Christianity Today got the President-elect of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, to write their May cover story on Christianity and hip-hop, replete the with cringe-inducing title of “W.W. Jay-Z?” Here’s the question that the article begins with (the rest is behind their paywall):
The violent edge of rap—”it’s just so angry”—is most often what I hear behind American Christians’ ambivalence about the new wave of Christian hip-hop. But not all of this ambivalence is reactionary, revealing white-bread taste. It’s a real question: Can one authentically rap the Sermon on the Mount, with its Beatitudes, warnings against anger, and meekness? No doubt one can set Matthew 5–7 to rhyme and meter, but would it still be hip-hop? If not, does that rule hip-hop out as legitimate Christian art?
Jonathan Fitzgerald unloads on the piece:
To put it plainly, May’s cover story, “W.W. Jay-Z,” written by Dr. Russell Moore is an unmitigated disaster. And that’s to say nothing of the misleading — but attention-grabbing — title on the cover, “Why the Gospel Needs Hip-Hop.” It is so horrendous that, upon reading it, I knew immediately I had to respond, but I couldn’t figure out where to begin or how to go about responding.
One of Fitzgerald’s objections is that Moore neglects the history of Christian hip-hop:
Although Moore refers several times to the contemporary crop of Christian rappers as “new,” he shows no evidence that he’s aware of what was “old.” In fact, I’m not even sure after re-reading several times if he is calling the whole phenomenon of Christian rap new, or just this most recent manifestation. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he’s just saying that Lecrae and Shai Linne and Trip Lee and their ilk are the newest brand of a Christian hip-hop culture that is just about as old as hip-hop in general. But if he knows this to be true, why not mention this long lineage? How can you have a meaningful conversation about the interplay between gospel message and rap music without looking at those who have both succeeded gloriously and failed miserably before this most recent crop?
If he had any knowledge of those that came before, the question of whether or not the gospel can be communicated through rap lyrics would be moot. He could have skipped that question altogether and looked instead at the ways it has been done. If he wanted to see his bias about rap being bolstered by threat of retaliation, he could have looked at how Christian groups like Gospel Gangstaz, T-Bone, and C.M.C’s (among others), appropriated (badly, as if that wasn’t obvious) the “gangsta” style for Christ. But from there, he would have had to acknowledge that there’s not just one feeling of rap music, and as such, Christian rap groups ended up being quite diverse, particularly through what I call the golden age of Christian hip-hop, the mid- to late-90s. Good luck trying to group LA Symphony, Tunnel Rats, Grits, or Cross Movement under one general “feeling.”