RUADJAI

Did they have a problem with the song itself?? Or just the video... I feel like the song isn't that controversial. 

He couldn't as listened to the song in his car and got inspiration for the production as Leonard tells this in a Billboard interview and Madonna explains the idea I mentioned above for the video for Interview magazine. 

Madonna had the vision for this song's controversial video long before Pepsi released its cutesy dancing-in-the-streets version. She told Interview magazine: "Originally, when I recorded the song, I would play it over and over again, trying to get a visual sense of what sort of story or fantasy it evoked in me. I kept imagining this story about a girl who was madly in love with a black man, set in the South, with this forbidden interracial love affair. And the guy she's in love with sings in a choir. So she's obsessed with him and goes to church all the time. And then it turned into a bigger story, which was about racism and bigotry... Then Mary Lambert got involved as the director, and she came up with a story that incorporated more of the religious symbolism I originally wrote into the song."

 Madonna's original idea for the video was to have her and the black saint-figure shot in the back.

the video itself once so much controversy came with the launch. Several of his choir members quit and they Andre Crouch Choir was not welcomed in some churches for a while.  til the storm blew over.