The priest of Black Sabbath: why heavy metal and Christianity might just be compatible

Fr Oskari Juurikkala is a Finnish Catholic priest who is crazy about heavy metal and hard rock. He told Adamah Media why.

Fr Oskari, you recently started a YouTube channel called Made for Glory, where you react to and analyse contemporary music, especially heavy metal, from a Christian angle. The first two videos revolved around the metal bands Metallica and Black Sabbath, which some people may have been shocked to see a Catholic priest appreciate. What’s the background to all this? How did you decide to start such a channel? 

I’ve been thinking and praying about this idea for a while, but the core intuition goes back a long way. I was an avid music lover as a child. My mother would take us to classical concerts when we were small kids. 

Later, when I was a teenager, we had a wonderful music collection at the local library (this was just before the internet revolution). I would explore it and bring a big pile of records to listen to every month. 

Then, I would choose the best discoveries and sit down with my mum in the dark living room and play those gems to her. She was a film director and often quite tired from work, so it was a beautiful way of appreciating some great music and sharing the moment and the experience.

For many people, heavy metal and Christian faith seem directly opposed to each other. How is such a harmony possible in your view? 

Over the months that the idea was maturing, I talked to various people about it and, among those who don’t listen to metal, the common reaction was bewilderment.

But as soon as we published the first videos, I began to receive messages from all sorts of Christian friends who said they also love metal! They were so happy to realise that we share that passion as well as the faith. 

Of course, it’s a complicated relationship. I’m definitely not preaching heavy metal as gospel.

But in my experience, in the peculiar but massive world of metal you find some of the most powerful expressions of the human condition in its complexity.

These include fundamental questions concerning suffering and death, various kinds of trauma, or the tension between our yearning for greatness and our mortality and misery.

Also, there’s a lot of Christian and other religious imagery and vocabulary in the metal world, from record art to lyrics. It’s not always portrayed in the right way, of course, nor always respectfully. Still, its presence reveals that the big question of God and religion is not something you want to escape. 

The challenge for the Christian is: How do you deal with all that? How do you show that your faith is an answer to those questions and concerns?

You discovered Christianity later in life. Could you share a bit about how that happened?

Yes, I grew up in a Finnish family which was in many ways loving and wonderful, with a lot of humanistic culture and books. But unfortunately, I wasn’t baptised as a child nor had much exposure to Christianity.

In secondary school, I discovered philosophy, which was kind of my first love. I also began to read about different religions, including Buddhism. But it was just before going to university that I discovered Catholicism – first, as a philosophical tradition, I’d say. 

I also stumbled upon some texts from Pope St John Paul II on the social doctrine of the Church, which struck me for their wisdom and beauty. 

And I read about the natural law tradition, which appealed to my moral sense and contrasted with the relativistic morality I was hearing from society at large.

A while later, God then led me to discover the Catholic organisation Opus Dei on the internet. I got in touch with them in Helsinki, began to receive classes of basic Christian doctrine – which were absolutely wonderful – and a year later I was baptised.

Going back to the atmosphere you grew up in, you also mentioned listening to various kinds of music as a child and teenager. How did heavy metal fit into that and what did it mean to you? 

Heavy metal came to my life first through my older brother. We’re talking late 1980s. Bands like Metallica were entering the mainstream music industry, and we actually got to go to two Metallica concerts with a group of friends – and my mum, as we were still quite young!

It actually took me a while to like metal, so I can perfectly relate to people who think it’s just yelling and noise. I suppose that with music, it’s a bit similar to an acquired taste, like learning to appreciate beer or wine or olives, which may first seem too strong or unpleasant.

Over time, heavy metal became a very personal thing for me, on various levels. Externally, my brother and I had this beautiful, long blond hair and we dressed in broken black jeans and leather boots. 

I also played the drums while my brother played the guitar, so we set up a series of bands with friends. I still can’t think of almost anything as cool as playing drums in a metal band! It’s a very physical instrument, and the music is powerful and technically demanding. So this experience gave me a uniquely incarnational sense of music. 

On the inside, there were more things going on. My brother and I had suffered the divorce of our parents when we were very young. As is usual, we didn’t really know how to deal with that, and our parents weren’t really able to help much either, as they were in some ways even more wounded or scarred. 

