When Mike Sartain, who released his latest EP, Push On Through, in April and goes by the stage name Sartain, saw the back cover of Rancid’s 1994 album Let’s Go for the first time, in ninth grade — with a mohawked, leather-clad Tim Armstrong flipping off the camera — he knew that everything he had been taught in his life was a lie.
“It was like an alien. I’d never seen anything like that,” he says to me in a downtown coffee shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Besides being a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, Sartain is a former member of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a fundamentalist Christian organization founded by infamous minister, speaker, and writer Bill Gothard in 1974. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because the Duggar family of the reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting was associated with the organization; that is, until Gothard resigned in 2014 due to allegations by more than 30 women of sexual molestation and harassment.
Gothard created the organization as a way to teach what he claimed he believed to be the only way to achieve true success in life, by following core concepts based on strict biblical principles for living a morally pure life in the eyes of God. A prescription he obviously felt excluded him.
Mike Sartain was eight years old when his mother remarried and moved from Greenville, South Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia. “My mom’s marriage to my stepdad started out great,” he tells me. “He was really nice to me. He would play catch with me and take me to ball games. And that was kind of a big thing for me because I didn’t see my [real] dad very much.” But then, his stepfather started to change.
“I watched that marriage just absolutely deteriorate,” he says. “He became cold towards me and he would berate me about a lot of stuff.”
Sartain’s stepfather integrated the IBLP lifestyle into his new family swiftly, with a strict homeschool regimen that sheltered Mike from all aspects of the secular world.
Mike says IBLP centers around the concept of the “Umbrella of Authority,” which emphasizes submission to authority within the family.
“We have Christ here and then the husband who’s in charge here, and then the wife who’s in charge, and then there’s the children,” he says as he draws a diagram on a napkin. “So, you see that there is no autonomy for children in any way. And so it also creates this feeling of ‘I’m never good enough. Everything I do is wrong.’
“It’s a strange concept for a child to go through life feeling God is looking over their shoulder all the time, judging them and possibly threatening them with hell.”
While he didn’t live on a compound like, say, the Twelve Tribes, which teaches a similar fundamentalist philosophy, he was subjected to IBLP’s homeschool program — the Advanced Training Institute, with a curriculum based on IBLP’s core biblical principles. It made him feel incredibly isolated. He wasn’t allowed to watch TV and was forced to surrender all his toys, because they were outside secular influences.
“When you’re a kid, man, your room is your world,” he says. “I remember at eight, taking a giant Hefty bag and just slowly tearing my world down. I did not want to be involved with this. I was resistant from the beginning.”
He wasn’t allowed to have friends outside of IBLP. Even within the organization, he had only one or two; one with whom his parents tried to arrange a courtship. Arranged marriages, he says, are part of the program.
Mike walks me through the very scripture-driven curriculum. He shares an example of a math lesson revolving around the armor of Goliath and a biology lesson about how to be a good Christian and avoid being punished by God with leprosy. “You’re taught not to believe in yourself at all,” he says.
One positive experience was music, but the only songs he was allowed to listen to were by the church band. The program, Mike tells me, ascertains that because a rock beat is on two and four, and your heartbeats are on one and three, that the rock beat is evil, and it’ll cause Satan to enter your life. Mike gravitated toward the drums, eventually teaching himself how to play.
By the time he entered high school, his mother had divorced his stepfather, they were kicked out of IBLP, and she enrolled him in one of the biggest high schools in Georgia. Educationally and emotionally, he was not prepared
“Being in a classroom with 20 other people was new. And I think because of this ‘Umbrella of Authority’ thing, it was really confusing for me.”
He was bullied a lot, not only because he had come from the IBLP, but because he suffered from autism. “It took me about 20 minutes to realize that high school was just gonna be what it was until I was free of it,” he says.
After eventually buying a drum kit, he wound up in his first band, a Christian rock group called Uncle Jed’s Oil.
“I really loved the fact that people would come up to us after we would play and say, ‘Hey, that was meaningful to us.’ That gave me a lot of value.”
Then he heard Rancid and everything changed.
“I met this kid and he had a spiked jacket, smelled kind of funny,” Sartain says. “And for whatever reason, he had a pretty smart mouth on him, and he would stick up for me. And he started introducing me to this thing called punk rock.”
And through his new friend he also discovered alcohol and drugs. He experimented with other drugs like cocaine, but his go-to was alcohol, starting each day with a pint of vodka disguised in a bottle of Gatorade. Because of his drinking, his bandmates kicked him out of Uncle Jed’s Oil.
“It was kind of funny that we were supposed to be out there helping people who were hurting, and I was the one who was hurting, and I got thrown out.”
Mike was a terrible student and eventually dropped out of high school. He moved up to Nashville when he was 20 and joined another band called Westover with future The Lone Bellow guitarist Brian Elmquist, only to get kicked out again, this time for using heroin.
As his addiction got worse, Sartain found himself homeless, eventually moving back to Atlanta and joining another band called Blackwater Lane in 2016, switching from drums to lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter, touring regionally. His drinking and drug abuse continued to spiral out of control.
He had been drinking every day for 20 years before his wife, Llana, urged him to go to rehab, something he’d tried before, unsuccessfully.
“They kept me there for about a day, and they said that I was too unstable to stay there,” he says. “So they moved me to the ER at the local hospital. From the ER, they moved me to the ICU, and they drained almost eight liters of fluid from my abdomen. They were pretty surprised that my other organs had not shut down. They told me if my kidneys had gone, I would’ve died.”
For the first six months of his recovery, Mike had six doctors closely monitoring him. During his year in treatment, he wrote the songs that made up his debut record, Sartain, in 2023. He plans to head back to the studio in November to record his next EP, with a tentative release in late January. He’s also working on a memoir about his time in IBLP and his addiction recovery, and in the near future taking his songs and stories on the road to play at rehab centers and sober living spaces around the Southeast, under his organization Outlaw Grace.
Although his blood levels stabilized, Mike lives with cirrhosis, which could eventually kill him. “They said that if I drink three ounces of alcohol, it’ll kill me,” he says. “Fear is a powerful motivator.”
Sartain tells me that when he was in detox, while floating in and out of consciousness under sedation for two days, he had recurring visions of the face of a lion. And that’s when he began to realize his true self and learn to stop living in fear. The lion — which not only graces his debut album cover but in tattoo form on his body — now serves as a metaphor for how he chooses to lead his life.
“I have kind of run with that image of the lion and kind of made it a part of what I think about during the day,” he says.
Referring to his time in the IBLP, he says, “I would consider myself one of the lucky ones to get out of that.”
