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    Mandisa Hundley, ‘American Idol’ Singer, Dies at 47

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    She performed and produced music with Christian themes and won a Grammy Award in 2013.Mandisa Hundley, a gospel singer whose strong vocals were applauded on “American Idol” and who later won a Grammy Award for best contemporary Christian music album, was found dead at her home in Nashville on Thursday. She was 47.The Media Collective, which represented Ms. Hundley, confirmed her death and said in a statement that the cause was not known.Ms. Hundley performed and produced music with Christian themes. She was a fan favorite on “American Idol” in 2006, but became the fourth of the 12 finalists to be eliminated.As a soul singer, she spoke openly about her love of God, and her music resonated with fans.Ms. Hundley famously stood up to Simon Cowell, the “American Idol” judge, who has a reputation for being intimidating. In her video interview for the show, she referred to her audition in Chicago, when Mr. Cowell, in an apparent joke about her weight, said after she left the room, “Do we have a bigger stage this year?”Ms. Hundley said in the video that, despite the remark, she would still travel to Hollywood and face Mr. Cowell in the final judging.“When I got to Hollywood, I knew I had to put my game face on,” she said. “I knew that I would finally get to speak my piece.”“You hurt me, and I cried,” she later told Mr. Cowell. “But I want you to know that I have forgiven you.” Mr. Cowell replied that he was “humbled,” and the two hugged.Ms. Hundley told The Oklahoman in 2006 that her faith helped her overcome Mr. Cowell’s hurtful remark.“Food has always been a problem for me,” she said. “When Simon first made the comments, it was a nightmare. But God turned it around. Those words became the impetus I needed to kick-start my plan to live a more healthful lifestyle and get my eating under control.”She went on to record several albums. Her first was “True Beauty,” in 2007. Her 2013 Grammy winning album, “Overcomer,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Christian Albums Chart. It was her first Grammy Award after three nominations.Mandisa Lynn Hundley was born in Sacramento on Oct. 2, 1976, to John Hundley and Ruby Berryman, who worked for the state. She sang at church and studied vocal performance at American River College, a community college in Sacramento, and then continued her studies at Fisk University in Nashville.After college, she worked as a vocalist for the singers Trisha Yearwood and Shania Twain.She is survived by her parents and a brother, John Hundley.On her 2017 album, “Out of the Dark,” she addressed her struggles with depression, which she also wrote about in a 2022 memoir of the same name.“My dream is that this book will be a tool used in living rooms and coffee shops all over the world to help prompt discussions about our mental health,” she told “Good Morning America.”Emmett Lindner More

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      Martin Scorsese to Headline a Religious Series for Fox Nation

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      The Oscar-winning director is the latest Hollywood name to sign up for the Fox News streaming platform, joining Kevin Costner, Rob Lowe and Dan Aykroyd.Martin Scorsese has agreed to spearhead a documentary series about Christian saints for Fox Nation, the subscription streaming service run by Fox News Media.“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” which begins airing in November, will be hosted, narrated and executive produced by Scorsese, the decorated director of classic films like “Taxi Driver” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Fox Nation is set to formally announce the series on Wednesday.Since its debut in 2018 as a companion service to Fox News, Fox Nation has expanded into entertainment and general-interest programming as it aspires to become a kind of Netflix for conservative audiences. The streaming network already boasts shows with Hollywood stars like Kevin Costner (“Yellowstone: One-Fifty”), Rob Lowe (“Liberty or Death: Boston Tea Party”) and Dan Aykroyd (“History of the World in Six Glasses”).The Scorsese series, created by Matti Leshem, dramatizes the stories of eight saints, including Joan of Arc, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Becket.“I’ve lived with the stories of the saints for most of my life, thinking about their words and actions, imagining the worlds they inhabited, the choices they faced, the examples they set,” Scorsese said in a statement. “These are stories of eight very different men and women, each of them living through vastly different periods of history and struggling to follow the way of love revealed to them and to us by Jesus’ words in the gospels.”Along with narrating re-enactments of the saints’ stories, Scorsese will also host on-camera discussions with experts. Four episodes will stream on Nov. 16, with the concluding quartet of episodes released in May 2025. The series is directed by Elizabeth Chomko and written by Kent Jones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Donald Wildmon, Early Crusader in Conservative Culture Wars, Dies at 85

