Why do Christians take themselves and their religion so seriously?
And why is it easier to hate Lil Nas X than to look inside their own house?
Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.
Jon Stewart
I’m probably going to gore a few sacred cows here, so if you’re someone who’s prone to clutching pearls when someone speaks unfavorably about their religion, well…consider yourself warned. It’ll be downhill from here, if you know what I mean.
I’m not a hip-hop fan; it’s just not my thing. Generally speaking, if it doesn’t have a guitar and a set of drums, I’m not interested. But that’s just me. I do, however, admire the talent of hip-hop artists, and there are many out there with a surplus of talent.
I particularly admire Lil Nas X. It’s not for his music as much as his ability to be unapologetically himself and speak his truth to power. And the results are the sort of things that will invariably piss off a lot of folks and result in a lot of pearl-clutching.
It’s a beautiful thing. Truly.
At midnight tonight, Rapper Lil Nas X will release his first new single since 2022. It’s called “J CHRIST,” and he said earlier in the week that it was dedicated to “THE MAN WHO HAD THE GREATEST COMEBACK OF ALL TIME!”
The image accompanying that caption wasn’t subtle at all[.]
A subsequent post show Nas as an angel… with two machine guns. (Which, let’s admit, resembles modern-day evangelicals far more than Jesus ever could.)
But all of that paled in comparison to the announcement that the rapper, whose real name is Montero Hill, had been accepted to Liberty University, where he would get a degree in “Christian Leadership and Biblical Studies.”
There are, of course, people who will look at this and see it for what it is- parody, Lil Nas X using Christianity’s arrogance and tendency to take itself far too seriously as the basis for art.
‘Cuz if there’s one thing Christians do, it’s take themselves WAY too seriously (and yes, I realize that I’m generalizing).
It’s not as if Lil Nas X is the first artist to use the iconography of Christianity as inspiration to create art. It’s a medium that goes back centuries from the Crucifixion to some genuinely awful Jim Caviezel movies today. Some of the art is serious, some is parody, and some tries to be serious but is so bad it feels like parody.
My point is that nothing that Lil Nas X is doing is blasphemous. It is original, but he’s certainly not the first to skewer Christians for taking themselves too seriously. That hasn’t stopped the pearl clutchers from breathlessly taking offense over his previous work.
The video for the single he was promoting at the time (MONTERO- Call Me By Your Name) showed him sliding down a stripper pole and giving Satan a lap dance. Yeah, it’s…different, but then so is he. More power to him for his vision and willingness to let his freak flag fly, eh?
Oh, and if you’re into paying attention to lyrics, they don’t leave much to the imagination, either…yet more fuel for the pearl-clutching faux Christians in the studio audience.
It turns out that generating some good ol’ Christian faith-based outrage is good for business. MONTERO- Call Me By Your Name debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, while the album reached #2 on the Billboard 200.
It must have been all that free advertising from people like Greg Locke, huh? F*****g brilliant.
[Evangelical Christians] are a natural “enemy” for an openly queer artist who defies convention. The fact that he makes catchy music means their outrage never reaches beyond their evangelical bubbles. They just get madder and madder while he pokes them harder and harder.
As one X/Twitter user joked at the time, “Love seeing Christians be like ‘I can’t believe LGBTQ teens are worshipping Satan instead of our nice god who hates them.’”
Not only did Lil Nas X get a whole lot of free publicity back then, he got to use his platform to go after one of the most pernicious forces in our society: conservative Christians who are primarily motivated by how much harm they can inflict upon marginalized communities.
I’d imagine there’s something surprisingly satisfying about going after people you know to be hateful hypocrites and exposing them for what they are. People like Greg Locke are no more “Christians” than I am a Nobel laureate. They’re living Christ-like lives in the same way I could hang with Steph Curry in a three-point shooting contest.
It’s sad that people who claim to revere the Prince of Peace live to inflict pain and suffering upon marginalized communities and believe that America belongs to White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals. That’s where we are today, though, and Lil Nas X has no problem exposing them for the hypocrites they are.
[U]nlike Taylor Swift, he’s not interested in a universal message. He’s playing to his audience, and that audience knows the difference between spirited mockery and inherent cruelty when they see it. (The side claiming to worship Jesus isn’t the good one in this battle.) Even the website promoting the single takes a jab at apocalyptic thinking: BeginningIsNear.com.
For what it’s worth, Lil Nas X doesn’t see any of this as trolling (even though he’s very clearly trolling). He sees this as art, using iconography that most people recognize, then reinterpreting it with his own vision. It’s the same reason all those paintings of Jesus make him look like a white guy when he obviously wasn’t.
Regarding the image of him on a crucifix, Nas claimed that was a sincere homage, not some anti-Christian taunt:
He does have a point.
As I said earlier, it’s not as if Lil Nas X is the first artist to use Christian iconography in his art. It’s an art form as old as the religion itself and still found in contemporary art.
There are even those in the hip-hop community who are arrogant and self-serving enough to compare their suffering with that of Jesus Christ, something Lil Nas X has steered clear of:
Ye (Kanye West) has even bought into some of the conspiratorial beliefs that drive some contemporary Evangelical Christians, who all too often see themselves as a persecuted MAJORITY…as ridiculous as that sounds.
Of course, Ye is all about Ye, a wholly different pathology I’ve no interest in delving into. Lil Nas X isn’t about self-worship or self-glorification. What he’s doing is holding up a mirror for self-professed “Christians” to examine themselves. Unfortunately, most “Christians” lack the self-awareness to understand what’s happening.
Ultimately, no one is hurting the Christian faith more than the bigots who use Jesus as an excuse to hate others and suppress their rights. That fact that some Christians—presumably a lot of the same people who got upset over Sabrina Carpenter’s harmless video—are getting more worked up over these Lil Nas X posts than they ever would over pastors who routinely use faith as a weapon tells you just how misplaced their priorities are.
Sadly, it’s easier for some Christians to lose their shit over Lil Nas X’s music and videos than it is to look at the rot and corruption in their own house. They could call out their co-religionists whose lives don’t in any way reflect the teachings of Jesus Christ, but that would be difficult and painful work. Instead, they choose to take the easy road and go after those who build their art and brand on ridiculing the hypocrisy of those who’ve bastardized America’s majority religion.
And Lil Nas X is laughing all the way to the bank. Good for him.
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