Kanye and Christian Culture

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg of the Magnificat Institute. Find out more here: http://magnificatinstitute.org

Kanye West is on a promotional kick for his new album Jesus is King which, as the title suggests, highlights the resurgence of his own fascination with Christianity. And along with that he’s been giving long format interviews and saying a lot of things that have stirred up the admiration and excitement among Christians, including Catholics.

And this coincides with the phenomenon of West’s “Sunday Service” which has been his own rendering of a Sunday church service with him as the focal point. And this was tied together with the new album when a streamed Sunday Service drew heavily from the track list was uploaded to YouTube this past week.

So, I was curious about all the hype and tuned in for a few minutes to see what everyone was so excited about and the first thing I was struck by was the sense of importance of it. This felt like the kind of thing that would draw people together because of it’s irresistible gravitational pull with music and the cultural influence it has is at the center of it.

And part of the reason this feels so important is because it benefits from the polish and sophistication of show biz media and by contrast Christian and especially Catholic culture has become marred by irrelevance. It is a sad and very beige cultural expression.

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But these currents of culture that Kanye has tapped into, can we really say that this is culture? Kanye has, for some time now, been at the vanguard of pop culture which has largely replaced a true sense of culture.

So it might be worth asking, what is culture because without a clear sense of that, it’s easy to mistake a surrogate for the real thing. The best succinct definition of culture that I’ve ever heard is: a way of life.

It’s is the practices, habits, beliefs, and expressions of those things through elements like art and music that are shared among a people. It is the way a people move together like an organism expressing its own character and purpose.

Pop culture isn’t any of those things. Pop culture doesn’t galvanize us as a people into a way of life. It certainly doesn’t harmonize our beliefs, our habits, or our expressions. Pop culture is a supermarket. It implores us to substitute authentic health and prosperity, for quantity of choices and a relentless steam of opportunities to consume.

And the things the we most often associate with culture, like music and art, instead of being the unrestrained offspring of a people expressing their shared joy, revelry, religion, heritage, and suffering, is something that is hatched in a consumer marketing strategy meeting by people who are trying to direct us towards one end: their profits.

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Pop culture is oriented towards one thing: consumerism and the longer this experiment goes on, the harder it is to hide that fact. We aren’t even able to produce original movie scripts anymore. We’re now in a season in which everything is recycled and with little understanding of what made the original great.

Kanye’s own genre of music is characterized by remixing portions from old classic songs to fill in for the deficit of melody that we can’t seem to produce originally anymore. The great accomplishments of our cultural icons, on full display on their Instagram accounts, are how big their shoe collections are, and how many cars they own, and how many watches they have. Again, this just reinforcing that consumerist urge.

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What makes culture so edifying and life giving for the human soul is the fact that many people all affirm something together in a shared way of life – and isn’t it better when we can all agree on something and express it in harmony and community? And this is sorely missing from modern “culture”.

In today’s modern society we have plurality and multi culture. But multiculture is an oxymoron because it implies that everyone expresses some kind of culture of their own instead of us all expressing something together.

You can’t have a plurality of “ways of life” and then expect that any identifiable shared culture will emerge out of that. It won’t. All that happens is we lose culture. Sometimes more isn’t more. You can’t have multiple spouses in the hopes of having more marriage. If you tried, in the end you’d have no marriage.

What culture ultimately means is that we belong to each other. When we have a shared way of life, we will encourage one another, we will hold one another accountable, we will work together by a shared vision of what truly matters. And the benefits should be obvious.