Jonathan Calvillo on How Hip-hop Cultivates Community

Jonathan Calvillo is a sociologist who teaches about Latinx communities at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia. His most recent books are In the Time of Sky-Rhyming: How Hip Hop Resonated in Brown Los Angeles (Oxford, 2024) and When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance: Reflections on Borderlands Pentecostalism (Fortress, 2024). Research for his forthcoming book on hip-hop and spiritualitywas made possible in part by a 2024 Teacher-Scholar Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship’s Vital Preaching, Vital Worship Grants program. In this edited conversation, Calvillo talks about where he sees God at work through hip-hop.

Please describe the main elements of your grant project.

I study how hip-hop artists—Christian and non-Christian—make sense of race, place, and faith through hip-hop. I’ve interviewed creatives in Los Angeles for years, learning how they connect hip-hop to spirituality and respond to social issues. Many are in their forties or fifties, which shows that hip-hop isn’t just for youth. The Teacher-Scholar Grant helped me expand my research to hip-hop spaces in Atlanta and New York City. This work will be part of my upcoming book on exploring hip-hop’s spiritual and cultural impact.

During the grant year, I did in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation, and analysis of creative cultural production. I built relationships, attended events, and helped host a 2025 conference at Candler. There I shared my research on hip-hop and Pentecostalism within Latinx communities. l explained how hip-hop is shaping Latinx creatives’ agency in their own spiritual communities and in fashioning spaces of religious innovation.

What makes you personally and academically interested in hip-hop and faith?

I grew up in a second-generation Mexican family in a working-class neighborhood in the west part of Fullerton, a city in metro Los Angeles. We attended Latinx Pentecostal churches. Hip-hop had become a prophetic voice, a way to understand the struggles of urban Black and brown communities. It gave me a way to live out my faith in conversation with the world around me, a way to say “I care about what you’re going through.”

Hip-hop had become a prophetic voice, a way to understand the struggles of urban Black and brown communities.

Hip-hop demonstrates how creative agency gives participants the opportunity to shape their spiritual identities. Hip-hop cultivates communities. Theologians need to be looking into hip-hop spaces for God’s redemptive work. Within churches, third places, and networks outside church walls—and even in grassroots hip-hop spaces outside Christianity—I believe God is at work bringing forth equity, sustainability, and compassion.

Can you share some key insights about Christian hip-hop and the church?

During my years as a teen, and, later, as a youth worker, I participated in and helped promote Christian hip-hop spaces such as Saint City Sessions in Santa Ana, California. I experienced how socially active churches can provide lifegiving safe spaces for younger people in less safe or underresourced communities. These spaces can give voice to vulnerable people and help them heal. But a lot of church leaders and church-based theologies are missing out on rich conversations among hip-hop creatives. Many artists address injustice, racism, poverty, and violence—without glorifying violence.

However, some churches have realized that hip-hop is not a fad or trend. It’s been around for more than fifty years and is still relevant for thinking about faith and art. Some churches have included hip-hop worship elements during Black History Month. Others, such as Greater Hood Memorial AME Zion in Harlem, have been offering hip-hop worship services every month or so for years.

What did you learn in Atlanta?

Atlanta has become a hotbed and hub for Christian hip-hop events at different locations. The site/network I researched is composed primarily of Christian hip-hop artists who perform in church-related settings. They explicitly tie hip-hop to Christian theology and gospel witness. Participants are largely still members of churches willing to partner with Christian hip-hop artists. They cultivate venues of Christian sociability that revolve around hip-hop.

The highlight of my Atlanta research was visiting an album-listening party where a group of young hip-hop artists shared their forthcoming album with attendees. There, I had the opportunity to meet several artists and discuss my work with them. I found that some people travel for several hours from out of state and have come to know other Christian hip-hop creatives in Atlanta. They stay in touch through digital networks. Christian rapper Lecrae Moore has a whole network of young artists. Erika D. Gault’s book Networking the Black Church: Digital Black Christians and Hip Hop documents how Black Christians are creating digital third spaces.

What did you learn about Christians doing hip-hop outside church venues?