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      He founded the American Family Association, which became a juggernaut in the Christian right’s campaign against sex and gay themes in art, television and pop culture.Donald E. Wildmon, a conservative activist whose alarm over indecency on television spawned a national organization, the American Family Association, a once powerful cog of the Christian right, and who led boycotts over sexuality and gay themes in some of America’s most popular TV shows and in the arts, died in Tupelo, Miss., where he lived, on Dec 28. He was 85.The cause was Lewy body dementia, according to a statement posted by the American Family Association.Mr. Wildmon’s crusades beginning in the 1970s against boundary-pushing trends in popular culture and the arts — including high-profile attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts — were an early thunderclap of the culture wars that have moved from the fringe of the Republican Party to its mainstream.A former pastor in the United Methodist Church, Mr. Wildmon became a lightning rod for liberals, who attacked him for bigotry and stifling free speech. In 1981, the president of NBC, Fred Silverman, a champion of socially conscious television, said that Mr. Wildmon’s threats to boycott advertisers were “a sneak attack on the foundation of democracy.”“A boycott,” Mr. Wildmon responded in an interview with The New York Times that year, “is as legal and as American as apple pie.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Music

      Why You Love (or Love to Hate) Christmas Music

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      Like the holiday season itself, the nostalgia that Christmas music evokes can be emotionally charged.It’s been a little over one year since the Backstreet Boys released their Christmas album, “A Very Backstreet Christmas,” and Francine Biondo has had it on repeat ever since.To be fair, Ms. Biondo, 39, a child care provider in Ontario, Canada, is a fan of Nick Carter and maybe even a bigger fan of Christmas music. The Christmas season was in full swing for her by mid-November, with plans to decorate a tree. Although she typically begins listening to holiday music after Halloween, she is known to sprinkle in a little Christmas cheer during the summer.“It just puts me in a happy, feel-good mood,” she said by phone of songs like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” adding that they invoked happy memories of her childhood.For Ms. Biondo, the songs do more than get her into the holiday spirit, they also boost her productivity. “To be honest, I need music to just get me through the day,” she said. “I need music when I’m cleaning the house and just doing the daily things, it kind of helps motivate me. Christmas music, especially around that time of year, it just’s more fun.”She might be on to something.Daniel Levitin, an author and musician in Los Angeles and a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, said research has shown that most people in Western countries use music to self-soothe. “They know that there are certain kinds of music that will put them in a good mood,” he said. “Christmas music is a reliable one for a lot of people.”The healing effects of music have long been studied. Mr. Levitin participated in a 2013 study that concluded that music boosts the body’s immune system and reduces stress.Mr. Levitin said that