Discover the influence of religion in Tobias Forge’s life

Tobias Forge, the leader of Ghost, was questioned if religion had a “big part” in his childhood in a recent interview with Rolling Stone Germany’s Markus Brandstetter.

Yes, but not in the traditional sense… We all know people who grew up in religious homes, or maybe in times where religion was more part of the mainframe. However, I grew up with religion from a cultural aspect because my mom is just a very cultural person and very interested in art and films. And so there was a natural sort of influx of more the cultural aspect of… Whenever we were traveling someplace, we would always go to a church — not for religious reasons, [but] because of cultural reasons, for the artwork, like a museum. And as an imaginative kid, of course I was interested in the fairytale aspect of it. It was almost from an Indiana Jones point of view, because it was magic. But that was a positive thing. That felt historical, that felt magical, that felt ancient and cool. And then the other aspect of it was people in my vicinity that were religious who weren’t necessarily very nice, or at least I didn’t find them to be very pleasant. And one of them was my teacher in first and second grade. This was late ’80s, and she was probably around retirement age at the time. So, she was born in, like, 1915 or something, or ’20. I don’t know. I don’t remember. But she was very much like an old-school disciplinarian — very unmodern, mean. Everybody hated her. And even before I started school, just because in my kindergarten, there was a lot of kids who, who were older and they were, like, ‘Yeah, you’re gonna end up in her class. She’s a real bitch.’ So it was sort of served that way as well, and as soon as I started, we immediately clashed. And I remember her so clearly telling — I mean, anybody who was in my class might say that, ‘Oh, she never said that,’ but I remember clearly that she was, like, ‘Had this just been a few years ago, I could have hit you.’ And she was, like, ‘Back in in the day — it was not very far, very long ago — I would’ve been allowed to hit you kids.’ And you could really tell that she wanted to be that sort of physical disciplinarian. And you can argue maybe that maybe someone like me deserved it. I was very stuck up. I didn’t like authoritarian people when I was a kid, so I didn’t like it at all. And she was very deeply religious. As my memory of it, and this might go against what anybody else’s memory of it was, but there was a lot of singing psalms, or hymns, and there was a lot of biblical… I think she went off course in the amount of biblical study that we did. On the other hand, that served also my interest in history. So it wasn’t like a waste, but she was definitely like an embodiment of, to me, the paradox of her self-proclaimed representing the good side and she was actually evil. She was mean and petty and bitter and represented negativity and regression, and I’d say that skewed me a lot. But I definitely, obviously fell out of favor of her. And then that sort of continued throughout school. We had another [teacher]… When I started seventh grade — I don’t know to whatever extent she was religious, but she was definitely a righteous woman and she hated me. And this was right when I was in my most blooming satanic adolescent, 13-year-old kid. And I came into her class and she was, like… I know afterwards, because when my kids started school, for a brief time they actually went to the same school that I attended in seventh grade, and they had the same teacher as I had at the time, and he [told me], like, ‘She was really mean to you.’ ‘Oh, that was not just in my head?’ He was, like, ‘No. She went around to other teachers trying to color their perception of you and how she wanted you to fail.’ But I was very, very opinionated and I tried to diminish her thing with the class. I was the sort of kid that that would stand up in the middle of class and, like, ‘Nobody here likes you. You’re just a dumb cow.’ [Laughs] So I was also a little shit. But as a kid and a teenager, I was in constant sort of collision with the world. I also have a great respect thinking about my own role in it. But if I wanna give myself a little slack, I would say that had I had nicer teachers, it would’ve been better. There are definitely others that I knew that had other teachers — had I been in their classes, I probably would’ve succeeded better. Succeeded with what? Things turned out okay. So it’s, like, it’s fine. But, yeah, that’s the short answer to your question.