why pop’s Mother Monster is also a theologian

Lady Gaga is leading the nominations for this year’s MTV Video Music Awards – merely her latest accolade.

Since she burst onto the scene with The Fame album in 2008, Gaga has become one of the world’s most recognisable pop stars. Her hit Born This Way even topped Billboard’s list of the 100 greatest LGBTQIA+ anthems of all time. The track defines her commitment to celebrating diversity in all its forms.

While she is known for filling dance floors and dominating pop culture, she has also sparked serious academic interest. Scholars have explored her influence on music, fashion, gender and sexuality. Yet her use of religious imagery remains relatively under-examined. As a theologian, I have studied Gaga’s music and its rich religious symbolism.

Gaga’s most overtly political and theological album was Born This Way, released in 2011. It also inspired the Born This Way Foundation, which she founded with her mother to “empower and inspire young people to build a kinder, braver world that supports their mental health”.

I argue Gaga’s work makes her a kind of “musical public theologian”. In other words, an artist who brings theological arguments into public debate, particularly around LGBTQIA+ inclusion, often in tension with religious communities.

Born This Way

Take the title track. Here she tackles the theological opposition to LGBTQIA+ inclusion head on, in what might seem a fairly obvious and unsophisticated way: “No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgender life, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to survive … I’m beautiful in my way ’cause God makes no mistakes, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way.”

In a world where some claim that God’s design allows only for heterosexuality, Gaga turns this argument upside down. If God makes no mistakes, she insists, then diversity itself is divinely intended.

So far, so simple. But there is a more complicated story to be told about Gaga’s theological affirmation of difference. Some queer theorists are uneasy with the idea of being “born this way”, and the notion that identity is fixed by biology alone.

This is where deeper analysis of Born This Way pays dividends. The video offers a more fluid understanding of identity as something that can be performed.

It opens with a surreal sci-fi creation myth, scored with the theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a film in which identity is not straightforwardly “given”. The dancers adopt multiple postures resembling ovaries and wombs – a visual metaphor for the possibility of new births – suggestive of our ability to take on fresh identities for ourselves.

Gaga doesn’t do the work of connecting the lyrics and the visuals. That goes on in the world of queer theology, which is an approach that places LGBTQIA+ people at the centre of faith. But Gaga makes a significant public theological statement by holding them together in this song and its accompanying video.

Central to Gaga’s creative vision and resistance to dominant narratives telling people who and how they should be, is the theme of monstrosity. She calls herself “Mother Monster” and her fans “little monsters”, reclaiming a word often used to exclude or belittle those who are different.

The “Manifesto of Mother Monster”, at the beginning of the Born This Way video, presents a mythic creation story where freedom and difference are celebrated. It builds on the ambiguous place of monsters in religion.

Garden of Eden

Although her later albums are less overtly theological, Gaga has continued to weave religious themes into her music, including those of monstrosity. On her latest album Mayhem, for example, which was released earlier this year, the song Garden of Eden plays with the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve.

At one level, the theological motif of taking a bite from the apple in Eden can be seen simply as a metaphor for indulging in a short-lived relationship that, for that very reason, disobeys more conservative expectations of sexual relationships. But here, too, Gaga’s lyrics can be read at a deeper level. The story of Adam and Eve is fundamental to Christian theology, and it can be used to enforce certain ways of being.

Instead, Gaga’s reinterpretation of Eden offers a liberating vision. There’s an invitation to rethink a story that has been used to divide the world neatly into good and evil. Instead of using scripture to police behaviour, she reimagines it as a story that opens up possibilities. This reflects the experiences of many of her fans, who may have felt excluded by dominant religious narratives.

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How Lady Gaga acts as a custodian of hope

Through her music and imagery, Gaga invites us to embrace difference and to question stories that oppress. She queers tradition, offering an alternative theology rooted in inclusivity and creativity. Her work demonstrates that theology does not belong only in churches or seminaries. It can be found in music videos, stadium tours and dance anthems.

In studying Gaga’s work, I have come to see her as a theologian in her own right. She transforms pop music into a space where faith, identity and power are re-imagined. That, to me, is why she is worth celebrating, not just as a pop icon, but as someone who has turned theology into art for a wider audience.