The gospel of Britney Spears

An Evangelical girl went off-script

Britney Spears was always an Evangelical. Her first concert, age four, was in church. Every aspect of her upbringing was keyed into the religious culture of the time.

She was homeschooled. The great Evangelical idea throughout the 1980s and 1990s was that public school was evil. She became a performer at Disney, a rare entertainment outlet to be Evangelically-approved.

In her public romance with Justin Timberlake, who was also Southern Baptist, she was the sexy virgin, ready to be his Evangelical wife. But was she too sexy? That was her appeal. She was dramatizing a religion’s roles and fantasies, until she went off script.

Evangelical culture at the time was in a particularly deranged moment.

Britney’s career tracks with the end of the “purity culture.” For around a decade the religion had locked down on the sex lives of its youth — instructing them not to have premarital sex, not to date, just to “wait” until God led them to their intended spouse.

The Southern Baptist sexual messaging organization ‘True Love Waits’ was founded in 1993. Joshua Harris’ mega-bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye came out in 1997.

And Britney’s first album, …Baby One More Time, was released in 1999. These events are connected. After nearly a decade of trying to be ‘pure’, the religion’s youth were thirsty, and antsy. And she performed that.

She held out sexuality that was “pure,” and not.

She hinted at being sexy and ‘bad’ while seeming totally ‘pure’ and religiously acceptable. In her video for “Baby One More Time” she did this by posing as a Catholic schoolgirl. This was the old Evangelical strategy, as old as Martin Luther, of calling Catholics grossly sexual.

Britney passed off her own sexual values by assigning them to Catholics, and so she continued to ‘read’ as religiously acceptable to Evangelicals — because she dressed as the rival religion.

But the real shock of “Baby One More Time” was her strange level of awareness. She’s not ‘submissive’. She’s not waiting for her husband to ‘lead’. She’s interrogating you with her stare, asking who you are, what you desire.

Britney has always been a strangely conscious being.

I’m flipping through biographies. A friend recalls: “She was curious about everything, but that meant she analyzed everything to death: life, love, God and people’s motives.”

That wasn’t anything her religion taught her.

And if anyone analyzes the motives of Evangelicals—well that’ll drive you crazy.

They raised women to be nubile sex slaves.

Britney’s song “I’m a Slave 4 U” was only articulating Evangelical sexual values. An Evangelical woman was to have sex on cue. Her husband was to have his wife, whenever he wanted. The woman was seen as passive, a sex and childbearing machine.

But Britney was more. She became what they feared and hated: the female with sexual agency, one who was in charge.

She became the “fallen woman”—who knew everything about them. As religion writer Renée Roden noted, she was “a symbol for a woman you wouldn’t want your daughter to become.”

But she was going into the unconscious life of her own religion.

In her career she evokes Evangelical phobias and fantasies, their repressions and shadows. As she went, she had to be dismissed, insulted, attacked: just another Eve, out there again with her serpent.

But the Evangelical talk then shifted into how to manage sexuality, how to live with it. A woman might even think about being sexy and fun as an expression of her divine being.

She kept trying to get back to who she was “supposed” to be.

She got married to a hometown boy—in Las Vegas. Jason Alexander was Baptist. That wasn’t really her, but there were too many of her. Even the dancer Kevin Federline couldn’t keep up with her.

She seemed intent on horrifying the religion, as when she kissed Madonna in a celebrated T.V. appearance. Her father, Jamie, was on hand to denounce her in the media: “She has to live with it, but I don’t approve of what she did, not one bit.”

Evangelical parents, of course, feel free to “approve” of every move their children make — or to indicate when approval is withheld.

In a 2003 interview she’s asked about her old Baptist pastor criticizing her. She shrugs it off:

“I can’t, you know, relate to him on a level of, you know, there’s a lot of people that-he has his beliefs and his belief system and I have mine, right. But his belief system is Baptist, and this religion thing and the way he believes and stuff. And it’s like if you think about, religion is the thing that’s causing wars right now. And it’s like who’s to say who knows what he’s talking about.”

She kept trying to get back into the religion.

In 2004 she joined Faithful Central Bible Church in Los Angeles. It didn’t last. Under Madonna’s influence, in 2006, she did some study in ‘Kabbalah’.

