Kendrick Lamar is a prophet — and a multimillionaire. Through his music, he tells the stories of the oppressed and marginalized, even as his own net worth surpasses $140 million. He calls for spiritual and political resistance to empire yet stood center stage at the Super Bowl halftime show — America’s most-watched spectacle of capitalist excess. At the end of it, he delivered a moment of rebellion, urging viewers to “turn the TV off,” subverting the very platform that elevated him. And yet, the performance also propelled his music sales and deepened his entrenchment within the industry’s elite. At a sold-out Pop Out show, he brought together feuding Bloods and Crips in a powerful gesture of peace and unity — sponsored, ironically, by Amazon, a corporation widely criticized for its union-busting, exploitative labor practices, and surveillance capitalism.
These tensions are not lost on me. They do not necessarily disqualify the spiritual and prophetic power of Lamar’s music, but they do complicate it, asking us to consider what it means for a prophet to speak from within the structures they critique. That complexity was only sharpened when I attended a meditation session on Lamar’s work, hosted by the Center for Spiritual Imagination. There, I encountered a new title for Kendrick Lamar: contemplative.
To be a contemplative in the Christian tradition is to cultivate an inner life grounded in silence, stillness, and radical attentiveness to God. From the desert fathers and mothers of early Christianity to mystics like Julian of Norwich and Howard Thurman, contemplatives have long withdrawn from the noise of empire in order to listen more deeply — for God’s voice, for the cry of the oppressed, and for the truth of one’s own soul. Contemplation is not escape. It is a posture of spiritual resistance — a way of seeing and being that allows one to speak prophetically and act compassionately.
To call Lamar a contemplative, then, is not merely to praise his introspection. It is to recognize in his work a rigorous, interior wrestling with truth — one that becomes audible through his lyrics, his music, and the alternative moral vision his songs offer. And yet, sitting in that meditation session, breathing in rhythm with Lamar’s words while knowing the scale of his fame and fortune, I couldn’t ignore the tension: What does it mean for a multimillionaire to draw from a tradition shaped by those who fled empire altogether? It was this very dissonance that made the session so spiritually arresting — and it was this dimension of Lamar’s artistry that I was invited to encounter firsthand.
Alongside about 100 other participants, we listened to Lamar’s music and entered the contemplative space shaped by hosts Guesnerth Josue Perea and Cameron Johnson. For those familiar with lectio divina — a spiritual practice of reading and meditating on scripture in repeated stages, with attentive openness to God — Perea and Johnson offered a parallel practice they called audio divina. But instead of turning to a biblical passage, we turned to a track from Lamar’s 2015 album, To Pimp A Butterfly: “How Much a Dollar Cost.”
We listened to the track in three stages, visualizing in our minds and sensing in our bodies the movement of our breath as it followed the rhythm of each beat, the flow of each bar. I was taken by the spirit of the song, drawn into its emotional arc and spiritual depth. In the quiet of contemplation, Lamar’s lyrics unfolded not merely as verses, but as a kind of sermon: His resistance, his sorrow, and his final moment of repentance resonated through our collective silence. The song became prayerful, even confessional, inviting us to examine our own complicity and posture toward the poor. At that moment, I understood what Perea and Johnson meant when they called Lamar a “contemplative.”
In a Zoom call, Perea and Johnson shared the rationale behind the event: “With Kendrick, there’s an intentional usage of spirituality.” Much like Thurman’s emphasis on cultivating an inner life from which one can draw, they recognized a deep well of spiritual wisdom within Lamar’s own life as one that overflowed into his very musicality.
Case in point: Lamar himself wrote in a brief letter ahead of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, “I spend most of my days with fleeting thoughts… The morning rides keep me on a hill of silence. I go months without a phone.” For Johnson, this echoes Thurman’s vision of the contemplative life: a withdrawing from the distortions of the world to encounter God anew, to come to know oneself more truthfully, and to draw from that inner reservoir in order to see the divine in all people and creatures and love them accordingly. As Lamar shares in “Worldwide Steppers,” “Yesterday, I prayed to the flowers and trees” — a practice Johnson connects to the ancient tradition of the desert fathers and mothers, who sought and encountered God in creation and the earth itself.
Over the course of our conversation, Perea and Johnson also emphasized hip-hop’s radical emergence — what critical theorist Cedric Robinson might describe as a cultural expression of the poor and oppressed “masses,” rising as an alternative to the reigning racial-capitalist structural order. Citing literary scholar Imani Perry’s work on hip-hop and the prophetic, Perea and Johnson described the genre’s history as one that “reflects the soul [of America] back to America.”
