Growing up closeted while attending an evangelical church in small town North Carolina, Matthew Blake found refuge in music – particularly the songs of the Christian musician turned pop star Amy Grant. When, years later, they began performing in drag, they took on the name Flamy Grant in honor of their hero.
“Writing songs in Flamy’s voice opened up a new world to me,” Blake recalls. “I could say things I didn’t know how to say before.”
Now, Flamy has earned a No 1 hit on the iTunes Christian music chart – thanks in part to a prominent evangelical provocateur.
Sean Feucht, a failed Republican congressional candidate and one of Trump’s most powerful evangelical allies, called Flamy’s collaboration with a Christian rock star a harbinger of “the last days”. He probably didn’t mean for his remarks to make the drag queen a superstar – but that’s exactly what they did.
Shortly after telling Flamy Grant “hardly anyone listens or cares what you do”, Feucht accidentally inspired the growing movement of “exvangelicals” – those who have left the Christian right – whose love for Grant’s music (and disdain for Maga persecution of drag performers) drove their album and song to the No 1 spot.
The rising phenomenon of Flamy Grant and other exvangelical musicians is not only driven by the backlash to the Christian right, but exists within a tradition of queer Christian songwriters wrestling against their industry’s institutionalized homophobia. “I’ve been called groomer and pedophile a lot,” says Flamy Grant of the harassment they’ve faced following their chart success – the album, Bible Belt Baby, hit No 1 on 27 July and remained there for nine days.
Grant’s star was already on the rise when Feucht, a failed Republican congressional candidate and one of Trump’s most powerful evangelical allies, tweeted about the drag queen. A marketing whiz of the Christian right, Feucht hosted large gatherings of Christian worshipers during the Covid lockdown, successfully galvanizing audiences around perceived threats to their religious freedom, from critical race theory to Covid restrictions.
This tactic boomeranged last week when Feucht’s attacks on Flamy Grant had a similar effect on the drag queen’s fans, who flooded iTunes and purchased the album and the song Good Day, a combination queer anthem and Christian worship song.
For generations, contemporary Christian music (CCM) was an isolated corner of the music industry that expected its performers to remain on the right side of the culture wars (with mixed results). But thanks to shifts in how music charts are calculated, along with a movement of confessional songs from those scarred by evangelical childhoods and questioning such teachings (whose work is still categorized as “Christian music” on iTunes), the entire genre is being turned on its head.
“There are a lot of people in Christian music who want this,” says Grant’s collaborator, Derek Webb, former songwriter for the popular Christian rock band Caedmon’s Call, speaking of LGBTQ+ acceptance in Christian music. “But no one wants to be the first to take that step. What would be suicide for one person could be a revolution for those who follow.”
Webb was part of a wave of 90s Christian rock stars – including Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan and DC Talk’s Kevin Max – who became disillusioned with the rightwing culture of CCM and began writing songs questioning that institution, going through a process commonly referred to in the exvangelical world as “deconstruction”, wherein a Christian unpacks the political, cultural and theological rhetoric they’ve been fed throughout their lives and discards what doesn’t ring true any more (which, for some, is all of it).
Webb appreciates the term for fueling this movement but fears that it’s been weaponized by the right to the point of being meaningless. When Feucht attacked Flamy Grant’s collaboration with Derek Webb – with Webb dressing in drag in his music video – he tweeted:
If you're wondering the end goal of the deconstruction movement in the church, then look no further than former worship leader @derekwebb's new collab with a drag queen.
— Sean Feucht (@seanfeucht) July 26, 2023
These are truly the last days. https://t.co/sgvzGFoRgu
None of this was new to Matthew Blake.
A maternal figure like Grant – a kind of Cher or Dolly Parton to young queer Christians like Blake throughout the 80s and 90s – became essential when Blake, like so many questioning Christians of their time, enrolled in Exodus International, an ex-gay, “conversion therapy” program that has since shut down and been disavowed by its founders. Blake was working as a worship band leader at a megachurch in Reno at the time, and was trying to shed the queer impulses that had been with them since grade school.
