Christian rock artist John Cooper believes that people who think hard rock is inherently “demonic” are “getting the gospel wrong.”
“I would say, I just think that you’re misunderstanding something very basic, which is that music does not belong to the devil. Music belongs to God and it’s the intentionality,” he told Fox News Digital. “It’s the lyrics. It’s what you do with it. It’s not in a sound. It’s in a heart posture. And I would just say to those Christians, you’re not just getting the issue of music wrong, I would say you’re getting the gospel wrong.”
He added that he doesn’t believe any style of music “in itself carries some inherent evil.”
“I just don’t think that that’s right,” he admitted. “And I think that God gave us creative expression.”
Skillet, the group he co-founded in the ‘90s, recently saw its 2009 hit “Monster” become the first song by a Christian rock band to reach 1 billion streams on Spotify, which Cooper said “shocked” everyone.
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The band has sold more than 23 million albums, and they average 12 million monthly Spotify listeners, which includes “Monster,” which has surpassed 4 billion global streams.
Cooper noted that Christians believe God “created us in his image, and that part of what that means is that God gave all of us humans, every single one of us, the ability to do something kind of like what he does, which is to create something beautiful.”
WATCH: JOHN COOPER SAYS EVERYONE WAS SHOCKED WHEN SKILLET BECAME FIRST CHRISTIAN BAND TO REACH 1 B SPOTIFY STREAMS
The ability to write a song, he said, is an “amazing gift of freedom God has given all of humanity.”
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“Talk about a God that says, I’m going to give you a very powerful gift and it’s up to you how you choose to use it,” he said. “Man, that is powerful.”
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He said he doesn’t like the idea that “Because [rock music] sounds a certain way, it is pagan or something like that. I just can’t be down with that.”
“So, I would just say to critics, I would say, ‘Hey, You can have something that sounds incredibly beautiful that is actually offending God in its intentionality, in its lyrics.”
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If Cooper were “the devil, I probably would want to fool somebody and make it sound really, really nice and pretty, and then insert something subversive underneath that begins to poison the well just a little bit like a siren song. You know? You think you’re hearing something beautiful, but it’s drawing you to your death. That’s probably how I would do it.”
Cooper admitted that he grew up in a household where his parents believed rock music was demonic.
WATCH: JOHN COOPER SAYS EVERYONE WAS ‘SHOCKED’ WHEN SKILLET BECAME FIRST CHRISTIAN BAND TO REACH 1 B SPOTIFY STREAMS
“My mom very much, very much believed that like the loud guitars, anything with a drum beat really was Satanic, was from hell,” he explained. “She believed that Christian rock music was the devil’s tool.”
He called his mom, who died when he was 15, “wonderful,” adding, “I never speak ill of my mom ever. That’s just what she believed. And so I grew up with that mentality. It was always a wrestle, and it’s the reason I think I talk so freely and so, I hope, graciously towards people that believe that. I don’t hate them. I’m not mad at them, but I definitely grew up in a household like that. So I’m very familiar with it.”
When demonstrators show up outside of his concerts to protest the band as “servants of the devil,” he said he doesn’t speak to them because he knows there isn’t anything he could say to them to make them believe differently.
“And I also know that they believe that they are loving me, and they believe they’re loving people to warn them of Satan’s tools, and I just got to go, ‘I don’t know, there’s something about that I strangely appreciate, and I know I can’t change their minds and so I don’t try,” he added.
Regarding the success of “Monster,” Cooper said he can’t pinpoint exactly if it’s the lyrics or the music that people like, but “I always meet kids that love the song,” he said.
“I think that they like the idea of feeling like a monster. I think it kind of gets their attention and then I think that probably most teenage — especially teenage males, who are getting all that testosterone dump, you know, at 14, 15 are probably finding themselves angry and don’t know why, and then you have kids and you don’t sleep and you really feel like a monster.”
The song is something people “can relate to and it rocks. It’s a very, it’s a simple song. There’s not much reason not to like it.”
