The provacative faith of Lady Gaga

Good article. I worship at her altar. An excerpt:

"Her prayer is the same as countless progressive Christians who recoil at the hypocritical judgment of fundamentalism yet still seek to follow Jesus. She prays to an affirming God with expansive love, not a narrow-minded magician in the sky who damns nonbelievers to eternal conscious torment.

"Lady Gaga’s faith confounds a popular narrative of religion in America. She is considered both a practicing Christian and a passionate advocate for progressive values. She simply doesn’t fit in the controlling narrative, endorsed by both the secular left and the religious right, that relegates religion be the sole domain of social conservatism.

"But some conservative Christians reject her as heretical. The dancing alone is enough to damn her. The secular left doesn’t know what to make of religious progressives, so they largely ignores her Christian identity. But what then do we make of Lady Gaga? The result is that her strong religious and progressive convictions get ignored.

"Yet she seems content to hold her faith and LGBT cards in the same deck. She’s posted several times on Instagram about attending church and came under fire for supposedly feigning religious convictions as part of a publicity trend. She responded to her critics, “We are not just ‘celebrities,’ we are humans and sinners, children, and our lives are not void of values because we struggle. We are as equally forgiven as our neighbor. God is never a trend, no matter who the believer.”