Rock Stars Finding Their Religion

S urprising things happen at rock concerts. Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat. Ted Nugent shot flaming arrows. Pete Townshend smashed his guitar, and Jimi Hendrix set his on fire.

Earlier this month I saw something that was, if not quite as exciting, at least as unlikely: Morrissey made the sign of the cross.

In case you didn’t spend your high school years crooning along with this singer’s trademark combination of wit and woe: Morrissey made his mononym as the lead singer of the college-rock favorite The Smiths during the 1980s. Since then, he’s had a solo career that, while not nearly as legendary as his former band’s output, has included a couple of great albums (Your Arsenal; Vauxhall and I) and many outstanding singles (“Suedehead,” “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get,” “First of the Gang to Die”).

Morrissey has the reputation of being an unpredictable performer. Earlier this year, he canceled a performance in Valencia because the city’s music festival was too noisy for him to sleep. A press release explained the “experience has left Morrissey in a catatonic state.” Nothing says rock ’n’ roll quite like Turn that racket down! One website reports that Morrissey has canceled at 416 out of 1,765 scheduled shows — nearly a quarter of his concerts. When I bought tickets to see him four years ago, he canceled because of illness. Even when the shows do go on, he’s ended them early.

This time, not only did Morrissey show up, but he sounded great, was gracious and funny, and generally seemed as happy as someone so temperamentally melancholy could be. The most visible expressions of this good humor were the several signs of the cross he made between songs, as he spoke to the audience. (I counted three; you can see two of them here and here.)

At the time, the signs of the cross struck me as sincere gestures of faith and gratitude to God. Seeing them on video afterward, I’m less sure. There seems to be an element of cheekiness to them, as they come after expressions of his famously dry wit: He made one after talking about his recovery from illness and another when talking about how good-looking he is. Not mocking, exactly, but not reverential, either. As a Catholic myself, perhaps I was inclined to interpret the signs sincerely because we often want to see ourselves in the artists we admire. I’ve enjoyed his music for more than 30 years but was seeing him live for the first time, so it’s possible my irony radar needed recalibrating.

Morrissey has long expressed ambivalence about Christianity. Raised Catholic, he once called his Catholic primary school in Manchester, England, “a bleak mausoleum” that “has the power to make you unhappy, and this is the only message it is prepared to give.” The Smiths’ song “The Headmaster Ritual” has the best anti-educational couplet this side of The Wall: “Belligerent ghouls / run Manchester schools.” But the religious education was formative. In 2006, an interviewer asked whether, “even if you don’t practice, you’ll always be a Catholic?” Morrissey replied, “I don’t think you have any choice. It’s sandblasted into you.”

During his solo career, the influence of Morrissey’s Catholic upbringing is often expressed through an urge to resist sexual temptation. The singer has long been coy about his sexuality, calling himself a “humasexual” rather than a homosexual, but in the 2004 song “I Have Forgiven Jesus,” he laments “all the desire / You placed in me when there’s nothing I can do with this desire.” For his 2024 tour, Morrissey performed “Dear God Please Help Me” — a song about trying, and failing, to resist sexual temptation — with the backdrop of an image of Jesus (as portrayed by Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ) wearing the crown of thorns. The image is accompanied by the Bible verse, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” Is Morrissey making himself Christlike with that passage? Or is he looking to Christ for consolation?

With his signs of the cross when I saw him, Morrissey was again calling attention to the faith that shaped him, expressing its influence without entirely embracing or rejecting it. Keeping it within reach, but not quite in hand. That may be why the cover of his new album features a cross shining in the background.

Morrissey’s concert brought to my mind the Christian elements of a new documentary about another musical act from Manchester, the rock band Oasis. The film Don’t Look Back in Anger follows the band’s 2025 world tour, its first since 2009, when the band broke up over continued feuding between brothers Noel (guitarist, songwriter) and Liam (lead singer) Gallagher. Last year’s tour was a reunion that many fans thought would never happen.

In concert footage of the reunion, Liam occasionally makes the sign of the cross, albeit in a more obviously flippant manner than Morrissey’s. More earnestly, the documentary includes a segment in which a priest in Manchester delivers a sermon about why so many people are eager to see the band’s reunion. The enthusiasm for the reunion reflected “a shared longing for healing,” he explained. Turning to the Gospel, the priest reminds us that Peter asked Christ, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus replied, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy times seven.” The priest explains, “The crowd didn’t just show up for the music. . . . They came for the reconciliation.” He was absolutely right.

The priest’s voice returns at the end of the documentary, over the sound of Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” “Forgiveness is hard,” says the priest. “It costs us something. But if we refuse to forgive, we imprison ourselves, we carry bitterness, anger, and shame. . . . So let me ask you today: who do you need to forgive? A friend? A sibling? A parent? Maybe even yourself?”

Those are the last words spoken in the film, apart from Bacharach’s lyrics calling us to love.

I don’t want to make too much of these unexpected, if momentary, mergers of rock and Christianity. Maybe Morrissey, inspired by his hero Oscar Wilde’s deathbed conversion, will return to the church, but I’m not counting on it. Nor do I expect Liam Gallagher’s X account to become a series of insights into the Gospel.

But, for as often as pop stars challenge Christianity, these unlikely episodes show that rock music and Christian belief are not necessarily at odds and that the experience of performing and experiencing the music and art we love can kindle our faith.