Propaganda has spent twenty years making music that asks questions most people avoid. This Is Our Fellowship is what happened when he stopped pretending he had the answers.
There are two people in Jason Petty’s life who call him by his first name. His wife, Alma — refer to her by her prefix (iykyk)— and Jen Hatmaker. Everyone else calls him Prop.
Jen Hatmaker. Remember that name. We’ll come back to it.
I found him through the music first. Somewhere between Excellent and Crimson Cord, before Red Couch, before Hood Politics — that’s where this started for me. I joined his Patreon because the work mattered and I wanted it to continue. I’ve been listening ever since. So when I say This Is Our Fellowship — his new collaborative album with ProducerTrentTaylor (@producertrenttaylor_), out now — hits different, I’m not saying it as someone encountering him for the first time. I’m saying it as someone who has watched the arc. If you want the full breakdown of the record, I’ve already written it. Go read that first, or after — either way, it’s there. What happened in the conversation is its own thing.
I asked him when the shift happened — when he went from being a man full of answers to one willing to live inside the questions. He didn’t have a clean date. Nobody does. “I think you don’t know the day that it happens,” he said. “It’s just the maturation process.” The L’s accumulate. Assumptions get challenged. You look at the men around you and start running the numbers — this one never admits he’s wrong, and look at the trail he’s left; that one leads with humility, and look at who’s still in his corner. The math isn’t complicated. The doing of it is.
What kept coming back, in several different forms, was the weight of being a trusted voice. Not a famous one — a trusted one. There’s a difference. “It may not be millions of people,” he said. “But enough people are listening.” And rather than that inflating him, it pressed him toward accountability. He started thinking about what he wanted to model. Which meant first getting honest about the gap between who he thought he was and who he actually was.
He talked about his marriage in a way most men don’t, and won’t. The slow reckoning that comes when you believe something is going beautifully and Alma — Dr. Alma — was counting the days. Not because anyone was lying. Because he wasn’t listening closely enough to hear what wasn’t being said. Most men never get around to telling that story in public. Prop put it on a record, and then sat across from me and said it plainly.
The phrase at the center of everything — the album, the conversation, the whole ethos of this season — is “You Got It, Chief.” It’s not his coinage; it lives in the vernacular already. That affirmative response to something you fundamentally disagree with and have decided isn’t worth the fight. Sure. Whatever you need to believe. He and Jabee built a song around it, but the philosophy runs deeper than the track. It shows up in his early Twitter battles. In the faith spaces where people decided his “politics” disqualified his belief. In a political landscape where misunderstanding metastasizes into violence because nobody could stop performing long enough to actually listen. “There is so much,” he said, “for me to even answer the foolishness of what you just said — we’d have to go back to freshman year.” And sometimes, he’s decided, it’s just not worth it. You got it, chief.
That kind of peace reads differently in hip hop and in politics — two spaces that traditionally don’t reward what looks like backing down. Prop’s aware of the tension. He lives in it. But he traces the shift back to a slow grind, not a single moment: years of edges being rounded out, the way water rounds a stone. “When you pick those stones up,” he said, “they’re beautiful.” He said it quietly, like a man who has been sitting with that image for a while.
On faith he’s equally careful and equally direct. I Didn’t Leave You isn’t a deconstruction song in the way that label usually lands — it’s a correction. And here’s where Jen Hatmaker pays off. She wasn’t a throwaway name at the top of the conversation. She was the first thread of a longer pull — someone who got read out of the same institution for similar reasons, around the same time. When Prop mentions hanging around Michael Gungor, that’s the second name. The hat trick would’ve been Derek Webb. All different charges. Same verdict. The institution decided it was done with the questions, and the people asking them found themselves on the outside looking in — not because they walked away, but because the door closed behind them.
The Western American church has committed, and continues to commit, incredible harm toward the people inside it. That’s not a fringe take. That’s the lived experience of anyone who got close enough to see how the machinery actually works. Prop isn’t interested in re-litigating it. He’s interested in naming it clearly and moving on. “My views were basically that Mike Brown should still be alive,” he said. “That’s where it started. Y’all had a problem with THAT?” The barometers being used to measure his faith had nothing to do with his actual faith. The point was never to fight the church. It was to stop being its mascot.
Near the end of our conversation, he talked about what draws him toward ritual — coffee in Ethiopia, a cigar with a friend, the kind of unhurried presence he sees in elders and monks and imams and wants, badly, to cultivate in himself. Not mimicry. Absorption. The fellowship the album describes isn’t abstract or religious in the way that word usually sits. It’s some
thing older than that. Specific humans who’ve been in your life so long you can’t remember not knowing them. The casual holiness of just being together with people who knew you before you were anything.
He said he believes peace is a divine attribute. That if you follow an omnipresent God, you should be able to find evidence of that presence everywhere. So he goes looking. He stays curious. He lets the world keep rounding his edges.
This Is Our Fellowship is available now on all streaming platforms. The full album review is at embellishpod.com. This conversation is live on audio, YouTube, and Substack — if that’s your thing.
Pinkies down, fun up.
