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.
Check out Part 2 of our interview with Lecrae where he talks about his song, “Deconstruction,” and provides advice for pastors and leaders walking with others through their own deconstruction process.
Paul J. Pastor is editor-at-large of Outreach and author of several books, including The Face of the Deep, The Listening Day, Palau: A Life on Fire (with Luis Palau) and Bower Lodge: Poems. He lives in Oregon.