As our culture cultivates more hostility to the Bible and the virtue that Christ promotes in the Gospel, I thought I would take a minute to speak about the frenzy surrounding rapper Kanye West’s first faith-based album, Jesus is King. The album has sparked history on Billboard’s Hot Christian Songs and Hot Gospel Songs charts.
It concurrently crowns the all-genre Billboard 200, Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and Top Rap Albums charts and currently reigns as the first set ever to rule all five rankings. In light of the album’s success, searches for “Jesus” and “What do Christians believe?” have spiked on Google.
West has drastically transformed from the once vulgar, misogynist Grammy-winning rapper to a Christian artist who now intends to remove all expletives from his previous songs. The 42-year-old’s gospel-rap album is filled with biblical references, and now the American Bible Society promised to hand out free copies of the Bible to interested fans.
For those of you who didn’t know, the American Bible Society was founded in 1816 by people who were committed to the Bible and to the end of slavery. The first president was Founding Father Elias Boudinot, who had been president of the Continental Congress from 1782 to 1783. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was named president of the Society in 1821.
It sure is refreshing to see the influence of America’s Founding Fathers still permeating our culture today. West’s work is catching fire all over America, promoting the Bible that John Adams claimed, “contains the most profound Philosophy, the most perfect Morality, and the most refined Policy, that ever was conceived upon Earth. It is the most Republican Book in the World, and therefore I will still revere it . . . .”
Perhaps one of the most prevalent influences of men like John Adams and the Founders was Baron Charles Montesquieu. In his work “The Spirit of the Laws,” Montesquieu emphasized: …A moderate Government is most agreeable to the Christian Religion…The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power.
The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage with which a prince punishes his subjects, and exercises himself in cruelty. Founding Father Dr. Benjamin Rush explained: In contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them.
We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by the means of the Bible.
Dr. Rush concludes: For this Divine Book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and those sober and frugal virtues, which constitute the soul of republicanism.”
From our Creator to our Constitutional Republic, to the influence of the Bible in popular culture, the Old and New Testaments of Jesus Christ remain a beacon of liberty to the world. Schedule an event or learn more about your Constitution with Jake MacAulay and the Institute on the Constitution and receive your free gift.
