Why Lecrae briefly questioned Christianity, how he recovered confidence

Rapzilla.com: How did you go from being depressed and doubting God to saying, “You can’t stop me now?”

Lecrae: Candidly, it was already a tough year — just loss, experienced a lot of stuff. I never anticipated that much pushback from the Christian community. I think I had a false perception of evangelicalism. This is going a couple years back.

I didn’t know what voices were trustworthy, so my faith, I had to start over [with it]. I went all the way back to the Council of Nicea because I didn’t want to start at anything that had to do with Westernized Christianity, so I wanted to go back as far as I could. And I saw it branched off — studied Greek Orthodoxy, and I learned a lot, but that didn’t solve my problems either.

Then having really good friends wrestling through me. I think what a lot of people don’t know is that a lot of Christians of color were depressed and frustrated. Many of them were leaving the faith. Many of them were saying, “I don’t want to have anything to do with these pastors who weren’t speaking on my behalf.” I had good friends that I could bounce all this stuff off of.

It was a gradual process. It wasn’t overnight. I think step one was mourning and grieving. Step two was having my friends tell me constantly truth because I didn’t want to hear truth. I didn’t want to read the Bible. The Bible to me was black ink on white pages. I wasn’t interested in reading the Bible because I didn’t trust … I was, “Who wrote it? ESV? I don’t like it. I don’t trust them.”

It was a long process. Then I think it was realizing that, like I said in the song, Jesus is not American. Jesus is not holding on to these patriotic perspectives that I think a lot of Americans mesh with their Christianity, so that gave me solace about him as a Savior, and that the Jews wanted him to be patriotic, and he wouldn’t be.

Then finally, I think it was, of course, my pastor sitting down and having good conversations with me, my friends like BJ [Thompson] and [Adam Thomason], Tedashii. Then finally, I think the breaking point was having some conversation with Eric Mason out in Philly. He just did a series Woke Church, which is really, really powerful. And another guy named Pastor Carl Ellis.

All of their voices collectively really helped me to see I don’t have to fit this box of mainline Christianity that I think everybody wanted me to fit in.

What were some of the key truths that you learned through your friends that brought you to where you are now?

One is the Bible was written from a marginalized person’s perspective. It’s not written from the Egyptian perspective. It’s written from these enslaved Hebrews. It’s not written from the Babylonian, Assyrian perspective. It’s not written from the Roman Caesar. It’s written from Paul, from a prison, from the perspective of the systemically oppressed and the socially oppressed.

It helped me to realize that I’m on the right side of history, even if mainline evangelicalism thinks I’m out of my mind. It helped me to say, “Man, you know what, liberals and conservatives killed Jesus.” I think I got more comfortable in the gray area of my faith than it being A or B.

Do you feel a certain burden to help other Christians follow the same path as you who are discontent with evangelicalism? Especially with Donald Trump being elected president, it feels like there are more cries than ever like, “I’m done with the title evangelicalism.”

I’m here for anybody who wants to process it. I don’t feel like that’s my mission. I feel like I’ve given so much of my time, effort and energy into pouring myself into entities that only wanted to use Lecrae and didn’t need Lecrae, and there were plenty of places, people and infrastructures that needed Lecrae’s voice.

No disrespect to any of the big CCM tours or whatever, but they don’t need me there. If I don’t show up, they’ll be fine with Matthew West. They’ll be fine with TobyMac.

But the West Side of Chicago needs the voices of Thi’sl’s and Lecrae’s. South Side of Houston needs the voices of the Thi’sl’s and Lecrae’s. The people who love hip hop and needed a voice within hip hop that articulated their faith. They need us. They don’t just want, like, “Aw, that’s cool!” It’s like, “No, we need this music.”

I say all that to say, if you want to learn, I’m more than willing to articulate it. But that’s not my mission.

I don’t care how brilliant you are, when a person is grieving and you don’t comfort them, you do put yourself in a position to where your words fall on deaf ears.

