David Bazan

The first time I saw Dave Bazan play live was in 1997. I was wrapping up my tenure at Philadelphia College of Bible (now Philadelphia Biblical University),and Bazan was fronting the band band Pedro the Lion — which, even in its earliest days, was a controversial presence in Christian music circles. Bazan’s approach to faith was unflinching, and he exposed the hypocrisy of Christianity as often as he praised its virtues — sometimes more often.

In the 12 years since then, it feels like Bazan and I have plotted a similar course. We both moved away from Christianity — first toward skepticism then to outright unbelief (Bazan identifies as an agnostic; I am an atheist). On his first solo full-length, the marvelous Curse Your Branches, Bazan deals with this conversion head-on, writing harrowing, potent songs that cut to the core of his unbelief. The writing — both the melodies and Bazan’s lyrics — are masterful; it’s the best record of his career and, arguably, one of the best records of the year.

After a brief performance at the eMusic offices, Bazan and I went to a local bar to discuss our shared histories, our time in Bible College and our mutual loss of faith.

So your dad was the music pastor at the church where you grew up. I wanted to talk a little about some of the positive experiences you had in church. What did it do for you as a kid, and as a teenager?

You know, I really liked it. That’s one of the things about it — people often think, “Oh, you just had a bad experience with church.” But that’s not really the case — my experience with church was pretty positive. I was very serious about my faith. And for me, that meant a lot of thinking outside of the box. Because I knew other people who were “serious about their faith,” and they were total dickheads. People who were really zealous just seemed to get it way wrong. They were really keen on, like, everybody going to Promise Keepers. And that seemed to me to not be what the deal was. So I led songs in Youth Group, I did that in college as well. Church was such a social thing, and I loved that. I read the Bible a lot, and took it at face value and tried to see what it could mean. But, you know, at the same time I was also trying to finger-fuck girls, getting BJs in my dad’s office —

I would do that and then go on this days-long jag of guilt and self-hatred —

Yeah, I feel like those were my main “mess-ups,” but I was somehow deluded enough where I didn’t have that roller coaster thing. I was like, “Well, hey, what am I gonna do?”

So where did you go to college, exactly? I went to Philadelphia College of Bible — now Philadelphia Biblical University.

I went to an Assembly of God college called Northwest College. I was a Religion and Philosophy major. I went there specifically because I thought, “I want to be a songwriter for a living, and I think that if I get a Religion & Philosophy degree, I will be a better songwriter.” I was already a fairly inquiring mind, but that really took hold when I was there. It’s maybe even ironic that it did.

At a school like that, there are a lot of different forces at work. There are forces there that are trying to instill in kids maintenance of the status quo. And then there are some really subversive professors who are really just trying to get kids to wake up. And those, of course, are my favorite professors — these guys who were just fucking courageous men, who would have had pretty stunning academic careers other places, but they were loyal to a movement that they were hoping to help, to right the course of that ship. I don’t know if some of those guys would be bummed at one of the products of their work, but —

And I guess that’s what I wanted to know. What was it for you that caused this change of mind?

A biggie was the inerrancy of the Bible. I feel like at some point it dawned on me that inerrancy was a completely inappropriate assumption to make. I mean, beyond there not being evidence for inerrancy, it’s the product of a cultural norm that no one has ever questioned. The Bible is still the central document of my life and informed a lot of my understanding about things, and I’ll probably continue to study it for my whole life. I mean, not only is it the primary subtext of all of Western civilization, but it’s the primary text for my 25, 26 years before things started to fall apart.

I left church with the question in my mind — “Does God pursue us?” This was in like 2002. I thought, “OK, I understand the Gospel, but I want to find out if God pursues us.” It’s a very Calvinistic, God-sovereign idea. And I thought, “If this is real, if Christianity is real, I need to feel some kind of intrinsic motivation.” There’s this bullshit parable about a pastor who goes to a guy’s house who’s stopped attending church. The guy has a fire going, and so the pastor picks up with the little tongs a lump of coal, and puts it on the end of the hearth. And so they’re talking and the pastor asks “Why aren’t you going to church?” The guy says, “Oh, I’m just reading the Bible on my own.” And so the pastor refers back to the coal that has since burned out, because it wasn’t close to the fire. And I just thought, “If there’s a real mystical energy that’s coming from this being, from this belief, then the coal just has to keep burning regardless. The surrounding coals can’t be the driving force keeping it alive.” And when I realized that, I thought “My gosh, I’ve been making profound assumptions my entire life that need to be examined before I move forward.” And that was basically it.

