Category Archives: Culture

The Shawshank Redemption and the Hypocrisy of Incarceration Nation

Posted on by under Culture, General Articles

prison

I would bet against me avoiding political commentary in the coming weeks and months. For now, we’ll focus in on an issue that – surprise surprise – has not  managed to hold much place in the ongoing political dialogue. Dialogue is, I suppose, much too kind a word for the bloviating that dominates political rhetoric and disscourse (extra ‘s’ intentional).

The justice system in this country is in need of major fixes and some total overhauls. Among the necessary changes to the justice system is prison reform. The current prison system is a bloated panacea that has become a supplier of neo-slave labor. Additionally, it has disproportionately contributed to the plight of many black communities and created a warped sense of reality that frustrates statistical interpretation and projection. White-collar criminals have unfairly avoided prison sentences or bought their way into nicer detainment centers. There are numerous incidents of prison guards grievously abusing inmates. The current system emphasizes punishment rather than rehabilitation, and life after prison is a really tough go for ex-cons – creating such a high re-incarceration rate.

Despite all the wrongs of the prison system, it seems that Americans, in general, don’t care about their incarcerated compatriots. There’s not a lot of sympathy going around for people locked behind bars. Of course – of course – there are some individuals in prison who are dangerous and deranged and should be kept in prison for the well-being of society. But even the psychopaths should be treated humanely. For the most part, people just tend to not think about the millions of people in prison.

And this neglect, apathy, and outright disdain persists despite the fact that prison is – what’s the word? – I honestly can’t think of the right word. It is a horrific, dangerous place to be. At its most basic level, prison is a box that holds people that need to be kept away from society for a while. But prison so often becomes a cruel and unusual punishment. Taking away life’s luxuries is one thing – subjecting people to physical, sexual, and psychological trauma is another. If you can stand it, listen to a few seconds of what solitary confinement sounds like (hint: it’s not quiet).

But here’s the disjointed and hypocritical part of Incarceration Nation that I want to get at: sometimes we really like prisoners. Sometimes we empathize with them. In fact, I think it’s our natural inclination to have pity on the prisoner.

Because you realize that arguably the most-loved American film of all-time is about prisoners, right? Yes, The Shawshank Redemption has a wrongly-convicted man as its main character, but it takes almost no effort for the filmmakers to get the audience to love all the prisoners, with the obvious exception of the men who repeatedly rape Andy. We’re thrilled, as an audience, to see the prisoners gain some nice things like the library, and everyone has a few notes played on the heart strings in the famous “Opera Scene.”

Morgan Freeman’s character, Red, has to be one of the most beloved characters Freeman has ever played – and he’s a black prisoner who readily admits to murdering someone!

Shawshank isn’t the only example of this either – Cool Hand Luke is another iconic film about prisoners – albeit in a setting that’s a little less “maximum security,” given that we’re supposed to believe most of the prisoners aren’t there for the long haul. Still, this film also manages to make the audience love the convicts and celebrate their happiness and mourn their hardships.

So what the heck is up with that? Why do we like these prisoners but hate the ones in real life?

Is it because of the sadistic wardens and guards? It shouldn’t be – there’s plenty of those in real life too.

Is it because of the vibrant characters? Shouldn’t be that either – there’s some interesting people locked away right now.

Is it because the prison life doesn’t seem as bad as in real life? Well, maybe, but if it was worse in the movies, wouldn’t that make us pity them all the more?

I think we just have to accept this as disjointed and hypocritical. We like the fictional characters that are safely locked away on the big screen, but we ignore and even hate the real life convicts that once walked among us. Watching those films, we can let our desire for freedom and our touting of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness dictate how we feel. We set aside our prejudices and embrace empathy as we see humans locked away in a place none of us want to be.

But when does this disjointedness reveal an unnatural mindset: when we watch the fiction or when we consider the real life prisoners? In other words, are we fooling ourselves when we pity the dangerous criminals on screen or are we dishonest when our empathy withers as the detainees become very real?

I don’t know. I am pretty sure, despite our acceptance of Morgan Freeman’s character, that there’s a racial component to it (and, besides, could we really be scared of Morgan Freeman?). It is worth noting that Red is, if my memory serves, the only non-white character in either film (and in Stephen King’s story, Red is not black).

But racial factors probably compound what might be the real underlying hypocrisy – we can get invested in fiction because it’s fiction. It’s easy to watch a movie and then feel inspired to make a difference, but actually acting on real life problems is so much tougher. Obviously.

What remains clear is a dissonance between our love of freedom and our sympathy for fictional inmates and the way we treat prisoners in real life. Prisoners are people too. Yes, many are dangerous, and many should be behind bars for the safety of others, but the Chateau D’if that we’ve made of  the American prison system needs some major reworking

Forth now, and fear no darkness.

