Fun fact: Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Bible Student movement (which in turn birthed Jehovah’s Witnesses), professed, for a little while, a doctrine that identified the 144,000 members of the true church as “faithful and discreet slaves.” Over time, the honorific migrated to a few other groups within the church; in 2012, it was announced that the phrase applied to the Governing Body of elders who guide the Witnesses from their Brooklyn headquarters. The irony of becoming a slave so soon after breaking with Warner Bros. might have tickled Prince, who was introduced to the faith by legendary bassist Larry Graham over the course of several years. The Witnesses, like damn near every Christian sect, have a long legacy of racism, but these days boast a larger percentage of minority adherents than most anything else. Around this time, stories of Prince the proselytizer hit the music press: secondhand accounts of a slight millionaire (often in disguise), earnestly reading from the scriptures.

It would seem that his faith has had a profound centering effect; The Rainbow Children, for better and worse, is one of his most settled collections. Sure, it starts off a bit gonzo, with Prince, dropped to a subterranean pitch, intoning the tale of the Wise One and the Resistor over a soul-jazz groove. Eddie Gayle it ain’t, but the funk eventually asserts itself, along with an orchestral swirl scuttled by the mix. This is no “Temptation”: there’s no true sense of drama or angst. It approaches the blissfulness — if not the creativity — of a devotional Alice Coltrane cut. The predominant tone is of the Fender Rhodes, pooling like melted glass, sighing with the serenity of the saved. That doesn’t make this a boring document by any stretch — “Digital Garden” is a potted mystical history of the witnesses, relating the banishment of evil, approaching creative rights in a sideways manner, deploying some vintage guitar rev. “Family Name” is a fuzzed out epic, a technological meditation on race, history, and the politics of naming that makes room for a little fun. (If you want to access the network, you gotta clench those cheeks.) There’s also three references to names that sound intended to be… er, Jewish? A compelling — and ultimately, problematic — listen.

But it’s not just schooling he’s after, but testifying. “Everywhere” is skittering and ecstatic, an uptempo hymn with a killer horn chart and the familiar cadences of American Christian worship music. “Last December” is an elongated exhortation to spiritual unity; Graham’s here in support, as are a group of vocalists dubbed Milenia, but no one speaks truth to power quite like Prince’s fuzz solo. And because it wouldn’t be a Prince album without his getting his dander up, there’s “The Everlasting Now.” It’s a washed-out Minneapolis groove notable for a lyrical debt payment to Sly Stone and some stripper-and-rapper-shaming. After a beguiling solo in the Latin mode, he punches through the fourth wall (“U know, this is funky, but I wish he’d play like he used 2, old scragglyhead”). Then, the sound of a slap. “We want Prince,” the background chant goes; as far as he’s concerned, everything’s swell.