KENOSHA (WI)
Christian Post [Washington DC]
September 7, 2026
By Leah MarieAnn Klet
Skillet frontman John Cooper has shared how a painful split from the church he served for nearly 30 years plunged him into one of the darkest periods of his life, triggering depression, anger, debilitating hurt and a crisis of trust that ultimately helped shape the band’s new EP, After the Storm.
In an interview with The Christian Post, the 51-year-old Kenosha, Wisconsin, resident opened up about how, in recent years, his family endured a “very bad church abuse situation.”
According to the rocker, an increasingly authoritarian leadership structure left him, his wife, fellow Skillet member Korey, and their children ostracized from a congregation they had spent decades helping to build.
“The last couple of years have been something I never planned for,” Cooper told CP. “I will say the hardest years of my life since I was a teenager, since I really, really got to know who Jesus was.”
Cooper, who has long spoken publicly about how his faith delivered him from anger and depression as a teenager after growing up in a conservative Christian home where rock music — especially Christian rock — was viewed as a spiritual danger, said some of those struggles returned amid the church conflict.
“Those things really came back in the last couple of years, and they came back with a vengeance,” he said.
Cooper shared how the church had been part of his life for roughly 30 years, with its leadership including members of his own family. But over time, their relationship deteriorated as the singer began questioning teachings he said reflected an increasingly authoritarian understanding of spiritual authority.
“We went through something that you’re seeing a lot on YouTube right now with all sorts of testimonies of going through a very bad church abuse situation, where the rug was really pulled out from under our feet,” he said. “It was not just a church that we love, but a church that we helped serve in and helped build. Those leaders are also our family, our literal family.”
He alleged that church leaders subsequently “ostracized” the family and “lied about” and “slandered” them. Cooper further alleged that leaders publicly insinuated over a period of roughly two years that he and his wife were “being used by the devil to tear down the Kingdom of God” and had compromised their faith.
“It has destroyed our entire family, all of our friends, everything we built for 30 years,” Cooper said. “It’s been absolutely brutal.”
For the “Comatose” singer, the most damaging aspect of the fallout was how he began to question his own ability to distinguish truth from manipulation after spiritual leaders said he was working against God.
“The hardest part about it wasn’t that it made me mad. It did make me mad, of course,” Cooper said. “The hardest part about it is that it was very much like it became a high-control group, a little bit cultish, in the way that you could not challenge authority.”
“It makes you feel crazy,” he continued. “When it’s people that you’ve known for 30 years who are brothers and sisters in the faith that love God, and they’re telling you that you’re being used by the devil, you start going, ‘Maybe I am being used by the devil.’ And I don’t know how to discern … who do I listen to?”
Eventually, he said, even prayer and Scripture became difficult as the church leadership grew increasingly hostile toward Cooper and his family.
“You don’t know how to pray, and you begin to read the Bible, and everything becomes confusing,” he said. “It was a very dark time. … It just caused me a real depression. I had a mental break where I just didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t real.”
That anguish became the fuel for After the Storm, Skillet’s six-song independent EP slated for release Oct. 9. The project, produced by David Cowell and Korey Cooper, explores betrayal, grief, perseverance and hope, and includes the singles “Scream” and “Lift Me Up.”
“Scream” includes the lyrics “I wanna scream/ I wanna break something beautiful/ because I can’t believe that I can be something beautiful I lost/ Come pull me out from under the noise and thunder/ What have I become? I wanna scream, nobody’s listening, will I ever be enough?”
According to Cooper, the album includes “a lot of heartache.”
“What I hope to communicate is that yes, life can be really, really hard, and there can be a real temptation for nihilism, to just get to a place where you just think nothing matters, no one sees me, no one sees my pain,” he reflected. “Maybe they see it, but they don’t care. ‘No one’s listening. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.”
Despite the album’s painful origins, Cooper stressed that he doesn’t want listeners to hear the record simply as a musical retelling of his church experience. Instead, he said, he wanted to take the raw emotions of his own suffering and create songs that listeners could apply to whatever darkness they’re facing.
“It’s not that I want people to hear the EP and think about my personal story. I don’t want you to think about my personal story,” he said. “But that is the amount of heartache and raw authenticity that went into these songs.”
