Chase Rice: I Choose Jesus After Childhood Abuse Trauma

Country singer Chase Rice says he chooses Jesus in the moment when shame creeps in. In a new interview on the Take Back Ocala podcast, published 3 November 2026, Rice opened up about being a victim of childhood sexual abuse and about the shame, guilt and addictions that followed him for years and nearly broke him.

Rice first disclosed the abuse publicly on the In the Blinds podcast in June 2025. In this new conversation, he went further, describing how the trauma shaped his adult life and how his faith became the thing he reaches for when the old feelings return. He says he has let God lead his life since about 2017, after a men's retreat through Operation Restored Warrior helped him confront what had happened to him.

The retreat was the turning point he keeps coming back to. Before it, the shame had a free run at him. After it, he had a practice, a sentence he could say to himself when the darkness crept back in. It is a simple sentence, and he repeats it like a man who has tested it in the hardest moments and found that it holds.

“When that shame creeps in, I talk to it. I'm like, 'It's all good man. Nope. I choose Jesus. I choose Jesus right now.' When I do that, it's like the shame has no power.”

Choosing Jesus in This Moment

That is the heart of what Rice is saying, and he says it in the present tense, not the past. Faith, for him, is not a decision he made once and filed away. It is a choice he makes again and again, in the middle of ordinary days, in the middle of a struggle, and in the middle of the good things too.

“I just know that I want to choose Jesus. I want to choose Jesus today. I want to choose Jesus in this moment, in this struggle, in this good thing. If I'm doing that, I can't go wrong there.”

There is no grand theology in those sentences, and that is the point. Rice is not preaching a system. He is describing what actually works for him when the shame shows up uninvited. He talks to it. He names the choice. And in his experience, the shame loses its grip.

The interview also reached into the part of the story that hurts most to tell. Rice spoke about the emotional phone call with his mother after he revealed the abuse, telling her the trauma was not her fault, Taste of Country reports. For a son to make that call, and for a mother to hear it, takes a kind of courage that has nothing to do with fame or fortune.

Loss Piled on Loss

Rice's story carries more loss than the abuse alone. His father died of a heart attack when Rice was 22, and he lost his dad and his football career in the same year. He has said he feared fame would expose his secret, that the brighter the spotlight grew, the more likely the thing he had buried would come out into the open.

That fear makes sense when you think about it. A young man carrying a secret like that does not want the world looking closely. So he built a life that looked strong from the outside while the shame did its work on the inside, feeding the guilt and the addictions that followed him through his twenties.

The men's retreat through Operation Restored Warrior changed the shape of that story. It gave him a place to confront the trauma directly instead of running from it, and it gave him a language for what came after. Letting God lead his life since about 2017 has not meant the shame never returns. It has meant he knows what to do when it does.

Other stories of faith carried through hard seasons are told in Pastor Mike Stone Daughter Sarah Dies at 19 After 12 Weeks in Hospice Care and Today: Pope Leo XIV Meets Bob Dylan at the Vatican and Gives Him a Rosary. A teacher's fresh look at glory and heaven is covered in Today: N.T. Wright Says Glory Does Not Mean Going to Heaven in Dallas Romans Teaching.

Music, Film and the Road Ahead

Rice's album Eldora was released in September 2025, and the interview also covers his acting in the Ocala film and the songs he wrote for its soundtrack. The music and the film work sit alongside the testimony now, part of the same life, and Rice seems in no hurry to seperate the artist from the man who had to learn how to live with his own past.

What he offers in this interview is not a finished story with a neat ending. It is a practice, repeated daily: when shame creeps in, talk to it, choose Jesus, and watch it lose its power. For listeners carrying their own secrets, that may be the most useful thing a famous singer could say. Whether the next chapter of Rice's life brings more music, more film, or more of these honest conversations, the sentence he keeps repeating will likely be the thread that holds it together.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.