Paul Tillich and Kendrick Lamar: The Lost Dimension of Religion and DAMN

During my first year at the University of California Davis, where I was completing my bachelors in Neurobiology, I decided to take up a minor in Religious Studies. I had no idea that my university had a remarkable Religious Studies program. I found that out quickly as the professors in this department were brilliant in maneuvering through religion. I had no particular interest in spending much time studying Christianity in an academic sense, I had done a lot of that on my own, and my mentors were great at keeping me theologically sharp. Instead I decided to focus on studying and learning more about Islam, and the academic study of religion in general.

During my second year, in my second to last quarter of my college career I took a class that was one of the required classes for my Religious Studies minor, it was called RST 100, Issues and Methods. I had no idea what the class would entail, and certainly I did not think that it would be the class to leave me in a state of complete disparity and doubt with regards to my faith, and then bring me to a place in my faith that I have since then never left, and couldn't be more thankful for.

The class was essentially a study of the study of religion. Looking through history at how people have understood religion, it's purpose and function, and how to exactly define it. It was a brilliantly constructed class as the professor led us through a maze to try and define religion (which in the end we did to no avail). It was in this class that I read my first Nietzsche, finally read some of Freud's bizarre, yet intriguing work, and lastly, it was in this class that I began to hear and ask questions that I could not answer, questions that left me in a state of anxiety, fear, and confusion. The professor of this class was by no means out to get me or any "religious" person in the class, but I remember very early on going to his office hours and him being able to read me like a book. He could tell I was a Christian, and he respected that, but he told me something along the lines of, I want you to really experience this class, not as a Christian, but as Rafik. I took him up on that.

The combination of several external factors and observations during this time, and the inability for me to adequately answer, explain, or understand certain questions that the course required me to ask left my faith and religious beliefs inadequate. My beliefs, which create the foundation of how I understand the external world around me and how I fit into it, could not handle the weight of the questions. I was at a crossroad, I had a choice, either I could quietly ignore those questions, say to myself: God is sovereign and quote some bible passage that talks about Gods plan for everything, or I could let the weight of it all crush my foundation and leave me in doubt and anxiety, left with the task of somehow trying to rebuild that foundation, if at all possible. I choose the latter.

Many people refer to this as an "existential crisis." As I began to share with some people what I was experiencing, many would say things like: ah yes every Christian goes through that phase! But what I quickly began to realize was that this wasn't a "phase." At the time this was all going on, I was also taking a systems neuroscience class which focused on the patterns and behaviors of the electrical circuitry of neurons, often I was learning about "phases." A fundamental principle with phases is that they are completed when they end where they started. I did not feel like what I was experiencing was something that I would come out of the same as before, no this was different, I had choosen to enter something that would forever change me.

I was in panic mode. I began questioning everything I believed. The sermons I would hear on Sunday or in my college fellowship all began sounding outside of my reality. They continuously avoided the kinds of questions I was asking, why? Was I just crazy? I felt alone, and didn't feel like anyone understood what I was trying to convey. I found a friend in the most unlikely of places, in a dead German theologian and philosopher by the name of Paul Tillich. God always has a way of using the most unlikely of people in our lives, in this case He used the professor of the class that rocked my world. I don't know why I approached him during this time, but I did. During one of his office hours I went into his office and began sharing with him what I was going through (remember this is a public university, not a christian college). He listened very well, and before he was about to say what he thought, he stopped himself and asked me, "have you ever heard of Paul Tillich?" Never heard of the guy. He went on his computer and sent me an article by Paul Tillich called: The Lost Dimension of Religion. I went home that night and read it. It felt like this Tillich guy was inside my head hearing all of the things I was asking, and wrote me a personal letter.

The article was written in June of 1958, in the heart of the Billy Graham Crusades (a famous christian evangelist that is credited with sharing the Gospel at large venues and having many give their life to God). Tillich describes what was occurring during these crusades, and really as a whole in American society with regards to religion as, the loss of the dimension of depth. This was a metaphor that he used to describe mans loss of the ability to ask the "religious question" which to Tillich were such questions as: "What is the meaning of life? Where do we come from, where do we go to? What shall we do, what should we become in this short stretch between birth and death?" He thinks that many during this time have lost the ability and desire to ask these questions, and have therefore lost the dimension of depth, and instead live a life only in the "horizontal plane." In the article he gives examples within the Christian understanding of life, of what happens when this dimension is lost. The creation story in the horizontal plane "becomes a story of events in a removed past for which there is no evidence, but which contradict every piece of scientific evidence," if the Fall of Man "which points to the tragic estrangement of man and his world from their true being" loses it's dimension of depth it becomes "a story of a human couple a few thousand years ago in what is now present day Iraq."

