CeCe Winans recently reflected on how she and her brother BeBe helped break down racial barriers in Christian music — and she says it started long before either of them ever signed a record deal.

“The racial barrier — that was not in our home,” Winans told Faithfully Magazine in a June 30 interview. “We heard Andraé Crouch, but we heard Second Chapter of Acts. We heard people from Sweden who sang… We had the Mighty Clouds of Joy. You name it, you name the genre — it didn’t matter the color of the skin. It was in the Winans home. And I think that just helped shape us as artists and as musicians.”

That upbringing meant she and BeBe were caught off guard by how narrowly the rest of the Christian music world defined gospel once they broke out in the 1980s. “We didn’t know that the rest of the world thought gospel music should just be with a pipe organ, or should just be traditional — because we grew up with Rance Allen,” she said.

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‘Musical Bigotry’

Winans’ account lines up with the historical record, according to Dr. Claudrena Harold, a University of Virginia historian and author of When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras.

When we previously spoke with Harold about her book she pointed to famous observation, credited to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that 11 a.m. on Sunday is the most segregated hour in America as a pattern that held in Christian music, too.

“In many ways, BeBe and CeCe traveled the road that Andraé Crouch paved,” Harold said. “The Christian music industry is reflective of larger dynamics, I think, in American religion… those patterns are also present in music.”

Before BeBe and CeCe became breakout stars, Black artists rarely crossed into the largely White Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) world. Harold named a short list of exceptions, including Leon Patillo, Larnelle Harris, and Crouch.

Even the Winans brothers, the family’s original gospel stars, didn’t cross over in the same way. Harold recalled — although she qualified that she wasn’t certain of the detail — that Marvin Winans complained as late as the late 1980s about being seated in the balcony at the Dove Awards, the Gospel Music Association’s flagship honors.

Winans, who was a nominee that particular year, denounced the “musical bigotry within the ranks of the gospel music industry,” according to Ebony magazine.

“So one of the things you begin to see with BeBe and CeCe, and then Take 6 around the same time, is that they were winning these categories that had traditionally just been won by White artists,” Harold said. Their introduction to that mostly White Evangelical audience came through “PTL,” the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker television program that made the teenage siblings PTL Singers starting in 1982.

Winans said she remains aware of what the industry cost artists who didn’t look like the mainstream.

“Going into the industry and seeing some of the racism, and some of the things that were blocking one audience from hearing another audience, or hearing different artists — I think we all miss out on that,” she said. “My prayer is that we will continue to tear down walls, because there’s great music in every culture, great music in every generation. And I think when we close the doors or put up walls, we all miss out.”

Lingering Divisions

In 2022, Winans became the first Black female solo artist to win the Dove Awards’ Artist of the Year — 34 years after she and BeBe won the ceremony’s inaugural New Artist of the Year award in 1988.

Three years before Winans’ historic win, gospel powerhouse Kirk Franklin — after accepting his own Gospel Artist of the Year award — announced a boycott of Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN).

TBN had, for the second time, edited his on-air remarks about a police killing, this time of Atatiana Jefferson, out of its broadcast of the 50th Annual GMA Dove Awards. Franklin called it evidence that “they edited the African American experience,” according to CNN. TBN, led by the Crouch family, who are White, later made his full, unedited speech available, and Franklin eventually returned to the Dove Awards stage.

Some note that years later, the needle still hasn’t moved much.

A 2025 essay published by the Evangelical Covenant Church argues that “Christian” and “gospel” remain largely separate industry tracks — a split the writer traces to the Gospel Music Association’s own origins as a group promoting White Southern gospel, distinct from Black gospel.

The GMA, now led by its first Black president, has taken symbolic steps toward reconciliation, including breaking ground on a joint Museum of Christian and Gospel Music. But as the essay puts it, symbolic gestures can’t undo decades of bias overnight.

Historian Dr. Leah Payne, whose research traces CCM’s roots to the segregated South, has made a similar point about the genre’s current commercial boom. While she credits acts like the multiracial worship collective Maverick City Music for adding real diversity to CCM, she’s also noted that the genre remains “overwhelmingly [W]hite” — and that it’s “no coincidence” the two artists leading Christian music’s crossover moment, Forrest Frank and Brandon Lake, are both White men.

And a Baptist News Global essay pushes the subject further — digging into some of the dynamics that keep some Black gospel artists from getting paid on par with their White counterparts. It also calls for an “honest conversation” between CCM and gospel that moves past surface-level diversity gestures.

Meanwhile, a new generation of Black Christian rap, R&B, and Afrobeats artists is drawing younger, more diverse audiences on streaming platforms, even as they continue to face less industry investment and radio airplay than their White CCM counterparts.

In other words, the industry Winans stepped into more than 40 years ago is still working to build what her parents gave her for free.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.

Access our premium interview with CeCe Winans at our Faithfully Mag Substack.