Evangelicalism, Drag, and Flamy Grant

For so many LGBTQ+ people—and for the parents who love them—the church has been a place of deep wounds rather than deep belonging. Too often, the message has been that to be loved by God, you first have to change who you are. So many have walked away from faith altogether, believing they had to choose between their spirituality and their authentic selves. But every once in a while, someone comes along who refuses that false choice. Instead of abandoning faith, they reclaim it. They reinterpret it. They reshape it into something expansive enough to hold their whole, beautiful selves—and in doing so, they create room for others to come home, too. Today In the Den, Sara talks with drag artist, songwriter, and musician Flamy Grant, whose bold blend of gospel, folk, country, and unapologetic queerness is challenging assumptions about who belongs in sacred spaces. They talk about reclaiming spirituality after harm, the healing power of music and drag, what it means to plant a stiletto in sacred space, navigating both praise and backlash, and why joy itself can be an act of resistance. Whether you've left religion behind, found your way back, or are still figuring out what you believe, this conversation is an invitation to imagine a faith that celebrates you exactly as you are.

Special Guest: Flamy Grant

Flamy Grant is a trailblazing drag queen and musician from Asheville, North Carolina with over 1.5 million streams on digital music platforms. Beautifully blending her Appalachian roots with drag artistry and musical excellence, Flamy has stormed stages from Los Angeles to London, from New York to the Netherlands, racking up over 1.5 million streams on digital music platforms. This powerhouse vocalist, intrepid songwriter, and shame-slaying drag queen serves up a therapeutic, theatrical experience that is fearless, flamboyant, and full of heart.

Links from the Show:

• Flamy on TikTok
• Flamy on IG
• Flamy on FB
• Flamy on Threads
• Flamy on YouTube
• Flamy on BlueSky
• Join Mama Dragons today

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons, a podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

So many LGBTQ+ people and the parents who love them, the church has been a place of deep wounds rather than deep belonging. Too often the message has been that to be loved by God, you have to change who you are. And so many have walked away from faith altogether believing that they had to choose between their spirituality and their authentic selves or their kids. But every once in a while, someone comes along who refuses that false choice. And instead of abandoning faith, they reclaim it. They reinterpret it and they reshape it into something expansive enough to hold the fullness and beauty of all of our authentic selves. And in doing so, they create room for others to come home to. And so today's guest is exactly that person. I am so excited that we get to hear from drag artist, songwriter and musician Flamy Grant, whose bold blend of gospel and folk and country and unapologetic queerness is challenging assumptions about who belongs in sacred spaces. A former worship leader turned award-winning recording artist, Flamy made history when her debut album, Bible Belt Baby became the first album by a drag performer to hit Number one on iTunes, Christian music charts. Then, in one of those moments that feels almost too unreal and poetic to script, her career exploded after a prominent conservative commentator with Turning Point USA attempted to mock her on social media for daring to make Christian music in drag. But instead of ending her career, the attack introduced millions of people to her music, fueled massive online support pouring in from across the country, and her album just shot up the charts. So what was intended as condemnation became one of the biggest boosts of her career. And it's a reminder that sometimes hate accidentally hands the microphone to the very people it's trying to silence. So we're going to talk today about reclaiming spirituality after harm, the healing power of music and drag, and why joy itself can be an act of resistance. Flamy Grant, welcome to In the Den. It is so great to have you with us.

FLAMY: Thanks, Sarah. It's so delightful to be here. I appreciate you having me on.

SARA: You are so welcome. I've been a fan. I've been following you for a while now, after I was introduced to you because of course your name was the immediate attraction with like well I know what that kind of music's gonna be like and as one young person who used to listen to Amy Grant it was just really lovely. So let's start with this obvious question: tell us about your drag name and how much of it is a love letter to Amy Grant? How did you decide that she was going to be something of the patriot saint of your drag persona?

FLAMY: Like most of my career, I kind of stumbled into it. I grew up very evangelical, in a very conservative family that was really strict on the type of media we were allowed to consume. Lots of us grew up in these types of families where, if you can't find it at your local Christian bookstore, then you can't consume it, right. So that was me. And the thing is though for me I loved it. I loved Christian music in the 90s when I was coming up.

SARA: What did you love about it?

