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It’s appropriate that Switchfoot’s most recent project was recording a song for the latest installment of the “Chronicles of Narnia” movie franchise.

Both have a religious core cloaked, however thinly, by a secular genre. In the case of C.S. Lewis, he set his tale of Christian values in the world of fantasy literature.

Switchfoot does the same thing, only with a triple guitar attack.

The band’s music is never openly religious. There are no songs that directly mention Jesus or God or any Biblical passage. But they do focus a lot on questioning the virtues of hedonism and excesses of modern American life.

There are some coded messages that anyone who has spent time within the Christian community can see are references to the faith.

“Am I alive? Am I on purpose?” frontman Jon Foreman sings on “Circles.” While those lyrics can have a general secular meaning, it’s not hard to relate them to following the Christian path.

And the band makes no qualms about the faith of its members. These guys aren’t going to deny that they are very devout in their personal lives.

“We aren’t trying to hide anything,” says Tim Foreman, bassist and younger brother of Jon Foreman. “But we see Christianity as a faith, not a genre.”

Still, for the band it seems all people focus on is that label — Christian rock.

Hank Hill once told Bobby in an episode of “King of the Hill” that the music isn’t making Christianity any better, it’s “just making rock and roll worse.”

And such has been much of the critical response to music made by overtly Christian musicians. While their songs might provide a great inspiration to millions of people, they aren’t going to replace Bob Dylan in the pantheon of great songwriters any time soon.

That’s why most bands with more than a couple ounces of critic-pleasing chops quickly shy away from the Christian label. U2 started out as a Christian band but quickly left that category behind. Dylan nearly sank his illustrious career by moving toward faith-based music.

Recently, a spate of bands left the religious circuit for success on the secular front. Evanescence got its start being sold mostly in Christian bookstores. P.O.D. got its start on a little known Christian label, Rescue Records. Creed has often been linked to core Christian values.

Two of those bands have gone out of their way to eschew the Christian connections in their music and personal lives. Evanescence’s record label pulled the band off the shelves at Christian stores. Creed’s members have publicly denounced any association with the Christian rock community.

The list of bands on the verge or already well into mainstream popularity who have ditched the Christian moniker is pretty long.

And for a while San Diego-natives Switchfoot was one of them. Or at least that’s the way it seems from the outside looking in. After the release of their breakout album “Beautiful Letdown” in 2003, the band removed itself from the Christian scene. They stopped playing shows that were geared toward a religious audience and passed on interviews with the Christian media. Not that it stopped Christian fans from buying their records. Since “Beautiful Letdown,” each album the band releases debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Christian album charts. And the band has won a slew of Dove Awards, the contemporary Christian music version of the Grammys.

Switchfoot did what every other band in their position seems to have done. They said goodbye to outward signs of faith for the big record sales of mainstream America.

And it worked. The band sold more than 2.6 million copies of “Beautiful Letdown” and got a lot of airplay on commercial radio.

“We weren’t really thinking of things like that,” Foreman says. “We try to strategize our press and things based on how we can reach the widest audience possible.

“It’s the same with our music. We don’t play shows geared to just one audience. These are songs for everyone.”

Those answers might seem diplomatic. But that comes with the territory when you are trying to be equal opportunity. The band has returned to doing interviews with religious publications, but they still try to shift the focus of interviews away from affiliating themselves with a genre, whether it be Christian or emo.

“It’s like junior high all over again,” Foreman says. “Everyone wants you to fly their flag. But we can’t do that. We have to just do our thing.”

Their thing includes leaving the major label comforts of Columbia Records for their own label. The band was one of the most vocal opponents of the copy-protection software that Columbia and it’s parent company Sony BMG added to CDs in 2005. The software was later recalled after security concerns came to light.

“It felt like a huge insult to our fans,” Foreman says. “These people bought your record, they should be able to use it however they want.”

But there are a lot of fears that come with removing the safety net provided by a multi-billion dollar company. There are no more big advances and record sales have dwindled. The most recent release “Oh! Gravity” hasn’t hit gold status more than a year after it’s release despite the best reviews of the band’s career, an irony of which Foreman says the band has taken note.

“But you can’t write songs thinking about numbers, numbers of records sold,” he says. “You have to write songs from an honest perspective. You better believe it, and they better mean something to you.”

Something you could also say about faith.