Wilco's Jeff Tweedy rocks... Messiah College?

It must have been quite an event… a conference on Christianity and the arts, featuring Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy!

News of Delaware County documents these words from Tweedy:

“Actually, I’m honored that you would invite me to your campus. I think a lot of Christians would consider me a blasphemer,” Tweedy said before deadpanning, “I have a checkered past.”

“I think I should play ‘Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down’ now… not because I’m scared or anything,” Tweedy joked after the song, before adding, “I hope no one thinks that I’m mocking their faith in any way by playing that song. I sincerely have a lot of respect for the Christian faith and of all people of faith … you gotta have something in this world.”

“I think one of the things that’s really beautiful about rock music is that it’s one of the rare places that people go in their lives where they join together with a bunch of people and raise their voices and sing along with somebody and transcend themselves, to find themselves as a part of humanity as opposed to being apart from humanity. I think that that’s a beautiful thing … Unfortunately there’s been a lot of times where I think a lot of people have missed that experience in church and they found it in other places without knowing that’s what they were finding.”

And then there’s this little anecdote:

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s “Heavy Metal Drummer” ended with Tweedy substituting names of bands shouted by the audience in the line “playing Kiss covers, beautiful and stoned,” mentioning Christian rock acts Stryper and Jars of Clay before pausing, then relenting at the suggestion of Uncle Tupelo, the band Tweedy left to form Wilco.