Interpreting Childish Gambino’s “This is America” in Relation to the American Church

The Backdrop…

While Glover is dancing and telling us to “watch him move…” with young children emulating his every move, there’s an intentionally ironic and chaotic backdrop filled with persons being chased by cops, there’s a car burning, and a hooded man riding through on a white horse.

For me, personally, my interpretation is simple… “This is America” represents the fact that we’ve all been coerced into this sociopathic form of culture. In order to succeed, we must become borderline insane. Blind and indifferent to all that’s happening in this particular videos backdrop. We wake up for and dedicate our lives to simply, “get our money.”

People will do anything to alleviate their anxiety.

We over-medicate. We dance. We cheat. Steal. And, we do whatever it takes to ignore the chaos that’s happening right now in the backdrop of our lives.

It’s not “black-culture” that says “get your money,” it’s American culture that’s saying “get your money.” It’s the post-modernistic sociopathy that perpetuates a toxic form of individualism. It creates something worse than hate, indifference.

Only because this is also a Christian site, what’s most scary to me is that “This is The Church…”

The scariest thing for me has been re-entering into many churches and seeing that very little has actually changed. While we’re progressing it seems as if the church is not.

At best I’ve noticed within predominantly white progressive Philadelphia Churches they’ve reformed where it’s comfortable so that they’re still able to maintain control, power, or this illusion of being “better.”

They won’t verbalize this, nor do I believe they even recognize it on the surface level. Again, this is American culture; we’ve become so accustomed to indifference and these swamp waters we’ve been wading in we don’t even realize how toxically awful it is for everyone (including the ones who believe they’re on top; even though they’re not).

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