where did imagine dragons go to high school

The fest now has a detente with church leadership, which organizers take as a good sign that they’re making progress. Even given his band’s stature, Love Loud was on thin ice until it received a tacit blessing from the church before its debut last year. In the film, Reynolds isn’t necessarily wrestling with doctrine - he’d always been a relatively liberal Mormon himself - but with understanding the scope of this problem and how best to use his platform. “Even the farthest-right person should be able to say, ‘I don’t want a gay kid to take their life.’”įor those unfamiliar with the Grammy-winning Imagine Dragons, “Believer” is still a poignant arc about a young man from an insular, largely straight and white community following his faith to unexpected conclusions and activism. “All sides should be able to say that ‘We can agree that our youth are precious and we need to talk,’” Reynolds said. But Reynolds’ work might be a turning point in convincing Mormons that the crisis is desperate - and to show those affected kids that they’re valuable. As the film’s tough conclusion shows, the road ahead is still long. It wasn’t obvious that his activism would resonate within the Church. In the last two years, he’s grown from a crowdpleasing, red-state-popular rockstar (and, along with Mitt Romney and Brandon Flowers of the Killers, one of the most popular Mormons on the planet) into an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights and mental health in one of the most conservative religious communities in America. That I could have wrapped my arms around my friend from middle school and said ‘God loves you.’”Īs he watched youth suicide rates skyrocket over the last decade - in the Church’s home base of Utah, it rose four times faster than than already-rising national rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention- Reynolds felt a new urgency to help save the lives of the kids his band played for every night. That even though I wasn’t homophobic, I didn’t speak up when I’d had the chance to.

That was a heart-wrenching realization for me. “I’d say the greatest disservice and most hurtful thing to youth is people who are indifferent,” Reynolds said.

Where did imagine dragons go to high school