When Kurt Cobain went to church
The Nirvana frontman’s music was forged in Evangelicalism
In 1984, at age 17, he was a high school dropout. Homeless, aimless, stung by his parents’ divorce he mostly smoked pot, drank, nursed inner turmoil.
Kurt Cobain considered enlisting in the Navy, just for a place to be. He took to hanging out with a friend, Jesse Reed, and then was going to church with Jesse’s family.
He attended the Youth Group. He became Christian.
In existing biographical sources, the period is most fully described in Charles R. Cross’s 2001 biography Heavier Than Heaven:
“Jesse’s parents, Ethel and Dave Reed, were born-again Christians, and the family went to the Central Park Baptist Church, halfway between Monte and Aberdeen. Kurt began to attend Sunday service regularly, and even made appearances at the Wednesday night Christian Youth Group.”
Ethel Reed is quoted: “He was such a sweet kid; he just seemed lost.”
Kurt had an experience of ‘accepting Christ’.
Jesse Reed recalled the moment:
“One night we were walking over the Chehalis River bridge and he stopped, and said he accepted Jesus Christ into his life. He asked God to ‘come into his life.’ I remember him distinctly talking about the revelations and the calmness that everybody talks about when they accept Christ.”
After Kurt was “saved,” the Reeds suggested he move in.
Kurt’s father had remarried, and the new wife, Jenny Westeby, recalled: “They were a religious family, and Dave felt he could discipline him when no one else could.”
The Evangelical life, after all, is all about ‘discipline’. It was working. Kurt quit pot and alcohol—and wanted Jesse to do the same. Trying to fix himself, Kurt tried to finish his high school education. When that bogged down, Dave Reed got him a job at a local restaurant.
Kurt was said to have been baptized.
I locate his pastor, Lynn Lloyd, whose wife Bonnie recalled Kurt better. She says he wasn’t baptized at their church. She had vague memories of him.
At church, Kurt met another local musician named Krist Novoselic, a future Nirvana band member, who visited since a girlfriend attended.
Kurt seemed to be finding his way. Charles R. Cross writes:
“Life with the Reeds came close to recreating the family he’d lost in the divorce. The Reeds ate dinner together, attended church as a group, and the boys’ musical talents were encouraged.”
Kurt attended meetings of the church’s youth group. When he turned 18, his aunt sent him a gift, and he replied with a note:
“All the kids from the church Youth Group came over, brought cake for me and Jesse, then we played stupid games and Pastor Lloyd sang some songs (he looks exactly like Mr. Rogers). But it was nice to know people care about ya.”
Kurt was writing his first songs.
While living with the Reeds, he began to think of himself as a professional musician—already with an eye on a major label contract.
In March 1985, Kurt was at work and seriously cut his finger. Panicked, he quit his job. “He had to get stitches,” Jesse Reed recalled, “and he told me that if he lost his finger and couldn’t play guitar, he’d kill himself.”
Not working, not at school, and not playing music, Kurt’s discipline collapsed. Hanging around the Reed house, he resumed drinking and doing drugs. He seemed to lapse into a private state. A neighborhood woman thought having him around was like “living with the devil.”
Ethel Reed recalled:
“We tried to draw Kurt out, but we just couldn’t. As time progressed we decided that we weren’t helping him, and that all we were doing was providing a place for him to withdraw further from people.”
Was Kurt’s gender performance part of it?
In 1992, he told The Advocate:
“I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.”
The Evangelical rehab experience at the Reed house had been an opportunity to get ‘normal’—which would’ve included an idea of Kurt butching up, getting a job, and probably marrying.
When that didn’t happen, Kurt became a problem that the religion handles with rejection. One day, he forgot his key to the house and kicked in a window to get in. The Reeds asked him to move out.
Jesse and Kurt got an apartment together.
Jesse recalls that Kurt’s talk “was more moving against God. After that he was on an anti-God thing.”
But Kurt still seems to have gone to church on occasion. This is mentioned in Christopher Sandford’s 2004 biography, Kurt Cobain. Kurt seems to have sung in the choir, though, as Sandford notes, “his voice attracted attention.” It seems Kurt was singing in some subversive way.
The references are hazy, but I’m understanding he’d attended one church and then a second church. The churches aren’t identified but there is mention of a church called Open Bible Church in Aberdeen, which seems to be no longer in existence.
In a late-night vandalism he left his poems burning on the church’s porch, and spray painted words.