FLAMY: I loved that we had such variety and choice within CCM. You know Christian music is like the weird genre that's not a style. It's more of a content descriptor than a descriptor of the style of music. So, if you turn on a classical station or a reggae station or an R&B station, you know what sounds you're gonna hear. But with Christian music, at least back then, we were a little spoiled for choice. And in fact, I feel like the industry itself was trying to cover all bases, right? So, you would walk into your Christian bookstore and you would see a whole row of CDs and on the little corner of the CD – or the cassette tape, if you go back far enough – it would say, it would have a band like Switch Foot. And then there'd be a little sticker on there, and it would say for fans of, I don't know, whatever equivalent band . . .

SARA: Whatever the secular equivalent was.

FLAMY: . . . secular version of Switch Foot was in the 90s. It's just a weird genre in that way, or at least it was. I feel like nowadays, Christian music has morphed into one pretty, it's one sound, which is worship music. You know, that just really cheesy worship music that I hate. But back then, we worked with a choice. And I loved a singer songwriter. I always have. I always will. That's what I do now. That's how I see myself first and foremost, is as a singer songwriter. And so we had all kinds of options back then. You know, my favorite bands were Caveman's Call and artists like Jennifer Napp and Margaret Becker and Nicole Nordiman and just people who wrote their own music. And they were just writing their story, right? They were doing what I do today which is you know, use music to tell stories about their own lived experiences. And, yeah, there was an understanding that it was all going to be kind of couched in a certain type of language or the themes of the music were going to be Christian in nature. You're always going to come back to Jesus as the answer by the bridge, right? But still, we had really talented, really great artists back then. And Amy Grant, of course, is the Queen of Christian Pop. And I loved her as much as the next person and still do. And so I stumbled into the name one night while I was watching Drag Race with my husband. We, I just turned to him and I was like, “Do you have a drag name? I don't have a drag name. I want to make one up.” And he was like, “Of course I do. My drag name is Amanda Do It.” And I just started kind of like, I was, you know, spit balling. I was like, “Well, what would my name be?” And I've always liked names that were puns on a real person. Chaka Convict, Delta Worker, those kinds of names. And I mean Amy was my diva. And the name just kind of stumbled out of my mouth. And Chris, my husband, gave me some guff for it. But he laughed and I was like, “Well, if he's laughing at it. . .” He had no context for the type of evangelicalism I grew up in. So I was like, if he can laugh about it, I know that there's a whole generation of church kids who would find that pretty funny. And I was not thinking anything of it at the time other than, “Well, that's cute and maybe I'll do something with it one day.” And so I went and reserved the handle on Instagram and you know, that's how it started.

SARA: So when you were growing up in your evangelical family, was music, were you performing? Were you writing songs with that always kind of something you were dabbling with?

FLAMY: Yeah, I wrote my first song when I was nine. Although I remember getting in trouble even when I was even younger for changing the words to some of the little Bible choruses as we would sing from church. I don't know what they were, but I remember one time I was singing a Bible chorus, but I changed the words to it. And my dad was like, “Why are you changing the words to that? That song's about Jesus, you shouldn't be . . .” I don't know why, but he treated it like it was scripture, like don't mess with it? And, so, yeah. So the inclination has always been there. And by the time I was in high school, I was really writing songs and performing them, mostly in the context of church or summer camp or the Christian school that I attended. But yeah, it's just been part of me for as long as I can remember. And I put out my first record as a solo artist in 2006, I think. I had just moved to San Diego, California, and it’s very much a DIY little record that I did with some friends. Even at that point though, I was like, I'm not going to call this a Christian record, or anything like that, even though a lot of the themes were there. I just wanted to be a singer songwriter, and kind of have been chasing that ever since.

SARA: When you took on the Flamy Grant persona, I read somewhere that when you started channeling that and writing as Flamy, what was the first song that you wrote as Flamy Grant?

FLAMY: I don't know if I remember. I don't know what the first one was but I do know that there was – like a point came when in pandemic when I had started kind of playing in drag and showing up to this live stream that my friends and I did. My housemates at the time were musicians and so the three of us, we would just do a little live stream every week the way a lot of artists were doing.

SARA: Nice.

FLAMY: So we would cover songs. we would just do themed nights every week where we would have, the theme tonight is Lady Gaga Songs. And we were just do a whole night of Gaga, or whatever. But I started showing up to those in drag and that was where I was getting a feel for what it was like to be a musician in drag. And so at some point in there, I started thinking, “Hey, I'm a songwriter. Why don't I put songs in Flamy's voice and see what that starts to feel like?” I wrote a handful of songs and talked to one of those housemates who was a music producer as well and was like, “Hey, Ben, would you want to produce a little EP?” I was thinking like five songs, very acoustic, very simple, you know? And I ran a little kickstarter for it and raised like $10 grand and it turned into a whole album. And then we were kind of off to the races at that point. At no point was there a plan for any of it. I never had a strategy. I never even thought that I would be able to do this as my job full time. It was just something fun. It was how I was getting my life at the time, because my day job wasn't doing it. And I've always found a way to make music on the side. So that's what I was doing with this too.