Soli Deo Gloria

– Peter

Travelling the Uncharted Self

Posted on by under Culture, General Articles, Poems

This is one of the most pretentious things I’ve ever done as a blogger (although I used to be kind of a jerk in my nascent sports-blogging stages (“Boom! Eat it Merril Hoge! My pick for Offensive ROY just went HAM and chucked for a debut record 422 yards” (I am so embarrassed that I ever wrote something like that (but I’ve done worse (in writing (and real life too (I guess))))))). And, actually, I’m realizing that the pretentious thing could have been using seven parentheses and banking on you continuing to read. Pardon.

No, the pretentious thing I’m going to do is start this blog post with a poem that I wrote sometime last autumn:

Like a River

There’s a space inside a man which
runs like a river through mountains.
It flows from the sidereal heath
and travels a landscape of virile solitude.
It is breathtaking –
what a man finds when he can walk
within himself –
who can find his way into the halcyon valley
and take in the expanse of the starry night.
To see the mountains proud and cold,
to see the mud languishing in the
foul water that pools in ponds of neglect
and feel the sparkling stream steadily wash it clean.
What it must be to see the height and breadth
of this meandering path running from the gleaming void
to the tossing sea
where other rivers
deposit the story of a soul.

Even as I click “copy” and “paste” questions linger about whether or not you care about my poem or if it will help you to see what this post is about. And, even as I write this, I’m not certain of where this post is going – it’s actually one of the most organic posts I’ve done in a long time. I’ve been writing quite a lot, but not material for blogging. So, in a way that I haven’t always, I’m writing a blog because I want to, not because I feel I need to.

But I begin with the poem because I’m finding that, while I still believe everything I put into it, I’ve come to even better understand the pictures that I tried to paint. I’ve lived these truisms in ways I hadn’t when I first translated these ideas into a stanza.

The poem can mean a lot of things, which are not my present intention to demonstrate, but the poem is partially about where, spatially speaking, a human being exists. Yes, the Ship of Theseus that we call the self appears to occupy only one finite location in a physical body at any time – right now my 5’11” frame is seated at my desk. But if you’re reading this, then you know that where you exist is hardly limited to wherever your own Ship of Theseus might be moored, as writing and reading is an act of telepathy (ht Stephen King). In some sense, you’re existing in my mind. Or consider that just as your physical body might stand in line at the DMV until 2:18, you might find yourself in a virtual line for tickets to Hamilton that extends to 2018.

The space we occupy is much more mutable and much less defined than the physical space our bodies occupy. This space that we live in is a view within ourselves but also a boulevard to the spaces we share, metaphysically, with our fellow humans. That’s part of what writing the poem revealed to me, and in the recent months I’ve learned that all the more, and these meditations have been spurred on and guided by a variety of teachers.

First, my physical place in the world for the time being has put me in a rather unusual, and often uncomfortable, sea of consciousness. I graduated in December, and I’m going back to school (somewhere) for a Master’s degree next autumn. But, for the time being, I’m living at home. This unfamiliar territory is an unstable terrain that removes me from parts of my identity that I have grown accustomed to – I am not a student right now, I’m removed from the lives of my closest friends, I’m an “only child” for the first time, I see both my parents every day, the infrequency with which I’m substitute teaching hardly qualifies me as a working person, and, although I have a plan for what I will do next autumn, I have only heard back from one of the eight schools to which I applied, meaning that my future status as a student, friend, son, and employee is in a state of flux.

Mentally and emotionally, this makes me feel much more removed than even my physical state of being would designate. My close friend studying in England feels a world away – my friends at school feel only a little closer. Future schooling and work are so diaphanous even in rose-tinted lenses, as I am employed but hardly working, and in line to enter school but waiting on decisions.

All of this makes this time between schooling a time in which it is challenging to form my identity and just as tough to express it. Which is, I suppose, one reason I’m writing this post.

But there’s a yin to every yang. As my physical state has remained isolated and removed, and as my identity has lost or modified some of its significant traits, I have roamed far and wide among the constellations of the mind. I spend my day with ideas. I read (books, tweets, and online articles) and I observe (talk radio, music, debates, TV events, and the like) and I think and I write. And the space we share mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, can be a breathtaking space with a power to define as strong as our physical location. When I read Quiet by Susan Caine, I connected so directly with what she wrote about introverts that it made me like myself more as a person, and I have such profound gratitude for what she wrote that I almost feel like Susan is one of my friends now. Or, for another example, when I read The Souls of Black Folk, I found Du Bois’ ideas so powerful and so accurate, and so affirming in my interests and studies, it was like he had sent the book from 1903 directly to me to read. Books, TV, and the internet have pooled their resources with my mind, and each day I find myself so much a part of this human experience, removed as I am for the time being. My meditations explore these tributaries and my writing is one way in which my experience is given life.

