David Kinnaman, vice president of Barna Research, the market research group that conducted the file-swapping study for the Gospel Music Association, thinks that it's going to be tough for parents, record companies and even church workers to convince teens to stop swapping music with their friends.

"What you have to understand about teenagers is there is this hierarchy of moral decision making," says Kinnaman, who specializes in Christian research, and has done projects in the past for the Campus Crusade for Christ, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Focus on the Family. "What's more important, my friends or the record companies? It's a simple choice for them."

To the teens in the Barna study, "hooking up" a friend with a copy of your new CD is like giving a pal a free Coke if you work at McDonald's -- no big deal, and an accepted, even expected sign of friendship.

"Being faithful to your friends, giving them something for free, is more important than any kind of moral allegiance to a record company. Whether a teenager is a committed Christian, of a different faith or just has no religious affiliation, some of the patterns of how they make decisions transcend religious input," Kinnaman says. He believes that to change those kids' attitudes, you'd have to somehow influence those networks of friends, not just tell the kids that what they're doing is wrong.

Another complication: For some Christian kids Barna studied, sharing the religious hits that express their faith is their way of spreading the word. "They wanted it to be part of their ministry. They wanted to share some of the positive messages from their music with non-believers. It's an evangelistic impulse." He compared it to the old saw about the stolen Bible: "If someone came and stole my Bible, I'd be happy that they stole it, because they needed it."

Even McPherson, the Christian computer scientist who takes a hard line on file sharing, has mixed feelings about the trading of religious movies and music. When he heard that "The Passion of the Christ" was the most widely available pirated movie on the net in April, his e-mail response was to quote the following scripture: "The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains. But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice" (Philippians 1:18).

McPherson applies the verse to movie-trading bandits as follows: "Is it sinful to copy 'The Passion of the Christ'? Certainly it is. But instead of shaking my head and saying, 'What a lot of sinners those file traders are,' it would be better to, like Paul, rejoice that Christ is being preached through the film. It is not morally inconsistent to simultaneously state that copying the film is wrong and yet rejoice that God is using even sinfulness to get the word out about His Son."

Styll maintains that many teens who buy Christian music don't even realize that an artist might object to a copy being burned: "It's clear from the number of burned CDs that are brought to artists to sign that they just don't have a clue. They think: If it's there, it must be legal. If it was illegal, why wouldn't they shut it down?"

Gospel, which represents 7 percent of the domestic record market, for a total of between $700 million and $800 million in sales in the U.S. per year, experienced a 5 percent decline in sales in 2003, says Styll. But sales are still up 10 percent over the last five years, which is more than the music industry at large can say.

The best hope for Christian music publishers might reside in going after a completely different sin. The "Millions of Wrongs Don't Make It Right" campaign soon to be showing up on Christian radio stations, Christian retail stores, church literature, and religious magazines and newspapers will target not just kids, but their parents. The literature will also stress the pornographic content available on peer-to-peer networks. "I think that within the church that's a hot button," says Styll. "If they don't care about the music thing, they're going to care about that."

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