How Do I Tell You About Lecrae Without Saying He’s A Christian Rapper?

There’s a secret part of my music library. It’s the section I skip over when my phone’s hooked up to the Bluetooth and other people are in the car with me. It’s the section I keep off my barbecue playlists. It’s the section I only play when I’m alone, and when I do, I bang it. This section’s made up of lesser-known rappers, and all those rappers love Jesus.

I’ve been outed twice as someone who listens to this kind of music. The first was in a car with a friend. I wasn’t paying attention to what my phone was playing and an Andy Mineo song (“Tug of War,” if you must know) came on and Andy rapped some Jesus-y things and my friend laughed and asked “Is this Christian rap?”. I said it was and she laughed some more and I felt very small the rest of the drive. I didn’t skip the rest of the song because it would have been embarrassing to reveal how embarrassed I was.

The second time is when the new Lecrae album, All Things Work Together, landed on my desk at work. Sometimes press copies of books and albums come into our office, and I snagged the Lecrae record as soon as I saw it. Someone asked about it and I said it was a rapper I liked and that person took the album and looked closer and furrowed their brow and asked, “Is he a Christian or something?” and I said that he was. They gave me the record back and I waited for them to use the words “Christian rap,” but mercifully, they didn’t. I took the album home and listened to it a bunch. I like it. The best song is “Facts.”

It’s hard to articulate why I resist the term “Christian rap.” I guess for one, I think it’s unfair to classify a subgenre of rap based on its performers. We don’t say “white rap” or “Jamaican rap” or “Latin rap,” so why is there a need to segregate “Christian rap” from the rest of the group? Clearly, there’s an implication at work.

And it’s not a mystery what the implication is: Christian rap is worse than other rap, and if we’re honest, it’s worse because of its Christian-ness. It’s corny, stupid, weak, and preachy. Hip hop is supposed to go hard, keep it real, be powerful, and not give a…not give an eff. White light and angels and hands folded in prayer? Not in real hip hop. If you listen to Christian rap, you’re not only listening to a worse product, you’re listening to a softer product, something that doesn’t bring the same room-thumping, heart-pounding, crowd-bouncing dynamics other hip hop does. Hip hop goes hard in the paint. Christian rap sits in the bleachers, afraid to scuff its sneakers, which by the way, aren’t even Yeezy’s. More like New Balance.

I’ve loved rap music since college. Nothing makes me feel a greater surge of power than Tupac’s “Can’t C Me.” Nothing makes me feel cooler than OutKast’s “Return of the G.” Nothing makes me feel like I could float through the ceiling more than Kanye’s “Waves.” It’s the greatest, but at the same time, nothing feels truer to me than Lecrae’s “Hands Up.” Nothing reaches me more than his song “Fear.” I’ve never been more blown away by a first listen than “Co-Sign.” Can you take that seriously? I dunno, man.

Granted, older Lecrae records are pretty churchy. Rebel, his third solo album, is borderline hymnal, to the point where it’s probably inaccessible to a non-Christian. The lyrics aren’t bad by any means, but they’re super intimate, almost sermon-esque. There are songs about resisting temptation, songs about prayer, and songs about calling upon the Holy Spirit to share the gospel with non-believers. As a Christ-follower, I can applaud it, even admire it, but I would never blast it in my car. Remembering my non-Christian teenage self, I know those songs would sound awfully hokey to someone who didn’t share Lecrae’s belief. I feel second-hand embarrassment listening to them; it’s too easy for me to picture people laughing at it.

The Lecrae I love emerged on the Church Clothes mixtape in 2012. The lead track, “Co-Sign,” is everything I’ve ever wanted out of a rap song, forget a Christian rap song. It begins with some mischievous interplay between Lecrae and producer Don Cannon, where Lecrae tells Cannon how audiences keep trying to put him in a box, confining him to a particular sect of listener and stick him with “Christian rapper” labels designed to diminish him. Cannon laughs, and then clears out of the paint before Lecrae starts lashing out with tongues of fire.

