“My higher power has been looking after me all my life,” Elton John told Time magazine in late 2024. “He’s got me through drugs, he’s got me through depression, he’s got me through loneliness, and he got me sober.
“He’s been there all the time, I think. I just didn’t acknowledge him.”
That’s how the legendary singer-songwriter summarizes his deepened spiritual appreciation since becoming sober in 1990 — part of a shift away from a party life toward one more centered around higher ideals that include family and God.
Although the most famous, John is not the only rock star who has described an expanded appreciation for the divine. Bono and the other members of U2 became more public about their faith in the 1990s, describing how they used Bible study and prayer to help them “wind down” after concerts and telling journalist Terry Mattingly that when it comes to these higher realities, “deep down, everyone is aware.”
Other rock stars witness to a more defined Christian conversion, including Bob Dylan (1978), Kansas’ Kerry Livgren (1979), Alice Cooper (1980s), Foreigner’s Lou Gramm (1991), Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine (2002) and Korn’s Brian “Head” Welch (2005).
Still others, like John, don’t describe themselves as “religious” or “Christian,” yet they have expressed deep appreciation for spirituality. That includes the late Leonard Cohen (born Jewish, influenced by later Buddhist practice) and George Harrison (devout Hindu), as well as Carlos Santana (deeply influenced by Hinduism) and Cat Stevens, who changed his name to Yusuf Islam in 1978 after becoming Muslim.
Elton John and Alice Cooper’s stories provide a glimpse into how some of the world’s most famous people find their way to a new relationship with God.
A God of love, not harshness
“God, for me, represented a punishment,” John said to NPR’s Terri Gross, referencing briefly his early experiences in Sunday school as a child. “You know, God will punish you for doing this; God will punish you for doing that.”
Even the word God was hard for him, he admitted, until someone said, “‘Listen, do you believe in something greater than yourself?’ And I said, ‘Of course I do. There’s been so many things in my life that have happened ... decisions I’ve made that have been prompted by something inside of my soul.’
“I only have to look up in the sky to believe in something greater than myself, or I’ll go walk in the field or look at a mountain,” John remembered thinking.
So, John started trying some new language for the divine. “It doesn’t have to be the punishing God. … It can be a higher power that … sends me messages.” Accepting that, he said, was “really very important to me.”
‘I kept overlooking my soul’
Alice Cooper described his previous self as “the prodigal son” — having been raised by a preacher and going to church regularly, but then going away from that life “as far away as you could.”
“I was up on top of Beverly Hills in my big mansion,” he told pastor Greg Laurie in a 2024 interview. “I had a pipe, a rock (drugs) and a pistol, and I’m sitting there going, ‘This is it?’”
In those wild years, his wife Sheryl Goddard said she felt Cooper wonder if “he stepped on an airplane and that went down, was his security eternal? Where was it going to go?”
“I started really realizing what was important to me,” Cooper said of his later story. “Of course, my career was important. Of course, my marriage was important. My children were important, but I kept overlooking my soul.
“Deep down inside of me,” Cooper said, “I knew that my relationship with God was absolutely in the bottom drawer where it should have been in the top drawer. And that ate away at me and ate away at me to the point where finally I had to get off that fence and say, ‘I’m not going to just kind of be a guy that likes God. I’m going to be a guy that is for him, not against him.’
“I had to pick a side.”
‘Never too late’
“It’s never too late to change your life — to make decisions that will make your life better,” John said on Stephen Colbert’s show in early 2025. “I just wasted so much of my life doing the most stupid things and then I got sober and I made amends for it and I got a new life together.”
It’s been 35 years since John got sober in 1990. Seven years after, he told Oprah Winfrey: “I knew I had a problem. And the hardest thing for me was I thought I could solve everything myself — you know, ‘I can do this. I’m intelligent. … I’m successful. Why can’t I do this?’”
Yet “for 16 years, I couldn’t say, ‘I need help’ ... because I thought it was a sign of weakness. And I thought I was clever enough to do it all on my own.
“There are some things in life you cannot do on your own.”
John added, “I wish I’d have had the ability to be a bit more humble earlier on. ... But I’m afraid that’s what addiction does to you. … You think you know everything.”
John said he “had an incredible problem with authority figures.” Emphasizing how becoming “ruthlessly honest” and really listening to trusted voices got him “learning to be a human again,” the singer said he “started a new life.”
“I was learning to walk properly, learning to treat people properly, writing letters to apologize to people, but just being able to have a life without all that rubbish … and waking up in the morning and feeling good about yourself.
“It was an immense relief for me.”
‘God took it away’
“I started realizing that that beer made me feel a little bit better,” Cooper said of his own earlier struggle with substances. “Pretty soon that beer was in my hand all day.
“You don’t even want to drink, but you’re drinking because it’s a medicine to get you to the next point and get through it.
“That drug becomes like oxygen,” he said. “If you don’t have it, you’ll sell everything in your house to get it. … Nothing else is important.”
“I just continued to pray for him,” Goddard, his wife, recalled, “for his deliverance from alcohol, from these addictions, and to come to know God.”
Cooper went on to describe a miraculous healing that took away his drug and alcohol cravings, which he hasn’t touched for decades since.
“He was healed,” Goddard said. “It was taken away from him, and I got a new man.”
Even Cooper marvels at what has happened — not falling back even once with drugs or alcohol for nearly 40 years. “Even the doctor said it’s impossible that you don’t at least fall off the wagon three or four times because you’re the classic alcoholic.”
When Cooper insisted his cravings were gone, the doctor doubted him, saying, “Everything about your life should be deception. That’s what an alcoholic and a drug addict does.”
What they didn’t understand, he said, is “that God took it away from me.”
“The doctors were going, ‘you’re one in a million cases.’ I went, ‘Well, God works like that.’”
‘Never knew life could be this good’
“I keep a very rigorous schedule but my schedule is all around my health — my spiritual well-being and really trying to stay clean,” John said. “And I love this new life. I mean, I never knew life could be as good as this.”
Even in a life of sobriety, he said “life is full of pitfalls,” but “I can deal with them now because I don’t have to run away and hide.”
“I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories,” he said in an earlier 2006 Guardian interview, before expressing concern that religion can turn some people into “hateful lemmings.”
With conflict then escalating in the world, John expressed hope that religious leaders could come together in “dialogue — that’s the only way. Get everybody from each religion together and say ‘Listen, this can’t go on. Why do we have all this hatred?’
“We are all God’s people; we have to get along and the (religious leaders) have to lead the way,” the singer said. “If they don’t do it, who else is going to do it?”
Christian, but still rockers
When asked who Jesus Christ was to him, Cooper said, “he’s the core of everything. He’s life itself. He’s the light. ... I mean, if we don’t all revolve around Christ, we’re way out in space somewhere.”
”He draws you in,” he added. “You’re drawn to that light. And it’s nothing you can explain in words. You know, it’s something that happens to your heart.”
Cooper describes his faith as a central, stabilizing force in his life, but is quick to admit that God didn’t tell him, “And now that you’re a Christian, you can no longer be in rock and roll.”
Instead, he felt God’s plan was, “now you’re a Christian, go be in a rock and roll band, but follow me.” He added, “So now, when I write, I always try to have some lyric pointing towards Christ.”
Cooper has been amazed at the resurgence of interest in his music, “despite the fact that I’m very open about my Christianity that generally would put, you know, a knife in the back of a career.
“I just go, ‘Look, I’m Christian. Deal with it.’”