These uncertain spaces have formed a symbiotic relationship with my spirituality as well, and once again I find the doctrine of election to be one of the most stunning attributes of God (admittedly, it causes me some angst as well, but that is a separate issue for now). I believe that God chose me before I was born (Galatians 1:15) for salvation, but also to have a purpose in life. Whether or not God controls everything I will do, I don’t know, and frankly I think too much ink is spilled pondering human free will. But I am sure, just as God planned for Paul to minister to the Gentiles, that God has a reason for calling me, and a way in which he intends to use me to glorify God and serve my neighbors. As God protected Paul against plots against his life to get him to Jerusalem, I believe God has a way in mind for me to love God and neighbor, and whatever the odds are God will see it done.

Whether you can relate or only imagine, that’s a tremendous thing to believe. But, like most Christian beliefs, it’s not something you can download into your mind like we’re plugged into the Matrix. It takes time to work through and accept. And, like most Christian beliefs, Christians always have some doubts. I’ve said that most Christians (me included) don’t actually believe they will go the heaven when they die – they do, but if they could 100% grasp and believe that they would be in heaven, they would live their lives so very differently on earth, wouldn’t they?

What this means is that living a purpose-driven life is tricky when you haven’t reached a place that seems to fit your idea of a “purpose.” I don’t think what I’m doing right now is my ultimate purpose – rather, I tend to think of “God’s plan for me” as being where I will be in, say, ten years. Then I will be doing God’s work, then I’ll be using my education to make the world a better place and glorify God. But that’s not a particularly comfortable or useful way to think. Because God has a purpose for me now, and tomorrow, and next week, just as much as ten and twenty years from now. But believe me – I wish I was doing what I’ll be doing in ten years now. That’s the work I want to do today. This attitude makes it easy to punt away spiritual work, going days at a time with little thought for God. But I’ve learned over the past couple years that ignoring daily excellence is one of the worst things a person can do (I wrote about this last year and you can follow up on that later if you wish, here).

Recently, I began to think myself very wise in the ways of theology, scripture, and spirituality. I began to think myself quite holy and righteous. But what I started to lose sight of was the way in which we must constantly turn to God, even if it means re-hearing an old truth or re-reading a letter of Paul yet again. But the truth is that, even if the words in the Bible remain the same, the truths evolve – not that they are subject to our understanding, but rather that, at each stage of our lives, the same words may be breathed in and breathed out in a different manner that attends to our situation in life while calling us to be more like Jesus every day. And even if you know everything there is to know, the way to be more like Jesus is going to be different from time to time, depending on where you are on your journey. Thus, I must continue to preach to myself.

Okay, so I know that probably felt tangential, but my musings on the bundled self, identity, and Christian living do all amount to more than an entry in my diary that you may or may not care about.

What I’m seeing is a failure for people to embrace the mutability and connectedness of our existence, choosing instead to label others and label themselves in ways that don’t make sense. When we see our soul flowing from the sidereal heath through our halcyon valleys and into the commingled sea of souls, then we can better understand ourselves and better understand and love each other, and we can move past the things that divide and conquer us.

Concerning Peyton Manning, Dan LeBatard is right: why can’t it all be true that Peyton did horrible things, Peyton is now a good guy, the journalist is not credible, the journalist has an agenda, the story is true, this doesn’t have to be about race, but yet this is about race? Those things can all be true. Why does someone find themselves saying that Peyton is totally absolved and Shaun King is a race-baiting devil?

Concerning Cam Newton’s press conference: It’s true that he should have acted differently, but can’t we all understand why he would act that way? Can’t we be fine with what he did, and try to empathize, yet still say he was wrong?

Concerning Kanye West: why does he have to be a crazy douchebag or a peerless artist? Why one or the other? Can’t we treat him like a person who’s on a journey like all of us, and say that his album, while not a masterpiece, is still pretty damn good? Can’t we appreciate the nuances that come with him and with his work?

Feeling the need to label ourselves and others inevitably leads to incorrect and overbearing labels that unnaturally warp our thinking, and in no place is this more obvious than this thing going on called the 2016 Presidential election. Fam – I fully believe that the two-party system in American politics is one of the most harmful things for our culture, our government, and our society. It creates extremism. Compromise and bipartisanship is a sham – usually when someone says that’s what they want, what they really mean is they want people on the other side of the aisle to agree with them. And this dichotomy of liberal:conservative makes people think some pretty unnatural things.

Conservatives have an overwhelmingly negative response to Beyoncé, Kendrick, DeRay, and just about anything related to race, especially when it comes to #BlackLivesMatter. Somehow it became a part of conservatism, and it is really disturbing to see the ways that conservatives predictably buck against any sort of racial protest or the suggestion that there is systemic racism, even though there is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a serious race problem in this country. Conservatives find other labels to disparage as well, SOCIALISM being one of the most prominent. So rather than consider the merits of Democratic Socialism, conservatives discredit the ideology altogether, trampling all of the good things liberalism can bring to the social inequality workbench. In short: conservatives contort their minds to oppose things that are new, different, strange, or uncomfortable. And that’s a problem, no?

