Recording artist Lecrae is one of the best-known Christian hip-hop artists of all time. Co-founder of Reach Records, his recognitions include two Grammys, a Billboard No. 1 album (2014’s Anomaly), 10 Dove Awards and many other accolades. He is also the author of the New York Times bestselling memoirs Unashamed (B&H) and I Am Restored: How I Lost My Religion but Found My Faith (Zondervan). In November, he released the fourth installment in a series of Church Clothes mixtapes.
Outreach editor-at-large Paul J. Pastor sat down with Lecrae to discuss his story, the process of reconstructing his faith after his painful and often public experiences of faith deconstruction, and the role of artists in the life of the church.
Your work engages big ideas and the depths of faith. How do you understand the significance of what you are doing through your music?
Often academics—professors, theologians, seminarians—communicate in a way that only other academics can understand. It’s like speaking with an inverted megaphone—there’s a lot of information going in, but it’s coming out very small. One of the ways I see my work is turning that megaphone around. I work to take poignant truths and difficult understandings and say them in a way that reaches a broader audience.
We see Jesus doing this. He was the complex, omnipotent, omnipresent God but made himself in the form of a little baby who needed help. I turn the megaphone around so that something complex and majestic and nuanced can reach a broad group in a way that is accessible and understandable and graspable for a wide variety of listeners.
Tell me about your story. Where did you come from? Who were the people and what were the experiences that have shaped you?
I come from a very disenfranchised and marginalized community and family. A father who tried to do his best but ended up succumbing to a drug addiction, who was in and out of prison. My mother, who was single, had to figure out how to raise me with limited understanding and limited resources. Her mother came from an even more tumultuous background. When you’re raised in that environment, the men in your life are pretty dysfunctional. You just grow up in a dysfunctional world.
But, becoming a Christian after about 19 years on the planet, I found a sense of stability and care and consistency in the church. That made me very passionate and compassionate for people in marginalized environments and communities. Because I came from there.
I imagine hip-hop was also a shaping influence.
Yeah, my uncles grew up in the ’80s, when hip-hop was really broadening and becoming a big influence. They were teenagers then and grew up in it. As a young kid in the 1990s, I was being taught what they had experienced and had been exposed to. I was taking it all in.
So hip-hop became second nature. It was a culture among marginalized and disenfranchised teenagers and kids. I just adapted well to it. It became more than a form of expression; it became a lifestyle in a lot of ways. So, it was already a part of what I knew and understood, in the same way, someone might have always just grown up with a saxophone or violin. It was always there. Becoming a Christian, it was already second nature for me to know how to navigate the culture of hip-hop and using music as a form of expression.
At the core of Christianity, and to some extent at the core of the richest hip-hop culture, is a thread of what we might call rough, unvarnished truth-telling. Was there an interplay between what you experienced in church and what you were hearing, perhaps, from an artist like Tupac or someone else known for deep messages in their music?
Oh yeah. I gravitated toward the prophetic in church and in music because I needed honesty and vulnerability to make sense of the chaos going on around me. I needed a view that would be a plumbline; something I could hold on to. Growing up in such a dysfunctional world, a young man is looking for a voice in the wilderness to say, “Hey, this is the way you should go.”
As a kid, I did gravitate toward Tupac because of his ability to just say what he believed was necessary. As a Christian, I gravitated to prophetic voices who were bold. I wanted to become one of those voices. To be honest about what I felt like needed to be said.
Where did your artistic journey go from there? What were a few milestones?
I was always industrious, starting as a 10-year-old kid going door-to-door selling candy I had bought. I had dreams of creating a music label and building something. And I’m just a natural catalyzer. So, after becoming a Christian and beginning to make music, I began to try to figure out how to get it in the hands of people I thought would appreciate it. I began writing songs for other artists and collaborating with some gospel artists. I was trying to think through how I could use my artistic gifts in the music scene.
