For the first time, multiple Christian musicians are charting on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time — and staying there for weeks. Has the mainstream music industry found Jesus Christ?

Brittany talks with University of Michigan-Dearborn Professor Emerita Dr. Deborah Smith Pollard and Christianity Today reporter Kelsey Kramer McGinnis to understand the multi-million dollar machine behind the Christian Contemporary Music genre. They unpack who gets shut out, and why this holy crusade on the charts has the potential to impact your listening habits.

Episode Highlights:

What exactly is Christian contemporary music, or CCM?

KELSEY KRAMER MCGINNIS: I tend to talk about it like an industry. So CCM is not a genre so much as it is a media ecosystem that really became popular in the 1980s and 1990s, at least popular in the way that it is now. So this music mirrors what you’d hear on mainstream radio in terms of style and characteristics. But you wouldn’t have the objectionable content. So think, you know, no sex, no drugs, those kinds of things.

DEBORAH SMITH POLLARD: Certainly, and when we look at Maverick City Music and Elevation Worship , when we look at CeCe Winans and Dante Bowe, we see that there are African Americans who sing both gospel and CCM.

What kind of CCM is hitting on the charts right now?

KRAMER MCGINNIS: I call it Barstool conversion rock. It’s sort of this interesting web of things between masculinity, kind of conservative politics, and country [music]. I mean, you even have Jelly Roll, Shaboozey, Alex Warren, a whole collection of, I would add, primarily male artists making this kind of faith-flavored music and really making breakthroughs with it.

How do these big megachurches, like Hillsong or Bethel, play into the economy of this worship music?

KRAMER MCGINNIS: For at least 20 years or so now, that megachurch experience has been driving the style, format and intended effect of a lot of CCM, what I would call contemporary worship music. You can find resources we call multitracks or stems that are created for churches to basically plug and play. There is a whole industry underneath this music that exists purely to help churches recreate the experience of being at one of these megachurches as closely as they can. Even if I go to a church of, you know, a hundred and fifty people on a Sunday morning, if I don’t have 20 musicians on stage, I can buy a couple synth parts. I can buy an electric guitar part. I can buy background vocals. I can buy choir effect. I can purchase lighting, all of these pieces that make it closer to what you would see when you watch a recording by Bethel.

How do we know what kind of music is being played in these churches?

KRAMER MCGINNIS: Christian Copyright Licensing International tracks the use of music across churches. And there’s a reason why so much of the music in there is tracking what’s being used in white churches, and there’s not as much music that is regularly used by Black churches there. So all of this is shaping the Christian music industry and the sounds of popular Christian music as we watch this all unfold.

Is there the same economic opportunity in gospel as there is in Contemporary worship music?

SMITH POLLARD: I doubt it because I’ve never been to a Black church where there’ve been the lyrics on the screen, other than the lyrics for a hymn or the lyrics for a Negro spiritual, OK? So that’s why I would say 99.9% of them are not having to pay CCLI for using that particular music.

Why do you think understanding this current CCM boom is something that’s important for people who are outside of Christianity?

KRAMER MCGINNIS: A lot of this music is made by men. And a lot of it is a little bit country-flavored as well. And to the extent that those things are all connected, what might be happening there? Why might this music be resonating? What does it tell us about masculinity and, you know, conservative politics and the search for faith at this moment? We have an administration right now that talks very openly about wanting to fight against anti-Christian bias in the world. And it’s hard not to look at that and then look at celebration over Christian music featuring prominently on “American Idol” and seeing a certain segment of evangelicals feeling like, this is our moment.

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Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode “The biotech visionaries”

Developing neurotech can transform how we monitor and improve our well-being. But lawyer and AI ethicist Nita Farahany warns this tech can supercharge data tracking and infringe on our mental privacy.

About Nita Farahany

Nita Farahany is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke University and founding director of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, which works to advance the responsible use of science and technology. She has advocated for a new international human right known as cognitive liberty. From 2010 to 2017, Farahany served as a commissioner on the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Law Institute, and she is an appointed commissioner for the Uniform Laws Commission. Her most recent book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology, deals with the promise and peril of the neurotechnology revolution and charts a framework for securing a right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences.

