Christian singer-songwriter Colton Dixon said the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the government’s restrictive response to the COVID-19 pandemic “changed” him.
Dixon, 35, told CBN News seeing Kirk murdered for exercising his right to free speech pushed him “to seek truth harder.”
“I feel like, just for a lot of people, whether you believed in what Charlie stood for or not, just for a lot of people, it was, like, it just — I don’t know, it changed me,” said Dixon. “It was just, like, ‘Wow.’ [It] gave me a new outlook on things, even just to seek truth harder.”
The up-and-coming generation, he added, aren’t taking things at face-value anymore, regardless of the source. “They’re seeking truth for themselves,” he explained.
As a Christian recording artist, Dixon said he believes he has found the answer: “The answer’s Jesus.”
The recent spate of culture-defining events have, according to the “Build a Boat” singer, “anchored my feet down in my beliefs so that I’m not going to be pushed around by a little Chihuahua who might bark louder.”
“I kind of even really figured out why I believe what I believe,” he said. “[B]ecause again, it’s just COVID and just all these different things, they’re trying to get you to do different things and I’m like, ‘OK, why aren’t we just going to do it?’ Let’s figure out why so we’re not just being stubborn [and] hardheaded.”
“We open up God’s Word, we pray, we seek godly wisdom, and then we come to the conclusion, ‘Oh, this is why,'” Dixon said. “So now I just feel more steadfast in why I believe what I believe.”
As he’s ruminated on his convictions in recent years, Dixon has become noticeably more comfortable creating edgier content — at least edgier for the status quo in the contemporary Christian music world.
The “American Idol” alumnus just released a new song, “Bones,” based on the Old Testament passage of Ezekiel 37, chronicling the story of the prophet being transported to a valley filled with dry bones. God asked whether the bones could live and then commanded Ezekiel to prophesy over them. As the prophet began speaking promises to the bones, they assembled and were covered in flesh. Then a second prophecy called breath to fill their lungs and they became a living army standing to their feet.
Dixon said the song is “straight from Scripture,” recalling reading the biblical account and feeling “super inspired” and “like God gave me revelation” about speaking “over the dead things in your life.”
During a time of year when most of American culture is fixated on death from a secular perspective, Dixon saw an opportunity to flip the script around Halloween with a biblical understanding of death.
“What if we could … take this passage that already theatrically lines up with a lot of the visuals of skeletons — that’s what this whole passage was, it was a valley of dry bones, the bones rattling, coming together, flesh coming upon the bones, it was like zombies out there, you know, in Ezekiel 37,” he reflected.
That passage of Scripture, Dixon emphasized, shows a biblical interpretation of death, which, for the Christian, he said, is “just a little blip on the timeline of what our lives look like.”
He said, “For the rest of the world, death is the final word. … That’s the period. Life after death is this big mystery. But for a believer, death is not the final word; the cross —what Jesus did on the cross — is the final word, and not only that, but three days later, Him resurrecting from the grave so that we could spend eternal life with Him in heaven. … Death can be a scary thing to talk about, but as a believer, I don’t think it should be.”
The song — and its music video, which is set at night in a graveyard — is certainly unorthodox in its approach, but it paints a clear picture to the world that this life is not all there is. It also tells the story of spiritual power, a nod toward Romans 8:11, where Paul wrote, “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you” (NLT).
“I think that this song is … a kick in the pants for sideline Christians, where I’ve found myself before,” said Dixon. “It’s time to start using the spiritual authority that we have as believers and not just talk the talk, but walk it, as well.”
In fact, for Dixon, it was his wife Annie’s certainty about spiritual authority that led him to do some self-reflection.
“I found myself being so in awe of [my wife] that that was her first response [to pray and speak over things],” he said. “But then also going, ‘Why isn’t that mine?’ You know? If I’m really going to be the best spiritual leader of our house, I need to stop kicking my feet up and actually get in the game and start doing this for real.”
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