David Archuleta’s raw and honest book Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself is out Tuesday, and in it, the former American Idol star shares how he ultimately rejected his Mormon faith to live unapologetically as a queer man.
“How I describe the book is, it’s like a prequel to where I’m at right now,” David told ABC Audio. “It was all of the disappointment. It was all the fear. It was all the anxiety of what would happen if I made the changes in my life to be more authentically myself,” noting he specifically questioned, “What would happen to me spiritually?”
But aside from the outside pressure of his faith, David said he also had to overcome his harmful people pleasing tendencies.
“I feel like a lot of Devout is the cycle that I had to learn how to break, because I would always find someone to try and just follow and obey, listen to, do what I was told,” he noted. “And so I feel it’s this journey of breaking from that and learning how to just not give a ‘you know,’ and learn how be more loyal to myself, than to other people.”
David’s other struggle was the emotional abuse he says he suffered at the hands of his family, but after he’d “aired out” his family’s “skeletons,” he said, they’ve been able to heal.
“The book brought a lot of opportunity to talk about the difficult things that happened in our family’s past. And I was like, ‘Hey, can we talk about this? Because we haven’t,'” he explained.
Now, they’re in a better place.
“We don’t have to pretend like ‘everything’s fine’ anymore,” he explained. “We can really sit with each other and say, we’ve made it this far together and look at us now. We’re closer than ever and bonded. And I’m just so grateful to have my family.”
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