Lecrae: Is He “Woke”?

Back­ground Infor­ma­tion

• Full Name: Lecrae Devaughn Moore
• Born: Hous­ton, Texas, U.S.A. 1979
• Under­grad­u­ate: Uni­ver­si­ty of North Texas, Bach­e­lors in Applied Arts and Sci­ence
• Known For: Rap Career, Found­ed of Reach Records, Author, Speak­er
• Note­wor­thy Works: Albums- Real Talk; When the Music Stops; Rehab; Grav­i­ty; Anom­aly; Church Clothes 1, 2, 3, and 4 Books- Unashamed, I Am Restored

Overview

Lecrae is per­haps the most suc­cess­ful Chris­t­ian rap­per of the 2010s and 2020s. Ear­ly in Lecrae’s illus­tri­ous career as a Chris­t­ian rap­per, before he broke into the main­stream, his lyrics were large­ly bib­li­cal and refresh­ing to the Chris­t­ian soul. One such instance was Lecrae’s 2004 debut album “Real Talk” which fea­tures promi­nent themes of repen­tance (“Take Me As I Am”, “Noth­in’”, “Heav­en or Hell”); reject­ing world­li­ness (“Who U Wit”, “Rep­re­sent”, “We Don’t”); and faith alone in Jesus for the for­give­ness of sins (“Souled Out”, “Crossover”). For exam­ple, in the song “Who U Wit”, Lecrae com­mend­ably gave audi­ences this bib­li­cal­ly sound mes­sage in the hook of the song:

Who u wit? Are you in it to win, man?;

Are you livin’ in sin or are you livin’ for him, man?;

Who u wit? Can’t walk the fence y’all;

It’s God or the world ‘cause the two don’t mix y’all.

How­ev­er, since the 2016 elec­tion cycle, fans of Lecrae have noticed a rad­i­cal shift in direc­tion away from bib­li­cal Chris­tian­i­ty and toward racial­ly woke talk­ing points. In his 2016 album enti­tled “Church Clothes 3”, we observe this change where Lecrae spoke lyrics such as the fol­low­ing:

The new Jim Crow or the old one?;

Peo­ple out here fight­in’ for equal­i­ty and hon­est­ly I think they owed some.

In this song enti­tled “Gang­land”, Lecrae is shy­ing away from the­o­log­i­cal lyri­cism and instead is ori­ent­ing his song toward a racial theme. First­ly, he implies that we are in the “new Jim Crow,” which is a com­mon trope of the left, that we are still in a coun­try that is racist against black peo­ple. Sec­ond­ly, he states that black Amer­i­cans are “owed” equal­i­ty, which assumes the unbib­li­cal and cov­etous moral imper­a­tive that blacks should have equal income to whites (as Lecrae clar­i­fies in a tweet found lat­er in this pro­file). The lyrics from these two songs rep­re­sent a larg­er trend with Lecrae: he is becom­ing more racial­ly woke over time.

Slip­ping Into Social Jus­tice

The ques­tion thus remains: why did Lecrae alter his mes­sage so dras­ti­cal­ly? The answer is hint­ed at in his 2016 song, “Can’t Stop Me Now”:

And then they killed Tamir Rice;

And they just go on with they life;

They tellin’ me shut up talk­ing ’bout it;

Like, I should just talk about Christ.

