Kristen Bell is known for her endless charity work, sparky personality and kind heart, growing up in the shore-heavy state of Michigan and moving to New York City in her teens, she is the typical girl-next-door type.
Although Bell was brought up Christian, the actress has said that she is non-religious and instead subscribes to a “humanist” belief system.
Read more below about Bell’s Christian mother, as well as her own beliefs.
Lorelei Bell
Kristen has admitted that since her mother, Lorelei Bell, became a “born again Christian”, there has been “a lot of turbulence” between the pair. Kristen Bell was brought up Christian and attended a Catholic high school. However, the actress has said that she feels she has both “disappointed” and “upset” her mother for not subscribing to the religion in later life. “I think it’s hard for her to digest [that I’m not religious], and I don’t really like to talk about it a lot because when I’m talking about it all I feel is that I’m disappointing my mother, which is an awful feeling…I don’t know this, but from my perspective, I believe she was upset we didn’t baptize our kids,” the actress has said.
Furthermore, speaking on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Kristen told the host about her Christian mother, “it’s something that makes her feel very safe and very loved. It’s an idea of practiced behaviour that is good for her. I am not in need of that same thing. I feel like I have a good barometer of being more of a humanist, a good barometer of good and bad and how my conduct should be toward other people.”
Kristen’s Charity Work
Although she isn’t religious, Kristen has high morals, so much so that they made Dax Shepard second guess wanting to marry her. In a video, he said that he questioned wanting to be with someone who, “has eight people living in her house for free, who has to get out of a car when there’s a dog who doesn’t have a leash and ruin her whole day to rescue this dog?’”
He goes on to say, “that’s great, and she’s good, but that’s not what I want to do. I’m not that good. I don’t want to spend my day finding the owner of a dog. So I wasn’t fearful I would lose her. I wasn’t certain I wanted to be with someone like that.”
Kristen has supported a list of 26 charities and 26 causes, as well as being a vegetarian since she was 11 years old. Some of the charities that the actress has worked with include, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Alzheimer’s Association, Red Cross, PetSmart Charities, Artists for Peace and Justice, and others. Kristen once told nonprofit organization, PETA, “I have always been an animal lover. I had a hard time disassociating the animals I cuddled with—dogs and cats, for example—from the animals on my plate, and I never really cared for the taste of meat. I always loved my Brussels sprouts!”
In 2013, PETA even crowned Kristen, and her husband Dax Shepard, the “Sexiest Vegetarian Celebrities of 2013”.
See an adorable video of a rescue dog that PETA tagged Kristen in on Twitter by clicking on the link below.
Philosophy in The Good Place
Netflix’s show The Good Place ran from 2016 to 2020. The programme is known for making philosophy fun and was very popular among its Netflix audiences. The story is centered around a girl who has died and gone to heaven (aka “The Good Place”) after living a corrupt life and tries to hide her past in order to stay there.
It approaches classical ethical dilemmas, such as the trolley problem, and mentions famous theories about morality, such as Kant’s deontology and Aristotelian virtue ethics. Although there is no mention of religion or Christianity in there, ethics is often associated with such.
So, even though Kristen Bell isn’t Christian, her mother is devotedly, and Bell herself has similar morals, undergoing a lot of charity work, with concern for animals, the environment and other important causes.