Taylor Swift: Goddess, Witch, or Christian?

Who is Taylor Swift - Part 2

Jan 11, 2024

So the lights went down upon myself and a multiplex theater half-filled with teenage girls in Tbilisi, Georgia. It was over a month since Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie opened and it had been mostly sold out during that entire month. The girls were squealing with delight. And soon the film begin to unfold with something more than Sensurround®, as the girls mirrored the sounds and actions on the screen from their seats, eventually spilling out into the aisles and front of the auditorium. I was prepared for this, but the full reality clearly revealed something that I had not witnessed before. (Midnights at the Rocky Horror Show not withstanding.)

What I wasn't prepared for was the totemic imago dei femina of this global throng - Taylor Swift herself. She appeared as an enlarged presence before the mass of concert goers, blurring the distinction of the screen before me and the screens within the actual concert being filmed. There was a strange tension that Taylor herself surely understood better than anyone else. In the video for her recent Anti-Hero she features a gigantic version of herself, and in the concert film the screen behind her also features a Godzilla-esque Taylor walking clumsily through a cityscape of skyscrapers. And at times she appeared to be in conversation with the large screenal presence looming over her. And obviously this is done to prevent little Taylor on the stage from seeming to be a dancing musical insect from the back of the arena.

Read Who Is Taylor Swift Part 1

Taylor opens with a few numbers from her Lover album, before pausing to connect with the undulating mass in the dark. She is engulfed by the jet screaming sounds of 72,000 fans at the SoFi Stadium in Southern California. She points out to a section of the audience and suddenly it erupts, she points to another to the same results, then another and another. She clearly relishes this effect to a degree impossible to gauge. And there is a shot of the microscopic Taylor (dressed in a sparkling light blue bodysuit highly reminiscent of a baton twirler's uniform) beneath her own face in closeup on the massive screen behind her, she shakes her head while smiling, she leans back and lets out an a scream buried in melee of sound. Meanwhile back in realtime, I am sitting in a seat in Tbilisi directly behind girls who echo the screams, and I say to myself, 'She is a god to these girls.' It is near the beginning of this very long film, and I am struck by the fact, registered clearly on Taylor's face, that this woman knows she has power. Serious power.And the screaming intensifies. She speaks with mock concern to her legions, “This is getting dangerous. This is about to go to my head real fast. You just made me feel so...” A pregnant pause. A pause that I am sure she has crafted and rehearsed meticulously. She continues, “so powerful.” And she looks at herself, at her body, the repository of this power. She flexes a naked bicep on her right upper arm. And then she kisses it. Highly, highly symbolic indeed. Oddly erotic, yet more uncanny than sexual.

I remember watching the film Woodstock in theatres back near its original run in the 1970s. A film, which by the way, when adjusted for inflation is still the concert film box office champ. With Taylor at number two by some distance. And though the entertainment media will declaim Taylor's film the all-time most successful concert film. The mainstream media is always loathe to adjust for inflation, an ill understood notion among the broader swathes of the populace. But to me the parallels are fascinating. Woodstock, too, is filled with the divinities of the age. Although the three greatest entities of the age were missing. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones: A fact that the Stones would later try to rectify, much to destruction of that era. But in Woodstock you had not one god, but a pantheon: Sly Stone is the Dionysian deity of excitement, Joan Baez the goddess of conscience, Joe Cocker is god on insanity, Jimi Hendrix, the mystical reigning deity, is clearly the god of power, raw, electrical, energy.

