Article

Culture

Music

Taylor Swift

14 September 2023

6 min read

Taylor’s truth: how superstar authenticity appeals

As Taylor Swift fans took over his town, Nathan Betts contemplates the truth at the heart of the superstar’s appeal.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

Taylor Swift wears a long yellow dress and signs with an outstretched arm against a backdrop of woods and a close up her singing beside it.

Taylor Swift performing on the Eras Tour.

Paolo V, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

If you have been paying any attention to Taylor Swift’s most recent tour, you will know why the last several months have been termed The Summer of Taylor Swift. The artist has traveled across America, boosting economies en route, and filling stadiums with contagious happiness.

I hadn’t realized the enormous impact Swift had made on entire cities until I was walking downtown Seattle earlier this summer for a Mariners baseball game. While walking from my car to the stadium I encountered an endless sea of Taylor Swift fans waiting outside the stadium in the early afternoon for her show that would begin that evening. I had heard about Taylor Swift before, had listened to her music, but seeing what I saw that day told me something more profound about her and something about us as human beings.

But what I saw on the downtown streets of Seattle leading up to Taylor Swift’s concert was different.

In recent history, we have seen different artists such as The Rolling Stones and AC/DC elicit strange (and frankly awkward) adulation where people throw their clothes onto the stage. U2 concerts have been hailed as a religious experience in which stadiums become cathedrals. And more recently, Justin Bieber gave many “Bieber Fever.”

But what I saw on the downtown streets of Seattle leading up to Taylor Swift’s concert was different. I’ve been trying to pinpoint what it was exactly that struck me that day. People of all ages packed into surrounding streets in Taylor Swift attire, countless groups lustily singing her songs, cars and vans marked up with Taylor Swift song lyrics. There was a unity, a togetherness and distinct humanity to it all. The feeling was more akin to a spiritual revival than merely a big stadium concert rolling into town.

I remember coming back home that evening and texting friends to see what they made of it. My question was: “What is it about Taylor Swift that has enabled her to connect with so many?” The answers I received all struck the same notes: A Taylor Swift concert was the best they had ever experienced. But more than the concert, it’s the vibe, the pure joy and happiness that you experience with everyone at the concert. There is something about her that makes people feel happy. And although she is a stratospheric star, she has deliberately made a point of seeming like the girl next store. People think and feel that she is their friend. She is relatable.

If you are a Taylor Swift fan, you already know this. But as these thoughts about Taylor Swift rumbled through my brain for weeks after that experience, they took on a greater meaning during a lunch meeting I had with a friend back from college for the summer. Midway through our time together he asked me, “How do you deal with people who are fake?” The pensive look on my face revealed that I wasn’t exactly sure what he was asking, so he sharpened the question: “How do you deal with people who are hypocrites?”

I now understood what he was getting at. He gave a few examples of friends and leaders around him who had acted in hypocritical ways. He saw through it. Although he had moved on from those relationships, the jagged edges of hypocrisy still dug into him. They hurt. My friend was asking me how or if it’s even possible to trust in people who let you down.

The truth is, I’ve lost count of the conversations I’ve had with people who have asked or expressed the same question. And yet, when my friend asked me this question, I wasn’t sure what to say.

I offered just one thought: “What if the antidote to hypocrisy is the real thing? As in, what if the medicine for the disingenuous and fake is seeing a life that is genuine and real—a person who is true, honest, who lives a life of integrity?

And in Taylor Swift, we’ve found a companion who knows the struggle of life and invites us to join her.

This is where my mind came back to Taylor Swift and why it is that millions of us feel a real connection to her. The answer is nuanced, to be sure, but I wonder if part of it has to do with the fact that when we see or hear Taylor Swift, we experience a person who comes across as real. Perhaps more than in recent memory, we as a society have a low tolerance for BS. Yet, despite our abhorrence for the fake, our attraction to the real and authentic has grown just as strongly.

Enter Taylor Swift. Among other qualities, Swift is not a fake. Isobel Jones, a cradle Swiftie, recently explained this to me:

‘Taylor Swift isn’t fake because we’ve known her since she was 14, she gave all of herself to us, in her songs, in her interactions with fans, sending her coat to a fan who loved it (During the RED era; Swift would have been 22ish). She’s one of the first Tumblr gen artists who has consistently connected with fans and grown up with them, proving her consistency.’

We can relate to the words in Swift’s songs. Her lyrics of sadness, anger, hope, and grace connect with us. She touches the human spirit, not necessarily because we’ve been through the exact same kind of struggles, but because we are all human beings trying to figure out how to cope with hard things in life, own up to our shadows and weaknesses and still engage our journey in life. And in Taylor Swift, we’ve found a companion who knows the struggle of life and invites us to join her.