This segment of TED Radio Hour was produced by Harsha Nahata and Rachel Faulkner White and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. You can follow us on Facebook @TEDRadioHour and email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.

Web Resources

Related TED Bio: Nita Farahany

Related TED Talk: When technology can read minds, how will we protect our privacy?

Related TED Talk: Does AI actually understand us?

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All Things Considered: When law enforcement wants your social media content, do data privacy laws hold up?

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Taiwanese voters rejected a bid to oust about one-fifth of their lawmakers, all from the opposition Nationalist Party, in a recall election Saturday, dampening hopes for the ruling party to flip the balance of power in the self-ruled island’s legislature.

The independence-leaning ruling Democratic Progressive Party won last year’s presidential election, but the China-friendly Nationalists, also known as the KMT, and the smaller Taiwan People’s Party have enough seats to form a majority bloc.

While vote counting was still underway, preliminary results showed that the recall efforts failed to remove any of the two dozen KMT lawmakers, with most defeated by sizable margins. The scale of the recall elections is unprecedented, with another seven KMT lawmakers facing similar votes on Aug. 23.

If the August vote’s results are also unfavorable to the DPP, the outcome signals that the government of Taiwan President Lai Ching-te could continue to face strong resistance from within the legislature before the next elections, which are expected to take place in 2028.

“An uphill battle”

Despite their huge effort, those backing the recall were facing an “uphill battle” in trying to unseat lawmakers in well organized, strongly KMT districts, said Lev Nachman, a professor of political science at National Taiwan University and expert on Taiwan’s elections.

The result is going to make it even harder for Lai to push his agenda forward, especially ahead of local elections next year, Nachman said.

“At the moment, there is very little Lai can do other than try to think of other creative ways to appeal to the public,” he told The Associated Press.

Fu Kun-chi, one of the most powerful and controversial lawmakers targeted, said the result left Lai with no option other than to meet with the opposition and “find a way for Taiwan to proceed in a more stable way in this chaotic world.”

Both sides say they are for democracy

Those who support removing the 24 lawmakers were angry that the KMT and its allies have blocked key legislation, especially the defense budget, and passed controversial changes that are seen as diminishing the power of the executive and favoring China, which considers the island its own territory.

The opposition parties’ actions sparked concerns among some Taiwanese about the island’s democratic integrity and its ability to deter Chinese military threats, leading to the recall campaigns.

But the KMT alleged the ruling party was resorting to political retaliation after it lost the legislative majority, saying the recalls were undermining and challenging Taiwan’s democratic system.

The KMT holds 52 seats, while the ruling DPP holds 51 seats. For the DPP to secure a legislative majority, at least six KMT lawmakers would need to be ousted, and the ruling party would need to win the by-elections, which must be held within three months of the announcement of results.

For the recall to pass, more than a quarter of eligible voters in the electoral district must vote in favor of it, and the total number of supporters must exceed those voting against.

The poll closed at 4 p.m. local time. Taiwan’s Central Election Commission will announce the official results on Aug. 1.

Tensions flared over the poll

The elections have intensified tensions between those backing the status quo and those favoring improved ties with Beijing. Critics accuse China-friendly politicians of compromising Taiwan and take issue with their meetings with mainland Chinese politicians. But these Taiwanese politicians claim their connections are vital for dialogue given Beijing’s refusal to interact with the DPP.

When asked about the recall election, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Zhu Fenglian said in June that since the administration of Lai came into power, it has sought to achieve “one-party dominance” and practiced dictatorship under the guise of democracy, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The office is a branch of China’s ruling Communist Party government, which itself maintains strict one-party rule.

Zhu said that Lai’s government has spared no effort in suppressing opposition parties and those who supported the development of cross-strait relations.

Taiwan’s mainland affairs council said Wednesday that the Chinese authorities and state media had tried to blatantly interfere with the vote.

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What drove Venus Williams to the court at the Mubadala Citi DC Open this week after a year-long break from competition?