SARA: That's great. I want to back up to a little bit because I'm also curious to know – especially in light of your particular evangelical upbringing – what was your coming out like? What was your understanding of your own queerness? How did that evolve? And you're coming out story, because I also think that I read in an article that you went to Exodus International?

FLAMY: I did.

SARA: Yeah.

FLAMY: Yeah, gosh, the coming out story. People say that like, “What's your coming out story?” And almost no one I know has a story where they're like, “Oh, I came out on the date and then it was done.” You know, that's just not how it works, right?

SARA: No.

FLAMY: Like it's a whole lifelong journey of figuring these things out about ourselves. So, I knew by the time I was in fourth grade, I knew something was, I was not in sync with my peers, and especially other boys, other people who were being raised male. I didn't have a language for it probably until middle school. I think it was probably when I learned some of the words around, just like the word homosexual or lesbian or gay. And so by, I would say by middle school, I knew what it was. And I was like, “Oh, that's the thing that I think I have.” And it scared the – are we allowed to cuss on your podcast?

SARA: Only once.

FLAMY: I'll save it for later then.

SARA: Otherwise, we might have you bleep you out.

FLAMY: I might have a better reason to use it later – But you know, it scared the crap out of me. I was very fearful from childhood because of doctrines of hell and the pressure that's put on you as an evangelical to live up to this standard of living.

SARA: And was that really clear to you from a young age?

FLAMY: Oh, yeah.

SARA: That theology that homosexuality was openly spoken of being a sin and you would go to hell and like, because I know there's a softer version in the evangelical world, but we just don't talk about that.

FLAMY: Oh, no, no. I was not that version. We were the version where if it was brought up, like if I had ever asked about it, it would have been made very clear to me. But it was not addressed. We didn't talk about it. It wasn't a fire and brimstone, kind of church where they were preaching, railing against it from the pulpit. But it was for sure, it was very much a sin. And so for me, some of the first memories I have of realizing and recognizing were like when Ellen was coming out and how my mom was like, “Oh yeah, we're throwing this – we got the TV guide in the mail – she was like “We're throwing this issue away immediately!” the one that had Ellen on the cover. So there were those little signs and cues that were really easy to pick up. So I knew that it was going to cost me if I ever engaged with this thing in me. And so yeah, I tried to suppress it, run from it, hide from it, ignore it. Any way, I could not engage with it, I did. And that included, yeah, and kind of self-enrolling in Exodus conversion therapy at the age of, what, probably 20. I had spent a couple years at college, and I had moved back home. And in college was when I had come out to a couple of friends for the first time. But like, come out by saying, “I struggle with this. I struggle with same sex attraction.” I didn't call myself gay. I didn't say any of that. I was just like, “This is my struggle and I have to fix it.” And I left college largely because I was struggling with this. And you know, there was no place for me to do that on the Christian college campus I was on. And so yeah, moved to home, started going to Exodus meetings, went to their national conference one year up outside DC in Virginia and really followed that program for five years.

SARA: Wow.

FLAMY: And yeah, at the end of five years, nothing had changed, you know? If anything, I was like, “I'm still pretty gay.” And so that was when I started asking even deeper questions about, “What does it mean that I have been, in all sincerity and with my whole heart and my whole being, pursuing straightness as the ideal situation for me and it's not working? Like what does that mean? I know in my heart that I have given this my all. I have obeyed every rule to a T. I have followed this program that these people have handed to me.” It's not like a 12 step program, but there're definitely steps. It's like, “Reconnect with your same sex parent because the reason you're queer or – they would never use that word. They would say the reason you're homosexual – is because you have a deficit of love from your same sex parent.” I did these things. I reached out to my dad who I did have a terrible relationship with. And nothing was changing, nothing was getting fixed. So that was when at the age of, gosh how old was I? I guess 25 or so, I was like, “Okay well, what's really going on here?” And I kind of shifted from this position of pursuing straightness as the ideal to accepting that I was gay, but choosing, for the sake of my faith, to deny it. And just say, “Yeah, I'm gay, but I'm single and celibate. And I'm gonna do that for a while.” And I did for several years. And it really wasn't until I was 28, I think was when I was like, I've done the digging into the scripture, looked at it texturally, read a whole bunch of work from other people who had done this work. And I was like, “Oh, there's nothing here that's actually condemning this. And I've been lied to my life by evangelicals and my family and my church and my school. They've all lied to me and it's okay. I'm gonna be okay.” So that was when I started dating for the first time when I was 28.