In this song, Lecrae dis­cuss­es his depres­sion and “decon­struc­tion” of his faith that threat­ened to make him give up the faith entire­ly. An exam­ple this lyric gives is the case of Tamir Rice, in which Rice was mis­tak­en­ly killed when he was car­ry­ing around a toy gun that was an exact repli­ca of a real gun after he had been report­ed to author­i­ties for point­ing the gun at pedes­tri­ans. Accord­ing to evi­dence sub­mit­ted to a grand jury, Tamir showed the cops his gun, pos­si­bly in an attempt to show them that the gun was a toy. How­ev­er, because the cops did not know the gun was fake, they had to assume it was real and was going to be fired at them, so they shot Rice. While the shoot­ing was a trag­ic sit­u­a­tion, under the total­i­ty of the cir­cum­stances, the Cuya­hoga Coun­ty Pros­e­cu­tor decid­ed not to pros­e­cute because that office “did not believe that ‘any rea­son­able judge or jury would find crim­i­nal con­duct.” How­ev­er, to this day Lecrae main­tains the nar­ra­tive that Tamir Rice was mur­dered, and that the cops got away with it. Even worse, he claims that those who would rebuke Lecrae for push­ing a false nar­ra­tive are just telling him to “shut up” about it. As we will see, Lecrae has exhib­it­ed a pat­tern of assum­ing false nar­ra­tives that paint white police offi­cers as vil­lains, then dis­miss­es any­one who would point out the false­hood as lack­ing com­pas­sion.

Because Lecrae has delet­ed his tweets from before 2020, we can only spec­u­late as to which of his posts caused the most back­lash in the begin­ning. How­ev­er, thanks to pri­or writ­ings, in addi­tion to tweets avail­able on the Way­back Machine, we have accessed some of Lecrae’s past and present state­ments which shed light on what he was think­ing in 2014 around the time when this woke shift was tak­ing place. For instance, regard­ing the police shoot­ing of Michael Brown after Barack Obama’s Depart­ment of Jus­tice found no evi­dence to indict offi­cer Dar­ren Wil­son for mur­der, Lecrae said the fol­low­ing: “So what’s hap­pened in Fer­gu­son is not immune from bias. And while I can’t say who is guilty and who isn’t, I can say that when you iso­late this case, it’s easy to over­look the sys­temic oppres­sion that our coun­try was built off of and how it affects every­thing.” As ear­ly as 2014, we have state­ments from Lecrae say­ing that Amer­i­ca was found­ed on “sys­temic oppres­sion.” Note that Lecrae unam­bigu­ous­ly declares that he does not know whether Brown was mur­dered here in this 2014 state­ment, because his sto­ry has changed.

Lecrae fur­ther elab­o­rates on this par­tic­u­lar peri­od of time in the video com­pan­ion to his book, “I Am Restored”, in which he asserts:

Things start­ed to shift for me when…I wres­tled with what hap­pened with Trayvon Mar­tin, and then I spoke up a lit­tle loud­er about Michael Brown after [he] was mur­dered. And I didn’t real­ize that there were so many dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. I thought that every­body who was God-fear­ing was sad­dened by this mur­der. And I didn’t real­ize that there was polit­i­cal ideals that went along with all of it. When I start­ed speak­ing out about issues of jus­tice, God’s peo­ple did not love me. They did not embrace me. And what should’ve been a peo­ple wound became a God wound. These peo­ple had turned their backs on me, but I lumped them all in with God and I said, God has turned his back on me because his peo­ple did. So I became embit­tered with all of it. 

One strik­ing fea­ture of Lecrae’s rhetoric in this quote is the utter incon­sis­ten­cy between his 2014 state­ment about Michael Brown’s shoot­ing, ver­sus his asser­tion in 2021. Here he says that Michael Brown “was mur­dered” where­as in 2014 Lecrae said “I can’t say who is guilty and who isn’t.” There­fore, one of the two state­ments is untrust­wor­thy, and nei­ther are cred­i­ble claims because we can­not know which one is Lecrae’s hon­est belief. If Lecrae was so hurt by Chris­tians’ denial of what he calls the “mur­der” of Michael Brown, then why was he him­self say­ing he didn’t know whether Brown was mur­dered in 2014? Nev­er­the­less, 2021 Lecrae not only changes his sto­ry on Michael Brown, he also accus­es the body of Christ of not car­ing about the “mur­der” of Brown, with­out any evi­dence that he was mur­dered in the first place, and in the face of a moun­tain of coun­ter­vail­ing evi­dence. How­ev­er dubi­ous this sto­ry may seem, it is the nar­ra­tive Lecrae has woven regard­ing why he shift­ed from rap­ping about main­ly Chris­t­ian themes to embrac­ing wok­e­ness.

