Has Sylvester Stallone Announced That He Has Surrendered His Life To Christ?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Outline

Circulating message claims that actor Sylvester Stallone publicly announced a few days ago that he had “surrendered his life to the Lord Jesus Christ”. The message suggests that the announcement was not given media coverage because “it has no rating, it pays no publicity and it is politically dangerous”.

Brief Analysis

There are no credible reports that support the claim that Sylvester Stallone announced in 2013 that he had “surrendered his life to Jesus”. Back in 2006, Stallone did tell media outlets that he had returned to his Catholic faith and was going to church again. But, in 2010, he reported that, while he was a spiritual person, he did not belong to any structured church.

Example

Detailed Analysis

According to a message currently circulating the blogosphere and social media sites, high-profile US actor Sylvester Stallone has, within the last few days, publicly announced that he has “surrendered his life to the Lord Jesus Christ”.  The story has also been posted to several Nigerian based websites, couched as a news item.

The message questions why the announcement has not been given greater coverage by the media and suggest that, if Stallone had instead declared that he was gay, the media would have provided much greater coverage of the announcement. It concludes that the lack of coverage is because the media considers such a religious orientated announcement as “politically dangerous” and of no news value.

Given a gossip hungry celebrity press that hangs off every word of the rich and famous, it is highly improbable that Stallone’s alleged spiritual epiphany would not have been reported by at least a few. The press is rabid for even the most nebulose of news on high-profile targets such as Sylvester Stallone and they would certainly not have let such a public announcement go unremarked.

And the message gives no indication of exactly how Stallone made his supposed public announcement. No such announcement is published on the star’s website, nor on his Twitter feed. And, if the press ignored the announcement as claimed and Stallone has not published the information via his own channels, how then did the writer of the message here of it?

It is possible that the writer is referencing media reports from, not several days ago, but several years in the past. In 2006, Stallone told various media outlets that he was going to church again, after drifting away from his Catholic roots.

In December 2006, Catholic Online reported:

Sylvester Stallone grew up Catholic, stopped going to church after he tasted fame and fortune, but now considers himself a churchgoing Catholic again.

Stallone’s shift back to church started when his daughter Sophia was “born sick,” Stallone said in a Dec. 7 telephone interview from Dallas to promote his new movie, “Rocky Balboa.” […….]

Things started turning around for Stallone, he said, before his marriage in 1997 to his third and current wife, Jennifer Flavin. “When I got married everything changed,” he said. “When my daughter was born sick, and I realized I really needed some help here, I started putting everything in God’s hands, his omnipotence, his all-forgivingness.” Stallone added that being Catholic “puts me where I should be. I was alone in the world. I thought I would have to handle things in my own way.”

And yet, some years later, in September 2010, when asked in a GQ interview if he was a religious man, Stallone noted:

I’m pretty spiritual; I believe a lot in the spirit of man. I’m certainly not an atheist.… I was baptized Catholic, but I don’t belong to a structured church. I have no opposition to it. I think there’s great nuggets of knowledge in there, some wonderful rules to live by. Then the flip side is the amount of agony that’s caused, which is, excuse me?

Thus, it seems likely that the lack of press reports on Sylvester Stallone’s supposed publicly announced religious awakening is not due to lack of interest or political correctness. There are no reports because no such announcement was actually made. At least not in 2013.