And then, I met my now-business partner, Ben Washer, at a Bible study. He had a similar vision of creating music that could help kids growing up in rough environments. We put our heads together and thought through what that could look like. At the time, I was rapping at a juvenile detention center on the weekends. He would come visit. I didn’t have any start-up capital, but he did because his dad had written him a check for graduating college. He put that money into starting Reach Records.
My first album, Real Talk, was the first to have any kind of success. You start a label with $5,000 and you make like $7,000, and feel like, “All right, we did it.”
The real investment is the art.
Exactly.
Tell me about your spiritual journey during that time. Who influenced you during those early years?
When I first became a Christian, I didn’t realize there were distinctions in denominations. I just wanted to hear from God wherever I could, wherever God was speaking. I lived in Dallas at the time, going to the University of North Texas. Dallas is a pretty significant city for Bible teachers and leaders. I didn’t know who to listen to. My approach was pretty simple: if someone was having a Wednesday night Bible study, I was going.
But as the years progressed, I noticed myself leaning toward a more intellectual side of faith. I wanted to know the deeper things behind the Bible studies. I wanted to understand the context, the sociology of ancient times. So, I started learning from seminary students and just trying to figure out what these things meant in any way I could. Often there would be seasons when I was learning a lot of information, but I didn’t know how to readily apply it to my life. You’re in this battle where you’re learning these deep, profound things, but you’re not quite sure how this prevents you from going to a club or hangin’ out too late with the young ladies. And once I really zeroed in beyond just information and focused more on character and community, I really began to grow.
Obviously, we’re looking back on those experiences after a period you have described as “deconstruction,” so I imagine there were things that were positive about that time, and that there were negative or conflicted aspects too. How did that dynamic play out? What did you wrestle with? What were some of the spiritual themes that emerged for you as you grew in faith?
Man, that’s a deep question. I think you’d have to look at it from the vantage point of a young kid who grew up without his father, who found some success in music, who was now being embraced by these respected evangelical men, most of whom were white. I felt like I had found a new family. But I was missing some important distinctions. I was like, You know, we love Jesus and we love the Bible and we love intellectual discourse, and that’s great, but I’m not thinking about anything else.
As I said, I grew up in a very marginalized community, and during one season I lived in such a community intentionally to reach people in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Memphis. I found myself constantly being asked questions by people like Francis Chan or John Piper about the work I was doing in the community. I was blown away that they were asking me, you know, because I was sitting there thinking, You guys are the great leaders. I didn’t realize that my work in those communities was somewhat unique, you know? I was just doing what I felt I should be doing.
And so, because of that proximity, once I started to see unarmed Black people being killed, it began to hit a lot closer. I come from these communities. I can relate to these stories and people. I still lived in these communities, and these kids are like the kids I mentor on a regular basis. So when I spoke out about these people and places I loved, when I expressed my pain and sadness and I was met with resistance about my sadness by Christian communities and leaders—even pastors—I was blown away. I was so confused as to why they would challenge me on this.
Long story short, what began to happen is I began to realize that we were not seeing things in the same way. I did not know if I was seeing things correctly since the only developed version of God I knew was from these particular people. So now I didn’t know if I was seeing God correctly, or if I was just wrong altogether. At that point, I thought, Maybe this faith is not legitimate. If these people can’t seem to care about the people that I am seeing killed, then maybe this whole thing is a fluke. It took me to a very dark place.
A dark place that, in some circles, is controversial. The “D” word: deconstruction. One of the tough things about talking about deconstruction is that it seems to mean different things to different people, so that passionate people using the same word often talk completely past each other. Tell me about what deconstruction meant or means to you.
For some, deconstructing means whittling faith down to a place where many of them are landing on the belief that there is no God, or at least that Christianity is a farce. So they lash out, justifiably in some cases, against the American church, for its inconsistencies, but then the process goes far beyond that. I have used the word to articulate my process of getting beyond the many inconsistencies within the Christian church, particularly the American Christian church.