And as I watched Taylor kissing her muscle, amplified by the elaborate screens behind her, remembering Woodstock, I realized who Taylor Swift was for this generation. She was the goddess of the Self. To her fans, the Swifties, everything about her was a mirror of the self, her self, her story, her mythology. Yet, a week later when discussing this idea with a couple Gen X/ Millennial guys at my house, they disagreed. They said that their generations were also focused on the self. But they agreed, there was something different here. When people in the Me Decade of the Seventies focused on the self, when the youth from the 80s, 90s, 00s thought about themselves, they thought about following their dreams, about becoming unique, about putting the self before everything. They were in a sense becoming their own deities. (A disconcerting thought.) One could even say that this religion of the Self was behind so much of the political divisiveness which has come to be an obvious meme of the present. But this cohort of Swifties was doing something else. The word hive-mind is often used. They were becoming they extensions of one single self, their Goddess, their Queen... Taylor Swift. From Japan, to Brazil, to Atlanta, to London, to Tbilisi, they were all taking their life cues from this Goddess of the Self. These mass concerts (rallies? spectacles of light and legend?) were unifying forces in a way no one else could match in 2023.

Now is this the outcome Taylor imagined? She evidently wanted to be seen since she was a young girl. She wanted to see her face on t-shirts, on the side of her tour bus, plastic portable coffee mugs. Yet I can't help but consider how all of this has escaped any expectations she once had as a young teen writing songs to show the others who she really was. I think in her heart she genuinely hopes that her fans are learning something from her, becoming happier through the concerts, becoming unique selves in that late 20^th Century sense of the word. But it isn't really like that is it?

To any outsider, it's pretty hard not to see Taylormania as social contagion of sorts. And I can tell you from doing the research for this series of essays (and videos) I feel it too. I feel the increasing pull towards wanting to learn as much about Taylor as possible. And I'm far older than her usual demographic! For among other things what she has been crafting all these years is a story. One neither she nor we can see the edges to yet. And it is this legendary tale that draws you in. It is idea of Taylor circling above us possibly choosing to deign to approach us with her presence. I even feel it as I write. (What if Taylor reads this?? Which on most levels I can brush off for the ridiculous notion that it is. And yet it is that strange relationship Taylor has to the world below her that suggests a continuing story in which we are all connected, for good or ill.)

And it is precisely that possibility, Taylor descending from on high, that infinitesimal chance that she might pick you out of millions to grace you with a visit or a listening party or any number of other benefices she has indeed bestowed upon the individual members of her fandom. Watching Swifties being plucked out an Ellen show audience to meet Taylor is for them actually an overwhelming ineffable experience akin to an epiphanic eucatastrophe. Speech becomes impossible. They cry uncontrollably, sputtering their unutterable words, as Taylor reaches out to touch them and comfort them. She laughs with joy, while they shake in holy awe. She doesn't have to be in the room, or even nearby.

There is a video of a bored American teenage girl opening a last Christmas present from her father. A good sized box too. She opens it to find another inside of it. And another. And several more. All the while she is the typical sarcastic 21^st Century teenager wondering she is going to ever get to the end of this endless shrinkage of poorly made matryoshka doll boxes, some wrapped in Christmas paper, some in duck tape. Finally she gets to an envelope at the bottom. She still can't guess what it is. Money? Gift certificates? What ennui... No. It's a pair of Taylor Swift tickets. Her faces instantly melts, breaking into tears, ugly cry face, she can't even talk. She hugs her father who has obviously spent a LOT of money on these holy relics.

Even more touching is a video of Taylor back around the time of her 1989 album randomly visiting a 96 year old World War 2 veteran. There is a gathering, a message told these people to be there, someone special was coming to visit them. A couple young girls correctly guess that it's going to be Taylor Swift. Most of them have no idea. Some of the younger children guess Santa Claus. The door opens, she simply walks in carrying a guitar case. Evidently the old man was a Taylor Swift fan. When Taylor walks through the door, the girls and women scream for a minute straight. Joyful unbelievable chaos ensues. And then Taylor, like she's just an old friend, pulls her acoustic guitar from the case. In a few moments everyone is singing Shake It Off. I have to admit, this one finally got to me. It was uncanny. By doing these descents from her castle towers into the midst of daily life, Taylor creates a bond so strong even among her most distant lonely fans, girls (usually) living impossibly far from any future concerts or even the rumor of a TS sighting. It provokes the idea among the Swifties that she is an angel or a goddess.

