American singer-songwriter and actress Madonna has incorporated references to religious themes and spiritual practices from various religions, including Christianity (she was raised Catholic), Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Kabbalah. This became one of the most defining and controversial aspects of her career, with responses documented in the popular press as well as from theologians, sociologists of religion, and other scholars of religion.
Madonna's onstage representations of religion, along with her performances and provocative statements, attracted institutional criticism from groups such as the Catholic Church, Orthodox rabbis, and Hindu leaders. Some individual clergy offered neutral responses. Religious adherents staged protests against Madonna numerous times, and she has been accused by critics of sacrilege, heresy, iconoclasm, and blasphemy. Her personal views on religion have been complex and evolving; while she has acknowledged the teachings and divinity of Jesus, she has expressed disagreement with organized religion, and her eclectic approach to spirituality has been publicly criticized as unorthodox.
Though the phenomenon goes beyond Madonna, she received solid reviews discussing her religious forays with an ambiguous impact in popular culture across decades. She was credited with inspiring various scholars from different fields to seek new approaches for works and its religious meanings. Madonna was among the leading public figures often considered medium for popularizing in Western countries, spiritual traditions coming from Asia such as yoga. She was sometimes analogously described with emic religious words and terms in both religious-targeted and secular press, including the word "icon", with her name appearing in references works such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary or Diccionario panhispánico de dudas to illustrate its new usage in contemporary culture. She was also exemplified as an exemplar of religious illiteracy and some have adopted an alienated view of Madonna as the "Great Whore of Babylon".
Background and scope
Shortly after her debut in the 1980s, various cultural analyses of her figure touched on Madonna's religious connotations. Various of them were categorized under her mini academic subdiscipline, the Madonna studies, which flourished with other topics, according to observers such as Andi Zeisler, Douglas Kellner and Ricardo Baca. Author and professor Thomas Ferraro notes this early stage, saying "Madonna's impact posed an expressly religious puzzle". She also became a "favorite topic" for religious fundamentalists in her prime according to editors of Religion and Popular Culture (2016). They also addressed how her video "Like a Prayer" inspired "perhaps more than any other music video scholarly analysis of its religious meanings". On the other hand, religious studies scholars, like James R. Lewis, explored Madonna's figure from perspectives that included astrology.
In 2018, Cady Lang from Time magazine, commented that there are few figures more closely associated with religion in pop culture than Madonna. According to Ferraro, in Felling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (2005), "Italian Catholicism informs just about everything Madonna does, most often in ways that are not officially sanctioned". Such long-standing relationship or reciprocal reactions from Roman Catholic Church was noted by publications, including Phoenix New Times, whose editor Jason Keil described as a "synonymous with each other" in 2015. In 2010, Time magazine included Madonna's moments in their "Top 10 Vatican Pop-Culture Moments"; a rank that shows how the Roman Catholic Church mixed with contemporary culture.
Madonna's religious profile Madonna's religious background and public display have been documented.
Catholicism Madonna was born and raised Catholic. She adopted "Veronica" as her confirmation name, paying tribute to Saint Veronica.
Agents like the American theologian Chester Gillis, have explained that Madonna was educated in a strict Catholic household. It influenced and left a mark on both her life and career, with scholar Arthur Asa Berger recalling "the importance of her Italian Catholic background". In 1991, Christian author Graham Cray, wrote for Third Way that Madonna was the only lapsed Catholic in popular music who "has made a reaction against her Catholic background, in her driving force" and as a source of "motivation of her work". Years later, however, French academic Georges-Claude Guilbert commented that "her resentment toward Catholicism is proportional to the marks it left on her", but he didn't feel it as "particularly original", because many writers and artists built entire careers on such ambivalent feelings. To American philosopher Mark C. Taylor, "Madonna's ongoing involvement with Catholicism is exceedingly complex".
Biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, in Madonna: An Intimate Biography (2018) adds that to Madonna's ambivalence about religion "must have been the way she was influenced by the somewhat fanatical —and confusing— she witnessed in her mother". He cited an adult Madonna saying: "I saw my mother doing things that really affected me. She would kneel on uncooked rice [...] If my aunt came over my house and had jeans that zipped up front, my mother covered all the statues so that they couldn't see such a display. She then turned the holy pictures towards the wall".
Spiritual seeking Madonna made a major turn in the mid-1990s during her pregnancy. She began practicing yoga and reading spiritual developments coming from Asia such as Hinduism and Buddhism. She also became a Kabbalah devotee. However, she kept her Christian education, revealing that her daughter Lourdes, "will spend more time with the Bible than her television". Religious professor Kathryn Lofton, said that her turn to Kabbalah "inspired articles emphasizing her new spiritual enthusiasm". Erik Davis, considered her case "the biggest metaphysical blast" in an article for Spin published in 1999, where he reviewed industry's artists that incorporated or practiced spiritual beliefs. Commentators Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor called it a "notable turn" in her life, impacted by motherhood, yoga, Kabbalah and Hindu mysticism.
