Kathie Lee Gifford recently spoke to Fox News Digital about her faith and reliance on Jesus. She made a distinction, however, between what she called “religion” and her faith. “I can’t stand religion. Religion puts people in chains,” she said. “And Jesus comes to set us free.” She declared the difference as finding “someplace and sit in the same pew week after week after week and hear the same stuff that doesn’t change your life at all” and choosing to “walk with a living creator of all things who loves you and has a plan for your life…” “That’s the only thing I’m interested in,” she concluded.

Without her faith in Jesus, however, “I could have never made it,” she stated. “I’d be in an insane asylum without Jesus. I’ve been through a lot of crappy stuff in my life. I’ve been blessed beyond belief as well. But I’ve had a lot of things that ended up being very public too, that would have put me away for a long time and done a lot of damage to my family, to my everything,” she said. Gifford faced very public exposure when her husband, Frank Gifford, was revealed to have had an affair with a former flight attendant. Years after the revelation, Gifford stated she chose to forgive Frank rather than divorce him. “I could have let the seed germinate but I don’t want to be that person, that bitter, angry, unhappy, miserable human being ’cause you know what you end up doing? You end up making everybody around you every bit as miserable. I have always felt from my earliest youth that I had the choice every day of my life to be a blessing or a burden and I want to be a blessing,” she said. The pair remained married until Frank’s death in 2015.

Gifford has often been critical of “religion,” telling The Christian Post in March, “The Church, to me, has never been a building. The word is ‘ecclesia’ in Greek and it really means ‘movement,’ a movement of God. That can happen in a building on a Sunday morning. It can happen in a synagogue on a Saturday morning. It can happen when you’re walking in the park, it should happen everywhere. The Bible says in Him we live and move and have our very being. That’s thrilling to me.” In July, she told TODAY she didn’t want to raise “religious” children because, “I don’t like religion,” she said. “I don’t want to go visit ‘God’ someplace once a week. I don’t want to do that. I want to teach my children that in Jesus and in the Holy Spirit, we live and move and have our very being every moment of our day.”