It was both correct and insightful of you to credit this explosion (in modernity) of the revelatory process rarely experienced since the first century to the oft mocked and derided Jesus people and the evangelicals!

From Matt. 11:25-27
“I humbly acknowledge, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to the simple;
be it so, Father, for so it seemed good to your sight.
All these things are delivered to my by my Father,
and no one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

Philosophically, Jesus is the primary reason why equality and spiritual-freedom-from-your-polis become taken seriously. Peter’s great Modern and American Dignity illustrates this better than anything can, especially the chapter on “nominalism.” What’s good in the modern by and large comes from Jesus.

Historically, it is worth noting that the even while our Washington asked us on this day to thank our God for the nation’s success, a God with very Christian attributes, he displayed such a reticence about his own beliefs that until the recent work of the Novaks, it was possible to think he was Deist. Sometimes I am guilty of a similar reticence, and without any of Washington’s good (politic) excuses.

That reticence characterizes quasi-modernity, and becomes virtually an embarrassed silence during the intermediate stage. But one of the freaky things about the fully-modern stage, is that the Jesus freaks come out into the open. The radicalism of the gospel, and its de facto war with modern culture, is brought out into the open.

Of course, that is what happened in America…the other extreme might be seen in the total free-fall Catholicism experienced in Quebec upon the 60s advent of full modernity. That is the real American exceptionalism–not the absence of serious socialists, but the abiding presence of Jesus freaks.

But I guess the really key way Jesus should come into the whole question about rock, is that he joins the sinners’ feast. Matthew is made a disciple, a process that begins at his hip and degenerate party.

“For these artists, the modernity they denounce is often basically that of the intermediate stage, although the more honest aspects of their songs may well betray and reveal their actual unhappiness with the fully modern one as well.”
Well, this is fascinating. If the rocker denounces modernity/modern in his song is he embracing another form of deculturation that merely exacerbates the continuing loss of reality? Or, is he attacking/critiquing a truth not grounded in reason but merely ‘opinion.’ Or, put another way if modernity deforms humanity, as you’ve illustrated, does the protest to untruth (in song) amount to anything more than a continuing movement away from that truth?
Even Dylan fell victim to modernity’s ‘summum malum’ and didn’t recover until his “Christian phase.” Which requires the question, Where is Jesus in this analysis?