Job’s friends — Job was going through it. His friends could’ve had the right perspective, but they didn’t come with compassion or empathy. They just came with, “Well, here’s what this says.”

To see people silent about the woes of our society, specifically as it pertains to people of color, but still want me to endorse their books and champion their conferences was very disheartening for me.

That made me say, “I don’t trust you, and I need some time to process all this. I need to grieve. I need to understand. And I need to just trust Jesus because these networks of Western Evangelicalism, American Evangelicalism, have caused me a huge sense of distrust. I thought you loved me, yet when I’m telling you I’m grieving, I’m met with silence, or I’m met with, ‘Stop being political.’”

No knock against the writers of the ESV, so to speak, but it’s just saying, I know too many of those voices and those faces. Those are the ones who told me that John Perkins had issues, that James Cone had issues, that Tom Skinner had issues, that Martin Luther King had issues. But they never told me that Martin Luther or John Calvin had issues. We can deal with their antisemitic hatred of Jewish people, but we can’t deal with the liberal theology of Martin Luther King.

I feel like if we’re gonna deal with these people’s issues, we gotta deal with these people’s issues as well.

How extensively were you studying, and what was the time frame of this nose-in-the-book studying?

There was a two-week period where I told my wife, “Honestly, I don’t know what I believe anymore … I don’t know where I stand because everything I’ve know about Christianity is falling flat right now.”

If it wasn’t for my friends, I wouldn’t believe anything any of these people had to say anymore. It was great people in my life who kept reminding me and, in my lowest moments, trying to wrestle with it.

I was almost re-evangelizing myself. And I realized I was trapped in grace. It was like, “Nah, you’re stuck in this, buddy. Sorry, you’re saved. There’s nothing you can do about it.” But I would say from 2014 to 2016, it was a wrestle. It was all wrestle, and there were very low points in 2016.

2014, that was after Mike Brown’s death, right?

Right.

Did anything in particular spark that two-week period?

Just the visceral hate. You feel like a show-pony. You feel like a circus act. People saying stuff like, “We made you,” “Just rap for us, and stop talking about this other stuff,” “Deleting all your music.” And I’m like, “So I was only here for your personal entertainment. You never cared about me the person.”

Then I think to see leaders that I respected and looked up say really harsh things and say really tough things that I just would never imagine them saying caused some frustration. I think kinda some of the final straws were … it was definitely the silence from the pastors and leaders in evangelicalism. The silence was painful.

Then losing my cousin was really, really tough. That was a compounded piece of it. Then … I mean, I’ve been called “porch monkey,” “nigger” by professing Christians. And so you’re like, “I know that these are just broken people, Lord, but these are supposed to be your people.”

I didn’t want to have anything to do with anybody. I just couldn’t hear it. I didn’t want to hear anything to pacify my pain that had to do with Scripture or anything for a good two-week period of time. I just needed to step back and process what was all going on.

Some were social media, some were hate mail, some stuff delivered to my house — all kinds of stuff. I quit posting a lot of personal pictures up, so you notice there’s a season where you don’t see my wife and kids anymore on social media because of how visceral and mean it got. When they were calling my daughter out on her name…

Social media’s one aspect of it, but when people mail stuff to you… And then the silence, too. It was kinda all-encompassing.

Was the silence after one particular death the loudest?

I think it was just … clearly there’s division. Clearly you’re seeing person of color after person of color who’s a believer expressing this. It’s not something that’s happening in a vacuum.

If you don’t really have real relationships — and that’s probably what part of the problem with the church is, most of us don’t have genuine relationships with people outside of our ethnicity or our background. We have proximity but not real unity. You may work with them or are around them, but you don’t know their real problems.

Which I’m really grateful for Ben Washer, really grateful for another one of my friends Josh Robinson because these are white guys who I can go through the tunnel of chaos with, and we can wrestle through these hard conversations.