“It dropped.” That was the text on my phone when I was in the office talking World Series, impeachment, or one of the other long-forgotten cultural touchstones.
A half-second later, the vocals of Kanye West’s Sunday Service Choir exploded through the speakers. My eyes were wide, and so was my smile. But the rest of the little audience — graduate students studying the finer points of statecraft — just shrugged.
After months of anticipation and missed release dates, Jesus is King finally arrived in the familiar, haphazard way characteristic of Kanye. You don’t have to like Kanye the person, but it’s hard to deny Kanye, the artist. Not only has he pushed an entire genre of music forward, but he has come to define the modern musician: singer, writer, producer, and promoter. He also has a rare talent, an ability to both embody the cultural zeitgeist while eliciting ire from the taste-makers themselves.
We expect our artists to push back against the cultural orthodoxies of the time. So, what precious dogma did Kanye expose in 27 minutes and some odd seconds? It’s not secularism, though that is part of the larger narrative. No, the scandal of Jesus is King is brazen hopefulness in our cynical age.
Christians and unbelievers were equally guilty in their cynicism toward Jesus is King — both on the legitimacy of Kanye’s own religious conversion and the truth claims presented on the record. This ecumenical arrangement between sacred and secular communities reveals a shared cynicism, a common sin that prevails throughout common culture.
It’s no surprise that both would doubt the authenticity of Kanye’s conversion. His former life is a testament to hedonism, set to music over eight albums, and cemented after an unfortunate booze-fueled interruption of American sweetheart Taylor Swift. And there’s that whole part about claiming he was God on his 2013 album, Yeezus.
Even Christian Kanye can do wrong. For example, he does himself no favors in flirting with the heretical idea of the prosperity gospel. And as with any new believer, Christians should prudently refrain from elevating Kanye to a place of authority in the church. But our hesitation should go hand-in-hand with grace and celebration, especially if many of the outward signs of genuine conversion are present. To do otherwise would be to err toward cynicism and assume, arrogantly, that we have ourselves always properly articulated the articles of faith, even in spiritual infancy.
Secularists also doubt whether Kanye is serious about Christianity. As many have pointed out, this cannot be anything other than another desperate attention grab, bringing the focus back on Kanye so Kanye can sell more Kanye (Jesus is King socks start at $20, sweaters at $250). All the same, redemption has been wiped from our modern vocabulary, replaced with a more sinister form of purification — permanent cancellation.
As Christians we should also be discerning, but too much hand wringing imitates a secular cynicism about the efficacy of the Holy Spirit. For Christians, it should not be controversial to say God has the authority and ability to save whomever He sees fit. As Kanye himself quotes on Selah, scripture tells us that who the Son sets free is free indeed.
More potent, however, is the cynicism towards the truth claims on this record. The prominent taste-makers all seemed to arrive at the same critique: the message is too simplistic.
“Life is not black and white, and neither is the experience of communing with any god,” wrote Rawiya Kameir at Pitchfork. “Dividing the complexity of the human experience into good and bad, righteousness and sin,” asserted Chris Richards of the Washington Post is, “morally superficial.” Kanye’s new vision of the world only includes “Jesuses and Judases,” complained Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic.
Simplicity, however, does not necessarily imply superficiality, incompleteness, or oversimplification. Attacks on Kanye’s album reveal universal skepticism about Christianity’s capacity to answer the questions our culture faces.
In a world besieged by polarization, alienation, inequality, what role is the Church to play? For some secularists, Christianity is not only lacking in solutions but is, in fact, the problem. They see it as a useless relic, a lie advanced by privileged white men without any bearing on public life. And some faithful believers have entertained a certain escapism that advocates retreating from culture entirely. Most people fall somewhere in the middle.
Both Kanye and his new album are antithetical to this entire framework. In just 11 tracks and a handful of interviews, Kanye has described how his new Christian faith informs his views on music, politics, family, and social media. “Are you a Christian artist?” Jimmy Kimmel pressed Kanye. “I’m a Christian everything,” Kanye responded in Kuyperian fashion.
Unlike his many detractors, Kanye is entirely hopeful about the Gospel’s position above culture, and the light it can shine on it. In this way, Jesus is King has captured a recent boldness by people of faith to push back against the narrative that our faith is something we leave at the door of our homes and churches.
Ironically, we got here out of faithful devotion to the false god of individual truth. Objectivity has been replaced by subjectivity; the good, the true, and the beautiful only to be determined by the eye of the beholder. We have become the kings of our own little kingdoms without any power to affect any meaningful change.
Perhaps this is the true power of Jesus is King — a capacity to unite the self in service to something higher. Today we live segmented lives, separated between our home and our work — online and offline. We constantly jump between neighboring kingdoms afraid to offend or be offended. We were promised fulfillment, identity, and purpose but watch impotently as our culture sinks deeper into moral insanity and falls victim to despair. Gone are the days of the communal boombox. We live in an AirPod world now.
“Follow Jesus, listen and obey,” may sound simplistic, but only as simplistic as Jesus’ commanding words, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.”
Critiques of the moral shallowness of Jesus is King might contain more sense or even validity if Kanye were describing sanctification, or the process of following Jesus amidst difficulties after discovering faith. Perhaps this is the artistic path Kanye decides to go next, supplying us with a hip-hop soundtrack to The Pilgrim’s Progress. But Jesus is King is about justification, not sanctification.
Romans teaches us that those who have been justified will be glorified. Revival precedes awakening. To hear the Gospel according to Kanye: Someone is meant for the throne, and it isn’t us.
Robert Hasler is a seminary student living in Washington, D.C.