listening to a song that has not been heard in a long time can transport a person back in time. “That’s the power of music to evoke a memory,” he said. “With those memories come emotions and possibly nostalgia, or anger, or frustration, depending on your childhood.”For the people who find joy in Christmas music, the brain may increase serotonin levels and may release prolactin a soothing and tranquilizing hormone that is released between mothers and infants during nursing, Mr. Levitin said.Conversely, if negative memories and feelings are associated with Christmas, the same songs could cause the brain to release cortisol, the stress hormone that increases the heart rate, and trigger the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. “There are a lot of people who, when Christmas time comes around, they just want to run home and put their head under the covers and wait it all out,” Mr. Levitin said.Christmas music, like all forms of music, is powerful. But this genre is perhaps more potent than other forms of music because the holiday season itself is emotionally charged. It represents the ideals that most humans strive for like equality, tolerance, love and tranquillity. “For some of us, that’s an inspiring message,” Mr. Levitin said. “For others of us, it just draws in stark relief how far we are from achieving that.”Yuletide music sung to celebrate the winter solstice has been around for thousands of years, some even predating Christianity, according to Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, an English professor at Indiana University East. These songs were sung in communal, secular settings and as early as the third century, Christianity adapted Yuletide festivals for celebrations of Jesus’ birth. Then, stories of Jesus were woven into carols, which were still sung in communal settings, even across class divides.“During the dark months of winter, it brought people together for celebration and generosity,” Professor Clapp-Itnyre said, adding that she thinks this still happens today in various forms, like the Salvation Army holding donation drives and carols being sung in nursing homes.By the 20th century, secular Christmas songs like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “White Christmas” began reflecting the grief people were facing and brought solace, particularly to World War II soldiers who could not be home for Christmas. “These songs are becoming popular during the war because people are seeking something traditional, something that they used to know of family and peace and those good traditions, even as their whole world is being blown to smithereens,” Professor Clapp-Itnyre said.The positive feelings associated with Christmas music are something Vanessa Parvin, the owner of Manhattan Holiday Carolers, a holiday entertainment company, knows well. Ms. Parvin, 45, has been singing Christmas music professionally since 1999.Part of the joy, she said, is “adding to other people’s holiday magic experience and nostalgia,” which can mean honoring song requests that remind guests of their childhoods or relatives who have died.While she has a memorized repertoire of about 90 Christmas songs, there is one that invokes memories of her own family. “‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ was my grandmother’s favorite, so that doesn’t make me think of caroling,” she said. “It makes me think of my grandmother and my mother.” More

