Media pundits have recently been debating whether we are seeing a religious revival among Gen Z. Spoiler alert: mostly no, or at least not in the way people think (but also, sort of yes).

Something more convincing, however, seems to be happening in hip-hop.

It would be wrong to say that rap got religion this year. Hip-hop has wrestled with God, sin, justice and salvation in every era of its more than 50-year history, even when its biggest hits were more focused on worldly things than the divine.

Still, the 2026 Grammy nominees for Best Rap Album are striking. Many of the genre’s most lauded works this year feature religious themes—themes that arguably helped spark a renewal of hip-hop itself by rejecting algorithm-friendly, personality-driven music in favor of lyricism, moral seriousness and artistic authenticity. 

In other words, this year’s hip-hop revival has come with sustained reflections on the divine.

This is not just because two of the nominees have “God” in the title: Hip-hop duo Clipse’s “Let God Sort Em Out” and Atlanta-based rapper JID’s “God Does like Ugly” announce their engagement with religious themes prima facie and make good on their promise through some of the tightest writing the genre has to offer. But the other nominees—Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX,” Tyler, The Creator’s “Chromakopia” and GloRilla’s “Glorious”—grapple with religious themes as well, despite offering primarily secular projects. (In addition to God, capital letters are clearly back in vogue.)

None of these albums are squeaky-clean in the manner of traditional worship music—in fact, they are often the opposite—but their allowance for messiness and struggle provide some of the strongest spaces for theological reflection that one will find in music today.

A feud, a scandal and a great awakening

We can trace this great awakening to an exact moment: March 22, 2024, when the Charles Finney of hip-hop, Kendrick Lamar, launched his first diss at Drake on Future and Metro Boomin’s song “Like That.” 

What followed was not just the biggest rap feud in a decade, but a public argument about the state of the genre itself. Although Lamar repeatedly denied that he is anyone’s “savior,” he embraced this role and successfully framed his battle with Drake as one of authenticity vs. commercialization, of cultural appreciation vs. appropriation. 

Lamar and the hip-hop heads—the ones who love the genre at its most technical and whose listening experience is deepened by studying the genre’s history—won, as did the fans drawn to rap’s religious imagination and fixation on justice and moral reckoning. The more party-centric, vibes-forward approach to rap offered by Drake certainly did not disappear, but it took a significant blow.

2025 also brought scandal for some corners of hip-hop, with Drake at the center of much of it. Multiple rappers including Drake have been accused of paying streaming services to inflate their numbers, and Drake’s defamation suit against Universal Music Group for the release of Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us” was dismissed, although he is now appealing. Ye, the artist formally known as Kanye West, went on a manic antisemitic tirade for which he has recently apologized, and the trial of Sean “P Diddy” Combs exposed a salacious, exploitative culture surrounding some of rap’s biggest moguls. 

By some metrics, hip-hop had a less commercially successful 2025; this boded ill for pop rap, but it enabled a reordering of values and allowed music made for meaning rather than metrics to shine through.

The Grammy nominees

This brings us to the favorite to win the Grammy for Rap Album of the Year, Lamar’s “GNX.” The project brings a distinctive West Coast vibe back to the mainstream in a genre that once had more distinctive sounds in different regions of the United States. The internet era brought new experimentation to rap, but it also brought homogeneity, with projects sounding the same whether they were produced in Atlanta or New York. “GNX” sought to reverse this trend, with Lamar collaborating primarily with other West Coast artists, sampling West Coast classics and producing West Coast bangers in the process. Regionality revived.

Every Lamar project grapples with Christian themes to some extent, and “GNX” is no exception. Amid more hard-hitting anthems, the Compton-born rapper does some of his most compelling storytelling on a track in the middle of the record, “reincarnated.” Lamar follows Lucifer’s fall from his role as heaven’s “music director” to his continual reincarnation as historical Black musicians—and eventually as Lamar himself. 

These various incarnations receive immense musical talent and influence at the cost of losing their souls as they struggle with the temptations brought by fame, pride and wealth. The song culminates in Lamar speaking to God as Satan and ultimately resolving the generational cycle through purifying his art and soul. Kendrick raps, “I rewrote the devil’s story just to take our power back.”