SARA: So at that point did you walk away from faith and the church?

FLAMY: No. No. Faith walked away from me.

SARA: Faith walked away from you. Yeah.

FLAMY: Yeah. I got kicked out of the church I started. I had been at a church in San Diego for five years that I had helped to start. There were a team of four of us that moved down there to start this church. And they were my best friends. And it was during that time when I was really reckoning with everything. And so I was doing it publicly, not publicly, but openly within my community, right? So I was part of that church. I led music for that church, I did way more than just lead the music. I did all the communications. I did anything administrative for that church, it literally would not have gotten off the ground without me. And poured my heart and soul into the life of that community and I was authentic with them the whole time. They knew what I struggled with. They knew when I read some new article or some new thing or had some new insight because I would tell them that at small group. I'd be like, “Oh my gosh, you guys, look what I found.” And had weekly breakfast with the pastor who was my best friend. But in my mind, I felt like we were on that journey together, that church and I, and and towards the end I was really excited about “We're going to be an open and affirming church. We're going to be that.” I wasn't the only queer person attending that church either, like openly queer person. And I started, I held meetings. I started bridge building work where I was trying to reach out to San Diego's queer community, with our church, have people meet each other and get to know each other. And so by the end, I was like “Yeah, we're here. We're on the verge. This is gonna happen.” And that was when I was like, “Okay, I'm gonna start dating, y'all.” And once I crossed that specific line, once I was no longer committed to singleness and celibacy, that was when about half the people I would say including the pastors, who were my best friends, kind of showed their true colors. And they were like, “Actually no, you're not. At least you're not going to stay on leadership here if you're going to do that.” And so yeah. I stayed for seven more months, literally as an attendee, a butt in a seat of this church that I had been intimately involved in from day one, which was horrible, of course. I’m not a butt-in-a-seat person. I don't attend things. I make things. I've always been that person. And so it was miserable. And that was when I finally left that church and found open and affirming churches and got involved in them for years.

SARA: That's great.

FLAMY: Years and years.

SARA: And I think one of the most interesting and beautiful things about your discovery and story as Flamy Grant is that you, your music offers a kind of, maybe deconstruction and reconstruction of what is it like to, how to be a queer Christian. And I think that's a really beautiful thing because we hear so often it's such a dichotomy. It's such a queer people feel like they have to choose between being fully themselves in the church or faith, and that they can't be both.

FLAMY: Yeah.

SARA: And so what I love about your music and your story and as you tell your story, in a lot of your albums and concerts is that your really, your evidence of actually, No, that's not true.

FLAMY: Yeah.

SARA: What made you decide, as your music as Flamy was really coming forth? What is it about that? What made you decide to kind of live there and stay with that kind of very personal storytelling and stay in that kind of that lane of Christian music for a while?

FLAMY: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting how art gets received versus how it's intended, right? That's just a thing that every artist for all the time has always dealt with, I think. And I mean, I didn't decide anything. I was literally just writing my story into song. Music is how I have processed my journey, always, since I was nine years old. I discovered that I could say things in song that were really hard to say otherwise. I learned that by sitting down and not knowing what the end destination of a song was going to look like – I don't know how many verses there's going to be. I don't know what the melody is. I don't even know what the mood of this song is going to be – you just start writing and you find your way. And the finished product might be completely different from what you anticipated it could look like. Or you just learn things about yourself through that process. That's a beauty of, that's why we make art is we get to excavate parts of ourselves that haven't seen the light of day or have been stuffed away or whatever. And so there was no decision; it was just these are the songs. This is what I have to offer. This is what I've written over the past year. And now I'm going to record them and put them into a record, and I don't even know what that's going to look like when we're done. So I made these records and the first one in particular, Bible Belt Baby, I finished it and I was like I am going to put this in the Christian genre because, number one, let me be completely transparent and honestly, Semler had done this, right? Do you know who Semler is?

SARA: No but I saw that they're featured on one of your tracks.

FLAMY: Yeah, they are just an incredible artist, songwriter, genre-bending musician who is the first person who had a number one album on the Christian music charts as an out, queer person. That happened in 2021, I think, during pandemic.

