Britney Spears has declared that she is an atheist, for unfortunate reasons. I say unfortunate because her apostasy is a consequence of the horrible treatment by her family, and it’s sad that she had to go through that.
Britney Spears, to put it lightly, has been through a lot. Between her conservatorship and her current family drama with her ex-husband and her children, her faith has been tested, so much so that she now says she doesn’t “believe in God anymore.”
In a now-deleted audio recording (as transcribed by Page Six) shared on Instagram last night (September 5), Spears concludes by saying of the four-month mental health facility stay she regularly mentions, “God would not allow that to happen to me if a God existed. I don’t believe in God anymore because of the way my children and my family have treated me. There is nothing to be believe in anymore. I’m an atheist, y’all.”
K-Fed will do that to you, I guess. I’d rather that major religions recognized that abuse is not an effective recruiting tool and cracked down on their repulsive believers.
Abuse fulfills authoritarians’ real goal which is power over others.
Will gladly welcome her. A shame that this is what it took. Hopefully if she decides to explore her beliefs more she will not be sucked in by the charlatan and authoritarian atheists.
Having endured a lot of personal abuse, Ms Spears will now find out (more) about public abuse as publicity-craving fundagelical finger-pointers compete for headlines in denouncing her apostasy with alternating rage and condescension.
Pass the poison popcorn!
I have nothing but sympathy for that woman. She was a child star which is a recipe for a messed up childhood. The whole conservatorship. That time she freaked out and shaved herself bald. She’s had a rough three decades. I’m glad she’s getting the help she needs.
I don’t think that personal hardship is a “poor” excuse to become an atheist. The theists love to claim that god ALWAYS provides to those who believe (for example, Matthew 7:7-12), if your prayers aren’t being answered you just don’t really believe and need to faith harder, What better way to demonstrate the Problem of Evil than unanswered prayers in the face of hardship and abuse?
Granted, it may not be the best reason, but it’s a good start.
She could hang out with Reagan Junior and others who are not ideologically motivated but just think the whole shebang is stupid.
I remember when Anne Rice got so disgusted with the Christian for-profit penal colonies for children that she left christianity.
(and the Catholic church keeps delivering reasons why you should not put your faith in religion. BTW our brothers and sisters in the growing ex-muslim community can provide even more testimonies about that)
Spears story is a sad one. Indeed being a child star is a recipe for a horrible childhood and adulthood…and a life sometimes cut short because of the self-abuse that comes along with being abused. There are exceptions to this story line so maybe she can pull out of the tailspin.
But to tell you the truth, this could be the mere preamble for a sudden turn “back to God”. She’s gone from Southern Baptist to Catholic to atheist in fairly short order. All it would take is some “man of God” to convince her that her trials and tribulations are the work of Jesus blah blah, and she could flip back to evangelical Christian of some sort. It’s a long standing pattern in Christian culture, particularly Protestant and evangelical.
R.L. Stollar – “Britney Spears and White Evangelicalism.”
This has a link to Stollar’s illuminating interview at SWAJ and a Religion Dispatches piece also about the role of Evangelicalism in Spears’ travails. Before listening to the SWAJ episode I had been unaware of a lot of this background.
From Stollar’s 2021 Religion Dispatches piece, “Why #FreeBritney is an #Exvangelical Cause”:
@6 Ron Reagan Jr. has always been an excellent poster child for rational though and action. Atheist, liberal & childless by choice. When asked about kids, his response “we have cats”. What’s not to like?
Although if you weren’t inclined towards atheism already, having two nutty parents who are not just conservative Christians but also believe in ESP and psychics should pretty tip the scales towards rational thought and atheism.
Forget the exvangelical angle–it looks (to me anyway) like Britney is rejecting all or most forms of authoritarianism. Her toxic AF family might have had evangelism as an excuse for their toxic and controlling (to say nothing of narcissistic) behaviors. Religious belief might have been an excuse, not a reason.
Notice how Britney’s parents called a lawyer at breathtaking speed to get her Vegas wedding annulled but were perfectly fine with Britney’s younger sister being pregnant at 16 and moving in with her then boyfriend? Only one of the daughters had any real money.
Anne Rice ditched Catholicism for a number of reasons, including the Catholic Church’s stance on homosexuality. Her son is gay.
Then she turned around and wrote multiple bestsellers which included a lot of homoerotica and likable gay characters.
