It’s been one week since Lil Nas X released his music video for Montero (Call Me By Your Name). If you’ve been paying even the slightest attention to the news this week, you’re probably already aware of the huge backlash the video has received. The music video draws heavily on traditional religious symbolism to tell a story of sin, judgment, and redemption (read more about the symbolism here). Conservatives have accused Lil Nas X of promoting Satan worship through his video. However, he says it is intended to be a critique of the church’s mistreatment of LGBTQ people, and that he hopes it will open up dialogue to help youth who are condemned by their churches, so they don’t have to grow up hating themselves. As usual, those criticizing the video have completely missed the point. While many claim it is a sign of how depraved our culture has become, in reality it should be a wake up call to the church. Montero forces us to face how the church has turned its back on Christ’s message of love and grace in favor of a false god of judgment and condemnation.
And this is not a new phenomenon either. As western Christianity has cut its bloody path through history, other victims have expressed the same sentiments. One of the most famous was the Taino chieftain Hatuey, who was burned at the stake in 1512 for leading resistance against Spanish conquistadors. Just before he was executed, a priest made one last attempt to convert him, telling him that if he became a Christian, he would go to heaven instead of hell. Hatuey asked if the conquistadors would go to heaven, and when the priest answered in the affirmative, the chieftain said “If that is heaven, we would rather go to hell.” In my younger, more conservative years, I used to scoff at such attitudes. They don’t understand how bad hell really is, I thought. If they did, they wouldn’t say that. I, like many others, saw it as a sign that something was wrong with them. Why else would someone prefer hell over God and heaven? (Of course, the people who say they’d hell don’t generally believe in the Christian God or heaven and hell, so it’s more of a philosophical argument). But over time I’ve come to realize that the problem is not with the individual who says, “I’d rather go to hell.” It’s a sign of a serious systemic issue within mainstream Christianity.
When Christ walked this earth, he devoted his ministry to preaching a message of grace and love, to freeing people from judgment and condemnation. He didn’t threaten people with hell to convince them to follow him. But somewhere along the way the church completely lost sight of that. The church became more concerned with the power that came from being able to control the majority, and the threat of hell became a useful tool. So many churches today preach messages that bear little to no resemblance to anything Christ taught. The preach messages that teach kids to hate themselves. They preach messages that lead to parents kicking out their own children. They preach messages that cause LGBTQ youth to be three times more likely to consider or attempt to commit suicide than their cishet peers. And the result of this preaching is Montero. The result is people who have been so traumatized by their churches that they say, screw it, I’ll just go to hell. The result is people who are convinced they can never be loved as they are by the God who created them in Their image. We cannot allow churches to continue to pretend they are following God’s will when they are causing so much harm to God’s children. Conservatives are crying that Lil Nas X is promoting “Satan worship”, but the reality is they’re the ones who drove him away from God with their judgment and abuse. As followers of Christ, it’s our job to prevent them from doing it to anyone else ever again.