The church does not like the term deconstruction because in many ways it feels dangerous, like a possible justification for no longer trusting in Jesus. No longer believing in faith as we know it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I think there is a healthy way to deconstruct, but I am not talking about us getting rid of Jesus. I’m talking about getting rid of things that are more cultural than Christian to get closer to Jesus.
One example: Many people say, “Just read your Bible,” but what they fail to realize is that when they say that they are not taking into account the interpretation that we may bring to the Scriptures. Some of those things need to be broken down. Some need to be done away with. Some bad constructions need to be deconstructed.
Some people would say, “I didn’t see you in church on Sunday, so you are in sin. It says ‘Don’t forsake the fellowship.’” My pushback there might be, “Well, Sunday for many of you all is going to a production. You are not connected to a community, and there is no leadership connected to your life. You are just going to listen to an orator and then leave. So, to not show up to that on Sunday? I don’t think that’s what God had in mind. When he said, ‘Don’t forsake the fellowship,’ he means, ‘Do not turn your back on the very people you are supposed to be connected with, who see into your life, who can speak into your life, who can correct you when you are wrong, and encourage you.’”
When we begin to say things like this, of course, some people are going to rally against it. But what does it say when Christian leaders speak out more adamantly about people sleeping together before marriage than about injustice and violence? It just looked like hypocrisy to me.
What was necessary for me was to break down these particular views that I had been given and see what the Scriptures had to say. This has been done over centuries. This is exactly what Martin Luther did when he nailed the 95 theses to the door. He returned to Scripture. This is exactly what the Civil Rights Movement did. The African American church said, “Hey, these things don’t line up with Scripture.” It’s what the abolitionists did during slavery. They said, “Hey, read the Bible. If you guys love Jesus, you should not be keeping these people as property.”
It strikes me that you could deconstruct a building with a piece of dynamite, or you could deconstruct a building with a power saw, right?
Yes. There is a difference between destruction and restoration. There must be seasons of deconstructing in order to reconstruct a biblical perspective.
In your song “Deconstruction,” you say, “Maybe you ain’t never met me / but you know my pain.” That underlying grief, frustration and feelings of betrayal from leaders is widespread. Is there a generational moment where you are walking through something here that is recognizable to many other people?
Absolutely. At first, I thought I was crazy. That it was just me. But as I began to share about the process, people came like Nicodemus at night saying, “This is my story, this is how I feel.”
It sounds like you experienced well-meaning people trying to fix something that frightened them when what you needed was for someone to sit with you in the pain.
That’s exactly accurate. Often, I would feel that people were trying to fix me but not face me.
I would tell someone I respected what I was experiencing, and it would be met with how I had the wrong perspective. For example, when mourning the deaths of Black people killed by police, I would hear some version of “I don’t know why you are hurt when the person that was killed was clearly a thug. Have you seen their rap sheet? Have you seen their history?” For me, I was like, “I’m not here to justify how amazing of a person this was. I am saying they should not have been killed for what happened. I have a terrible rap sheet, but Jesus still loves me. If we are judging each other by our past, and if the Bible says that all of our works are ‘filthy rags,’ then none of us have any justifiable credibility. I am hurt, and other people are hurt. And I am not understanding how you are not seeing how hurt we are.” And in those tender moments, my grief would be met with some sentiment like, “This is media hype.”
I was trying to express, “No, I live in these communities. No, this has been my reality as a person. Can we not talk about this?” But there were all these ‘theological’ terms that were put around pain. I heard fear. “Oh no, you are becoming one of them.” Instead of, “I don’t know what you feel, but it sounds like you are really hurt. What do you need in this moment?”
I had a lot of Job’s friends. Job was saying some stuff because he was in pain. “God doesn’t see me. God’s not here.” And it’s like, “You know what? That’s not true, but obviously you are in pain. So let me address the reality of what you are dealing with. So that by my faithfulness and consistency you may be able to hear other things, later. We can process some other aspects of this.”