Skip the apple pie: Anne Rice and Cher are the REAL faces of motherhood. For loving their kids no matter what and not insisting that their kids carve themselves into ever-smaller pieces of themselves to be considered acceptable and lovable.
silvrhalide @ #10:
Um, fuck off.
If you bothered to read/listen to the materials I provided, you’d see that this went well beyond her family.
SC @ 11
OK, is there any foreign jurisdiction where we can crowdfund a ‘contract’ on Lou Taylor ?
birgerjohansson @ #12, WTF?!
#12 @birgerjohansson,
I know a guy.
Sadly, not an international assassin, just some guy. Wait, is that bragging? Is knowing a guy something important now?
Louis
@11 From the link that you provided (and apparently failed to read)
“Spears has never identified as an #exvangelical and #FreeBritney is not about religion. But she is a former evangelical who has pushed against her controlling family, who has suffered immensely at the hands of evangelicals”
SHE GETS TO CHOOSE FOR HERSELF.
From your link:
“Spears was actually a standard-bearer for evangelicalism, especially evangelical purity culture, about which numerous articles have been written.
As journalism professor Evelyn McDonnell has observes, “Selling Britney as a virgin…made her a non-participant in the sexual pleasure that was clearly a part of her appeal. From the very beginning of her career, she lacked agency.””
Did Britney choose to be the “standard-bearer for evangelicalism” or was it chosen for her?
Britney, as a teen performer, never chose how to market herself and certainly never chose Lou Taylor as a business manager. Her toxic parents did all that for her. Or more accurately, to her.
Claiming Britney as the poster child for exvangelicals is doing exactly the same thing that her family did to her–slapped a label on her and forced her to fit into it for their convenience and their purposes. What you are doing by stating, unequivocally, that she is in fact an exvangelical is the flip side of the same coin. You label women for your own purposes and convenience without ever once considering that the woman in question might have opinions or beliefs or positions of her own.
Did you interview Britney personally? Speak to anyone authorized to speak on her behalf? No?
So unless you have some hitherto undisclosed mind-reading abilities, you don’t know either.
The original article in the post stated only that Britney stated that she was now an atheist.
You don’t know if she identifies as an exvangelical or if she just decided that she’s done with religion, or just done with that particular religion. She has stated that she is an atheist. Let’s see where she is next week. Or next month. Frankly, it looks like she’s trying out all the different personas and philosophies that most people work out in their teens and early twenties, except she never got to be a normal teen because her toxic and controlling family was too busy milking the cash cow that was the Britney Spears money-making machine. And boy howdy were they quick to skim the profits.
Britney’s parents, for all their ostentatious displays of conservative Christian piety and ideals, certainly didn’t seem bothered in the slightest about Britney’s younger sister Jamie Lynn being pregnant out of wedlock and moving in with her then boyfriend. But Jamie Lynn wasn’t the kid with the real money either. The minute Britney got married in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it (Christian!) Vegas wedding, her parents were right there in a hot minute getting the wedding annulled and using it later as proof of her instability and her need for a conservatorship.
Let’s review: Jamie Lynn gets pregnant out of wedlock; a nonissue for her conservative evangelical Christian parents.
Britney gets married in a Christian wedding and suddenly it’s full-blown panic time. Why exactly is that? Is it because, according to the Spears parents’ own beliefs that Britney’s husband, not them, is now the decider of Britney’s life, career, and more to the point, money? (A position generally supported by the law, BTW. Generally, the minute both parties say “I do”, each spouse becomes the other’s medical proxy, financial proxy, legal proxy, etc.) If Britney’s husband is now in position to control her money, where does that leave her grifter parents? Better get that annulment tout suite!
For all their ostensible Christian beliefs, the Spears marketed (or allowed her to be marketed by her ostensibly Christian business manager) their underage teenage daughter in a creepy-as-fuck teenage jailbait kind of way. And not in a way designed to appeal to other teens, or at least, not just other teens. In a way to attract the attentions of older creepy men. (The same creepy men demographic that counted down–online no less–the days and minutes until the Olsen twins turned eighteen. Gross.)
The Spears parents used their evangelical religion as a pretext for their toxic and controlling behavior. Evangelism didn’t cause their toxic, controlling and grifting behavior. There are plenty of toxic, controlling parents, kids, spouses, intimate partners etc. out in the world who aren’t evangelicals. Evangelism was the fig leaf for their power grab and grifting.
