ELVIS PRESLEY, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, would have been 90 years old next Wednesday. His lasting impact on music and culture has long been accepted, whether he is regarded as an original artist or, more controversially, as a significant early repackager of African-American culture for white audiences. Perhaps less well-known is his spiritual side — more specifically, his Christian faith.
Elvis released 89 gospel songs in the course of his 23-year career, most of them on the albums His Hand in Mine (1960), How Great Thou Art (1967), and He Touched Me (1972). Gospel songs are also included in his compilations and Christmas albums. Gospel was in his blood, and, while the exact nature of his personal faith is unknown, there are many who believe that he was not just a believer, but an excellent ambassador for Jesus.
Madeleine Wilson, of Bridlington, in Yorkshire, is president of the Elvis Gospel Fan Club and the author of Elvis Presley, Gospel Singer: An inspirational life (2022). She believes that the combination of his enduring popularity and his personal faith makes him an excellent catalyst for Christian witness. “Jesus, Coca-Cola, and Elvis — the most famous names in the world,” she says. “When you’ve reached Elvis fans, then you can start telling them about who Elvis was, and how important the gospel was to him.”
Ms Wilson says that, although Presley was too famous to attend church without distracting other worshippers, she sees evidence of real faith in his generosity and dedication to gospel music. which have their roots in his Pentecostal upbringing. “God was the centre of their lives,” she says, “and he loved God. He always recognised and knew that God had given him this gift, and he knew that he had to use it.”
Elvis's stepbrother, Billy Stanley, confirms this. “He was a Christian, and most people don’t know that,” he told the news and opinion website Faithwire, in 2022. “When I say ‘Christian’, he was a Bible-carrying Christian. . . wherever he went, he took the Bible with him.”
Indeed, Elvis had a large collection of Bibles: several have sold for tens of thousands of dollars at auction in recent years, and family members settling the singer’s household affairs after his death reported finding at least three Bibles near his bedside.
WHY this apparent personal devotion did not lead to more of a clear and public declaration may have more to do with the demands of his career than with shyness.
Mr Stanley told an Arkansas newspaper in 2022 that, when he heard people telling Presley “You’re the king,” the singer would reply: “No, no, I’m sorry. There’s only one king, and that’s Jesus.” This personal willingness to ascribe greatness to God will have been in tension with the wishes of his management, Ms Wilson believes. She describes a story repeated to her, about the reaction of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, to Presley’s speaking about his faith to a journalist.
“Colonel Parker was absolutely furious,” she says. “‘You don’t talk about that,’ you know, ‘in public. That’s your private life.’” This may account for the fact that so much of what is known about Presley’s faith has had to be deduced from his upbringing and the artefacts of his life.
The tension between his faith and fame is part of what Mark Macias imagined in his off-Broadway play The King: The final hours, which concerned the singer’s spiritual struggles at the end of his life. Mr Macias did extensive background research for his play and is a lifelong fan of Elvis. “He was raised in a church where it was a sin to dance,” Mr Macias says, “and here he was, dancing.”
But the image of the young Presley, whose gyrating hips so scandalised America’s Bible belt, has been supplanted in the public imagination by the later one in sequins and winged jump-suits. It is this image — more glamorous and yet tragic, with the attendant stories of drugs and womanising — that is perhaps the reason that more people do not automatically associate Presley with Christianity.
Mr Macias believes that the singer “had an ongoing yearning to get closer to God, but faced many barriers”, and yet “ultimately returned to his Christ-centred focus at the end of his life”. While Mr Macias acknowledges that, for Presley, “fame, money, and drugs weighed him down, and took him off the path,” he also believes that, “like many people, he’d go back to where he came from.” That, for Elvis Aaron Presley, meant Bible-believing Christianity.
But, if Presley did indeed make the journey back to faith, the path was not an easy one. The singer Nick Cave, no stranger to fame, excess, and tragedy (Feature, 25 November 2022), has written of the images of Presley captured on film close to the end of his life: “drugged and mortified eyes, the terrible aloneness, the horror of the moment — his vast soul crucified on the cross of his own body”. Mr Cave describes it as “one of the most traumatic pieces of footage I have ever seen”.
His recollection of the footage is perhaps a way of understanding Presley’s spiritual struggle as quintessentially Christian. Mr Cave refers to “Elvis's mortified, tear-streaked face; his head hung in sorrowful acceptance; and his caped arms outstretched in triumph”, which, he argues, are “the stages of Christ’s passage upon the cross, the anguish, the sufferance, and the resurrection — a journey which welcomes us all, in time”.
The popularity of Elvis songs at funerals is a marker of some kind of spiritual impact. But perhaps the best way to understand his Christian legacy is through his creations that speak directly of God: his gospel recordings. “When he was performing these songs,” Mr Macias says, “he was really singing to God and not for the money.”
NO DISCUSSION of Presley’s legacy would be complete without mentioning the impersonators, tribute artists, and assorted Elvis-adjacent showbiz acts. Lookalikes, soundalikes, and fusion performers abound (Elvana, a tribute act in which the music of Nirvana is performed in the style of Elvis, played Glastonbury in 2022). Even here, Christian faith is often on the bill.
The Revd Andrew Kelso is not the only ordained minister to don the jumpsuit, rhinestones, and sideburns, but he may be the only one who felt commanded to do so by God. After he retired from full-time ministry as Team Vicar of St Peter’s, Ipsley, in the diocese of Worcester, Mr Kelso says, “I prayed every day for 15 months that the Lord would tell me what he wanted me to do, and one day he spoke these words to me: ‘Take Elvis to the churches!’”
After some initial trepidation (not to mention shock at the command), Mr Kelso found himself used in a thriving ministry, from which he has only recently retired. “My Elvis gospel tribute act went down so well for churches trying to reach their communities,” he says. “So many lives were touched, and God worked powerfully each time.”
The Revd Wynne Roberts is another ETA — an Elvis tribute act, as opposed to an impersonator, as he is careful to point out — and he is also the Chaplain Manager for Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board in Bangor. His act, he says, has “turbo-charged” his ministry. “If people are in need of pastoral spiritual care, people will sometimes be reticent about going to see a man in a collar,” he says. “But people can come to me through Elvis.”
Mr Roberts is regularly asked to sing at the funerals and remembrance services that he takes, performing parts of his Elvis repertoire, and has also performed an all-Welsh-language Elvis concert at the National Eisteddfod of Wales. “Everybody knows me in Wales,” he says. “And they also know I’m a ‘Reverend’.”
That witness, a connection to God through a connection to a performer who has become a legend, may not be a traditional approach to evangelism, but, for the fan-club runners, performers, and writers who use Elvis as a way in to churches and deeper conversations, it seems to be working. As Ms Wilson puts it: “Elvis gives me the opportunity to tell people about Jesus.” And, for that, it might be fitting to say: “Thank you . . . thank you very much. . .”