Christian Rockers Go Beyond Pulpit : Three Orange County bands release new albums that, to varying extents, reach out beyond a circle of confirmed believers.

Individualism is the indispensable ingredient of good rock music. A strong, proud, independent streak that challenges dogma and received wisdom, declaring the right to think and speak for oneself, to hold and express a personal vision--that is the rocker’s greatest gift, and it is rock’s greatest claim to being a popular art form, rather than merely a form that is popular. Rock is--or ought to be--the performer’s diary, and the audience’s bulletin board: lived experience, set to a backbeat.

When rock labels itself as specifically “Christian” in outlook, essence and substance, it comes up against a strong, probably insurmountable pressure to compromise the above artistic ideals in favor of religious ones.

With “Christian rock,” the need to proclaim a set of beliefs is apt to limit the rocker’s ability to test extreme ideas and forms of expression. The performer also may feel obligated to say a great deal about God, while subordinating his or her own experience, ideas, and expressive voice. The work of the “Christian rocker” becomes evangelism by other means, a way of girding confirmed believers’ faith and winning new adherents. Undoubtedly, “Christian rock” has value as a religious activity. But it is of little interest to lovers of rock who want to experience the music’s physical and emotional impact without being proselytized.

At the same time, spirituality and religious feeling have inspired some of the finest rock music. Bob Dylan (the universalist Dylan of “John Wesley Harding,” “I Shall Be Released” and “Father of Night,” rather than the cranky sectarian of “Slow Train Coming” and “Saved”), Van Morrison, Prince--all of these have managed to depict spiritual experience in ways that are unconventional, highly individualistic and loath to proselytize. There is no dogma binding the Van Morrison of “In the Garden,” or the Pete Townshend of “And I Moved,” two songs that portray divine encounters as moments of transcendent sexual intimacy. The themes are religious, but the vision and expression are the singer’s own.

Three Orange County rock acts that have been identified with the Christian rock movement have new albums out that, to varying extents, reach out beyond a circle of Christian believers.

Stryper, the best-known and best-selling Christian hard-rock act, seems to have recognized how confining it is to work within the quotation marks of “Christian rock.”

While still informed by Christian principles, Stryper has decided it no longer needs to thump the Bible at every turn. Amen to that.

Mike Stand, singer of the Altar Boys, has never been a mouthpiece for religious dogma, but his second solo album suffers from a malady that afflicts songwriters of all persuasions: an inability to dig down deep for the specific details that can turn broad, abstract notions into vivid slices of experience.

Rick Elias and the Confessions arrive with a superb debut album that merges Elias’ Christian convictions with a true rocker’s insistence on thinking and doing things in a way that is uniquely his own.

** 1/2

STRYPER

“Against the Law” (Enigma)

If ever a band needed to be born again, it was the Stryper of 1988’s awful “In God We Trust” album. Slick and gutless, the sound was closer to warmed-over Boston than to credible heavy metal. Lyrically, meanwhile, the band was glued to the most wooden pro-Jesus sloganeering imaginable.

“Against the Law” is Stryper’s assertion that it ought to be able to talk about life in terms other than the language of the pulpit. It’s also Stryper’s re-assertion that it is a metal band, not some gussied up, unconvincing hybrid.

The reborn Stryper doesn’t exactly brim over with imagination: “Against the Law” falls solidly within heavy metal’s sonic conventions, although it at least dips into several different ones.

The album includes a pop-metal power ballad, some Aerosmith-style heavy boogie, galloping speed-metal, and a hard-hitting, but not cohesive, funk-metal cover of the Earth, Wind & Fire song, “Shining Star.”

Michael Sweet’s rangy voice spearheads big, sing-along choruses, the rhythm section rumbles hard enough to make heads bang, and the guitars, while anchored to the too-familiar metal whine-and-wail style, at least avoid that style’s worst excesses.

Though avoiding specifically Christian imagery, Stryper continues to contradict metal’s typically heathen values. That remains the band’s most interesting facet in songs like “Not That Kind of Guy,” which gives a disdainful brushoff to the sort of libidinous groupie who most hard rockers pray will come knocking at the stage door.

While the lyrics trumpet steadfast restraint, the music maintains a hot, sexual pulse that embodies the temptation at hand.

