COURTESY OF REACH RECORDS
THE COOL CHRISTIAN
That’s bad. That’s secular. You
can’t touch that. Hey Lecrae, your
engineer is not a Christian. He
can’t mix your stuff. He’s going to
get sinner cooties on it.’”
“This is real. I wish I were making this up,” he said.
Lecrae’s songs are still centered
around a Christian worldview and
approach to life, but to some Christians, the outside world is something to be shunned, not engaged.
“So Lecrae modestly mentioned
Jesus, yet he passionately bopped
his head to extreme negative rap,”
one fan wrote on YouTube. “Aren’t
we as Christians called to be set
HUFFINGTON
03.09.14
apart from such profanity; rather
than to be taking pride or joy in it?”
“Lecrae is a secular rapper
now. … The world got to him.
And now he’s rapping for the
world. … Lecrae, what happened?!” lamented another.
These types of comments populate Lecrae’s Instagram feed, his
YouTube videos. Fans even criticized Lecrae’s wife for wearing a
dress that they thought was too
short. It’s enough to make Christianity unappealing to even its most
faithful adherents. But this reaction is the product of decades of
evangelical thought.
Evangelicals adopted an isolationist mindset for much of the
20th century. Non-Christians, the
“People are
beginning
to see me
as my own
entity, as kind
of my own
category.”