Liberals aren’t faultless either. Perhaps in particular is the liberal tendency to bash Christianity. Yes, there is a marriage between Christianity and the GOP that makes me uncomfortable, and yes, Christians often conflate religious liberty with religious supremacy. But the caricature that liberals draw up of sexist, homophobic, racist, selfish Christians is unfair, and brings to an end helpful discussions about abortion and what it truly means to be “pro-life,” or what it really means for a Christian to “hate the sin and love the sinner” or how defeating ISIS is different from defeating Islam. Some people say some pretty bold stuff about gay rights and reproductive rights that, I think, upon further review, don’t make sense. But, because someone identifies as “liberal,” they feel the need to turn into a lemming and run off the cliff to get away from being conservative. In short: liberals charge ahead at unsustainable speeds, desperate to be unlike the close-minded people of the past. And that’s risky, no?

Why can’t a conservative support the teacher’s union and environmental protection? Why can’t a liberal be pro-life and opposed to gun control?

Too many people have never learned to think for themselves, and it’s because their insistence on taking sides and fabricating labels clouds their knowledge of the self and sets up roadblocks on our common boulevards of existence. We look to cues from thought leaders and ideologies and trending topics for guidance, forcing ourselves into labels and bending our perception of ourselves and our perception of others into something that is unnatural and unhelpful. You exist someplace that is so much more free than the temporal entrenchment that you’ve assumed.

Since this post of loosely-related parts somewhat resembles The Life of Pablo, I guess I will, 2500 words in, finish with a reflection on a Kanye song. I think these ideas that I’ve been kicking around in this post rather clumsily appear, in some form, in Kanye West’s song “Real Friends.” They’ve been ruthless in keeping that song off of YouTube, but here’s a 30 second preview on Tidal if you haven’t heard it.

People tend to take friends for granted. Or, at least, people don’t think critically about what friendship really means and what it means to be a real friend or have real friends. In our insatiable need for labeling, we find ourselves satisfied with acquiring “friends,” just as we call ourselves a student, spouse, employee, male, female, etc etc. But “How many of us are real friends/To real friends, ’til the reel end/’Til the wheels fall off, ’til the wheels don’t spin,” Kanye asks. But it’s a two-way street: “Who your real friends? We all came from the bottom/I’m always blamin’ you, but what’s sad, you not the problem.” Kanye is questioning whether or not he has real friends, and also whether or not he is a real friend.

What makes this message and this song so potent, besides the stellar production (love the piano sample), is that this comes from the type of introspective and self-deprecating voice that so many people seem to think Kanye doesn’t have. He isn’t bragging about being a deadbeat cousin, hating family reunions, and spilling wine at communion – he’s criticizing himself for it. He’s coming from a dark place on this one, and in that same dark place he voices frustration over his cousin stealing his laptop and holding it for ransom, and laments the loss of friends since becoming famous.

This is one of the things that makes Kanye great – when he puts himself into this metaphyscial space in such an honest and heartfelt way, you find yourself there too, even if you can’t relate to everything he’s talking about. I’m not famous. I’ve never had my laptop stolen. I’ve taken communion many times, but have so far avoided making a scene. But, listening to this song, I can’t help but think about what kind of friend I am, and who my real friends are. I can’t help but think about if I’m a good son and a good brother, and if my family’s always been good to me. It is well to consider those things, and in this case it doesn’t happen if Kanye doesn’t put himself in that space or if I put Kanye in a box he doesn’t belong in or if I deny myself the song based on what I think of that kind of music.

I think what I just said about “Real Friends” makes sense and fits into this post, but to be totally honest I just really wanted to talk about that song because I like it so much.

I’ll leave you with this: seek that place that is removed from your physical position. Do not be bound to a finite location. Challenge what you think you know. Rebel against the labels that society wants to put on you, and be careful which labels you claim for yourself. Your heart and soul and mind exist someplace that your body can never be. Explore that place. Know yourself. And when you find a fellow human there, embrace their journey, knowing their sandals are just as worn as yours.

Forth now, and fear no darkness.

Soli Deo Gloria

-Peter

Church Clothes 3 is Exactly What We Needed

Posted on by under Culture

Lecrae’s maturity will make some uncomfortable, but will also create the space to take a subgenre to the next level.

Church Clothes 3

“I’m not saying that a Christian audience shouldn’t listen to this – I think it will be beneficial for them, however, I don’t think you’re gonna get some of the same type of messages that you’re used to nor the same kind of music that you’re used to. It’s not gonna be a lot of “commercial” music on here. It’s gonna be raw, uncut hip-hop tracks.” – Lecrae, discussing Church Clothes (Volume 1) in 2012

When Lecrae moves, Christian hip-hop moves. Although he does not claim the crown of the subgenre, to call Lecrae the Jay-Z of CHH is entirely short-changing Lecrae. Being the leading man of this particular subgenre that is simultaneously music, movement, and lifestyle is not like being the leading artist in any other type of music because the music has such a close connection to a religion. The squabbles that fans of music have about their favorite artists are magnified by the stakes of the debate, namely: Is the music Christian enough or is it too worldly? These debates are often quite silly, and it’s not my present intention to walk through them, but suffice to say the subgenre is, for many reasons, hindered by disagreements over how this type of music should be handled.

