That Killer Mike can pull this off, night after night, all over the world, is at least in part a product of his raising in Adamsville with his grandparents, Bettie Clonts and Willie Burke Sherwood, after whom Mike named one song on the “R.A.P. Music” album.

His grandparents were members of Mt. Olive Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, just outside of Adamsville. But the Baptists were a little too uptight for Mrs. Clonts.

“Even though we belonged to the Baptist church, my grandmother preferred these small Pentecostal and Holiness churches,” Mike says. “We were a two-churcher family. We’d do early morning service at our home church, then Sunday School, then we’d go to these other churches and be there the rest of the day.”

Most of those afternoons were spent at Bethlehem Healing Temple, where Mother Mary Jackson usually invited musicians from other churches to play with what Mike calls “the little ad hoc choir” at Bethlehem.

“It was all-out funky, dope music,” he says. “We had great singers. There was more wailing, too, because a lot of the older hymns were still there. It was like what you would have gotten out of the fields, where you just sang to get through the day. There were a lot of testimonials.

“I learned my Bible there. It was an interesting place. The music was different there. The focus was very different there. The focus was on children and the poor and helping people.”

But Mike never, as the saying goes, “got religion” at Bethlehem.

“I don’t know if I left religion,” Mike says. “I don’t know if I was ever in it as more than a curious observer. You know, there’s a Langston Hughes short story where he talks about them going to church and sitting on that front pew …”

The story is called “Salvation.” It’s from “The Big Sea,” Hughes’ autobiography. In it, the 12-year-old Hughes is taken by his aunt to a revival meeting. The minister makes an altar call specifically aimed at the young, saying, "Won't you come? Won't you come to Jesus? Young lambs, won't you come?"

After a while, all the young people in the church have come forward except for Hughes and a young man named Westley, who quickly joins the other young people after he whispers to Hughes, “God damn! I'm tired o' sitting here. Let's get up and be saved." Ultimately, Hughes himself relents. “I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved.”

The story ends this way: “That night, for the first time in my life but one for I was a big boy twelve years old — I cried. I cried, in bed alone, and couldn't stop. I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt heard me. She woke up and told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost had come into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me.”

“I was that kid,” Mike says. “I knew that whatever everybody was feeling, I didn’t feel. That didn’t mean that I didn’t believe that God existed, and I knew the moral good I was learning. There was some real fire and brimstone stuff in the Pentecostal church, but there was some moral good that I was hearing in the gospels, which I recognized as something valuable. But I just obviously didn’t have the same feeling that some people had, whatever it was. So I never adhered in the same way.

“I support the beauty of religion, the moral beauty, the stories you read. It’s amazing. But the fact that we have these three big religions that know they’re related and they can’t get their shit together is pretty disheartening. So how could I buy in to any of the three? I do think we’re here for a purpose. And even if we’re not, there’s nothing wrong with us having created a god for ourselves. But we should honor that creation better.”

What did stick with him at Bethlehem was the value of the people around him, who faithfully did the simple work of honoring the creation.