Dolly Parton Reveals How She ‘Found God’

Country music icon Dolly Parton has always been outspoken about her deep faith.

Dolly sat down with Khloe Kardashian for her July 10 installment of her podcast, “Khloe in Wonderland.”

About halfway through the hour-long conversation, Khloe Kardashian turned to the topic of Dolly’s faith, saying, “You’ve said before that your faith has carried you through hard times. Do you have a go-to prayer? Are you conversational with God?”

“Well I talk to God like He’s my… in fact, you know how they say ‘Father in Heaven?’ I say ‘hey Dad!’ So I talk about everything, I talk out loud if somebody was to see me when I’m by myself, you know, if I get excited I shout out. If someone was to see my they’d think I’m insane,” Dolly explained.

Dolly told Khloe that her grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher. She says that the focus on “hellfire, and brimstone” left her “so scared.”

But she says she truly found God in a more quiet setting.

“There was an old, abandoned church house down below us where it had been a church years ago,” she said on the podcast. “It still had an old abandoned piano, and it had broken down. And this was where people go to drink, have sex, stuff written on the walls, but still had Bible verses and everything. But I would go to that old church, and I felt the presence. I felt the presence there. And so it was in that old, abandoned church that I just praying to God the way that I — I was just saying, ‘Well, just show me, help me, save me, because I want to be ready.’ So it was then that I just had this peace fall over me, and I just felt like that I had, for the first time in my life, had truly found God.”

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Dolly Parton Says Her Encounter With God Directed Her Future

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Dolly Parton says that encounter with God set her on the path she has followed ever since.

“I felt like that I just had a knowing of what my life was supposed to be,” she told Khloe. “And I thought it was just a feeling that said, ‘You go and don’t you stop until I say, ‘Stop.’ So I never have. So that was kind of how that happened. It had to happen without fear and without influence and without anything else.”

Dolly says her faith is an essential part of who she is.

“You have to believe in something bigger than you. And whether you call it science, whether you call it nature, whether you call it this or that, doesn’t matter. There’s a force there, there’s an energy, there’s a greatness. And those of us that do believe like we do, however you find Him, just do,” she said.

“Even if I knew there was no God, I’d choose to believe it. Because I want to believe there’s something out there. And I do believe it,” she added.

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Dolly Parton Says Her ‘Jezebel’ Look Helps Her Share Her Faith

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Dolly Parton told Khloe Kardashian that she thinks her over-the-top look actually helps her share her faith with others.

“I look like a Jezebel. But I want to feel like more people will be drawn to that than if I came out like the Pentecostal women I grew up with.”

Dolly continued, “I think you’re going to reach more people, somebody like us, that are in a place of power,” she explained. “I think there’s a lot of people out there that don’t know what to think, don’t know what to believe. They want to believe in something, but they don’t. Whether they believe in God or not, if they believe in something you’re doing, and if you say something that’ll give them that hope that ‘there is something more. So I, really, just think we just have to walk that fine line to kind of try to keep it within ourselves, but to be able to project that to people.”

Dolly went on, “If your intentions are good and you want to do great, and you’re working toward that, then I think that sometimes people (are) going to pay more attention to somebody that looks like us.”

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Podcast Is Not Dolly & Khloe’s First Collaboration

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The episode of the “Khloe in Wonderland” podcast was not Dolly Parton’s first collaboration with Khloe Kardashian.

Dolly teamed up with Khloe’s Good American clothing company for a denim collection called “Joleans.”

On the landing page for Dolly’s designs, the collection boasts, “A LITTLE BIT OF COUNTRY, A WHOLE LOT OF GLAM.”