But is Taylor Swift a goddess on any level? Hardly. And no one knows that more than she does herself. Though the temptation is certainly there! Especially while performing. And it is telling that most of these acts of beneficent condescension predate the Reputation era. And now the Swifties are so thick on the ground that she can barely travel undetected by the social media sprites.

And it appears that the Swifties don't take seriously the presence her very serious flaws or sins. One thing Taylor often discusses openly is that she has often had anxieties about performing and her career. From my observation of her fandom, they don't get what she is actually revealing about herself. They seem to think she is like they are; lots of doubts and confusions about life. And for them it is listening to Taylor's lyrics and identifying with her struggles that helps them get through their darker times. While no one's problems can simply be called common, I do believe what Taylor is describing is on a different order of experience. That is, when she talks about anxieties before performing, or that sense of failure that occasionally plagues her (What, after all, is pushing Taylor?), the constant need for reassurance that her fans feed, or the glimpses into her we get through a song like Anti-Hero. Her darkest and deepest truths about her personal fears are always revealed ironically, to allow herself an escape hatch through deniability.

Consider these lyrics. Are they meant to be taken seriously or ironically?

I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser

Midnights become my afternoons

When my depression works the graveyard shift

All of the people I've ghosted stand there in the room

(and later in the song...)

Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism

Like some kind of congressman? (Tale as old as time)

I wake up screaming from dreaming

One day I'll watch as you're leaving

And life will lose all its meaning

(For the last time)

From Anti-Hero by Taylor Swift

'Did your hear' is the ironic point in this song. Casually slipping her real confessions off onto the people talking about her. Her fans think they are like her, but they have no conception what she is actually singing here. They sing along in concert, and basically apply the chorus 'It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me.” to themselves, a weird blending of irony and sincerity, thinking that Taylor understands them. The perfect example of taking Taylor's songs and turning them into your own mirror, few realizing that the greater impact a soul has upon the world, the more cripplingly intense the interior psychological war has to be. The only possible exit to this dilemma is to look up beyond yourself. Does Taylor do this? Which of us has the increasingly gigantic public image of yourself that Taylor has to deal with daily. Knowing human nature, I can guess that there is a roiling inner warfare she must struggle with, sometimes daily. I'm not just talking tears here. I'm talking manifestations of pain that must completely submerge her in a kind of mental sulfuric acid from time to time. (Consider the number of references to drinking that have appeared in her songs and interviews since her more naive pop country days. Fortunately she seems to cut down on the drinking to prepare for the Eras Tour.)

______________

And that intense pressure and self doubt, even loathing, drives her towards finding answers in places that one would be best avoid. I won't make a list here, but I will remark on one area, that has been getting noticed more often over the years, an area that is now also breeding the darkest reaction to her. Occult imagery.

Now one thing that has happened over the years is an increase in both darker imagery, as in the Reputation era, and more dreamy mystical imagery as in the Folklore era. While watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour I watched the seeming ritual with the pumpkin shaped lights, and my first thought was Stevie Nicks. (And this is no coincidence.) Taylor was diving into that rather pop culture sense of sorcery. In all of her songs that might reference witches, not that many, they seem to be more Harry Potter than Wiccan. And certainly not anything resembling Gardnerian witchcraft, or heaven forbid, LaVeyesque Satanism.

Yet playing around with that imagery, like the Harry Potter books before her, will get you labeled a Satanic witch by some of my more conspiracy minded Christian fellow travelers. And I understand why. There is one girl, a former Swiftie, obviously very serious about it, dressing snakily like Taylor during her Reputation period, changing her morals as a mirror of Taylor's changing personas. Now clearly this girl, now closer to 30 years old, took Taylor as a model for everything in her life. Taylor's songs reinforced a sense of victimization, entitlement, which also fed a sense of nihilism and superstition. And she is not alone. How many Swifties have taken Taylor's apparitions as a strange sort of spiritual command to change as well? Then this former Swiftie, through her rather patient boyfriend, now husband, became a Christian and she turned quite intensely against her devotion to Taylor. When she talks now the words witch and demonic appear regularly. Now obviously, by her own admission, she had her own issues. And yet Taylor was her “Lord and savior”.