In LA, I investigated whether participants retain aspects of their Christian participation within their ongoing hip-hop participation or whether they have disavowed their Christian ties. There are young artists and creatives who are using their art to speak to this moment. If they don’t see churches respond, they may feel as if church is becoming irrelevant. Many young people and young adults are negotiating how to stay rooted in Christian faith and stay connected to hip-hop creatives who are building community. So they create alternative spaces outside church but informed by Christianity.

I went to an LA gathering that happens one or two Sunday afternoons each month at a lounge. It features live DJs, hip-hop music, and dance in a relaxed atmosphere. People in their twenties, thirties, and forties come to relax, have fun, and build community. Almost all the people I talked with were in youth ministry at one point, and a lot still attend church but now focus their creative energies on a less explicitly Christian scene. Some queer and other people I talked with have distanced themselves from the churches where they grew up but still retain faith. Others are post-Christian.

And what can you say about your hip-hop research in New York City?

I wanted to talk with people in New York City because that is where hip-hop started. I built on contacts I already had to gain access to hip-hop culture, including some who identified as “spiritual but not religious” or are involved in Afrodiasporic spiritualities. I drew on oral history and participant observation approaches to allow people to share from their own experiences how hip-hop and faith intertwined for them.

I came to realize that many of the creatives I spoke with at all sites had deep trauma because of family dynamics, structural inequality from colonial legacies, and neighborhood violence, among other things. Many creatives I spoke to had lost loved ones to violence or due to economic inequality. Some of their art emerges as practices of remembrance. I also recommend reading Hip Hop’s Hostile Gospel: A Post-Soul Theological Exploration (Brill, 2016) by my friend Daniel White Hodge. The book details how hip-hop creates alternate spaces for marginalized people to explore God, deity, and spirituality,

What differences have you noticed between Christian and non-Christian hip-hop creatives?

Christian rappers generally don’t use profanity or glorify violence. They often express a lot of joy and celebration. Christian hip-hop artists seem to talk with and support each other on social justice issues. But sometimes fans feel like they are entitled to a certain type of politics or view on how to live out your faith in the world.

Non-Christian hip-hop artists seem more ready to talk about more kinds of justice issues. When Christian hip-hop creatives move beyond accepted evangelical theology or views, they can easily become stigmatized. They often feel constrained in talking about certain justice issues even though hip-hop was created to express Black and brown urban struggles.

Which of your findings about hip-hop might surprise people outside that culture?

Some people may think of hip-hop as mainly loud and sonically complex or even chaotic. It’s not typically associated with contemplation. But in Atlanta I observed how many young people took on a worshipful posture during a hip-hop music performance. They raised their hands, sang along, closed their eyes, and expressed joy at various points. It was not unlike many contemporary evangelical worship services.

Can you say more about how hip-hop can help people pause and reflect?

A movement of Black contemplation is a great example. I recommend learning from Guesnerth Josue Perea, a co-director of The Black Contemplative Society. He explains how hip-hop can be a contemplative form of music. This approach is similar to how lectio divina helps people reflect on scripture. Perea has people listen to a song, usually from hip-hop or the gospel music industry. They reflect on the theological repercussions of the music, even from hip-hop artists who aren’t identified as “Christian artists.”

Perea invited me to share some of my instrumental music which he used at a Black Lives and Contemplation event to guide attendees. I taught an intensive summer course for Duke Divinity School’s Hispanic Summer Program. I incorporated one of my songs into a class session. Students reflected on my song alongside our reading materials. Many journaled about that song in their daily journal assignment.

Anything else you’d like to say?

This project deepened my understanding of how hip-hop’s participatory creativity fosters spiritual communities in and beyond traditional church spaces. I see hip-hop as rooted in spiritual traditions, offering creatives a way to express worship through their art. The Holy Spirit guides these artists as ministers, regardless of medium. Testimonies—especially in my Pentecostal tradition of testimonios—can affirm this sacred work. I’d like to see churches showcase hip-hop creative works as testimonies to God’s movement in artists’ lives. This could honor their spiritual journeys and expand how worship is experienced and shared.