Dark spiritual imagery, glorifies drug use and sexual immorality, no redemptive content.
Abel Tesfaye, known as The Weeknd, was raised in the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian tradition by his grandmother in Toronto. This background makes his artistic output all the more striking — he has taken a rich Christian heritage and built an artistic identity that systematically inverts its values. His music is not randomly dark. It is intentionally constructed around hedonistic nihilism: drug use as transcendence, sexual conquest as meaning, fame as redemption, and numbness as the only honest response to existence.
The After Hours era (2020) marked The Weeknd's most explicit engagement with spiritual imagery. The album's visual world — bandaged faces, blood, a dystopian Las Vegas — draws on imagery of corruption, self-destruction, and an anti-salvation arc. His Super Bowl LV halftime show extended this visual language to one of the largest stages in entertainment, featuring disorienting maze imagery and unsettling visuals that left many Christian viewers deeply troubled. The Dawn FM album (2022) presents a "purgatory radio station" concept that engages directly with afterlife themes from a thoroughly post-Christian framework. The album's theological imagination is not empty or accidental — it is purposeful, imagining the afterlife without redemption and without hope. Hebrews 9:27 says "people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment." Dawn FM imagines that judgment as an endless limbo of pop music — a pointed rejection of the Christian hope of resurrection and renewal.
The honest answer is: probably not in a literal theological sense, but spiritually the distinction matters less than it might seem. 2 Corinthians 4:4 describes Satan as "the god of this age" who blinds the minds of unbelievers. Content that consistently promotes the values of this age — hedonism, nihilism, the supremacy of pleasure, the absence of God — advances those ends regardless of the artist's conscious intent. His music does not feature explicit devil worship, but it consistently glorifies the precise things that the Bible warns will destroy human souls. Galatians 5:19-21 lists the works of the flesh — sexual immorality, debauchery, drunkenness — and The Weeknd's catalogue could serve as a soundtrack to this list.
The Weeknd scores 12/100. His music is among the most spiritually corrosive in mainstream pop — not because of explicit occult imagery but because of what it teaches about the purpose of human life. Christians, and especially young Christians, should avoid his catalogue. His music is ubiquitous on streaming platforms and presents its worldview in aesthetically beautiful packaging that makes the spiritual danger harder to recognize and resist.
Personal faith and musical content are distinct categories that frequently diverge. GodlyScore evaluates both separately. Key questions: What are the lyrics saying? What worldview do they reflect? Are they consistent with Philippians 4:8 — "whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable"? Score: see full guide.
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