There’s a hidden canon of music that belongs neither to the category of “Christian rock” nor to that of “mainstream indie,” but to a strange and sacred in-between, a liminal space where indie musicians confront the divine in unexpected, unorthodox ways. These aren’t praise songs or altar calls, but deeply personal reckonings: with faith, with doubt, with grace, and with the possibility of God.
To see this canon clearly, we first have to define our terms.
“Christian rock” is typically made within and for a religious community. It’s spiritually direct, often evangelical, designed for worship or edification. Bands like MercyMe, Third Day, and Hillsong United are standard-bearers, offering lyrics that reaffirm Christian doctrine and reinforce communal belief.
“Indie rock,” on the other hand, often champions ambiguity and introspection. It’s skeptical of institutions—including religious ones—and tends toward the personal, poetic, or ironic. Think of the storytelling of The National, the confessionalism of Bright Eyes, the internal landscapes of Bon Iver. It’s not that indie avoids God altogether, more that it usually sidesteps certainty.
The Grammy Awards provide some of the sharpest distinctions: there’s an award given for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album, whereas indie albums are usually entertained in the Best Alternative Music Album or Best Alternative Music Performance categories. Websites like Pitchfork and Stereogum carry the torch for indie reviews, whereas you’re more likely to find out about contemporary Christian artists through Spotify playlists or Christian radio.
But in recent decades, a third space has quietly emerged, a canon of indie songs that use the tools of ambiguity to seriously engage the divine. These songs aren’t Christian rock, yet they aren’t secular either. They come from artists like Vampire Weekend, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sufjan Stevens, Belle and Sebastian, and Father John Misty—musicians deeply ill-suited to contemporary worship music, yet too spiritually hungry to be defined as purely secular. In their work, God is not always a given, but a presence to be longed for, quarreled with, or approximated through sound.
This isn’t a subgenre with a name. It’s more like an adjacency, an unrecognized canon where the sacred leaks into the indie bloodstream.
Take Ezra Koenig, frontman of Vampire Weekend. In “Ya Hey,” a song from the band’s 2013 album Modern Vampires of the City, Koenig directly addresses a God who refuses to speak back. The chorus:
Through the fire and through the flames
You won’t even say your name
Only “I am that I am”
But who could ever live that way?
Ut Deo, Ya Hey
Ut Deo, Deo …
To read the lyrics is one thing; to hear them is another. Koenig pitch-shifts “Ya Hey” into an inhuman, auto-tuned falsetto, a childlike machine-voice that evokes both reverence and discomfort, like a synthetic cherub. “Ya Hey” is both an inversion of “Hey Ya” (the 2003 Outkast mega-hit) and a way of saying Yahweh (God) without actually saying it. Meanwhile, “Ut Deo” means “to God” in Latin. The line “I am that I am” references Exodus 3:14, but it’s not devotional—it’s defiant. The speaker wants answers. God remains elusive. The song dances on the line between theological frustration and liturgical chant.
In another song from that album, “Everlasting Arms,” Koenig sings to the divine: “I was born to live without you / but I’m never gonna understand, never understand.” We as listeners never understand why he was “born to live without” God—because he grew up Jewish and is singing to a mainstream, Christian God? Or because his intellect can’t ever allow him to take the step towards full, unquestioning belief?
The seriousness with which Koenig approaches spiritual language places him in a lineage that includes Jeff Mangum, the reclusive genius behind Neutral Milk Hotel. On In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998), Mangum wrestles with mortality, memory, and mysticism. The second track, “The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3,” begins with a line that still startles: “I love you Jesus Christ / Jesus Christ, I love you, yes I do.”
There’s no irony here—and no context, either. The confession appears suddenly, without explanation, and it disappears just as quickly.
In the album’s liner notes, Mangum writes:
… and now a song for Jesus Christ. And since this seems to confuse people I’d like to simply say that I mean what I sing although the theme of endless endless on this album is not based on any religion but more in the belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them that I see as eternal …
It’s a crucial moment. Mangum may sidestep institutional religion, but his language is metaphysical. That “white light”—ineffable, radiant, eternal—becomes a through-line for other indie artists in this unofficial canon. Wilco singles out this ineffable inner glow on “What Light” from their 2007 album Sky Blue Sky: “There’s a light / White light / inside of you.”
In their work, God is not always a given, but a presence to be longed for, quarreled with, or approximated through sound.
In other hands, we’d be talking about The Soul. But this is Indie, and we use a different vocabulary.
What separates these songs from both Christian rock and mainstream indie is that they are neither affirmations nor dismissals. They’re explorations. Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of Belle and Sebastian, embodies this liminal posture. He’s long included spiritual themes in his lyrics, often wrapped in the style of gentle, melancholic chamber-pop. His 2025 autobiographical novel, Nobody’s Empire, reveals how his maturation as a musician came hand-in-hand with a spiritual awakening: God called him to life, to music, to health (through the fog of chronic fatigue syndrome)—all at the same time.
