What would Jesus do? For starters, he would pay for his music instead of engaging in piracy like some of the Christian teens who responded to a poll for the Gospel Music Association.

With last year's drop in Christian album sales by 5 percent to 47 million, there's a lot of mammon at stake. Jesus may have forgiven the thief on the cross, but the Christian music industry wants to instill the fear of God in its young customers before there is further erosion of its $800 million in sales.

Last year Christian music outsold jazz and classical music combined and has constituted an increasingly lucrative market for mainstream record companies looking to diversify and expand their profit margin. The study by The Barna Group points out that Christian youth are downloading and illegally burning CDs at nearly the same rate as their non-Christian peers.

The survey of 1,448 teens showed that 4 out of every 5 engaged in some type of music piracy in the last six months. More sobering for the Christian music industry is the study's finding that "church attenders (78 percent) were just as likely as non-attenders (81 percent) to engage in piracy; born- again Christians (77 percent) were just as likely as non-born-again Christians (81 percent)."

Does the devil make them do it? The rationalizations speak to the unique place Christian pop music has in American culture. Many Christian teens point to the evangelical nature of the music itself as their best defense. Young people consider themselves agents of the Great Commission when they give copyrighted music away to friends and acquaintances who might not hear the Gospel otherwise.

But a Christian teen's version of free and unfettered "Good News" is a Christian businessman's shrinking profit margin. Unlike their secular counterparts, Christian music executives aren't likely to take music pirates to court or sue them to enforce copyrights. Such litigiousness might violate Christ's command to "turn the other cheek."

For the time being, the Christian music industry must appeal to the conscience of its young customers to stop robbing Peter to avoid paying Paul.