I mean, for me, I just want to get some distance. I mean, is it OK for a guy just to get some real distance? It takes years to do this. And in Christianity, the answer is, “No, because if you die tonight …” Even in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, he talks about how timeline-obsessed Christians are. Christianity builds in all these motivators — you’ve got to figure it out now, you don’t have the time. And that was one of the first things that I rejected.

Because that’s just panic-motivated faith. You’re not coming to faith because you’re searching, you’re coming —

— because you’re fucking scared to death —

— right, “so let me hedge my bets now” —

— which kind of gets to Pascal’s Wager — “Which is the safer bet? That there is a hell, or that there isn’t?” You know what? Fuck that. That’s the most fearful, least-courageous thing… If this is what the Supreme Being of the Universe resorts to in order to get people to do his bidding, then I’m gonna fucking stand up to him and tell him to fuck off.

If the central message of the Gospel is love, why is it “Love, or else?”

And that’s the whole thing — it’s predicated on the notion that a guy who created these objects of love then put a test before them that determines whether he’s going to be with them in the end. That’s fucking absurd.

And then the game is rigged on top of that, because if you believe God is truly omniscient, he knows where you’re going to end up anyway. So life turns into this Rube Goldberg machine where all the switches are going to get flipped no matter what you do — you’re just a ball rolling through the contraption.

So, yeah, I started to see that the premises that undergirded my whole system were unproven assumptions. They weren’t even faith-leaps — they were assumptions.

I love your song “Bearing Witness,” because I feel like you take a lot of Christian lingo and turn it inside-out. There’s the line, “Though I have repented, I’m still tempted, I admit” — but it’s the exact reverse application of what that line would mean in a Christian song. You’ve repented of being a Christian, but you’re still tempted to go back to it.

Exactly. It’s that feeling of comfort that I got from Christianity, coupled with the notion that we’re not to “bear false witness.” It dawned on me that I wasn’t bearing witness at all. In order to do Christianity the “right” way, you have to actively not bear witness. You have to deny things that you’re actually seeing in order to keep your system working. And to me, it’s like — don’t do that.

I don’t know if you did this intentionally or not, but the record, just like the Bible, begins with the Creation story and the Garden of Eden.

Very much intentional —

— and I liked that because for me, on a totally banal level, one of the things that got me questioning things was that story of the Garden of Eden. It’s like you said — in order to keep your system working, you have to deny so many things — you have to deny so much scientific evidence. And so for me it was like, “well, wait — either every scientist in the known world is involved in a vast conspiracy to suppress the true age of the earth in order to destroy Christianity, or this story is a) an allegory or b) a flat-out invention. And if it’s an allegory — if it’s not literally true — then how much else in the Bible is “just an allegory”? The whole thing starts to fall apart. If you extend that leverage to Genesis, or to Noah’s Ark, where does it stop?

Right. Right. Even the narrative about Jesus and the crucifixion. [Bart] Ehrman brings up a really interesting point; he says seven different sayings are attributed to Jesus on the cross, and the arc of them is very different. There’s a despairing Jesus, there’s a Jesus full of hate — so which is it? Did he say all those things? What’s the order? “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” “It is Finished.” These are very different postures. If it’s factually inerrant, it just doesn’t add up.

I remember my Life of Christ class in Bible college, it was about taking the Gospels like they were a jigsaw puzzle, and sticking this piece here, and this piece there —

— harmonizing them —

— exactly, harmonizing them. I mean, at the same time, there are a lot of valuable things in the Gospels, the message of love and compassion —

— it can be a profound engine for moral action. You look at Mother Teresa or the fucking Civil Rights Movement — when you think about Martin Luther King in connection with Jesus’ teaching and the thread there — it’s potent, there’s something to it. It doesn’t mean that Jesus was true or divine, but there is something there. It was a powerful thing, it was an emblem, and a lot of people were able to own dignity because of it, and the thing that drove all of this was King’s interpretation of Christianiity. Supernatural or not, it’s a cultural force. Any truly educated person needs to know the Bible.

