Lecrae

“My mom was big on education, big on reading, so she was always pushing books on me: 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' like, 'Read these books.' And it was like, man, I'm learning stuff that I just can't get anywhere else.”

“My graduation was an amazing moment for my family, my community. In my early childhood, we lived on a subsidized income, with government assistance - at one point when I was growing up, my mother was making $14,000 a year. Now I had made it out of the hood, so to speak.”

“It is possible to call God 'Lord,' to feel emotionally connected to faith, to do the altruistic things and still not want God.”

“My mother was a - she worked at a halfway house. And one of the former inmates slid me a mix-tape full of different hip-hop songs. And so that was my first kind of experience with rap music.”

“When you have legends who want to do music with you, and you befriend the Kendrick Lamars and the Chance the Rappers, that's due to you really being authentically hip-hop and not being contemporary Christian.”

“Nobody would deny that if someone was a billionaire in 1962, his billions are going to affect all of his descendants. The reverse is also true. The lack of education, material, and finances for a slave are going to affect the descendants of that individual as well.”

“Being an outspoken Christian in the music industry means always feeling out of place. It's like whatever you have accomplished is less credible because of your faith.”

“I'm digesting C.S. Lewis and Tim Keller and so on and so forth, Francis Schaeffer. I'm seeing how they've affected culture and politics and science and so on and so forth, with implicit faith versus explicit faith.”

“That's a win for me, for people to be able to say, 'Faith, fatherhood, monogamy exists in hip-hop.'”

“Faith is not about serving some tyrant in the sky that says, 'You need to get your act together.' Faith is about having a loving father who says, 'Hey, listen... I'm here with you. I'm going to hold your hand. Just rock with me.'”

“My music is not Christian - Lecrae is. And you hear evidence of my faith in my music.”