And this experience is so much bigger than just me. We are moving toward a very post-Christian society in America. Many people feel they should move on from faith because there’s nothing there anymore. Someone has to speak to that. People are coming to grips with the fact that some church leaders have let us down. Some churches have let us down. There’s been so much inconsistency. People are hurt. They don’t know where to go from here. So they’re stagnant. They’ve done away with church, and they’re just kinda’ piecemealing faith together for themselves: a little podcast here and a little something there, but they don’t know what to do. They don’t understand that they don’t have to do away with Jesus. They haven’t contemplated the reality that reconstruction is possible.
With all this, what held you to Jesus during this time? What was it that kept you? Put bluntly, why are you still showing up?
I’m reminded of the disciples asking Jesus when he asked if they were leaving: “Where else would we go?”
“… With you are the words of eternal life.”
Exactly. Some of us know this feeling.
But it was more than that for me. In the middle of my struggle, there was a series of events I believe God set up. One of them happened in my early deconstruction phase, when my doubts about God were getting very deep. I went to Egypt with my wife. While there, we toured some of the historical landmarks. Our guide was brilliant—studying to get her Ph.D. in Egyptian history.
Anyway, at one site she told us about a particular pharaoh who was not respected. When I asked why, she replied, “Because he let all of his slaves go.” And I said, “Oh, like Moses in the Bible.” And she said to me, very stoically, “I do not know anything about the Bible. I’ve never read it. I don’t know this story.”
I said, “You don’t know the story of Moses? And the pharaoh who let the slaves go?” She said, “I do not. I know this history though.”
I was baffled. There I was, trying to distrust the Bible, even to say there is no God, and this woman—who doesn’t know God at all, has never read the Bible, doesn’t know anything about it—is making a convincing argument for the historical legitimacy of the Exodus. That was Episode 1 of God working.
Episode 2 happened when I went to a Coptic church there in Egypt. I saw literature and writings, and ancient art of the apostle Mark. I’d never experienced this cultural angle on Christianity. It was all new. I was like, These people thousands of years ago [were] holding this reality. It challenged me. Like, this is ancient. It is not American, it is global. I needed to process that.
And then, I went through a very serious and trying time of depression and severe anxiety. God just put me in a very humble place where I had to trust him. I remember being on a beach in Mexico. I had to escape the realities I was existing in. In Mexico, I’m on this beach, and I am sincerely contemplating ending it. Like, I don’t know, God—I can’t take this anymore. Suddenly, I saw water shooting up out of the ocean. I thought, Oh great, now I am going crazy. This is perfect. I am losing my mind. Water is shooting out of the ocean. and it must be time, God. Just take me now. And something said to me, You know what? Just read the Bible. There and then, I decided I’d give it another shot.
I opened the Bible and started reading the book of Jonah. I saw how Jonah wanted to end it all inside the belly of this whale. And God rescued him. After that, I looked up and the water that was shooting out of the ocean was [from] a whale that actually came into view. I was shook. I cried. I prayed. I just felt like the presence of God was with me. I prayed, God, you are real and I want to hold onto you. From that moment forward, I felt as if I began a different level of dependency on Jesus, on the Scriptures and on God.
I see that Jonah reference now in the song “Deconstruction”: “Tears streaming as I weep / felt I heard the Lord speak / I’ve been running from you but you never ran away from me.” Still, I imagine your pain didn’t end in that moment. If that was the turning point, talk to me about what it was like to begin a process of faith reconstruction.
I got to this place where I realized that God was so merciful and kind. In Psalm 23, it says, “goodness and mercy will pursue me all the days of my life.” The word “pursue” in Hebrew is radaph. It essentially means “hunt.” Like a bloodhound, like a lion. God’s goodness and mercy are hunting me. I had to reconcile with that reality. His goodness and mercy are chasing me down.
Now I want to build on top of this reality. It’s not that God was ever fake. It’s that his people are inconsistent. That’s always been the story, throughout history. Israel was inconsistent. I’m inconsistent. So, how could I expect his people to be something that they’ve never been? It’s why we needed a Savior.
