Christian rock still exists? I thought that after Skillet everyone just realised what a bad idea it was.
Me and my friend(both of us atheists) recently went to see Skillet in concert. He's a fan of skillet for some reason despite them being a religous band. He asked me to come along so he, "wouldn't have to suffer alone", refering to the Jesus freaks and other annoying people.
I'm pretty sure the place was filled past the limit of people. We either stood or sat on the floor the whole time, being told by the event staff to clear the walkway, despite there being no where else to go. It was called Winterjam or some shit so we had to sit through 10 or so really shitty bands that were slightly more famous than the local youth group band. We spent most of the time trying to block out the horrid music with our MP3 players.
Between bands they would preach bullshit and once had a magician escape and water tank chained up as an analogy for Jesus(despite biblical laws against "magic"). One preacher had everyone hold a hand out toward the center to give him there power so Jesus will hear or something, and it looked like everyone was giving a Nazi salute. When I pointed it out to my friend he was quite literally on the floor laughing.
They would also play commercials on the big screens. One of the commercials was about how more children don't have bibles in their language than don't have food. I face palmed so hard at the fact that they think bibles are more important than food. There were also MANY anti-abortion commercials. One even told kids to nag their parents to vote against abortion. There was one band selling tshirts that said, "take this world and give me Jesus" and "Jesus + nothing = everything".
By the time Skillet came on I was almost ready to start killing people for the amount of stupid that filled the building. Thankfully skillet made a point to NOT talk about stuff we don't want to here and actually play some damn music. Having never heard them before I thought it was pretty good if you could ignore the religious overtones of the songs. The heavy use of pyrotechnics probably helped.
Needless to say I will NEVER sit through a damn religious concert again unless the last band is one I really love(like Rammstein) but most bands I like wouldn't be at a Christian concert to begin with.