Lecrae’s Woke The­ol­o­gy

In a March 2023 livestream, Lecrae claimed the fol­low­ing in response to a fan ask­ing whether he is woke:

I hate the word woke. I didn’t always hate it because it was in style. It’s a slang term in the black com­mu­ni­ty. That’s all. It’s not what­ev­er the con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal Fox News agen­da has defined it as…So what­ev­er peo­ple have decid­ed woke is, they’ve rede­fined it. And I don’t even like it because it’s an old term. It just means be aware. Keep your eyes open. That’s it. That was years ago. We don’t even use the term any­more.

Accord­ing to Lecrae, he does not like being char­ac­ter­ized as woke, and con­ser­v­a­tives have stolen the term and rede­fined it. There­fore, we will be care­ful to define what we mean by “woke” and why we believe the label applies to Lecrae. Despite Lecrae’s asser­tion to the con­trary, for many years, the term “woke” has been ubiq­ui­tous­ly used in acad­e­mia and in social media to refer to a per­son who has a “crit­i­cal con­scious­ness” of the var­i­ous oppres­sions that vic­tim groups expe­ri­ence, clas­si­fied by race, sex, gen­der “iden­ti­ty”, etc. In her book, “Teach­ing While White,” Crit­i­cal The­o­rist Lau­ra Roy gives us a suc­cinct def­i­n­i­tion of woke: “The notion of ‘get­ting woke’…is defined as being acute­ly aware of racial and social injustice—not just aware­ness and acknowl­edg­ment of iso­lat­ed inci­dents, but aware­ness from a posi­tion of under­stand­ing sys­temic and insti­tu­tion­al racism.” While we acknowl­edge that Lecrae is not com­plete­ly “woke” in the sense of adher­ing to the entire ide­ol­o­gy of inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty by embrac­ing the oppressed sta­tus of every inter­sec­tion­al iden­ti­ty group, this pro­file will prove that at the very least, Lecrae is racial­ly woke accord­ing to the aca­d­e­m­ic def­i­n­i­tion. 

Sys­temic Racism

The first major evi­dence that Lecrae is woke is found in the fact that, as we’ve seen, he has embraced the idea of sys­temic racism and oppres­sion. In a 2016 inter­view, Lecrae assert­ed the fol­low­ing regard­ing the sub­ject:

Race in Amer­i­ca is a social con­struct that cre­ates these bar­ri­ers for the haves and the have nots. Some peo­ple mat­ter, some peo­ple don’t matter…If you’re inhal­ing tox­ic gas every day, but you’re like ‘well, I don’t real­ly smell it,’ but you’re still inhal­ing it…it’s still here. That’s racism in America…You may not see [it] as obvi­ous as you would think, but it’s still toxic…People always will crit­i­cize you when you bring up…systemic racism…Think of the eth­nic­i­ties that run most major cor­po­ra­tions that are behind most of every­thing that’s going on in Amer­i­ca. It took 45 [pres­i­den­cies] to get an African Amer­i­can president…If you look­ing for movies to go watch…be Asian or be His­pan­ic or be black and look for some­body who looks like you down that list. You’re going to see fif­teen movies, you’re not going to see any­body that rep­re­sents your eth­nic­i­ty.

In this quote, Lecrae is expound­ing on the idea of sys­temic racism. While he nev­er ful­ly explains the con­cept in a suc­cinct def­i­n­i­tion, Lecrae sur­mis­es that sys­temic racism is like breath­ing tox­ic air that one is unaware of. Three exam­ples of this phe­nom­e­non he gives are the fact that the major cor­po­ra­tions are run by white peo­ple, that it took a long time for a black pres­i­dent to be elect­ed, and that there are more white char­ac­ters than black char­ac­ters in movies. In a dif­fer­ent inter­view, Lecrae gave the exam­ple that a white man assumed he liked bas­ket­ball as an exam­ple of racism, even though he does in fact like bas­ket­ball. 

