"I Believe In You" by Stryper

1988 / #88

Rate Your Music score: 2.95 out of 5!

I'm pretty sure I heard this song in my day. Either that or I'm confusing it with "She Believes In Me" by Kenny Rogers.

The band Stryper was one of the few acts that performed Christian rock to reach the Hot 100. The Wikipedia article on Stryper cofounder Michael Sweet says, "The band's reputation declined in the 1990s." I'm not exactly sure what happened. Maybe they started biting heads off bats at concerts or something, but I'm not sure.

For a personal anecdote about Stryper, let's go back maybe a year or so before this song charted, back to when I was a high school freshman. I went to high school with some real punks. They were too old to be brats. They were punks. I don't mean it in a good way. They were juvenile delinquents. But they claimed to be good Christians, so that made it socially acceptable.

One of the worst offenders apparently liked Stryper. Now, the good thing about gym class was that we didn't wear our dumb school clothes for that class. So, for that class, this student always wore his Stryper t-shirt that had the number 777 prominently displayed. Get it? Instead of that devil number 666 - or the even more shocking 555 - Stryper used 777.

I think this student also sat right behind me in homeroom for 2 years, but gym class would always bring out the worst behavior in everyone. In gym, he was every bit as much of a troublemaker as you'd expect - and then some. I just don't remember much about what he did specifically. I just know it was bad.

I do remember a couple incidents in gym that show just how bad things were overall. One day, right in the middle of gym class, I saw a student emerge from the locker room carrying my school clothes, books, and other belongings. I don't remember if it was the same student discussed above. He proceeded to strew them all over the floor of the gym. I tried to stop him, and I got in trouble.

One other time, the teacher noted how bad everybody's behavior had become, so she required everyone to just sit on the floor and not do anything for the whole hour. We had to change into our gym clothes one by one instead of using the locker room all at the same time. At the end of the class period, we had to change back into our regular school clothes one by one. By the time we were all done changing into our gym clothes, it was time to start changing back into regular school clothes.

And much of the misbehavior was courtesy of a diehard Stryper fan!