Jul 24, 2026
By Kiel Hauck
Why Christian Hip Hop should embrace failure and move on.
by Kiel Hauck
In 2008, I penned an article for Christ and Pop Culture titled Why Christian Hip Hop is Not a Failure. It was an article written out of emotion, in response to a piece that placed a critical eye on the genre. My goal was to come to the defense of the music that impacted my life, though much of my response was driven by passion and a conviction that may have been misguided. I loved Christian hip hop, but was I really the one who should be speaking on its behalf?
I think most people took it with a grain of salt and responded with a shrug. If I could go back in time, I’d sit myself down and tell myself that the matter at hand wasn’t worth getting worked up over. After all, in a little over five years, I wouldn’t be listening to Christian hip hop anyway.
I was introduced to the Christian faith through hip hop, so it stands to reason that I’ve held an emotional investment in the topic through the years. I started a Christian hip hop group when I was in high school and began writing for a Christian hip hop publication when I was in college. I was fortunate enough to work with Uprok Records founder, Josh Niemyjski, wrote for his website Sphere of Hip Hop, and contributed to Feed Magazine. I interviewed various members of Deepspace 5, LA Symphony, Tunnel Rats and more. I knew the artists, loved the music and felt confident that it would be more than a pastime in my adulthood. Christian hip hop would be my life.
Alas, it was not. As the years passed, new interests and activities began to take its place. Even though my passion for music never wavered, my interactions with the Christian hip hop scene grew less and less prevalent. I kept up with friends and acquaintances from that world through social media, emails, and phone calls. I even participated in a Christian hip hop members-only fantasy football league. But the truth is, I could hardly be considered as an active member of the community when I composed that article in its defense back in 2008.
So why I did drift away from the scene that I loved so much?
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While fully immersed in the Christian hip hop scene, I consumed everything in the genre without much discernment. Over time, I’ve become more thoughtful and selective about my choices in music and other media. As with any other music scene, there’s a lot of bad Christian hip hop and increasingly, I’ve been able weed out the excess and focus on other endeavors and interests that were more worthy.
I also began to realize how uninterested I was in the more preachy sect of the genre. I found myself far more enamored and captivated by art that dug deeper than a more didactic or evangelistic purpose.
Eventually, I made a conscious decision to distance myself from media that was pre-labeled as Christian. Too often my desires to soak up anything related to the faith trumped my judgment about partaking things based on excellence. As I grew out of that fallacy, I discovered how truly enjoyable and worthy things without that label could be. I found myself no longer moved by rap songs that merely recited theological facts and became enamored instead with calls to social action or introspective lyrics that caused me to reflect on the person I was and who I wanted to be.
At the same time, many of the Christian hip hop artists that I still listened to began to shed the Christian label themselves. For some, this was out of a desire to expand their audience. For others, it was in an effort to be more honest as artists without feeling the need to drop the Lord’s name at least once every song. Many began collaborating and touring with “secular” artists and tweaking their own style and sound. Truthfully, some of the best hip hop I still find myself attracted to comes from rappers who no longer identify themselves with the genre, such as Pigeon John, Redcloud, Ahmad, and more.
This points to the divide that plagues the genre and haunts it to this day. Whereas much of the rock community has been able to embrace Christian influence among its artists, allowing for crossover acts to achieve mainstream success, holy hip hop heads have not been so lucky. If a Christian rapper isn’t youth-group approved or preaching a direct message, he falls into a no-man’s land between the Christian hip hop community and the hip hop community at large.
The current reformed Christian rap movement is a perfect example of this separation. While surely well-intentioned, the focus on specific theology and the addition of further lines in the sand have proven to not only cause a divide amongst the artists, but it expands the gap between listeners, who must choose which camp they choose to support.
Emphasizing theological perspectives tend to do this, regardless of the medium they’re interacting with. Should a listener now select an artist to support based on “soundness” of theology over quality of the product itself? Sub-labeling an already sub-labeled genre seems counterproductive if the end goal is the same. Yet in matters of theology, these distinctions of tertiary issues have a way of subverting causes for the greater good.
While the perspectives on this rift are abundant, one thing is clear: the Christian hip hop community as a whole has been unable to decide which audience it’s speaking to. While evangelistic rap certainly wants to speak to nonbelievers, it more often caters to the church while turning a critical or suspicious eye to those who gain a broader audience while not using the opportunity to preach. The result is a tear in the fabric of Christian hip hop community that by now seems like it may be beyond repair.
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I’m thankful for the friendships I made and the artists I still love who were once a part of the same community. In truth, I hope that Christian hip hop finds its place, although my desire would be for that place to be within the larger hip hop community, which has been rife with conflict and disharmony in the past, but in recent years has shown a more accepting and embracing attitude – one more open to diverse ideas and expressions.
With any luck, Christian hip hop will follow suit and be set apart by presence and quality and less by a categorization. If the goal is for Christian hip hop to exist as an entity that can aesthetically and culturally rival its secular counterpart, it has failed.
There is certainly talent to be found in the Christian hip hop community. Finding a way to harness this talent and create dynamic, original music is key for the success of current and future artists. Perhaps if the goal shifted from creating solid Christian rap to rival its secular counterpart to creating innovative music in and of itself, the audience would expand, regardless of content.
If the collective mindset is simply to evangelize by word alone, then perhaps the genre has reached its potential. If the goal is to reach a wider audience with good news and counter-cultural ideas, there is surely room to grow, and this includes pushing the boundaries of the music itself and creating noteworthy and praise-worthy music.
My hope is that any failure thus far could be viewed as a blessing that spurs artists on to create music that needs no upfront explanation, but sets itself apart simply by showing itself to be uniquely good music.
Kiel Hauck is the editor in chief at It’s All Dead. Over the past decade, he has been a contributor for multiple online and print publications and was most recently an editor at PopMatters. Kiel currently resides in Indianapolis, IN with his wife and their imaginary pet, Hand Dog. You can follow him on Twitter.
