Not since Tupac died have we seen the country quite as fixated on a feud between rappers. Over the past several weeks, artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar kept the news cycle abuzz with their dueling diss tracks—ridiculing one another in trivial matters of height and weight and recognition before getting nastier with implications of secret love children and the possible grooming of minors.
As the lyrics amped up, police even investigated whether the argument was related to a shooting of a security guard outside Drake’s home in Toronto. For most individuals, though, the feud didn’t seem dangerous; it just seemed fun. And that’s what worries me.
I’m removed from qualified to evaluate who the higher artist is between Drake and Lamar. My dogs were named Waylon and Willie, but, come to consider it, the Outlaws wrote a diss track or two themselves. Even so, if this were only a story about musicians’ egos battling, it may very well be quickly forgotten. The greater concern is just not that these two artists have diss tracks, but that we’re all living in a single ourselves.
Drake and Lamar obviously do have some real dislike of one another. I share sarcastic barbs with an excellent friend sometimes, but I’ve never accused him of being a pedophile or of neglecting his child support. And yet, it also seems that much of this feud is theatrical—meant to mutually profit them each.
After all, the query within the music industry press immediately is just not whether restraining orders can be sought but whose tracks are beating whose on the charts. The truth is, irrespective of who’s “winning” or “losing” in that competition, each are winning. People are listening, if only to see which one will hit lyrically lower, jab more personally.
And the consuming audience wins too. It’s one thing to be a fan. It gives fandom an additional hit of adrenaline, though, to maneuver that fandom from liking someone’s work to liking someone’s work while hating another person’s. That transcends genres and platforms. Not way back, some fans were enraged by DC Comics author Tom Taylor’s musings that he would love to revisit some facets of the backstory of the character Batgirl. They showed it by posting pictures of them burning photographs of Taylor’s face. He responded by posting, “I write COMIC BOOKS.”
This could be one thing if it were limited to fandoms vicariously living out virtual feuds, posing their favorite artists / movie franchises / characters / video game avatars / restaurant chains as imaginary gladiators at war with each other. The problem is that, as with a lot else, these online realities have gotten real world realities. And they’re affecting every a part of life, including that of the church.
Texas Monthly recently highlighted the way in which that many Eastern Orthodox church communities within the United States are disturbed by the phenomenon of “Ortho Bros” tearing apart their communions. These are often young men, almost all the time somewhere on the spectrum of white nationalist/Putinist/neo-Confederate. They are perhaps disproportionately “incel” (involuntarily celibate), but almost all the time with a view of girls that confuses misogyny with masculinity.
And of their churches, they take the tactics of online troll discourse—complete with “I used to be only joking” when caught in one-step-too-far indefensible behavior—into the actual lifetime of the congregation. These are often, the Orthodox say, un-discipled young men, often with “father issues,” who aren’t drawn by the spirituality or liturgy of Orthodoxy but by having the ability to use it like a gamer would a “skin”—an identity from which to discover enemies and to fight them, “safely” and from a distance.
We, in fact, have seen a much, much larger phenomenon like this in our own evangelical circles. The theology differs, but not the vibe—and, after some time, one realizes that the vibe is what matters, when one is bored of following Jesus and learning the Bible.
Decades ago, there was an evangelical trope that one needs to be a disciple of Jesus, not a fan. That’s true, but perhaps we should always recognize what particular sort of fandom is infecting our religions communities: the sort that finds belonging by a shared hatred fairly than a shared love.
This damages not only the witness of the church however the souls of the “reverse fans” who use it as a spot to spike their adrenaline with a continuing craving for controversy. It also hides what’s really damaged and hurting, in need of the repair that may come only from grace.
Long before hip-hop, one unbelieving philosopher launched what one might call a “diss track” against one other (by then long dead) anti-theist philosopher that just about predicted the reverse fandom we’d see now—especially with the theatrical pseudo-masculinity that denigrates women. In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell dismantled Friedrich Nietzsche’s tough-guy portrait of himself as a woman-hating nihilist who valorizes the strong and abhors “weakness.”
“It is clear that in his day-dreams he’s a warrior, not a professor; all the boys he admires were military,” Russell wrote. “His opinion of girls, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotions towards them, which is clearly considered one of fear. ‘Forget not thy whip’—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he refrained from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.”
Even as atheistic as he was, Russell also called out the ridiculous nature of Nietzsche’s dismissal of Christianity for its “weakness” and “slave mentality.” He wrote: “He condemns Christian love because he thinks it’s an end result of fear: I’m afraid my neighbor may injure me, and so I assure him that I really like him.”
“It never occurred to Nietzsche that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is itself an end result of fear,” Russell wrote. “Those who don’t fear their neighbors see no necessity to tyrannize over them. Men who’ve conquered fear haven’t the frantic quality of Nietzsche’s ‘artist-tyrant’ Neros, who attempt to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are stuffed with dread of the inevitable palace revolution.”
With a number of minor tweaks, the identical may very well be written of the sort of trolling we see now—absent Nietzsche’s intellect but with all of his bile—that seems obsessive about putting women of their place and eager for a caesar who can impose a Nietzschean sort of “Christianity” on the remainder of the world.
These are sometimes people who find themselves petrified of women and who would fairly fantasize about cracking the whip in an imaginary, restored Christendom of the long run than leading a prayer group in their very own actual church. This sort of soul doesn’t resonate with the psalms of the faithful but only with diss tracks—of whatever genre or denomination or tribe, so long as they channel anger and punish enemies.
The police responding to shots at Drake’s house unnerved those that remember previous “feuds”—not only between musicians but even between Olympic athletes and highschool athletes and cheerleaders (or their parents), not to say rival mob bosses—that led to blood, not only words. Many keep in mind that what starts as theater often becomes real. Artist rivalries are one thing—competing fandoms normally don’t hurt anybody. The stakes are higher, though, for a neighborhood, for a nation, for a church.
A individuals who lose truth turn to theater. A individuals who have given up on mission entertain themselves with feuds. A individuals who forget the right way to sing the songs of the redeemed can find that each one that’s left are the diss tracks of the enraged.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
