Britney Spears says she’s an atheist
A look at her religious journey
She’s been having issues with Christianity, and in a recording posted Monday, pulled the trigger. “There is nothing to believe in anymore,” she said. “I’m an atheist, y’all.”
It’s been the strangest story? Britney Spears was Southern Baptist. The sex symbol was from the religion that hates sex, and her life has been a long struggle against its violence.
She was raised going to an SBC church.
She had her first concert, at age four, was at First Baptist in Kentwood, Louisiana. She sang “What Child Is This?” at a Christmas concert. She was raised to be ‘good’, as a biographer notes, “a typical Southern belle who carried the Bible’s teachings within her innocence.”
The religion lays down the sexual rules, especially on women, while the lives of male members are in open chaos. Britney’s father was an alcoholic who slept around, as her mother divorced him.
As a girl she was sent to Parklane Academy, a Christian school that was white-only. It was the whole hellish Southern Baptist experience.
She was everything the religion hated.
It wasn’t just that she was sexy early. She had a heightened awareness about life. A friend recalls of Britney as a girl:
“She was curious about everything, but that meant she analyzed everything to death: life, love, God and people’s motives.”
She went to work at Disney, a rare entertainment outlet to be Evangelically-approved, since it was presumed to be sexless. In her public romance with Justin Timberlake, who was also Southern Baptist, they played at being the proper Christian couple at the height of the ‘purity culture’, not having sex.
Other teen acts went along, at least publicity. The Jonas Brothers wore their ‘purity rings’. Britney never did.
She was out to provoke her religion.
In Britney’s career we see a Christian woman in theological rebellion: being openly sexual and not controlled by clerics. In her video for “Baby One More Time” she did this by posing as a Catholic schoolgirl.
It was the old Evangelical strategy—as old as Martin Luther—of assigning all the “bad” qualities to Catholics.
But these were Britney’s own values. She was sexual, and not ‘submissive’. She wasn’t waiting for a husband to ‘lead’.
Her religion was obsessed with her.
Her largest audience was Evangelical Christians. But it was a hate kind of love, in which she was the object of horrified fascination.
She stood in front of Evangelical America with a snake draped over her in her famous performance of “I’m a Slave 4 U”—which was only the usual Evangelical messaging on women.
But she didn’t seem like a slave. She seemed to be in charge.
She also kept trying to be a “good girl.”
She got married to a Southern Baptist man, Jason Alexander. As bad of a match as it was, it was a memory of who she was raised to be.
When she later sings “you drive me crazy” — I’d say she was addressing her religion. In the video she sings as she looks into the mirror applying makeup. It could be an open tribute to Tammy Faye Bakker. The song is about the religion’s strictures on women.
With dancer Kevin Federline, she kept trying to be a good wife and mother, and present a traditional marriage. She kept trying to go back to Evangelical churches.
But as a performer she seemed intent on horrifying the Evangelical God—like when she kissed Madonna in a notorious T.V. performance. Her father, Jamie, was on hand 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 feel free to “approve” of every move their children make. Or they withhold approval if they’re not pleased—which is often.
Britney tried other religions.
In 2006, under Madonna’s influence, she studied ‘Kabbalah’. Then 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.”
She kept trying to the religious questions didn’t matter, so long as she could be a mother. As she sang in 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”
But Britney never really did see herself as a baby-making machine.
She saw herself as something more than a breeder, which is how the religion saw her. Is that the meaning of “Gimme More”?
Her life seemed to descend into mayhem, and in 2008 her father asserted his rights over her in her ‘conservatorship’. But this was really just a Southern Baptist father asserting rights over his daughter’s life — as done to every female in the religion.
As a columnist for Christianity Today noted: “The conservatorship of Britney Spears is paradigmatic for the experience of women in society and the church today to varying degrees.”
Britney went along with it, doing what she was “supposed” to do.
Jamie Spears’ tenure as ‘conservator’ is a Southern Baptist story.
As detailed in the New Yorker profile by Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino, the conservatorship was a religious plot at every step. Jamie’s advisor was a pastor’s wife named Lou Taylor who talked it up as a religious imperative.
The goal was to subordinate Britney, to finally bring her into religious compliance. Jamie Spears took to hectoring her. A family friend recalled:
“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’d regularly say: “I am Britney Spears!”
She was in a contest for her own identity with a Southern Baptist man intent on controlling her.
Britney came to frame her father’s oversight over her in the language of rape.
As she presented it later 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.”
They assigned her therapy, likely a religious counselor. Britney rejected it on her own religious grounds. She reported to the court:
“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 attorney framed the conservatorship in terms of sexual abuse, saying Britney “has been abused by this man for the last decade and since her childhood.”
But sexual abuse is Evangelical too.
She kept trying to get back to ‘God’.
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!”
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.”
But her latest messages have been filling in details. “I’ve always been scared of the judgment,” she says, “just scared of judgments.”
And she started to have doubts: “How is there a God? Is there a God?”
She understood it as a religious act to leave the conservatorship.
She could speak of leaving it as God helping her get stronger. As she says: “Eventually, by the grace of God and praying on my knees, I left the place. But I was still scared. I was really really scared.”
The idea haunted her, she says, that she might not believe in God at all.
“And through that, I remember saying ‘I don’t believe in God anymore.’
Her mind seems aggrieved as she ponders the cosmic injustice: “How the fuck did they get away with it? How is there a god? Is there a god?”
The subject here is not just Britney’s own life. The subject is the situation of women on earth facing “religion,” i.e. the rules that men place on them.
She started posting naked photos and videos.
It seemed she was trying to horrify the religion that fetishized and protected the female body.
But was it her own religion, her own reading of the Bible? In one photo, she’s naked on vacation as the conservatorship was ending. The caption: “A beautiful day here in paradise celebrating…”
Her sons disparaged her social media postings, insulting her as attention-seeking, i.e. a whore. She replied on Instagram:
“I’m sorry for the way you feel … but guess what ???? I’ve got news for you … I’m a child of God as well we all are in God’s eyes …”
Her sons took on the role of Evangelical man.
They were keeping the female in line. Because she’d excluded her father from her wedding, her sons refused to come—punishing her. The message: in defying male authority, she is in religious violation.
She addresses the matter in the terms of a religious discussion:
“Jayden, as you undermine my behavior just like my whole family always has with, ‘Hope she gets better. I will pray for her’ — pray for what?”
They only ever seemed to love her, she says, if she undertook to “play a fucking saint, and it was still never good enough.”
‘God’ seemed to flicker in and out of existence.
How did it “happen to me if God existed?” she asks. “I don’t believe in God anymore because of the way my children and my family have treated me.”
Was the religion only ever threats to keep her in line? When men wish to control women—they call it ‘God’.
But it wasn’t clear her atheism lasted very long. In an Instagram post a few days later, she notes her broken heart over over what her father has done, adding: “I pray he burns in hell.” 🔶
