A few days after the star singer Forrest Frank fell off his skateboard, crashed into a wall and fractured two vertebrae, he previewed a new track about the accident on TikTok. Frank, formerly a member of the pop duo Surfaces, has exploded in the past year by making Christian music that pairs hip-hop inflected beats with relentlessly sunny lyrics. Though he was in “excruciating” pain, his tune aimed for uplift. “God’s got my back,” he sang, still bedridden. “Even when I fall or get attacked.”
The TikTok clip has earned nearly 4 million views. After Frank officially released the track, titled “God’s Got My Back,” it racked up more than 15 million streams on Spotify and another 5 million on YouTube.
As Christian artists embrace a wider variety of sounds and market songs savvily on social media, they are rapidly widening their reach. Faith-based music can go viral just like rap or pop songs, and it gains an additional boost from its close relationship with country, which currently dominates the charts.
“I’ve been in it since 1997, and in all my years, I can’t remember a time like this,” said Holly Zabka, president of Provident Entertainment, a faith-based music label owned by Sony Music.
Frank is the bright-eyed, mustachioed face of Christian music’s new wave: He has earned more than 1.2 billion on-demand streams in the U.S. in 2025, according to the data company Luminate. “I think God just has his hand on him and is using him to speak to a generation through music,” said Caleb Grimm, a Christian singer who makes popular mashup videos with his wife Kelsey.
Other Christian acts are racking up big numbers as well. Brandon Lake, a 35-year-old belter from South Carolina, has pulled in 862 million streams, while Josiah Queen, a 22-year-old with a knack for thumping acoustic folk, has 515 million. Christian music was one of the five fastest-growing genres in the U.S. in 2024, and that momentum rolled into 2025 (Luminate’s Christian music category includes gospel.) In the first half of the year, Luminate reported that streams of recently released Christian tracks increased more than streams of new songs from any other genre except country.
Brandon Lake performs at the BET Awards on Sunday, June 26, 2022, at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
As David Myers, an influencer who choreographs dances to faith-based songs, put it: “We’re on fire for God again.”
While Christian music’s share of the overall U.S. market still remains low, it has climbed from 1.7% at the end of 2023 to 2% halfway through 2025. (For comparison, dance/electronic music sits at 3.3%.) Frank and Lake had singles on the Hot 100 simultaneously this year for multiple weeks, a once-in-a-blue-moon event for the genre. And faith-based artists appear increasingly able to score “major cultural moments with songs that are explicitly Christian,” said Brad O’Donnell, co-president of Capitol Christian Music Group.
Frank triumphed with “Your Way’s Better,” which serves up playful statements of gratitude: “Lord, I am so thankful for the ways that You blessed me/Everything You say making waves like a jet ski.” Lake’s “Hard Fought Hallelujah” is a more somber affair, a growling ballad with touches of Southern soul.
Thanks to streaming services and short-form video platforms such as Reels and TikTok, contemporary Christian artists have an easier time reaching curious listeners than their predecessors. “For the longest time, to discover faith-based music, people had to come through some sort of Christian portal—a Christian bookstore, Christian radio, the church,” Zabka said. On TikTok, in contrast, listeners may not even recognize that a song is religious—they just want to try the popular dance routine .
“Your Way’s Better” has been used in more than 800,000 TikTok videos. After Myers and his wife developed dance steps for the track that went viral, Frank brought the pair on stage to perform for thousands of fans. The Savannah Bananas , a popular Harlem Globetrotters-like baseball team, have released videos set to secular pop hits like Rihanna’s “Breakin’ Dishes” and Jojo’s “Too Little Too Late”; in May, Frank posted a clip of the squad doing the “Your Way’s Better” moves.
The singer Seph Schlueter watched his reverent ballad “Counting My Blessings” take off on Instagram in Brazil before catching fire in the U.S. “Every week I’d get a new message from someone like, ‘Hey, did you see who used your song?’” Schlueter said. “And it would be, like, Hugh Jackman .”
“Your Way’s Better” and “Counting My Blessings” could blend smoothly into a playlist of secular male pop songs by Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber and Alex Warren. Executives in the Christian music industry believe that contemporary sheen has also helped the songs spread. “The more risks that [Christian] artists take sonically to compete, the more they will have an opportunity for their music to be heard,” said Jonathan Roberts, an agent at United Talent Agency who works with both Lake and Frank.
Lake incorporated a range of genres into his July album “King of Hearts,” knitting everything together with a rich, sandpapery voice. He applauded the “fearless pioneers” in Christian music who are borrowing “sounds that have been synonymous with country, rock, rap, every ‘more legitimate’ genre.”
“I think you can worship God screaming your head off,” Lake explained. “I think you can worship God with a ukulele.”
He has more country-leaning songs on the way. Like country music, the Christian music industry is based in Nashville, Tenn., and this has helped faith-based artists gain new footholds. “You’re seeing a ton of crossover between the two,” Grimm said. “Nashville is a small world, and all the people in the business kind of know each other and mingle.”
The country hitmaker Jelly Roll hopped on Lake’s “Hard Fought Hallelujah”—he had already heard it on TikTok, according to Lake. Thomas Rhett has songs with Lake and Frank, while Lainey Wilson joined the Christian artist Anne Wilson on “Praying Woman.” Another fast-rising country hitmaker, Bailey Zimmerman, recently told Billboard he was interested in collaborating with Christian artists.
“When artists who most people see as secular come and do these Christian songs, they reach such a larger audience,” said Jacob Petersen, a Christian TikTok creator with 3 million followers. “I’ve seen so many videos on TikTok where it’s like, ‘I’m not religious, but low-key, Christian music slaps now.’”
Write to Elias Leight at elias.leight@wsj.com