As a result, Lecrae, as the subgenre’s leading man, faces more pressure than anyone because he carries the most weight and can affect the most change. And that’s why some fans were upset by what Lecrae said about the content of Church Clothes and then eventually by the mixtape itself.

But what Lecrae began with Church Clothes in 2o12 has come to full realization with the surprise release of Church Clothes 3 on January 14. Even as Lecrae’s retail LPs took his name and the subgenre to new heights of popularity (Gravity won a Grammy for Best Gospel Album in 2012 and Anomaly hit number one on the Billboard in 2014), it has been his trilogy of mixtapes that have been his most important contribution to music. While he has risen to be one of the most recognizable icons in popular Christianity, it has been the side projects of Church Clothes that have done the most for him, his subgenre, mainstream Christianity, and mainstream music.

Church Clothes was not a mainstream-seeking, worldly, irreligious sell-out like some fans irrationally feared. Rather, it was a collection of 18 “raw, uncut hip-hop tracks” that boasted an impressive array of producers and featured artists and some of Lecrae’s best lyrical work. Hosted by Don Cannon, and released for free on DatPiff, the mixtape drew the attention of many in the “secular” rap world. Most remarkably, it was fierce, gritty, and yet unapologetically Christian. It was, in a way that so much of Christian music is not, rooted in the so-called “real world.” While his 2008 album Rebel (an instant classic in CHH) was like a lion roaring in a pulpit, Church Clothes was more like a panther stalking the streets. Both cats are useful, even excellent, in their own right, but the important thing about the panther is that mainstream Christian audiences, let alone mainstream secular audiences, were only used to the lion in the pulpit.

Lecrae incorporated the panther approach into his 2012 LP Gravity, and continued it in full with Church Clothes 2 the next year. However, even as Lecrae’s rapping skills improved alongside better and better production with each release, and even as his lyrics became more and more socially-conscious, mainstream Christian listeners revealed that these things mattered little in their decision to help make Anomaly an astounding commercial success. The same fans who turned their backs on Sho Baraka for Talented Tenth, perhaps the most “black” CHH album of all time (and basically To Pimp a Butterfly before there was To Pimp a Butterfly), passed over Anomaly’s “Welcome to America” and “Dirty Water,” two hard-hitting songs about social inequalities, for the more tame and more mainstream songs like “All I Need is You” and “Messengers,” the two songs on the album that received Grammy nominations. In the wake of Anomaly, racial tensions grew in America, especially concerning police brutality, and Lecrae, like many of his fellow black Christian rappers, received heavy criticism for talking about issues of race.

In short, the message from so many listeners was clear: make youth group music. Make fun music with a Christian message that young white people can listen to while driving around with their friends. The sound can be mainstream, the lyrics can be mediocre, as long as it’s loud and Jesusy.

So you could say that, entering 2016, CHH was in another formative stage as it awaited the next release from its biggest star.

Enter Church Clothes 3, the mixtape that settles all debate on what Lecrae is about and where the subgenre is going.

Like the other two installments in the trilogy, CC3 is going to be just about totally absent from any kind of mainstream radio as well as Christian youth conferences. There are no conventional party tracks, hype songs, and no features from contemporary Christian music (Lecrae has previously featured big names like For King and Country and Tenth Avenue North).

Instead, the album starts with “Freedom,” which recalls the African spiritual sound with which Sho Baraka began Talented Tenth. “Freedom” and “Gangland” set the tone for the album as they take hard looks at the plight of black America. CC3 is not black in the way that To Pimp a Butterfly or Talented Tenth are black, but suffice to say there are a lot of listeners who will want to turn the music off after guest artist Propaganda raps on “Gangland”: “Why would we listen/When American churches scuff their Toms/On our brother’s dead bodies as they march/To stop gay marriage/Yo, we had issues with Planned Parenthood, too/We just cared about black lives outside the womb/Just as much as in.” Together, “Freedom” and “Gangland” make a statement: Christian rap isn’t running from racial issues, even if many listeners would rather ostrich the issue and ostracize the activists.

 Lecrae takes the time to address his haters and critics on the album, most notably on “Sidelines,” but makes statements on other songs like “It Is What It is”: “You wasn’t with me on the 4th down, huh?/Then you can miss me when I touchdown/And that’s no shade, no shade/It’s just those games, I don’t play/I’m gettin’ wiser with more age/And realizin’ some gonna hate/And that’s okay.” Recently, Lecrae has addressed these kinds of criticisms people cast at him and his Reach label mates, but on CC3 he sounds much more sure of himself, letting his actions speak for themselves, whereas his verse on KB’s “Sideways” last spring seemed more conceited. This approach is in step with how he has handled criticisms recently: those who criticized his label for removing Romans 1:16 from their mission statement (this writer included) had to backpedal as Lecrae shared pictures on social media of his mission trip in the Middle East, not even bothering to address the criticism directly.

