Underground Rap as Religion: A Theopoetic Examination of a Process Aesthetic Religion
Underground rap is largely a subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary movement in underground hip-hop, tending to privilege creative freedom as well as progressive and liberating thoughts and actions. This book contends that many practitioners of underground rap have absorbed religious traditions and ideas, and implement, critique, or abandon them in their writings. This in turn creates processural mutations of God that coincide with and speak to the particular context from which they originate.
Utilising the work of scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill uses a secular religious methodology to put forward an aesthetic philosophy of religion for the rap portion of underground hip-hop. Drawing from Whiteheadian process thought, a theopoetic argument is made. Namely, that it is not simply the case that is God the “poet of the world”, but rather rap can, in fact, be the poet (creator) of its own form of quasi-religion.
This is a unique look at the religious workings and implications of underground rap and hip hop. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies and Process Philosophy and Theology.
About the Author(s)
Jon Ivan Gill (they/he/him) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College and co-owner of Aesthetic Religion Records and Texts in Saint Peter, Minnesota and Tijuana, Mexico. His work revolves in the realm of Whiteheadian process philosophies, metaphysics of present day Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, futurisms, poststructuralism, philosophies of (post)race, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, etc. They are also a solo Hip-Hop artist using the moniker “Gilead7” and a member of Chicago Hip-Hop collective Tomorrow Kings, Southern California-based Echoes of Oratory Muzik, and the duo Crystal Radio along with Michael Adame, also known as Phantom Thrett. His newest book, Multi/Race/Less/Ness: A Process Philosophy, was released by Bloomsbury on 11/13/2025. Their first monograph entitled Underground Rap as Religion: A Theopoetic Examination of Process Aesthetic Religion, is in the Routledge Studies in Hip-Hop and Religion series, edited by Monica R. Miller and Anthony B. Pinn. Toward Afrodiasporic and Afrofuturist Philosophies of Religion, a second text, is an edited volume of Pomona and Pitzer College student essays.
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