I’ve been intrigued lately by a relatively new band called, Kings of Leon.  Their latest album entitled, Only By the Night, is musically unique (and in my opinion, exceptional).

However, it’s not just the music that intrigues me, it’s the story of the guys in the band.  Three of the four members were born and raised in the home of a traveling Pentecostal camp meeting preacher, and it seems that their upbringing – in many ways – screwed them up.  Because this is not something I want to do to my kids, I did a little research on these guys to find out what went wrong, and here’s what I discovered.

Nathan, Caleb, and Jared Followill spent much of their youth traveling around the South with their father, Ivan, a traveling United Pentecostal Church preacher.  Their mother home-schooled them when they were traveling, and the boys learned to play drums, guitar and bass as children while performing gospel songs in the church.

While Ivan preached at churches and tent revivals (anywhere from 3 days to 12 weeks at a time) throughout the Deep South, the boys attended and were occasionally enlisted to play worship music. All three of them thought that they would follow in their father’s footsteps and end up being preachers.

While their mother listened only to gospel music during the family’s long road trips, their father would often play rock music in the car by musicians like the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Bad Company while their mother was not around.  Did that brief and secretive exposure to “secular” rock music ruin these boys?  Is that what pushed them over the edge into a life of Christian skepticism and rock and roll?

Probably not.  As the boys got older, their father became an alcoholic which ruined his marriage and his ministry.  Their divorce of their parents deeply wounded the boys and seems to have served as the event that sent them spiraling away from their faith roots. Caleb says of their former strong religious faith: “That was our past, ever since 1997 to 1998 when our parents divorced and our dad got out of doing what he was doing.” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2004)

Their mom has since remarried, attends church regularly, and lives near the boys in Nashville, TN.  Their father, however, has not returned to the faith.  My conclusion is that it probably wasn’t the rock music that sent these boys spiraling, but it was the broken rock upon which their family had been built – their parents’ marriage – that did it.

I’ve learned through my 15 years in church ministry that parents can make a lot of mistakes (pretty big ones included) and still not send their kids spiraling away from the faith.  But, when mom and dad divorce, it almost always rocks the faith foundation that they worked hard to build in their kids.  Unfortunately, the Followill boys are experiencing the same faith disillusionment that thousands of church kids face when their parents divorce.

Let me end this sad story with a bit of hope.  Even though the boys have – famously – been somewhat less than clean-living, they appear not to have lost their faith entirely. There’s a lyric on their new album that says “Jesus don’t love me”, and Caleb has admitted that when it was first played back to him and he heard the line, his eyes welled up with tears, and he said, “That’s the worst thing that I could imagine happening”.