At the height of his fame, Jimi Hendrix was asked by Johnny Carson, “What’s it like being the greatest guitar player in the world?” The rock legend demurred, telling “The Tonight Show” host, “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask that Christian guitarist, Phil Keaggy.”
This exchange offers a window into the minds of evangelicals who are prone to adopt the dominionist Seven Mountain Mandate (7MM) ideology that aims to conquer the world with its particular (and peculiar) take on Christianity.
One of the primary lessons it teaches us about them stems from an essential truth about the story. Namely, that it didn’t happen. There is no record of Phil Keaggy ever being mentioned on “The Tonight Show,” and Hendrix died in 1970, long before Keaggy became known in the relatively small Christian music circles.
The urban legend began to circulate in the 1980s, years before digital tools made it possible for the average person to verify whether it was true. Later, perhaps to account for the timeline discrepancies, the interviewer morphed into a “Rolling Stone” reporter, and Hendrix became Eddie Van Halen or Eric Clapton.
Incidentally, the myth has taken on a life of its own in niche corners of social media. Last year, a post on X read, “Apparently Taylor Swift appeared on the Tonight Show, and when Fallon asked her what it was like to be America’s Sweetheart, she said, ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Phil Keaggy.’”
Myths reveal things about the communities that spread them—things those communities might never say out loud themselves.
Since the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) industry shifted from the folk- and rock-inspired countercultural expressions of faith in the 1970s to the broader, multibillion-dollar Christian media industry of the ’80s and ’90s, there has been a desire among many evangelicals for cultural validation of their artists. The Keaggy myth, however, speaks to something deeper than a need for validation.
It wasn’t enough for Keaggy’s Christian music fans to believe that he was an excellent guitar player. (Keaggy is, by the way, widely considered to be among the very best.) It wasn’t even enough for him to be the absolute best, as if such a thing could ever be measured. Someone who wasn’t Christian needed to acknowledge his superiority.
Zooming out beyond just music, evangelicals in the late 20th century were renegotiating their relationship with the arts just as they were doing with politics. A pivotal figure in this movement was the theologian Francis Schaeffer, who founded the L’Abri community in Switzerland.
In his various writings, Schaeffer took a special interest in the arts. He believed that Christians had abandoned the arts to secular influences, which harmed both the Christian witness and human flourishing.
Schaeffer’s writings on various topics were foundational in the creation of the religious right and the rise of Christian nationalism. For a period, he was influenced by the work of R.J. Rushdoony, who believed that the federal government should enforce certain Old Testament laws, including punishment for acts such as adultery and same-sex relationships.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this series, Seven Mountain Mandate teachers Lance Wallnau and Loren Cunningham have claimed that Schaeffer was part of the group to whom God gave a dominionist, 7MM vision.
Schaeffer’s son, Frank Schaeffer, admits that the elder Schaeffer was complicit in much of the rise of Christian nationalism. But he also believes that evangelical leaders such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell misrepresented his father’s work after his death in 1984.
Frank recalled an exchange with Robertson and his father in which the Christian Broadcasting Network founder bragged to Schaeffer that he had gleefully burned a nude painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. “As Pat told us his art-burning story … Dad squirmed,” the younger Schaeffer wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Crazy for God.”
Frank stared in his dad’s direction, he writes, “but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. My father loved Modigliani, and sometimes talked about how Modigliani ‘retained the human in his art, in contrast to Marcel Duchamp.’”
Francis Schaeffer’s own work suggests an aversion to approaching the arts as an evangelistic tool—and certainly as an instrument of domination or supremacy. In “Art and the Bible,” he wrote, “A Christian should use [the] arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God.”
Similar to the business sphere, arts and entertainment is a challenging mountain for 7MM adherents to scale. Although art can and does reveal truth, any artistic endeavor that is created for the sole purpose of teaching or persuasion is almost always rejected by mass audiences.
This leaves Christian supremacists with only the tools of censorship and boycotts to conquer the arts and entertainment mountain. They will continue their attempts to chip away at what they see as godless, secular entertainment, but the mountain is steep.
In the meantime, there are Christian artists who provide a counter-narrative to the “art as evangelism” movements that exist within the CCM and Christian filmmaking worlds.
The Japanese Christian painter Makoto Fujimura approaches art from the standpoint of Schaeffer’s earlier vision, without the layers of political and nationalist baggage that were later imposed upon it. He presents an alternative in which art doesn’t dominate culture—it nurtures it.
In Fujimura’s book “Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life,” he writes: “Culture is not a territory to be won or lost, but a resource we are called to steward with care. Culture is a garden to be cultivated.”
What does that look like in practice? I’m not an artist, so I’m not positive. You’d have to ask Phil Keaggy.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