I agree. I mean, you talk about your experiences in college — that’s one thing I miss, spending afternoons reading, like, Pascal and Spinoza and Kierkegaard — and at the time it was, you know, to try to pick them apart, but I miss doing that, and I don’t think I would have done that if I’d just gone to a regular college.

Because your whole identity is hanging by this thread. So a lot of this process was trying to hold my own feet to the fire. “You say you believe this, well, back it up.” And I came to realize — I don’t have it. And there was a long period where I couldn’t even read the Bible. I was so tense. And I’ve come back around.

One thing I can’t escape from is that I am connected to evangelical Christianity at a million different points. And I don’t want to break ties with family, with my wife. I mean, when you went through your process, did you experience — because I experienced, and still am experiencing — grief. Real grief, because there was a thing that I had, and now it’s dead. Did you have that experience?

It was more a sense of panic. The one thing that stands out to me is the memory of every week looking up a different church in suburban Philadelphia to attend, because I so desperately wanted this thing I’d invested so much time in to work out. And so when it still wasn’t working, I just panicked. And at a point I just settled into a kind of relief. I’d taken the pressure off myself — it was OK that it didn’t fit. All of the pressure to try to get these illogical things to make sense just abated.

I still have a deep respect for people in the movement. I care what happens to the movement. When I heard Richard Cizik, the head of the National Association of Evangelicals, on NPR — and he ended up losing his job over this — but he came on to Fresh Air saying that the younger generation of evangelicals aren’t as hung up about homosexuality. They’re still pro-life, but they’re not as relentless about it as their parents were. Just hearing that, just the hopefulness of getting out of that hateful gridlock, it broke me up. I really care what happens.

In the end, I’m in a really happy place right now. I feel like I can hold my own and have permission from myself to be in limbo for years and years, to just collect data. In the meantime, if evangelical people that I know will have me, then great. There are plenty of things we can agree on.

I just got together with some friends from Bible College a couple of weeks ago, but we all just adopted the attitude of “We know where we’re all at, and we’re just not going to go there.” Did you have to break it to your parents at a certain point?

No, we’ve had a pretty strong rapport all growing up. I’d have discussions with them about religion. I was always a little outside of the box. So I think that they saw this coming. But when I finally turned the corner — my mom was sort of in denial about it. There was a moment where she was saying, “Just pray that this happens,” and I had to say, “Mom, you know I don’t believe that.” And that was hard for her.

My mom actually almost had to stop coming to shows, because she really had the concern that I was influencing people toward a direction of spending an eternity in hell. And she didn’t know if she could support that. She told my dad, “It would be one thing if he was writing songs about girls.” Like, I could lose my faith and write songs about girls, and she’d still support what I was doing. But losing my faith and writing about it, she was like, “I don’t know.” But eventually she came around, and she hasn’t missed a single show.

And it’s not like you’re going to keep writing this record over and over again. I know for me, when I first got away from Christianity, I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want people knowing I went to Bible college, I didn’t want to be associated with it. And then when I finally embraced it again as part of who I was, I almost came full circle, and now I’m getting concerned, like “OK, is this my schtick now? The ex-Christian? And any time there’s a musician with a religious background, I’m the dude who writes about it? Am I turning this into a gimmick?” Do you worry about that?

Yeah, I’m not looking forward to being that guy, either. I absolutely feel your angst about that. But it’s funny, you get a bottle of wine in me and this topic comes up, and I’ll talk about it. I’m like “OK, let’s go.” It still is the central question to me, and I still care what I find out. It matters to me what conclusions I come to.

How did your wife react the first time she heard “Please, Baby, Please”?