While the album is not a roaring lion in the pulpit that some listeners want, or the light and easy feel-good message that satisfies many contemporary Christian music fans, make no mistake: this is still a “Christian” album. Lecrae is not hiding: “Now they’re wondering, is it rap or is it Gospel?/Look all you need to know is I was dead, now I’m not though… I hit my pastor on the cell, I said, “I’m catching hell”/Well, what you think they did to Jesus?/Only time will tell.” As well as he ever has, the message of Lecrae’s music artfully balances the grit of the real world and the hope of the Gospel, making the message of CC3 authentic and meaningful.

Musically, CC3, executive produced by S1 (who has worked with big names like Kanye West and Jay-Z), is not only excellent, but continues the Church Clothes tradition that makes a statement for keeping raw hip-hop sound in CHH. While the youth group crowd clamors for EDM and pop sounds, which can be found aplenty in CHH, CC3 is another album that is neither commercialized nor overwrought. While some mixtapes become a conglomerate of different sounds, CC3 remains fairly consistent throughout under S1’s capable direction.

Lyrically, this is as good as we have ever heard Lecrae. His flow and delivery have always been as strong as anyone in CHH, but occasionally his writing has been less than ambitious. On CC3, Lecrae’s flow and delivery are nearly flawless, and his pen is as strong as it has ever been. Sometimes the nuances of lyricism are overlooked by mainstream crowds (Christian and secular alike), and in truth Lecrae would sell records even if he mailed it in lyrically, but it is clear from this album that Lecrae is committed to the craft and can hang with anyone bar for bar.

All of this is plain to see in the album’s best song, “Misconceptions 3.” The beat drives forward as S1 samples “N.Y. State of Mind ,” a legendary song by Nas. Lecrae finishes the song with what is probably his best verse of the album, but only after unleashing as lethal a lineup of lyricists as you will find – “Misconceptions 3” features cousins John Givez and JGivens, as well as Jackie Hill Perry. And oh are they ever lethal. Hip-hop listeners, in general, tend to overreact to how great a verse is, but there is no overstating how excellent John, J, and Jackie are on this song, and it is to Lecrae’s unending credit that his verse is not a weak link when all three of his guests are more gifted writers. And it’s not a song about nothing – it’s a brilliant battle-rap style song that attacks the misconceptions that Christians and non-Christians have of Christian rappers. JGivens raps: “This a misconception triple threat/Did Givens flex? Still a Christian? Yep/Don’t need acknowledgement, just respect the conglomerate/Double tap it and follow it.”

The featured artists on CC3 are significant when considering the accomplishments of the album. Lecrae features his talented young label mate, KB, as well as rap veteran E-40, and the little-known N’Dambi, who sings the hook on “Freedom.” But more significant are the features from the aforementioned John Givez, JGivens, Jackie Hill Perry, and Propaganda. They are four of the best artists in CHH, despite not being as popular among the youth group crowd. The key is that all four fit the Church Clothes panther approach, favoring authentic instrumentals, skilled lyricism, and socially conscious content rooted in the real world. All but John Givez are signed to Humble Beast, which is, for my money, the best label in CHH right now, but one that is anything but mainstream. Givez and his teammates at Kings Dream are not far behind Humble Beast, and have a similar style. It’s pretty clear that CC3 is an endorsement of the style of Humble Beast and John Givez. Even as Lecrae’s label becomes more mainstream, Lecrae has made it clear that he wants to run with the talented underground of CHH.

CC3 demonstrates not only Lecrae’s skills, but his goals and intentions: he’s going to be a socially conscious, Gospel-rooted artist no matter what anyone (including mainstream Christianity) says. It sends a message to the world of secular rap that he is committed to authentic music and he can make it as well as anyone, while alerting Christian listeners that, while his music is still unashamedly Christian, he isn’t here to make youth group music. And, because Lecrae is doing and saying these things, it creates the space for other artists in CHH, including those at Humble Beast and Kings Dream, to say those things and continue to gain recognition for the excellence of their craft.

And Lecrae does all of this without ever overreaching. The album exudes confidence. Listening to Anomaly, it was clear that Lecrae knew he was making something that was going to be wildly popular and change the landscape of CHH, and there were shades of that on Gravity as well. But CC3 continues the understated artistry that has made the Church Clothes trilogy such a joy. This is as comfortable as we’ve ever heard Lecrae.

Many listeners, particularly in mainstream Christianity, will not like or appreciate CC3, and it is sure to make some people uncomfortable, especially since it is Lecrae’s blackest and most socially provocative album to date. But this is exactly what everyone needed from Thursday’s surprise release.

