But as the Rev. Paul Durham, pastor of Nashville’s Radnor Baptist Church, points out, many Christian-music listeners think of file-swapping as sharing God’s message. “It’s like a ministry,” he says. That’s how Marlee Welsh, 18, of Bethesda, Md., sees it. “You’re supposed to receive and spread God’s word,” she says, “and by that I don’t think downloading is stealing.” Darren Whitehead, youth minister at the People’s Church in Franklin, Tenn., questions the morality of file sharing, but he hopes that “spreading the Gospel takes priority for the music companies over profit–assuming that they’re Christian.”
Music companies say they can’t be expected to give away the store. “Honestly, it almost always comes down to money,” says Bill Hearn, head of EMI Christian Music Group–but among the faithful, he notes, “that’s a dicey subject.” The GMA has ruled out a fire-and-brimstone approach to its anti-piracy campaign. “It’s good people that are doing this,” says BMG executive Terry Hemmings, a member of the association’s task force. “We’re not going to say, ‘You’re ungodly and you’re going to hell because you’re file sharing’.” Instead, they may appeal to parental technophobia. “If Christian parents found out their 7-year-old could think she’s downloading a song and instead be downloading the latest porn video,” says EMI’s Hearn, “I can tell you it would stop immediately.”
Christian recording artists would prefer to leave the problem in God’s hands. Mark Lee of the rock band Third Day says that while downloading may cut into sales–in the last month, 297,726 people shared Third Day songs–it may also win fans. “I really don’t know what to do,” he says. But when fans asked about it during a recent Internet chat, Lee typed four words: “Thou shalt not steal.”
