'I'm a Christian': Rocker Billy Corgan talks faith in showbiz, calls Jesus 'my Lord and Savior'

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan opened up about his faith in Christ in a conversation with longtime Stryper singer Michael Sweet. 

In the Sept. 23 episode of Corgan’s podcast “The Magnificent Others,” Sweet, 63, reflected on the tensions between faith, family and the demands of his decades-long rock career, including the painful period when he left the band in the early 1990s and what it means to be a “Christian rock band.” 

The 59-year-old Corgan, who released "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" as a single in October 1995 — a song whose chart run stretched into 1996, making it a hit spanning both years — once wrote the lyrics "Jesus was an only son for you/ And I still believe that I cannot be saved," and identified himself as a Christian who made a conscious decision in the past to become more vocal about his faith.

“I’m a Christian as well,” said Corgan. “At some point, I made my own personal decision that I was going to be willing to talk about God in a way that I know most people in my generation do not talk about God in music.”

After Sweet recounted past conflicts with his Stryper bandmates and even his own brother, the conversation turned to the challenges of expressing Christian faith in rock music. Corgan recalled once telling Rolling Stone magazine that “God is the third rail of rock and roll” when it comes to careers in the music business. 

“If you talk about God, you know, you might as well throw your career down the hole,” he said. “And I made the decision that I was going to talk about God honestly, at least God in my life or believing in Jesus as my Lord and Savior. And if it was going to hurt me, I didn't care. Because if you don't really understand me … if I can't be willing to be honest with who I am, well, what am I asking a fan to believe in?”

Sweet agreed and shared his experience from early in his career with Stryper, when the band was connected to the Calvary Chapel movement and took a more direct approach.

“The goal was to preach more in between songs, after the show, and we did that,” Sweet explained. “But nowadays, we don’t do that so much. We toss Bibles and music does the talking. We don’t preach. We don’t pull out a Bible on stage and start preaching.” 

Doing that, he added, often “drives people away from God and we don’t want to drive people away from God.”

Asked why more mainstream recording artists remain silent about their faith, Sweet pointed to fear. He described encounters with other Christian musicians who praise Stryper privately but stay quiet publicly: “It’s always like that. … So I think it comes down to they’re afraid to do it. And man, dude, you're doing it, you’re brave.”

The conversation veered into the topic of Christian apologetics and what it means to share your faith with others in a culture that oftentimes, like show business in general, scoffs at the things of God.

Corgan shared how he responds in debates with people over whether God even exists, and how, ultimately, the debate often centers on morality: good and evil. 

"The discussion sort of starts somewhere along this line: ‘Well, how do you know God is real?’ And I always say, ‘But I don't. I don't,'" he said. “And they say, ‘Well, if you can't be sure that God is real, then why do you believe?' And I always say, 'Because that's just the way I feel.'”

He continued: “It makes more sense to me that there's a just universe. Because if there's not a just universe, then we're just animals, living in some sort of archaic code of behavior. As opposed to believing that there's some sort of reason that we're organized, and historically, over thousands of years, organized to believe that it's better to be good than to be bad.”

Corgan went on to question why it is that “people are very comfortable talking about everything but God,” and cited statistics from a 2022 survey that found over 80% of Americans say they believe in God. 

“Why is everybody comfortable talking about everything else?” he asked. “What I'm saying is, if you believe in God, why is God antithetical to the part of marketing who you are?”

Both performers expressed concern about a broader cultural shift toward a form of godliness without Jesus' power and authority as its foundation. “As our common culture moves to a more secular, non-spiritually rooted collective consciousness,” Corgan observed, “we’re not getting a lot of good in return.” 

Sweet agreed, adding, “Not to be biblical, but that's the whole point of those stories is, we're not going through anything unique that hasn't happened before. We just have cell phones now.”

Known primarily for his Grammy Award-winning music with Smashing Pumpkins in the early 1990s, Corgan has shared his faith journey in recent years. In 2013, he told CNN he was through exploring suffering in music and was now pursuing God, which he thinks is "the great unexplored territory in rock 'n' roll music."