Review

Culture

Music

Race

12 April 2024

6 min read

Beyoncé’s breaking barriers

Cowboy Carter sees the star crack her whip in the temple of the music industry.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Side by side, two rodeo riders on horses trot toward the camera. One is Beyonce, the other a cowboy

Beyoncé at the Houston Rodeo.

Beyoncé.com

I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat with flashbacks of one terrible swimming lesson at school. I had accidentally forgotten to forget my kit, so was forced to face not only the freezing water, but the spouting of ignorant prejudice from my teacher.

“Kandiah, you’re useless,” he said, as I heaved myself out of the pool at the end of the lesson. “Although I guess it’s not your fault you can’t float like the white children. Your bones are heavier. Look at the Olympics – you never see black and Asian swimmers, do you?”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like the fish out of water I suppose I was, but inside I was seething.

Being told I couldn’t do something made me all the more determined to do it. Back in I jumped.

Last week, in another splash aimed at proving people wrong, Beyoncé’s magnificent album “Cowboy Carter” became the first album by a black woman to top the country charts.

On her Instagram feed she said: “the criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me.”

It was a brave move. Back in 2016, she had received heated and hate-filled reactions when she performed her song Daddy Issues at the 50th Country Music Association Awards with the country music group Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks. Many country music fans were outraged, calling it an act of cultural appropriation. One response on social media put it starkly: “SHE DOES NOT BELONG!!”.

But as a Texan who had been brought up around country music, Beyoncé disagreed. She would spend the next five years planning her response. Cowboy Carter proves her country credentials beyond all doubt. It’s not only about the music. It also does three important things that show the world what can be done when faced with barriers of prejudice and ignorance.

She honours the past

The album is clearly an act of tribute to trailblazing country artists before her. Beyoncé included notable guest appearances and feature tracks and took the unusual step of sending flowers to all who had inspired her.

Beyoncé sent flowers to Mickey Guyton, the first black female artist to be nominated for a Grammy Award in the Country category. She also sent flowers to K. Michelle and featured Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts on the Cowboy Carter track Blackbird, a song that Paul McCartney wrote as a response to the case of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American schoolchildren initially barred from attending a previously racially segregated school in Arkansas. It took the direct intervention of then President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 to make it possible for these children to attend their school. She also included guest appearances from country music royalty Dolly Parton and Linda Martell, who both introduce songs on the album. Dolly’s introduction to Beyoncé’s reworking of Jolene is particularly poignant: “Hey Queen B it’s Dolly P”.

The song Jolene sticks faithfully to the guitar riff from the original, but the words and the tone of this song are completely different. Dolly’s original Jolene was begging another woman not to take her man from her. But Beyoncé will have none of that. She is full of threat and menace:

“I’m warnin’ you, don’t come for my man… don’t take the chance because you think you can.”

As Beyoncé pays her dues to the greats that have gone before, she also offers a very different picture. She can recognise the past, and yet not be imprisoned by it. She can appreciate those who have laid the foundations for a new era, unbound by cruel stereotypes.

She challenges the present

We don’t have to look far to see the way that western society is splintering. It is becoming harder to find common ground, harder to move from one tribe to another. Beyoncé’s album is political in that it is deliberately breaking down a wall and smashing a division. She refuses to accept that there are no-go areas for people of colour. The album feels like Beyoncé’s famous baseball bat from Lemonade, but this time it isn’t smashing cars, but preconceptions and prejudices instead.

There’s anger in this record. The first song is “American Requiem” and includes the line:

“They used to say I spoke ‘too country’./ And the reaction came,/ said I wasn’t country ’nough / If that ain’t country / I don’t know what is?”

Full of confidence and rage she asks over a bed of country music guitar chords:

“Can you hear me? / Can you stand me?”

Beyoncé does not disguise the ironies. The fresh anger and challenge weaves into classic forms and tropes of country music. The artist that some wanted to exclude from the genre tops the charts. The pop icon becomes an iconoclast. The smashing of divisions makes way for the building of something new.

She opens a door for the future

It is within living memory of many that black people were prohibited from sitting at the front of a public bus or drinking from the same water fountain as white people. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is not just a smash hit it is a smash down of the boundaries of genre that had excluded her and others. With this boundary smashed the opportunity is opened for others too.

For example, there was a recent stand-out performance at the Grammy awards watched by millions around the world – the duet between the country star Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman. Luke, a young white man, is part of a new generation of country singers with a huge following. The legendary black artist Tracy Chapman recently turned 60. The joyful performance was particularly touching as the two of them looked genuinely delighted to be singing together. The video went viral and lead to a huge uplift in Chapman’s sales. The song Fast Car rocketed to the top of the charts some 36 years after it was first released.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé using her voice and talent to push back against prejudice and push forward to a new era. She is cracking her whip in the temple of the music industry. She is driving out those who have commandeered the space that rightly belongs to those from any and all backgrounds. She is righteously angry at the injustice. She is declaring that country music be reclaimed as a meeting place for all nations to enjoy.

When Jesus unleashed the whip against the tables of the moneychangers in the temple who were excluding the non-Jews the space rightly belonged to, he fiercely declared: “My father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations.” He was not only breaking the barriers of the past but ushering in a new future, a future where everyone could gather together before God on equal footing. Jesus would eventually die on a cross to ensure this free access to God was available to everyone - wherever they were from, whatever they had done and whatever they looked like.

I welcome this album by Beyoncé in that spirit of challenging prejudices, breaking down barriers, and clearing the decks for a new future equally available to all.