I don’t think it’s an accident that heavy metal became so popular in the 1980s, which coincided with a massive divorce boom that left a whole generation of young people traumatised. You can see a lot of that pain reflected in the music and the lyrics. 

Metal doesn’t try to hide that painful side of existence but goes head on into it. 

I’m not saying it’s always healthy and constructive. But it can be surprisingly helpful.

Just recently I was watching some reaction videos to Metallica’s 1984 classic ‘Fade to Black’, which was their first metal ballad. 

The singer and songwriter James Hetfield had a very difficult childhood, as his dad left his family when he was 13 and then his mum died when he was only 16. So a lot of their early songs reflect this pain. ‘Fade to Black’ is a hauntingly beautiful and powerful song. 

Coming back to today, you have all these reaction videos on YouTube with therapists and all sorts of people listening to it for the first time. It’s very impressive and moving. 

But the most amazing part is the comments. 

In the comments section, you find all these people sharing their stories of how they were going through a lot of suffering or anxiety as teenagers, and ‘Fade to Black’ was the moment they felt that others feel this too, and therefore someone else understands them. 

The song’s lyrics are tough, but reading the comments I realised how songs like this can help a lot of people to go through those difficult emotions, to express them somehow, and go forward because they know they’re not alone with them.

That sounds very powerful indeed. Did your conversion to Christianity change your musical taste in any way? Do you still like the same music?

Great question! When I became Christian, I noticed something surprising: I began to like joyful music!

In my childhood, when I heard cheerful music, like very upbeat music or a song in a major key, it felt somehow flat and superficial to me. It didn’t seem authentic. I think that’s because there was so much sadness in my heart. That kind of simple joy didn’t feel right. 

That’s not to say my taste has entirely changed. As a rule, I still prefer songs in a minor key. And I don’t think that contradicts my faith: we do have the immense joy of our faith and of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, but we’re also still in some respects distant from our final destination in this ‘vale of tears’, as we sing in the Salve Regina.

Moreover, already in my teenage years I gravitated towards music that, in retrospect, seems to me like a kind of praeambula fidei (preparation for faith) – I mean, an emotional and preparatory space that led me closer to the faith. 

For example, I loved a progressive metal band called Dream Theatre, especially their early album Images and Words (1992). It takes the listener on an incredible musical and poetic journey that awakens and inflames the innate sense of greatness in us. It gave me one of the first experiences of that soaring to the heights of the spirit which God has meant for us all. 

Still today, when I listen to music, I find that I’m always praying in one way or another.

I don’t necessarily do it deliberately; I just try to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit as I listen. It almost feels to me like a secret school of the Spirit in which I learn to connect with so many different people and to see glimpses of their hearts and their at least implicit yearning for God and salvation.

Still, is there any music you feel uncomfortable with, especially from the metal genre?

Absolutely! For example, there’s a subgenre called black metal. It’s very aggressive and dark, with scary aesthetics like a shrieking vocal style. The lyrics are often openly anti-Christian and even Satanic. To be honest, I’ve never liked it! But now it’s clearer to me why. It’s not a space I want to go to.

Saint Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, used to say that, to save a soul, we should go with them all the way to the gates of hell, but not any further. We can’t go where there’s no possibility of loving God. 

To me, black metal is like that: there’s nothing you can redeem there. Of course, you can pray for the people involved because they still have the possibility of coming out of this world.

But there’s also some popular music I won’t listen to. In particular, a lot of soft pop is so intentionally sensual – not just the lyrics and the visuals, but the music too – that it’s just completely unhelpful. I think it’s deliberately produced to appeal to our lower passions and doesn’t really contain any depth. 

Some Christians might say we should only listen to sacred music, or at least classical music. What would you say to that? 

I can understand the desire to prioritize sacred and classical music. Of course, one shouldn’t naively idealise all classical music, as the vibes or the spirit in classical music can also be unhealthy. 

Still, in much of classical music there’s a strongly Christian atmosphere, and the sense of harmony and beauty found especially in older classical music can be morally and spiritually very formative. 

