Kanye West at Paris Fashion Week in 2015 (Charles Platiau/Reuters)
You likely have heard about Kanye West’s new album, “Jesus Is King.” West apparently has converted to a quite traditional style of Christianity.
This is not surprising in itself, as most African-American churches are conservative, but some, like Andrew Walker at National Review, think it may be important as shown below in the article with the title: “Kanye West’s Conversion Could Be a Cultural Wrecking Ball.”
One of the songs on Jesus Is King is “Closed on Sunday.”
It is actual music, as opposed to rap, and its lyrics have triggered lots of
liberals:
Closed on Sunday, you’re my Chick-fil-A
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A
Hold the selfies, put the ’Gram away
Get your family, y’all hold hands and pray
When you got daughters, always keep ’em safe
Watch out for vipers, don’t let them indoctrinate
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A
You’re my number one, with the lemonade
Raise our sons, train them in the faith
Through temptations, make sure they’re wide awake
Follow Jesus, listen and obey
No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A
Hold the selfies, put the ’Gram away
Get your family, y’all hold hands and pray
When you got daughters, always keep ’em safe
Watch out for vipers, don’t let them indoctrinate
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A
You’re my number one, with the lemonade
Raise our sons, train them in the faith
Through temptations, make sure they’re wide awake
Follow Jesus, listen and obey
No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave
The Chick-fil-A reference has gotten the most attention;
could there be a better ad for the chain? (By the way, the two best things you
can order in a fast food restaurant, in my opinion, are the Chick-fil-A Deluxe
and Spicy Deluxe.) More important, of course, is West’s declaration of
independence from today’s liberal culture, which includes the Democratic Party.
His pro-independence message coincides nicely with Candace Owens’s themes.
I doubt that Kanye’s conversion will turn out to be of
earthshaking importance, but it is one more instance of African-Americans
breaking free from the liberal plantation. The long-term consequences of this
growing independence movement will be enormous, and I think we will see some
early signs of it in next year’s election.
Click here to listen to “Closed On Sunday,” which I
actually like. It has been viewed–or listened to, anyway–two and a half million
times on YouTube.
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RELATED
STORY
“Kanye West’s Conversion Could Be a Cultural
Wrecking Ball.”
By ANDREW T. WALKER
Kanye West’s just the figure to bring a needed message that our
society should reconsider what it deems praiseworthy.
On Friday, anyone with a pulse would have seen the news
of the release of Kanye West’s newest album, Jesus Is King. It
comes after months of news stories about West’s very public conversion to
Christianity, a Christianity that bears no resemblance to the vague
spiritualism of Moral Therapeutic Deism that is often associated with celebrity
conversions.
The lyrics to each song in Jesus Is King are
shockingly Christian. It is not an album of feel-good Christian spirituality
aimed primarily as a message of uplift. West co-wrote and sang the hit “Jesus
Walks” on his debut album The College Dropout (2004),
but Jesus Is King is different. Throughout the whole of the
new album, West is in many respects deeply critical of modernity and cultural
progressivism.
There are calls for a focus more on the family than on
individual glory. He seems to applaud Chick-fil-A, which in our age is
tantamount to endorsing bigotry. Social-media obsession should be exchanged for
family prayer. Fatherhood is characterized as a virtue. Materialism is
pilloried. Calls for worshiping Christ redound to such effect that West’s first
Christian album is arguably more Christian than what most contemporary
Christian artists could similarly muster.
But in the media rollout of West’s album, it’s worth
paying attention to other statements he’s made. He’s criticized abortion and
believes that the African-American community is getting played by Democrats.
He
remains defiant in the face of political correctness. A man of evolving
identities who has struggled with mental illness in his past, he told Zane Lowe
during a two-hour long Beats 1 interview that during the planning of the album,
he insisted that those around him fast and abstain from premarital sex. In the
interview with Lowe, West has the anthropology of C. S. Lewis, the economics of
Wilhelm Röpke, the cultural mood of Wendell Berry, and the defiance of Francis
Schaeffer. In Jesus Is King and in interviews, we see a Kanye
West upholding what Russell Kirk referred to as the Permanent Things.
He’s rejecting the hyper-sexualization of culture that he
admitted he helped create. In an ode to the Niebuhrian Christ-and-culture
typology, he said he’s now living his life for Christ and ostensibly against culture.
In a word, Kanye West is now a cultural reactionary by
the standards of our society, and could be, in time, a cultural wrecking ball
that dislodges so much of the assumed, comfortable, and unchecked cultural
liberalism that dominates the most elite sectors of our country and mocks
anything resembling traditionalism and social conservatism. In an age of
libertarian sentiment, when the currency of American society appear to be
glamorization and the notion that consent is the only reasonable moral
standard, West is calling for restraint and limits.
To that end, I wish him success. He’s just the figure,
given his massive iconic cultural status, to bring a needed message that our
society should reconsider what it deems praiseworthy. To that end, his
religious conversion could spark a revolution in morals, similar to what the
conversion of 19th-century abolitionist William Wilberforce helped foster in
England.
If I were a cultural progressive, West would now be on my
enemies list. He’s daring to name the forces that eat away at human happiness,
and, given his unpredictable nature, there’s no telling what he will not be
willing to confront. He’s a figure with just enough audacity and celebrity to
get people to reconsider their lives.
Time will only tell of what will come from his radical
conversion to Christianity. But in the wake of this news, I have one message of
warning to my fellow Christians about West: There will be a temptation by
well-meaning Christians to make him a champion of Christianity. Christians
could easily impute their own cultural insecurities onto West, who is the very
definition of a cultural icon. Let’s not do that.
The Apostle Paul warns in the New Testament about vesting
too much hope and confidence in new converts, fearing they would be puffed up
with pride (something, let’s be honest, Kanye has no problem exuding). We need
to let Kanye be a Christian Kanye without making him into a Christian
celebrity.
ANDREW T. WALKER is a senior fellow in Christian ethics at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
