What’s Taking Us So Long: An Examination of the Scholarship of Hip-Hop in African American Religious Studies

*A Paper Given at the National Council of Black Studies on March 18, 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana

by Andre E. Johnson, PhD
ajohnson@memphisseminary.edu
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Religion and African American Studies at Memphis Theological Seminary

Introduction

Since coming on the scene from the dilapidated and decaying streets of New York, Hip Hop has been a powerful phenomenon. Whether one is inclined to see hip hop as a positive or negative influence, the culture has captured the minds and hearts of millions around the world. While many thought hip hop to be a fad, many culture critics caught hold of this phenomenon early on and began to chronicle the new sub-culture. In 1985, Nelson George produced Fresh, Hip Hop Don’t Stop, a book that contained nearly a hundred photographs that celebrated hip hop and its culture. Following George’s book, many magazines, newspapers and other popular media forums focused attention on hip hop, while the academy remained loathe to the study of hip hop.
However, in 1994 the academy’s official dis of hip hop would end with Tricia Rose’s seminal work, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. After her work, some in the academy, no longer caught up in philosophical arguments and debates about whether the academy if the proper forum for the study of hip hop, begin to produce innovative scholarship and begin to start a new filed of study. Led by “New Jack Cultural Studies scholars, such as Rose, Russell Potter, Michael Eric Dyson and others, hip hop found its way into the halls of academia and after a tenuous start at best, it has now found a home in many of our academic journals and other publications. While it would have been a major deal to find someone in any department teaching a hip hop course of any kind, one can now find many hip hop course offerings on many college and university campuses housed in several disciplines.
However, while other disciplines have made peace with hip hop, we cannot say the same about religious studies. Religious studies as a discipline is still hesitant about engaging hip hop and while there are many reasons for this apprehension, one of the main reasons I believe is how hip hop is currently constructed. As framed and constructed by the media and even some practitioners, hip hop is considered a hyper-violent, misogynistic, materialistic and, a so called heathenistic culture devoid of anything holy, sacred and good. Indeed, many spiritual leaders of all faiths indict the entire culture of hip-hop and promote it as the work of the devil (or Evil One). Therefore, there is no reason to engage hip hop because the culture is devoid of anything good. It is this belief that limits research from religious studies scholars.
While it is not surprising to find within the field of Religious Studies this response, it is quite another to find it within the field of African American Religious Studies. African American Religious Studies got its start along side the Black Studies movement in the late 1960’s. Like its secular and at times volatile cousin, Black Religious Studies challenged status quo, reinterpreted theoretical presuppositions, and offered new and exciting theories of its own. The foreparents of the movement maintained that Blacks viewed God and religion entirely different from whites and saw to ground much of the Black religious traditions in Africa instead of Europe. Scholars such as James Cone, Gayraud Wilmore, Delores Williams, Jacquelyn Grant and a host of others, along with many students, stood up to entrenched power structures at seminaries and divinity schools to usher in new ideas and new ways of thinking.
However, as hip hop begin to matriculate and develop, many in the African American religious community turned the proverbial deaf ear and a blind eye towards the culture. During hip hop’s rise in the late 80’s and 90’s, many scholars within African American religious studies rejected hip hop as a definitive voice of many who found themselves on the margins, trapped by the sweeping tide of conservative policies that left many urban areas more desolate. While many Black religious studies scholars showed empathy and sympathy for Black Power advocates a generation before, these same scholars dismissed hip hop as one of the authentic voices in Black America. Black theologians could not understand the pain and anger found in gangsta rap and womanist theorists saw hip hop’s misogyny as not only repugnant and hateful to women but to the Black community as a whole.

This narrative—that hip hop offers nothing in the way of religion and thus unworthy of study from Religious Studies scholars permeates throughout the discipline even today. However, this could be further from the truth. From its beginning, I suggest that hip hop has a profound spirituality and advocates religious views—and while not orthodox or systemic in anyway, nevertheless, many in traditional orthodox religions would find the theological underpinnings in hip hop comforting, empowering, and liberating.

In the rest of this paper, I offer a brief literature review of scholarship within African American religious studies and offer some suggestions as to the direction religious studies scholars need to head to establish this field.

