At a Warped Tour date in 2013, Memphis May Fire frontman Matty Mullins called out girls who dress “slutty”. Subsequently, he received backlash from a good portion of the community, including members of the Wonder Years and the Amity Affliction.

Now, over two years later, the vocalist spoke on the matter with the BadChristian podcast. “I was kinda at a weird time in my life—not that that’s an excuse for it at all—but I didn’t think so much about what I was saying before I said it,” he says. “I had good intentions; I think that my intentions were of the Spirit, but my words were of the flesh. Does that makes sense? I made a comment about the way that girls were dressing at Warped Tour to remind them to respect themselves, and [subsequently] had a huge uproar of people that were offended by the comment. Later on I did multiple interviews where I apologized for the wording that I chose. I think that most people have come to kinda move past it, and it gave me a chance to connect to people on a different level, too.”

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He later adds, “Like I said, I chose the wrong words. I could’ve come at it with a different set of words that, I think, [would’ve] had a totally different response. I think there still would’ve been some backlash too, but choosing to use words that are considered slut-shaming wasn’t the best choice. The message I should’ve gotten across was, ‘You can dress however you want and I’m not going to treat you any differently.’ Jesus loves you anyway. But I guess I come at it from a different perspective because I’ve been married for nine years now, and I look at my wife and how special she is to me and our intimate relationship and how specific that is to us, so when you think of people offering that part of themselves up to the world before thy have a chance to offer it up to one person for the rest of their life, I have a heart for that; to tell people that they don’t need to do that; that it can be different; that it can be beautiful; it can be special and individual to them. So that’s where I was coming from and I just said it the wrong way.”

You can listen to the full episode below.

Created by current Emery members Toby Morrell and Matt Carter, along with former bassist Joey Svendsen, BadChristian is a thriving community that focuses on interacting with culture from an alternative Christian point of view. They do so by being transparent, entertaining, honest and artistic. Their book, Bad Christian, Great Savior, is available for purchase now.

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