The revival did not end with Lamar. 2025 brought the return of Clipse, the classic duo of brothers Pusha T and Malice who released their first project since 2009. “Let God Sort Em Out” exemplifies the figurative and literal religious renewal of hip-hop, so much so that Clipse performed the album’s lead song—“The Birds Don’t Sing,” a touching tribute to their recently deceased parents—at the Vatican, a first for the genre. Moreover, Malice is a devout Christian who speaks openly about his faith, and also many critics’ choice for Rapper of the Year.

As I wrote in September: 

The brothers’ history and style allows them to create music that is almost, if not substantively, Biblical: Their vocal deliveries have the force and grandeur of a divine pronouncement, and the substance of their writing often finds them trapped in a struggle against guilt and sin. 

Clipse slips into an Old Testament register when they surgically dissect their foes. If you’re unconvinced, compare Pusha T on “Chains & Whips” to the Book of Amos: 

You run from the spirit of repossession
Too much enamel covers your necklace…
You know I know where you’re delicate…
I will close your Heaven for the hell of it

Scathing. But the prophet Amos is not to be outdone:

I hate, I despise your…festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me….
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream! (Am 5:21-24)

He could have been a battle rapper! As Amos passes judgment on the northern kingdom of Israel, Clipse evaluates the state of hip-hop since during their hiatus—and they do not like what they see. The duo critiques the “60-day stars and 20-year thousandaires” who chase trendy sounds and streaming numbers over competitive art.

JID’s “God Does Like Ugly” and GloRilla’s “Glorious” contain some of the most overtly devotional music of the nominees. Both artists are from the south—JID is from Atlanta and GloRilla is from Memphis—and their upbringings in southern Black Christian communities show up sonically and thematically. GloRilla even grew up wanting to become a gospel singer.

JID embraces a more lyrically-driven, arguably old-school approach to the genre, having shared tracks with acclaimed wordsmiths like Eminem in the lead up to his recent album. He engages in some of the same righteous condemnation as Lamar and Clipse, and he goes deeper to express spiritual longing, sometimes doing both at the same time. On the opening track, “You Ugly,” he begins:

Live from the depths of hell with angel wings that have yet to flail
And fans argue ‘bout record sales like they record exec’s themselves

He critiques music discourse that is too focused on numbers over quality while maintaining Christian hope amid difficult circumstances. Later in the song’s segue, he joins a choir singing a prayer:

Dear Lord, there’s tears in my eyes, I know
That tomorrow will bring sunny skies
And I will look back and smile
‘Cause it’s just a moment in time

GloRilla also embraces prayer on parts of her album, especially on the gospel-inspired track, “Rain Down on Me.” She praises God, asks for forgiveness for her sins and prays for her enemies:

Watch over my family, Lord, and watch over all of my partners
And even though he hate me, Lord, watch over my baby father

Donald Trump could learn something from this model of Christian charity! While naysayers may point to explicit themes and language elsewhere on the album, GloRilla brings prayer to a party in a sort of realist approach to evangelization—meeting people where they are.

In fairness, the religious themes on these projects are sometimes more generally spiritual rather than overtly Christian. This is particularly true in the case of Tyler, The Creator’s “Chromakopia,” which provides raw personal searching that is spiritual in that it looks deep within and beyond himself. And just because a rapper uses Biblical references does not mean that those references provide theological insight. (See Chance the Rapper’s double entendre about his jealous, or salty, ex-girlfriend turning back to look at him “like a pillar of salt.”)

It may be a coincidence that hip-hop’s artistic revival coincided with a greater focus on spiritual themes, but it is a suggestive one. As Pope Benedict XVI once observed, “Art and the saints are the greatest apologetics for our faith.” None of these albums are catechisms, and none of their authors are saints (despite what frequent visitors of r/KendrickLamar may tell you about rap’s current king). But after a long period of commercial dominance and pop crossovers, the nominees suggest that rap’s future may aim higher than the charts.

Edward Desciak is an O'Hare Fellow at America Media.