Celebrating Reconstruction

“They say we were walking away from the faith . . . ” a narrator says on the recent album Reconstruction, “We wasn’t walking away from faith. We was walking away from fraud.” The most recent album by Grammy-winning rap artist Lecrae, is part response to a toxic Christian subculture, and part road map for anyone looking for a flourishing faith that I would describe as post-fundamentalism. “I came back to rescue the people lost in the jungle,” Lecrae writes, “Recover the fumble and let ’em see what the Son do.”

The title song adresses topics like hypocrisy, legalism, and abuses of authority. Lecrae describes the sort of Christian leaders he has distanced himself from as “hard-hearted, self-righteous distributors of church hurt.” To be clear, it’s not just duplicity Lecrae takes issue with. It’s deeper than that, far more foundational. Lecrae describes the project as “scrutinizing Western philosophies and theologies.”

I’ve had a front row seat to the rise and reformation of Christian rap. I say this as a hip hop head. It’s my go to music genre. But I also mean this quite literally, as the school where I previously served in leadership had a number of students at the helm of this movement, from one of Lecrae’s producers to a number of other well-known rap artists.

I enthusiastically watched their climb, thrilled to see so many artists invited into conversative Christian spaces and celebrated for their leadership and artistry until some artists began going off script by adressing issues like racism, inequality, and the evangelical impulse to wed politics to the Church. They were welcome, until, apparently, they weren’t. It became routine to hear of artists being uninvited from conferences, sometimes reinvited if there was too strong of a backlash. Christian bookstores pulled some albums from their shelves (back when there were physical stores that had actual shelves).

The title of the album resonates with me on so many levels, as I think reconstruction is an ignored element for a lot of American Christians who are fighting to find a more biblically authentic way to see Jesus and the Church. As the title song states, reconstruction is not about destruction but about “clearing space to rebuild . . . a faith that can breathe, a gospel that liberates.”

One line in the song tells the whole story, “We rebels again.” The Christian rap movement that began as a rebellion against non-biblical values in the culture has been reconstructed, still framed as a rebellion, but now in opposition to non-biblical values in the church. “It’s not because we hate truth, but because we love it too much,” says Lecrae. I pray this message finds open ears and open hearts from this very gifted fellow Christian who is still making much of Jesus.