I've followed the Moodies for a very, very long time and I can assure you that John Lodge absolutely IS a Christian. He has ALWAYS been one. When the other band members were experimenting with intoxicants and alternative spirituality and all that back in the 1960s, he didn't bother. He had Jesus and that made him happy.
Here's an excerpt from an article I found on Christian rock stars:
JOHN LODGE:
Bass Force Behind The Moody Blues After being a Christian in rock music for 30 years, Lodge says nothing deters his faith.
He claims to be "just a singer in a rock 'n' roll band," yet John Lodge is an unusual figure in pop music. During his 30-plus years in rock music, he's never gotten involved in drugs and has always declined to indulge in the legendary excesses of the music-industry lifestyle. He puts it all down to the Christian faith he adopted in childhood.
"In the '60s we were all looking for something," says Lodge, who helped transform standard British R&B band The Moody Blues into world-class pioneers of symphonic rock, mixing electric guitars with orchestral sounds.
"If you did a gig you'd spend hours afterwards meeting people, talking about religion. I grew up through an evangelical church, and the more I talked to people, the more I realized all the things I'd learned at church were relevant--and what everyone was looking for. I was thinking, Just a moment, I think I've got that!
"That's really when I started to find an inner strength," Lodge told Charisma. "The '60s was a crazy time in rock 'n' roll, and you could have really gone to extremes in everything. But I found I had this inner strength that seemed to see me through a lot of things."
Born in 1945, Lodge attended Sunday school regularly as a child at Birches Green Evangelical Church in Birmingham, England. Lodge described the church as "quite fundamentalist," but there was freedom to ask questions.
"What it made me do was try to understand what the Bible was about--not organized religion--and what strengths you could gain from [the Bible]," he says.
The spiritual foundation proved its worth later in life when Lodge played bass for the Moody Blues. "Some things would come along--the excesses--and I'd question them and say this can't be right."
Lodge recalls one bizarre episode when he spoke with a Detroit pastor in a hotel room, while more than 100 people partied around them after a concert. "I remember us talking about Christianity amid this party, and I said to him, 'Isn't this strange?'"
It was a picture of his life: a nice, clean, Sunday school boy right in the middle of the dirty business of rock 'n' roll. Yet Lodge managed to make it work.
On one occasion, about 10 years ago, Lodge lost the strength in his arms.
"I ended up in the hospital," he says, "and they were bringing all these different people to try and find out what was wrong, but they couldn't find out."
Deeply troubled by this, his family contacted longtime friend and charismatic church leader Gerald Coates. "He got his whole church to pray for me," Lodge recalls. "That same day was the turning point. I started to feel better."
The incident had an impact on Kirsten--his wife of 32 years--and on his daughter, Emily, and his son, Kristian. "Everyone got strength from it," he says.
Through the years some Christians have challenged Lodge to pinpoint his "born again"experience. He sees his spiritual life as more of a journey than a reaction to a crisis point. He's not a regular churchgoer, but he attends events at Coates' church, Pioneer People, and visits churches while on tour.
While the Moody Blues were touring in the United States once, Lodge travelled more than 300 miles to hear Benny Hinn preach in Orlando, Florida.
So far, Lodge's Christianity hasn't fazed the rest of the band.
"They know where I'm at. It doesn't matter whatever we discuss, they know where I'm going to come from on it. But they also know I'm not going to come from an organized religious point."
Lodge still enjoys researching other philosophies--causing some people to question his reading habits. "Nothing's going to come along and determine who I am. I don't think that's going to happen, because I think if it was going to happen, it would've happened a long time ago."
So what is it like being a Christian in mainstream rock?
"To be honest, I just ride it," Lodge says. "Nothing deters me. I've got an inner strength that comes from it."
Justin, for his part, drifted away from Christianity but seems to have come back to it. Here's another excerpt from a different article where Justin talks about this:
In their prime the Moodies comprised five songwriters (two of them, John Lodge and Graeme Edge, remain with Hayward to this day) and all wrote rather spiritual lyrics. This was another reason they were ridiculed. “But at the time we got the reputation for that,” says Hayward, “I felt I was speaking for a lot of other people in the late ’60s. I wanted to write about our search for enlightenment, as simple as that. I’m still kind of doing it.”
And where has this search brought Justin Hayward in 2006? “I would have to say Christianity,” he answers. “I came from a family with a very strong faith, I moved away through all sorts of Eastern religions, through meditation, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, anything else. It was reading C.S Lewis, books like Mere Christianity, that helped me to define what I really felt and finally decide. So I came full circle.”
I am not sure about the other band members.
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