i'd like to welcome my friend, David Henson, as a guest blogger here at Existential Punk. PLEASE give him a hearty welcome. i really enjoyed the insights he brings to this post!
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I'd like to tell you a little story. It's about a woman who wrote and performed innovative Christian music, becoming arguably the most popular female Christian artist of her time. So successful was she that her songs were even used in hymnals and songbooks across the world.
But a few years after her success, she came out as a lesbian and was buried under a heap of criticism.
Sounds a bit familiar, right?
But this isn't the story of Jennifer Knapp, the popular Christian artist who came out this month as a lesbian. This is the story of Marsha Stevens, the woman who has been called the mother of Contemporary Christian Music. She began her career in the late 1960s and penned the popular song "For Those Tears I Died." But her revelation of her sexuality in 1979 exiled her from mainstream Christian music.
Yes, the woman who birthed CCM was a lesbian.
She was excoriated by the establishment and for two decades, according to the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, had her songs ripped from hymnals and mailed to her, a kind of sheet music shunning. Today, she continues to play music, albeit obscurely, for her Florida-based ministry BALM, or Born-Again Lesbian Music.
Sadly, this is a narrative that would resurface time and again in CCM. In fact, the industry's most major scandals seem loosely centered around female sexuality.
Amy Grant's divorce in 1999 sent shockwaves through the CCM world. Once again, Christian music's leading lady had run afoul of sexual norms and the industry made her pay the price. One can't help but wonder, however, if it wasn't her divorce that was so shocking, but that she planned to quickly remarry another man. Whatever the motivation, Christian radio stations took her songs off the air and a number of Christian retailers pulled her albums from their shelves. The darling of the CCM world had become its demon.
Now, Jennifer Knapp, the industry's former darling, has revealed she is a lesbian and in a committed relationship. CCM history is repeating, again, centered around the taboo of empowered female sexuality. No surprise then, that industry backlash again is forming. Already, Knapp has been awarded the dubious honor of a Timmy (the industry's mock awards doled out to the worst of CCM that year) and many Christians and former fans have abandoned her with remarkable vigor.
Knapp's story is more complicated, however, because she has come out on her own terms and is releasing her album on her own terms, outside the power halls of the patriarchal CCM industry. (Other bloggers have commented about Christian reaction, so I'll leave it to folks like Scot McKnight, Chad Holtz and Jonathan Brink to discuss points of theology and culture). Circumventing the CCM industry has already proved possible with people like Derek Webb, formerly of Caedmon's Call, whose new album criticizes conservative Christian response to gays and lesbians.
But I don't think the response here, at least when viewed historically, is primarily about what the CCM and its audience would consider "sexual sin." It's not about sexual identity. It is about women who dare to challenge men at the most fundamental level, sexuality. It is about women bold enough to own their sexuality. In the CCM world, it is enough to be stoned in public eye.
Men are not held to the same standard. For example, when well-known Christian recording artist Michael English and Marabeth Jordan, the married singer of another Christian group, had an affair and Jordan got pregnant, English suffered minimal fallout by comparison. Instead of being exiled, his affair was cast as a lesson of the all-too-real temptations that Christian artist face. Notice, his affair was cast as succumbing to temptation, the temptation of a woman, the temptation of Eve, the ultimate seductress.
Instead of pulling the albums from sales, his records flew off the shelves! And a station that tried to moralistically ban his songs were subject to the angry calls of fans demanding they be played again. And they were.
English even tried to return his Dove Awards (Christian version of the Grammy's). They were sent back, with the explanation that he earned him. What he never received back in the mail, though, were the songs he wrote that were used in hymnals and songbooks around the country. Barely two years after the affair, he was back in the folds of the CCM world, producing awarding-winning gospel albums with The Martins and performing with the renowned Gaithers.
If that wasn't enough, after English did all this, he became addicted to painkillers, convicted on drug charges, accused of abusing a girlfriend and even began dating a stripper, in 2000, the CCM industry tried to relaunch his career!
What of Marabeth Jordan, rising CCM star with whom English had the affair? She never got a second, third, or fourth chance at a career. She only had a miscarriage.
Even the male stars of the Christian music industry who have come out have faired better, comparatively, to the women. Ray Boltz, Tonex and Azariah Southworth garnered attention, but quickly faded. None were as controversial as Knapp, or even Grant.
So this is the scandal of Jennifer Knapp, Amy Grant and Marsha Stevens and of CCM. It is not about their so-called sins. Rather it is about them standing up as empowered females to the patriarchy endemic in conservative Christianity. It is about three women who refused to know their place because they knew exactly who they were.
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David Henson is a stay-at-home dad, self-consciously heretical blogger and a really bad Episcopalian who wants to be a priest. He also used to work at a Contemporary Christian Music radio station. Now he's ashamed of it. He blogs at unorthodoxology whenever his children nap at the same time.
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