There is a sentence I never expected to write: Slayer made me a better Christian. And yet here we are.
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Reign in Blood, the 1986 album that redefined what heavy music could be and, depending on who you ask, either corrupted a generation or simply gave voice to things that were already there. The album included twenty-eight minutes of relentless, theologically saturated, “morally” serious music that your parents and probably your pastor were certain was the devil’s own work (Think “Satanic Panic” during the 1980s.)
I am now a pastor. I have been a Slayer fan for most of my adult life. I have not just made peace with the tension; I have embraced it.
I attended my first concert ever at fourteen years old, standing in an arena watching Metallica. This is an excellent place to begin. But my in-depth introduction to Slayer came through a more unlikely channel: John, who was my pastor.
In the years since, as I’ve moved from colleague to pastor myself, John has remained a close friend. He is a man of deep faith and wide reading who, on one Sunday, preached a sermon on Psalm 100 and the mandate to make a joyful noise to the Lord, and then, in his office after the service, handed me a bag full of Slayer’s entire recorded catalog.
This was before the age of streaming, when lending someone a music collection was both an act of genuine trust and a theological statement. I received it in the spirit in which it was offered.
South of Heaven
One Sunday, John preached a sermon titled “South of Heaven,” which was the title of a 1988 Slayer album. He chose the sermon title for fun because he could and is exactly that kind of pastor.
Later that week, John and I finally saw Slayer together live, standing in a crowd surrounded by the faithful in their mostly black t-shirts. We stood together and watched one of the greatest live acts in the history of recorded sound do what they do.
It was loud. It was cathartic. It was, in its own way, liturgical.
I sometimes think about that night when people assume they know what a person of faith looks like, sounds like, or listens to on any given evening.
Years later, John had the great theological valor to stand at a pulpit and preach my installation sermon at Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. The man who handed me Slayer’s catalog the day he preached on joyful noise was the same man who welcomed me into my current calling.
These facts are not in conflict. They are, I would argue, the same fact.
Aristotle’s Catharsis
At forty, Reign in Blood has aged the way genuinely serious art ages, which is to say it sounds less like a relic and more like a document. Produced by Rick Rubin, it became one of the most influential metal records ever made.
The album opens with a song about Josef Mengele and closes with one about the torments of hell. This should tell you everything you need to know about its aesthetic commitments and its willingness to go exactly where it said it would. What I argue—what I think is genuinely true—is that this record and the body of work that followed it helped form my theological imagination in ways that more respectable listening material simply did not.
Aristotle wrote that catharsis is the essential function of tragedy—the way that art depicting suffering and terror produces not more suffering and terror in the audience, but a release, a clarification, a return to something like equilibrium. He was describing Greek drama performed at civic festivals, art that an entire community experienced together.
Aristotle’s insight was that the purpose of depicting the worst of human experience was not to wallow in it but to move through it collectively. The audience of a Greek tragedy did not leave the theater more broken than when they arrived. They left lighter. Something had been processed that could not have been processed by looking away.
Aristotle understood that the path to emotional and moral health did not run around darkness but directly through it, and that art was the vehicle. This remains true.
In an age of relentless content, algorithmically optimized for engagement, most of what we consume is carefully calibrated to manage our emotions rather than genuinely reckon with them.
We are offered the appearance of darkness—stakes that feel high and conflicts that feel real—while the resolution is always preloaded, always available, always thirty seconds away. None of this resembles the genuine evil of children killed in bombings or families torn apart by forced separation, to name just a couple.
Genuine catharsis requires genuine risk: the possibility that the thing you are watching or hearing will not resolve, will not comfort you, will not let you off the hook. Slayer has never offered comfort in that sense.
What it offers instead is acknowledgment, a full-throated, maximum-volume insistence that the darkness is real, that evil has weight, that the worst chapters of human history cannot simply be explained away. From that acknowledgment, something releases.
You arrive at the other side of the music, not more frightened but less laden. The catharsis is real precisely because nothing was faked.
Believing in Evil
This is closer to what I understand faith to be than a great deal of what gets presented as “Christian” music. The problem with much of contemporary religious culture’s engagement with darkness is that it doesn’t really believe in it—not fully, not at volume.
Evil, in the music and messaging produced for polite religious consumption, tends to be a vague negative force, a mild spiritual headwind to be overcome by the right attitude and a well-timed chorus. It is not a weight. It is not the thing that looks back at you from history’s worst chapters and refuses to be explained.
Slayer believes in evil completely and that honesty creates the conditions for genuine catharsis in a way that resolution-in-three-minutes never can. You cannot be released from something the music won’t first acknowledge.
The Christian tradition, at its most serious, has always known this. The Psalms of lament don’t rush to comfort. They make God sit with the accusation first.
Psalm 88 offers no comfort and ends simply in desolation. Lamentations is exactly what its name promises. The prophets are not polite.
The cross, encountered honestly rather than as a decorative symbol, is not something that survives sanitization. Good Friday only works if you don’t let people leave early.
There is a long and deep tradition within Christian liturgy and worship of going all the way down before going up, of insisting the darkness be named and sat with before it can be passed through. The ancient practice of lament, of bringing your full, unedited grief and anger and confusion into the presence of God without tidying it first, is not a peripheral feature of Christian spirituality. It is central to it.
What Slayer does, at high volume and without apology, is insist on that same refusal to tidy. The catharsis it offers is real precisely because it doesn’t skip any steps. It trusts the listener to survive the darkness rather than protecting them from it. Good liturgy makes the same bet.
Full Immersion
I did not think about Aristotle at my first Slayer concert, any more than I thought about musicology at fourteen watching Metallica in an arena with my jaw on the floor. I thought about very little, actually, in the way that good worship at its best temporarily empties you of the need to think and lets you simply be present to something larger than your own interior monologue.
The crowd, the volume, the total commitment of the band—there is a quality of immersion that liturgists spend careers trying to engineer and that a Slayer show delivers without apology.
My friend John, standing next to me that night, having just preached a sermon titled “South of Heaven,” was not there ironically–neither was I. We were there because the music meant something, because it reached into places that needed reaching, because catharsis is a gift wherever it comes from, and wisdom knows better than to refuse it on aesthetic grounds.
This is what I want to say about Reign in Blood at forty: It is a serious piece of work that has done serious work in me. It did not make me doubt my faith. It pressed my faith up against something real and asked whether it could hold.
The tradition I stand in—the one that takes lament seriously, that doesn’t flinch from the weight of history, that believes resurrection only means something on the other side of an honest reckoning with death—that tradition is capacious enough to include twenty-eight minutes of thrash metal that refuses to look away.
The man who handed me that catalog on the day he preached about joyful noise was telling me something I’ve spent years learning to articulate. He was telling me that the noise counts as joyful, not because it is pretty, but because it is honest.
The horns are up. The faith holds.
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