Chapter 5 - From Public to Street Theology

Summary

This essay takes up David Tracy’s adjective ‘mystical-prophetic’ amid racialised North America. Since 1990 Tracy has employed the category to indicate the way concrete theological expression brings together the mystical-aesthetic-contemplative (and apophatic) and the prophetic-ethical-political (and apocalyptic) in tensive conjunction. Emphasising the hyphen, this essay applies Tracy’s term to hip-hop, elucidating the tension between hip-hop’s early overtly political character– ‘the sudden eruption of black and brown voices on to the stage of American life, a rumbling and riotous explosion of sound and self-expression’– and its later characteristically aestheticised (and commercialised) pleasures as primarily ‘renegade music, dance and art’. Those drawn to the politics may not rush past hip-hop’s multilayered artistic and participative exhilarations. Examining Childish Gambino’s powerful 2018 song and music video ‘This is America’, the author finds Tracy’s category relevant and applicable beyond religion narrowly defined, proposing ‘street theology’ as a form of public theology that emerges here as the genius of hip-hop is interpreted sympathetically as mystical-prophetic.