Award-winning actor and film producer Brad Pitt has said he was just being rebellious when he identified as an atheist for many years.
For many years Brad Pitt was caught between atheistic and agnostic, but in a recent interview, he said he is returning to faith.
Speaking in an interview for the October issue of GQ, he said:
“Oh, man, I’ve gone through everything. Like, I cling to religion. I grew up with Christianity. Always questioned it, but it worked at times. And then when I got on my own, I completely left it and I called myself agnostic. Tried a few spiritual things but didn’t feel right. Then I called myself an atheist for a while, just kind of being rebellious. I wasn’t really. But I kinda labeled myself that for a while. It felt punk rock enough. And then I found myself coming back around to just belief in—I hate to use the word spirituality, but just a belief in that we’re all connected.”
In a 2009 interview with Bild, when asked if he believed in God, Pitt who was raised Southern Baptist, replied: “No, no, no!”
When pressed on whether his soul is spiritual, he said: “No, no, no! I’m probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don’t think anyone really knows. You’ll either find out or not when you get there, until then there’s no point thinking about it.”
Two years later in 2011, the 55-year-old actor told Extra how stifled he felt by his religion.
“I got brought up being told things were God’s way, and when things didn’t work out it was called God’s plan. I’ve got my issues with it. Don’t get me started. I found it very stifling,” he said.
It was that stifled feeling, he told The Hollywood Reporter, that led him to turn away from his Southern Baptist tradition.
“I grew up very religious, and I don’t have a great relationship with religion,” he said at the time. “I oscillate between agnosticism and atheism.”
The discussion of Pitt’s faith comes as he promotes a new movie called “Ad Astra.” It’s a paranoid thriller in space that follows character Roy McBride, played by Pitt, “on a mission across an unforgiving solar system to uncover the truth about his missing father and his doomed expedition that now, 30 years later, threatens the universe.”