Literature Review

While other disciplines were opening the doors to hip hop scholarship, Black Religious Studies came late to the party. One of the first books published that spoke on hip hop and religion of any kind was Anthony Pinn’s Noise and Spirit: The Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities of Rap Music. Published in 2003, this edited volume, while focusing on rap music, nevertheless opened the door to hip hop’s spiritual side. The essays collected in this volume, from well noted African American Religious Studies scholars such as Garth Baker-Fletcher, Juan Floyd-Thomas, and Ralph Watkins, demonstrated that hip hop has much more in common with the African American religious tradition than many previously thought. In addition, by not just focusing on Christianity, with this volume, Pinn also demonstrated the connections hip hop and the African American religious tradition has in common with other religions. The African American religious tradition has always been much bigger than Christianity and by using hip hop as the vehicle; Pinn helps us to see this reality.

The next book published was Five Percenter Rap, by Felecia Miyawaka in 2005. Her insightful work focused on the religious themes developed and found in the work of the five percenter nation. Though not written by a religious scholar, Miyawaka offers a deft account of the spirituality and theology of the five percent nation from interviews and an analysis of their texts. Her works demonstrates that while rapping and performing within a secular context, groups such as Poor Righteous Teachers, Rakim, Wu-Tang Clan and Erika Baydu, spoke from a well of spiritual insight and knowledge.

The next book published in 2005 was James Perkinson’s Shamanism Racism and Hip Hop culture. While the first two books focused entirely on the element of rap music, Perkinson is the first within religious studies to center his analysis on hip hop culture. In this collection of essays, Perkinson become one of the first to theorize hip hop culture spiritually. By way of personal narrative and testimony, Perkinson argued that the spiritual flavor of hip hop can position itself as a response to racism and by way of shamanism, again, part of the African and African American religious tradition, can begin to strengthen communities.

After these books and several other articles published in both academic and popular journals and magazines, the Black Church woke up to the fact that after 30 plus years, hip hop was not going away anytime soon. Recently, there has been a slew of books published that necessarily do not focused on the spirituality of hip hop and what it means, but on how the church can relate to hip hop culture. In short, these books focus on evangelism and how can the church be more proactive in understanding the culture. Books such as the Hip Hop Church, Disciples of the Street, Timothy Holder’s The Hip Hop Prayer Book, and the aforementioned Watkins, Connecting with the Hip Hop Generation are part of this genre.

New Directions and Conclusion

While one can see there is still much more to do in this field, I am glad to report that newly minted Ph.D.’s, other scholars awaiting defense dates, and some awaiting acceptance into doctoral programs, are beginning the work. To my knowledge, I taught the first hip hop class in the country at any accredited seminary or divinity school at Memphis Theological Seminary. Since that time in 2005, while there is not a plethora of courses offered at seminary and divinity schools, there has been an upsurge in conferences, workshops, and weekend class offerings that discuss hip hop theology/spirituality.

I have also attended the National Communication Association and the American Academy of Religion conferences along with this one and others to present papers on hip hop’s spirituality. While there, I have met with several scholars who would want to do this work but are not sure of what direction they need to take. Therefore, where do we go from here? Well, I suggest three major areas.

First, work must examine hip hop spirituality and theology. We must go beyond rap music or textual examples, we must begin to examine clothes, dance, and in short, the entire hip hop performance. This could also lead to the reappearance of early hip hop elements such as break dancing and graffiti.

Second, we should welcome multiple methodologies in doing this work. Hip hop is the ultimate interdisciplinary phenomenon, taking us into music, communications, culture studies, black studies, anthropology and several others. All of those disciplines have methods appropriate to its field. We should welcome them to examine the spirituality hip hop. However, as I mentioned at the top of the paper, hip hop is enjoying major attention and some are considering hip hop studies as its own field. If this is the case, then methods would be developed and thus used in examining hip hop religious centering as well.

Lastly, we should keep on writing. While many still are not on board as of yet, we should continue to speak. I believe hip hop’s religious sensibilities have much to offer to the public as well as the academy. For example, just in my own research of those sensibilities, hip hop’s God is much bigger than many of the god’s of our own religion. This God is more inclusive, more tolerant and more understanding than the god that society seemed to construct for itself. This god goes by several names and cannot be located into one position. This god understands the struggle, the pain and the game that one has to play in order to survive. I wonder how these and other theological presuppositions would work in the broader public as a rhetorical or public theology. It would be great to find out and the only way we will get there is if we keep doing the work and supporting one another.