One would there­fore have to ask, accord­ing to Lecrae’s idea of sys­temic racism, is South Korea sys­tem­i­cal­ly racist in favor of the Kore­ans? After all, theirs is the major­i­ty cul­ture, their elect­ed offi­cials are Kore­an, and their shows and music fea­ture more Kore­ans than peo­ple of oth­er eth­nic­i­ties. Or, is being the major­i­ty cul­ture only a bad thing when white peo­ple are the major­i­ty?

Anoth­er glar­ing prob­lem with this quote is that Lecrae claims the main issue with race in Amer­i­ca is the bar­ri­ers it cre­ates for “the haves and the have-nots.” This is clas­sic Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry and Marx­ism, in which white peo­ple are char­ac­ter­ized as the “haves” who are pit­ted against the non­whites, who are the “have nots”. In oth­er words, whites have replaced the bour­geoisie in clas­si­cal Marx­ism, and blacks have replaced the pro­le­tari­at, where there must be a rev­o­lu­tion to over­throw the white cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem in favor of an equi­table (social­ist) soci­ety.

To be fair, Lecrae would not go so far as to say that he would like to see social­ism replace cap­i­tal­ism, at least in pub­lic. For exam­ple, in a March 2021 tweet, Lecrae unequiv­o­cal­ly stat­ed, “I’m not a Marx­ist”:

How­ev­er, this begs the ques­tion: if Lecrae is not a Marx­ist, then why did he char­ac­ter­ize the prob­lem of race in Amer­i­ca as bar­ri­ers for “the haves and the have-nots”? Per­haps a deep­er ques­tion is raised in the fol­low­ing 2020 Lecrae tweet regard­ing abor­tion and sys­temic racism:

Here, Lecrae main­tains that the “income Gap between White peo­ple and peo­ple of col­or” is pri­ma facie evi­dence of “sys­temic racism.” Thus, while dis­avow­ing Marx­ism in name, Lecrae com­plains about an income gap that is the nat­ur­al result of a cap­i­tal­is­tic soci­ety. The pre­sup­po­si­tion that an “income gap” between peo­ple groups is inher­ent­ly racist, is a staunch­ly Marx­ist per­spec­tive because it pre­sup­pos­es that, absent sys­temic dis­crim­i­na­tion, all out­comes would approx­i­mate income equal­i­ty. Lecrae may not want to admit that he desires equal­i­ty of out­come (Marx­ism), but his evi­dence of sys­temic racism is inequal­i­ty of out­come. 

Anoth­er very alarm­ing evi­dence that Lecrae holds to Marx­ist posi­tions regard­ing sys­temic oppres­sion is that in 2014, he rec­om­mend­ed the book, “The Cross and the Lynch­ing Tree” by James Cone to help his white friends “get it”:

First­ly, this same James Cone is an avowed Marx­ist. In his book, “For My Peo­ple,” Cone writes, “The Chris­t­ian faith does not pos­sess in its nature the means for ana­lyz­ing the struc­ture of cap­i­tal­ism. Marx­ism as a tool of social analy­sis can dis­close the gap between appear­ance and real­i­ty, and there­by help Chris­tians to see how things real­ly are.” To make mat­ters worse, in “A Black Lib­er­a­tion of The­ol­o­gy,” Cone refers to white peo­ple as “dev­ils” and “antichrists”. Third­ly, in “The Cross and the Lynch­ing Tree,” the cen­tral the­sis is that the cross is mere­ly a metaphor for black lib­er­a­tion from white, cap­i­tal­ist oppres­sion, and not sal­va­tion of the indi­vid­ual soul from sin. From the fore­go­ing pieces of evi­dence, it is clear that Lecrae has embraced woke the­ol­o­gy, whether he wants to admit it or not.

