Black America Needs a Heart Transplant
Faith can fix the dysfunctional culture that popular music reflects
Art does more than entertain people. It reflects their culture.
If you want to understand what a society admires, fears, celebrates, and aspires to become, listen to its music. And if we compare much of the popular black music of the 1960s with some of the most influential music of today, we can see just how dramatically parts of our culture have changed.
Turn on the great R&B music of the 1960s and early 1970s and listen to what men and women sang about.
The Temptations sang about devotion and wanting a woman in their lives. The Four Tops sang about enduring love. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell celebrated a love strong enough to overcome obstacles. The Supremes sang about longing, heartbreak, romance, and commitment. Stevie Wonder sang of love with innocence and optimism.
Even when those songs dealt with infidelity, heartbreak, loneliness, or temptation, they generally recognized that love mattered. Men pursued women. Women wanted men who would cherish them. Marriage was an aspiration. Commitment was valued. Family formation was part of the cultural horizon.
The music wasn’t perfect because the people weren’t perfect. The 1960s certainly weren’t a golden age in every respect, especially for black Americans confronting segregation and discrimination.
But much of the music pointed toward something higher.
It reflected a black culture deeply influenced by the church, family, community, and a belief that tomorrow could be better than today.
Compare that with some of the most commercially successful and culturally influential gangsta rap and hip-hop of recent decades.
The contrast can be jarring.
Women are too often reduced to sexual objects. Violence is glorified; men boast about accumulating women rather than committing to one. Drug dealing becomes entrepreneurship. Strong profanity is commonplace. Gawdy material possessions become a measurement of self-worth. Marriage and family are invisible.
This is not an indictment of every rapper, every hip-hop artist, or every young black American. It’s the reality of current-day culture, as reflected in popular music.
For generations, young people have absorbed art devoid of messages valuing marriage, intact families, and the love that comes out of those relationships. Young people have been duped into a false sense of what success looks like, how it is achieved, and how to sustain it. There is no institution in the black community that teaches honorable manhood, womanhood, or family.
That matters.
Sixty years ago, Black Americans faced obstacles that most young people today can scarcely imagine. Yet our families, churches, neighborhoods, and civic institutions possessed enormous cultural strength.
The people of that era often possessed tremendous dignity with a cultural expectation of self-respect.
Parents disciplined their children and taught them to respect adults. Teachers were supported rather than undermined. Pastors were expected to preach moral truth and teach the relevancy of the biblical truths applicable to the current challenges rather than act as political mouthpieces. Fathers were expected to provide for their children. Marriage was considered an achievement worth pursuing.
Something has changed.
Government policy deserves some blame for financially undermining families. Political leadership deserves some blame. Failing schools deserve some blame. Pastors deserve a significant amount of the blame. Entertainment corporations that discovered enormous profits in marketing dysfunction deserve scrutiny, too.
But blaming institutions alone allows us to avoid the most uncomfortable question:
What happened to us?
We cannot blame racism for every self-inflicted wound. We cannot demand that politicians repair what culture continues to tear apart. And we cannot spend another generation treating symptoms while refusing to address the condition of the heart.
Black America does not need another government program. It needs a heart transplant.
A heart transplant that embeds a belief and trust in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Because when the heart changes, everything downstream begins to change.
Restore God to the center and we rediscover the sacred value of human life.
Restore God and men understand that masculinity is not measured by sexual conquests, violence, money, or intimidation, but by responsibility, courage, sacrifice, and service.
Restore God and marriage becomes more than an antiquated institution. It becomes a covenant.
Restore God and children become blessings to protect, educate, discipline, and prepare for adulthood.
Restore God and pastors remember that their calling is not to follow the culture but to transform it.
Restore God and education becomes a pathway toward wisdom and opportunity rather than another battlefield in America’s political wars.
Faith alone will not instantly solve every economic, educational, or social problem. But without moral renewal, our policy solutions will continue treating symptoms while the underlying disease spreads.
Government cannot love your children.
Government cannot teach a boy to become a responsible man.
Government cannot make a husband remain faithful to his wife.
Government cannot manufacture character, restore dignity, create purpose, or replace a father.
Imagine what could happen if the cultural energy that sells dysfunction was redirected toward restoration.
Imagine music celebrating the young man who marries the mother of his children and stays.
Imagine artists making fatherhood honorable again.
Imagine young women hearing that their dignity is worth protecting.
Imagine churches unapologetically teaching marriage, responsibility, forgiveness, discipline, and biblical truth.
We have changed culture before. We can change it again.
The black community has survived slavery, segregation, discrimination, poverty, and exclusion. Our ancestors built churches, businesses, schools, families, and neighborhoods under circumstances far more difficult than ours.
They did not sacrifice so that succeeding generations could surrender to hopelessness.
The answer is not returning to 1965. America has made enormous progress since then, and no thoughtful person should romanticize the injustices of that era.
We need to rediscover something deeper that previous generations understood—freedom without faith and character eventually becomes another form of bondage.
If we don’t like what the mirror is showing us, smashing the mirror won’t solve the problem.
We must change what it reflects.
Restore the heart and the image will begin to change and so will the songs that we sing.
