David Bazan was the lead singer for Pedro the Lion, a Christian indie rock band I used to listen to many years ago. It ends up he isn’t really a Christian anymore, and Chicago Reader has an article about his experience “breaking up with God.” Some excerpts:
“People used to compare him to Jesus,” says a backstage manager as David Bazan walks offstage, guitar in hand. “But not so much anymore.” [...]
As front man for Pedro the Lion, the band he led from 1995 till 2005, Bazan was Christian indie rock’s first big crossover star, predating Sufjan by nearly a decade and paving the way for the music’s success outside the praise circuit. But as he straddled the secular and spiritual worlds, Bazan began to struggle with his faith. Unable to banish from his mind the possibility that the God he’d loved and prayed to his whole life didn’t exist, he started drinking heavily. In ’05, the last time he played Cornerstone, he was booted off the grounds for being shitfaced, a milk jug full of vodka in his hand. (The festival is officially dry.) [...]
He went on to explain that since 2004 he’s been flitting between atheist, skeptic, and agnostic, and that lately he’s hovering around agnostic—he can’t flat-out deny the presence of God in the world, but he doesn’t exactly believe in him either. [...]
Bazan says he tried to Band-Aid his loss of faith and the painful end of Pedro the Lion with about 18 months of “intense” drinking. “If I didn’t have responsibilities, if I wasn’t watching [my daughter] Ellanor, I had a deep drive to get blacked out,” he says. But as he made peace with where he found himself, the compulsion to get obliterated began to wane. On Curse Your Branches Bazan sometimes directs the blame and indignation at himself, other times at Jesus and the faith. He’s mourning what he’s lost, and he knows there’s no going back. [...]
With Curse Your Branches and in his recent shows, he’s inverting the usual call to witness: “You might be the only Christian they ever meet.” He’s the doubter’s witness, and he might be the only agnostic some of these Christian kids ever really listen to. [...]
Fans rhapsodize about Bazan’s work: they love his honesty, they love how they can relate to him, how he’s not proselytizing, how he’s speaking truth—but they don’t tend to delve into what exactly that truth might be. Brice Evans, a 24-year-old from Harrisburg, Illinois, who came to Cornerstone specifically to see Bazan’s set, dances artfully around it. “He’s showing a side of Christianity that no other band shows,” Evans says. “He’s trying to get a message across that’s more than that.”
It’s hard to say if anybody is conscious of the irony: the “side of Christianity” Bazan sings about is disenfranchisement from it.
I think it’s a shame Bazan turned to drink when he was leaving Christianity, but I understand the temptation. It is a very lonely road and many Christian friends are not willing to honestly talk about it with you. It can certainly drive someone to drink. Leaving a religion can be one of the hardest things to do in life — no wonder so few are willing to do it.
Here’s a video about Bazan’s crumbling of faith:
You can buy David’s latest solo album, Curse Your Branches, on Amazon. I’ve been listening to it this morning and it’s very enjoyable.
Great story. Thanks for posting this.
It is too bad that he turned to drinking because it plays right into the stereotypes of what happens to people who reject god, but I can totally relate. I had such a hard time when I left Christianity. It is a lot to deal with and, yes, very lonely.
Kinda like getting divorced, no?
It would have to be tough. I channeled my frustrations in to writing about it on my blog and ended up finding other people who understood and really appreciated my honesty and insight and needed to hear about it from someone else. But I just had a crappy, low-volume blog where I rambled about history and myth and whatnot. I can’t imagine being someone like Bazan, whose life had been dedicated to Christianity and whose main outlet had been to the Christian market.
I’ve learned that Christians can be brutal when you’re leaving the faith. They don’t want you to go but also don’t want to confront your reasons for leaving so they’ll make crap up about why you’re leaving and pester you if they get the chance. I managed to avoid most of it, since I withdrew from my old church and most of my old Christian friends and then withdrew from Christianity itself. But even so, I felt hunted and every once in a while someone popped in and tried to proselytize to me. It was uncomfortable and disturbing for the first year or so.
Bazan’s withdrawal has to have been worse. I can’t imagine people letting him leave so easily as they let me leave. And since his outlet would have been straight back to that audience…well…
Let’s just say that I can see the drinking. And it doesn’t surprise me that as he came to peace the need to drink began to wane. If its just a way to escape something, eventually you won’t feel as pressured to keep running.