Stand­point Epis­te­mol­o­gy

A sec­ond major issue with Lecrae is his implic­it embrac­ing of stand­point epis­te­mol­o­gy. In a recent inter­view, regard­ing his black iden­ti­ty, Lecrae explained that, “For black peo­ple, I think we think in terms of a col­lec­tive van­tage point or a col­lec­tive his­to­ry, and a col­lec­tive culture…[F]or black peo­ple, if we go into a restau­rant and we see a black per­son act­ing crazy, there’s a sense in us to say, ‘man, what are we doing?’…” Basi­cal­ly, Lecrae is say­ing that he sees him­self as a part of a black col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, and that he shares a group iden­ti­ty with oth­er peo­ple based on the lev­el of melanin in their skin. The phrase “col­lec­tive van­tage point” also implies that Lecrae believes that being black gives some­one a unique sub­jec­tive per­spec­tive that oth­ers can­not access.

In addi­tion to a unique per­spec­tive for blacks, Lecrae also believes that white men have a sub­jec­tive per­spec­tive that makes their inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible incom­plete. In the “Why I Stay” pod­cast, Lecrae stat­ed the fol­low­ing about his the­o­log­i­cal influ­ences in his ear­ly career:

So I was very attract­ed by the intel­lec­tu­al side of Chris­tian­i­ty which was most­ly white men…It was sub­con­scious. You weren’t real­ly pay­ing atten­tion to the fact that, oh you’re just lis­ten­ing to a lot of white men’s thoughts…You were just read­ing a book because it appealed to your intel­lect. And I didn’t real­ize that I was also read­ing their cul­ture into my faith. I didn’t catch that either. So I was just read­ing a book. And so their per­spec­tives became my per­spec­tives. And then I…begin to frown on black pas­tors and the­olo­gians because they were more…emotional and ser­vices, and less [intel­lec­tu­al rig­or]. And I was like, ‘man, why aren’t y’all think­ing like this? That’s wrong. And that doesn’t make sense.’ And so, I began to have this dis­dain and kind of prej­u­dice toward black teach­ers…

In his the­o­log­i­cal stud­ies, Lecrae indi­cates that he stud­ied “most­ly white men” and that their cul­ture had affect­ed his faith. How­ev­er, he does not explain what errors the white men com­mit­ted, just that they were lack­ing the “emo­tion and ser­vices” ori­ent­ed approach of black pas­tors. This does not clar­i­fy how the white the­olo­gians Lecrae read were mis­in­ter­pret­ing the Bible, only that the black pas­tors had a unique per­spec­tive that white the­olo­gians as a col­lec­tive group iden­ti­ty can­not access because of their dif­fer­ent cul­ture and per­spec­tive. It clear­ly fol­lows that Lecrae has embraced this rad­i­cal form of post­mod­ern sub­jec­tiv­i­ty because he has adopt­ed some form of stand­point the­o­ry.

As if this evi­dence were not enough to show Lecrae’s adop­tion of stand­point the­o­ry, con­sid­er his state­ment about lis­ten­ing to the expe­ri­ences of oppres­sion black Amer­i­cans endure:

You just can’t see it unless you walk in those shoes. You can’t ask me, what’s life like in Chi­na? I don’t know, I don’t live in Chi­na, I don’t expe­ri­ence the things peo­ple expe­ri­ence in Chi­na. So it’s igno­rant for me to be like, ‘that doesn’t hap­pen’ or ‘that’s not real.’ And it’s like, do you have those rela­tion­ships?… When was the last time you’ve had in-depth con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple from dif­fer­ent eth­nic­i­ties and races, and asked what their day-to-day real­i­ties are like?

Lecrae here betrays the ide­o­log­i­cal under­pin­ning of his pre­vi­ous state­ments regard­ing white male the­olo­gians and think­ing in terms of a col­lec­tive black iden­ti­ty: he believes that one can­not under­stand a person’s lived expe­ri­ence of oppres­sion from the van­tage point of a dif­fer­ent eth­nic group. 