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      Steve Pieters, Pastor Who Spoke of AIDS in Famed Interview, Dies at 70

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      He had the disease and was interviewed on the PTL network in 1985 by Tammy Faye Bakker, a broadcast that was said to have changed minds and hearts.In 1985, when fear and homophobia were still driving much of the conversation surrounding AIDS, the Rev. A. Stephen Pieters, a gay pastor who had the disease, was a decidedly different voice.That May, at the St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica, Calif., presiding at a mass for people with AIDS attended by hundreds, he declared: “Rather than feel deserted by God, I have never been more sure of God’s love for me. God did not give me this disease. God is with me in this disease.”That September, he spoke to The Los Angeles Times about the ostracism people with AIDS were encountering.“Some people ask, ‘How is it different from cancer?’” he said. “Well, most people with cancer aren’t asked not to use the bathroom in a friend’s house or served dinner on paper plates. I’ve had more meals on paper plates in the last year than I’ve had in my whole life.”One appearance he made that year had a particularly profound impact: In November 1985 he was interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker on the PTL (Praise the Lord) television network, which reached millions of Christian viewers, most of them conservative.It was a sympathetic interview in which Mr. Pieters spoke forthrightly about being gay and about his illness, and Ms. Bakker (who was then married to the televangelist Jim Bakker) urged her audience to be governed by compassion rather than intolerance and fear.“How sad,” she said, “that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, and we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.”The PTL network had an audience of millions, and in the years since, that interview has been credited with helping to change at least some viewers’ perceptions of gay people, AIDS and faith. Some televangelists had been implying or stating outright that AIDS was divine retribution for homosexuality. Ms. Bakker (who after a divorce and remarriage was later known as Tammy Faye Messner) called on Christians to instead show empathy.Among those impressed with her stand, many years later, was the actress Jessica Chastain, who won an Oscar last year for her role as Ms. Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” in which the interview with Mr. Pieters, portrayed by Randy Havens, was a pivotal scene. (A stage musical, “Tammy Faye,” which opened last year in London, also incorporated the 1985 interview.)“That interview was why I needed to make the movie,” Ms. Chastain told Variety at the movie’s New York premiere in 2021. “It was rebellious and brave and courageous and badass. I’m 100 percent convinced that there were people — conservative Christians watching at home — who realized that they had judged their family members unlovingly. I’m convinced that that interview saved families and saved lives.”If Ms. Bakker defied expectations with that interview, Mr. Pieters long defied AIDS, surviving for decades despite repeated health struggles. He died on July 8 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles. He was 70.His spokesman, Harlan Boll, said the cause was a sepsis infection.Mr. Pieters, who had continued his ministry and since 1994 had performed with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, was looking forward to the publication next year of his book, “Love Is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope.” In it, he said he was often asked why he thought he survived AIDS when so many others didn’t.“Whatever the reason,” he wrote, “I feel deeply grateful to be alive. So many gay men of my generation did not get to grow old. What a privilege to have reached the age of 70, still dancing with joy.”Albert Stephen Pieters was born on Aug. 2, 1952, in Lawrence, Mass. His father, Richard, was a mathematics teacher and wrestling coach at Phillips Academy, and his mother, Norma (Kenfield) Pieters, was a tax accountant and homemaker.“I knew that I was different from the time that I was about 3,” Mr. Pieters told Ms. Bakker in the 1985 interview, “and I grew up feeling like I didn’t quite fit in.”When he was a teenager, he said, he recognized that he was gay and talked to his pastor at a Congregational church about it.“He was freaked out,” he said. “He told me, ‘Don’t tell anybody; never say anything to anybody about it.’”He said that after graduating from Northwestern University in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in speech, he joined the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago and felt called to a ministry focused on gay people, that church’s main audience. He earned a master of divinity degree at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1979, then became pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Conn., before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. There he took a post at the Metropolitan Community Church of North Hollywood and, in 1984, received a diagnosis of AIDS, although he had been showing symptoms as early as 1982.He faced numerous health problems over the years, but just being around to face them was something of a victory: He said he’d been told in 1984 that he wouldn’t live out that year. The next year he spoke before a task force on AIDS in Los Angeles convened by Mayor Tom Bradley and Ed Edelman, a county supervisor, urging officials not to write off those who had already been diagnosed.“If I had succumbed to the hopelessness I constantly hear about AIDS,” he said, “I might have given up and not lived to see 1985.”Mr. Pieters is survived by a brother.At the 2021 opening of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” Mr. Pieters commented on the impact of his 1985 interview.“I’ve had so many people over the years come up to me and say, ‘I saw your interview live, because my mother always had PTL on, and it changed my life because I realized I could be gay and Christian at the same time,’” he said. “Or, ‘It changed my life because I realized that AIDS was a reality, and I had to start taking care of myself.’”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      in Music

      Marcos Witt, the Pop Star Bringing Latino Evangelicals to the Pews

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      The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      Hugh Hudson, Director of ‘Chariots of Fire,’ Dies at 86

