Kanye’s Christianity

Is it mostly about sexual restriction?

Catching up with Kanye West’s newfound Christianity, his Jesus the King album and long Apple interview, I’m trying to understand what is happening, spiritually. He doesn’t watch porn anymore? That sounds about right for a 42-year-old man.

He doesn’t want co-workers to swear, or have premarital sex. He asks them to fast. He’s restricting sexual displays of his children and wife.

Jesus did not speak of any of these subjects.

Kanye wants to design clothes that adhere to the laws in Leviticus. Does he know? Those rules come with death penalties.

What path is Kanye on? He can seem like a man hitting middle age, feeling jealousy that seems to intensify into paranoia. “As a God-fearing, married Christian innovator billionaire founder, no one’s gonna take my opinion away from me.”

Proclaiming himself the greatest artist of all time, he now is intent on re-designing the conditions of human life, on his way to rulership—becoming president, etc. His Christianity seems to affirm his ego and social status on the way to becoming the leader of a re-designed, color-corrected world.

Accessing the stylistic cues of black Protestant tradition in America, he seems imaginatively to be Catholic. He calls Rome the…