Christian Rap and White New Calvinist Poetics

When I started college in 2008, I was a seventeen-year-old white Southern Baptist woman desperate to fit in at my liberal-leaning R1 university but also to find Christian friends. I eventually found a group at church who were burgeoning New Calvinists. This evangelical subculture began its meteoric rise to popularity in the early to mid-2000s and draws on the ideas of sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin and others while rejecting or minimizing some tenets of classical Calvinism like infant baptism.1 New Calvinists are also known among U.S. Protestants as the "Young, Restless, and Reformed" or neo-Calvinists. Like most of conservative evangelical Christianity in the U.S., the movement is primarily led by older white men, although its followers skew younger.2 It heavily emphasizes gender difference and mandates men as the heads of homes to whom women must submit — an ideology known as complementarianism — because, in the words of celebrity New Calvinist pastor John Piper, "the fullest flourishing of women and men takes place in churches and families where Christianity has this God-ordained, masculine feel."3

The New Calvinist movement is heavily conservative, even fundamentalist, and strongly emphasizes the inerrancy and authority of the Bible.4 Its followers number in the millions.5 The movement's influence over evangelicalism, effected through what Brad Vermurlen calls "strategic action and conflict with the competing tribes and expressions of American Evangelicalism," outpaces even those numbers.6 Many evangelicals in the millennial generation — my generation — are particularly drawn to the theological tradition of New Calvinism because we grew up in a 1980s - 2000s evangelical culture heavy on big flashy events but light on theology. Millennial evangelicals largely define themselves as "theological conservatives rather than political ones," meaning they might find a hyper-conservative theology like New Calvinism compelling, but are more likely than their parents or grandparents to support progressive immigration policies, anti-racist activism, and LGBTQ rights.7 Younger generations are able to accommodate some progressive politics within New Calvinism's framework, but at its core the movement is a repackaging of the hyper-masculine conservatism of the older Christian Right generation.

The ideology of New Calvinism fit into what I had been taught in my conservative and predominantly white religious upbringing, but the small town in Oklahoma where I grew up also had a thriving Black culture which introduced me to rap music in high school. In college, Christian rap by mostly Black artists was a way for me to listen to music I enjoyed while avoiding the judgment of my Christian friends who thought secular music was immoral and harmful to our spiritual lives. My friends championed Christian rap as an easy way to learn theology. Our community heavily emphasized the importance of correct theology, so I took their endorsement seriously and dutifully listened to Christian rap alongside my favorite secular artists. Although this music felt new and relevant, it promoted the familiar gender and racial politics of hyper-conservative older evangelicals to my generation.

Though most of these Christian rappers were Black and writing from and about Black cultures and experiences, their audience was primarily white, sometimes creating tension between the theological and cultural dimensions of their songs. This tension eventually led artists like Lecrae, the most successful among Black Christian rappers, to pivot away from his white audience. In the months just prior to the 2016 election, professor and activist Dr. Christena Cleveland called Lecrae a white evangelical "mascot," charging that "the same students who play Lecrae in their dorms are the same ones protesting Black Lives Matter. . . . Somehow in their minds they're able to separate it."8 Lecrae called Cleveland's statement his "breaking point," noting he hadn't been his "full self" for a long time due to his connections to white evangelicalism and concluding that he hadn't "recognize[d] how intertwined certain views, values, political agendas were tied into evangelicalism."9 He has since worked to detach himself from white evangelicalism. Andy Mineo, a white rapper from the same circles has made a similar effort, distancing himself from Neo-Calvinism, but many Christian rappers have not made such explicit moves away from white evangelicalism.10 Other Black evangelical leaders have also disassociated from New Calvinism over race and politics since 2016, including Dr. Jemar Tisby, who tells his story on a recent podcast.11 Paradoxically given this schism, the still mostly white New Calvinist movement remains dedicated to a vision of "racial reconciliation" and "unity," promoting sermons, articles, and resources on the topic.12 Even today, the movement continues to try for a progressive appearance that appeals to younger generations while holding onto the conservative politics of the twentieth-century Christian Right.

