Stephan Jenkins (1964)
It was on this date, September 27, 1964, that Stephan Jenkins, the front man for the pop music group Third Eye Blind, was born Stephan Douglas Jenkins in Southern California. After overcoming childhood dyslexia, and earning a degree in Literature in 1987 from the University of California at Berkeley, Stephan Jenkins co-founded Third Eye Blind in San Francisco. As an act of rebellion to protest Siena College’s anti-contraception policy, at a November 1998 concert Jenkins threw 1000 condoms into the Catholic college audience.
In December 2000, Associated Press reporter Jennifer Vineyard interviewed Jenkins at the “Jingle Ball,” a Christmas celebration in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. “Though not much was said about the holiday festivities onstage,” Vineyard wrote, “Jenkins was more than happy to elaborate backstage about his feelings on the season. For Christmas, he said, he plans to go to midnight mass with his mother in Portland, though neither is a believer in God:
But I’m a big believer in praying, and I’m a believer in singing. So it’s an opportunity to sing and pray, and I like that a lot. I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It’s so conformist.*
* Jennifer Vineyard, Associated Press report, 16 December 2000, as quoted on the Celebrity Atheist List Web site.
Originally published September 2003 by Ronald Bruce Meyer.
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