So glad to know about this guy. I haven’t listened to Christian music in years, so I hadn’t heard of him. I love his music on here and his honesty. Thanks.
“he’s been flitting between atheist, skeptic, and agnostic,”
Huh? I wish I could sit down with him for a quick etymology lesson. I’m always simultaneously all three.
As for the drinking, it might not all be just loosing his faith. I spent 4 years on the road as a touring musician. As glamorous as it sounds, it’s really quite isolating and boring. Hours in buses, hours waiting for stages to get set up, hours fine sound checks, you spend your whole day waiting. Finally the big show, which only lasts a couple of hours, then you need to come down and try to catch some sleep. Rinse and repeat, and the booze helps the time pass. But vodka in a milk jug? Ugh, that sounds awful.
“vodka in a milk jug” sounds like a title of a good song.
The milk jug was probably because it was contraband vodka as far as the festival was concerned. He snuck it in like a high-schooler at prom. (which still points to the problem of possible alcoholism – which becomes a whole other type of faith to lose, a divorce from the coping mechanism of booze when was a replacement mechanism for dealing with loss of faith.)
To me, its most important that these days he feels *happy* and *comfortable* with whatever his choices are.
I’ve been a long time fan of David Bazan. I listened to him when I was a Christian, and even after I left the faith. I’ve always felt that his music reflected many of my attitudes towards religion and Chrisitanity – especially through my years of deconversion towards rational and logical thought – and now I know why. Thanks for posting this.
That’s a great story and one that I can certainly relate to. I was a fairly lazy Catholic, but when I decided to get serious about my faith, and started to get deep into the dogmas, rules and beliefs of the Church, I found myself suddenly unable to live up to those expectations.
I saw sin around every corner and was constantly worried about the state of my soul. Is this a mortal sin? Did I just sin? Sin, sin, sin, everywhere sin.
I was constantly going to confession and I had a method whereby I rotated between 4 churches within a 50-mile radius so it wouldn’t appear to the priests that I was that horrible of a sinner.
The deeper I got into my faith, the more depressed and hopeless I felt and I turned to alcohol to numb myself, which was just another sin by the way.
I guess you could say that there was some deeper mental health issues at work here, but the fact is that once I shed my faith, I began to see everything more clearly. I don’t drink anymore (well a beer or glass of wine here and there) but certainly not a half a bottle of vodka a night, and I have a better outlook on life. Which leads me to believe that maybe some people just aren’t suited for religion.
The God Critic,
I loved what you said-”maybe some people aren’t suited for religion.” So true, I think. Some people seem to love it. It confused and depressed me and kept my mind in a box.
Lynn,
Absolutely. That’s exactly how I felt.
Culturally speaking, sometimes, that box is very comfortable. Living outside the boxes and in the place where definitions and explanations must come with identities, and that you must ideologically battle with minutia, constantly, is really difficult. — I wonder if on the spectrum of humanity, age, culture, genetics, if there is a “wired for openness” and a “wired for comfort.”
Ignorance truly is bliss (if you can ignore a lot of things effortlessly).
I know a few Christian families that just SCREAM that exact idea. I can understand why too, I remember how comforting the idea of an all loving being, being with you all the time and “helping” you was. I also enjoy the idea of magic! And Jesus is a great socially acceptable WIZARD!
He’s a great artist. The penetrating honesty of his lyrics are what keep me listening.
This is incredibly inspiring. I find that most christians are immovable and will NOT listen to reason at all. It’s like talking to a wall. So when a well-known christian has the courage to question his faith, I’m uplifted and encouraged. For me personally, this road was not nearly so difficult because it happened gradually. It started with progressive christian writers, which led to non-christian writers and atheists. At the same time, my emotional life was evolving, preparing me for each step so it wasn’t so much of a shock. Because religion was so damaging for me, there was far more relief than anything else. I did have one bad night after reading Dawkins “The God Delusion” and fully realized that there may be nothing at all after death – that the loss of our loved ones is permanent. This really freaked me out, and I still struggle with it. But how can you argue with truth? Does it help to put our heads in the sand and pretend that there’s a god and a heaven? I would probably use that if it worked, but I simply don’t believe it because it makes no sense. My mom is dying of cancer, and I’m very, very sad about separation. But this is part of the maturing process, right?