Jesus Is King, Kanye West’s new Christian album, is a big deal. Within a few minutes of its release, its songs took up nine out of the top ten spots on Apple Music. It was, of course, all over the pop-music press, but it also was the top item on National Review Online and widely remarked upon throughout the conservative and Evangelical media. Writing at NRO, Andrew T. Walker, a senior fellow in Christian ethics at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, asserted: “West has the anthropology of C. S. Lewis, the economics of Wilhelm Röpke, the cultural mood of Wendell Berry, and the defiance of Francis Schaeffer. In Jesus Is King and in interviews, we see a Kanye West upholding what Russell Kirk referred to as the Permanent Things. . . . His religious conversion could spark a revolution in morals, similar to what the conversion of 19th-century abolitionist William Wilberforce helped foster in England.”
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A.
You’re my No.1, with the lemonade.
Not exactly Augustine. And it would be too easy to simply poke fun. But the song in question, “Closed on Sunday,” is of some interest. It is a meditation on the Sabbath. (Chick-fil-A, a Christian-owned business, is famously closed on Sundays.) In the song, West advises (hectors, really) the listener to set aside social media and other technological distractions for the day and to turn instead to family and prayer. That is not the usual feel-good, milk-and-water, love-songs-to-Jesus style of pop-music Christianity. The Sabbath is about giving things up as well as enjoying them. Sohrab Ahmari, quondam antagonist of “David Frenchism,” has spoken wistfully about the possibility of reviving the so-called blue laws, which forbade certain kinds of commercial activity on Sundays. Taking the Sabbath seriously would represent a genuinely radical development for American Christianity, an assault on sensitive progressive cultural norms that would no doubt prove as controversial as homeschooling and abstinence advocacy. The rest of the album is similarly direct and uncompromising in its conception of Christian life and witness.
Is the album any good? It is the sort of thing you’ll like, if you like that sort of thing.