“I had to come back for the insurance,” she quipped in an on-court interview after winning her first-round match on Tuesday. “I was like, ‘I got to get my benefits on!’ Started training.”

The crowd at the stadium in D.C. laughed knowingly. “You guys know what it’s like!” she said.

Even if you’re not a seven-time grand slam champion who just became the oldest player to win a pro women’s singles match in decades, you probably know the job-health insurance juggle that Williams was talking about.

Here are four ways U.S. health insurance can be challenging for Williams and many other Americans.

1. Her job is a little off and on.

In the U.S., most working-age people get their health insurance through work. Their employer gives them a few plan options and then pays a healthy chunk of the premium cost, with the rest deducted from employees’ paychecks.

When someone leaves a regular job maybe to start a business or take a break, there goes that health insurance deal. That’s essentially what happened to Williams — she took a break from competition and lost access to her regular benefits.

The health insurance Venus Williams got through the Women’s Tennis Association was a “best-in-class global medical, dental and vision insurance plan,” WTA wrote in a statement to NPR. In order to be eligible, players have to have a certain ranking and play a certain number of events in the previous year, according to the statement, and coverage lasts for the full calendar year.

“They informed me earlier this year I’m on COBRA,” Williams explained on the court Tuesday. COBRA is a law that allows you to keep your job-based insurance plan after your job ends, but you have to pay for the whole premium yourself.

“With COBRA, you may have a very good plan, but your health care costs are going to go up,” explains Miranda Yaver, health policy professor at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s notoriously expensive, often $500 per month or more. COBRA to cover a whole family’s insurance premium can easily rival a mortgage payment.

Venus Williams is a multi-millionaire, so the premium cost might not matter to her in the same way it does to the average person, especially if it allows her to keep that “best-in-class” plan she’s used to.

2. She has health care needs.

“Let me tell you, I’m always at the doctor, so I need this insurance,” Williams said in her courtside interview.

Williams recently explained she had surgery for uterine fibroids that had gone undertreated for years, she said. She also was diagnosed with an auto-immune condition called Sjogren’s syndrome in 2011.

She’s also an elite athlete. “Someone in her position might need physical therapy, sports, medicine, specialized care, and to be able to get that anywhere in the world,” says Cynthia Cox, a vice president at the health research organization KFF.

Plus, Williams is now 45 years old. Health insurance costs generally increase with age, as do health problems.

All of that could make finding a health plan that works for her more complicated than for most people.

3. She has way more options than she used to.

Before the Affordable Care Act, Venus Williams would have really been in a tough spot.

Professional athletes were included on a list of “Ineligible Occupations” — jobs that health insurance companies deemed too risky to provide coverage for — along with loggers, miners and taxi cab drivers.

Also back then, “even a wealthy person might have had preexisting conditions that could have made them uninsurable no matter how much money they were willing to pay for their premium,” Cox says.

That contributed to “job lock” — where people were stuck in their jobs no matter what because they needed the health insurance.

Now, if Williams really didn’t want to compete anymore and ran out of her 18-months of COBRA coverage, she could go to Healthcare.gov and buy an Affordable Care Act plan.

4. Only in the U.S., jobs and health insurance are deeply linked.

There’s no escaping the fact that in America, health insurance is connected to employment. “The dominant insurance model in the United States is employer-sponsored insurance,” Yaver says. (The story of how that came to be is related to the post-World War II economy when health insurance was a “fringe benefit,” to attract employees in a tight labor market.) Yaver adds that for workers who get insurance from their jobs, it’s often “a good deal.”

Since Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the public insurance plan for low-income people, Medicaid, will soon be tied to work, too. Beneficiaries will have to periodically prove they’re working a certain number of hours per month to be able to keep their health benefits. That requirement will affect mostly middle-aged, low-income women, according to a recent analysis.

For Venus Williams, the off-and-on nature of her job that comes with a high risk of injuries makes employer-based health insurance especially hard. In a way, the tennis hall-of-famer is dealing with a very special version of “job lock.”

