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