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Unpacking Madonna’s Spiritual Beliefs

Madonna’s 13th album, Rebel Heart, includes quite a lot of spiritual imagery—sometimes couching temptation in terms of a struggle requiring divine assistance, other times merging erotic sexual innuendo and religious iconography in deliberately provocative ways.

In a lengthy new interview with Rolling Stone, the Material Girl talked about some of her spiritual experiences growing up, as well as where she’s at today regarding her religious beliefs. Let’s look at what Madonna had to say, then consider some reasons why this culturally influential artist’s convictions are important.

Madonna described growing up in suburban Detroit without her mother, who died of breast cancer when she was young. She says having a “rebel heart” was a result of growing up in “what I considered to be a provincial, suburban, narrow-minded environment. Feeling like I didn’t fit in, feeling ostracized. So if people didn’t accept me at school, I would just push things even further. I thought, ‘Well, you already don’t like me. So f— you. I’m going to go even further. How do you like these hairy armpits?’ It was just in my DNA. And I didn’t have a mother. That probably had a lot to do with it, because it wasn’t like my mother was saying, ‘You shouldn’t behave that way.’ I had a father, I had older brothers. I did have a stepmother, but I didn’t have any relationship with her. So there was no role model for me.”

Madonna’s questioning, even defiant attitude toward life in general spilled over into her experience growing up in a strict Catholic environment.

 My father was very strict with me. … And the Catholic Church, all of the rules, and why did I have to wear a dress when they could wear pants? I would say to my dad, ‘Will Jesus love me less if I wear pants? Am I going to hell?’ I wanted to know why people follow rules blindly, or why girls had to act a certain way and boys didn’t. Why could boys ask girls out and girls not ask guys out? Why did girls have to shave their legs and guys didn’t? Why did society, like, set up everything the way they did? My whole adolescence was full of unanswered whys. Because they never got answered, I just kept lighting fires everywhere—metaphorically speaking.

By her own admission, Madonna was a smart, precocious, independent young woman without a role model and without anyone to help her answer the significant questions she asked. Given those ingredients, mixed with a personality that resisted being told what to believe or think, it’s perhaps not shocking that Madonna eventually began to formulate her own individual belief system, one that incorporated elements from several different religious traditions. She says:

 I don’t affiliate myself with any specific religious group. I connect to different ritualistic aspects of different belief systems, and I see the connecting thread between all religious beliefs. I have not converted to Judaism. I’ve studied Kabbalah, as you know, for many years, so there are a lot of things I do that one would associate with practicing Judaism. I hear the Torah every Saturday. I observe Shabbat. I say certain prayers. My son was bar mitzvahed. So this appears like I’m Jewish, but these rituals are connected to what I describe as the Tree of Life consciousness and have more to do with the idea of being an Israelite, not Jewish. the tribes of Israel existed before the religion of Judaism existed, so you have to do your history. … So, am I Jewish? I mean, some people would say, well, you do a lot of things that Jews do, but I would say I do a lot of things that people did before Judaism existed. And I believe what I practice has to do with something deeper than religion, that it embodies all religions, including Judaism. And Christianity. And Islam.

When interviewer Brian Hiatt noted that she was also wearing a cross, the 56-year-old singer said, “I like crosses. I’m sentimental about Jesus on the cross. Jesus was a Jew, and also I believe he was a catalyst, and I think he offended people because his message was to love your neighbor as yourself; in other words, no one is better than somebody else. He embraced all people, whether it was a beggar on the street or a prostitute, and he admonished a group of Jews who were not observing the prophets of the Torah. So he rattled a lot of people’s cages.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Madonna talked about the intersection of spirituality and sexuality. “I’m defying the convention that you can’t be both [spiritual and sexual], or that you have to be one personality trait. There’s no law that says you cannot be a spiritual person and a sexual person. In fact, if you have the right consciousness, sex is like a prayer. It can be a divine experience. … In the Old Testament, in the Koran, sex is not a bad thing. There are certain religious groups who have turned it into a sinful act. I’ve always tried to open people’s minds to the idea that it’s not something to be ashamed of.”

So what observations can we make about Madonna’s spiritual journey?

Madonna-blog-middleOnce upon a time, people typically adopted the beliefs of their parents as they grew up. But beginning in the ’60s and ’70s, the countercultural pushback against the prevailing Judeo-Christian influence in American culture opened the gates wide to other alternatives.

The alternative Madonna has crafted fuses bits and pieces of her values (individualism, self-determination and a rejection of traditional Catholicism’s sexual mores) with her experiences as an adolescent (having to fend for herself amid bullying and criticism, not having a mother) and her spiritual experiences as an adult (including Kaballah, Judaism, Islam and Christianity).

Madonna’s approach to spirituality is both postmodern (it rejects any one tradition’s claim that it alone offers objective truth) and syncretistic (it blends a variety of religious worldviews). In this, she’s could be considered a poster child for the way many folks approach spiritual issues these days—rejecting dogma and strict theology, replacing it instead with the religious practices and trappings that she deems authentic. In other words, Madonna is the authority for her own religious system, one that appropriates whatever she deems significant in crafting her own spiritual path and rejects everything else.

Madonna’s hardly the only one who takes this syncretistic approach to faith and spirituality. Many people would claim to be “spiritual, but not religious.” They engage in certain spiritual practices or hold to a set of mix-and-match beliefs but mostly reject dogmatic religious traditions (and their particulars).

But as the best-selling female artist in history, having sold more than 300 million albums worldwide in the last 32 years, Madonna continues to have huge influence when it comes to shaping the worldview of her fans. Which is why we’d do well to understand what and how she thinks and believes. Madonna says that she’s “sentimental about Jesus on the cross.” But there’s little evidence that the syncretistic, personalized spirituality she’s fused together has room for the One who also said in Matthew 16:24, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”