Her fans can celebrate, though. Even if it’s for the health insurance, they get to see her on the court again; she’s playing a tournament next month in Cincinnati.

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When Kenneth Ngure thinks about the global effort to control HIV/AIDS, he says, he feels like he’s flying.

“It’s like an airplane that’s traveling at cruising altitude, seeking its destination,” says Ngure, the president-elect of the International AIDS Society and associate professor of global health at the Jomo Kenyatta University in Kenya.

That destination, he says, is a world in which HIV/AIDS is no longer a threat. Even though there are still more than half a million AIDS-related deaths each year, he used to feel as if this goal was within sight on his in-flight map. He says a large part of the credit goes to the enormous U.S. investment in combatting the virus.

“[Lawmakers in the U.S.] are the pilots. They are the drivers,” Ngure explains. “They put in enough resources.”

Then came an unexpected patch of severe turbulence.

On inauguration day, President Donald Trump announced that he was halting the vast majority of foreign aid. That was a jolt.

“You hit turbulence and you start losing altitude. And you don’t know whether we are going to get to our destination,” says Ngure. “Everybody was in a panic. Is it the end?”

But last week, he says, came the equivalent of a reassuring message from the pilot.

The U.S. effort to address HIV/AIDS had been part of the Trump administration’s effort to claw back billions of dollars previously allocated by Congress to public media and foreign aid. The total pledged to PEPFAR, or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, that was slated to be cut: $400 million. But, word came on July 15 that the Senate was plucking PEPFAR out of the rescission list and rejecting those cuts. The program has long had bipartisan support and leaders wanted to avoid a PEPFAR-inspired revolt to the package. The rest of the rescission package passed both the House and Senate, taking back $9 billion. But PEPFAR escaped unscathed.

When Ngure heard that PEPFAR had survived the attempted cuts, he says, he thought to himself: “There’s hope, but still maintain your safety belts.”

But this was just one small positive note in an increasingly bumpy flight. Was this bipartisan effort to help PEPFAR enough to steady the plane and ensure it reaches its destination? Rumors abound. Some say PEPFAR is doomed. Others are hopeful given its bipartisan history. What does the future hold?

PEPFAR’s history

President George W. Bush created PEPFAR in 2003 — a time when HIV/AIDS was devastating communities in Africa and other parts of the world, killing about 3 million people a year.

“I saw very, very dark days — hospitals on a daily basis witnessing, honestly, excruciating deaths of young people in their late teens and 20s,” says Dr. Charles Holmes , who worked in Malawi as a medical student in 1999 and then again in 2002 before PEPFAR was born. He later served as the program’s chief medical officer during the Obama administration.

Holmes returned to Malawi in February and found himself “reminded of how far we had come.” Since its founding, PEPFAR has put more than $120 billion into combatting the virus in more than 50 countries. The result of all that money and effort, it says , is clear, citing accomplishments that are widely accepted: 26 million lives saved, a plummeting of HIV infection rates and a rebounding of life expectancy, especially in Africa.

Yet that wasn’t enough to protect PEPFAR from the foreign aid shakeup. When Trump started cutting international aid programs a lot of the PEPFAR clinics and services ceased overnight as stop work orders went out.

Ben de la Cruz/NPR / This PEPFAR-funded HIV/AIDS clinic, tucked in a market in Lusaka, Zambia, initially closed due to disruptions in U.S. foreign aid. It has since reopened but with fewer services. The clinic’s prevention work is now limited only to pregnant women.

“Clients come to the clinic, and in some cases, have found that the doors are literally locked and their trusted clinicians aren’t there to see them, and their drugs that they had anticipated receiving are not there,” says Holmes, who now directs the Center for Innovation and Global Health at Georgetown University.

All the disruptions of the past seven months have had a real and severe impact, says Ngure. He points to a new study by researchers at National Institute of Health and the Ministry of Health in Mozambique that found, among children there who are on HIV treatment, the percent who were successfully keeping the virus at bay dropped by 43% from February 2024 to 2025. The researchers — who presented their findings at the International AIDS Society’s 2025 meeting — attribute the drop to PEPFAR disruptions and the challenge of getting consistent medications.

