I Let Go of My Faith When I Came Out—But I Still Believe in Jennifer Knapp

What was I getting out shame, anyway? So I walked away from it all: going to church, reading scripture, prayer, even the Christian music I loved so much.

At the turn of the millennium, there was no Christian rock singer more critically acclaimed than Jennifer Knapp, no one whose star was more on the rise. No one whose gold-certified albums had her opening for fellow Christian rock stars and playing Lillith Fair. She released three albums between 1998 and 2001, back-to-back, and then, at the height of her success, just as she was poised to reach megastardom—she quit. Moved to Australia. Went off the grid.

Rumors swirled. The most persistent one? She was a lesbian. And was sick of hiding it.

The year Jennifer Knapp quit Christian music, I was fourteen years old, devoutly Christian, and decidedly not out to myself. It was 2001 and I was on the brink of starting high school. We had moved to a new state when I started middle school and I’d spent most of my time as the new kid trying to join friend groups only to get kicked out of them. I had a propensity for a certain intensity in friendship that other girls didn’t like. So I found solace and belonging elsewhere: with books in the school library and with God at church.

The move to Wisconsin in 1999, in particular, catalyzed and radicalized my faith. It uprooted my family from our support system and pushed me further toward the evangelical idea of God’s presence in my everyday life.

Knapp’s debut album, Kansas, opens with a prelude, “Faithful to Me,” in which the speaker sings directly to God: And reaching out my weary hand / I pray that you’ll understand / you’re the only one who’s faithful to me.

A perfect articulation of how I felt about God, from a tender age. Philippians 4:4-6 says, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Like other fundamentalists who interpret the Bible literally, I took this to heart.

When my eighth-grade art teacher massaged my shoulders, when the boys at youth group tackled me in a field and pinned me beneath them, when my dad yelled at my mom and pushed her against a wall: Present your requests to God, and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your heart and mind.

You’re the only one who’s faithful to me.

*

I found my peace in books and in music. In “Visions,” Jennifer Knapp sang about, the peace that passes all understanding in a world crazed with fear. I listened to that song, and her entire debut album Kansas, obsessively. I had seen her in concert twice—once in Waterloo, Iowa, when she opened for Audio Adrenaline; again in St. Paul, Minnesota, a few years later, when she toured alongside Christian megastars Third Day.

“You got to see Jennifer Knapp before she quit? LUCKY!” said the other girls in youth group at my evangelical, non-denominational church.

Stylistically, Knapp drew comparisons to The Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge. Her voice was deep and raspy, markedly different than the tone set for female Christian singers by early successes like Amy Grant or girl group Point of Grace. Though the late 1990s and early 2000s saw a boom in Christian worship music, Knapp’s music was its antithesis, tackling knotty theological problems around doubt and Calvinist depravity—Create in me a clean heart, O God / Renew a steadfast spirit within me / To my prayers you’ve always given heed—backed by her stripped down guitar that would have been more at home on an Ani DiFranco record than Christian radio.

The difference, of course, was that, though I loved Melissa Etheridge and The Indigo Girls growing up, courtesy of my father’s eclectic music collection, neither of them sang music that really spoke to the doubts I carried within me: the knowledge of my own jealousy over my female friends’ other friendships, of how I looked at women on the street.

The idea that I could be gay never took hold. It was excessive sin, not sexual orientation, the kind of sin that was with you every day, that never got better. The sins I continually laid at God’s feet were proof of my innate depravity.

Well it’s time to get down on my knees and pray / Lord, undo me / put away my flesh and bone, til you own / the Spirit through me, Knapp sings in “Undo Me.” I felt that to my core: I needed to be undone, and Christ was the only one who could do it. And my favorite singer was the only one who really understood it, who knew what I was going through.

I abdicated my desire—my own consciousness of my body—for as long as I could. I threw myself at the altar of God (and the evangelical cult of sexual purity) in an effort to do it right, to conform myself in Christ’s image. For someone like me, who wrestled with desire (and having the right kind of desire), the church’s messages about the dangers of the flesh were particularly relevant. To connect the spirit with my flesh was to be deeply aware of what my flesh wanted: which was women. So I spent years dissociated from my body, happily spiritual, pursuing God and ignoring myself.

The idea that I could be gay never took hold. It was excessive sin, not sexual orientation, the kind of sin that was with you every day, that never got better.

I married a man. I was a virgin on my wedding night. “How did you wait?” other Christian friends asked me. “Wasn’t it hard?” I took pride in the fact that it wasn’t. But, of course it wasn’t.

