By Alesia Stanford for Dailymail.Com
18:38 07 Jul 2024, updated 19:04 07 Jul 2024
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Imagine Dragons lead singer Dan Reynolds opens up about his “complicated” relationship with religion.
The 36-year-old hitmaker, who says he is in a “happy, healthy” relationship with girlfriend Minka Kelly, grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, the seventh of nine children in a “very conservative” family that was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon Church.
“There are obviously parts of the Mormon faith that I find very harmful, especially to our gay youth,” the frontman told People.
The church’s website states that “same-sex attraction is a complex reality for many people. The attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is.”
The Believer singer founded the LoveLoud Foundation in 2017 to support the LBGTQ community.
During the interview, he admitted that since leaving the church he sometimes feels “quite isolated” from his family.
“But I also love them and I’m close to them and I see them, and there’s no animosity there,” he explained. “I’m on a different path. I have to love myself enough to follow my truth.”
Before leaving the Church, Reynolds served a two-year mission in Omaha, Nebraska, and attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
At BYU, he founded Imagine Dragons, with which he won the school’s Battle of the Bands contest and other competitions.
The Eyes Closed singer said he was “really angry” with religion in his 20s and early 30s because he felt like he had been “ripped off.”
‘[I] “I’ve seen firsthand a lot of the damage it’s done to me personally,” he said.
“But it also seemed to work really well for my family. They’re all healthy, happy individuals.”
“As I get older, I don’t get mad about it anymore. When something works for someone, that’s really great and rare, and I don’t want to compromise that.”
Reynolds’ ex-wife, Aja Volkman, 44, converted to the Mormon faith so the two could marry within the faith.
However, the couple, who separated in September 2022 and finalized their divorce earlier this year, have chosen not to raise their children, Arrow, 11, Gia and Coco, seven, and Valentine, four, according to the Mormon faith.
“My biggest goal every day is not to manipulate my children. I really don’t want to tell them what their spiritual path should be,” he said.
“I give them my opinion and of course I try to protect them and take care of them. At the same time I make sure they have the freedom and the freedom of choice to choose what they want.”
Reynolds and his bandmates will soon embark on the Imagine Dragons’ Loom World Tour, kicking off July 30 in Camden, NJ.
It is their biggest North American tour to date.
“I think this is our best record to play live,” Reynolds claimed. “It’s got a lot of pace, a lot of different emotions.”
“We’ve been doing this long enough that I’m like, ‘Oh, this is going to be a party, but it’s also going to be cathartic.’ It’s going to be sad in all the right ways, heavy in all the right ways, happy in all the right ways. It’s going to be a really fun album to tour with.”