the opening track of When Light Flashes Help Is on the Way. I was then drafting a chapter on the outsized place of Berry in the latter days of the evangelical renaissance. That Charlie Peacock found his way to Berry only confirmed my argument. Peacock has long traveled alongside others in pursuit of the scent of life, and, like many others, found in Berry a profound understanding of the source and significance of life itself. “I’m living the eternal now transformed by inexhaustible love,” he says, as he closes his testament.
I first began to hear and heed Peacock’s voice in my own season of rebirth in the late 1980s, after a deadly season of despair and doubt as my college years were ending. Later, in the midst of a rejuvenating recovery, I joined the staff of a youth ministry of a large evangelical church in Lancaster, PA, one that was bustling with people and questions and ordinary Christian joy. In 1990 Peacock released an album called The Secret of Time, and, loving the work I now knew God was calling me into, I placed—as if in anticipation of the shape of Peacock’s book—a quotation from the title track of that album above my desk, at the center of pictures of all my friends in that truly beloved community: “I could see what a great and grand act of affection it’s all been,” Peacock confessed. It struck me then, as it does yet today, as in fact the secret of time.
After three years at the church I moved on. I needed to travel further up and further in (in Lewis’s grand phrase), as many vital souls in the still vibrant evangelical world—Peacock, Mark Heard, Os Guinness, and more—had been whispering to me. I made my way to one of the intellectual centers of this movement (a seminary, it’s worth noting), where I found dear teachers and life-long companions. The great act of affection was continuing right before my eyes, and deep inside my heart.
Is there anything we need more than new life, in all its magnificent forms, surging forth from unspeakable love, nurtured in communities of care? To pose the question is to know the answer.
Eric Miller is Professor of History and the Humanities at Geneva College, where he directs the honors program. His books include Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, and Brazilian Evangelicalism in the Twenty-First Century: An Inside and Outside Look (co-edited with Ronald J. Morgan). He is the Editor of Current.