“Co-Sign” is overproduced and boundless, but its sheer amount of ether is uncontainable. Lecrae comes down on the rest of hip hop for trying to disavow his position. He lashes out at critics for reprimanding the rawness in his lyrics. He doubles down on his secular background (“I am not insane/product of the culture/I’m what happens when OutKast meets the writings of Moses”) and swats away holier-than-thou accusations (“Me and Christ don’t match, but we coordinate”). He even exposes the hypocrisy of those who applaud Wu Tang’s Islam-centric “5-percent gems” while putting down his explicit gospel tracks. The rhymes are reckless and roiling and the momentum builds until it overwhelms everyone from duplicitous Christians to party rappers to money-minded labels. There are references to Jay-Z and Kanye and Lupe Fiasco. It’s searing. The beat explodes. There’s a literal gunshot on it. I think I collapsed the first time I heard this song.

“Co-Sign” is the pinnacle example of a rap song that provides everything you want in a hip hop track while not compromising the artist’s Christian perspective. There’s no cursing or crassness or boasting about money or sex. It’s a pure song, but it triumphs because it doesn’t feel pure at all. “Co-Sign” is ruthless and swathing and bombastic and nasty. It leaves people stumbling in its wake. It lifts its arms high. Christian or not, that’s real rap.

So calling Lecrae a “Christian rapper” feels like stripping him of his legitimacy. He’s resisted that phrase himself (on “Co-Sign again, he says “I’m not a gospel rapper/not a holy roller/I’m just a product of grace spreading hope to the hopeless”). Lecrae understands that to be called a Christian rapper is to be set apart, shut down, denied a seat at the table. To be called a Christian rapper is to be skipped over on Spotify, ignored on iTunes, laughed at on the Bluetooth. If you’re a Christian rapper, you suck. Heaven can wait.

But what Lecrae understands further is how “Christian rap” confines his audience to just Christians. It seems he really doesn’t want that. In an interview to promote All Things, Lecrae said, “People have the expectation it’s going to be faith-driven. Faith informs everything, but I want to shed some of the stereotypes people put on me. We exist to shatter categories, shed narrow views.”

And that’s where Lecrae meets me: He’s one of my favorite rappers, but I feel afraid to tell you he’s a Christian. As soon as you hear that, I worry you’re going to label him with your Christian-artist preconceptions and put him back in the box. For someone who tries to walk a precarious line between loving Jesus and loving entertainment that lies outside of explicit Christianity, that’s a constant worry.

Because whole-heartedly, I’ll be the first to say that Christian entertainment sucks. The music is syrupy and overwrought, the movies are some of the worst I’ve ever seen, and the television is often literally of the devil. So when performers like Lecrae emerge, with a product that’s rooted in faith yet still mass-appealing, exciting, and actually fun to experience, it feels special. It also feels weighted and important: Will this be the thing that convinces everyone we all don’t just listen to worship music and radio edits? That we can go to R-rated movies and read Harry Potter and play violent video games? There’s more to Christianity than preachy movies and weepy worship songs. The uncomfortable truth is that if Lecrae was soft or corny or any of those classic “Christian rap” things, I’d be the first to roll my eyes at his music. But these songs bang.

I wonder where faith-based, or rather, faith-backed entertainment and culture will go. When Lecrae leaned harder into mainstream-rap trends, he was ripped for abandoning his Christ-centric roots (preposterous, really). But if we look elsewhere for artists in his vein, we see groups like Twenty-One Pilots dominating pop-rock. We see comics like Nick Thune become regulars on The Tonight Show. We see Stephen Colbert owning Late Night. Heck, Alice Cooper was one of the biggest artists in the world during his prime; you’d never guess he was doing all that shock rock for the Lord. Those performers are less explicit in their Christian-ness than Lecrae, but they’re still Christians, and they’re not contained or confined or restricted by that identity at all. In fact, a more cynical person might say they’re succeeding in spite of that identity. It’s encouraging in some ways, if you believe, and if you don’t, I wonder if it makes a difference.

Those Christian entertainers don’t give a believer any reason to feel embarrassed for their fandom. That’s the best thing about them. But on the flipside, maybe the problem is really just a personal one. Lecrae’s rap coalition—yes, he has one—calls itself One One Six, for Romans 1:16, which begins “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.” In Lecrae’s ultimate defense, through his corny early career and his noise-bringing new jams, he’s never wavered or sacrificed his core values. He just bowed his head and wrote music from his heart and brought forth no one but himself. He stayed unashamed. When I think about the car rides and the playlists and that recurrent question—Is he a Christian rapper?—I wish I was the same about him.