A question is bothering me.
Is Kanye West’s professed conversion to Christianity thrown into more doubt by his brazen antisemitism a couple of years ago, or by his recent announcement of his own “adult film” company? I am forced to admit that, for me personally, it was probably the latter. I doubt I’m alone.
For good reason, of course; there is something so depraved and destructive about pornography that it simply does not calculate to be the business of choice for a truly born again Christian. But hating Jewish people—whether in word or deed—is depraved and destructive, too. Why did my alarms go off so much more loudly at the one than the other?
This uncomfortable self-examination becomes more uncomfortable because it overlaps with what’s going on right now in some evangelical church culture. I don’t think there’s much that evangelicals can “learn” from the reality that Kanye West’s profession of Christ seems to have been false. Sadly, it’s just another brick in the wall of American celebrity spirituality. But Kanye’s particular trajectory—from anti-woke irritant to Christian performer, then Hitler-appreciating “truth-teller” to divorced pornographer—is a distressingly familiar pattern to some who have been watching the trend line of evangelical public life.
West’s profession of Christianity reverberated through conservative evangelical culture not just because he is very rich and famous, but also because he was something genuinely rare: a convert to an expressly conservative form of Christianity. The lyrics to Jesus is King were not trite repetitions, but frequently thoughtful and biblical. West’s public comments on everything from his then-wife’s image, to parenting, to abortion, were a thrilling moment of representation for us. For a moment, West seemed to be the most high profile “trad” Protestant in the world.
But there was also something else going on the entire time, something that most of us admitted only in private conversation or the backchannel. Kanye West wasn’t just taking a stand for traditional Christianity in the halls of the elite; he was aggrieving, agitating, and confusing the right kind of people. West had staff writers at The Atlantic tying themselves into knots over the depth of his betrayal of “blackness.” He was forcing journalists at Rolling Stone to talk about theology. Here was one of the most successful black entertainers of all time, rolling with the grassroots MAGA folk and daring the wealthy and powerful to stop him.
This narrative was so powerful in a stretch of unrelenting American polarization—Trump, COVID, George Floyd—that it washed right over the very obvious and longstanding questions about West’s mental state, his thirst for greater fame, and the significant challenges someone of his status and reputation would face in a life of discipleship.
Few people raised these concerns. First Things covered West glowingly, calling him “the bravest of all modern hip-hop artists” and his album Donda a “stirring masterpiece.” These are eminently forgivable errors, but would First Things’s current stable of writers offer such forgiveness if the man starting a pornographic film company were a former “Big Eva” personality, instead of someone who built up a reputation among evangelicalism’s right-wing? Not likely.
And there’s the point. West’s slow, spiraling, but predictable descent into madness and sin was always less likely to attract thoughtful attention because of his anti-woke persona. I won’t go so far as to say that evangelicals were giving him a pass; I saw no serious person defending West’s comments about Hitler. But for a conservative evangelical political culture that’s increasingly defined by how angry you make the Left, how far you can alienate and offend “the longhouse” or “the progressive gaze,” there is simply no definable line between punchy truth telling and hatefulness.
What’s more, there is a segment of conservative evangelical politics that is trying to coach itself not to speak when it sees something in its ranks that offends God, if it also happens to offend The New York Times. Below is a tweet posted this week by the current associate editor of First Things:
I cannot say definitively what Justin Lee means by this. But I know how many people will be interpreting it: as a call to ignore, accept, and perhaps even justify moral evil like racism and misogyny, if doing so will save face for conservatives in front of the Left and prevent bad PR.
Logically, all of this depends on a purpose in life that abandons spiritual reality. If you believe that the fate of Western civilization is a bigger, more deserving object of your attention than the character of God as revealed in Scripture, the grace of Jesus as revealed in the gospel, and the people of God as revealed in the church, then yes. There is practically nothing worth breaking rank with your fellow conservatives about. Solidarity must win the day, because the day is all that can be won.
Of course, for saying this, I have been and will be labeled a traitor, a progressive, a secular operative, “Big Eva,” a quietist, a defeatist, effeminate, gay, pagan, a white knight, a concern troll. You name it, I’ve been called it. To criticize the Christian nationalist and New Right movement is to invite oceans of invective your way. And this fact alone does not make them wrong. Indeed, they are not all wrong. Western civilization is worth saving, and there are those in power who want it gone. There has been evangelical capitulation, consciously and otherwise, to the spirit of the age.
What’s lost in all this discussion, what’s been lost in it for years now, is the sense that Christians can and must be people who do more than one thing at a time. It is possible to be a bold, uncompromising, vote-wielding, public power-utilizing Christian who tells the truth about human depravity, even when it makes our team look bad. In fact, there’s no other Christianity possible.
Sin doesn’t respect ideologies. It does not stay in its lane, and it will not let you leverage it strategically. A conservative evangelicalism that makes peace, even a silent peace, with some sins of the flesh is making future peace with others. West’s adult film company is tragic, but it is not shocking, because the self-centered, success-obsessed logic that has undergirded much of his public life is just showing up once again.
Is it purely an amazing coincidence that evangelical conservatives get news of West’s adult film company in the same year they are being marketed a right-wing swimsuit calendar?
I wonder if Kanye West was ever told about what it means to be a justified sinner. I wonder if someone told him that fame is not the only life possible, that money is not the only or even best comfort, and that it is better to lose Addidas and sponsorships and reputation in this life, if it means you leave this life with Christ.
I hope so. Because there are many of us who need to hear that too.
Lee's belief that "No enemies to the right" is a good mantra to adopt is both absolutely hilarious and a little bit frightening if you know the history of the phrase.
The original phrase was "no enemies to the left," and it was the watchword of Aleksander Kerensky, a moderate socialist who headed the Provisional Government in Russia after the February Revolution that overthrew the Tsar. For those of you unfamiliar with what followed, while he was constantly on the lookout for a coup from right-wing and monarchist elements, in the end it was Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks, who were to his left, that overthrew the Provisional Government and ushered in the Soviet Union, aided and abetted by Kerensky's unwillingness to see them as a threat despite the clear signs that he and they had very different visions of what Russia should look like.
Excellent piece.