Using videos and lyrics from popular hip-hop artists such as the Fugees, Chance the Rapper, Bobby Shmurda and J.Cole intertwined with scripture and stories from the Bible, Dr. James Logan shared with Bluffton University students, faculty and staff why Christians should work side by side with the hip-hop generation—activists, organizers, practitioners, public intellectuals and ordinary people—to confront problems such as mass incarceration, religious and ethnic xenophobia, and political vindictiveness.
Logan, an author and professor at Earlham College, presented “The Art of Hip Hop Religion and Culture in Civil Society” during the 2017 Keeney Peace Lecture at Bluffton University.
“Peaceable Christians of the current age must pay attention to, and engage with the moral significance of hip-hop as an important religious and cultural phenomenon,” said Logan.
During the presentation, Logan noted that the five basic elements of hip-hop (DJing, rapping, graffiti art, dance and knowledge), “give those committed to a hip-hop way of life important narratives and resources for belonging to, and association with, something that gives life ultimate meaning and purpose.”
And because hip-hop holds such high esteem among younger generations, Logan explained he is working to understand Anabaptist faith, hope and love in the context of two powerful socio-cultural forces—one as ancient as human life itself, religion, and the other rather contemporary, hip-hop.
“Hip-hop as a cultural art, or a way of life, confronts many complex and subtle forms of human violence that are as far afield, yet inextricably connected, as spiritual doubt and warfare, police murders, poverty, mass incarceration…and yet, as many of us know well, hip-hop can be as death-dealing, misogynistic, and otherwise violent as any of the worst atrocities in modern times.”
While some Christians engage hip-hop as a risk of faith, Logan argued that Jesus surrounded himself with the kind of people society alienates, people like the ones who live their existence within the hip-hop generation. “Jesus embraced the alienated and despised, he loved them, he cared for them. He demonstrated the scandalous wages of love and grace and he died on a cross with two criminals hanging there alongside him,” said Logan.
“Committed Christians are often offended by the reprehensible grotesqueness of hip-hop, but supposedly we’re regularly reading our Bibles where there are horrific stories of human malice that scarcely move us today. We think the God we follow and the Biblical witness that is divine for us is somehow more sanitized than the world we live in today, but it is not.”
He added that hip-hop offers Christians a deeper understanding of what the costs of tracking and standing with the oppressed really entail in contemporary society.
Logan is a professor of religion and professor and director of African and African American Studies at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. His teaching and research cover many areas including the relationships between religion, ethics and politics in civil and public life.
Logan has published several works and is currently working on the manuscript, “The Limits of Perfection: Race, Nonviolence and Anabaptist Peace Church Assimilation into the American Social Order.”
Dr. Logan’s visit was possible because of a peace lectureship established in 1978 by the family of William Sr. and Kathryn Keeney to express appreciation for Bluffton’s influence and to strengthen the continuing peace witness among the community.
