(Image source: The Gospel Coalition)

The following excerpt comes from Erika Gault’s Networking the Black Church: Digital Black Christians and Hip Hop. The book explores how hip hop, social media, and new technologies have transformed the lives of young adult Black Christians.

The excerpt comes from the book’s preface.

***

My mother bought me my first writing tablet “for my thoughts” when I was about five or six. Even then, I felt “the call” to write. I wrote my first poem in the second grade for my teacher Mrs. Nesbit’s going away party:

I want you to go
I want you to go
but before you go
I want you to know
I love you so.

She bounded towards me with her arms flung open wide, enveloping my little brown self in her plump rosy arms. I was astounded. Till then, I had not known my words could inspire such emotion.

***

It was a small store front church in South Carolina that ran along the shabby end of Sumter’s more picturesque downtown. Sandwiched between a barbershop and beauty salon, it was the holiness Pentecostal church that my father pastored. Each summer, just prior to the start of the school year, our church hosted a revival. I hated it. The revivalists always stayed in our home, taking over the bedroom my sister and I shared. Past and present transgressions would be uncovered and used as cause for more tarrying— a process of mournful waiting and petitioning for the Holy Spirit’s presence—and fasting. Though less intrigued by the latter, tarrying was of some interest to me. I had seen other child seekers on bended knees before the altar repetitively calling on the name of Jesus as missionaries whispered words of encouragement and admonition in their ears. They often leapt to their feet shouting, smiling, and testifying about having been made new. More than anything, I was curious to know what that felt like.

***

“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” I shouted as loudly as my little lungs allowed.

“You got to call Him like you want Him!” the evangelist shouted into my ear just as loudly.

In the background, I could hear my father along with the other members of the congregation singing, “Come by here de Lo-ord, Come by here. Oh-oh- Lo-or-od come by here! Somebodies calling Lo-ord. Come by here. Oh-oh- Lo-or-od come by here.”

I was six years old and I desperately wanted to be saved “with” the Holy Ghost like other children. I had been tarrying for a week and had decided that I would receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost that very night. Finally, I felt a break between the physical and spiritual. “See him on that cross!” my father cried in my ear. And I could. As I focused on Christ, called his name, and considered the magnitude of his sacrifice for me, the tears begin to flow. I saw Him come down from the cross and begin walking toward me, just as my father had said He would. I called, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” louder and faster until he was near to me, standing in front of me, taking me up in his rapturous embrace. I cried, smiled, and jumped about just as the other children had. What joy! Never mind that throughout the entire experience Jesus was a white man with sandy-blonde locks.

***

Of my siblings, Pep was the cool one, Keya was the pretty one, and I was the smart one. As we grew up, we learned to fit into our roles with amazing precision. Based on these roles, my brother and sister soon developed a base of fairly popular friends, girlfriends, and boyfriends. And I worked on my book collection. While my parents encouraged me in such pursuits, I longed to sit at the cool kids’ table. Keya and Pep seemed to fit in so effortlessly, while I remained, well, bookish to say the least. Few things are as accessible to Black Christian kids growing up in strict households as style in language. If you could not look cool, at least you could talk cool, and what was cooler than rap music? We shared lyrics everywhere: on the school bus, in class, wrote them out on notepaper and hid them in our trapper keepers. One day in fifth grade, a white student was summoned to the principal’s office for sharing “explicit” lyrics. Upon the teacher’s interception of them, the wide-eyed student exclaimed, “It’s not mine!” “Well whose is it?” the teacher shot back. Later questions regarding rap’s ownership, even when played out in our little country town middle school, had racial undertones. Whose is it? Everyone knew rap belonged to Blacks. The two teachers I overheard gossiping about the incident were both white. They described rap music as a poison spreading throughout the school. Rap was bad. But to us, bad was cool. Everyone else had seen the lyrics by then, so I felt left out. Later that day at home as Keya and I sat on our parents’ front porch after school, she pulled another folded, much handled copy from her notebook. I voraciously read over her shoulder hoping to glean the epistemologies of cool. After all, what’s cooler than “Ice, Ice, Baby?” So much for Blacks owning hip hop, much less rap music.

***

Perhaps seeing the influence of rap music, my parents offered us an alternative. We were allowed to purchase Hammer’s new cassette single, “That’s Why We Pray.” When Kirk Franklin and the family appeared on Gospel music shelves in 1995, many staunch Christian family friends opined that his music “just went too far.” But by Christmas, all the churches that we visited in my father’s fellowship were singing “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” decked out in red and Black outfits just like Franklin’s own family. By the following year, Franklin was a staple in our household. Salt of Salt-n-Peppa and the whole Nu Nation crew bounced back and forth across our TV screen as Franklin proclaimed,

“For those of you that think gospel music has gone too far.
You think we’ve gotten too radical with our message.
Well I got news for you, you ain’t heard nothin yet,
and if you don’t know now you know. Glory, Glory!!”