In 2010, the year I got engaged, Jennifer Knapp came out as a lesbian. She returned to the United States, and to music—albeit not to the Christian music industry. She wrote a memoir, she went on Larry King, she gave prominent interviews to The Advocate and Christianity Today. She went on tour. She released more albums: not as big, but perhaps more honest. And she was still a Christian, she said. She started Inside Out, an organization for LGBTQ+ Christians.

Her first secular album, Letting Go, was primarily about her coming out. The subtext about the Christian church was clear on “Fallen,” the debut single, which opens, unapologetically:

Even though they say we have fallen, / doesn’t mean that I won’t do it twice / Given every second chance, I’d choose again / to be with you tonight

My marriage fell apart soon after it began, when my union forced the spirit and the flesh together, when the disunion of them became intolerable. Leaving my husband was far easier, however, than leaving the church. I didn’t want to leave the church: I wanted to have it all. Jesus was the most formative, definitive relationship of my life. I had been with him since I was four years old.

I talked to Jesus, prayed to Jesus, wrote to Jesus in my journal almost every day of my life, from the time I was a young child until the age of twenty-five. That’s two decades of a deep, intimate knowledge of a Creator’s involvement in my daily life, of my own relationship with him, of my understanding of myself and my own worth being rooted, firmly, in being chosen as one of his children.

That identity crumbled, gradually, like sand. My queerness was too great a weight, a pressure, to put upon my faith. Jesus doesn’t say much about queerness, it’s true. He says a lot about divorce, and, more broadly, the New Testament says a lot about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, about a refusal to accept the help of Jesus, about declaring that a situation in our lives is too great for Jesus to heal. During my divorce and coming out, I rejected so many of Christ’s teachings that to sit in a pew on Sunday morning felt like I was awash in hypocrisy.

I took those teachings at their word, and my failure to live in accordance with them as proof of my own rejection of that life. What was I getting out of this shame, anyway? So I walked away from it all, slowly: going to church, reading scripture, prayer, even the Christian music that I loved so much.

For years, Jennifer Knapp didn’t play her old Christian music when on tour, even though she said she maintained her faith. But eventually, she started adding one song from her debut album to her sets: “Martyrs & Thieves.”

I can’t remember where I was when I read that Knapp had started playing that song on tour. I was still living in Boston. I don’t know if I was in a coffeeshop in Harvard Square or at my girlfriend’s apartment in Union. What I do remember is that I burst into tears. This song, she kept. Maybe I could keep it, too.

“Martyrs & Thieves” is one of my favorites. It’s stripped down, quiet, just her and her guitar. And listening to it, that day, I heard it as if for the first time, picking up on lines like the last verse, which starts, I’ve never been much for the baring of soul in the presence of any man.

It felt so distinctly queer. It was faithful, of course. But the song was about living an honest life and leaving shame behind:

So turn on the light and reveal all the glory / I am not afraid, / To bare all my weakness, knowing in meekness / I have a kingdom to gain

I sat there, a recently-out, recently-divorced, struggling-to-hang-onto-my-faith lesbian, as the words of a song I had loved since I was a child, words sung by my favorite, also-lesbian Christian singer, washed over me. And I sobbed. The kinds of tears that are healing.

Turn on the light and reveal all the glory / I am not afraid

That life feels like another life. Today, most of my friends are people I met after the divorce, after I left my faith, after I came out. They only know the me now. They know about her, about that past Jeanna, that old life of mine, but it is fathomless, foreign.

I can’t imagine you with a man, they say. I can’t imagine you as religious, they say. I can’t imagine you believing that shit.

This song, she kept. Maybe I could keep it, too.

The truth is that, in some ways, I miss my faith. Jennifer Knapp’s music remains my one link to that life, culturally; her early albums, the only Christian music I still listen to. She feels like an old friend, a lesbian elder I’ve known my entire life. In many ways, she is.

There isn’t a way to be a cultural Christian, in part because of how Christianity and its rituals are so predicated on the exclusivity of belief, on the singular insistence of Jesus’ godhood. There’s a reason that ex-fundamentalists and evangelicals tend to leave the church for good, struggling to find homes in other more mainline, liberal denominations that are more flexible with their interpretations of scripture.

Our brains are hardwired a particular way. The solution is just to leave. Intellectually, I could read scripture in a more flexible way, but at the end of the day, I am—as my friend Alana would say—simply too orthodox to be a Christian.

Still, I try to not get too entrenched, too fundamentalist, as it were, in my apostasy. As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.” So, I stay open. I listen to Jennifer Knapp. I stare at the moon.

Turn on the light and reveal all the glory, I sing with her, I am not afraid.