But she isn't alone with the demonic thing. The devotion to Taylor is so intense, when girls break with it, it's a truly serious thing. Like the converted hippies of the Jesus People who couldn't listen to Pink Floyd anymore without being sent into flashbacks of their acid daze, some of the girls who have had to turn away from Swiftie fandom have had to do so violently.

And that along with that, some of the hyper-literal interpretations of Taylor's more mystical lyrics among certain conservative Christian groups have seen Taylor as part of the larger Q theory, itself a variant on the Illuminati conspiracy trope. How could Taylor have gotten where she is without having colluded with the satanic powers that rule over the music industry and Hollywood? (Andrew Tate really goes off insanely here.) Well I think if we follow Ockham's Razor, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and all it takes is following Taylor's route to the top to see the logical progression at each step along the way. There aren't any unexplainable gaps here. Some people like to see the period before the Reputation that way. But her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian was quite public. And her social media accounts were genuinely filled with snakes, and Taylor, while in no way a Situationist, and probably knows nothing about that art movement, nevertheless is quite adept at taking a page out of their playbook and engaging in acts of detournement, where she turns the images people use to attack her back around at her attackers, hence the snake imagery during the reputation tour. I don't imagine she was consciously thinking occult imagery, in fact I'd be willing to bet that if you put Taylor in a room with a loose snake she be panicked by it. As she is by most horror imagery. Yet she is confident enough to use zombie images against her foes. If Taylor was this Illuminati plant, she'd have to be one of the most evil people in history. But the evidence isn't there.

Yet this idea of her Swifties imitating what they think is her behavior is a serious one. And her influence upon teen and twenty-something girls is massive. She has recognized the fact that she is a role model since the beginning. And unfortunately she has done too little to correct the more extreme interpretations of what it means to be a Swiftie. (I suspect that well beneath public scrutiny by her fans Taylor must suffer squalls of 'what have I created' in the wee hours?) She has allowed them to develop a hive-mind, which is what makes Hunter Hancock's caustic animation 'Taylor Swift's Break Up', while savagely dehumanizing in most respects, ring true, when the frumpy Swifties depicted therein (a beastly exaggeration of her real fandom) speak as though they were Taylor collectively themselves. This aspect of the Swifties' Taylormania does cause genuine fear out there in there beyond the fans. And more than one person has recognized certain aspects of her concert spectacles in events from the past. (I'm just going to leave that vague.)

Taylor seems to take these conspiracies, at least in public, with a sense of humor. And that ability to laugh is probably the best refutation of this conspiratorial mindset. When a massive jet passes very visibly overhead in Buenos Aires during the Eras Tour, while she sings lines from Labyrinth 'Oh, I'm falling in love. I thought the plane was going down, how'd you turn it right around?', knowing the 'Taylor is a Witch' theory, she wittily comments on X (formerly Twitter) ‘Never Beating the Sorcery Allegations’ attached to a short video of the moment. (To which, the conspiracy legions immediately said 'Aha!')

I think the worst that can probably be said of Taylor's more New Agey side is that she is too superstitious (number 13 anyone?), she probably has played around with the kinds of ideas that a person seeking some remedy to the fearfulness and unpredictability of life might resort to, but in fact she doesn't give off the vibes of an esoteric occultist. Even when she uses a word in the song Karma, it seems quite divorced from its origins in Eastern Religion. It simply seems to be a sloppy translation of the biblical concept of 'you reap what you sow' (Galatians 6:7), not that Taylor seems to understand context of that verse either. She's simply made it a kind of pop philosophy of her own, repeating the word often as a catch phrase of sorts. I think she'd be more surprised to learn about the Hindu/Buddhist conception of trying to escape the endless wheel of reincarnations. But perhaps she'd less surprised to see the concept she is describing as originating in the Bible. And as spoken by most of her fans karma, is a word that only relates to which side of Taylor's you are on. (Hint Jo Koy with his rather poor Golden Globes joke about Taylor in her presence showed what being on the frosty side of the Queen of Swiftness looks like in 2024.)