Par­tial­i­ty

On a fun­da­men­tal lev­el, Lecrae views his black iden­ti­ty in such a way that it caus­es him to open­ly embrace par­tial­i­ty toward those with more melanin in their skin. A recent inter­view in the con­text of why Lecrae embraces his black iden­ti­ty demon­strates this dis­po­si­tion:

When you say to me, the Los Ange­les Lak­ers are the best team in the world, and I grew up a Knicks fan, I feel a lit­tle way about that. Wait. Do you mean you hate the Knicks? And it’s not that I hate the Knicks…It’s that I love my team, and there’s noth­ing wrong with that. And so, if you were able to say, ‘oh, I spent some time with Lecrae, and I noticed he grew up in LA, so [he’s] embody­ing the LA cul­ture, it was his dad’s favorite team, his dad passed away, I see why he’s such a Lak­ers fan.’ That’s the nuance of it. And when you don’t take time to under­stand the nuance, you feel a way inter­nal­ly.

Obvi­ous­ly, Lecrae sees him­self as a mem­ber of “team black” and sees black peo­ple as “the best team in the world” in an anal­o­gous way to how sports fans view their own team. To jus­ti­fy this pos­ture, he main­tains that cul­ture and tra­di­tion estab­lish one’s biased view toward their own eth­nic­i­ty. 

Punch­ing Right

Dur­ing polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions, Lecrae open­ly acknowl­edges that he has dis­agree­ments with both the Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can par­ties. On the one hand, he crit­i­cizes the left for sup­port­ing abor­tion. On the oth­er hand, he chas­tis­es the right for not being racial­ly woke enough. In a tweet men­tioned ear­li­er in this pro­file, Lecrae stat­ed “I’m polit­i­cal­ly agnos­tic.” How­ev­er, when one observes the rhetoric Lecrae uti­lizes to crit­i­cize both sides, he metaphor­i­cal­ly uses a care­ful scalpel to dis­agree with the left, but a chain­saw to go after the right. 

For exam­ple, Lecrae epit­o­mized these unequal weights and mea­sures when he remarked about which polit­i­cal par­ty one should vote for: “Some peo­ple will say ‘hey, the con­ser­v­a­tive or the Repub­li­can par­ty upholds the lives of the unborn, and some par­tic­u­lar con­ser­v­a­tive moral val­ues. And then oth­ers will say ‘the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty or the par­ties of the like uphold eth­i­cal val­ues such as ‘love your neigh­bor as your­self,’ the jus­tice of the oppressed, which is all through­out the Old Tes­ta­ment…” In anoth­er inter­view, Lecrae fur­ther illus­trat­ed the point when he stat­ed that, “when you care about unborn babies, you’re pro life and con­ser­v­a­tive. But when you care about the lives of African Amer­i­cans, you are polit­i­cal­ly pro­gres­sive or lib­er­al.” In both of these exam­ples, Lecrae accu­rate­ly por­trays the Repub­li­cans’ dis­agree­ment with the left on abor­tion and does so in pre­cise terms. By con­trast, Lecrae implies that Repub­li­cans fail to love their neigh­bor, do not uphold jus­tice, and do not care about the lives of black peo­ple. Evi­dent­ly, Lecrae is only con­cerned with nuance and char­i­ty with one polit­i­cal par­ty, but not with the oth­er.

This is obvi­ous, not only in Lecrae’s words, but also in his actions. In response to con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Char­lie Kirk call­ing out Lecrae for appear­ing at a ral­ly for a pro-abor­tion can­di­date for Sen­ate, Raphael Warnock, Lecrae replied,

I don’t think peo­ple see the amount of racist rhetoric that comes out they mouth when they try to can­cel. You rep­re­sent one of the largest major­i­ty white insti­tu­tions and orga­ni­za­tions out there, and you’re say­ing, ‘don’t invite this black man into anoth­er church again.’…All the white suprema­cy wrapped up in that is crazy.

When it comes to a con­ser­v­a­tive pun­dit, Lecrae has no prob­lem accus­ing him of spew­ing racist rhetoric for right­ly point­ing out the hypocrisy in per­form­ing at a polit­i­cal ral­ly for a pro-abor­tion can­di­date. Last­ly, right after Don­ald Trump’s elec­tion, Lecrae retweet­ed a sto­ry about protest from the pub­lic about his vic­to­ry, again demon­strat­ing Lecrae’s polit­i­cal bias to the left despite protes­ta­tions to the con­trary.