I remember listening to Man Up, an album released by the Christian rap supergroup 116 in 2011.13 The album's release was accompanied by a website, curriculum, and conferences which composed what the artists referred to as a "campaign." The lyrics articulated and confirmed overt lessons about gender I had heard at church — wives must submit to their husbands, men must be strong to lead, women must be quiet and modest — making it easy for me to map my own ideologies and identity onto the music. I was able to do this despite the album's purported goal, which was to reach men in the "hip-hop" or "urban" culture, a euphemism for young men of color, primarily Black men, who lived in cities.14 The fact that I could relate so readily to the music suggests that Man Up confirmed covert lessons I had learned growing up as well, especially that "biblical" models of gender, family, and parenthood were synonymous with the norms of white, middle class, evangelical culture.

The men behind the Man Up campaign set "biblical" manhood against "urban" manhood. Black rapper KB defines "urban" manhood in a promotional video as "rims and women" paired with stock footage of a Black man loading a gun and riding in a car with white rims, then cutting to women at a bar concert. KB adds that rap is a perfect venue for this message because it "carries a masculine feel, is authoritative, leads, and demands attention," and therefore the album addresses Black men first and foremost.15The album's lyrics call a "biblical" man a "real" man, defining him as a heterosexual husband and father who provides for and leads his family; finds his confidence in God; submits to governmental, church, and heavenly authority; remains content with his life and family; resists temptation to sin and repents when he fails. In summation, 116's argument locates social problems within Black identity and offers an education in a biblical alternative based on individualistic and heteronormative values integral to white evangelicalism.

Tension between Black identity and biblical manhood is evident in the album's title track, "Man Up Anthem." Its lyrics rely heavily on end-rhymes and few internal rhymes, with two- and four-bar groupings, which Adam Krims identifies as features that typify MCs' flow in "party rap" — the typically lighthearted, dance-oriented hip-hop subgenre known (and sometimes) derided for its crossover commercial appeal.16 The musical backing, though, while upbeat in tempo, is dark and dramatic, characterized by martial drums, synthesized minor-key string, horn, and choral stabs, and arpeggios of portentous tolling bells — affective cues familiar with epic film soundtracks. If the flow prioritizes accessibility, the music suggests high stakes and urgency. The song's first verse, performed by Lecrae, begins with a set of four-bar groupings establishing his Black identity by stating: "Momma want some Obama in me / The hood want 'Pac hip hop, want to see the Common in me / And since it's a senseless contradiction / I end up a misfit trying to fit in." Lecrae then reveals his primary identity as a Christian man — separated from these components of his Black identity — with the same four-bar grouping and ending rhyme style: "This ends when I stand up / And see the hands of the standard, holy is the lamb, huh," finishing by turning to the listener: "Now we holding you to man up / 'Cause we were made in his image / Start lookin' at what you came from." This verse reflects the album's purported goal of reaching "urban" audiences by referencing Black identity and giving the audience a call to rise above the impossible and contradictory standards to which Black men are held, as Lecrae details when he explains that his role models Tupac and Obama are diametrically opposed.

However, lyrics about these "real men," paired with intense, militaristic music, affirm the deadly seriousness of the gender and racial ideologies that inform a white New Calvinist poetic. It is easy to re-interpret the grouping of rhymes in the first verse of "Man Up Anthem" as subsuming Lecrae's Black identity within his Christian identity. The call to "man up" thereby becomes universal while the music imbues the messages with a heroic gravity, as if it is truly a matter of life and death for a man to get married, work outside the home, and be in charge of his wife and children. This call to "man up" is rooted in a heteronormative understanding of gender that white New Calvinists could easily interpret as their own, while the martial cues of the music sit comfortably with a white evangelical worldview that already imagines believers as "Christian soldiers." The juxtaposition of military-style beats with gendered lyrics thereby enables an interpretation that affirms white New Calvinists' sense of cultural superiority, as "their" values are disseminated to a non-white audience, while also letting white New Calvinists take those messages to heart in their own lives. Simultaneously, it's easy to ignore the specifically Black culture within these songs because of their easily accessible party-rap lyrical style, as well as their emphasis on Christian identity over any other. White New Calvinist listeners can, in consuming such music, rest assured that they retain cultural supremacy as the primary purveyors of these traditional values and by calling people of color to aspire to them. In this listening experience, the genealogy and particularities of Black culture are elided while values identified by white New Calvinists as their own are centered.