In our age of loneliness and disintegrating relational bonds, I believe the message of Taylor Swift transcends her concerts and songs. She carries a message for us, a reminder of what we need as human beings. Truth, integrity, authenticity. We don’t necessarily expect people to be perfect, but we need an honesty in our relationships about who people really are, whether that is the good or the bad. Just please, whatever you do, don’t be a hypocrite.

Wounds from hypocrisy can be hard to recover from. As a person of faith, I have experienced first-hand and have heard myriad stories of hypocrisy in the church. There is indeed much to be disheartened by in our world, and far-too-often within church walls. But in my more sober-minded moments when I am looking for lasting and healing solutions, I encounter a balm for my pain when I focus on the core and centre of the Christian faith.

At its heart, Christianity goes beyond offering merely propositional prescriptions for the pain that paralyses us. Instead, hope is offered supremely in and through the person of Jesus Christ, God-in-flesh. Within Christ is a truth that rolls throughout the whole of sacred Scripture. It is the beautiful message that there is a God who can be trusted. We can trust him because he is real, he lived in our world of pain and hypocrisy, and he conquered its power. We might carry scars for the rest of our lives, but Christ’s life tells us that there will come a point, before we die or after, when he will heal the deepest of our wounds. He can be trusted, not because he makes everything in life work out the way we want it to, or because we will never experience pain, but because in Christ, we’ve found the one who knows the way through it.

There’s also a challenge here for those who follow Christ and it is simply to reflect his character of truth, love, and beauty in how we live thereby opening up a world into which people actually want to inhabit.

Recovering from being hurt by hypocrisy can be a long and hard road to travel. A recent conversation with a friend reminded me of how difficult that is while my experience of Seattle bubbling with Taylor Swift happiness provided a signpost of hope. And behind all of this I am made to wonder, more than I can ever recall, whether faith in Jesus Christ can help steer us in the right direction, if we are willing to engage who he was and the life into which he invites us.

Interview

Culture

Education

Justice

S&U interviews

17 February 2025

8 min read

How justice shaped a world of rights

Historian John Coffey talks about his contribution to a new book: Justice & Rights.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A statue of a woman holding a spear in one hand a lightening bolt in the others that reads: 'Droits de l'homme'.

A French statute celebrating Human Rights.

DDP on Unsplash.

In our networked world old problems, and new ideas to solve them, flash across our minds and screens. It can be a hectic and dis-orientating feeling that occurs when we try to make sense of it all. Whether it's the global order changing or yet another injustice occurring.

Seeking insights on all this means crossing boundaries, and that’s what over 160 scholars do by sharing with each other. The members of the Global Faculty Initiative (GFI), drawn from all faculties usual in great universities, integrate faith and scholarship through dialogues. They examine the themes of justice, order, flourishing and beauty - mixing subject matter expertise in everything from physics to public policy.

The GFI has just published the results of one such dialogue in a book Justice and Rights. Among the contributors is Professor John Coffey. His work explores the history of religion and the big ideas like justice and rights. Recently he talked with GFI coordinator Bethan Willis, on its Justice podcast series. Here’s an extract of the discussion that looks at the ‘genealogy of rights.’

Bethan Willis So, shifting focus now to the question of rights, particularly. So, you talk in your Brief about the genealogy of rights, and in his Theology Brief, Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a case for placing rights at the centre of our understanding of justice, but that's obviously not an uncontested move. And some people would see a focus on rights as problematic, and part of the debate about the legitimacy or the value of rights can sometimes centre around the question of where rights actually come from. So which period in history, which philosophy and vision of human life and justice gives rise to this language. So can you tell us a little bit about that kind of trajectory that you've set out in your Brief , the different points at which people might identify rights as coming to the fore and why that happens and the various interests at play in these discussions of where rights come from?

John Coffey So it can be very confusing if you read the scholarship on this subject because if you listen to someone like Samuel Moyne, he will argue that the human rights revolution of the 1970s really invents human rights or maybe grudgingly the 1940s and the conservative statesmen who created the UN declaration of human rights in that period. Others, of course, would root it in the enlightenment. And I guess this is a classic answer. It's the enlightenment and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which is really at the heart of the story of rights. But then early modernists and medievalists pushback, they see natural rights language, the idea of individual subjective rights that one has simply on the basis of one's humanity. These are distinct from legal rights, but they're individual natural rights that they would see this concept emerging in the Middle Ages with canon lawyers and Juris and so on, and then being embraced by various 17th, 16th, 17th century groups up to Locke.

