Tune into the Grammys on Sunday night and you'll hear the name Evanescence more than a few times. The goth-rock group is nominated in five categories, including Best New Artist, Album of the Year, and Best Hard Rock Performance for the song "Bring Me to Life."

On their way to the Grammys, the band has shown that its musicianship is solid but its diplomacy needs some work. In the past year, the group alienated a segment of the industry they seemed to have an affinity with - the Christian market - by insisting that its albums be pulled from Christian stores, charts, and radio stations.

What sounds like heresy is really a sign of the growing pains experienced by artists of faith who are finding their way into the mainstream in larger numbers. Wanting to reach a wider audience, musicians are pushing beyond their Christian record labels to the world of MTV, and are sometimes bypassing the religious market entirely.

"Almost every week or so I hear of another band that is either stepping away from being signed only in the Christian market or just sort of ... avoiding it altogether," says Mark Joseph, author of "Faith, God & Rock 'n' Roll." "It's just exploded in this last year."

Driving the trend is a generation of young artists who don't want their music marginalized simply because they read the Bible. Many don't consider their music as being suitable only for Christians and would like to be part of a broader cultural discussion. It's the idea that if movie stars and running backs who talk about their faith aren't relegated to Christian movie studios or football leagues, why should musicians be? The way that one band, Switchfoot, has put it: We're Christian by faith, not by genre.

Million-selling rock group P.O.D. takes a similar approach. The band, formed more than a decade ago, released their first album with Atlantic Records in 1999 and has since sold 6 million albums.

All the members are Christian, but their manager, Tim Cook, says they never went the Christian-label route.

"The guys recognized that they were inspiring people and that people were attracted to what they were saying, so to place that gift in a limited environment would have been a big mistake," he says.

More options are available to new artists in part because bands such as U2, Jars of Clay, and Creed paved the way in the past two decades. (Grammy winners Jars of Clay, for example, used to call newspapers and record stores personally and ask that the band be listed under the rock/pop rather than the gospel category.)

Cultural changes have also helped make society more receptive to bands such as Sixpence None the Richer and Switchfoot. Spirituality is discussed more often in pop culture - consider TV's "Joan of Arcadia," for example, in which a teen talks to God. A greater openness to mixing spirituality and pop culture, say some of the pioneers, is making it easier for groups to get a hearing.

"People aren't as threatened by Christian ideas as maybe they were 10 or 15 years ago," says Mark Odmark, a member of Jars of Clay, who sees less pigeonholing of musicians than when his band hit the mainstream in the mid-1990s. "But I also think that the quality of the art and product has come into its own. Purely from a quality standpoint, it's not as obvious that 'Oh, it's a Christian song' because it sounds kind of dated, and it sounds not as inventive or creative."

Nonetheless, others say, the comfort level of the general populace is still not that high. "Generally speaking, if people are doing religious music, Christian music, that's not acceptable for secular radio stations," says Mark Allen Powell, a professor at Trinity Lutheran Seminary and author of the "Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music." "And that is a part of the American culture that would obviously not be true in many other societies and many other parts of the world."

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