Justin Bieber’s seventh album, Changes, has just debuted at the top of the US Billboard chart, beating a record set by Elvis Presley 59 years ago. At the age of 25, the Canadian singer is now the youngest solo artist ever to achieve seven number one albums.
Despite his youth, Bieber has been in the public eye for more than a decade, having been discovered at the age of 12 when a marketing executive accidentally clicked on a youtube video his mother had uploaded.
His mother, who had become a Christian at 17 following an abusive and troubled childhood, hoped that God would use her son as a voice to his generation. For many years it looked like her prayers had gone unanswered. By 2013 Bieber was no longer the prepubescent teen idol who had rose to fame, and within another year his life was a train wreck. The media catalogued his offences, from egging a neighbour’s house to urinating in a mop bucket, from turning up at a Brazilian brothel to being charged with drink driving after drag-racing his Lamborghini in Miami Beach.
Looking back on it, he says ‘I found myself doing things that I was so ashamed of, being super-promiscuous and stuff, and I think I used Xanax because I was so ashamed. My mom always said to treat women with respect. For me that was always in my head while I was doing it, so I could never enjoy it. Drugs put a screen between me and what I was doing. It got pretty dark’.
Over the last couple of years however his life has turned around. In a recent interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, he says ‘Jesus has saved me’. Like many who may be reading this, although Bieber had been raised with a nominal Christian faith, he says ‘I’d had really bad examples of Christians in my life, who would say one thing and do another’.
But he says that a changed perception of who Jesus really was changed everything. ‘I was just living in this shame, living in all this sort of stuff in my past and I wasn’t able to move on…now the way I look at my relationship with God and with Jesus is I’m not trying to earn God's love by doing good things. God already loved me before I did anything to earn or deserve it. It’s a free gift by accepting Jesus, giving your life to him, and what he did is the gift’.
It’s easy to be sceptical about celebrity conversions, but interestingly Bieber has also spoken about the role of obedience in the Christian life. He says that previously ‘I believed in Jesus, but I never really got that following Jesus means turning away from sin. So there’s no faith without obedience. I had had faith in that I knew Jesus died on the cross for me, but I never really implemented it into my life – I wasn’t being obedient’. One widely-reported aspect of that obedience was his decision to abstain from sex for over a year before his marriage to Hailey Baldwin. Speaking about it, he said: ‘God doesn’t ask us not to have sex [outside marriage] because he wants rules and stuff. He’s trying to protect us from hurt and pain’.
Bieber’s newfound faith has also changed what he values in life. Previously it was money and fame. He says that now those he wants to imitate most are those who have healthy relationships with Jesus, their wives and their children.
The new Bieber is also realistic about the human condition, saying: ‘At the core I don’t believe that humans are good…I fight temptations every day, and things that are instinctive to do – to lie, be greedy, all these things that just naturally come’. As a result, he sees Christianity not as a crutch, or a way to feel better about yourself, but as the answer to humanity’s greatest need: ‘Humanity is broken. Just look around – there’s just so much pain. People are looking for hope and a way out and an escape and truth, and I have the opportunity with my journey to see a God who accepts me and loves me. They call him the Saviour and I believe that to be true’.
For her part Hailey says: ‘Being able to share that with each other—to have that bond of faith and spirituality—is so critical for us. It’s the most important part of our relationship, following Jesus together, being a part of the church community together. It’s everything’. I couldn’t put it any better!
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 5th March 2020