_________________

Which brings us to the larger question, is Taylor Swift a Christian? From my observations there is no clear cut answer to this question. And that fact alone tells us volumes. But there are clues from her history that have found their way into the record. So let's look at a few pieces of her story to see if we can at least find some of the edges to our Swiftian jigsaw puzzle.

First of all it is uncontested that she grew up a Christian home and attended church services. But after that it becomes less certain. She seems to have been raised a Catholic, and did indeed attend a Catholic school when she was young. I have seen other churches mentioned with regards to her faith. Presbyterian and Pentecostal independent churches. But it is hard to find any solid evidence for any of these. But clearly she did indeed go to church. She is quoted as saying “I grew up in a household where faith was always present. My mom would take me to church every Sunday. We prayed before every meal. It was just this routine that we had.” She seems to know some contemporary Christian music, and sang in a choir. And she often mentions thanking God or praying in her first albums. And then her second release was a fairly bland Christmas record released 2007 contain a song she wrote Christmas Must Be Something More where she refers to Jesus as “the birthday boy who saved our lives”.

And this is really first serious public clue as to what kind of Christian she was. Which is to say, in British parlance, bog standard; much like any 90's Christian in an average American church, emphasis on a kind of popular casual folksiness, emphasis on the 'Baby Jesus' at Christmastime, the gospels as stories for the children, the Bible as comfort for the elderly, and ultimately the relatability of God, certainly nothing dour, no hell, no brimstone, and above all no mystery. And whatever else, no emphasis upon the darker elements of this human life, except in the recital of certain verses. Now I'm not being fair. There certainly were churches with more of serious tone and a respect for deeper aspects of our human natures. But in that one phrase Taylor reveals that she wasn't attending one of those churches.

There is one song that predates her debut album which tells us much more about how she understood God. It's a song that has never (as of January 2024) officially been released, yet easily found; Didn't They? The song, written sometime after September 11^th 2001, and recorded when Taylor was about 12 or 13, deals with an extremely difficult subject. Why did God allow so many people to die on 9/11? Were there not good people in the World Trade Center towers? Did many of them not pray? Where was God? A remarkable song of doubt and faith for anyone? Neither perfectly written nor composed, yet sung with a conviction missing from her debut album. And a song that reveals the limits of her teaching in home and church up till that point.

In the first verse she singing about a girl her age walking to school, holding her books, unsuspecting anything remotely like the events of the day. Is Taylor the girl, whose world is going to shatter?

She walks to school

With her arms crossed

It's just another day

At 10 o clock she hears this screaming

Then finally she sees them

It's scary how things change

And I saw the story on the news

I saw the footage from the roof

I sat down and cried

Then she sings a chorus which she will sing three times, slightly varying the subject.

Didn't she call you?

Didn't she need you bad enough?

Was there some reason

I'm not aware of?

Did you not write it down?

Just one more thing to do

Where were you?

And didn't she pray too?

Then young Taylor imagines a business man taking an early morning flight, as her father had done many times. And he finds himself on one of those planes. And confronting the attackers.

Three men walked and said

We're here to die for our God

He stood up and said that's funny

Cause my God died for me

I put the magazine down

I read his words out loud

I sat down and cried

And in another verse she imagines people simply going to work trusting that the Twin Towers would always be there. And she ends their chorus with her plaintiff line 'And didn't they pray too?'

And finally she ends the song with a short coda.

I walk to school

And I wear a cross

I'm counting

Every day

From Didn't They by Taylor Swift

She maintains her faith but she has a new appreciation for the unpredictability of life, and maybe some inkling of its latent evils. Or maybe not. And maybe September 11^th has cast a dark shadow over the rather comfortable faith she has grown up in?

