By JJT (written for ThinkChristian.net)

In a series of surprise blog posts, indie musician Sufjan Stevens explicitly explores his Christian convictions.

Sufjan Stevens is on a tear. The mysterious, press-shy, and often obtuse indie-music darling has been leaving little to the imagination when it comes to his Christian convictions lately. It seems desperate times call for desperate measures. Stevens has a platform, dadgummit, and he’s gonna do some preachin’!

Although Stevens’ music has been imbued with spirit and soul since day one, he’s been explicitly exploring Christian theology in a series of blog posts that kicked off about three weeks ago at Sufjan.com. His first missive, entitled “The Ten Commandments,” laid out the artist’s frank declaration that God’s law is really not all that complicated. “The Ten Commandments are neither profound nor difficult, at all,” he writes. “They are meant to distinguish us from barbarianism and narcissism.” He goes on to outline a passionate, urgent, acerbic, and even humorous understanding of the law. For Stevens, it’s about living for others, humility, service, and honesty. He contrasts the simple message of Moses’ tablets with the values of today, and in doing so throws down the gauntlet for the entire series of posts.

Some time later, after a few smaller posts in between, he returned with a scorcher that starts: “There really is no such thing as an illegal immigrant, for we are all immigrants and refugees in a wildly changing world that is dominated by superfluous boundaries built by blood and war.” His latest installment is even more politically engaged. Labeled as a  “Friendly reminder,” it tackles the notion of Christian nationalism. After an opening salvo that plainly outlines the incompatibility of biblical Christianity with “My country right or wrong” jingoism, Stevens gets downright Pentecostal on us. “A ‘Christian nation’ is absolutely heretical,” he declares.

Stevens goes on to reference about a dozen different Bible verses. His reminder that Jesus said “you must hate your mother and your father and you must love your enemies” are direct allusions to Luke 14:26, Matthew 10:37, and Matthew 5:44. When he declares that “God is love, period,” he has 1 John 4:7-8 as support. And it’s hard not to think of Paul’s egalitarianism in Galatians 3:28when Stevens calls for a “spiritual deployment of true identity, which no longer resides in skin color, nation, ideology, genealogy, name, people, places, and things…”

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