THE COOL CHRISTIAN
or talked like me, so I thought
they were Martians from another
planet!” he told an interviewer in
2012. “When I saw them, I said,
‘Oh you guys are human!’ They
loved me genuinely and that’s really what started it.”
A year or two later, he attended a
Christian conference with friends,
and a sermon he heard there resonated deeply with him. He ended
up marrying a woman he met at the
Bible study, Darragh Moore. They
have three children together.
By 2002, he was visiting youth
detention centers with a Christian
organization. Sometimes he would
rap, and he began to see how music
could be a way to spread the gospel.
Two years later, Lecrae founded
Reach Records with a friend, Ben
Washer, and soon after they released Real Talk, the first of Lecrae’s six albums. Over the last
two years he has also released
two mixtapes, Church Clothes and
Church Clothes 2, both of them
hosted by DJ Don Cannon, who is
now vice president of A&R at Def
Jam Recordings.
“I think we’ve made a lot of
room, and people are beginning to
see me as my own entity, as kind
of my own category,” Lecrae said.
HUFFINGTON
03.09.14
SEATED INSIDE his tour bus,
parked on a rain-soaked field in
central Pennsylvania at the Creation Festival last summer, Lecrae admitted that his attempts to
break out of the Christian music
world were not sitting well with
“[LECRAE] MAKES BEING A
CHRISTIAN COOL. IT DOESN’T
FEEL PREACHY. IT DOESN’T
COME OFF AS HOLIER THAN
THOU, BUT SPEAKS TO
PEOPLE’S CIRCUMSTANCES,
EXPERIENCES, AND
JUST LIFE IN GENERAL, JUST
LIKE REGULAR HIP-HOP.”
some of his more hard-core fans.
“It’s so counter-cultural to all
this,” Lecrae said of his vision,
gesturing past the walls of his bus
and toward the scores of muddy
teens and youth-group leaders
trudging among campsites and up
and down Hallelujah Highway.
“Christians have no idea how to
deal with art,” Lecrae said more
recently, during H