Will PEPFAR change?

Holmes is not exactly optimistic. Even though Congress preserved the $400 million funding for PEPFAR in the current fiscal year, he says that the organization’s future is far from secure.

“The President has proposed major funding cuts for next year,” he says. “I don’t think the program is out of the woods yet.”

Others echo this uncertainty. Yap Boum II, of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says it’s “premature for us to really know how [PEPFAR] will change.”

Even if funding continues as in past years, Holmes says, a key question is what that funding goes toward. So far under Trump, the vast majority of HIV prevention work has stopped — with the limited exception of preventing mother-to-child transmission — as has much of the support the U.S. used to provide for millions of AIDS orphans . For example, PEPFAR has paid for the procurement and distribution of PrEP, a medication that prevents HIV infections in high-risk individuals such as couples where one is HIV-positive and one is HIV-negative. The Trump administration moved quickly after taking office to limit this medication to pregnant and breastfeeding women — and did not allow it to be provided to others.

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“Without prevention and without care for orphans and vulnerable children, PEPFAR will be much, much diminished,” Holmes says.

A spokesperson for the State Department did not respond to specific questions about resuming PEPFAR’s full range of prevention efforts as well as its care for AIDS orphans and vulnerable children. However, the State Department’s Congressional Budget Justification for the upcoming fiscal year does emphasize the importance of “deploying targeted campaigns to reduce new HIV infections” and singles out new and high-effective HIV prevention shots .

An uncertain future

Experts say there are several reasons why it’s hard to predict what PEPFAR will look like in the future.

For starters, PEPFAR’s authorization from Congress expired in March and has not yet been renewed. That doesn’t mean an end to PEPFAR operations — Congress can still provide funding even without authorization — but there are risks.

“Without an authorization, that can lead to special interests trying to insert things into funding bills that dilute the program,” explains Holmes.

Another challenge is that PEPFAR usually puts out country and regional operations plans to outline the program’s strategies and clarify what activities it will support in different parts of the world. That information has not yet been released for 2026. The State Department spokesperson did not answer questions about when such plans would be released.

However, an emailed statement to NPR said: “Secretary Rubio has stated that PEPFAR is an important and life-saving program that will continue. He has also said that PEPFAR, like all assistance programs, should be reduced over time as it achieves its mission.”

And there’s another concern about how PEPFAR can function in this vastly altered world of foreign aid: the interaction of HIV and other diseases.

“The biggest killer of people living with HIV is actually tuberculosis,” says Holmes. And the U.S.’s tuberculosis program has been drastically cut,” he says.

Not knowing what the rest of the global health landscape will look like makes it hard to know what the HIV/AIDS situation will be. “It is a time of such great uncertainty,” he says.

“We’re beginning to see a glimmer”

Still, some HIV/AIDS specialists are increasingly confident about the future of PEPFAR — even as they predict that the U.S. will likely be turning the reins over to other countries.

“I feel like we’re seeing the resurgence of strong bipartisan commitment,” says Susan Hillis, who spent seven years at PEPFAR. During Trump’s first term, she was selected to lead a $100 million initiative to use faith-based groups to advance HIV/AIDS work. “We’re beginning to see a glimmer of: Yes, it’s possible to move forward in the same direction together.”

Hillis has been meeting with lawmakers and, she says, people are starting to agree on some things, including working with countries to wean them off of PEPFAR money — gradually.

In the State Department’s Congressional Budget Justification , the administration emphasized the U.S. plan to “accelerate the transition of HIV control programs to recipient countries and increase international ownership of efforts to fight HIV/AIDS,” including a “responsible off-ramp.”

Hillis admits nobody knows exactly what PEPFAR of the future will look like — and how long it will exist as an independent program.

Yet despite a turbulent year so far, Ngure isn’t ready to parachute out. He says over the past several months other countries are trying to make sure that plane reaches its destination, even bringing in additional pilots. He says the HIV/AIDS plane “cannot go back.”

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