Sexvangelicals Newsletter 5/9: Coming Out in Evangelical Spaces, with Singer-Songwriter Adaline
Check out Adaline's newest album, Hymnal
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It was birthday weekend at the Jeremiah/Julia household. I turned 40 on Sunday.
And to celebrate, Julia, her parents (who have been in town the last few weeks), and I went to Efteling, which is the Dutch equivalent of Disneyworld.
Efteling celebrates the fairy tales, stories, and morality plays of Dutch culture, complete with some of the familiar stories—The Little Mermaid, Snow White, Cinderella—and some stories that I had never heard before.
Such as the story about the little red shoes that continued to dance even after removal from a child’s feet.
Or a story about a wise troll king.
Or a talking tree.
As I turn 40, I want to access my ability to play, to imagine, and to be creative. Visiting Efteling and walking through the animatronic retelling of these fairy tales (even the dark fairy tales) was a fantastic start to that goal.
Podcast Episodes
This week on Sexvangelicals, we’re thrilled to continue our conversation about coming out in Evangelical families with Canadian pop-artist Adaline.
Adaline is the founder of the nonprofit Bad Believer, which provides support and resources to queer folks who grew up in unsafe religious spaces. We talk with Adaline about her second album, Hymnal, which came out March 22:
“I was going through a really hard time of reconciling the spiritual, religious part of me with my queerness with my identity. And then, of course, when Bad Believer happened, I was having hundreds of conversations with people where themes would start to really emerge. Obviously everyone's journey is unique, but there were so many things that were the same, which I found a lot of comfort in.
It was comforting to know that a lot of the ways that I was speaking about myself and speaking about religion were being echoed in other people's voices.
So when it came time to make a new album, it would have really been impossible to not, right? Through Bad Believer and through my own journey and speaking to religious leaders and pastors, I started to advocate for LGBTQ people from religious spaces in finding healing and acceptance and love and calling people back to the kind of Christianity that is written about in scripture, and really just trying to find ways to connect, not throw arrows at each other, and really just find ways of healing forward.
So it just felt like I had to write about these themes, and the ones that came up were purity culture, everyone had experiences with purity culture.
There are a lot of people that were coming in that were either not yet out or had experiences of coming out. They were really traumatic and hard. So those experiences, feeling fatigued and exhausted by church communities, trying to save them, making them feel like there's something wrong with them, that family at Christmas giving unprompted, unboundaried conversations or nudges to save them from whatever their belief was, and the church to not be showing the kind of love that they preach.
And then finally for me and just in general, the importance of having support when you do come out and what it can feel like when church people show up to you in a really be show up for you in a really beautiful way.”
Check out Adaline’s music video for the song Brave.
Books That We’re Reading
Jeremiah’s Recommendations:
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. I have a friend who has a self-described shrine of Britney Spears. I'm not really into pop culture, so I thought it was fairly amusing. And then I Britney's memoir and understand why. #freebritney is a real thing.
The writing style is not great, and I'm curious what this memoir would look like if it were written five years from now with a bit more healing and distance, which is why I gave it four stars rather than five. But given the shit that Britney's been through, I think she can get away with writing a sequential narrative with minimal personal reflections. Britney is the poster child for the intersection of Purity Culture and sexism in the larger American zeitgeist, and I hope that she's continuing to get the help, healing, and space that she needs. 4 stars of 5. #freebritney.Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness by Andrew Scull. The three stars have nothing to do with the topic at the center of the expose. The field of psychiatry has morphed into an enterprise that skirts the scientific process in the name of capitalistic profits, courtesy of pharmaceutical companies (which Scull does a lot to mention) and insurance companies (which Scull refers to but doesn't mention as much).
The three stars are more about the style of writing; the bibliography at the end is fairly intense, but Scull doesn't often refer to them in his prose, instead relying on metaphors and hyperbolic axioms to prove his point.
Important read nonetheless. 3 of 5 stars.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia