In a new interview with Rock Feed, John Cooper, the frontman and bassist for the Grammy-nominated Christian rock band SKILLET, once again spoke about his intensely strict religious upbringing where all pop music, black clothes and even Christian rock music was banned and how it shaped his view of religion. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "There is a ton of hypocrisy in Christianity, in the church — there just is — and I find it personally disgusting… "I don't wanna get into a deep Bible lesson, so I'm not gonna preach to anybody. I'm gonna tell something that I believe. Take it or leave it, everybody. "I think what I love about Christianity — one of the things — is it gives you a framework for everything that happens in life," he continued. "It is the difference between saying that my life, John Cooper's life, the reason that I exist is for me to be happy and to feel good and to get the things I want and to be my most authentic self. That is one way to look at life. The Christian viewpoint is this: the reason that I exist is actually not about me and the things that I want. The reason that I exist as the creature is to give glory to the Creator. And so whatever he wants from my life is fine; whatever he wants from my life is right. And it gives you a framework of understanding relationships with parents, with wives, husbands, with kids, with friends, with business. There's no sphere of life that comes outside of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That's the idea of Christianity that I just find so peaceful, because then everything makes sense. And whatever happens — if I get COVID, if my wife gets COVID or cancer or whatever happens, I know it's within the framework of my life is here to glorify the one who created me. So I don't deserve to be selfish and I don't deserve to treat you — whoever human being watching this program right now — I don't deserve to treat you as a lesser person than me 'cause we are both the same; we've been created in the image of God. And that is a beautiful picture. Part of that means that I look at my mom who loved me and did her very best to raise me, and I say she's just like me. She had good intentions and she had a lot of great stuff, and I think she missed it on some stuff. And I miss it on some stuff. And my wife misses it on some stuff. And so then you begin to give grace to one another to say, 'I think that they're wrong about that, but hey, I'm not God and I know I do a bunch of stuff wrong.'" Cooper added: "So, for me, Christianity wasn't about all the hypocrisy, even though the hypocrisy is real and I find it personally disgusting. When you see these preachers that are making millions of dollars and begging for money, that doesn't seem like Christianity to me. When you see these preachers that are talking about 'you get your life right' but they're having affairs and hiring prostitutes, those people make me want to punch them in the balls. So that stuff is disgusting, but it teaches you to have grace for other people because other people are just as messed up as I am." In various interviews over the years, John has said that he "always had faith in God" and that his mother was a "Jesus fanatic." He also claimed that he was willing to put his career on the line to take a stand for Christ. Last April, Cooper told the "Undaunted.Life: A Man's Podcast" that it was perfectly fine for Christians to play rock music. "I would say that music is created not by the Devil; [it is] created by the Lord," he said. "All things were created by God. So instead of thinking that the Devil owns a genre of music, I would say capture that music and bring it back into subjection under the Lordship of Christ." Cooper recently published his first book, titled "Awake & Alive To Truth (Finding Truth In The Chaos Of A Relativistic World)". It "tackles the reigning philosophies of our day of post-modernism, relativism, and the popular view of the goodness of man-and combats these viewpoints by standing on the absolute truth of the Word Of God," the book's description reads.
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