“I definitely considered ending my life,” Blake recalls. (Data shows that conversion therapy leads to higher rates of depression and suicide). “Thank God for music, because if I didn’t have those creative outlets I don’t know where I’d be.”
After five years with Exodus failed to turn Blake straight, they eventually embraced their sexuality, began attending a progressive church in San Diego, and launched a podcast that laid bare their deconstruction experience. During the pandemic, Blake played music on an exvangelical livestream called Heathen Happy Hour, and one night decided to show up in drag under the moniker Flamy Grant.
Drag turned out to be the perfect medium to portray the deconstruction experience, where Flamy could organically blend dark humor, social outrage and wild theatrics fit for a megachurch. On their album Bible Belt Baby, they sing with the delicate yet powerful range of a worship band leader, while telling the story of a boy who wants to cross-dress as the Virgin Mary, followed by a feminist anthem set in the Old Testament, and a cover of Amy Grant’s Takes A Little Time.
Exvangelical audiences flocked to Flamy Grant almost instantly, leading to collaborations with the former 90s Christian rocker Jennifer Knapp, the queer exvangelical songwriter Semler (who also topped the iTunes Christian music charts the year before with Preacher’s Kid), and Derek Webb, with Grant appearing in his music video for Boys Will Be Girls.
Chrissy Stroop, trans author and one of the pioneers of the exvangelical movement, says all these artists “display an authentic expression that is lacking in what we typically think of as CCM, allowing themselves to ask real questions and not come away with the pat answers evangelical subculture demands. They also directly reject certain evangelical doctrines and explicitly include and affirm queer people.” Still, she notes, “while they may top the iTunes charts, they’re not going to be played on Christian radio stations, because evangelicals control those”.
Ever since the CCM industry was born in the early 70s – when a small group of ex-hippies began proselytizing through rock music – there have been queer Christian musicians hiding in plain sight.
Credited with writing the first CCM song, Marsha Stevens-Pino saw her career destroyed when she came out in 1979, inspiring her to form Born Again Lesbian Music (Balm) Ministries, one of the first of a growing network of queer Christians in need of a home.
Ray Boltz was an evangelical household name with his megachurch anthem Thank You, but he lost much of his conservative audience when he revealed he was gay. Yet Boltz continued writing Christian songs, albeit with new, provocative themes, like 2010’s Who Would Jesus Love?
Unlike outright mockery of faith by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’ “new atheism” movements, exvangelical songs (as well as memoirs, podcasts and stand up comedy) often bleed with raw vulnerability, sitting with the unanswered questions about the Bible and the evangelical experience, wrestling with doubt and longing, loneliness and persecution, not necessarily rejecting God but often inviting him to the table for a difficult conversation.
“I don’t think uncertainty is the enemy of faith,” says Webb, adding that a lot of the ministry of Jesus was a kind of deconstruction of Jewish laws of the time, not unlike what exvangelicals are up to today.
Questioning gender roles, sexuality, capitalism, sin and salvation doesn’t sit well with the Christian right, where biblical literalism and Christian nationalism answer most questions.
Embodying conservative principles (or at least not violating them) has been a prerequisite for any musician working in the CCM genre. But exvangelical songwriters can now simply click “Christian music” when categorizing their music on iTunes, and suddenly they’re in the game.
This has led to a fundamental revolution in the genre, dragging it into a new cultural and political sphere, and discovering a large audience has been waiting for it all along.
“The term ‘Christian’, when applied to anything but a person, is a marketing term,” says Webb. “Anyone can claim the category. My record, Flamy Grant’s, Semlers, they’re for Christians, and that’s why we categorize it that way. It’s like new life from the Phoenix ashes.”
• This article was amended on 13 August. An earlier version included an image of international poker player Derek Webb, not the musician of the same name.
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
