When God appeared before Abraham in his old age to tell him he would have a son, Abraham laughed, and after that laughter Isaac was named. Of the forefathers in the Bible, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it is Isaac we know the least about.

The Bible does not bother to tell us much about Isaac, we know he marries Rebecca, and they have two sons: Jacob and Esau. Despite this, one of the most famous stories in Genesis centers on his sacrifice. When God commanded Abraham to bring his promised son to a mountain top to be sacrificed Abraham was immediately obedient. And Isaac trusted his father. His father who would never hurt him. His father who had prayed for years just for Isaac to be born. Who told him that they were just going on a hike, just going to sacrifice to the Almighty. He didn’t know that he was the sacrifice.

Sometimes I wonder just how scared Isaac was when he was tied down. What was he thinking when the knife in his father’s hand came down on him. How could he ever trust anyone afterwards, if even his father, someone sworn to love him could hurt him. Abraham was stopped, A messenger from God stilled his hand and no harm came to his beloved son. This is not the case for Taylor Swift.

In the violence soaked landscape of The Tortured Poets Department religious themes abound. Swift sprinkles allusions and references to the bible, Christian beliefs and activities. She relies on these short hands to get across the exact type of judgmental creeps who cut their eyes at her choices.

“Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best/Clutchin’ their pearls, sighing, “What a mess”/I just learned these people try and save you/’Cause they hate you,” This verse in “But Daddy I Love Him” masterfully evokes the image of the southern Baptist, or really any denomination, matriarch who swears they have your best interest at heart when they condemn you for wearing clothes too short or having your ears pierced, these are the church elders who use the bible as a tool to grandstand upon.

In the violence soaked landscape of The Tortured Poets Department, religious themes abound. Swift sprinkles allusions and references to the bible, Christian beliefs and activities. She relies on these short hands to get across the exact type of judgmental creeps who cut their eyes at her choices.

She does this again in “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” evoking Christian judgement over her romantic choices. “They shake their heads sayin’, “God, help her” When I tell ’em he’s my man.” She chafes against the fakeness that can be found in these people. She laments how they used her and ignored her in “Cassandra” as well. “The family, the pure greed, the Christian chorus line/They all said nothin’…Bet they never spared a prayer for my soul.”

But Taylor does not just stop at allusions to church culture, she takes on the stories of the bible themselves, at times twisting them to reckon with her own desire for control and her inevitable need to surrender said control. As she says in “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus:” [She] changed into goddesses, villains, and fools. 

One of the most popular ways Taylor uses allusion in The Tortured Poets Department is by positioned herself as Jesus or as godlike figure. She is both the sinner and the divine, demon and angel, devil and Savior. It is in this dichotomy that we uncover layers to Swifts on desire to grapple with control and fate. When she is godlike, she can lead a dangerous man into an heaven if “he’ll be an angel all night…” (ICFHNRIC). She can become a savior, she’s the “devil that you know” that looks like an “angel” (“The Albatross”). She is also the demon that needs to be excised, “even if [she] dies screaming,” (The Black Dog). She doesn’t need anyone’s “good Lord” because she is in complete control. Except she really isn’t. 

At her most destructive Taylor paints herself as a willing sacrifice. She can’t relinquish control so she would die instead. This is most apparent in the bridge of “Guilty As Sin”:

“What if I roll the stone away?

They’re gonna crucify me anyway

What if the way you hold me is actually what’s holy?

If long-suffering propriety is what they want from me

They don’t know how you’ve haunted me so stunningly

I choose you and me religiously“

Everything about this bridge is an intense look into the psych of a woman who in feeling that she has no control left, over her public image and her love life, decides she’d rather be sacrificed instead. She would die for this object of her affection’s sins because he’s the only one giving her any type of attention at the moment, as we know from earlier in the song. She wants to choose something even if it’s bad for her.

And when she does choose this person, it is with the fervor of a religious fanatic. This is not the only time she places herself in the image of Jesus for the person either. In “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” she reasserts that she chose this man she knew was bad for her. She would have “died for [his] sins” despite the fact that he was the one to hang her on “[his] wall” and “stabbed [her] with [his] push pins.” She wasn’t offered a cross like she imagined either, just stuck to a wall and ghosted. 

There are moments of wrestling with control of fate that truly are stand outs across the album. “The Prophecy” sees her completely relinquish that control she’s fought so hard for. Shes not God and she just has to beg for any power to give her love. She’s a crumbled statue waiting for someone, anyone, something, anything, to change what she sees as her fate, ending up alone. She expresses a similar sentiment in “Peter” where she asks a loss lover if they have fallen out of favor with “the goddess of timing.”

Her desperation is so apparent in “The Prophecy” she even slips with her biblical reference. “I got cursed like Eve got bitten.” The Eve of the Bible was never bitten by a snake. Instead, she was seduced by said into committing the first sin. This slight shift in Eve’s story shows us that Taylor Swift this song sees herself as less of an active participant in her life and more as someone who is at the whims of a higher power. The only thing she can do is surrender, fall to her knees and beg for them to have some mercy and “change the prophecy.” 

In moment of making herself a theophany of Jesus, a moment that keeps me up at night, a moment that spurred the creation of this essay, Taylor opens “So Long London” with a line that works as an allusion to the crucifixion once again. 

“My spine split from carrying us up the hill

Wet through my clothes, weary bones caught the chill”

In Taylor’s story we know how she responds when no messenger angel comes to stop her lover’s blade: with a remarkable self-implosion, and it leaves us, her rapt audience, her fans, and herself reeling in its wake. Because she is no one’s savior, not even her own.

Taylor places herself in the shoes of a willing sacrifice for the briefest of moments in So Long London. She carries her own cross to Calvary. The cross she chose to bear, that of a loving partner who is willing to do whatever is necessary to keep them together.

“You swore that you loved me but where were the clues?

I died on the altar waiting for the proof

You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days”

She is the love of this man’s life and yet he abandons her at the altar, leaves her to wait and then sacrifices her and their relationship to his gods. He does so because she was holding with a “white knuckle dying grip”. Taylor is neither goddess nor heroine and she cannot control fate no matter how hard she tries. She couldn’t keep her relationship and subsequently her life together.

Despite this she did not choose to be a willing sacrifice. Her trust in her Lover to meet her at the altar to stay true to his promises of love was used against her in the same way Isaac’s trust in his father was. Taylor became Isaac, however, in Taylor’s story we know how she responds when no messenger angel comes to stop her lover’s blade: with a remarkable self-implosion, and it leaves us, her rapt audience, her fans, and herself reeling in its wake. Because she is no one’s savior, not even her own.