The Queering of Contemporary Christian Music: 8 Big Names to Know

LGBTQ+ Artists and Allies in CCM

Writing for Vice, Josiah Hesse argues that Christian music today needs LGBTQ+ musicians if they want to relate to Gen Z in any meaningful way. He quotes Jennifer Knapp saying that “CCM has mostly given up on artistry. It’s just praise and worship music now” and “There are evangelical queer musicians in those worship bands, living double lives, but that market won’t sign an out person until they’re a financial competition. They have the right to have their own type of quality control for Christianity, but at that point, it’s not a genre that’s supporting the diversity that Christianity has to offer.”

I agree. I noticed that since I was a teenager listening to Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), it was already changing when I was in my twenties, becoming more cookie cutter worship music and less the interesting, sometimes envelope-pushing, artistry I loved. I stopped listening to CCM when it got boring.

Maybe if I had known that there is a long history of LGBTQ+ artists in CCM, I would have been more interested, but I had no idea they existed when I was growing up.

Marsha Stevens-Pino

One of my favourite songs of all time is “For Those Tears I Died” by Marsha Stevens-Pino. I only learned her story a few years ago.

Stevens-Pino is credited as the mother of Contemporary Christian Music. She and her band Children of the Day were hippies, Jesus People, the original progressive Christians in the 1970s.

When Stevens-Pino came out as a lesbian in the 1980s, Christians tore the pages with her songs out of their songbooks and her record company tried to hold back her royalties. To this day, the Christian music industry ignores her ministry with Metropolitan Community Churches, acting as if she doesn’t exist.

Yet, she continues to minister to those the wider church ignores.

Avalon

Avalon was a CCM quartet from Nashville, Tennessee. Their biggest hit was “Testify to Love”, which was later covered by Wynonna Judd.

In 2003, founding member Michael Passons’ Avalon bandmates kicked him out of the massively popular Christian singing group and no one outside knew why for years. It wasn’t until 2020 that Passons told the whole story: they forced him to go to reparative or conversion therapy and, when that didn’t work, they booted him from the band for being gay.

Ray Boltz

Ray Boltz was a big name in Christian music when I was growing up. His song “Thank You (for giving to the Lord)” was one of the most played at retirements and funerals and the like. It never fails to make me cry.

His music was a formative part of my teenage years. When he came out as gay in 2008, some Christians “felt betrayed” and called him “apostate.” I didn’t know why he vanished from CCM until several years later.

Jennifer Knapp

In 2010, when Jennifer Knapp came out as a lesbian, things weren’t much better. People said hateful things about her and the Christian music industry shunned her.

“Knapp positions herself as the martyr,” wrote The Gospel Coalition, “facing condemnation for her beliefs, though it is she who advocates views that directly contradict the testimony and witness of Christians for the past two thousand years … Knapp’s point of view appears to be liberating and compassionate. It’s actually condemning and dismissive.”

However, Knapp says that she “wasn’t closeted during her years at the forefront of CCM and that she didn’t leave because she was gay. She said that she disagreed with a range of ideologies of that world and found she couldn’t write the songs she wanted to within the genre’s corporate propaganda machine.” — Vice

I hadn’t listened to her music much before, and I can’t remember when I heard that she had come out. She was mentioned only in hushed whispers in my recollection.

Jars of Clay

When Dan Haseltine, lead singer of Jars of Clay, tweeted about same-sex marriage in 2014, he was trying to understand why so many Christians were so aggressively against marriage equality, since he couldn’t see why it affected them. He received a lot of backlash, along with some thoughtful conversation, and “so many great messages from gay Christians.”

“Not meaning to stir things up BUT… Is there a non-speculative or non ‘slippery slope’ reason why gays shouldn’t marry? I don’t hear one.”

I just don’t see a negative effect to allowing gay marriage. No societal breakdown, no war on traditional marriage. ?? Anyone?

Michael Brown wrote in the Christian Post at the time of the “Shattering of Jars of Clay” and said, “It is for reasons like this that we have been sounding the alarm these last 10 years.” Christian radio stations started pulling Jars of Clay songs from their rotations.

Haseltine hadn’t even stated support for same-sex marriage, let alone “came out” as anything. He only asked some questions. They still wanted to run him out of town for it.

Trey Pearson

Trey Pearson came out as gay in 2016, and his band Everyday Sunday were scheduled to perform at Christian festival Joshua Fest later that year until festival workers threatened to walk out and fans started asking for refunds.

Eventually, [Joshua Fest owner Aaron] Diello decided to give in to the dissenters and push Pearson and his band off the ticket, even though Everyday Sunday had performed at the festival almost every year for the past decade.

“I was hurt,” he admitted. “I felt like I was powerless in the situation — like I was just punched in the gut. I was forced to let down a friend, someone that I really wanted to just love and support, the way Jesus tells us to. I was being denied that opportunity, at my own festival. It was a horrible situation.”

But then, just before the festival was due to start, popular Christian ska-punk band Five Iron Frenzy called Pearson and asked him to join them for their last song, which would close the event. So, Pearson got to be the first out gay Christian singer on a Christian festival stage after all.

DC Talk

When Kevin Max, the rock of “rap, rock, and soul” trio DC Talk, announced he is “exvangelical” in 2021, he was accused of renouncing Christ though he says he has always been “a believer”. While the group, made up of Michael Tait and Toby McKeehan, along with Max, had some anti-racist songs, they toed the Evangelical line on most issues.

When I was a teenager, I loved Tait and McKeehan, but I always felt like Max was a bit boring. Don’t get me wrong, I adored DC Talk, but Max was definitely my least favourite.

He is now my favourite of the group by far.

Semler

Then along came Grace Semler Baldridge, who performs as Semler. In 2021, the nonbinary singer’s album Preacher’s Kid, written during pandemic lockdown, hit the top of the iTunes Christian chart, shocking the Christian music world. Semler’s lyrics are unapologetically queer, covering “everything from the meaning of the gospel and activism, to what really happens in youth group.”

Semler had built their audience on YouTube and Tiktok, singing Christian music from a queer perspective. When they announced on Tiktok that they had an album in the works and pondered releasing it as CCM, listeners got excited. When Semler decided to go for it and put out a call on Tiktok for their followers to pre-order or pre-save the album on iTunes and Spotify, no one, least of all Semler, ever thought it would go as big as it did.

The album hit #1, a truly grassroots movement.

Where to now?

We’ve come a long way from the complete erasure of Marsha Stevens-Pino, Michael Passons, and Ray Boltz when they dared to come out while part of CCM. Hesse in the Vice article says, “Queer musicians say the industry is facing a spiritual crisis: Adapt to a new generation of listeners, or die.”

I believe the evangelical church as a whole is at this same impasse. The next renewal, the next outpouring of Holy Spirit is at hand. And once again, LGBTQ+ people will be at the vanguard of the revival.

In the Bible, the trumpet players and singers often led the armies into battle. Perhaps that is what these queer Christian music artists have been doing for us all along. Isn’t it time we follow them?

Esther learned to read when she was four years old, and began writing shortly thereafter. She is a queer Christian poet, crafting with words to create art and music.

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