When Lecrae moves, Christian hip-hop moves, and thanks to Church Clothes 3, the subgenre is moving in a great direction.

The album is available on Apple Music, iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, and select retailers. There is also an excellent short film that accompanied the album release, featuring “It Is What It Is,” “Gangland,” “Deja Vu,” and “Misconceptions 3.” All Humble Beast music is available for free download at humblebeast.com. 

Forth now, and fear no darkness.

Soli Deo Gloria

– Peter

Social Justice and the Broken Body of Christ

Posted on by under Culture
The Crucifixion by Aaron Douglas and The Deposition of Christ by Caravaggio

The Crucifixion by Aaron Douglas and The Deposition of Christ by Caravaggio

This post hinges largely on a basic premise that I firmly believe, and one that grieves me because I firmly believe it:

American Christians are not doing enough to promote social justice.

Exploring this premise unfolds in numerous directions. There are many in which Christians fail, there are a number of reasons (valid and faulty) that Christian give for being less involved, there are plenty of ways in which Christians can become more involved, and there is a plethora of indictments that might be brought against American Christianity for their shortcomings in this area.

It would be impractical to try to touch on all of this in a mere blog post, so let’s turn our attention to one incongruity that strikes me as inconsistent and perhaps even hypocritical within the zeitgeist of American Christianity.

Christian doctrine must, like all religions or other concepts of spirituality, reconcile our distinctly physical existence with what is, as far as we can tell, non-physical. How is it that people “go” to heaven? How does God “hear” prayers? How is one “filled” with the Holy Spirit? These are part of a set of very complex philosophical questions that people have tried to answer for thousands of years.

Oftentimes, Christians will make a distinction between the physical and the non-physical or spiritual, speaking of the ways in which their flesh is at war with their spirit, or the way in which their brain is different from their mind or the way in which a spirit or soul exists within their physical frame.  Christian must consider these distinction when judging how they handle themselves, as well as how they interact with their fellow human beings. This brings Christians to what is really a false dichotomy: “Do I serve my neighbor’s physical needs or their spiritual needs?” Is a Christian to feed poor people or give them Bibles? Should they become a doctor or should they become a pastor?

Even as I write this I have to fight the urge to run off in a dozen different directions with this, but I will do my best to focus this discussion on the single most important picture of the relationships between physical and non-physical: the Nazarene named Jesus. Just as Jesus’s place in the Trinity is a logically accepted mystery, so too is the union of Jesus’s spirit with an earthly body a tricky doctrine of nearly unsurpassed significance. In short: the second person of the Trinity, usually referred to as “the Son,” existed at the beginning, long before Jesus ever did. But the Son took on a human body, and thus the spiritual Son and the physical man were fused together in what is known as the hypostatic union. In order for the Gospel to work, Jesus must be a god-man; he must be 100% divine and 100% human.

Christians fail to value social justice when their view of their neighbor’s physicality does not match their fixation on the body of Jesus. Too often, Christians look at issues of social justice and fail to see where there might be an opportunity to evangelize or explicitly present the Gospel or in some way tend to the spiritual side of their neighbors, and as a result they consider it not worth their time. Supposedly, they will substitute this with some sort of direct spiritual action, but I find that this is not the case and usually this spiritual action amounts to posting a spiritual message on social media. Christians worry about wasting their time and effort pouring themselves into an issue of social justice, all the while living a life that they justify with words like “relevancy,” confining their spiritual work to the occasional conversation with a friend or coworker, furthering the false dichotomies of sacred and secular.

Because it is an issue that I am invested in, I will use race and racism as my primary example in this post, starting now: too many Christians, even those who acknowledge that racism is a big deal, are slow to act against it because they don’t think that the Gospel can be advanced in battling institutional racism. If they do not see a way that fighting racism can be a direct avenue to sharing the Gospel, then they see mistreatment of people based on appearance as something not worth devoting direct attention to. The “physical” need (job discrimination, harmful stereotypes, economic disadvantages, police brutality, justice system bias) is seen as being secondary to the “spiritual” need (accepting Jesus as savior, becoming a Christian), so much so that the physical need is just ignored.

Meanwhile, American Christianity is obsessed with the carnality of Jesus. Most Christians have, at some time, been walked through the gory details of Jesus’s death, emphasizing the physical pain that he went through in order to be the atonement for sin. The bloody spectacle of The Passion of the Christ brought in hundreds of millions of dollars, as people sat through extended sequences depicting the destruction of Jesus’s body, including the horrific flogging sequence that is based on one sentence in the Gospel of John. The physical details of Jesus’s death are the most obvious example of Christianity’s obsession with the body of the Christ, but it is hardly contained to this. Communion reveals a fixation on the body that ranges from the most mild interpretation (that the bread and wine merely represent blood and body) to the rather mind-blowing concept of transubstantiation (the bread and wine literally become the blood and body of Jesus). Some Christians muse on the sexuality of Jesus, and most everyone can’t help but wonder about some details that are fairly trivial, such as whether or not Jesus cried when he was a baby. The bottomline is that Christians care a lot about the human part of the god-man Jesus.

