GILFORD, N.H. — My last day at SoulFest, New England’s largest festival for Christian music, started at a suicide prevention panel.

According to festival organizers, the Aug. 4-6 festival drew around 9,000 people this year to its three full days of shows at Gunstock Mountain Resort. More than 75 artists performed, alongside a number of scheduled sermons, workshops, and candle-lighting ceremonies.

At a Christian event like SoulFest, you can find “prayer warriors’’ ready at each hint of a thunderstorm, crying and hand-raising during a rap show, and rock music about Jesus saving you from depression.

You’ll also see, not so unlike secular music festivals, a penchant for emotional extremes. SoulFest’s performers sang often about despair and hopelessness, forging a message of hope from delving, first, into their darker moments.

SoulFest’s first and last headliners, for KING & COUNTRY (who have 1.8 billion career streams on Spotify) and Skillet (who’ve sold 12 million albums worldwide), epitomize that hyper-vulnerable tone.

Both were also fixtures of my evangelical childhood. I rarely listen to Christian music now, but I still remember the way its emotional intensity used to captivate me.

The same vulnerability that first drew me to contemporary Christian artists has also helped turn Christian music into a multi-million-dollar industry over the last few decades, with a market significantly larger than that for classical or jazz music, according to Berklee College of Music’s Music Business Journal. Christian artists have no problem selling concert tickets, either: The popular Christian Winter Jam festival consistently ranks among the top tours in the country year after year.

On SoulFest’s first day, the afternoon and evening’s back-to-back rap performers leaned heavily into that soul-baring atmosphere. Christian rap titan Derek Minor talked about the depression he battled during the pandemic; Boston’s Caleb McCoy talked about his struggles with anxiety and being in an “abusive relationship’’ with social media.

International Show, also from Boston, freestyled about having sleep apnea and getting in a near-fatal car accident. After arriving at the part of the story where God saved his life, he invited audience members to join him in a call-and-response worship song.

The heavier the artist’s testimony, the more audiences cheered. Mental health conditions and physical injuries were celebrated at SoulFest: They were proof, it seemed, of just how much someone needed God.

In that kind of environment, a suicide prevention panel fit right in.

“Suicide prevention’’ is perhaps an overly formal title: The Saturday afternoon event was more like a group therapy session. Three panelists sat on a stage surrounded by drum kits and microphones and told audiences in detail about the events that had brought them to consider ending their lives.

Every seat in the audience was filled; crowd members murmured along in eager, grateful approval.

Maybe it was all the trauma-bonding, but SoulFest did feel, as one after another artist would describe it, like a “family.’’

Dozens of people — teen girls with orange streaks in their hair on a festival shuttle, parking lot volunteers who’d been coming to the festival for seven years, a woman from Connecticut who’d spent multiple decades in the Marines — all eagerly asked for my story.

I forgot how intoxicating it could be to be surrounded by people so desperate to figure out how to save you.

So intoxicating, even, that I almost forgot the strings attached.

After a day of rock music, story-swapping, and candlelit worship songs, SoulFest’s final day ended with a performance from Skillet.

The multi-platinum kings of “Christian metal’’ know how to sate a crowd hungry for vulnerability. They’re associated with what The Tennessean newspaper called “headbanging optimism,’’ for hard rock and metal music about finding salvation, and the depression, hopelessness, and despair that lead you to crave it.

True to form, Skillet frontman John Cooper took time early in the band’s set to talk about how difficult the pandemic had been for him. Cooper paused after his first song to name the kinds of struggles that had affected either him or his fans, like “depression, addiction, and suicide,’’ as he put it.

“Tonight we say no to depression, to fear,’’ he exhorted. “Tonight, we rise.’’

Cooper paused the music again before he launched into “Not Gonna Die,’’ in which a person on the edge of death proclaims God is “everything I need’’ to keep going. The hope Cooper had spent a quarter-century singing (or screaming) about, he explained, came with conditions.

“Liberal Christians’’ couldn’t offer you salvation, he told the audience — only those who interpreted the Bible the right way. “Whoever is telling you that you can be an immoral Christian, because Jesus loves you so much that he doesn’t care, is lying to you,’’ he said, his voice rising to a fever pitch.

The band went on to play a new song called “Dominion,’’ which it released this year as part of an album of the same name. “Life has become a war/ Under our overlords,’’ Cooper sang to a frenzied crowd. “Our rebellion has begun,’’ he continued, before launching into a screamed chorus of “Dominion, dominion!’’

For over 10 years, I’ve listened to Skillet sing about voluntary salvation.

But this song’s cries to “rebel’’ against the “power state’’ felt like an allusion to something far more radical: the theology of “Dominionism.’’ This strain of Christianity teaches that “God has called conservative Christians to exercise dominion over society by taking control of political and cultural institutions,’’ according to social justice research center Political Research Associates. In other words, it’s the opposite of church-state separation — and you can see it in the rise of politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert (who called the separation of church and state “junk’’) and many Christian religious leaders.

Cooper has always talked about “standing up for what you believe in’’ — which, according to comments he made to Christian outlet CBN News this year, is the message of the song “Dominion.’’ But in the past few years, he’s also begun talking more about Donald Trump, the evils of “liberal Christianity,’’ and the need for Christians to “fight’’ against “anti-Dominionism.’’ As the SoulFest crowd chanted lyrics like “Revolution from within/ Let the kingdom reign begin,’’ “Dominion’’ seemed to me like a battle cry for a more militant method of salvation.

The band moved to their closing song, “The Resistance.’’ Its final lyrics “it’s our resistance, you can’t resist us’’ echoed across the now-darkened mountains.

I searched the crowd for expressions that shared my concern, but I was the only person I could see who had stopped singing along. I became newly aware of just how many thousands of people I was squeezed between, and tried to contort my angered expression into something safer.

Driving home that night, I replayed older Skillet songs to make sense of a band I used to love.

My favorite song of theirs is “Awake and Alive,’’ which I’d always seen as an anthem of overcoming. “It’s getting harder to stay awake/ And my strength is fading fast,’’ the second verse starts. “You [God] breathe into me at last/ I’m awake and alive,’’ it ends.

I thought back to the suicide prevention panel that started off the festival’s final day — to the number of times speakers had told us that God was the only thing they could, and should, hold on to when the world was closing in on them.

It came to seem like no coincidence that the festival’s final, most-anticipated act was a band that married that open-wound vulnerability with a call for radical obedience.

A savvy, confessional-filled Christian metal show is far more likely to sell modern audiences on the hope and radicalism of conservative evangelicalism than a church choir.

That’s the allure of a Christian music festival like SoulFest — and, perhaps, also the danger.

Joy Ashford can be reached at joy.ashford@globe.com. Follow them on Twitter @joy_ashford.