The Man Up album and campaign provide a particularly vivid case study in how a powerful subculture of white Christians appropriated and absorbed other subcultural artistic production in ways that promoted the normative whiteness and misogyny of ultra-conservative evangelical movements like New Calvinism. New Calvinists' biggest conferences often platform older conservative white evangelical men alongside Christian rappers who are featured either as entertainers or speakers, sometimes both. I attended the Passion conference in Fort Worth in 2011, a gathering of thousands of mostly white college-aged adults that Vermurlen notes is a gateway for exposing "(primarily college-educated) twenty-somethings . . . to Calvinistic teachers and preachers" like Piper, who spoke at the conference I attended.17 The conference's entertainment included a surprise concert from Lecrae, which was the highlight of my weekend. Lecrae's audience around 2011 was predominantly white because radio and music retailers placed him in the white-dominated genre of contemporary Christian music and his theology, politics, and music were palatable to white Christians at the time. The students at Passion that year reflected his typical audience demographics.18

Marketing strategies that connect Christian rap with contemporary Christian music — a multimillion dollar genre consumed primarily by white people — compound Christian rap's accessibility to white audiences and in turn make that audience its most lucrative market, even as it is artistically targeted at Black listeners.19 116's label, Reach Records, is associated with the contemporary Christian music industry, and the label's website states it was founded by "a few guys from Texas" whose music combined faith with their "everyday experiences in the street, volunteering in detention centers, or just having fun with friends."20 The label leaves the racial identity of its founders — one of whom was Lecrae — ambiguous, but its mention of "the street" provides a euphemism for a Black experience while washing skin color from its origin story.21 White people could thus enjoy the Man Up album on their own theological and cultural terms while also believing the album could proselytize to people of color with Christian values normative to white American evangelical Christianity.

This New Calvinist appropriation of Christian rap music relies on a specific formal logic and hermeneutic that combine to form what I would call a poetics of power. This poetics of power is particularly insidious as it takes the music, created by artists of color, far from its origins in Black culture and re-interprets it in a doctrinal framework and tradition informed by religious fundamentalism and ideological whiteness. The Man Up album's militarism, epic scope, and references to teachings exclusive to New Calvinist celebrities were interpreted by white New Calvinists to fit their white- and male-centric theology while reaching "urban" culture with their values. Justin Taylor, a contributor to the immensely popular New Calvinist website The Gospel Coalition (TGC), exhorts his readers that even if Christian rap "isn't your 'kind of music,'" you should pray for God to "use these gospel-centered brothers to make a real difference in helping a lost and hurting generation, especially in the urban context, discover what it means to be a real man in Christ."22

Most significantly, this poetic safely locates Christian men of color as outsiders to the mainstream occupied by white Christian men. The "Man Up" campaign claims that urban culture is confused about what being a real man means, with no explanation or evidence beyond anecdotes. Justin Taylor claims in his TGC blog that the "Man Up" campaign aims to solve "the crisis of absent fatherhood" which "is best addressed by biblical masculinity."23 This claim assumes stereotypes about Black men with which white people are familiar and which recent studies and theorists have debunked.24 This rhetoric makes Black men a kind of mission field, which white people can pray for as if praying for a country where Christianity is unknown. Taylor's rhetoric presumes that the white community already has the knowledge of what it means to be a real man and must impart it to others as part of God's plan. This presumption follows the ideas in John Piper's 2011 book about racism, Bloodlines (one of the more popular books in my college church group), where he argues that until individual and group actions can be taken — actions that ultimately must be taken inside the Black community, with some help from the white community — systemic change is impossible and not worth trying.25 White Christians can only attempt to seek racial harmony while knowing that the sin of racism will persist until the end of the world, when the gospel "will bring the bloodlines of race into the single bloodline of the cross."26

***

It was during my training in literary studies that I began to develop the tools to analyze and re-interpret media that had shaped my worldview, particularly Christian media that I had previously consumed without much thought. Those of us who teach in locations with a high concentration of evangelical students can use these critical tools to help our students think about how their ideologies affect their engagement with media and vice versa. The New Calvinist poetics of power contributes to a conservatism that looks more progressive than that of conservatives who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. However, this progressive-looking rebranding is in fact complicit in propping up white supremacist and misogynistic ideologies in mainstream evangelical culture. As baby boomer evangelicals are replaced by younger generations, their conservatism will live on in new and superficially more inclusive rhetoric. While not as extreme as their avowedly fundamentalist brothers and sisters, those who subscribe to the new kind of Christian Right ideology I outline here, the New Calvinists, are larger in number, often younger, and hold more political power.

---

Brittney Rakowski (@bmrakowski) is a Lecturer in the University College at the University of Oklahoma. Her writing has appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth-century American literature and film, gender studies, and rhetoric.

---

References