This, this spoke to the core of my anxiety. The point I had reached in that class wasn't the end of something, but was actually the beginning of something, it was the birth of the dimension of depth for my faith, that dimension though, the deeper you went, provided less answers, and more questions, brought more anxiety and doubt, than relief and affirmation. The dimension of depth, which is the religious question, leaves the subject in a permanent state of discovery. But it is not without hope. Tillich describes three different types of anxieties that present themselves to those willing to acknowledge them: fate and death (ontological), the loss of meaning and emptiness, and that of guilt and condemnation. For Tillich, one does not simply overcome these three anxieties, instead he accepts them using doubt and despair. The subject does this by having courage, which "...does not remove this anxiety but embraces it by acknowledging it (The Courage to Be, Tillich)."

Embraces it by acknowledging it.. and here is where Paul Tillich and Kendrick Lamar meet. Embracing the anxieties of life (those that Tillich describes) is something that Kendrick Lamar has continued to do since Section.80, as he described the ontological despair of the lives of Keisha and Tammy, he embraced the anxiety of the loss of meaning and emptiness as he wrestles with that the point of his adolescent life was in the midst of a MAAD city, and finally, he embraces the anxiety of guilt and condemnation as he self examines his life as an artist, the ways in which he has been institutionaLIES, and wrestles with his own, and others morality. DAMN is no different, again he embraces the anxieties of life, choosing to not avoid them, but to press into them.

But boy oh boy did we, the listeners, really miss the mark on this album...

In an interview shortly before the release of DAMN K-dot explains that his next album, DAMN, will be about GOD, he said that TPAB was addressing the problem, this next one is the solution. After DAMN came out, the internet was flooded with theories about the soon release of a second album, NATION (DAMNATION). It was a fairly entertaining theory to entertain, I even bought into a little, but I caught myself. I had about 20 different people (I know, I'm a bid deal) send me texts and messages asking me what I thought about the album and what I thought it all meant, for the most part I choose to not respond. I began to see blog after blog and post after post dissecting the living hell out of the album, something that Kendrick Lamar fans love doing. May I remind you though, this is Kendrick Lamar, not Christopher freaking Nolan, but I digress. These articles and theories missed the mark because they were all looking for something.. clear resolution. Maybe you felt like me at the end of that album, unresolved. It felt like a song ending in a minor note, without a sound resolution. If this album was as Kendrick described, about God and the solution, where was the solution? Where was the peace? Here we find ourselves asking the kinds of questions that one who is only in the horizontal plane would ask. For Kendrick, the concept of God doesn't introduce just peace and resolution, but it introduces the realization of who we really are as humans, a fallen race (I'm not going to get into the whole black Israelite thing, referring to the human race here). The album is an honest introspection at how one views themselves in light of an all powerful and all loving God. A fundamental principle of the gospel, or good news, of the Christian faith is not that we become sinless, but that we become aware of our sin, and the need for a savior that will accept and forgive us, INSPITE of that. 

Shortly after his album was released, he choose to respond to an article that was written by DJ booth, and in the response he says: "I feel it's my calling to share the joy of God, but with exclamation, more so, the FEAR OF GOD. The balance. Knowing the power in what he can build, and also what he can destroy. At any given moment." 

In the article, Kendrick explains his experience with church, "As a child, I always felt this Sermon had an emptiness about it. Kinda one sided, in what I felt in my heart." I believe the emptiness that Kendrick experienced as a child was the emptiness, or loss of the dimension of depth. Kendrick goes into more detail of what he believes is a theology of how God corrects us. I don't know how much of it I necessarily agree with, but nonetheless, I believe DAMN reaffirms Kendrick Lamar as an artist who has the courage to be, the courage to remain in the anxieties of life, and choose hope in the midst of it. I don't want to dissect this album and breakdown each line in how I think it relates to what Kendrick is trying to convey, we do that all too much, but in the end the album is about hope. Where's this hope in the album? Listen to the first or last track a few times, and you may pick it up. Kendrick is a man that yearns for the dimension of depth, and he does it so courageously. This isn't unique to Kendrick, true hip-hop artists have been doing this since the genesis, it is as I believe, one of the fundamental traits of being hip-hop. In recent times we have been deprived of that, artists like J-Cole and Kendrick are reminding us why consciousness is so important. 

Tillich ends the article with where I began to find myself in my last year of college, and where I feel like I still am today. With regards to the questions that Tillich raised as the "religious" question he says:

"Is there an answer? There is always an answer, but the answer may not be available to us. We may be too deeply steeped in the predicament out of which the question arises to be able to answer it. To acknowledge this is certainly a better way to toward a real answer than to bar the way to it by deceptive answers. And it may be that in this attitude the real answer (within available limits) is given. The real answer to the question of how to regain the dimension of depth is not given by increased church membership or church attendance, nor by conversion or healing experiences. But it is given by the awareness that we have lost the decisive dimension of life, the dimension of depth, and that there is no easy way of getting it back. Such awareness is in itself a state of being grasped by that which is symbolized in the term, dimension of depth." 

May we never stop asking the "religious question", and may we do it boldly, in-spite of despair and doubt.