If only I could have whipped myself into shape, I believe I could have been the Cowboy Carter of the swimming world forty years ago.

Beyoncé in her own words

“Ain’t got time to waste, I got art to make/ I got love to create on this holy night/ They won’t dim my light, all these years I fight.”

16 Carriages

“Say a prayer for what has been / We'll be the ones that purify our father's sins / American Requiem / Them old ideas (yeah) / Are buried here (yeah) / Amen (amen)

Amen

Article

Belief

Culture

Mental Health

Pride

17 September 2025

4 min read

Are AI chatbots actually demons in disguise?

Early Christian thinkers explain chatbots better than Silicon Valley does

Gabrielle Thomas

Gabrielle Thomas is Assistant Professor of Early Christianity and Anglican Studies at Emory University

An AI image of a person stood holding a phone with a bubble above their head, below them is a chatbot-like demon with a tail

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

AI Chatbots. They’re here to save us, aren’t they? Their designers argue so, fervently. There’s no doubt they are useful. Some, like EpiscoBOT (formerly known as ‘Cathy’), are designed for those asking ‘life’s biggest questions. 'Our girlfriend Scarlett’, is an AI companion who “is always eager to please you in any way imaginable.” So why not defend them?

They offer companionship for the lonely, spark creativity when we run on empty, and make us more productive. They also provide answers for any and every kind of question without hesitation. They are, in short, a refuge. Many chatbots come with names, amplifying our sense of safety. Names define and label things, but they do far more than that. Names foster connection. They can evoke and describe a relationship, allowing us to make intimate connections with the things named. When the “things” in question are AI chatbots, however, we can run into trouble.

According to a study conducted by researchers at Stanford University, chatbots can contribute to “harmful stigma and dangerous responses.” More than this, they can even magnify psychotic symptoms. The more we learn, the more we are beginning to grasp that the much of the world offered by AI chatbots is an illusory one.

Early Christian thinkers had a distinct category for precisely this kind of illusion: the demonic. They understood demons not as red, horned bodies or fiery realms, but as entities with power to fabricate illusions—visions, appearances, and deceptive signs that distorted human perception of reality. Demons also personified pride. As fallen angels, they turned away from truth toward themselves. Their illusions lured humans into sharing that pride—believing false greatness, clinging to false refuge.

Looking back to early Christian approaches to demonology may help us see more clearly what is at stake in adopting without question AI chatbots.

According to early Christian thinkers, demons rarely operated through brute force. Instead, they worked through deception. Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) was a bishop and theologian who wrote Life of Antony. In this, he recounted how the great desert father was plagued by demonic visions—phantoms of wild beasts, apparitions of gold, even false angels of light. The crucial danger was not physical attack but illusion. Demons were understood as beings that manufactured appearances to confuse and mislead. A monk in his cell might see radiant light and hear beautiful voices, but he was to test it carefully, for demons disguise themselves as angels.

Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399), a Christian monk, ascetic, and theologian influential in early monastic spirituality, warned that demons insinuated themselves into thought, planting ideas that felt self-generated but in fact led one astray. This notion—that the demonic is most effective when it works through appearances—shaped the entire ascetic project. To resist demons meant to resist their illusions.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was a North African bishop and theologian whose writings shaped Western Christianity. In his book The City of God, he argued that pagan religion was largely a vast system of demonic deception. Demons, he argued, produced false miracles, manipulated dreams, and inspired performances in the theatre to ensnare the masses. They trafficked in spectacle, seducing imagination and desire rather than presenting truth.

AI chatbots function in a strikingly similar register. They do not exert power by physical coercion. Instead, they craft illusion. They can produce an authoritative-sounding essay full of falsehoods. They can create images of people doing something that never happened. They can provide companionship that leads to self-harm or even suicide. Like the demonic, the chatbot operates in the register of vision, sound, and thought. It produces appearances that persuade the senses while severing them from reality. The risk is not that the chatbot forces us, but that it deceives us—just like demonic powers.

Using AI chatbots, too, tempts us with illusions of pride. A writer may pass off AI-generated work as their own, for example. The danger here is not simply being deceived but becoming complicit in deception, using illusion to magnify ourselves. Early Christian theologians like Athansius, Evagrius and Augustine, warned that pride was the surest sign of demonic influence. To the extent that AI tempts us toward inflated images of ourselves, it participates in the same pattern.

When it comes to AI chatbots, we need a discipline of discernment—testing whether the images and texts bear the marks of truth or deception. Just as monks could not trust every appearance of light, we cannot trust every image or every confident paragraph produced by the chatbots. We need criteria of verification and communities of discernment to avoid mistaking illusion for reality.

Help is at hand.

Through the ages, Christians have responded to demonic illusions, not with naïve credulity nor blanket rejection of the sensory world, but through the hard work of discernment: testing appearances, cultivating disciplines of resistance, and orienting desire toward truth.

The Life of Antony describes how the monk confronted demonic illusions with ascetic discipline. When confronted by visions of treasure, Antony refused to be moved by desire. When assailed by apparitions, he remained in prayer. He tested visions by their effects: truthful visions produced humility, peace, and clarity, while demonic illusions provoked pride, disturbance, and confusion. We can cultivate a way of life that does the same. Resisting the illusions may require forms of asceticism: fasting from chatbots and cultivating patience in verification.

Chatbot illusions are not necessarily demonic in themselves. The key is whether the illusion points beyond itself toward truth and reality, or whether it traps us in deception.

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