Songfacts®:

• "Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America," finds Matty Healy pondering religious faith and love from the perspective of an LGBT person.
  
  I'm in love with Jesus Christ
  He's so nice
  
  He goes onto describe how he has to hide his sexual identity because of his religious beliefs.
  
  I'm in love with a boy I know
  But that's a feeling I can never show
  
  Healy is an ally of the LGBT community and the song's sarcastic tone ties in with his views on religion. He sees most faiths as discriminatory, and in 2019 the singer defied Dubai's strict anti-LGBT laws when he kissed a male fan on the lips at a concert. The 1975 frontman told the crowd he loved them and that God did too.
• Healy identifies as a humanist and atheist. In his younger days, he was strongly opposed to all forms of religious faith, but he has since softened his views. The 1975's 2016 gospelly track "If I Believe You," for instance, finds him questioning his anti-religious beliefs. Two years later, he said in a Genius verification video for "Love It If We Made It," "I want salvation just as much as the next person, I envy the faithful if there's anybody who's actually got some good evidence."
• Phoebe Bridgers, who openly identifies as bisexual, contributes a fragile and vulnerable verse from a gay female perspective. She sings of her love for "the girl next door"; her love is unrequited as she is unable to reveal her true feelings to her neighbor.
• The song is a sparse, acoustic duet. Healy and Bridgers are backed by just a pedal steel guitar plus distant horns and double bass. It is the most stripped-down song The 1975 have released since 2016's "Nana."
• Asked by Beats 1's Zane Lowe how she came to collaborate with The 1975 on this song, Phoebe Bridgers revealed that she and Healy began their friendship by sending each other direct messages.
  
  "We started DMing… Matty told me he was a fan, and then it turned very quickly from talking a tiny bit to then completely no talking to just memes back and forth for months," Bridgers explained. "He has very good taste in very obscure nerdy memes."
  
  "And then I met all of [The 1975] and they're the sweetest."
• Matt Healy originally wrote two sets of lyrics for the song. One version was about the prison industrial complex, he explained to Billboard. The other "was about religious oppression on middle-American youth." Healy cut up the two versions and made one song out of it.
• Phoebe Bridgers described the song to The Forty Five as a duet where the duet partners don't want to have sex with each other. "It's a love song of two lonely people," she said.