By now, you’ve probably heard the popular song I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry.

It includes these lyrics:
I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry ChapStick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don’t mean I’m in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it
I liked it
Here’s the fun twist: Katy Perry used to be Katy Hudson — a Christian singer and daughter of two preachers.
And Christians aren’t too pleased with her recent transition:
… In her interview with Blender, Perry confessed she wasn’t “a typical Christian” and revealed she had done “lots of bad things” as a teenager.
…
“I just think it’s interesting that seven years ago she had a Christian album and what she’s doing now is clearly not Christian,” said Joanne Brokaw, who blogs about Christian music for Beliefnet.com. “I get the sense that maybe she was engaged in rebellious behavior back then. I just wonder what the decision was… did people not really know or were they looking the other way?”
“It seems like ever since the name change, she’s gotten this rep as a party girl,” [music critic Russ] Breimeier added. “You can still hear some of the talent that was there before, but it just sounds like she’s doing whatever she can to get noticed,” he said. “And that’s unfortunate. I feel bad for her folks.”
…
“The thing about her is that she decided to leave that scene behind,” said Joe Levy, editor in chief of Blender magazine. “I don’t think she fits in with other Christian music artists who transition to pop success. She didn’t transition… she stopped dead, reinvented herself, became an artist who has nothing to do with Christian music. It’s a footnote in her career. It looks like who she is now is who she wants to be, slightly outrageous and very cute. And right now that’s working.”
Despite what the reviewers of her old album have said, she doesn’t seem to have ever caught on with a Christian audience, despite comments like these made in Seventeen magazine:
Katy has a steady boyfriend, but she doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. “I know what it does to people,” she says. “One night my boyfriend and I went a little too far and I felt like I’d fallen so far away from God. I doubted myself and my strength. I was so weak at the time in my relationship with Christ.”
If someone is going to have sex, however, Katy absolutely believes that person should use a condom: “Some Christians think that if you use a condom, it’s premeditated. So nobody uses a condom at all and they have sex and get pregnant the first time.”
I’m trying to think of any Christian acts that have made it mainstream without changing their message, and not too many come to mind. There are a few you may have heard of — Amy Grant, Sixpence None the Richer, Sufjan Stevens — though I don’t know if any of them were ever classified as “cool.”
Katy Perry? Definitely popular. And definitely not singing about Christianity.
(via The Dallas Morning News)
[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]