As a Christian from another era, I think I can safely say that the increasingly positive messaging of too many late 20^th Century and early 21^st Century churches holds little space for a serious discussion of darkness of humanity. The Bible, besides stating the need to love, is quite clear about the evil that mankind is fully capable, the ultimate depravities of slaughter and pillage. But since the 60s the darker part has more often been hidden, de-emphasized, in order to seem more accepting, inclusive, relatable. Much fewer are the churches who have guided their flocks through the Scylla of inoffensiveness and the Charybdis of doomsday fearfulness. Solzhenitsyn speaks with the Christian voice missing from too many American churches when he says, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.” Too many American Christians get surprised, even shocked, by the existence of evil and darkness. And yet as I live here in Tbilisi Georgia far away from the extreme optimism of my American compatriots, I can see little of that surprise that bad events seem to hold for my fellow citizens. Contrasting the difference between the 2020 pandemic reactions; the Americans panicked, the Georgians just hunkered down and rather calmly said 'Here we go again. At least it won't be as bad the Nineties.'

And what does this say about Taylor Swift's Christianity?

I think we can say that it was more concerned with appearances than with the reality. By her own words in the Miss Americana documentary, she always felt the intolerable pressure to be the ‘good girl’. And in the beginning of her career, she certainly came across that way. And so being seen as good was always more important that being good. And so the young Taylor singing Didn't They, clearly has never run into a version of Christianity that already understood the darkness of humanity. And when her musical talent propels her into the limelight and into the demimonde of celebrity status, her ideas begin to change. In the music biz, in the entertainment industry, there is a very different version of righteous appearances. It involves social justice, narrowly defined through words like inclusion, diversity, equity. And by 2019 these words were at a fever pitch in all of the commanding heights of the society; the mass media, the schools, advertising, social media. And that fever would break in 2020.

Now to be fair to Taylor I am sure that she tried, and maybe on some level still is trying, to hold together the beliefs of her youth with this brand new (historically speaking) ideology. Yet while Taylor certainly can fight for herself, her music, her fans, her fellow travelers, I get the feeling that she is quite weak when it comes to being seen as a good girl, as opposed to being good. (To be good you must understand the darkness, and one gets the feeling that, apart from the hideous realms of gossip, she has been fairly well protected all of her life.) There is a definite battle within her on these things. 2019 was a feverish time for her as well. When I rewatched Miss Americana again recently I realized that the documentary was certainly timed to go along with what would have been her Lover album tour. That LGBTQ+ emphasis that was all over it. Taylor wanted to provide definitive reasons to justify what might have seemed like a controversial new direction to her original fans. Curiously most of the 'drunk Taylor' compilations on YouTube come from 2019. And for Taylor's sake I am glad that 2020 shut her down. Something needed to change. She had become a propaganda animal. And in my opinion Lover is her low point. (Though Cornelia Street, when performed acoustically is one of greatest songs.)

The central moment in Miss Americana comes when Taylor discusses her political awakening with her father and team. Now many critics have complained that Taylor was fully an adult and didn't need to justify herself to her father or team. Yet by having this moment filmed Taylor somewhat checkmates her father into accepting her new move. She also uses the Trump boogieman as a foil to her nightmare fears. She expresses her shame at not becoming a more political creature earlier. And supposedly the media feeding frenzy over the caddish President had nothing to do with this. And it's hard to fault her, since in the climes she was existing in, that bubble of cool rich talented and famous entertainment folk, you would have to turn over quite a few rocks to find anyone who who would agree with Trump on even one thing. The idea that something else was happening that wasn't connected to the infamous president probably never occurred to her.