Amid her spiritual enthusiasm, Madonna later adopted the name "Esther", a Biblical Hebrew name that means "star". Shalom Goldman, a Middlebury College professor of religion, quotes Madonna as having claimed to have studied all the women of the Old Testament but she was most drawn to Esther because "she saved the Jews of Persia from annihilation". Some of her religious fans, according to Goldman, considered the name's choice as a "manifestation of the divine shekhinah" which in Kabbalah denotes "the feminine aspect of God's presence". Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky made the suggestion that Open Source Judaism was what allowed her to develop an interest in Kabbalah without any interest in converting to Judaism.
After her introduction to the Kabbalah studies, Madonna assisted for years to the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, introduced by her friend Sandra Bernhard. The centre attracted several Hollywood celebrities from Elizabeth Taylor to Britney Spears, but Madonna attracted "bigger headlines" according to Los Angeles Times investigative journalists Harriet Ryan and Kim Christensen. Publications and authors, including Reuters in 2011, Katherine Stewart in 2012, and British author Harry Freedman in 2019, similarly elaborated how Madonna drew extraordinary publicity to the centre, leading to her being called their most prominent devotee. According to American scientist Peter Gleick, she also made famous their "Kabbalah water".
Into the 2010s, it remained unclear if Madonna kept studying Kabbalah or if she was still an active member of the centre. In 2017, a Vice contributor explained that many celebrities, stopped attend the centre or studying Kabbalah. In 2011, British tabloid Daily Mirror and other media outlets, reported that Madonna considered joining Opus Dei, although Spanish newspaper El Confidencial reported it was a hoax. In 2020, editor Pedro Marrero interprets that Madonna has been a spiritual woman who has always sought God. Mary Lambert, director of her video "Like a Prayer", describes that "Madonna is a very religious person in her own way". Madonna herself, told Terry Wogan, in a 1991 interview, "I'm spiritual, religious". By 2022, she declared that spends some of her time praying for others. She reportedly prays before a stage show, and for what academic Akbar Ahmed called Madonna, the "pop philosopher of postmodernist culture" in the 1990s.
Madonna's religious views, and others interpretations Besides her spiritual seeking, Madonna has made several statements about religion, and specific denominations. "So many critics seem to love to discuss Madonna's obsession with religion", wrote Fosca D'Acierno in The Italian American Heritage (1998). In this regard, Anne-Marie Korte from Utrecht University, wrote that "religion plays a major role in Madonna's statements and provocations". Author Donald C. Miller, said "she has made very strong verbal and nonverbal statements".
In 2015, during an interview with the Irish Independent, she stated: "I don't affiliate myself with any specific religious group. I connect to different ritualistic aspects of different belief systems, and I see the connecting thread between all religious beliefs". In 2016, she stated that her use of Christian imagery "is just proof of her devotion to Catholicism". She has been quoted criticizing Catholic dogma, saying once that Catholicism "[is] not what God and Christianity are all about". She stated that the God she believes in created the world, and isn't a "God to fear, it's a God to give thanks to". In 2019, she also felt and stated: "The idea that in any church you go, you see a man on a cross and everyone genuflects and prays to him [...] in a way it's paganism/idolatry because people are worshipping a thing".
In Fill These Hearts (2013), West quotes Madonna supporting Jesus as a divine being, who walked on the Earth, but she rejects "the religious behavior of any religious organization that does not encourage you to ask questions and your own explorations". Similarly, Christian author Dan Kimball wrote in They Like Jesus but Not the Church (2009), that "Madonna doesn't find anything wrong with the teachings of Jesus" but doesn't believe that "all paths lead to God", citing the problem of religious war. Spaniard music critic Joaquín Luqui reports that she loves Jesus, in "her own way".
Canadian professor of religious studies, Aaron W. Hughes, in Defining Judaism: A Reader (2016), interprets that "for Madonna, religion in general and Judaism in particular are inherently divisive and this divisiveness is ultimately responsible for the problems we face". Korte was critical, saying that "Madonna's interest in religion has never been theologically focused: it consists of a combinations of distrust towards institutional religion and an eclectic individual form of spirituality".
Broadly, Catholic author Christopher West believes that "her reflections on her religious upbringing echo the sentiments of a large swath of the population". Similarly, Focus on the Family's blogger Adam Holz, considered Madonna as the "Poster Child" for the way many would claim "spiritual, but not religious", while describing her eclectic personal approach of spirituality as both postmodern and syncretistic (it blends a variety of religious worldviews).
Implementation in her works