She turned to Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God series. In 2007 she says: “I guess we will never really understand or figure out life completely. That’s God’s job. I can’t wait to meet him—or her.”

But Britney, really, remained Evangelical. She had deeply absorbed the religion’s idea of a proper female: husband, children, going to church every Sunday. She wanted it all—but without the religion.

She settled on a divine idea of motherhood.

She capped off her Kaballah phase by saying: “my baby is my religion.”

Or as she wrote in her lyrics to her 2005 song “Someday (I Will Understand)”:

“Someday I will understand in God’s own plan And what he’s done to me Oh, but maybe someday I will breathe And I’ll finally see, I’ll see it all in my baby”

She dramatized the struggle for her soul.

As in the “Gimme More” video, with the blond and brunette at odds, she was both the light female and the ‘dark’ one.

Her life seemed to descend into mayhem, and in 2008 her father asserted his rights over her in her ‘conservatorship’. This was really just her Southern Baptist father asserting rights over his daughter’s life — as done to every female in the religion.

And here as well she was teaching her religion—showing them who they were. As a columnist for Christianity Today recently noted:

“The conservatorship of Britney Spears is paradigmatic for the experience of women in society and the church today to varying degrees.”

Until Britney gave it a visual, they might never have admitted that, or seen it. A daughter just did…what she was “supposed” to do.

Jamie Spears’ tenure as ‘conservator’ is one of the strangest Evangelical stories.

As detailed in the New Yorker profile by Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino, the conservatorship was a religious expression at every step. Jamie’s advisor, a pastor’s wife named Lou Taylor, said she felt “felt God leading them to wait, fast, and pray…”

Jamie and Britney had never been close. He started to hector her, to insult her using all the religion’s attacks on the rebel female. A family friend named Jacqueline Butcher is interviewed:

“He would get all in her face — spittle was flying — telling her she was a whore and a terrible mother,”

At the same time, Jamie seemed to want to become his daughter.

He’s recalled to regularly exclaim: “I am Britney Spears!” A strange transgender drama—and that’s Evangelical too.

Britney came to frame her father’s oversight over her in the language of rape. As she recently presented it in court:

“Ma’am, my dad, and anyone involved in this conservatorship, and my management, who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no — Ma’am, they should be in jail.”

Her attorney, now, frames the conservatorship in terms of sexual abuse, saying Britney “has been abused by this man for the last decade and since her childhood.”

And sexual abuse is Evangelical too.

She kept trying to get back to ‘God’.

But she found no way of expressing it, overtly, except through Evangelicalism. Around 2013, she was regularly photographed attending another Evangelical megachurch. She reported that her favorite author was Max Lucado, the Evangelical standard-bearer.

She tried to get her music “saved” too. In 2013, she released Britney Jean—a gospel record! As Britney blogger Bradley Stern writes, the album was full of love songs to God, like “Now That I’ve Found You”:

“I have felt the love! I can see the truth! I believe in faith!”

Things kept falling apart.

And Britney never seemed to know why. She rejected the ‘therapy’ her father arranged for her. In her recent statement the court, she argued against having to go to therapy on religious grounds:

“I don’t — I don’t owe them to go see a man I don’t know and share him my problems. I don’t even believe in therapy. I always think you take it to God.”

Her comments on her religion seemed erratic. In 2016 she was asked her religion: “I grew up Baptist,” she says. “But I studied Kabbalah so I go back and forth — but I do believe there is a God.”

In an interview with V Magazine in 2016, she said: “My relationship with God and myself, and that’s what matters to me.” She adds: “I really don’t care what most people think.”

She’s always playful with religious imagery.

It’s never real — but she saw that a church is just a theater. She excited Catholics with an Instagram posting that seemed to say so. “I’m Catholic now … let us pray !!!” she said.

She deleted the message later. “Always take time to go to church even on vacation,” she advises in a 2020 posting, standing in front of an antique church…in a midriff blouse and sunglasses.

In a post done as her conservatorship was ending, she’s again on vacation, posing naked. The caption: “A beautiful day here in paradise celebrating…”

Another Eve, at another beginning. 🔶