Here is one example to prove the point. There is a photo from 2018 of a rather chummy Taylor with J.K. Rowling. And at that time I would imagine that philosophically they were pretty much on the same page, that liberal Christian social justice vibe. Then at some point J.K. Rowling, the definite feminist, came out against the identicality of transwomen with biological women. In other words Rowling starting in 2019 at least in this one issue was questioning the now dominant mainstream illusion that a transwoman was fully a woman as much as anyone born as such. Now I suspect that Taylor Swift holds similar views, though she also been at pains to show herself as an ally on LGBTQ+ issues. Yet especially given how much TS has sought to elevate the status of women. (Then again so did J.K. Rowling.) We have never heard a word from Taylor about the J.K. Rowling's statements. And this puts Taylor squarely on the horns of the appearing good versus being good dilemma, especially since there has been further fragmenting between the feminist side of the fence (which Taylor is firmly on) vs. the transhumanist 'don't dream, be it' agenda.

So in that central moment of the Miss Americana, Taylor pokes at a very Conservative senatorial candidate who is using Christian family values language, ('Tennessee Christian values'). Taylor, tears forming in her eyes, say in a passionate breaking voice 'Those aren't Tennessee Christian values. I live in Tennessee. I'm a Christian. That's not what we stand for.' And so here is the big question. Let's take her at her word. Let's say she is a Christian. What kind then? Lady Gaga once said 'I am a Christian woman. And what I do know about Christianity is that we bear no prejudice and everybody is welcome.' And Taylor would probably agree. And I know these people, the main verse they seem to know from the New Testament is where Jesus says 'Judge not.' (Matthew 7:1)

Tom Holland in his book Dominion, relating the history Christianity, and how deep Christian morality runs in Western culture, would I am sure recognize this species of Christianity. Essentially he sees it as deeply Christian, yet only in a few ways. His take on the recent culture war is that two interpretations of Christianity are actually having a societal civil war in the West. And while I do think much more is happening than that, he certainly isn't wrong. And Taylor Swift pretty much stands at the epicenter of this war.

And there are those who see her as the bellwether of a new faith. There is a video of a Lutheran Church (hardly considered Lutheran by traditional believers), who have developed what is called the Sparkle Creed. (That fully sounds like a Swiftian idea.) It comes complete with rainbow colors and prayers for 'Taylor and her Swifties'.

So is Taylor Swift a Christian by those standards? By Tom Holland's broadly cultural definition. Let's forget about doctrine and gender and social justice for a moment. Let's get to the core of the issue. While we might get distracted over Taylor's social agenda and point out disconnects between them and traditional Christian teaching, a much more problematic area exists. And that has to do with the subject matter of so many of her songs. Not the breakup songs and her repeated attempts to find a true mate. (I wish her nothing but good wishes here and in her current relationship.) Rather it is the vindictive, even vengeful, nature of far too many of her songs. And her ability to hold grudges far too long. Or to put it in the simplest Christian terms, is what she considers her Christianity deep enough to forgive those who have wronged her. And by any Christian terms, this is no slight issue.

Taylor Swift has a massive following of those who literally seem to live and breathe her words. If she speaks a word they listen and follow. A rather trivial example: how many young Swifties have gone out and bought a turntable because she makes a pretty big deal about her vinyl releases? Quite a few. (This actually makes me quite glad.)

On CBS Sunday Morning in the summer of 2019 Taylor talks about what she has learned about forgiveness, and she says 'You know, people go on and on about, like, you have to forgive and forget to move past something. No, you don't. You don't have to forgive and you don't have to forget to move on. You can move on without any of those things happening. You just become indifferent, and then you move on.'

There is no verse in the Bible uttering the folk wisdom 'forgive and forget'. But is what she is saying then, keep a grudge and remember?

Then when Taylor is asked point blank if she believes in forgiveness, she answers 'Yes, absolutely. Like, for people that are important in your life who have added, you know, who have enriched your life and made it better, and also there has been some struggle and some bad stuff, too. But I think that, you know, if something's toxic and it's only ever really been that, what are you gonna do? …Just move on. It's fine.'