And I think there are different things going on here. One, of course, is that there are turf wars between historians in different periods who want to draw attention to their period as being really seminal in various ways. People have talked about the revenge of the medievalists, the early modernists and the Renaissance specialists who made so much emphasis on this being a radical break from the dark mediaeval past that mediaevalists have always been keen to push back against that and to point to the mediaeval roots of a lot of modern concepts. But I think there's also more going on here. I think in some ways it's part of a bigger argument about political and to some extent economic liberalism as well, because rights language has been so important for liberals, whether they're talking about politics or talking about economics. So, you have an example of rival genealogies being used for political purposes, if you like, to both problematize and legitimize, right?

BW Your work is focused on the contributions that religious groups have made to politics and ideas. And you particularly reference the Levellers in the 17th century and the abolitionists at the turn of the 18th, 19th century. Can you tell us a bit about the contribution that Christians may have made to the development of rights and particularly to the rights of freedom of conscious thought and belief in particular?

JC Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to emphasize this because there's also been a long tradition of suspicion of rights language among Christians, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I mean, this has obviously been true in the Catholic church in the 19th century where there was deep suspicion of liberalism and the individualism associated with it and rights language was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by many traditionalist Catholics. But it's also true in Protestant circles as well, among some high Anglicans. But you could see it in the Dutch Calvinist tradition, they founded an anti-revolutionary party after the French Revolution, which is very critical of the political language which emerges from that event. So, it's interesting to see how historians and intellectual historians in recent decades have recovered what you might call the theological origins of rights talk. And that's true of people like Brian Tierney writing about the mediaeval era and showing the kind of seminal influence of various mediaeval theorists of natural law, but also natural rights.

And certainly, when you get to the period I'm most familiar with from the 17th century onwards, groups like the Levellers are not just talking about native rights or legal rights that they have as Freeborn Englishmen. They're also talking about universal natural human rights that individuals have on the basis of their humanity. And it's in that period in the 17th century that people begin really for the first time to talk about freedom of religion as a natural right. I mean, you don't see that in the Middle Ages. It's a development that emerges within particularly radical Protestantism in the 17th century. Though interestingly, it's also tied to the idea of duties. So because we have a duty to worship God according to our conscience, consciences must be left free and the individual must have a natural right to worship God according to their conscience, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to please God if they just follow the dictates of the state or the state church that they wouldn't be able to worship in a way that's pleasing to God. So, it is interesting the way the argument works. It's theistic grounded in a sense, but it applies not just to Christians, it applies to other kinds of religious worship, to Jews, to Muslims, to heathens and so on.

And you can see more widely a theological grounding for rights in figures like Locke. And that's encapsulated, obviously famously in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drafted in 1776, that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’. So, this idea that we have certain rights that we cannot transfer over to the state, that we can alienate them over to the state, they're inalienable, and we have a solemn responsibility before God to protect them. So yeah, I mean, it's certainly by the 18th century, this rights language is absolutely flourishing within Protestant circles, and you can see it being taken up quite significantly in the abolitionist movement in the 1780s, though people are also shying away from it in the 1790s because of the French Revolution and Tom Payne's rights of man and so on. But if you read 19th century American religious abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglas or William Lloyd Garrison or others, they're using the language of natural rights, pretty insistently.

BC And it's often to articulate the kind of victim's perspective, isn't it, to defend the weak against the mighty and to say there's a bigger kind of justice that is beyond the state or the law. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit about how that works?

JC Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right, and it's one reason why we should be wary about just tossing, tossing rights language out as some kind of secular poisoning of the, well, a, it does have some deep roots in Christian thought, but it also, rights language is also designed as one of the weapons of the weak, if you like. It's a way to defend those whose claims are often ignored and to assert their human dignity. So, it's why it gets taken up so much by religious minorities, by those who are pushing for widening the vote and suffrage maybe to all men, maybe eventually to women. The anti-slavery movement is using it, and of course, by the 20th century, the Civil Rights movement.

BC But as you said, Wilberforce himself doesn't really use this language much, partly because the arenas he's speaking in and partly because of these associations with the French Revolution. Is that right?

JC Yeah, and if you look in the 1790s, it's interesting because it's from that period really the language of left and right starts to emerge, and those on the right are very much concerned about law and order. They look across at France and they see disorder and the guillotine and regicide and Civil War and the exile of Catholic priests and so on, and it's extremely alarming for them. So, the emphasis very much shown law and order, and they become extremely alarmed by the way that rights language has been used to undermine order. So, it's classically articulated at that divide between Edmund Burke on the one side and Tom Payne on the other. What's interesting in the British context, is you'll find sort of devout Protestant Christians on both sides of that. So, Wilberforce would be very much on Burke's side in this argument, but the founder of the London corresponding society in the 1790s, a man called Thomas Hardy, he's actually a devout Scottish Calvinist, and he's absolutely on board with this rights language. And so different religious groups will be divided over this.

Follow the rest of John and Bethan's conversation on the GFI podcast.

John Coffey on Justice.