The Gospel According to the Pink Pony Club

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. If your household is anything like mine, there is a song that inevitably seems to be playing at some point during the day: Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan. Given that her songs often explore themes of same-sex relationships and queer identity, along with her openness about leaving her Christian upbringing, she is not exactly the favorite artist of many Christians in America… which is a shame. Because not only is her music banging, it explores themes that deeply resonate with the heart of Jesus’s teachings. Well, some of it does. So, this week, I’d like to break the myth that Chappell Roan is not for Christians and even try to explore what the Gospel according to Pink Pony Club might look like. At the heart of the opening of Pink Pony Club is Chappell Roan’s struggle between her inner sense of identity and the repressive nature of her Southern Christian upbringing. She hears about cities like Los Angeles and Santa Monica and the idea that there are places where you can be who you truly are every single day seems almost magical. The Pink Pony Club is emblematic of that place where, in her words, “boys and girls can all be queens every single day.” Even the sexuality of the song, the line about “lovers in the bathroom” is not truly just about unbridled sexuality, but is referring to the way that bathrooms and other public spaces became the only way queer people could connect and find community because it simply was not safe to find sexual relationships anywhere else. So, what does all of this have to do with Christianity and the Gospel? Well, one of the several fundamental claims of Jesus was that “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Sin is what binds you, it is related to choices and behaviors that twist and warp your true identity. Sin is inherently isolating because it breaks down love of God and love of neighbor. When Christianity builds repressive cultures and systems that keep people from being who God created them to be, it builds systems of sin that hurt, demean, and destroy. It builds places where the only safe love can be found in a secret tryst in a bathroom stall—instead love that is out in the open, bold, proud, committed and free. The Pink Pony Club this place where “boys and girls can all be queens every single day” is perhaps what the church actually should be like. In fact, this was what made the church so distasteful to first-century Greco-Roman Society. In early Christian congregations, men and women, slave and free, Jew and Greek, all were equal and had a full place and claim in the life of the church. This was contrary to everything about the highly stratified nature of society at the time. And if the church could recover that sense of safety and home, a place where queer people could be who God created them to be without shame or fear, then the church would once more be the emblem of freedom that it was for so many marginalized communities in the first century. Then people wouldn’t be forced into secretive places to find furtive experiences of love and connection because their love would be honored and celebrated as revealing God’s unbridled love for us. And then, I think, we would all dance and our dance would join the constant self-giving dance of love that is the Holy Trinity, a constant giving of love between the three persons of the godhead that is so intense we confess that they are simultaneously three persons and one being of complete love. Pink Pony Club… God… the Church… a place where boys and girls can all be queens every single day. That’s the church I want to build. Perhaps you’ll come and help me. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.