She cried like a motherfucker. The first two verses detail an incident that really happened. I woke up and she was there on the bed saying, “That’s it. You’re done. I can’t take it. I thought you were going to die last night.” I left for tour two days later and I actually called her two days later from Nashville — that didn’t sound as good in the song as “Atlanta” — and it was like 5:00 and I was really getting the itch, and I was just like, “Baby, please. Please, can I just have one drink?” When I wrote the song it was two years later, so we were already a good period of time removed from “the trouble.” She still can’t totally listen to the song, because there’s a raw nerve that it hits with her.

I mean, the song plays out like an apology to her more than anything else.

It is — it’s an apology to her and a warning to me.

You have to coda at the end where it almost feels like you’re envisioning your daughter in the future learning from your bad example.

And that’s what it is. The question at the end of the song becomes, “OK, you didn’t lose it all — but what other potential fallout are you going to suffer from these decisions?” I need to make sure I’m passing something on to Eleanor with my actions that isn’t going to land her in jail. I mean, since the trouble, I’ve driven drunk. So it’s a warning. Every show I sing it to myself: “Congratulations, dickhead. You’re not an alcoholic, supposedly. But it’s not over yet.”

The other thing about the record is the way you kind of step to God. You have that passage about Job in “In Stitches” that calls God out. What is it like to sing that every night?

It’s a weird thing because, in some ways, there’s this weird dynamic. When I wrote “When We Fell” and when I wrote “In Stitches,” I’m singing to the Christian character of “God,” which was my only view of God for a long time. And then there came a certain point where I started to realize, “Oh, wait, I’m just dethroning a notion of God — it’s not necessarily the same thing.” And so maybe there’s this other God, a real God, that doesn’t have those characteristics. And I do make an attempt to cultivate a relationship with that being on the days I’m comfortable thinking that he might exist.

It’s, in a sense, like Moses, when God called Moses up to the mountain and said, “I’m sick of this, I’m going to kill everyone.” And Moses said, “No, no, no you can’t do that. You promised.” And then it says that God changed his mind — the King James says, “God turned from his evil way.” It’s the notion of holding God accountable. It’s also me reminding myself that I reject a particular notion of God. I mean, when I was singing “In Stitches” back at the eMusic office, I was fucking singing to God in the room. And it dawned on me, “OK, these people are at work, and I’m basically having a reverse church service in their break room.” [laughs]

In the song “In Stitches,” you mention your daughter Eleanor is asking lots of questions about God. How do you answer them?

Well, we read the Bible together, because I do think that every educated person needs to know that document. But it’s also an effort to help her understand where she comes from. If she turns 16 and doesn’t know the Bible, she’s missing out on this whole sense of her connection with the world, because her family — both sides, way back, are evangelical Christians. So we read Bible stories, but when we’re done I say to her, “OK, we read this story. Did you like this story?” And she says, “yeah, it was a good story!” Then I say, “Some people believe that this story is really important, and also that it really happened. Some people believe this story is really important, but they don’t really know if it happened. And some people don’t think this story is important at all.” And the first time she said to me, “but it is true, isn’t it, Dad?” And I said, “I don’t know. When I was younger, I believed it was true. Your mom believes it’s true, your grandparents on both sides believe it’s true. I don’t know if it’s true, but I think it’s important, and that’s why we’re reading it. And the cool thing is, you don’t have to know either right now. Today you can think it’s true, tomorrow you can think it’s just important and not true. We’re gonna read these stories because I think that they’re important, but what you do with them at the end is up to you.” I’d like her to have a familiarity with the document without the baggage.

She goes to Sunday School with my wife, and that makes me cringe, but we talk about it a lot. We were driving once and I said, “Look at the wind blowing — isn’t that amazing?” And she said, “That’s God, Daddy.” And I said, “Well, here’s the deal with that — if you believe that God created the earth, then he created the trees and the weather, then you believe that he is doing this.” And it had come up many times before that I wasn’t really sure, so I said to her, “Now, do you have to believe what I believe? Do you have to believe what Grandma and Grandpa believe?” And she said, “No.” And so I asked her, “OK, so what do you think?” And she said to me, “Yeah, I think it’s Him.” And I said, “Ok, that’s awesome.”