Musicians Accused of Abandoning Their Faith: Exploring the Controversies
Making music can be a spiritual experience, assuming the artist who’s crafting the song or album is tapping into their creativity and not making something considered cookie-cutter. So, it’s not uncommon for musicians to find religion at some point. Just ask Yusuf Cat Stevens, who walked away from his music career in 1977 after converting to Islam.
Sometimes a religious experience is a return to the artist’s faith; other times the change is brand new and discovered for the first time in the throes of adulthood.
There are some cases, however, where it seems artists have abandoned their new-found faith, or they’ve been accused of doing so and chose to explain themselves.
David Bazan
David Bazan, who grew up Pentecostal, and fronted the indie Seattle rock band, Pedro the Lion, wrote songs steeped in religious subject matter, which gave the band a huge Christian following. But in 2006 he dismantled the band and became agnostic.
He then dropped a solo album in 2009, Curse Your Branches, and questioned what he learned growing up— specifically the Biblical story of Adam and Eve eating fromthe forbidden tree in the Book of Genesis.
“Wait just a minute, you expect me to believe / That all this misbehaving came from one enchanted tree? / And helpless to fight it / We should all be satisfied / With this magical explanation for why the living die?” Bazan sings in “Hard To Be.”
In short, Bazan was questioning the Christian belief that Adam and Eve’s choice to disobey God led to humankind’s sinful nature. He later released other solo albums before reuniting Pedro the Lion in 2017.
Kanye West
Kanye West has rapped about being a Christian ever since “Jesus Walks,” one of the songs on his first album, The College Dropout. Then in September 2019, the controversial artist said he was done making secular music.
He made the announcement in his hometown of Chicago during a listening event for his Jesus is King album, seeming to convince many that he had turned over a new leaf and gone were the songs, as well as the behaviors, that didn’t align with Christian belief.
That wasn’t the case, though, because West continued to make secular music. Plus, there were reports that he was entering the adult entertainment business in 2024 and launching his own pornography studio.
West also made a number of anti-Semitic statements after announcing that he was no longer making secular music, which some might say isn’t very Christian-like. The racist remarks eventually caused him to lose business deals, including his partnership with Adidas.
Kevin Max
In 2021, Kevin Max, who used to be in the Christian rap group DC Talk, called himself an exvangelical, a term used by those who stopped being an evangelical Christian. His since-deleted tweet caused a major stir on social media, and some accused him of dropping his Christian faith altogether.
But Max gave pushback to those claims, tweeting, “And I still follow the Universal Christ…. I have no idea how many peoples blogs or podcasts are using that announcement for further division, but I’m here for The Grace.”
Later, in a Twitter feed, Max blasted the people on social media who misinterpreted his exvangelical message and told them to read the lyrics of “It’s Okay,” a song from his band Sad Astronauts. “It’s ok to be estranged from everything that you were taught / And it’s ok to unpack all the hopeless baggage that you bought,” some of the lyrics read.
Mase
In 1999, New York rapper Mase, who was signed to Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records, walked away from music and started Saving a Nation Endangered Church International in Atlanta after becoming a preacher.
“I was corrupting young people’s minds to get that money,” he told the Associated Press at the time of his retirement, per the New York Post. “I was telling guys things like, ‘If you don’t have sex with at least five women a day, you’re nobody,’ leading millions of people astray. Imagine how much more I can have doing the right thing and serving God.”
But the man born Mason Durell Betha returned to hip-hop with the 2004 album Welcome Back and although it’s not curse-filled, and he stayed away from the risqué topics of his earlier work, he was still accused of leaving the Christian faith behind. But he later said that wasn’t the case.
“Mase was never a filthy artist. I was never saying, ‘You B’s and h-s,’ so I don’t know why people keep asking me about using curse words,” he told Billboard in 2004. Then in 2021, Mase was named the lead pastor of Gathering Oasis Church in Atlanta, which further proves his Christian faith still remains.
Brian Welch
Guitarist Brian Welch left the band Korn in 2005 after becoming a born-again Christian, but he was accused of stepping away from his faith after appearing on the podcast, No F—-n’ Regrets With Robb Flynn in 2021.
However, Welch said that he still has a strong relationship with God, but had to change the way he spoke about him.
“I think I went too far with it,” said Welch, who returned to Korn in 2013. “And I got obsessed with it, just like I was obsessed with the drugs. I believe I did, for sure.
“And I had to come out of that and find normalcy, because there’s nothing worse than a freaking irritating religious person just shoving it down your throat—there’s nothing worse than that,” he added.
Welch later said in a separate interview that the Christian news media and general news sites accused him of denouncing Christianity for clickbait.
The rocker followed that up by saying he still shares his Christian faith but does it in a way that wouldn’t be considered religious or obtrusive, and that he still has “an amazing relationship with God.”
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