That would be a hard no.
— Todd La Torre (@ToddLaTorre) September 12, 2021
Michael Sweet of openly Christian hard rockers STRYPER took to his social media on Saturday (September 11) to pose a question for his tens of thousands of followers: "Should SKILLET & STRYPER tour together? If this post breaks records with comments and shares then I’ll take that as a yes;-) Go!"
Several other prominent hard rock musicians responded to Sweet on both Instagram and Twitter, with QUEENSRŸCHE frontman Todd La Torre, who is an atheist, writing: "That would be a hard no." FOZZY's Chris Jericho was more open to the idea, saying: "That would be a great tour for u guys!!!" Former SALIVA vocalist Josey Scott was equally enthusiastic, writing: "YES!!!! I grew up with SKILLET in Memphis (the singer anyway) and he's always been a very cool cat man! And they friggin' STRAIGHT UP, DROP IT OFF BRO!!!!"
Sweet's post came one day after SKILLET and STRYPER shared the stage at the Rocktember Music Festival in Hinckley, Minnesota.
In a 2018 interview with the Detroit Free Press, Michael said that STRYPER was never fully embraced by the heavy metal and hard rock communities, largely because of the band's Christian lyrics. "We've never been accepted by either side," he said. "The secular side, the mainstream, they've never accepted us to this day. We're probably that band that everyone's going to go to whenever there's a time to mock. We'll be the band used for that in most cases. Now on the Christian side, we've never really had the full support of the Christian side because we don't fit into their little club. We're not wearing suits and ties and going to every church and preaching."
In various interviews over the years, SKILLET frontman John Cooper has said that he "always had faith in God" and that his mother was a "Jesus fanatic." He also claimed that he was willing to put his career on the line to take a stand for Christ.
This past April, Cooper told the "Undaunted.Life: A Man's Podcast" that it was perfectly fine for Christians to play rock music. "I would say that music is created not by the Devil; [it is] created by the Lord," he said. "All things were created by God. So instead of thinking that the Devil owns a genre of music, I would say capture that music and bring it back into subjection under the lordship of Christ."
Cooper recently published his first book, titled "Awake & Alive To Truth (Finding Truth In The Chaos Of A Relativistic World)". It "tackles the reigning philosophies of our day of post-modernism, relativism, and the popular view of the goodness of man-and combats these viewpoints by standing on the absolute truth of the Word Of God," the book's description reads.
