Why churches ought to pay attention to the Macklemore controversy
Photograph by Amanda Rhoades, San Francisco Foghorn via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Deed - Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf
The latest culture war moment is here, and I never thought that Macklemore, who I know mostly through his 2012 chart-topping single “Thrift Shop,” would be at the forefront of it. That’s because I haven’t been paying attention to his music. If I had been, I would have noticed that he has increasingly taken pro-Palestinian stances in his music, most importantly with “Hind’s Hall,” which is named for Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed in the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza and critical of the hypocrisy of politicians and companies who enable the genocide.
Enter another figure that I never thought would take center stage – Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. Kraft stepped in to basically kick Macklemore off Ed Sheeran’s tour for his pro-Palestine views. Macklemore refused to back down, and Sheeran let him get cut, citing the fact that he wants his music to bring together people of diverse viewpoints. The truth, of course, is that not all viewpoints are welcome in such appeals to unity. Everywhere you go, someone has an opinion about it – here’s mine.
For all that free speech seems to be a buzzword right now, there seems to be very little that one can’t say in the public square. The social media platform X (formerly Twitter), our online public square, has gotten more friendly to alt-right, racist voices, and those who foment hate not only avoid punishment but are lauded at the highest levels of office. The exception? Pro-Palestinian perspectives. It’s not just that Macklemore got kicked off the tour; it’s that it comes on the heels of the abuse of our immigration system to target critics of Israel and pressure for academics to avoid any conversation about Palestine.
Another way that Macklemore’s controversy is illustrative is that it pits Kraft, a billionaire, as the shaper of our national consciousness about what is acceptable and what is not. I can name far more billionaires than I would care to know – Bezos, Altman, Musk, Thiel. None of them are merely content to earn their money – they want to control culture in a way that I find genuinely frightening. Who can genuinely say that they are comfortable with these wealthy white men directing the course of the world through their creation of civilization-altering technology like artificial intelligence?
The church’s prophetic witness has never depended on saying what powerful people want to hear. The question that Macklemore’s actions raise for me is whether our own churches would have the courage to speak if the people holding the purse strings demanded our silence.
It seems I’m not the only one with a bone to pick with this new class of culture warriors. I recently noticed this tone this summer in the recent blended live-action and cartoon film, “Coyote vs Acme.” It pits the titular Coyote against a massive corporation, which has bought off senators and strives to keep secrets (for example, that they produce faulty and dangerous sports equipment) from emerging into public view at the expense of Coyote and his friends. I thought that was an interesting opponent for a “family movie.” The second episode of the new season of South Park also takes aim at billionaires who want to shape culture, deriding them as “weenie billionaires” and asking them to please just shut up and recede into the background like the billionaires of old.
Churches seem far removed from this sort of thing, until they are not. A recent visitor to my church — someone who was using the free space we donated to the community — aggressively challenged me about pro-Palestinian materials on display in the hallway. They claimed that they wanted “neutral space.” But when claims of “neutrality” are used as an excuse to turn away from the truth — and to privilege the hegemonic narrative — neutrality becomes a weapon. This is the essence of Paulo Freire’s famous quote from his 1985 book, “The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation.” He wrote: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”[i]
What I’ve come to see is that attacks on free speech rarely stay contained. They spread, and the question is, how long will it take for these restrictions on speech to find their way into our churches? Billionaires already decide so much of what we consume, think, and do, but one place we must resist their influence is church.
I recognize that Christians hold a variety of perspectives on Israel and Palestine, and I do not expect every congregation to arrive at the same conclusions. But churches must remain places where moral questions can be examined freely, even though wealthy donors might prefer that certain topics remain off-limits. The truth is that churches are often places where wealthy donors already have a high degree of control. How many of us have seen our congregations avoid offending them to seek financial stability?
The church’s prophetic witness has never depended on saying what powerful people want to hear. The question that Macklemore’s actions raise for me is whether our own churches would have the courage to speak if the people holding the purse strings demanded our silence.
Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf is senior minister, Lake Street Church of Evanston, Illinois. He currently serves as the co-associate regional minister with the American Baptist Churches Metro Chicago. His book, published in 2023 by T&T Clark, is titled “Sanctuary and Subjectivity: Thinking Theologically about Whiteness and Sanctuary Movements.” He is also the co-founder of Challenging Islamophobia Together Chicagoland, an initiative that brings together people of all faiths to counter Islamophobia from a religious perspective.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] Freire, Paulo. The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1985, p. 122.
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