When our mother used to take me and my brother to those classical concerts, I was so young that I can’t remember it consciously, but I’m sure they left a big mark on my soul. 

But to say you can only listen to classical music seems too extreme to me. If someone feels called to that personally, I’m going to respect that, but I don’t think it’s the only way of living as a Christian. 

Perhaps there’s an analogy here with different vocations and spiritualities in the Church. Some people are called to withdraw from the world – in the sense of the modern world with its temporal and secular dimension – in order to dedicate themselves to prayer and contemplation in spaces exclusively dedicated to God. 

That’s a wonderful vocation. But others – possibly most of us – are not called to stay the whole day inside a sacred space like a church.

Have you ever experienced that need to separate yourself more from secular culture and modern music?

I can perfectly relate to the idea that someone feels they need some separation from secular music because they have just found peace in Christ and that music takes them back where they don’t want to go. 

Something similar happened to me, too. When I discovered the Christian faith, for many years I didn’t listen to any heavy metal. To be honest, I didn’t spend much time listening to music at all. Perhaps I needed that new and clean space in which my faith could gradually take root. 

Let me illustrate this with two concrete examples that come to mind. A while after my conversion, I remember going through some old records and trying to listen to two bands called Manowar and Blind Guardian. 

Manowar was a huge metal band in my youth, very powerful and masculine. In Finnish, we used to call it sankarimetalli, ‘hero metal’. The lyrics revolve around fantasy and mythology, with a certain idealisation of warfare in the style of some old pagan peoples. 

Blind Guardian draws similarly from fantasy but with somewhat darker tones. Their album Imaginations from the Other Side (1995) was my favourite, and it can actually be quite scary. 

So, listening to this stuff as a fresh Christian, I felt distinctly restless and uncomfortable.

Years later, I gave them another try. And I realised that now, I was ready for it. I mean, I was sufficiently rooted in my faith and love of God to go back to those spaces.

Today, some of my favourite songs are by these bands. For example, there’s Blind Guardian’s ‘Imaginations from the Other Side’ from the album of the same name. It explores the fantasy world – you know, like Tolkien’s world – in an entrancing way. 

When I listen to it, I reflect on how that yearning for the other side, the imaginary world, is fulfilled in the Christian faith. It’s a powerful song and the entire instrumental dimension is just mind-blowing. 

Bands like this make you understand the saying that heavy metal is like classical music, just after the invention of electricity!

From Manowar, I’m maybe thinking of a song like ‘Spirit Horse of the Cherokee’, from 1992. It’s pure musical storytelling. It takes you on a journey, imagining the viewpoint of the native American tribes that were often duped and treated badly by the Europeans.

Now these are Cherokees, so they fight back, they go to war. And the song extols that pagan virtue of fortitude. The atmosphere is not entirely Christian, but there’s a lot there you can appreciate from a Christian angle too. 

When they sing in the last verse, “There has been much killing / There will be much more / The medicine man is dancing / He’s calling us to war / Hatchets sing with pride / Let the white man die” – it still gives me the chills! As a song, it’s very simple but incredibly artistic, like a perfect metal song.

What if someone only listens to modern music? What would you say to them?

At the very least, that would be impoverishing. I would encourage people to explore other kinds of music, and to give their minds and hearts that opportunity to broaden their acquired taste.

I was unusually blessed in that I discovered a wide variety of musical genres early in life. In my teenage years I fell in love with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos – especially 2 and 3 – which are just magical.

I’ve also listened to some of Ennio Morricone’s film scores countless times. And as I spent so much time with drums and percussion, I ended up diving quite deep into a variety of African artists, too. 

For example, the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour’s The Guide (Wommat) (1994) is still one of my favourite albums. Unlike metal, it immediately makes me want to dance, which I actually love!

The wonderful thing about music is that, since it touches you so deeply, it really connects you with other people and gives you an inside view of different cultures and human experiences.

 

One thing I would recommend is intentional listening. We live in a time where music is too easily reduced to something playing in the background. That’s fine for creating a nice atmosphere in a restaurant, but we need to learn and cultivate the ability to sit down and really listen. 

