Tim Lambesis, currently incarcerated lead singer of Christian death metal band As I Lay Dying, has admitted that the band had faked being Christian. Lambesis was sentenced to six years starting in May for attempting to a pay a hit man a thousand bucks to take out his then-estranged wife Meggan Lambesis, only to learn that the hit man was an undercover cop. Meggan Lambesis said they had an amicable separation and that she was surprised to learn her ex-husband wanted her dead. Tim’s legal team blamed his steroid use, related to a sudden obsession with bodybuilding, for the blurred mental processes that made him decide to have Meggan killed. Tim eventually changed his plea from “not guilty” to “guilty” and received the six-year sentence.

At home on house arrest in May, he wrote a long blog post about how he had been reevaluating his faith and “felt it was unreasonable to call myself a Christian in light of the evidence.” Then he admitted he hadn’t been Christian in quite some time, and neither had the other guys in the band. Before his sentencing, he told Alternative Press:

I actually wasn’t the first guy in As I Lay Dying to stop being a Christian. In fact, I think I was the third. The two who remained kind of stopped talking about it, and then I’m pretty sure they dropped it, too. We talked about whether to keep taking money from the “Christian market.” We had this bizarrely ‘noble” thing, like, “Well, we’re not passing along any bad ideas. We’re just singing about real life stuff. Those kids need to hear about real life, because they live in a bubble.”

Tim Lambesis, 33, says he’s been an atheist since college. He also said renouncing Christianity made it easier to justify the affair he had that broke up his marriage to Meggan. (I’m sure plenty of other religious people take out hits on their spouses, too.) Ex-bandmate Nick Hipa posted to his Facebook page the opinion that Lambesis is “a sociopathic narcissist,” a view he said the trial’s prosecution shared.

The Tim Lambesis scandal provoked talk among the Christian music faithful about an industrywide issue. How do you prove someone is really dedicated to Christianity and not just the lucrative record sales of the Christian market? Are there any EDM DJs who secretly hate EDM and are just cashing in on what they know is popular right now? At one point in the post, Lambesis admits he felt awkward praying with fans and talking publicly about his faith, but he apparently didn’t feel awkward enough not to!