From your post:
“If you bothered to read/listen to the materials I provided, you’d see that this went well beyond her family.”
I read the original article at the link that you posted. Did you read anything that I wrote? More to the point, did you actually understand any of it?
Those with knee-jerk reactions are best described by omitting the “knee”.
Better work on that reading comprehension.
[meta]
silvrhalide, not disputing you at all, but… you are so very vehement there.
Impressive.
(No value judgement, either… but I do like cogent vehemence)
What the hell? That wasn’t the “argument” you made above. You said: “Forget the exvangelical angle.” No one was roping her into anything, doofus. Stollar was suggesting that the movement to free her from the conservatorship should be embraced by exvangelicals especially given the religious aspects of her story and that the evangelical aspects of her story should be better publicized. (This is particularly true right now, as we’re seeing another wave of evangelical-promoted “parental rights” activism surrounding schools and libraries.)
You then said “Her toxic AF family might have had evangelism as an excuse for their toxic and controlling (to say nothing of narcissistic) behaviors. Religious belief might have been an excuse, not a reason.” What are you even talking about here? Who suggested this as an “excuse”? Why are you only discussing her parents when the article and podcast talk about others?
It seems you’re fundamentally confused about what Stollar is talking about and what I’m talking about. Perhaps you could summarize what you think I’m saying.
None of this is relevant to the point anyone is making. The article to which I linked explicitly stated that she didn’t identify as an exvangelical.
THAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT. Not just her parents but the community in which she grew up. That was the point of the fucking materials to which I linked. Her family wasn’t a free-floating thing operating in a vacuum. The ways in which she’s been victimized are an (in many ways extreme) example of the way many children and adults (especially girls and women) are treated in the US, and particularly in rightwing religious subcultures. The dynamics and institutional structures involved in her case transcend her case. Some exvangelicals are atheists and some aren’t, but many of them break with evangelicalism because of the abuses, trauma, and authoritarianism the religion condones and supports. The article was describing how these same forces have played some role in her victimization.
This is moronic. I very obviously stated no such thing.
Ahem:
(Obviously no one needs to accept her mother’s story at face value; again, the point is that Spears was harmed by people beyond her immediate family, that she was situated within a particular, and particularly patriarchal, religious subculture, and that people who have left/escaped from this subculture can potentially recognize some of the same oppressive forces at work.)
Greed and religion aren’t mutually exclusive. Nor, again, is this story solely about her parents or even her then-manager.
Again, the fucking point. This wasn’t inconsistent with the Christian beliefs of the people involved. It’s in the quotes I provided above. JFC.
Pretty sad, John.
Passion. Sadness is a value judgement.
Oh, good grief. I’ve already pointed out that the social structures involved here went beyond the parents – even if you believed her father’s motivations were purely personal, everything that happened to her would have been far more unlikely absent the religious institutions surrounding the family and influencing the culture. Of course there are people who are controlling, abusive, authoritarian, etc. who aren’t evangelicals (I can’t believe I’m even addressing this silly point), but there are cultural beliefs, practices, and movements that condone, promote, and justify abuse and authoritarianism. Obviously it’s helpful to address at the individual level, but equally obviously these aren’t problems that can be solved at the individual level.
(Incidentally, just last week I was recommending Philip Greven’s Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse.)
I should note that recognizing more fully what Spears has been up against should help everyone more fully appreciate her courage and perseverance.
And that doesn’t hinge on her remaining an atheist.
(Although it’s really the only reasonable position. :))
We accept her, we accept her. One of us, one of us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C4uTEEOJlM
(Sincerely.)
How does it make sense to offer that up in defense of “Forget the exvangelical angle”, especially given the final sentence that you omitted … “You can’t get much more #exvangelical than that.”
Poor woman.
Bet she has more $$$ than you, F.O.
I had deliberately avoided reading about the Britney Spears saga as I thought this was just anither celebrity crash and burn story. Now I know better.
And the music fans who previously were ignorant of the corruption present in society in general and religion will now be educated.
Seriously, I like the idea of a deepfake video with Lou Taylor and the Spears parents burning korans, and wearing shirts with the text “Kim Jong un is a tub of lard”.
#23 @Jim, I first saw Freaks in a movie theater back in the 70s and that scene is definitely very memorable and ever since someone saying “one of us” always seems foreboding. Freaks remains my all-time favorite horror film.