A look at a popstar’s faith
Born in 1969 and raised in Anaheim, California, the Pop icon Gwen Stefani was Catholic with her family. They did everything including a trip to the Vatican.
But it wasn’t just a family practice. She’d received the religion’s spirit into herself. “That was a seed that my mom planted in me when I was a little girl,” as she’d put it.
Was it unlikely that she got into punk rock music?
She’d recall the mentality of the day: “You’ve got to be a feminist and you’ve got to hate guys. And you’ve got to cuss and be tough.”
She continues:
“And I was never like that. I grew up, like, a Catholic good girl. Total Brady Bunch family. That always kind of scared me, the pressure of having to be so cool or like, ‘fuck you to the world’. But I kind of got over that and realized that, yes, I love to dress up and I love to wear makeup and be myself. I like being a girl. I like having a door opened for me. I like all that traditional stuff and I won’t deny it.”
She turned her musical career into a religious story.
Even the name of her band, “No Doubt,” could be read as a religious reference. Doesn’t having “no doubt” mean you’re a “true believer”?
Her music was often ‘confessional’, a word she’ll use of it.
She could be unexpectedly sexually conservative. In 1997, an interviewer asked when she’d lost her virginity. She was offended.
“I would never tell you that! Are you crazy? I would never tell anyone that. I have pretty strong feelings about that. If any girls were to ask me what my advice would be, completely wait as long as possible, wait till you’re married. I think it’s really a sacred thing. It’s different when you get older and you have a boyfriend. Like, I’m 27. It’s such a blessing that God gave us, we should be able to respect it.”
The music scene of the time was more religious than fans knew.
Many musicians of the time were reacting against childhood religious training as their music bore the marks of that process. There were the Evangelicals—Kurt Cobain, Eminem, Marilyn Manson, Scott Stapp—and the Catholics: Madonna, Courtney Love, and Gwen Stefani.
In the early music of No Doubt, Christian terms are often allusively placed, as in the tracks “Open the Gate,” “By the Way” or “Snakes.” In her hit “Just a Girl,” we may hear an allusion to Eve, the first woman, who in the biblical account in Genesis never speaks.
“So many reasons for me to run and hide,” Gwen sings. The first humans ‘hiding’ in Genesis 3:8 does seem a reference.
No Doubt’s 1995 album “Tragic Kingdom” was very Christian.
The ‘Kingdom’ is the key Christian concept of the world as it should be, and as it will be. The ‘tragic kingdom’ would be the world now.
Tracks on the album, like “Sunday Morning,” are hazily religious. And the video for the album’s hit single, “Don’t Speak,” re-plays the biblical story of the Fall. In the garden at the beginning of time, Adam—played by an ex-boyfriend—eats the forbidden fruit, as Gwen sings of a breakup.
Like many Catholics she was somewhat ‘liberal’ on social issues.
She wasn’t pro-abortion, she’d say, but she was pro-choice. She didn’t moralize. She’d sprinkle in some “God” talk now and then. On rare occasion she’d do overtly Christian gestures, but mostly it was a quiet practice.
She was noted to attend Mass every Sunday, even when on tour.
Her marriage in 2002 to the musician Gavin Rossdale was a Catholic challenge.
He grew up Anglican but had settled into a vague atheism. His music, as he’d reflect, had hymn-like qualities but he liked to add in insults to a Christian sensibility, which made Gwen upset.
She pressed forward with the wedding. They had three ceremonies, one Catholic and two Anglican. As she walked down the aisle, she carried her mother’s prayer book. Over their marriage she’d be described as often trying to influence him to convert to Catholicism.
He’d be described as often sleeping with other women—including the nanny.
The breakup was “hell.”
Her childhood fantasies of being a good Catholic wife were dragged through the tabloid press. Any fantasies she might’ve had of Rossdale eventually converting were put to rest. Instead she faced the gruesome religious ordeal of divorcing.
“I thought my life was over,” she’d say. Catholic assumptions are layered into the period. If divorcing, she might not be able to remarry.
She managed to get an annulment.
This was a tricky, as they’d had a Catholic ceremony—and two children—but Rossdale had committed adultery, and a direct appeal to the Vatican did the trick. She got the marriage annulled, and so, religiously, did not get a ‘divorce’ at all. She had never married.
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She calls her divorce a “breakup,” as if it wasn’t a marriage at all.
She’d also call it a “test” of her faith.
She says in one interview:
“This is the thing, I always feel like this whole thing that we’re doing here, this life thing, is a test. And basically, you get given all of these crazy challenges to trick you to think that maybe it’s not a test and maybe nothing good is going to be around the corner.”
Along the way, she adds, “you get lost on your journey.”
She set out to write and sing about the divorce.
Her 2016 album, This Is What the Truth Feels Like, is strikingly Christian, in that its agony over the end of her marriage is tinged by Catholic theology of marriage and divorce. But for her to sing about her pain was also Christian.
“I tried to find what was my gift and my purpose,” she said. “In that horrible moment, I just said to myself, ‘This is happening to me for a purpose…’ I tried to go right into the studio. I knew that was the only thing I know how to do good, is write songs and I wrote the Truth record.”
She’d add:
“It just makes me believe in God and my journey. My cross to bear was to go through these heartbreaks and write these songs and help people.”
To frame the ‘break-up’ of her first marriage as a crucifixion invites a next relationship being understood as her ‘resurrection’.
Her latest album, “Bouquet,” is a depiction of her love life as a religious journey.
Her first marriage is depicted as a regrettable mistake. The first track, “Somebody Else’s,” is clearly about Rossdale, who is not identified as a husband. He belongs to an unidentified ‘someone else’.
The break-up is the start of a religious process of contrition, penance and restoration. In “Swallow My Tears,” she sings:
“Lookin’ for God, I’m prayin’, kneelin’ Had to go and do some healin’”
Her next relationship is the divine one.
A new romance with Blake Shelton, amid his own divorce drama, seemed to her supernatural. “God put this other person there to love me,” she said.
She presented her second husband as her intended husband. In “Late to Bloom” she sings that she wishes they could “skip the part” when they weren’t together. In “Purple Irises” the 20 years they were apart seem to disappear. She doesn’t mention they were each married to someone else.
“The way you look at me I swear my heart hits rewind”
Blake Shelton wasn’t Catholic, but became one.
“I start seeing God in everything, because she does,” he’d explain. “Of course, that starts bleeding into my records and my music, and next thing you know, I’m recording songs and writing songs about faith and God.”
The ‘King of Country’ would convert to Catholicism before marrying her. The wedding was staged to suggest she viewed it as her first and authentic one, as if she’d understood marital love for the first time.
Her “Bouquet” album returns to images of planting a new garden.
The biblical references get pretty thick. The track “Reminders,” for which she is credited as the primary writer, is a prayer.
“Give me your peace I’m gonna dig down deep And bury those memories Sow under the soil Gonna let perfect love grow On this road to Jericho”
For all her clues and suggestions, Gwen Stefani wasn’t known to be a devout Catholic.
In making an ad for Hallow, the Catholic prayer app, she surprised even fans by being more publicly Christian, at Christmas.
“Join me and millions of Christians around the world,” she says, “as we celebrate the truth that God so loved the world, He gave us His only Son.” 🔶