It challenged me to really learn that ours is a global faith, not an American faith. The American church is going to be inconsistent—as is every other church in the world. Because of that, may I be all the more gracious. As gracious as God is to me. And let me realize there are no perfect people, no perfect churches. There are just people in pursuit of God’s perfection. It doesn’t mean I make an excuse for them. It means I understand the need for grace all the more.
From there I just started building, and building, and building my faith around a very gracious God. And doing some contextual work. I’m about to make my third trip to Israel. I’m going to Sudan and Egypt, some of these lands that have rich perspectives that I don’t have. Understanding that there’s a history of Christianity in Japan, in China, that I have never investigated. Then piecing it all together to paint a clearer, [more] accurate picture of the character of God.
In all this, it seems you’re living out the role of the Christian artist: to be a steward or an interpreter of experiences. Talk to me a little bit about the artist in the life of the church. What do you hope a pastor could learn, not just from yourself, but from the poets, the rappers, the painters, the storytellers and movie makers, in the pew?
I always think about when the Scriptures talk about the temple being built. It said that they chose gifted artists for that work of art. It wasn’t happenstance, arbitrary or random that God wanted artists to work on the temple.
We need to realize and respect that there are different people with different giftings and leanings, and that we need them all within the body. Artists give us a level of vulnerability. They hold a mirror up to us in many ways. That’s what good art is supposed to do: paint a picture of our reality—of us—so that we can see and process that reality in a healthy way.
As a musician and a poet, I want people to say, “Man, I need to muse on this.” That’s why it’s called music. You muse on it. You think on it. You chew it. You process it, and you allow it to work on your soul. The Psalms were not written to be read. They were written as music. They were written to be sung. I think there’s a reason for that because that was a way that God has used, historically, to connect with people emotionally.
On and on goes the pattern of us using art to connect emotionally, mentally, spiritually, to paint a reality of vulnerability and transparency people can live into.
What would you say to pastors or leaders who just don’t know what to do when someone comes to them and expresses that pain and doubt? How can they do a good job walking with others through a season of deconstruction?
I think you used the right word there. Walking with people is probably one of the best remedies. You know, the Scriptures say that we have a high priest who can understand our pain. Jesus can empathize, sympathize with us. Anyone going through pain can look to Jesus and know that he knows the depths of pain. I would hope that we would want to step into people’s pain too. That we would want to follow the footsteps of Jesus, to enter people’s pain and walk with them.
It’s the same as sitting beside someone’s bedside. I don’t understand cancer. I’ve never had it. I don’t know what it’s doing to the body, but I want to be with you. I want to understand, as best as possible. Why? Because we are part of the same body. When the legs hurt, the arms pay attention. Every part of the body affects every other part.
But we miss this interdependence. We are very transactional. That’s just our culture in the West. We are a transactional culture. I think pastors, like all of us, can learn to be more communal and not transactional. Really begin to shepherd. Being a pastor is more than being a preacher. It’s not just about giving a speech; it’s about caring for the flock. Tending to the people of God.
What do you think God is calling Christians to do and be right now, here in America with all the mess and complexity of it all? What does your spirit say we are being called to right now?
I think we are being called to realize that we’ve built some golden calves that need to be melted down, but not melted down just so we can say that we did our job. Melted down in order to understand who God says he is, and how God wants us to walk.
That might mean going back to some of the original Hebrew context or understanding the Eastern lens that Jesus is speaking through. But in any case, here we are in 2023. Let’s get back to see where we’ve gone off track. Let’s try to course correct.
This is how good and gracious God is: He has allowed us to exist with mistakes in so many areas and is still taking care of us, still blessing us, still growing us, still maturing us. It’s only right for us to say, You know what, God? You’ve been so good to us even though we have missed some things. And to try to be like King Josiah who goes back and basically says, “What? This is what the Scripture … What?! How did we miss this?” And build from there.