Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman presciently warned of a few consequences of an entertainment-driven age.

Among them was the temptation of celebrityism, in which fame supplants expertise and style supplants substance.

What Postman did not predict, however, was how much worse it would all get in the age of influencers,

or how the church would be especially vulnerable to the forces of entertainment culture,

including what might be called Christian celebrityism.

Now, there are, of course, wonderful stories of high-profile conversions like Chuck Norris and Kirk Cameron.

Chuck Holson could be included in that list, though his very public conversion to Christ predated our current age of celebrity politicians.

But then there's that longer list of celebrity converts who, after an enthusiastic

beginning, went completely off the rails. The latest addition to that list is rapper Kanye West.

Back in 2019, after announcing his conversion to Christianity, West launched a new album and a mini

tour called Jesus' King. His songs quoted from the Bible extensively and exhorted parents to

raise children who put their trust in Jesus. West even praised Chick-fil-A for being closed on

Sundays. Today, after a couple rounds of psychiatric treatments and a messy divorce, West is

literally singing a different tune. In fact, his newly released single is called Hail Hitler.

In it, he praises the German dictator who started the Second World War and murdered six million

Jews. And the song follows several years of anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi remarks from the artist,

including denying the Holocaust. The new song was quickly taken down by most major social media and streaming platforms,

but the music video, which featured a clip from one of Hitler's speeches, can still be found on X, formerly Twitter,

where it's accumulated millions of views and shares. Not only is the song directly, ideologically opposed to his previous musical production, but West added significant fuel

to an ongoing fire of online anti-Semitism and historical revisionism about the Nazis.

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