Strik­ing­ly, after thor­ough research, we could not find one exam­ple of Lecrae crit­i­ciz­ing a politi­cian, com­men­ta­tor, or artist for their Demo­c­rat views. How­ev­er, we could find evi­dence of Lecrae sup­port­ing Democ­rats in polit­i­cal races such as Warnock, in addi­tion to Stacey Abrams, the Geor­gia can­di­date for gov­er­nor who espous­es gay mar­riage, trans­gen­der males par­tic­i­pat­ing in female sports, and unre­strict­ed abor­tion for all 9 months of preg­nan­cy. 

Anti-Amer­i­can Rhetoric

While Lecrae would reject the label of “anti-Amer­i­can”, his own state­ments on the top­ic paint a stark­ly dif­fer­ent pic­ture. In his fore­word to the woke author Jemar Tisby’s book, “The Col­or of Com­pro­mise,” Lecrae accus­es Amer­i­ca of cen­ter­ing “white­ness” and of being a racist nation:

We live in a coun­try cen­tered around white­ness that dis­re­gards how the image of God is on mag­nif­i­cent dis­play in non­white bod­ies (and his­to­ries and the­olo­gies, etc.)…[Tisby] has traced our country’s wicked, racist his­to­ry and demon­strat­ed how the church has been com­plic­it in that work.

Addi­tion­al­ly, Lecrae believes that it is some­how unchris­t­ian to be patri­ot­ic toward Amer­i­ca: “My faith is not col­o­nized or politi­cized, or nation­al­ized. I think what peo­ple think of a Chris­t­ian, they have this patri­ot­ic, nation­al­is­tic, red-blood­ed Repub­li­can [in mind]. And they don’t give me room…for nuance, they don’t give me room for com­plex­i­ty. We [Amer­i­cans] are com­plex and diverse, and we like dif­fer­ent stuff…I don’t sub­scribe to what I call Ameri-Chris­tian­i­ty which is like an Amer­i­can brand of faith. The ‘apple pie, go get ‘em guy’ faith…[Christianity and patri­o­tism] don’t have any­thing to do with each oth­er.” While true that Chris­tians should not idol­ize their love of coun­try above their love of God, Lecrae here states that it is some­how “Ameri-Chris­tian­i­ty” to believe that Amer­i­ca is found­ed on good, bib­li­cal morals and prin­ci­ples that ought to be defend­ed. 

Final­ly, Lecrae betrays his unamer­i­can mind­set when he came out against crit­ics of Col­in Kaeper­nick, the NFL foot­ball play­er who was the first to take a knee before a game dur­ing the Amer­i­can nation­al anthem while his­tor­i­cal­ly, every­one stood up with their hand over their heart. In response to why Kaeper­nick decid­ed to take a knee, he said that, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a coun­try that oppress­es Black peo­ple and peo­ple of col­or.” Kaeper­nick was lat­er seen at a prac­tice wear­ing socks with pic­tures of pigs wear­ing police uni­forms. In response to the back­lash against Kaeper­nick, Lecrae answered,

I think it’s hypocritical…you take a Col­in Kaeper­nick for exam­ple, and it’s like, you would demo­nize this man for acknowl­edg­ing the hypocrisy in this coun­try, and say, ‘because he’s not being patri­ot­ic, he just needs to be thrown away.’ And I think that’s ridicu­lous. That defeats the whole pur­pose of free­dom, and lib­er­ty, and jus­tice for all. That’s what he’s ask­ing for. And we’re real­ly going to demo­nize him and crim­i­nal­ize him for tak­ing a knee?…When peo­ple are mur­der­ing peo­ple in cold blood, and get­ting off with demo­niz­ing a foot­ball play­er for tak­ing a knee because he wants to see freedom…It’s crazy to me.