Justin and Hailey go to church

Hailey and Justin Bieber announced the birth of their first child, Jack, just over a month ago. Since then they’ve stepped out a few times – for dinner and church, which is where they were yesterday.

These church outfits are making me laugh. And I know it’s not new for them, to dress for church like they’re heading into the studio but since I’m not a church person, it tells me something about their specific church culture, the celebrity church culture that’s become part of the gossip ecosystem (and please don’t tell me it's sacrilege to connect gossip and church when Carl Lentz is RIGHT THERE and, besides, I don’t have to go to church to know that church is pretty much gossip headquarters in most communities!), specifically white celebrity church culture. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s church or Coachella. 

Anyway, the paps are trying to sell these photos by describing Justin’s appearance – they’re saying he looks thin and they’re relating it to the Sean Diddy Combs mess. First of all, JB has been consistently thin for the last few years so I don’t see a difference but even if he is slightly thinner than usual, he’s also a new parent; nobody is sleeping at his house right now. And usually it’s the mothers who are frazzled and overwhelmed so if JB is experiencing this because he’s as involved as Hailey is in these early days of caring for their child, GOOD. 

About the Diddy thing though… 

Justin has been the celebrity who has come up the most on social media in relation to Diddy’s arrest and the charges against him. Because he was so young when he came into Diddy’s orbit, which has now resulted in so much speculation about what he may have experienced. Speculation and, frankly, concern trolling. We were all about this grossness back in the 2000s, I was part of it, I ate sh-t for it, and I deserved to, but the takeaway was that we were supposed to be more responsible. I’m not sure what we’ve been seeing online is all that productive. 

I’d rather talk about how… grown JB looks to me now?! I’m Canadian, I work at Canada’s entertainment headquarters, so I’ve been watching Justin Bieber since the very beginning, when he’d come to MuchMusic, the building where I work now and from where I’m writing this post, as a kid. And fame does this weird thing where we always think of that person as how they were when they first became famous. For a long time, many people saw JB as a 14-year-old, even well into his 20s. And now he’s a grown ass 30-year-old. In these photos, he finally looks like it to me.