By then, our family had moved to Rochester, New York. My grandmother, who had come up from South Carolina to visit us for the holidays, sat in my father’s recliner with her legs crossed at the ankles, her cane slumped against one knee, shaking her head. “Hump-humph-humph,” was all she said.

***

A family friend gifted me a number of CDs with a few new West Coast gospel rappers that I cannot remember now. By then I was fourteen. While my musical priorities were quite underdeveloped, I still knew: This. Was. Not. Hip hop. It lacked the driving lyrical flow I had heard from the Wu Tang Clan, the narrative style of Tupac, or the dope lyricism of Illamatic. Christian hip hop was mad corny!

***

(TLC. Image source: Blake Tyers for Associated Press)

Christmas 1995. Overalls, Flannel Shirt, Timberlands, and a First Down Bubble jacket. They felt much cooler on my fifteen-year-old body than they do laid out here in words on the page more than twenty years later. A string of female emcees had appeared over the course of the nineties who had toyed with notions of gender normativity and encouraged young Black girls from neighborhoods like mine to do the same. These otherwise masculine displays of sexuality were okay in my household, for they paralleled social norms regarding Christian modesty. Everything was covered. Somewhere in the middle of my teen years, I learned how to circumvent my strict Christian upbringing by selectively borrowing acceptable swatches of hip hop culture. Thank you Queen Latifah, MC Light, DaBrat, and TLC for giving us Black Christian girls a way into the culture.

***

Debt to Lauryn Hill,
Us dark skinned, nappy headed girls
felt and held your Ohh-oh-oh-ooooo-ohhhs
Those notes of hope
No Monica, Brandy or Bey (before Jay) you made night all right
You made being conscious cool
Talked of God and gods, earth and Earths
And it was cool
to hear someone I knew
In the music
Jill Scott, Macy Gray, Erkayh Badu.
Them sistas carried me through
High school
Taught me it was cool to be conscious,
had me woke
while my Black Church slept.

***

It was an evening class in the first year of college that got me serious about spoken word. Bryon Bain taught a class titled “The Spoken Word.” Very much influenced by the hip hop bent of the class, my rhymes began to take on more of the culture by making use of a beat, internal rhyme structure, and a celebration of hip hop in my prose. That year, I saw Sarah Jones three times, twice at P.S. 121, and then on campus at NYU. I began performing at open mics on campus, at the Nuyorican, and, in my sophomore year, with YouthSpeaks at another newly opened spot called the Bowery Cafe. By the time Jessica Care Moore performed “I’m a Hip Hop Cheerleader” at a NAACP student club event, I could confidently shout back “Hip Hop! Hip Hop!”

Spoken word and hip hop had become as integral to my Christian identity as being Black.

***

From where I lived in 2001 the architecture looked like one of those 3-D puzzles. The morning’s own sharp edges made it feel as if every one of the buildings’ dimensions were jutting out and moving in on me in jagged domino-like succession. If you cared to, by pushing your face all the way against the glass and craning your neck, from my apartment window you could peer all the way down the crooked side alley that ran just off Water Street to see them jumping off the towers. I did not care to.

***

My roommate and I left our apartment at about 9:20 a.m. that day. We were waiting for the bus, while others milled about. No one had yet mentioned the possibility of a terrorist attack. When the first tower fell and began rolling down our street, we started running. We had never really liked each other, but that day I remember catching her hand as we ran. I remember us trying to pull each other along to safety. I remember looking back for a brief second to catch a view that haunted me for years afterward. Scraps from the building wafted through the air toward us like tiny bits of paper. But behind us, there were many more people being enveloped by the debris. The smoke grew like a monstrous beast, falling over itself as it bounded down the street.

Afterward, we walked for nearly an hour trying to get to friends in the Village. Once we got to Broome Street, we sat on the side of a curb to rest. I had never seen Lower Manhattan like this before. The streets were desolate.

When I’m scared and uncertain, I joke. “It’s a good thing I wore my new Nikes. Didn’t know we’d be in a fifty-yard dash today.” We laughed. Then, she looked back and up from where we had just come and nodded for me to do the same.

“It’s falling.”

Two frightened Black girls, we watched the world change that day.

***

A friend from college came home with me that next spring break. She was a staunch conservative. I was staunchly in love with Black people. We watched the Iraqi invasion together with my parents. She bowed her head in prayer as the attack begin. As a Christian, she was firmly in support of the war. I wondered how a Black woman like herself could separate her race from her faith. As a Black Christian, I was firmly against Bush and Bush’s war. We had fought and healed over this issue before, though it remained an uneasy peace. I had been horrified by the anti-Muslim attacks and slurs that had become all too common in the City. I was confused when Bush had walked confidently to the podium back in September to declare war on terror. It felt too close to my own history, too close to the state-sponsored terror on Black men and women I was learning about in Robin Kelly’s class that semester. Later in the semester, he encouraged us to participate in Walkout Day against the war. I joined the protest and heard young people my age deliver impassioned speeches in Washington Square Park. There were some, like Shani, who continued to believe their faith called them to support the Bush administration. But many more of us became increasingly radicalized after that. By the time Bobby Seale and then Sistah Souljah came to the campus, I was torn. Was Shani right? How do I reconcile my religion and my growing Black militancy?

