Public Prayer as Serious Play: Coming-of-Age in Hip Hop Cultures

Abstract

Aggrieved religious practitioners often speak to God in public. Their demands of God elicit critical examination not least because they are irreverent and apathetic. The first part of this article explains the importance of hip hop culture to a democratic society through an analysis of Cornel West’s “danceable education”. The second part describes such an education as pious and playful. The next two parts examine how public prayers from a hip hop (part three) and gospel (part four) artist show how questioning God is a socially valuable way to come-of-age. Artists whose vocation is an act of protest against God-forsakenness and poor governance are exemplified in the invocations of those for whom respectability and redemption remain essential. The vocation of invocations in public stress the social value of loss and negation for reasons—maturation and playing—that make public God-talk good for groups that stubbornly need or actively ignore religious practices.