The word toxic has become quite toxic itself. Who determines what is 'toxic', poisonous, unforgivable? And there are Swifties who hear these words in an oracular manner. And in fact these words cut directly across the heart of Christian teaching. Let me allow C.S. Lewis explain from Mere Christianity.

“I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe the one I have to talk of today is even more unpopular: the Christian rule, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as yourself." Because in Christian morals "thy neighbor" includes "thy enemy," and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies. Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. and then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. 'That sort of talk makes them sick', they say. and half of you already want to ask me, 'I wonder how you'd feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?'

This, sadly, is where Taylor reveals the shallowness of the Christian teaching she received as a child. I know people, only a few days old in the faith, who already know how central forgiveness is to Christian teaching and living. What she is saying are essentially the kind of platitudes that too many pass around by osmosis in our age. Like the flu. It only takes a few moments cursorily reading the Gospels to come across the following verse by Jesus; a verse that even his disciples seem to bite back on in their confusion. In the Gospel of Matthew chapter 18 it relates how Peter came to Jesus and asked, 'Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?' Jesus answered, 'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.'“ That is both clear and shocking.

C.S. Lewis goes on explaining that forgiveness is there in the Lord's Prayer. “And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?”

So what can we say about Taylor Swift and what she thinks about her Christian faith? It seems to conveniently be there when she needs and not when she doesn't. And the fact that her CBS interview is from 2019 does not escape me either. That last pre-pandemic moment when one could righteously hate Donald Trump, evil Conservatives, people on the wrong side of history. (It's amazing how many times Taylor uses the phrase 'right side of history' during this era.) And it was a time when the mainstream media, suffering so deeply from Trump derangement syndrome, could circle the wagons and keep the barbarians out with a smug sense of being absolutely right. They weren't of course. And what Taylor didn't see, buried in the protective bubble of mainstream news and the endless approbation of her fans, isolated by her massive fame and the elite entertainment cadres, is that actually more and more intelligent people were coming together in a rather wide center, gays, lesbians, Christians, atheists, Conservatives, former Leftists, and many more, to have a conversation. A conversation she has yet to partake in, that she needs to partake in. Maybe she needs to enter it through J.K. Rowling’s window, questioning what these new developments mean for the women she wants to up lift. Maybe she needs a break from the rather overly solicitous folks that naturally gravitate towards such a bright star. I hope her football beau is a knight and not another man-boy.

So while I hope that this simple missive will find a few readers, nevertheless that strange sense Taylor peering down from on high remains in the back of my thoughts. So allow me to indulge myself for a moment. If I were to spend a few hours talking with Taylor what would I talk with her about?

I am sure we would talk about music: I would encourage her to dig deeper into music. As someone who knows more than the average person about music history, what she needs to do to deepen her influences, to expand her palette. She needs to drop below the mainstream radar of popular artists, which she knows quite well. She needs to excavate at the next layer down. I am actually quite salutary about about her Midnights album. While Lover seems infested with a new woke convert's desire to make propaganda, (I really can't take her grossly uncharitable depictions of the 'deplorables' in You Need To Calm Down seriously. It sparks my own reply, 'Taylor, they aren't the only ones who need to calm down.') Midnights is the doubts that keep her up at nights. And in my opinion Anti-Hero is her best and most honest song. And I want to see her going further down that road.

In chronological Order

Watch the videos if they exist.

All songs sourced in YouTube

Didn't They (Her pre-fame song about September 11th)

Picture to Burn (Early Country Pop revenge song)

You Belong With Me (The first song with multiple Taylors)

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Live Rock Version from her 1989 tour)

Blank Space (a much more potent and sarcastic development on Picture to Burn)

Look What You Made Me Do (The big change in Taylor's persona)

Cornelia Street (Live in Paris – Much more honest and passionate than the Lover album version)

Wildest Dreams (Live solo version from post Grammy show)

All Too Well The Short Film (Long 2023 video version)

Anti-Hero (Taylor at her most honest. Thus far.)

The Anadromist (Byrne Power)

Discussion about this post