So, if you’re listening to a piano concerto by Rachmaninoff, I don’t think you should be reading a novel at the same time! It doesn’t make sense. It’s not background music; it alone is like watching a film or reading a majestic novel.

Why does the modern music world, and many musicians within it, seem so morally corrupt, with lyrics and lifestyles revolving around sex, drugs and drinking. Is this necessary? 

That’s a complex question. I suppose there are several dimensions here. One is the music industry itself, which can be a very unhealthy environment especially to a young person. 

Moreover, some people on the production side are obviously keen to push lyrics and visuals which appeal to our baser passions, in order to sell more. 

On the other hand, there’s the wounded humanity of the artists themselves. Music allows you to express and exteriorise what’s on the inside, and that’s often not going to be very pretty. As Christians we shouldn’t be surprised by that: in music we get a glimpse of man’s greatness and misery.

Can Christians really hope to move in this field? Can they bring about any changes?

I don’t have a lot of experience of the music industry, but I know there are also many Christians there and some are doing wonderful work. 

Things are not so black and white. That’s true of many sectors in society. Perhaps we need courageous and principled Christians especially in fields like music and entertainment, given that they have such a huge impact on the minds and hearts of young people – and older people too! 

It’s interesting to see how the new technologies and platforms are changing the dynamics of music production and distribution. I’m thinking of Spotify, YouTube, and the social media platforms. 

Making quality recordings used to be so expensive and risky that it was dominated by big record companies, which in turn often made deals with distributors and radio channels. 

Today, production costs have come down a lot and distribution depends more on your creativity than on who you know. It’s much easier to make things your own way and to find your own audience. The social media algorithms also facilitate that. 

Of course, it’s an extremely competitive environment, but if you have talent and a vision, it’s never been easier to enter the scene.

Moreover, openly Christian and religious lyrics have become much more mainstream. I’m thinking of the recent Coldplay song ‘We Pray’ from last year, for example. 

It was a huge success, and they released several versions with different artists like the Palestinian singer Elyanna (performing in Arabic), the British rapper Little Simz, and the Nigerian singer Burna Boy. It’s a very interesting piece and a fascinating expression of this new atmosphere. 

On the other side of the coin, why is so much of explicitly Christian music cheesy and cringy, basically somewhat poor?

I suppose that can happen sometimes because Christians may wish to use music to transmit a message, so it doesn’t necessarily arise out of a genuine artistic process. 

I mean, if you just take some notional idea of the Gospel and want to give it a musical wrapping, then you’re unlikely to make great music. If it doesn’t arise from the depth of a heart, it’s not going to speak to other hearts, either.

Having said that, I think we’re in a much better situation now than one or two decades ago – maybe precisely because there’s a lot more space for independent artists today. 

There are many great Christian artists making wonderful music. For example, on the worship music side, you could try something like Matt Maher’s live ‘Come Holy Spirit’ or Jon Thurlow’s ‘Storm All Around You’. They’re live recordings from a modern worship setting, but they’re musically powerful too. 

Or, from a rather different angle, try ‘Receive Me (I’m Yours)’ by Brother Isaiah, who belongs to the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. It’s an impressive meditation on prayer, inspired by Mother Teresa. 

Gungor’s’ ‘Please Be My Strength’ is also musically amazing and theologically profound. It invites you to realise that grace is everything.

Then there’s Simon Khorolskiy’s ‘Holy Is the Lord’, based on Isaiah 6:1-8, so it’s basically about that tension between God’s holiness and his desire to use us as his instruments. Now, this is not some superficial background music.

Especially for the last one, I recommend grabbing a pair of good headphones and finding a quiet and dark room. Then, let it blast.

That sounds like quite an invitation! And it’s also a fitting note to finish on. But before we do so, would you like to add anything else concerning your channel Made for Glory? How do you see it developing in the coming months?

One thing I want to highlight is that it’s not just a personal project. The channel is a space for Christian reflection on music and culture and big questions in an atmosphere of friendship. 

I also invite your readers to discover the channel and if they like the idea, to send us their suggestions. 

We’re really keen on reacting to songs which others want us to comment on. I especially hope that other people will share any gems which mean a lot to them but I might never have heard of!

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