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      His first film — about two runners, one Christian, one Jewish, who compete at the 1924 Summer Olympics — won four Oscars, including for best picture.Hugh Hudson, a director whose first feature film, “Chariots of Fire,” won four Oscars in 1982, including for best picture, died on Friday in London. He was 86.His family announced the death to the British news media but did not cite a cause.“Chariots of Fire,” based on the true story of two British sprinters who competed at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, was nominated for seven Oscars and won four, including for the composer Vangelis’s musical score and for the screenplay by Colin Welland, as well as for costume design. Mr. Hudson was nominated for best director but lost to Warren Beatty, the director of “Reds.”“Hugh Hudson was the fulcrum around which ‘Chariots of Fire’ was built,” David Puttnam, the film’s producer, wrote on Twitter after Mr. Hudson’s death.Mr. Hudson had an affinity for the leading characters of his film: Eric Liddell, a devout Christian who resisted pressure to run in the 100-meter race at the Olympics because the heats took place on Sunday, the Sabbath; and Harold Abrahams, the son of a Lithuanian Jew who vowed to use running to fight antisemitism. Each man won a gold medal — Mr. Liddell for the 400-meter race, which was held on a weekday, and Mr. Abrahams for the 100-meter sprint.“I think David Puttnam chose me because he sensed that I’d relate to the themes of class and racial prejudice,” Mr. Hudson told The Guardian in 2012. “I’d been sent to Eton” — the prestigious all-boys boarding school — “because my family had gone there for generations, but I hated all the prejudice.”To play Liddell and Abrahams, Mr. Puttnam refused to cast stars; instead, he chose Ian Charleson and Ben Cross, who were both best known for their television work.“If I put stars in it, the film would never have been successful,” he told the newspaper The Jewish Chronicle in 2011. “With unknown actors, you look at them afresh.”The most famous sequence in “Chariots of Fire,” which depicts about two dozen young men running on a beach in slow motion, is seen during the opening credits.20th Century Fox, via Everett CollectionThe most famous sequence of the movie is seen during the opening credits: about two dozen young men, clad in white shirts and shorts, running on a beach in slow motion, their faces creased with pain and exhilaration.During the shoot, on the West Sands Beach in St. Andrews, Scotland, Mr. Hudson blasted Vangelis’s “L’Enfant” over loudspeakers. He wanted it to be the film’s theme, but Vangelis promised to compose something original, according to the online publication Art of the Title.The result was an instrumental blend of acoustic piano and synthesizer that provided a lush, pulsating accompaniment to the dramatic scene of young men in training. The song spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, peaking at No. 1.Hugh Donaldson-Hudson was born on Aug. 25, 1936, in London to Michael Donaldson-Hudson, an insurance broker, and Jacynth (Ellerton) Donaldson-Hudson. His parents divorced when he was young. He attended a boarding school before entering Eton, where he dropped “Donaldson” from his surname.He served in the British Army’s Royal Dragoon Guards and worked in advertising in the late 1950s before he started making documentaries and television commercials, some for Ridley Scott Associates. Alan Parker, who also worked for Mr. Scott, hired Mr. Hudson as a second-unit director on “Midnight Express,” his 1978 film about an American student imprisoned for trying to smuggle hashish out of Turkey. Mr. Puttnam was one of that film’s producers.Mr. Hudson’s best-known commercials included one in which Joan Collins splatters herself with a glass of Cinzano white wine, to the delight of another actor, Leonard Rossiter, seated beside her on an airplane; another showed robots building Fiat Stradas in a factory in Turin, Italy, to the music of Figaro’s entrance aria from “The Barber of Seville.”Mr. Hudson followed “Chariots of Fire,” with “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes” (1984), which received three Oscar nominations, including one for Ralph Richardson for best supporting actor. Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it an “unusually intelligent and serious entertainment for the mass market.”But his next film, “Revolution” (1985), starring Al Pacino as a fur trapper caught up in the American Revolution, was considered a flop.His other films, none of which did well at the box office, included “My Life So Far” (1999), about a family’s life on an estate in Scotland after World War I; “I Dreamed of Africa” (2000), the story of a divorced Italian socialite who moves to Kenya; and “Finding Altamira” (2016), about the discovery of Paleolithic cave paintings in northern Spain in 1879.In 2011, Mr. Hudson made a documentary for BBC Four, “Rupture: A Matter of Life or Death,” about his wife, the actress Maryam d’Abo, who had recovered from a near-fatal brain aneurysm.Ms. d’Abo survives him, as does a son, Thomas, from his marriage to Susan Michie, which ended in divorce.In 2012, “Chariots of Fire” was adapted by the writer Mike Bartlett as a stage play in London, first at the Hampstead Theater and then at the Gielgud Theater on the West End.The stage version was Mr. Hudson’s idea, to coincide with London’s hosting of the Summer Olympics that year. “Issues of faith, of refusal to compromise, standing up for one’s beliefs, achieving something for the sake of it, with passion, and not just for fame or financial gain,” he told The London Evening Standard at the time, “are even more vital today.” More