In Kurt’s later interviews, he said he’d written “GOD IS GAY”—though a police report listed the graffiti as “Ain’t got no whatchamacallit.”
As Kurt’s writings were typically obscene, I would suspect the thing he lacks in that declaration was a penis.
On another occasion he destroyed a large crucifix outside the church, and was arrested.
Kurt’s later music recalls his church period.
His early song “Fecal Matter” seems sung to Christians and Jesus.
“I don’t want you
I don’t need you
I can’t have you
I don’t want your cross”
The term ‘fecal matter’ asserts the nature of the human as decaying biological material. There is no spiritual drama.
Christopher Sandford says that Nirvana’s 1989 song “Lithium” was a “satire” of Kurt’s churchgoing. The lyrics seem puzzling, but let’s read them:
“I’m so happy ’cause today I found my friends
They’re in my head
I’m so ugly, that’s okay, ’cause so are you
Broke our mirrors
Sunday morning is everyday, for all I care
And I’m not scared
Light my candles in a daze
’Cause I’ve found God”
The reference to ‘Sunday’ establishes the scene as church.
The believer finds ‘God’ and other spirit presences—though they are imaginary.
Kurt thinks back on fellow worshippers as people who couldn’t see how ‘ugly’ they were becoming. This song is about Evangelicals.
Leaving church, he no longer observes Sunday as the day of worship. It’s “everyday, for all I care.”
He’s now left religion, but is not ‘scared’—of Hell?
He lights candles, he says, in his own service, having ‘found God’ on his own. By inference, the concert venue he’s then singing at is his new church. The song he’s singing is his new hymn.
Or try “Come as You Are.”
Kurt’s 1991 hit off the Nevermind album works with a phrase often used in Evangelical churches. To “come as you are” means to not put on a show, but to arrive at church as yourself. Kurt sings:
“Come as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend
As an old enemy”
The song is full of loaded terms that could be read theologically. The “old enemy” would be Satan, so often called the “enemy” (Lk 10:19, etc.).
In “Come as You Are” I hear a story of a person being invited into church, thinking he’s being called a ‘friend’, only to realize that he’s being identified as sinful, as Satanic.
He was told, that is, to ‘come as you are’, but the invitation proves to be ironic. What they want to do is to drastically change him—to purge an evil force they see in him, and turn him into someone else.
Kurt kept up a kind of personal religion.
His wife Courtney Love later recalled: “we read aloud to each other almost every night, and we prayed every night.”
He seems to have kept up a vague hostility to Christianity. In his famous MTV Unplugged concert he did a cover of The Vaselines’ “Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam.”
The figure of Satan clearly appealed to Kurt.
His tributes are legion, from “SATAN RULES” scrawled in his notebooks to professed motto to “Get stoned and worship Satan.”
Was it a joke? Kurt did seem haunted by a satanic theology. Charles R. Cross reports on a conversation with a friend:
“Tracy was brought up Lutheran, and most of their religious discussions concerned whether God could exist in a world filled with such horror, with Kurt taking the position that Satan was stronger.”
But as ‘evil’ as Kurt would ever seem, he was received as a rock messiah. As Cross quotes a friend saying to him after a concert: “Kurt, they think you are Jesus Christ.”
Kurt was as haunted by Christ.
He was ever one to display Christian artifacts—a large crucifix carried around jokily, like as a hood ornament on his car, or a Virgin Mary with the head chopped off.
But there was Jesus everywhere. I pause at a 1993 photoshoot where he’s frolicking around in a goofy dress.
This is the classic ‘Christ as the column’ pose, as by Caravaggio.
It’s the scene in the crucifixion where Jesus is being whipped.
His suicide note was a religious testament.
Saying goodbye to the world, he wrote:
“So much that it makes me feel too fucking sad. The sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces, Jesus man! Why don’t you just enjoy it? I don’t know.”
He wrote to Courtney: “I’ll be at your altar.” I’m not sure of the reference here, but there’s talk in the Bible of altars in Heaven (Rev 6:9 & 8:3, etc). He seems to have some idea, at least, of an afterlife.
After he died, Kurt’s mother Wendy recalled having a vision of him—“in a kind of bright blue graduation gown and he had that familiar look on his face, a little smirky but kind of Jesus-like, and euphoric.”
The vision, she added, “went flying like a rocket, further and further from my mind. Now I can’t see him anymore.” 🔶
