Hollywood it-man Brad Pitt opened up about his charismatic upbringing, including passionate worship and speaking in tongues, in a new interview with GQ.
Fresh off his divorce from fellow A-lister Angelina Jolie, Pitt revealed to the magazine the pain of his marriage breaking apart, his turn to sobriety and his rocky history with God.
“And we grew up First Baptist, which is the cleaner, stricter, by-the-book Christianity. Then, when I was in high school, my folks jumped to a more charismatic movement, which got into speaking in tongues and raising your hands,” Pitt says.
The interview is the men’s style magazine’s most recent cover story.
Pitt says when he saw others speaking in tongues, he wanted to try it for himself.
“Yeah, come on. I’m not even an actor yet, but I know … I mean the people, I know they believe it. I know they’re releasing something.”
The actor even goes as far as to credit his acting career coming out of what he saw in revival meetings.
“Well, people act out. But as a kid, I was certainly drawn to stories—beyond the stories that we were living and knew, stories with different points of view. And I found those stories in film, especially. Different cultures and lives so foreign to mine. I think that was one of the draws that propelled me into film. I didn’t know how to articulate stories. I’m certainly not a good orator, sitting here telling a story, but I could foster them in film,” Pitt says.
He continued: “I remember going to a few concerts, even though we were told rock shows are the devil, basically. Our parents let us go, they weren’t neo about it. But I realized that the reverie and the joy and exuberance, even the aggression, I was feeling at the rock show was the same thing at the revival. One is Jimmy Swaggart and one is Jerry Lee Lewis, you know? One’s God and one’s devil.”
Now, though, Pitt’s faith is unclear.
In 2015, he characterized it as “probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don’t think anyone really knows. You’ll either find out or not when you get there, and until then there’s no point in thinking about it.” {eoa}