What makes this fixation on the physicality of Jesus that much more inconsistent is the way in which many Christians do not emphasize the deity and thus the spirituality of Jesus. Sure, any Christian can tell you that Jesus is God, but what does that really mean? It means, among many important things, that Jesus wasn’t just afraid of being hung on a cross – rather, what had Jesus crying out for help (and possibly sweating blood) the night before his death was his impending separation from the first person of the Trinity, commonly called the Father. Think about this – the Son had been with the Father for eternity. The Son had been incomparably happy, because he was with the Father, forever. But, in order to take the weight of sin, the Son, now incorporated in Jesus, would be separated from the Father. If you believe in that theology (which Christians should), then that prospect is way (way) scarier than even the horrific fate of crucifixion.

If you read the New Testament, you will find a startling dearth of references to the physicality of Jesus, with the exception of references to the fact that a spiritual being took on an earthly form. The authors of the New Testament are much more concerned with the spiritual implications of the life and death of Jesus the Nazarene. However, in regards to fellow human beings, the story of Jesus is flanked by ministries inspired by Jesus that emphasize tending to physical needs. In Lukes’s account of John the Baptist, the Baptizer responds to the three questions of “What shall we do?” with three directions of physicality: “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.”…. “Collect no more than you are authorized to do.”….  “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.” In his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes that the Christian leaders in Jerusalem made only one special request as he set out on his ministry to the Gentiles: “Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.” The book of James says that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” It appears, to me at least, that the authors of the New Testament were very concerned with the physical needs of the world, but in regards to Jesus they were less interested in the violent destruction of his body and more interested in his spirituality.

And yet, so many Christians go on emphasizing the humanness of Jesus. This is not to say that they ignore the spirituality of Jesus, but it certainly receives less emphasis, and it is vastly disproportionate in comparison to the way in which so many Christians regard the way they should care for their neighbor.

So now that I’ve raked the muck, let me see if I can propose a fix to what I hope you see is an inconsistent, even hypocritical mindset for many Christians.

The first thing is to consider how you balance your vision of Jesus as being both physical and spiritual. But I can’t really say what that balance should look like.

Because perhaps there’s a good reason for the particularly carnal vision of Jesus, and maybe there is a good reason for the tendency to see Jesus as a human first and God second. In Jesus, Christians have the full revelation of God. By taking on the life of a human, the separation between God and humanity was bridged. But it was only through the physical actions of Jesus that this good news might be understood, as Paul repeatedly refers to Jesus as the answer to a mystery hidden for ages. It was because the Son stepped into a human life – a human life that involved friends and family and laughing and weeping and anger and food and drink – that humanity might see the good news delivered to them through Jesus’s call for love and peace in a ministry aimed to be for humanity’s good and for the Father’s glory. Indeed, Jesus’s humanity is crucial to appreciating his life.

But this emphasis on the physicality of Jesus should extend to the rest of his life, rather than just on his death and resurrection.

Consider the story in which Jesus heals the paralytic. The first thing Jesus tells the man is that is sins are forgiven, but of course the crowds cannot comprehend this. They need some sort of proof from Jesus, otherwise his ludicrous claim is blasphemy. What does Jesus do? He gives a physical sign and heals the man so that he may walk.

Of course Jesus came to save the souls of sinners from death, but he also said, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” (Kendrick Lamar knows what I’m talking about).

Which is all to say: Christians can talk all they want about Jesus’s love as they tend to the spiritual needs of their neighbor, but sooner or later they had better prove it.

And, if you can’t see the love in social justice, then you are probably thinking about various causes with a skewed vision. What the news says about Black Lives Matter protests is going to set you against it. What the old guys at your workplace say about feminism is probably really misinformed. Chances are if you live in an affluent community you have no idea what perpetuates poverty. The reality is that American society is progressive enough that average people have ample opportunities to invest themselves in improving the physical well-being of fellow human beings. And that is, from a Christian perspective, a way to tend to their spiritual needs. Remember: the dichotomy is false.

Why do Christians remind themselves of the broken body of Jesus hanging on a cursed tree?

Could it be for the same reason that we should remind ourselves of the smoldering body of Bobo hanging from an apple tree?

I ardently believe that Christians are called to tend to the physical needs of the world, even when there is no explicit opportunity to share the Gospel – I think the life of Jesus and the rest of the Bible makes that quite clear. And I believe there are tremendous opportunities for Christians from all walks of life to engage in matters of social justice and improve the physical well-being of their neighbor. And, through that, Christians can “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly” while also providing opportunities to share not only the message of the Gospel, but the love of Christ in a way that is as tangible as a crucifix.

If Christians can come to value the body of their neighbor like they value the body of Christ, just imagine what a world we might live in…

Forth now, and fear no darkness.

Soli Deo Gloria

-Peter

Extra Credit