Gods DJs Is Bringing the Love of Jesus to the Dancefloor
For millions of people around the world, hearing electronic music in a live setting often qualifies as nothing less than a spiritual experience. The dancefloor is church. Music is the religion. An especially epic drop is when you feel profoundly connected to God, or the universe, or whatever higher power you identify with, even if that higher power is simply bass. It’s no coincidence that the largest stage at Electric Daisy Carnival 2014 was modeled after a cathedral.
The profound power that electronic music has to create joy and unity is not lost on the Detroit-based organization Gods DJs. For this group, however, the spiritual transcendence experienced by the happy masses at festivals and nightclubs is fundamentally empty when it’s not done to honor the perfect love of Jesus. For real.
Or so says Nate Carlisle, the founder of Gods DJs. Carlisle got into the Detroit rave scene as a teenager in the early ‘90s and began DJing mosty trance music around 2002. Years of his life were dedicated to music and partying. In time, however, he developed a drug habit and began selling narcotics. After several overdoses, he knew he had to make a change.
He thus returned to Christianity, the religion in which he had been raised. But instead of abandoning electronic music and the scene, he created an organization that would satisfy both his love of pulsating beats and his love of Jesus. Founded in 2008 as an online forum, Gods DJs is now an international network of Christian dance music enthusiasts. They host parties in Detroit, set up booths at various festivals, have an online radio station, and boast more than 150,000 fans on Facebook.
Nate Carlisle
To satisfy his mission of transforming the dancefloor into a space in which to honor Jesus, Carlisle needed not simply clean, secular electronic—meaning that it didn’t contain dirty lyrics or sexual innuendo (bye-bye Borgore)—but music produced specifically with God in mind.
“The lyrics would have to be like something you might sing in church on Sunday morning,” he says, noting that Christian EDM covers the same genres as secular dance music—techno, trance, house, drum & bass, etc. Gods DJs Radio currently plays more than 2,000 Christian EDM songs. Carlisle calls it the world’s largest collection of Christian electronic music.
“In the beginning,” Carlisle says, “the quality was nowhere near what the mainstream world was doing, because a lot of our artists were new. But now the quality is on par with anything mainstream labels are producing.”
Some popular Christian producers include Matthew J. Bentley, DJ Jireh, RE5A—who founded a label called G&D (God & Dubstep) Records—and Kenneth Thomas, who has released tracks on Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto label. About half of the station’s sonic output is made up of clean tracks by artists including Armin van Buuren, Paul van Dyk and Tiësto. The organization’s current GoFundMe campaign is attempting to raise money for the station and other ministry initiatives.
Gods DJs has been contacted by a variety of churches from around the world interested in getting involved with the organization, in an effort no doubt to leverage EDM’s youth market popularity toward the church. The station has also gotten older people into the music via electronic remixes of widely known Christian rock songs.
“We’re forcibly exposing it to them,” Carlisle says of these remixes, “and they’re loving it.”
Gods DJs is not simply relegated to churches and the internet, however. Affiliates attend mainstream secular music festivals like EDC and Ultra and set up booths at events like Detroit’s Movement festival, which Carlisle has attended every year of its existence.
Attendees can come to the Gods DJs booth to get glowsticks, receive information about substance abuse counseling, or simply to be prayed for. Carlisle says the power of prayer has even helped people at their booth come down from bad highs. They even sell T-shirts that feature an image of Jesus and the words “Old school PLUR.” The organization also has a 24-hour substance abuse hotline and an online forum for people dealing with addiction.
“We consider ourselves rave missionaries,” Carlisle says.
With these efforts, according to Carlisle, Gods DJs is providing a meaning and a message that isn’t inherent in the much-touted peace/love/unity/respect ethos of the scene.
“Even PLUR is conditional,” he says. “You can say, ‘Hey man, here’s your PLUR bracelet,’ and ‘I love you’ and ‘Let’s party together’; and then you cheat on your girlfriend because you went to a party, and there’s no more PLUR there; it’s bad feelings.”
What Gods DJs offers ravers, Carlisle says, is the opportunity to experience the true fulfillment of Jesus’ love and find a lasting happiness that can’t be provided by worshipping simply the music or the DJ or the good-looking person you spot on the dancefloor, regardless of how spiritually elevated any of that carnal human stuff might make you feel.
“It’s a temporary fix,” he says of such secular partying. “Most people in the rave community are searching for something. Everybody goes to a party because they like the music, but more so the sense of connection, the family. We’re saying that it’s good to be searching, but you can go to raves for years, and at some point you’re going to realize it isn’t fulfilling the need inside of you. That’s where God comes in.”
That’s not to say that holy spirit-minded dance fans can’t get down. In fact, Carlisle notes there are a multitude of Bible verses that call dancing a form of prayer, as long as you’re dancing for God. “If you’re booty dancing or grinding,” he says, “that’s not a form of worship.”
While these rules might sound rigid, like many Christian churches, Gods DJs is ultimately a community open to all people—even those who listen to sexed-up trap music and enjoy grinding.
“Jesus loves us regardless, so his unconditional love and forgiveness, in our opinion, is the ultimate PLUR.”
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