This past week a new album by the artist Propaganda dropped and it’s fantastic! You can get it for free here and for the price, it’s worth it! I hadn’t heard of Propaganda (or hadn’t paid attention to him) until he was at the youth conference I took my youth group on this past summer but the man is gifted! Others have most likely heard him on Lecrae’s Church Clothes CD on the song ‘Misconception’

Now, as I said before, I really like this CD, I think it’s very well done and he hits on some very important issues in Christian’s lives today, but one of the tracks was very troubling to me. The one track called ‘Precious Puritans’ was interesting. You can see the lyrics and what Propaganda said about them here. After reading the interview I was much more at ease, but how many people are going to read that interview, and how many more of them will read it as Propaganda dissing everything the Puritans did. Yes, I will admit, they had their flaws and slavery was a very big flaw in that era. But not all of the Puritans were, as Propaganda put it, “chaplains on slave ships,” and for many of them, slavery was much different than we view slavery today. I’m not advocating for going along with the social norms (in those days it was slavery) but at the same time, that does need to be taken into account. For example, today many men use technology as a way to get a “quick fix” instead of pursuing holiness and purity, but I don’t think that means we need to completely do away with technology. The same way with the Puritans, while they were very flawed, I don’t think we should throw out their theology just because they had blinders on to some of their cultural “norms.” In the interview, Propaganda admits that he was overstating to make a point in his song, and at the end shows how God’s grace uses people despite them being “crooked sticks” but I still think he could have made the same point without completely dismissing the Puritans.

So despite what I consider to be an overstated argument, the CD is definitely worth getting and listening to, he deals with some heavy topics that need to be covered. For more on the song ‘Precious Puritans,’ Owen Strachan has written a very helpful blog on it, and specifically look at the first comment on the blog.