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September 29, 2006 > Opinion > Hip-hop religion grooves with columnist, beats out usual Judaism, Christianity

Hip-hop religion grooves with columnist, beats out usual Judaism, Christianity

By Schuyler Woods | Thresher Editorial Staff

“You need Jesus in your life, heathen.”

People have preached this to me countless times in my life. I have always shied away from a complete immersion into organized religion, particularly in the era of the business church, where people can achieve religious enlightenment by buying a New York Times bestseller — like Pastor John Hagee’s The Seven Secrets: Uncovering Genuine Greatness.

Today, religion can be packaged into best-selling books and DVDs, flashed across marquees and displayed to a packed stadium. Isn’t there a better message than a glittery mass of power, greed and condescending doctrine?

For the past 19 years, I have attended only a handful of church services — usually holidays or funerals. In fact, my attendance was so poor that my fellow congregants marked their recent meetings with me by the last funeral. But over the last two years, I have been lucky enough to have close and frequent encounters with Christianity at my gym back home in San Antonio, where I would brush sweaty elbows with Pastor Hagee, illustrious hegemon of the Cornerstone megachurch. Treadmilling alongside this man of God only repelled me further from that business of Christianity. The hypocrisy of Hagee’s mission of helping others, yet raking in over $1 million in annual salary — while attempting to shed gluttonous pounds off his elephantine frame — did not sit well with me. So I looked to a slightly alternative practice: Judaism.

I spent the summer before my freshman year hunched over Judaic texts at Barnes & Noble. Motivated by familial roots in Jewish culture — my grandfather is Jewish — I immersed myself in its traditions and doctrines. My interests in Jewish studies prompted my initial choice of major — religious studies — and led me to take RELI 207: Who is (not) a Jew? my first semester. After exhausting every possible condition of Jewishness, I concluded that Judaism, like Christianity, contains its own barrel of issues on how to present its identity and the identity of its proclaimed followers. As the year ended, I was no closer to identifying with a religion.

Then something happened. Something changed. Perhaps the sun’s rays boiled my brain or the humidity seeped into my pores, but by the end of the summer, I was trekking with my friends in tow to The Awakenings Movement, a new wave hip-hop church. Geared towards the college-aged demographic, the Awakenings Movement offers powerful, relevant messages through pulsing, DJ-chopped beats, driven by a small band and drenched in melodious, soulful song. No longer would I listen to the insipid, wealth-rewarding sermons or question the degree to which I identify myself within a religious culture — I could just be.

I do not claim to be saved. Rather, I might say that I have been found and continue to search for meaning from knowledgeable scholars. I realized I did not necessarily have qualms with the doctrine of Christianity as much as I had issue with the interpretation and the presentation by success-driven pastors like Hagee or the “fire and brimstone” diatribes of the traditional black churches of my youth. In the search for meaning and purpose in life, it is a comfort to know that there are many ways to find solace outside of the familiar, strict mass-produced diatribes.

Schuyler Woods is a Lovett College

sophomore and assistant opinion editor.

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