Phanatik of The Cross Movement Renounces Christianity

Prominent Christian rap artist ‘Phanatik’ airs some of the frustrations that influenced his decision to quit Christianity.

 
 
Another day, another evangelical notable throwing in the towel on Christianity. This week we heard from Phanatik, aka Brady Goodwin, a founding member of the Philly-based hip hop outfit from the early 2000s known as The Cross Movement. Unlike some other folks in recent years who have publicly distanced themselves from the evangelical Republican approach to church and politics, Phanatik has gone further and explicitly renounced his faith in Christ. On Monday, he shared his extended thoughts in a 24-min video posted to Facebook titled “Unbecoming A Believer.”

Along with other acts from that era like Mars Ill, LA Symphony, and The Procussions, I listened to everything The Cross Movement put out as a teenager. I’m familiar with Phanatik’s work. What I was less aware of were his extracurriculars after the group disbanded circa 2008. Like many Bible-believing Christians looking to ‘upgrade’ their faith game, Goodwin shipped off to seminary, in his case Westminster Theological in Philadelphia. As he discusses in the video, at the time he saw it as a way to supplement and bolster his twenty-five years of experience in “urban apologetics” — defending Christ on the streets.

It was during his stint at seminary when cracks in his worldview began to form. Hearing his professors give unsatisfying answers to fundamental questions about Christian doctrine fed growing doubts that lingered long after he graduated. He doesn’t elaborate here on which questions troubled him or the particular answers he found lacking, but I have a pretty good guess. From there he went on to teach at a number of Christian colleges and even in secular academia, endeavoring to defend the gospel all the while. Tailoring his apologetics to a secular audience brought out a poignant realization: if the answers he had been trained to proffer weren’t good enough for someone with vastly different theological commitments, “why,” he recalls asking himself, “are they good enough for me?”

Eventually, reason, logic, and critical study of the Bible demanded more than the shaky rationalizations and theological acrobatics in which he was being forced to engage could muster. The seemingly ad hoc explanations employed to maintain sync with the ambitions of his faith became too much to stomach, while imparting those threadbare answers to his students left him with a crushing sense of guilt. If he was no longer personally persuaded by the arguments he was touting from a position of authority, how could he continue the charade in good conscience? In the end, Goodwin chose intellectual honesty over bearing false witness and blind faith in ancient texts.

Goodwin’s journey out of Christianity hums some familiar bars, wherein a skeptical approach to the Bible and certain doctrinal commitments, informed by contemporary scholarship and modern evidences, culminates in a lapse of faith preceded by a prolonged period of disillusionment. In order to maintain our faith, we have to jump through so many hurdles that we feel cut off from our own intellectual and moral instincts. The final hurdle — the only one left to us at that point — is adopting a new worldview altogether. Fundamentalists will attack him for leaving, but Goodwin simply followed his innate, some would say God-given, instincts to their logical conclusion. As Galileo famously said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended for us to forgo their use.”

Others will no doubt blame Goodwin’s volte face on seminary, as though the information gleaned there would suddenly cease to exist had he chosen not to attend. It’s like crooked cops who confiscate phones rather than change their behavior. It’s what was being filmed that matters, not those capturing it, just as it’s scholarly consensus with respect to the biblical texts that’s the central concern here, not the institutions who relay the information. Much of what evangelical hardliners deem a threat to their faith amounts to basic, commonly accepted knowledge for anyone engaged in academic study of the Bible. The evangelical community should spend more time directing their ire toward the pastoral class that knowingly withheld this knowledge from them than discouraging skepticism and shutting down free inquiry.

In hearing Goodwin tell his story, I notice the same hesitancy and reluctance I experienced ~ten years ago, despite knowing full well where I had landed. Just getting the words out can be difficult, even when you know what words to say.

For many of us, deconstruction is a grueling, often lifelong process of inward reflection and evaluation of our beliefs availed of manifold modes of study and inquiry. Markers along the way can vary in their impact to our personal outlook, from disagreements with our church’s position on matters of LGBT equality and racial justice, exposure to convincing arguments against such doctrinal imperatives as creationism or biblical inerrancy, to lucid conversations with members of other faiths. To précis this far-flung odyssey in a systematic way can prove daunting, particularly when those least receptive to it may never have ventured outside the confines of their theological bubble. The tendency for fundamentalists to diminish our stories, their eagerness to dismiss our journey as an overnight, flippant decision, gives us pause.

Indeed, renouncing one’s religion can be high stakes, secular democracy or no. In the context of conservative Christianity especially, making it ‘official’ sets things in motion. It alters relationships, closes off opportunities, can affect the contours of your marriage. No matter how ironclad you perceive the logic behind your deconversion, the hidebound nature of fundamentalism brooks little tolerance for dissent. No matter how heartfelt your perspective, disaffiliating is so often tantamount to self-exile. The mounting consequences, including loss of your community and the thought of having to forge an entirely new social identity, can at times outstrip the intellectual and moral clarity that comes from unburdening yourself of suspect convictions.

You can see the anguish Goodwin has had to plough through to reach these conclusions and affirm them openly. Here’s a guy who made two careers out of championing what he’s now denouncing. As a public figure, he knew the moment he posted this that he’d be subjecting himself to a torrent of bad faith insults and sectarian drivel. While this can’t have been easy, I’m glad he followed his conscience and spoke out. Given the hold organized religion has over people’s lives and the undeserved deference toward faith in this country, more skepticism is always and everywhere appreciated. I trust his story will be a comfort to many struggling through the same questions and obscurantism in their own churches and communities. I know it would have resonated with me back in 2011 when my faith began to crumble.

Goodwin’s far from alone — ex-vangelicalism is a genre unto itself — but it’s not every day that someone of his caliber and notoriety delivers a forthright postmortem on their exodus from Christianity. I look forward to hearing more from him in the future.