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      in Theater

      Chad Kimball Sues ‘Come From Away’ Over His Termination

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      The actor, who is Christian, said in an interview he was let go because of his religious beliefs. The show’s producers declined to comment.A former lead actor in the musical “Come From Away” has sued the show’s producers, claiming that he was let go from the production because of his Christian beliefs.Chad Kimball, 45, a Tony-nominated performer who had been with the show since before its transfer to Broadway in 2017, filed suit this week in New York State Supreme Court, alleging that the production had violated his rights under New York City’s Human Rights Law.In the lawsuit, which was first reported by The New York Post, Kimball claimed he was terminated “wholly or partly” because of his religious beliefs. According to the lawsuit, one of the show’s producers allegedly told him there were concerns about supposed connections between his faith and Christian conservatives connected with the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.Matt Polk, a spokesman for the show, which reopened on Sept. 21, said the producers declined to comment.Kimball, a Broadway veteran described in the lawsuit as “a devout and practicing Christian,” had stirred controversy in November 2020 when he announced on Twitter that he would “respectfully disobey” Washington State’s coronavirus-related restrictions on religious services, including rules forbidding even masked worshipers from singing. At the time, he was living in Seattle, his hometown.“Respectfully, I will never allow a Governor, or anyone, to stop me from SINGING, let alone sing in worship to my God,” Kimball, who had previously had Covid-19, wrote.That statement drew strong criticism from some in the theater industry, including a co-star, Sharon Wheatley, who responded, “I respectfully totally and completely disagree with you.”Kimball said in an interview Friday that it was hurtful to have the initial reaction to his social media posts subsequently “snowball” into discussion of him as a “conservative Christian” whose beliefs were somehow connected with the Jan. 6 insurrection, which he described as “an event I wasn’t even involved with.”“I don’t talk about politics at all,” he said. “The only thing they really know about me for sure is that I’m a Christian.”Before the social media exchanges, the lawsuit said, Kimball, who had appeared in more than 1,000 performances of the show before the shutdown in March 2020, had never received any reprimand or complaint, and had never been told by anyone connected with the show that he “made them feel unsafe.” But subsequently, he “was forced to explain and defend his Nov. 15, 2020, tweet to Defendants’ agents and employees,” the suit claims.Then, on Jan. 18, the suit said, he was contacted by a producer, Susan Frost, who allegedly informed him that there was conversation around his “conservative Christian” faith and his “freedom to believe.”Frost, the suit claims, also mentioned the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and said that there were concerns that “the events at the Capitol, Josh Hawley and the conservative Christian movement were tied together and implied a connection” between Kimball’s faith and the “ideas and actions” of that day.On Jan. 22, according to the lawsuit, Frost told Kimball he would not be invited back to the production, which he was told “needed to focus on bringing the show back together and ensure people’s safety.”At the suggestion of Frost, the suit said, he spoke with the show’s director, Christopher Ashley, on Feb. 2, and asked him if he had been let go because of disagreements with colleagues or his religious beliefs. “In response,” the lawsuit continues, Ashley “stated that it was ‘everything.’”As a result, according to the lawsuit, Kimball was “made to suffer significant economic and professional harm,” as well as “emotional and physical pain and suffering.” The lawsuit is seeking compensatory and punitive damages and lost wages, as well as legal costs.Kimball was nominated for a Tony Award in 2010 for his role in the musical “Memphis.” While he has always been a Christian, the lawsuit said, it was following his recovery from an injury while in the show that he started becoming “more outspoken regarding his beliefs.”In the interview, a joint one with his lawyer, Lawrence Spasojevich of the firm Aidala, Bertuna & Kamins, Kimball said he had an inkling that his position with the show might be in jeopardy as early as December 2020 when he contacted the show’s producers to inform them of the tweets and the reaction to them.Kimball, who said he was currently not working, added that negative reactions to his beliefs weren’t new to him. “What was new to me was the idea that a religious belief could be used as fodder for deciding I wasn’t worthy of being a part of the show,” he said. More