Cooper said the record represents a desperate prayer he hopes listeners translate into their own circumstances: “God, I need You. I need You more than ever, and I am not going to make it if I don’t have Christ today, if You do not meet me today, I’m not going to make it, and it’s real.”
“Maybe people listening, your own addiction, or your own anxiety or depression, or just life — can’t pay the bills, fighting with your wife, or your kids are acting crazy, and you don’t know what to do with your kids,” he added. “Whatever your situation is, Christ will meet you. I can promise you that. But you might have to slug it out. It might take a while, but do not give up because He will meet you.”
But alongside the despair runs hope, with songs like “Lift Me Up.” Lyrics to the song include the lines “Lift me up/ not backing down/ Let the demons come/ I’m breathing dragon fire/ they’ll never drag me down/ I won’t give up.”
Most people that go through these kinds of trials, they end up having a silent scream. … Those are those silent screams of feeling that you don’t matter and that you’re not going to make it. I hope to communicate to people that God is with you during those times,” Cooper said.
During the lowest point of his church conflict, the songwriter said he found himself unable to formulate his own prayers and began turning to historic Christian prayers, from Puritan and Reformed Christianity to Eastern Orthodoxy.
“I would not pray my own prayers because I didn’t know where to begin and I didn’t know how to start,” he said.
Cooper said his anger was so intense that he started asking God simply for enough grace to make it through the day.
“I would ask grace for an hour because I was so mad and I was freaking out,” he recalled. “I wanted to put my fist through a wall, and I wanted to hurt somebody, and I was depressed, and I didn’t know how I was going to keep living.”
“I would just say, ‘God, I need grace for the hour,’ and then I would set my alarm for 59 minutes,” he said. “My alarm would go off in 59 minutes, and I’d pray all those same prayers again.”
One prayer in particular asked God to help him recognize his own sin rather than condemn those who had wounded him, and he prayed it “every hour on the hour.”
“I wanted to damn these guys to Hell,” he admitted. “Just being honest with you and being raw, I wanted them to get what they have coming. … If I want someone else to get what they deserve, then I’ve got to be ready to get what I deserve. And I deserve Hell and punishment. … So that began to change me to where I began to forgive them.”
Still, forgiveness doesn’t always mean reconciliation is appropriate, Cooper said, emphasizing he still doesn’t trust the leadership of his former church.
“I don’t want a relationship with them,” he said. “They are not safe. They are dangerous people. They are a dangerous church. They’re hurting people, and I don’t want a relationship with them.”
“But I need to forgive them and not wish punishment on them, and just focus on what Christ has done for me.”
According to Cooper, the ordeal has also altered his perspective on Christians who deconstruct or question their faith after experiencing spiritual abuse. An outspoken critic of deconstruction, the “Monster” singer said his beliefs haven’t changed; however, what has changed is the empathy with which he approaches people wounded by churches and pastors.
“If I could go back into the past, I would say it louder,” he said. “If you have deconstructed because of church abuse, if you went to a leader and asked a question and they refused to answer you, or said you’re not allowed to ask that question, or they kicked you out of a church because of something like that, I would just want those people to know your story matters.”
“It is legitimate that you feel the way you feel,” Cooper continued. “It is absolutely credible, and I would be there for you to listen to your story. … I do not want you to deconstruct. I do not want you to leave the faith. I can promise you, Jesus, He will meet you. His Word is sure. He is a sure foundation.”
“But I know what you’re going through.”
Cooper said the experience became so painful that for a time he struggled simply to walk through the doors of another church.
“I kept trying to go to church, and when I would walk into the doors, I just couldn’t take it,” he said. We gave a lot of money to that church. We believed what the church was doing. We gave our time.”
And even as Skillet became a multi-platinum international rock act, Korey would return home from touring and play on the church’s worship team simply to serve, he said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cooper volunteered to lead the congregation’s young adults ministry while touring was halted.
After the fallout, he found himself entering other churches and wondering, “Is any of this real, or does everybody just want your money?”
“I hate thinking that,” Cooper said. “I hate it because I believe in the Church.”
