Britney Spears revealed she is now a Catholic.
In an Instagram post, the pop icon wrote, “I just got back from Mass … I’m a Catholic now … Let us pray.”
As of Friday afternoon, the post has been removed from her profile.
The announcement comes almost a year after Spears told followers in a Q&A on the platform that she goes “back and forth” between religions.
“I grew up Baptist. But I studied Kabbalah so I go back and forth — but I do believe there is a god,” she said in the video according to Newsweek.
That video has also since been removed.
Newsweek notes that “there was a time in the mid-2000s when Kabbalah, a branch of Jewish mysticism, was the religion du jour among the celebrity elite, and everyone from Lindsay Lohan to Ashton Kutcher and Paris Hilton were spotted wearing the movement’s signature red string bracelet.”
The Pew Research Center said in 2018 there are an estimated 51 million Catholics in the United States. “Politically, Catholic registered voters are evenly split between those who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (47%) and those who favor the GOP (46%),” the fact tank reported. The Catholic church generally reports an annual net loss of members.
Christian online publication Aleteia wrote that there are typically five types of converts to Catholicism: intellectual converts, aesthetic converts, social media converts, Muslim converts, and spousal converts.
Decorated Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky said in a 2016 interview that her Catholic faith gave her strength in every aspect of her life.
“I think the beauty of Catholicism is its consistency through both successes and difficulties,” she told the National Catholic Register.
Spears has been struggling with her father and her right to independence for at least the past two years. The 39-year-old singer has been embroiled in a well-documented fight to end her years-long conservatorship.
In court, Spears described the legal guardianship — which was instated in 2008 after several public mental health concerns in the 2000s — as “abusive.” In addition to not having a say in her legal representation or finances, she also said she has been forced to use birth control despite wanting a child.
Fans and celebrities began posting under the viral tag #FreeBritney after concerns for her well-being hit a crescendo during the lockdown in 2020.
In 2019, her father, Jamie Spears, “requested to extend his daughter’s conservatorship to more than 10 states, including Hawaii, Florida, and Louisiana,” per Business Insider.
Last month, “Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Florida., and Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., introduced the bipartisan ‘Free Britney Act,’” reports CNBC. If adopted, the bill would “give individuals under a legal conservatorship or guardianship the right to ask for their court-appointed private guardian to be replaced with a public guardian who is ‘free from financial conflicts of interest.’ Current laws require individuals to prove in court that fraud or abuse has occurred for a guardian to be replaced.”
Additionally, the bill would mandate that an independent caseworker be assigned to individuals under a conservatorship or guardianship so that they can monitor for signs of abuse.
An estimated 1.3 million adult Americans are under restrictive arrangements similar to Spears.
