What made you decide to be more forthcoming about your faith?
I mean it’s always been something we wanted to do but it’s just one of those things where we’re growing up and we realize what’s important to us and we realize we love playing music and we love our fans so much we want to share the most important thing in our lives with them. I would feel like we’re wasting peoples’ time if we didn’t make it obvious. If people came and listened to our record and had no clue what we believed in, it would kind of defeat the purpose of Haste The Day.
Did those thoughts come to the forefront with the circumstances of Jason’s departure?
Yeah that was one of the things. If we’re going to move on from Jason because of his lack of faith or his new journey without God in his life, I think we really realized we needed to be even more adamant and share our faith stronger. To lose somebody that was very close to us in the band, we need to make sure we’re even more outwardly and obviously following Christ the way we should.
Was it his choice to leave?
We had to ask him to leave, which was the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do. He [was] studying other literature that had a big influence on him and opened his eyes to something else. It was a gradual thing, and eventually he let us know that he no longer had faith in Jesus Christ and for us, as much as we would have loved to make it work and just continue on anyways, as a band, that’s our focus. That’s what we’re set out to do: To spread the gospel, and having somebody who doesn’t believe it at all just didn’t sit right with us. We’re still in contact, we’re good friends, but we felt we really needed to move on and all be on the same page with the most important part of what the band is.
How did that become the most important part of the band?
I think it just comes naturally to us. It just always has. Our faith plays a huge role, so we’ll write a song and not know exactly what it’s going to be about, but it always just comes across that way. With Steven [Keech] writing and before with Jimmy [Ryan] writing, it was just always really faith-based, it wasn’t something like, ‘Ok this song has to be about this or that,’ it just happens naturally.
What is your target audience in that respect?
Our focus is to play for everybody. We’ve always been very open with our faith, this time we just went in more excited about it. I don’t know really how to explain it, I’m not doing very well with my words, but our target audience is definitely everybody [laughs]. I would be very disappointed if we only had Christian fans. That would tell me that we’re doing something wrong. Our focus is to spread the word. If we’re just preaching to the choir all the time, that’s not really doing what Haste The Day was set out to do.
