Freedom Begins Where Pretending Ends
EVENT
Amazon Music Hosts Live Poetry Reading and Panel Discussion with Christian Artist Lecrae
The week before Lecrae took the stage at JFK28, comedian Druski broke the internet with a savage megachurch parody. In the skit, he dangles above a congregation on a harness, smoke machines blasting Kirk Franklin’s “Revolution,” demanding four million dollars for a mission in Zimbabwe that no one can verify.
Within days, the video had crossed sixty million views. It split Black America down the middle — one camp called it blasphemy, while the other called it journalism.
Lecrae, for his part, was unfazed.
“This is not the opportunity for people to say, ‘This is why I don’t go to church,’” he said in an Instagram response. “This is the opportunity for people to say, ‘I don’t want to go to a church like that.’”
It’s the kind of nuanced take that has defined the Atlanta-based artist’s career — and alienated him from purists on every side. The Google search tells the story:
Is Lecrae canceled?
Is Lecrae still a Calvinist?
Does Lecrae still believe in God?
Christianity, Controversy, and Cultural Reckoning
When Lecrae launched his new poetry collection, Set Me Free, at an Amazon office on the Williamsburg waterfront, it felt predestined. Less as revelation, more as contradictions made visible.
Christianity is having its moment in the discourse — in a way that forces people to reckon with what faith has meant for Black Americans, with all its history: liberation and dispossession, salvation and subjugation, all at once.
A man handed me a postcard. It read:
Freedom begins where pretending ends.
Inside the Set Me Free Launch at JFK28
Lecrae read his poem first, then spent the rest of the evening hyping up his collaborators:
Theologian Sharifa Stevens
Atlanta Hawks chaplain Adam A.D. Thomason
The readings were followed by a panel moderated by rapper and spoken-word artist Propaganda (Jason Emmanuel Petty).
The Cost of Freedom: Confession, Lamentation, Resistance
The panel expanded on themes presented in the poems:
The tension between individual and collective freedom
Living with restraint and dignity in an age of capitalist excess
What it means to be Black, Christian, and free in a country that has often treated those identities as incompatible
Propaganda pushed toward the evening’s central question:
What Does Freedom Actually Cost?
“My therapist said to me,” he began, “artists think they’re good at being vulnerable, and they’re not. They’re good at disclosure. Vulnerability costs.”
He gestured toward Lecrae and Thomason.
“This book goes through four powerful movements: confession, lamentation, resistance, and what freedom actually means. And it’s not the three-point sermon freedom with the neat little bow. It’s the type that requires grief, courage, and vulnerability.”
Faith, Backlash, and Public Witness
Lecrae spoke about entering Christianity as a grown man — unaware of the factions, unprepared for how acclaim for “Jesus” would curdle into backlash with “Michael Brown.”
The panellists did not shy away from the irony of the venue.
A.D., wrapped in a green qafiyah, addressed it directly:
“When we want to keep our comfort at the expense of another human being, we are not free.”
Propaganda invoked the cobalt in everyone’s phones, the sweatshops behind everyone’s clothes.
“Because if that’s the question, we’re all complicit.”
Survival, Strategy, and Black Theological Work
The speakers drew on the story of the midwives in Exodus — women who used what one panelist called “mental technology” to deceive Pharaoh and save Hebrew children.
You can’t always burn the system down. Sometimes survival requires working within it, strategically.
Sharifa Stevens spoke about being the first in her family to earn a master’s degree, the first to navigate predominantly white theological spaces. After studying African American Studies at Columbia, she went on to earn her master’s at Dallas Theological Seminary.
Her mission, she said, has been “to defuse landmines — to find them, so that the people who come behind me are safe.”
She described the cost: being blackballed, having to affirm her own dignity when institutions would not.
Her recent book, When We Talk to God: Prayers and Poems for Black Women, sits alongside her contribution to Set Me Free.
“Contributing to this book was healing for me,” she said, “because the specific seminary that I was in did not affirm the holiness of my life.”
She paused.
“It is crazy and also very common.”
Amazon, Access, and Institutional Irony
JFK28 is not a place where you’d expect to find healing in faith and community.
Signage in the lobby required you to sign in your dog. QR codes advertised lunch discounts at Sweetgreen. And yet the audience told a different story — artists, community members, industry folk, friends, family.
That it was Amazon — and not a university or community institution — that held space for this evening, as an inheritance of centuries of scholarship nurtured by Black churches, raises unavoidable questions of access and privilege.
Where to Find Set Me Free
Set Me Free: The Good News of God’s Relentless Pursuit is available now as an audiobook and in bookstores.