** 1/2

MIKE STAND

“Simple Expression” (Alarma)

The problem here is that Stand’s subject probably defies simple expression. In song after song, he tries to give voice to something that is beyond words--the yearning to be in touch with God. Stand chronicles his reach for divine contact in a way far too personal to serve dogmatic purposes. But it’s also far too abstract to be deeply communicative.

Too often, Stand slips into a sort of religio-philosophical jargon that is inflated, hard to decipher, and ultimately distancing.

We encounter vague combinations of portent-filled words: imminence change , reformation regeneration , condition change . Even when the diction is more natural, most of Stand’s material remains self-consciously lofty and conceptual. As the album goes on, we want to know more about this seeker-after-God, but Stand isn’t interested in telling us about himself, or his earthly, day-to-day surroundings.

What worldly troubles and flaws have spurred this single-minded quest to be made spiritually whole? There is no inkling here.

Along with the sameness of theme, Stand overstocks the album with chiming anthems built on a Byrds-style massing of Rickenbacker guitars. Stand has an appealingly husky, fervently straining voice that recalls Jackson Browne, full of conviction that conveys the depth of his longing. The emotional core is there, but the details, the flesh of art, are missing.

The album has its moments. All of the ballads are pretty and evocative, with Stand’s emotionalism served well by stark arrangements.

Toward the end of the album, Stand begins to mix things up. “Great Things Happen,” with its bright, mid-tempo jangle, is followed by “I Melt Into You,” which throbs with a raw, punk-influenced forcefulness. The song carries the album’s most vivid impression--but only an impression--of the worldly pain Stand is trying to transcend.

Only in one song, “Time Pressing Dance,” does Stand introduce characters other than himself (and God). The portraits are sketchy, and the idea--time slips away from us--is conventional. But it puts Stand on the helpful tack of looking toward worldly embodiments of spiritual questions.

*** 1/2

RICK ELIAS AND THE CONFESSIONS

“Rick Elias and the Confessions” (Alarma)

Elias is a veteran Southern California rocker who is making his album debut, and it’s a striking one. On the one hand, we get rock’s rebellious spirit in angry, undiluted form: Elias is fed up with the negligence, impotence and hand-me-down solutions of societal and religious authorities, and he is determined to search for his own answers. On the other hand, we get a yearning for divine love that’s deep and abashed and worthy of the best spiritually informed rock.

“Don’t ask me to sing like a caged pet canary, when I’m burning for freedom, not just sanctuary,” Elias spits at one point in a trenchant R&B-tinged; rasp. This is clearly a restless soul whose search for answers isn’t about to be bound by any limits imposed from outside.

Elias’ lyrics take swipes at the limiting forces found in religion and materialism alike. The Dylanesque “Streets of Rome” rejects the safe, tidy, suburban acquisitiveness; “Riot (Comin’ On),” one of several persuasive Mellancamp-cum-Stones thumpers on the album, is a defiantly ticked-off song in which Elias, no fan of donation-seeking televangelists, tells self-anointed sages to put up or shut up: “Come on all you saints and wise men, come show the way if you can, come show us who you really are.”

At key junctures, Elias gives us a good idea who he is and why he is searching for spiritual answers. Allusions to hard, bitter times full of self-disgust and selfishness dominate “Without One Word,” a clenched, gutsy acoustic ballad that is unrelenting in its depiction of a confused, out-of-control soul. While Elias grapples with spiritual concepts--some of his songs are out-and-out prayers--his music is coated with the sweat and grime of lived experience.

Whether the song calls for a straight rock ‘n’ roll kick, or the more lush, textured sound of a number like the lustrous “Someday,” Elias and his band sound completely assured (Elias produced this album, and also co-produced Stand’s album).

It’s telling that when Elias sings of his moment of redemption in the opening song, “Confession of Love,” he fuses Christian imagery with an allusion from the pages of rock history.

“Well I came to the end of that deadman’s street / With a heart full of soul where a tomb used to be,” he sings, linking the title of a Yardbirds classic with the Christian notion of a tomb transcended.

At the end of the song, Elias can’t help breaking jubilantly into one of the most raucous and profane vocal riffs from rock’s annals, the “yeah, yeah, yeah, whoooo!” from the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.” Amen to that, too.