***

“I’m leaving the Church.” Those words had sat like four hard stones in my throat for some time. Yet I hadn’t felt relieved in telling my parents. I had just felt their disappointment. I had finished seminary and was working on my PhD, while simultaneously serving as Youth Pastor and chairing a host of church committees and Bible studies when needed. I felt drained. The church lacked relevance in my life. There was no socially conscious message coming from our pulpit or in our mission. Our senior bishop had recently called a meeting in which she condemned rap music, calling it “unintelligible” and “of the devil.” She urged us to avoid Facebook and read the “Word” instead. I was drawing different lines between what was sacred and secular than my parents had. I felt myself being pressed into something I no longer was. So, I left.

***

It’s funny who you meet when you hang out on the margins. I began conducting interviews of gospel rappers when I moved to Buffalo, New York as a way of studying the merger between sacred and secular (i.e. hip hop and religion). It was 2008, and most local rappers were using online tools to make connections and create and share music. Up until that point, most of the creative spaces I had explored in my research were connected to Black protestant houses of worship. There were the hip hop open mic sessions that took place in one church’s multi-purpose room. There were the gospel rap performances sponsored by another local Black Church. Even the daily Christian hip hop radio broadcast I studied was part of another church’s larger ministry. Online spaces, however, were not mediated by Black Churches. Along with generational differences in internet usage, Black pastors and leaders were less likely than whites to go online; uneven technological access among racial groups meant local Black Churches had little to no online presence. That online space was where I was now able to examine eighteen to thirty-five year-old gospel rappers’ religious interactions with each other and their personal attempts to articulate religious identity for themselves.

***

It was 2010, just before the formation of the American Academy of Religion’s Critical Approaches to Hip Hop and Religion unit co-founded by Monica Miller and Chris Driscoll. In 2012, Monica Miller’s book Hip Hop and Religion forced many of us young scholars to rethink such constrained binaries as sacred/secular. There was a growing similarity between those gospel rappers’ story and my own. All of us were in our early adulthood, and all of us felt like Black Church misfits. I watched as many of them began using the web to find a place of belonging and to get their work out there as artists. I logged on to the internet and then hung around on Myspace and Facebook doing what I soon learned was digital ethnography. Along the way, I began posting my own poetry performances on YouTube, developing a website, and staying connected with other digital Black Christians looking for a place to belong through social media.

***

Art. Performance. Hip Hop. Christian. Black. Urban. Woman. Every part of me seemed at odds with other parts of my identity, so I wrote myself into the text. I wrote about my hip hop identity in poems and performed it in churches. I wrote about what it meant for me to be a Christian and Black and female, and I started performing in slam competitions.

And then there was Ntare.

***

I met Ntare at a poetry performance hosted by my employer. Later, I signed up to compete in a slam poetry event that Ntare was hosting. He had learned to make use of many facets of hip hop culture by advertising events, by attracting members of the culture, and by using DJs and even dancers in his performances. He was later instrumental in connecting me with many of the emcees I interviewed for my dissertation. We talked about everything: God. Performance. Poetry. He knew a wealth of hip hop history, and via YouTube, iTunes, and MTV Soul he schooled me on the aspects of the culture that my strict Christian upbringing hadn’t afforded me. I knew all things Black Church. He knew all things hip hop. It was a marriage made in Black Christianity and hip hop. He, as did I, loved. My. Whole. Self.

***

Eight years later, I ended up joining one of the Black Churches that I had studied, Elim Christian Fellowship. Eventually, I became ordained as one of the church elders. It might seem that I joined The Establishment, but this does not debunk everything I have laid out here in talking about the new socio-temporal world that Digital Black Christians have configured for themselves. In fact, it adds weight to this book’s thesis, that Digital Black Christians, through their webwork (networked racial religious performativity), have created a new space in and beyond the Black Church, one that is linguistic and socio-temporal in design. In the process, they are changing physically located Black Churches, modes of church activism, communication practices around evangelism and Christian identity, and the transmission and consumption of Black Church cultural practices in popular culture. In short, they are rewiring The System.

Erika Gault is Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies Program at the University of Arizona and co-editor of Beyond Christian Hip Hop: A Move Towards Christians and Hip Hop.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out our conversation with Erika Gault in episode 22 of the Revealer Podcast: “Black Christians and Hip Hop.”