In his song “Funny Little Frog,” the narrator speaks to a love-object who gradually takes on divine attributes:
Had a conversation with you at night
It’s a little one-sided but that’s all right
I tell you in the kitchen about my day
You sit on the bed in the dark, changing places
With the ghost that was there before you came
You’ve come to save my life again
The song never declares itself a hymn, but it slides toward the sacred. As Pitchfork put it in a review:
All those awesome Motown songs turned out to make real nice hymns if you did the ol’ Christian rock trick and replaced “him” with “Him.” So The Life Pursuit’s “Funny Little Frog” … might not work as a soul song, but just think: a soul song. About someone who is everywhere, but you don’t think of in a physical way. Someone you might go and visit on rainy Sundays.
Sufjan Stevens—perhaps the spiritual lodestar of this canon—has spent his career blurring the line between sacred and secular. His early album Seven Swans included a string of songs with Christian references (“Abraham,” “The Transfiguration,” etc.), whereas most of his other albums weave aspects of belief with family memories, relationships, and geographical explorations.
On his 2023 album Javelin, Stevens returned to religious language with a vulnerable new context: the death of his partner, Evans Richardson. Upon the album’s release, Stevens dedicated it to Richardson on Instagram:
He was an absolute gem of a person…. If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close…. Live every day as if it is your last, with fullness and grace, with reverence and love…. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
One standout track from Javelin, “My Red Little Fox,” is a spiritual love poem that doesn’t separate its divine and romantic addressees. It’s a love song, in which Stevens issues requests to “Kiss me with the fire of gods,” “Kiss me like the wind,” and “Kiss me from within.” Here, the sacred element does not sneak up on you—indeed, Stevens mentions Pentecost in the song’s opening lines—but it’s the fragile balance between human love and sacred love, not knowing which he’s referring to at any given time, that sets the song afire. “Kiss me from within” is a beautiful request, whether pitched to a lover or the Holy Ghost, and the fact is the song never quite makes it clear who is the object.
Which is perhaps the point: the object doesn’t need to be singular. Something is gained by imagining sacred and secular love in a single address. What unites these artists is not a shared theology so much as a shared posture: longing. Longing for the eternal, longing for love, and longing for answers.
This canon finds its most unruly disciple in Father John Misty. Misty (real name Josh Tillman) satirizes religion even as he circles back to it in moments of sincerity. In his 2024 song “Screamland,” he paints a picture of spiritual exhaustion—the end of belief as spectacle, and the hope that something real still listens. My favorite verse:
Picked me up and drove by the light of the moon
Four hours to the desert from the Drawing Room
This year’s wine tasted suspicious
But just enough like love
God must be with the outcasts
’Cause when I call, you come
Note the eerie orchestral swell that follows this line—it’s as if Misty were attempting to musically summon the divine. The sound is unsettling, searching, and strangely comforting. The chorus, on the other hand, is explosive, an M83 rush: “Stay young / Get numb / Keep dreaming / Screamland!” And then it quiets down into a chant: “Love must find a way, love must find a way … ”
There’s an unsettling earnestness to the closing sentiments in the song: an indie song that’s already referenced God is now dropping words like “grace” and “faith”:
“Maybe we are living in a state of grace returned / Maybe faith like this has at least one practitioner”
Maybe.
What binds these artists, finally, is that they offer an outsider stance towards spirituality that the listener can freely adopt without feeling like they’re adopting a central stance. “God must be with the outcasts.”
I think of that Philip Larkin poem, “Church Going.” The speaker is a skeptic, a tourist in a church, eye-plundering the place for anything he can find or use. The building is in many ways irrelevant to him, not worth stopping for—“Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,” he tells us. The poem, it turns out, is less about the worthlessness of the church, less about his dismissal of it, and more about his own curiosity at what keeps drawing him back into these sacred spaces, given his avowed lack of belief. “It pleases me to stand in silence here; // A serious house on serious earth it is.” Churches will never be obsolete, Larkin tells us, insofar as “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious, / And gravitating with it to this ground … ” To start from the point of view of the skeptic, and gravitate to a position of oblique worship, or at least searching: this is the domain of sacred indie.
What else are these artists doing but surprising a hunger in themselves to be more serious, and gravitating to new ground?
But remove the binary: these songs don’t just paint a picture of outsider versus church, sinner versus correction. Instead, they actively maintain the mystery of the address to build a space for better searching in that sacred in-between. Call it Screamland or The White Light or the lair of the Red Little Fox. It’s a place where indie artists go when they feel the gravitational pull of the sacred, but want to keep it pure, keep it free from the labels and structures that might tank it. Not ambiguity for the sake of ambiguity, but mystery as a means to growth.
In these songs you always feel like the sole practitioner. Until you pause and take a look around: the church isn’t empty after all.