Over the following months, however, Cooper said his hourly prayers and renewed reading of Scripture slowly restored his confidence. The artist and his family have since found another church, where they’re able to worship without fearing that questioning leadership will be viewed as an act of rebellion.
“I began to read the Bible in a very fresh way, and I began to see how beautiful the Lord is, how beautiful grace is, how beautiful the Gospel is,” he said. “Christ doesn’t abuse people; He is the Good Shepherd.”
“Every time I go [to our new church], and we begin to worship God, I cry,” he said. “Every time I go there, I cry. The Holy Spirit moves on me. … I’m so thankful to the Lord that He rescued me from that and didn’t let me go down a bad path.”
Cooper is known for being one of the most outspoken Evangelical figures in contemporary Christian music. On his “Cooper Stuff” podcast and in books like Awake and Alive to Truth, he’s taken on topics many artists sidestep, including critical race theory, Marxism and LGBT ideology. Last year, he made headlines after calling out the Contemporary Christian Music industry for failing to adequately condemn the misdeeds of former Newsboys frontman Michael Tait.
In his interview with CP, the rocker traced the beginnings of the church conflict to around 2019 and 2020, when he became more vocal about difficult issues and was studying theology more intensely and becoming increasingly convinced of sola scriptura, the doctrine that Scripture is the Church’s ultimate authority.
“We all have the Bible and we all have the Holy Spirit,” Cooper said. “Yes, we’re submitted to our church leaders in a good and proper way, but there are limits to that submission because the Word of God is the ultimate authority.”
That means Christians have a responsibility to evaluate what they hear from the pulpit against Scripture, he said.
“Just because the preacher preaches it doesn’t mean you’re supposed to believe every single thing he says,” Cooper said. “You’re supposed to go to the Word for yourself.”
“If my preacher is preaching something that I think, ‘I don’t think that’s right,’ with a right heart, it is not just OK, it’s my responsibility to go to them. … The more I began to be like that, the more we began to be at odds, and I did not know why,” he said.
The underlying dispute ultimately concerned spiritual authority, specifically teachings that can place pastors beyond meaningful scrutiny.
“It’s an issue of authority,” Cooper said, stressing that the problem is not limited to charismatic churches and “can happen in any denomination.”
He also criticized teachings that suggest believers should obey pastors as though those leaders carry God’s own authority, arguing that such ideas are inconsistent with historic Protestantism.
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “I don’t think that Protestantism teaches that.”
After the Storm is being released amid renewed momentum for Skillet. Nearly three decades into its career, the band, formed in Memphis, Tennessee, now averages more than 12 million monthly Spotify listeners, while its six-times-platinum hit “Monster” has surpassed 5 billion global streams. Skillet is also preparing for its nationwide “Comatose: 20 Years, Still Screaming Tour,” celebrating the 20th anniversary of its landmark 2006 album.
“I can’t believe we’re still playing music. I can’t believe that people still want to come,” Cooper told CP. “Young people are discovering it for the first time, and our demographics are skewing really young. Now you’ve got all these young people coming to shows who just discovered Skillet. Some of them don’t know we’ve been around for this long.”
According to the rocker, the renewed popularity of rock music reflects a disillusionment with the overwhelmingly positive tone that dominated culture in 2019, demonstrated in songs like Pharrell’s “Happy” and “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars. But when 2020 hit, Cooper said he sensed people were longing for music that addressed the reality of human suffering.
“You’re not perfect the way you are,” Cooper said. “Life can be really good, but life can be really challenging, and life can be an absolute trial.”
“Rock music speaks to that fact that life is hard,” he added. “Sometimes you feel alienated. You know that you’re a broken person. You are angry. You don’t like who you are, and the world can just stink. And that is a perfect breeding ground for rock music to come back in style.”
And for Cooper, however, the message of After the Storm goes beyond acknowledging the darkness. The record is ultimately about what happens when a person chooses to keep believing that amid the darkness of the world and failures of man, the beauty and faithfulness of Jesus will have the final word.
“I do understand how this stuff might make you want to leave the faith, deconstruct, have a cynical attitude about all churches or all pastors,” Cooper said. “I get it. I hear you.”
“But there is life after the storm,” he said. “Jesus will meet you, but you’re going to have to be willing to just fight.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com