Brad Pitt and the Gospel

In last Sunday's Parade magazine, Dotson Rader talked with Brad Pitt about his formative childhood years. Pitt recalled his stint in conservative evangelical churches, particularly the Southern Baptists. It's interesting what he says he couldn't abide about it:

"You made me think about this girlfriend I had in senior year," he recalls. "She was a Methodist preacher's kid. She wasn't that into me, truthfully, although we were together for a semester. "

When I tell him I am the son of a preacher, too, he smiles and nods.

"Well," he continues, "she was tough, man, although really cool. She had an older brother who was killed in a four-by-four accident, which was not uncommon out there." He refers to a four-wheel drive crash. "She was a hardcore realist. She called me on so much bull—about any romantic ideas that I had grown up with about life. It was my first year in college."

Brad studied journalism at the University of Missouri at Columbia, hoping for a career as an art director in advertising.

"She helped me more than anyone else as far as setting off in my own direction," he explains. "It was my first year in college and I was pushing back against the religion thing. In my eyes it was a mechanism of guilt , this engrained system, used to keep the flock in servitude." Brad was raised a conservative Southern Baptist. "Guilt is the thing I find most evil about it. It's the thing I rail against the most. She helped me in defining what I believed.

"Religion works," he goes on. "I know there's comfort there, a crash pad. It's something to explain the world and tell you there is something bigger than you, and it is going to be alright in the end. It works because it's comforting. I grew up believing in it, and it worked for me in whatever my little personal high school crisis was, but it didn't last for me. I didn't understand this idea of a God who says, 'You have to acknowledge me. You have to say that I'm the best, and then I'll give you eternal happiness. If you won't, then you don't get it!' It seemed to be about ego. I can't see God operating from ego, so it made no sense to me.

I'm not sure what he means when he says of his college crush: "She helped me more than anyone else as far as setting off in my own direction." Did he mean she was the one who encouraged his doubts, or was she trying to challenge the doubts he was raising?

At any rate, an interesting bit of background on the midwestern heartthrob. Still somewhat attracted to the faith that gives "something to explain the world and tell you there is something bigger than you, and it is going to be alright in the end." But what he thought he heard from his childhood church about personal guilt and a holy God turned out to be a turn-off.

Are his folks still plugged in to a church back home? Do they pray for him and look for chances to talk with him about the gospel? It would be interesting to know.