Faith in Reason: Charting Sufjan Stevens’ Portrayal of Belief

Despite releasing seven studio albums of genre-spanning indie music, Sufjan Stevens remains something of an enigma. Naturally private, Stevens’ personal life has become fodder for music journalists and internet forum detectives alike. You get the sense Stevens enjoys stringing his fans along to a certain extent, peppering his cryptic lyrics with false-starts & red herrings, and telling onstage anecdotes that grow increasingly contradictory as the tour progresses.

Our interest in artists’ lives is often selfish — we want to relate to them in the same way we relate to their music, and feel that they are like us. Faith and death are two of Stevens’ longstanding concerns, and the former has been the focal point of such scrutiny. In particular, Evangelical Christian denominations have claimed Stevens as their own, attempting to drag his music into the insular vortex of “Christian music”. But in doing so, they overlook the astonishing complexity of Stevens’ portrayal of faith: the contradictions, the doubts, the ambiguities — all of which offer a far more nuanced glimpse into the vicissitudes of belief than anything usually prefixed by the term “Christian”.

The church first caught wind of Stevens after the release of his second album Michigan, which featured some of his first truly explicit religious allusions. “Vito’s Ordination Song” was written for the pastor of his church in Williamsburg, New York, a gently unfolding ballad that portrays God as a comforter. Built around four simple chords, alternatively major and minor, it is downtrodden yet optimistic — an acknowledgement that Christianity is often a negotiation between the reality of suffering and the joy of faith, as he reassures himself that “there is a design”.

Sufjan’s early portrayal of faith is a hopeful one, albeit melancholy in its acknowledgement of suffering; elsewhere “Oh God Where Are You Now?” expresses doubt, but it is an Old Testament doubt, like that of the Psalmist or the book of Lamentations — couched in a fundamental dependence on God. Yet this doubt is crucial to understanding Stevens’ faith, as it continued to germinate throughout his career, eventually metastasising into something altogether more subversive and complicated.

Stevens’ popularity reached an epoch with the release of his double album Illinois, receiving universal acclaim and impressive sales for an album produced and funded independently. Unlike predecessor Seven Swans, it did not dwell blatantly on the accoutrements of Biblical mythology and doctrine: doubt was its key religious concern. “Casmir Pulaski Day” — one of Stevens’ most beloved songs — is a deceptively straightforward folk song, replete with a typically sweet melody that belies the darker theodicy at its core. The song tells the story of a teenage girlfriend who was diagnosed with bone cancer and Stevens’ ensuing crisis of faith. Stevens shows no interest in euphemism, and his lyrics are blunt: “Tuesday night, at the bible study/ we lift our hands and pray over your body/ but nothing ever happens.” In interviews for the album, Stevens defended doubt as “inseparable from Christianity”, but began to distance himself from the institution of the church.

Stevens’ next album was the polarising, bi-polar Age of Adz. Disillusioned with his trademark sound (which was becoming increasingly tarnished by a legion of twee imitators), he embraced twitchy, angsty electronica full-on. Amidst white noise snares and modular synths heavily processed through effects pedals, Stevens’ belief is notably only in absentia. In its place is an eccentric mythological pantheon of Stevens’ own design, drawn from sources as disparate as Mount Vesuvius, U.F.Os and the deranged collages of homeless artist Royal Robertson. The only reference to God comes in the bizarre “Get Real, Get Right” in which visiting aliens repeatedly implore Sufjan to “Get right with the Lord”. This plea goes unanswered throughout the rest of the album; instead the lyrics tackle Stevens’ anxiety and depression following the breakdown of a relationship. This comes to a head in the disarmingly suicidal “I Want to Be Well”, which is about as far from the tender simplicity of his early music as imaginable. Vacillating between uncomfortable 7/8 and 5/8 time signatures, it’s a messy, chaotic track that culminates in what feels like a liminal moment: Stevens repeatedly yelling “I’m not fucking around!” in an incontrovertible departure from his role as poster boy for conservative Christianity.

Which brings us to Carrie and Lowell, the sparse, grassroots album Stevens released last year in the wake of his mother’s death. The album sees the return of not only acoustic instruments, but also of Christian references, although they are more oblique than ever. The doubt remains (“still I pray to what I cannot see” Sufjan wearily remarks on “Eugene”), but frequently allusions to God are confusingly conflated. In “John My Beloved”, a fraught conversation with Jesus is interspersed with a (perhaps homoerotic) romantic encounter in a puzzling maze of pronouns. In the chorus of “Blue Bucket Of Gold” he imagines an ultimatum to his estranged mother: “tell me you want me in your life / or raise your red flag/ just when I want you in my life” but the second verse subtly alters the object of this plea to the “Lord”, suggesting that his relationship with God has become as dysfunctional as the one between him and his mother, a schizophrenic drug addict.

But what’s most remarkable for an album about faith and death is the complete elision of an afterlife, of the “design” he once sang so optimistically of. The album’s moments of relief comes instead from curiously secular places; “Should’ve Known Better” is cluttered with Biblical allusions, but Sufjan finds “illumination” only in the beauty of his new-born niece. He finds even less relief in the drug-and-sex binge of “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” — as the title suggests, his faith proves as ephemeral as the substances he abuses, and he becomes a “lonely vampire” recoiling from the crucifix.

Some of these ambiguous lyrics sound like an outright rejection of Christianity in favour of a more rational, humanist response to death. “The Only Thing” features an ambiguous stanza in which he professes “faith in reason, I wasted my life playing dumb… Blind faith, God’s Grace, nothing else left to impart”. In his most recent track (the don’t-be-fooled-by-its-silly-title-its-really-about-death “Exploding Whale”) he seems full of regret, possibly at his years of religious devotion; “the thing I most resent is having consent to illusion / while confessing distress with my fist” — the fist here perhaps representing not violence, but prayer. The song ends with his a sample of his voice chopped, screwed and arpeggiated; it’s a breakdown both musically and mentally, the scrambled sound of a man uncertain of himself but, with each distant swell of horns and choir samples, vaguely hopeful about it all.

“I still describe myself as a Christian, and my love of God… is fundamental, but the manifestations and practices of it are constantly changing” Stevens told Pitchfork last year. It’s clear that pigeonholing his protean, amorphous faith is a fruitless exercise. Consistent, throughout all the years, however, is Sufjan’s philosophy — as he told a crowd in Manchester last August: “While you have breath [and] life, live abundantly and with joy. That’s my prayer tonight.”