To be clear, this isn’t a self-aggrandizing act that glorifies the entity called “America” or its myths of colonial greatness. Rather, it is a prophetic practice that exposes the rot in America’s soul, calling it to be discarded and repented of. As Perea put it, these prophets declare, “Look at this thing! Look at this reality!” America may refuse to admit its many sins and deformities, but they are there, and the task of the prophet is to expose them, and force U.S. to confront itself.
Lamar’s work fits squarely within this radical genealogy (especially as his lyrics continue to be used as chants for protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality), but there is also something distinctly inventive and transformative about his approach that Perea and Johnson were oriented toward. Unique to Lamar is a particular theological attunement that emerges in his claims about God and creation’s relationship to the divine.
In “How Much a Dollar Cost,” the track we collectively meditated on during the audio divina session, Lamar encounters a homeless beggar asking for some change. He refuses, only to be confronted by the revelation that the beggar is, in fact, God incarnate, who declares, “Know the truth, it’ll set you free / You’re lookin’ at the Messiah.” This line draws directly from the words of Jesus in John 8:32. In this way, the God-beggar also echoes Exodus 14, the chapter in which Moses parts the Red Sea to lead the Hebrews out of their enslavement in Egypt.
This moment brings Lamar into a state of realization and repentance: If one person — Moses — could be used by God to liberate an entire people, how much more could each of us do to help the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized among us?
Crucial here is the theological weight of the beggar’s divine identity, which resonates with one of Thurman’s central claims: God dwells with those who suffer, with those whose “backs are against the wall.”
In this regard, Perea and Johnson offer a new title for Lamar alongside “prophet” and “contemplative”: theologian. Each of these titles names a different dimension of his work. Like the biblical prophets, Lamar speaks truth to power by naming injustice, confronting empire, and echoing the cries of the marginalized. As a contemplative, he draws from deep interior reflection, cultivating silence, solitude, and spiritual attention. But Lamar is also a theologian — one who makes claims about who God is in relation to the world and the moral demands that flow from that vision. Specifically, Kendrick depicts God as one who uniquely identifies with the poor, the oppressed, the homeless, and the penniless. In this light, one can trace compelling connections not only between Lamar and the ancient contemplatives, but also between Lamar and the tradition of liberation theology, which proclaims God’s preferential option for the poor.
Of course, this is something Lamar himself must continually reckon with as someone who is among the wealthiest and most powerful figures in hip-hop, fresh on the heels of a high-profile, lucrative rap beef with Drake, and having recently headlined the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show in history.
Compared to the biblical prophets — whose clothes were made of “camel’s hair” and whose food was “locusts and wild honey” (Matt. 3:4) — Lamar’s prophetic and theological identity is not without contradiction. His net worth of $140 million is more than 10,000 times what an average person living below the poverty line in the U.S. earns in a year. Is that level of economic disparity compatible with liberation, even in light of Lamar’s profound lyricism and contemplative spirit? Can he truly be called a prophet when the same God-Messiah revealed in the beggar of “How Much a Dollar Cost” is the one who tells the rich young man who claims to have followed all God’s commandments to “sell all that you have and give to the poor” (Mark 10:17–31)?
Not just a portion. Not just a tithe. All of it.
Will Lamar, like the rich young man, be “disheartened by the saying and go away sorrowful”? Or will he heed the call of the God he encountered in the beggar?
However you feel about his wealth and influence, Perea and Johnson are right to discern that there remains something revolutionary in what Lamar is doing — something worth paying attention to. Because even if his message is complicated by his rising net worth, the masses remain, and they listen. They are moved by his lyricism, meditate on his music, and take to the streets chanting, “We gon’ be alright” as a symbol of solidarity, defiance, and hope amid the violence and injustice they endure.
Perhaps what is most prophetic about Lamar is what the masses do with his music — how they take it beyond his wealth and platform and carry it with God into the depths of creaturely suffering, standing with one another in pursuit of a liberated world. In this way, the prophetic is no longer lodged in Lamar himself, but in the collective movement that draws from his work.
As Lamar puts it in another song: “Kendrick made you think about it, but he is not your savior.”
I concur. Kendrick, and celebrities more broadly, are not our saviors.
The masses are the ones doing the real work.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article stated that Lamar’s net worth was 2,000 times the 2023 poverty threshold. It has been updated to 10,000 times to more accurately reflect the disparity.
Yanan (he/him) is a liberation theologian and musician from Cagayan de Oro, Philippines. His work explores the intersections of modern Christology, decolonial theory, Asian American studies, and the doctrine of Israel. In early 2025, he released Palimpsests, a post-classical album that meditates on the possibility of faith in a fragmented world.
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