One thing I’ve noticed in my later years is that I have gravitated toward musical artists who have a similar faith to me, but are also questioning. Rather than accepting the label of a “doubting Thomas,” it feels like we are becoming more comfortable asking questions and searching for answers not easily provided. I saw that a lot with Bruce Springsteen and his Roman Catholic upbringing, which he has largely rejected, but still influences his music quite a bit. David Bowie has a lot more in common with me than I ever realized.

Peter Ormerod’s David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God argues that spirituality is not a peripheral curiosity in David Bowie’s career but one of the central forces behind his art. Published by Bloomsbury in January 2026, the 256-page book traces Bowie’s engagement with Christianity, Buddhism, occultism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, mysticism, philosophy, and atheism from his early years through Blackstar and Lazarus.

Ormerod’s central insight is that Bowie should not be understood as someone who repeatedly adopted religions so much as someone who repeatedly searched for a way of understanding existence. His beliefs changed, sometimes dramatically, but the questioning remained remarkably consistent. Ormerod sees Bowie’s career and the music he produced as an ongoing spiritual quest.

Bowie himself provided evidence for this interpretation. In a 1996 interview, he described a thread running through his work as “a search for a spiritual foundation.” Ormerod takes that statement seriously rather than treating it as another piece of Bowie mythology. Bowie could be fascinated by Christianity while skeptical of organized religion. He explored Buddhism without becoming conventionally Buddhist. He became fascinated by occultism and esotericism without establishing a coherent occult worldview. He could invoke Christian imagery while simultaneously questioning whether God existed.

Bowie wasn’t necessarily asking, “What religion is true?” He was more often asking, “What does it mean to be alive, and is there anything beyond this?” He searched through a variety of religions and belief systems looking for those answers, and it was reflected in the music he made.

I enjoyed the deep dive into Bowie’s attraction to Tibetan Buddhism. It’s something that has always been on the fringes of my own beliefs, and what Bowie found in it seems to be in line with what my own beliefs have evolved to. Buddhism offered Bowie something Christianity apparently did not: a way of approaching transcendence without necessarily requiring the conventional Western concept of a personal God. This was attractive to an artist increasingly interested in consciousness, identity, illusion, transformation, and the possibility that ordinary reality might not be the whole of reality. Bowie’s attraction to Buddhism also reveals an important characteristic of his spirituality: he was attracted to systems that promised transformation. That becomes a recurring pattern throughout his career.

Ormerod sees Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust time period in a bit more of a controversial light: that of the messiah. Ziggy arrives from somewhere beyond ordinary human existence and becomes an object of worship. Bowie consequently constructs a strange relationship between rock music, celebrity, religion, and salvation. The rock star becomes a godlike figure. But Bowie simultaneously exposes the absurdity of that transformation, and Ziggy is ultimately consumed by the mythology surrounding him.

The problem is with Bowie’s music: once you start looking at it with an eye towards religious references, it seems like that is nearly all there is. Not every religious reference necessarily represents a profound theological belief. Sometimes a cross is simply a cross. Sometimes an alien is simply an alien. Sometimes Bowie was probably being deliberately ambiguous.

I found David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God to be a mixed bag. On one hand, I related to Bowie a lot more as a person searching for the philosophical answers that organized religion often tells us to ignore. On the other, it felt like Ormerod was trying a bit too hard. It took me a while to finish this book when I usually go through them much more quickly. There were moments where his analysis just lost me, and I was tempted to skip over some of the drier parts of his analysis. I think there is some merit to Ormerod’s arguments, but perhaps he was a bit too close to his subject to present it with a critical eye.

Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Bloomsbury USA, and author Peter Ormerod for the advance reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.