Chrissie Cheng | Editor-in-Chief
The room’s pitch black; the spotlight shines just on the vocalist. Her ethereal voice commands the room as she sings the famous worship lyrics, “How great is our God.” Chance the Rapper begins to drop his soulful and quirky rendition mixed with his other mixtape hit “All We Got,” and the curtain pulls up to Kirk Franklin and a gospel choir raising their hands and singing along with Chance in praise. Chance then adds a snippet from his song “Blessings” by singing, “It seems like blessings keep falling in my lap”—yet it also seems like he just brought music’s biggest names, and the 26 million other viewers watching the 2017 Grammys, to a church service.
The secular music industry has recently seen a new wave of gospel hip-hop. Popular hip-hop artists like Chance, Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West rap about their faith with gospel- inspired sound, yet notably receive backlash by Christian communities for their explicit and misogynistic lyrics. They couldn’t possibly be considered Christian hip-hop artists like well-known Christian rapper Lecrae and spoken word artist Propaganda. There’s obviously a fine line between the Christian hip-hop artist and a hip-hop artist who’s a Christian—or perhaps, they’re all just musicians, wrestling with their faith on a public stage.
Hip-hop and the Church
Hip-hop’s history makes it difficult for the church to welcome it with open arms. It’s often considered the music genre that promotes gang activity, objectifies women and uses offensive language. However, just because the content associated with the genre promotes such content doesn’t mean the genre itself should be shunned, especially by the church.
“There’s this kind of misunderstanding when you’re not from the culture that hip-hop is rooted in,” creator of The Good Christian Music Blog and Christian hip-hop fan Stephen Bradley said. “It’s the classic thing you get in life when you look at another culture and completely misinterpret it and just see it as a scary thing you don’t know. The church has kind of done that with hip-hop; they don’t quite know how to respond to it because they don’t understand it.”
Yet hip-hop’s roots in the South Bronx during the late 1960s told individuals’ stories and connected communities. Its emphasis on lyrical content more than any other genre makes hip-hop the perfect storytelling device, or as Bradley labels it, testimony music.
“It’s a chance to say here’s my story, here’s what God has done in my life,” Bradley said. “It’s much more personal, and you can perhaps relate to it more than the average worship song because there’s more specifics than a song designed for a congregation to sing.”
The music genre is also another way to engage with communities who connect with hip-hop culture. Three Chicago-
based artists created the Streetlights Bible after discovering the need for sharing the Gospel to the inner-
city youth who struggle to read, yet could recite hip-hop albums perfectly. The Streetlights Bible uses “word to word Scripture over a hip-hop soundtrack” to teach the Bible in a way that connects with the inner-city youth’s culture.
The Shoemaker
So does that make the Christian rapper the one who only speaks Scripture over a hip-hop beat? Or the ones who talk about their faith in a PG way?
Bradley uses C.S. Lewis’ shoemaker example to define what it means to be a Christian hip-hop artist.
“The Christian shoemaker isn’t a Christian shoemaker by putting crosses on every shoe they make,” Bradley said. “They just run their business in an ethical and morally good way. They show Christ through their work ethic, and I think that applies to music as well.”
Bradley mentions that he knows artists who consider themselves on both ends of the spectrum, and it is ultimately up to the artist to decide their vision. Whether the artist wants their music to be targeted towards youth groups to teach them about Jesus, or wants their music to share his/her testimony and personal struggles in their faith, it’s up to the Christian artist to do so.
Yet that’s where the irony kicks in—when the Christian community shuns the hip-hop artist for producing content that would be found in a testimony. Just this past month, the Christian bookstore LifeWay pulled the hip-hop artist Sho Baraka’s album from stores because he said the word “penis” in regards to his past immoral ways.
“It’s not strange for churches to talk about sex or more importantly sexual impurity,” Bradley said. “Yet when a rapper actually talks about their story and struggles with it, encouraging people to live their life in a godly way, that’s when the church gets all caught up and doesn’t know what to do…You have to look at it more as testimony music; it really is just people telling their story.”
The Public Stage
This new wave of hip-hop gospel may just be a trend in the music industry. “For whatever reason, religion becomes a cool marketing device, yet ironically only for those outside of religion,” Bradley said.
Yet after Chance’s Grammy performance, audiences couldn’t stop questioning his religious views, including Christian bloggers. For that reason, Bradley has a lot of sympathy and empathy for musicians like Chance, as it must be difficult to wrestle with their beliefs on a very public stage.
“You have one side critiquing you for not being that gangster you were a few years ago and you have the other side of the church saying, ‘You don’t use the right language, you’re not one of us,’” Bradley said. “It’s never that simple, you don’t just become a Christian overnight, you become a Christian your whole life.”
Bradley found Chance’s Grammy performance worthy of praise for taking a platform as huge as the Grammys to profess his faith, with or without the label of a Christian rapper.
“I have never heard a Christian artist sing ‘How Great is Our God’ at the Grammys, and let’s be honest, if most churchesgot to play at the Grammys, they’d probably play one of their more watered-down songs,” Bradley said. “I think what Chance did was amazing, and one of the coolest versions of ‘How Great is Our God’ you’ll ever hear.”