Mention the record album "Jesus Sound Explosion" to a typical child of the 1970s and that person is likely to picture one of those collections that used to be shown on TV (Call now Not available in stores ). When Mark Curtis Anderson spied a copy in a junk store a few years ago, he knew just what he'd found, and the memories of growing up in a Baptist minister's family came flooding forth.

The title of Anderson's memoir is a nod to the live concert album from Explo '72, a kind of evangelical Woodstock emceed by Billy Graham. Explo's crowds of 100,000-plus signaled that enterprising...