Hillsong’s music is awful, it is misguided and the object of its lyrics is often misfocused. And in the wake of Hillsong’s current train of sex scandals and its subsequent falling apart, nothing has become more obvious to anyone paying attention that the purpose of Hillsong was never about true worship of God, but rather the worship of Mammon.

That being said, I ran across one of the dumbest tweets I’ve ever seen from a Southern Baptist pastor—or former Southern Baptist pastor—who essentially said that Hillsong music is an invention of White slave captors that are now forcing Black people to participate in. Charlie Dates is the pastor of Progressive Baptist Church—a fitting name for a church led by a far-left racial agitator—and is also a contributor to the Southern Baptist Convention’s ERLC as well as The Gospel Coalition.

You may remember Charlie Dates from a video attacking Black Christians who placed their identity in Christ before their identity in their skin color.

But it gets worse. Dates now claims that Black music is purposely being taken over by White culture and replaced with “Hillsong-ish” music that Black people are being forced to sing.

That Dates asserts that his “theology” is different than that of the rest of the Church is part of the problem; there is only one true theology. There may be different experiences and histories, but in the true Church, that does not lead to different, especially contradictory, theologies.

There are plenty of good solid hymns that came out of the historic Black Church, no doubt, just as good solid hymns came out of the historic European tradition. I can agree with Dates that Hillsong music basically reeks, but where it gets weird is his woke spin on the use of Hillsong music in churches. He states:

But then he ends with this doozy; that, of course, it’s White supremacy that is causing Black people to no longer write hymns and forcing Black people to sit through White renditions of their sounds. Because, well, why wouldn’t it be? To the woke, everything is about White Supremacy.

How about just stop looking at everything through a racialized lens and try to recognize that that doesn’t work anymore. Just ask Jesse Jackson how that’s going. Realize that the bigger issue here isn’t about cultural appropriation, slave versus captors, or White supremacy. I hate Hillsong music as much as you do, but let’s be real, that garbage is popular across the ethnic divide and mostly in woke churches that don’t have a robust theology of worship. The bigger problem is that worship music has become an industrial complex designed to produce what sells—and that’s music with shallow theology with a musical structure designed to garner an addictive emotional response. And if you don’t recognize that, you are part of the problem.