Anti-Climacus

Among the flaws of the Christian approach to culture, broadly speaking, the attempt to read Christian themes into works that are decidedly lacking them is probably the most embarrassing. The attempt often comes off as either a far-too-extended explanation of the obvious or tearing the cultural object apart beyond sense in order to justify it in Christian terms. The end result of this process is, to use two real examples from the internet, how one ends up taking 800 words to explain the significance of the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" (it refers to Sunday! which is the day we go to church!), or well over 1000 explaining how a Coldplay album is an argument for Christianity (because they use words and phrases that mean something to religious people! Even though they also mean other, different things to non-religious people!). The logic is, I suppose, that one needs a veneer of justification in order to enjoy non-religious art or culture, and the best possible justification is that it actually secretly participates in Christianity, anyway. But the end result is Christian culture which is a pale approximation of real culture, but made safe for consumption, and a persistent inability to deal with the rest of culture on its own terms.

(Incidentally, the best article on contemporary Christian music and popular music remains Brad Shoup's Forever and Ever Amen Alright, worth reading even if you don't especially care for CCM)

None of which makes any sense when there are people out there like Kanye West. He's a man clearly aware of his own failings, and with a tortured relationship to his own religious beliefs. The result is great music and deep introspection, or the sort of thing Christians should be encouraging. It's all there in the song: he knows who he is, and what's wrong with him; he knows he believes in and needs religion but can't quite close the gap between that belief and his behavior; he doesn't want to tell people what to believe but he wants to write a great track, so good that people will be obligated to admit its greatness and show respect for the message it contains. And the end result is worthier of dissection than Coldplay: it's genuinely better as a matter of aesthetics, and Kanye has built in the religious component--no need to import it.

The reasons to ignore him, I suppose, are a general distaste for hip-hop, and a suspicion of any genre that involves dwelling on morally suspect behavior for too long. But I think Christianity would solve a lot of its problems with culture by accepting both that Christians can go out into the wider world without entirely losing themselves, and by accepting that not every piece of culture needs a didactic point or obvious correct moral. Neither of these are likely to happen in the near future, but it's good to occasionally remember what the ultimate goal is supposed to be.