Christian hip-hop artist, retailer clash

Popular hip-hop artist Sho Baraka has taken aim at Southern Baptist retailer LifeWay Christian Stores for dropping his album for including the word “penis,” a move that shows a growing tension between the black artist and his white evangelical fans.

A spokesman for LifeWay confirmed the retailer’s decision, saying in an email that customers complained about the language, but the representative declined to provide further details.

Christian bookstores don’t usually place rap albums by black activist artists front and center on their shelves. But in recent years, white evangelicals have embraced several black hip-hop artists such as chart-topping rappers Lecrae and Trip Lee, whose albums are sold on LifeWay’s website. Baraka, who was once part of Lecrae’s Reach Records label, said he upset LifeWay customers by including the anatomical reference in his album.

His album “The Narrative” debuted in the top 10 on iTunes last fall and was once described with high praise on LifeWay’s product page as “saturated in a Gospel worldview.” But, Baraka said, the retailer pulled his album last month after customers objected to the final track, which includes the lyrics:

“I was an insecure boy who just thought he was a genius

“But always pissed off, that’s because I thought with my penis

“It’s all strategic, I’m just asking us the reason

“Share my faith on the track, I’m just exorcising demons.”

Baraka said the song in question, “Piano Break, 33 A.D.” (a reference to Christ’s death), is about his past failures to live his life monogamously. It wasn’t profane in context, Baraka says, because it communicates how “God has been good in my life,” while acknowledging “how wretched and evil I am.”

“Like any retailer, LifeWay has a responsibility not to carry resources with content our customers consider inappropriate,” spokesman Marty King wrote in an email. “After receiving complaints about some language in The Narrative cd, LifeWay decided to no longer carry it.”

LifeWay got into a similar controversy in 2012 when progressive author Rachel Held Evans accused the retailer of not carrying her book over the use of the word “vagina.”

Baraka says that the retailer has a double standard when it comes to anatomical references in their books. Other books sold on their shelves use anatomical references. For instance, “Sheet Music,” a sex manual intended for Christian couples, contains 45 uses of the word “penis,” along with euphemisms like “Mr. Happy.”

Challenges attitudes

Frustrated with LifeWay’s choice, Baraka says the incident reflects a larger problem with American evangelicals, over three-quarters of whom are white. He believes his own culture, one shaped by a love for hip-hop and a pride in his ethnic heritage, is at odds with a Christianity dominated by white, political conservatives.

“The Narrative” is an album in praise of and in service to black people. The cover features a three-quarters profile of Baraka in clear homage to 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

The Atlanta-based artist taps into a black civil rights lineage, from “The New Jim Crow” scholar Michelle Alexander to 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley; many song titles on the 2016 album reference a significant date in black history (“Foreward, 1619,” “Maybe Both, 1865”). He is what old-school hip-hop fans would call “conscious” or what younger fans might call “woke.”

Baraka’s work reflects his larger mission: He challenges the attitudes of people of all political and religious stripes, even his own fan base on the left and the right.

Baraka’s conversion to Christianity while attending Tuskegee University led him into the world of Christian hip-hop. An early member of Lecrae’s Reach Records, Baraka, who attends Southern Baptist Blueprint Church in Atlanta, performed to packed-out sanctuaries of predominantly white, conservative evangelicals.

In recent years, Baraka has sought to carve out his own political path. Last year, he co-founded the AND Campaign, a coalition of urban Christians concerned with racial justice who seek solutions to the problems that primarily impact minorities. They want to chart a third way between the increasingly polarized two-party system, which Baraka believes forces black Christians to sacrifice significant aspects of their faith on the one hand and their politics on the other.

AND Campaign leaders draw inspiration from the civil rights work of Fannie Lou Hamer, who spoke out against Jim Crow-era voting restrictions while also vocally opposing abortion.