Author’s Note: As some people may have noticed, since this article was published in 2020, dear Kanye has gotten himself all tangled up in anti-Semitism: a real shame. In the interest of avoiding scandal to all of those trying to understand New Polity’s thought, I would like to point out that this refers to 2020 Kanye, not 2022+ Kanye.
There were many arguments that Evangelicals and Catholics used to sweeten the somewhat bitter pill of a Trump presidency. One was the biblical interpretation of Trump as a modern King Cyrus, a pagan king who protected the Jewish people in the Old Testament.
The logic was simple: While Donald Trump may be reprehensible in his personal behavior; while he may not be a Christian in the sense of understanding what Christianity means, reading the Bible, or asking forgiveness for his sins; still, God raises up, not only believers, but even unbelievers into the service of his faithful. By fighting for religious liberty and advancing Christian causes, Trump plays the role of a protector of a flock of which he is nevertheless not a part. A vote for him was not only a vote for God’s plan for America, but it was also a vote for Trump’s conversion to the Christian faith, which would result from his encounter with the Church that he has been ordained to politically protect.
Let the merits of this view stand on their own. I only want to argue that, by this same logic, it is conceivable that God has moved into the second phase of his plan for Christian America, in the possibility of the presidential leadership of Mr. Kanye West.
Kanye wheels a baggage cart of offensive statements (usually in the form of lyrics), morally dubious decisions, and outright scandalous associations with other celebrities — just like Trump. West is given to egoism — just like Trump. West faces the great difficulty of convincing the American public that his celebrity status is no hindrance to his capacity for leadership, but precisely the means by which he is enabled to stand up for the forgotten and the oppressed — which, I recall, was precisely the difficulty that Trump faced, and overcame. The difference is this: While Trump could only play the role of King Cyrus, West can assume the position of Nehemiah, who faithfully rebuilt Jerusalem; or Hezekiah, who assumed the throne of Judah in a time of a perverse, national commitment to idolatry, and “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord” (2 Kings 18:3). Christians continue to struggle to defend Donald Trump as a Christian, banking their acceptance of him on a sincere hope for his interior conversion — which “only God knows.” They’ll have no such difficulty with Kanye West. His conversion is clear, he has declared that “Jesus is King,” and it colors and informs every statement he makes.
Unlike Donald Trump, and certainly unlike Joe Biden, Kanye West actually appeals to the kingship of Jesus Christ as the ordering principle for his political action, saying: “It’s God’s country, we are doing everything in service to God, nobody but God no more. I am in service of our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ, and I put everything I get on the line to serve God.” This is not the language of a person who has been assigned a certain pro-Christian role, while remaining tragically outside of the faith. This is the language of one who takes the politics of a Christian society seriously — in which all good human law and righteous political authority are just instantiations of the eternal law of God. Kanye speaks the bubbling language of a convert. Who better than a convert to help convert the structures of sin that beset our nation?
Consider, for instance, the difference between Trump and Kanye’s support for prayer in public schools. Trump bases his support for school prayer on the freedom of individuals to be Christian. Recently, Trump argued that “in public schools around the country, authorities are stopping students and teachers from praying, sharing their faith or following their religious beliefs. It is totally unacceptable.” At a megachurch rally he said, “We will not allow faithful Americans to be bullied by the hard left...I’ll be taking action to safeguard students’ and teachers’ First Amendment rights to pray in our schools.”
Trump is obviously pro-Christian — but Kanye is Christian. Trump is a protector — but Kanye is a believer. Unlike Trump, Kanye West does not argue negatively. He does not argue for the legal protection of the individuals to express their Christianity, if they so desire. He argues positively. He argues for the enshrinement of the love of God as the fundamental orientation of our nation: “Reinstate in God’s state, in God’s country, the fear and love of God in all schools and organizations and you chill the fear and love of everything else.”
Kanye leads us away from a secular conception of freedom — freedom-from. When we are free-from, we are free from those who would attack our right to pray — in the exact same manner that a Satanist is free from those who would attack his right to pray to Satan. Kanye leads us to consider a new kind of freedom — freedom-for. When we learn to “fear and love” God, in and through the conversion of our institutions and the persons that constitute them to the God of Love, we are free, not to do evil or make violence, but to do good and to make peace. The love of God frees us for good, even as it frees us from loving and fearing powerful men, money, and the allures of this world.
This “battle-cry of freedom” shows that Kanye is willing to stretch out of the straitjacket of secularism. Superficially, the creed of secularism is a friend to the creed of Christianity, accepting it alongside Buddhism and Islam as “one possible option among many.” Secularism says one may be a Christian — just so long as Christianity is redefined as lacking political importance, a “private belief system,” a lifestyle lived in the same mode and manner that one might otherwise live as a witch, a libertarian, or an atheist.
This “friend” to Christianity is a wolf. Secularism is the compromise that America made when it founded itself on the rights granted to individuals by “Nature’s God” — an abstract, vague, all-encompassing power — rather than the God of History, revealed in all His particularity in the person of Jesus Christ. A good compromise makes everyone unhappy, and apparently unfaithful as well: Americans are leaving the Church.
When Christians define their Christianity as a merely individual, private choice (one way of approaching Nature’s God among others) then Christianity loses its civilization-building power. It ceases to convince. It begins to smell like a niche ideology, rather than the real means by which that just and peaceful social order called the Kingdom of Heaven can be instantiated on Earth. “Private Christianity” raises its fists as an interior, therapeutic disposition of people choosing to be Christian within a social order antithetical to the love and peace it preaches — but its fists are falling soft and its arms are giving out. We are not private individuals. We are social, political creatures. We don’t want the private peace that comes from therapy, but the public peace that comes from Christ, instantiated in our families, neighborhoods, cities, and nations. We want a Christianity that ends wars, not just personal malaises; that redeems nations and the structures they erect, not just individuals, all else be damned; that gives grace to our leaders, enabling them to transcend their sinfulness and ignorance in order to enact good laws, rather than a Christianity that graces our “private lives,” leaving the political sphere untouched — as an operation of the human will that somehow escapes the saving plan of Christ.
Liberalism is an education of the Christian person into the belief that Christianity only has private significance. It is a school, free and attended by all, for leaving the Church, bored by its irrelevance and stifled by the height of its ceiling, which stops at the paltry height of every private person.
Kanye West raises the ceiling. He opens the windows. He invites the world to church, rather than inviting the church into the violence and limitations of the world. By openly advocating for Jesus Christ as true King of America; by naming the love of God as the ordering principle of the social order he would establish; Kanye West skips over the deadlock of secularism and gives Christians the capacity to realize a world in which the Incarnation of Jesus Christ matters, not just for me (and who knows, maybe for you) but for the good common to us all; for America.
Christians have a choice: We may continue to concede the political sphere to the philosophy of liberalism, which posits the marble halls of political power and the boardrooms of economic power as secular “safe-spaces” in which it is rightfully said “God is dead; and we have killed him.” Or, we can vote for Kanye West, whose very words and life trouble and contradict the Christian despair which would limit itself to the choice of a private individual, for fear of becoming what Jesus Christ meant it to be — a Kingdom.