SARA: Okay.

FLAMY: Or maybe 22. I can't remember. I discovered Semler on TikTok, I think, probably in pandemic. That's where I discovered most of the things that have influenced my life now. And we kind of became friendly online, and they actually wrote me into one of their songs. There's a song that has a line that goes, “There's a drag queen out in Tennessee who dedicates her act to Amy.”

SARA: Very cool.

FLAMY: And I didn't think it was me. I didn't think it was me because of the time I lived in California. And yeah, so I was like, “Oh, that's somebody else who's got an Amy Grant drag thing going on.” And then they told me, they’re like, “No, that's you. Tennessee was more poetic.” It was creative license. So I put it in the Christian genre because I had a road map from Semler. I saw somebody else do it. This out queer person who's writing about their spiritual journey, and they got a number one single out of it or a record out of it. And I was like, yeah, let's do that. Why not? Because that's what this album feels like to me. It feels like all of that stuff that I listened to in the 90s that I loved so much that impacted my life so much. So I put it in that genre. And nothing even happened right away. It was 10 months later that – you know you referenced the Sean Feucht moment. 

SARA: Yeah, let's talk about that because that's actually a part of your story I didn't know until . . .

FLAMY: Oh, really

SARA: . . . doing some research. No, I only I discovered you on Instagram. So this whole tweet – I still can't bring myself to call it “X” – so tell us, how did that come about?

FLAMY: I don't know how my stuff – well I do know how my stuff got in front of him probably. So as part of this whole journey, one of my little side quests, I think, has been kind of collecting all of my favorite songwriters like CCM musicians from my upbringing who are now in a place where they've been on their own journey, right? Especially in regards to theology and acceptance and affirming queer Christians and all of that, or affirming queer people, I mean.

SARA: I was surprised to learn that. There is a huge group of Christian musicians who've been on their own journey of deconstruction and lots of them queer. That was fascinating.

FLAMY: Yeah, Derek Webb is one of those for me. He was one of the lead singers of Caedmon’s Call, my favorite band in high school. And then I followed his solo career, have followed his solo career ever since. And yeah, so Derek and I, we became pals and Derek sang on my record. He invited me to sing on one of his songs. And then he had an album release show concert for his record. It was called the Jesus Hypothesis in ‘23 July, I think, of ‘23 and invited me to go out to Nashville to open that show for him. And of course, I was like, “Absolutely, I'm going to go open one of my musical heroes. I get to go do that.” It was wish fulfillment for me. So while we were there, Jennifer Knapp was there that day as well as was Tiffany Arbuckle Smith from Plumb – Plumb is her artist name. Both big deals in the 90s, 2000s Christian music scene. And so I'm a product of their music, right? Like all three of them, they're writing influenced me. And so I'm geeking out that night. And I'm like “We have to take a picture I want to picture with all of you.” So we took a picture. There's three iconic artists from CCM's glory days and then a drag queen. And I posted it. I think Tiffany or somebody posted, somebody else posted it. It made the rounds enough to where it got in front of Sean Feucht, I think.

SARA: I see. 

FLAMY: Yeah, and he then – I think that's probably how he became aware of me and decided he had to weigh in on my existence in his “industry”. He said it was the last days.

SARA: The last days, yes. He was apparently with the harbinger of the new apocalypse. But then, I mean the response was kind of extraordinary. And was there a moment when you sort of realized what was happening, that the train was moving beyond a place that you had imagined?

FLAMY: I'm really slow on the uptake with these things. Seriously, my friends will tell you I'm one of the most gullible people they know. I just don't, I'm just slow to recognize this stuff. So, Derek is the one who actually sent me that post. Sent me Sean Feucht's post. And he was like, “Do you know who this guy is? He's kind of a big deal in this MAGA world. And look at his follower account. He's got like a hundred thousand followers. You could really, you could work something here.” And I was like, “Okay. Sure, Derek.” So, I just wrote a little tweet back. And I said something like, “Last days. No, babe. We're just getting started.” And then he, Sean, actually wrote me back a second time and said, and I guess he must have looked at my follower count on Twitter at the time, which was nothing. It was like, I didn't engage in Twitter. I've never liked Twitter. And so he wrote back and he was like, “Well, it's a good thing that no one listens to you or cares what you do.” Which, come on, that's such a shady little low blow and also a challenge. And I'm a drag queen. I'm not going to let that just sit there. So, what I guess he probably didn't know is that I had had a lot of success in pandemic on TikTok. I had like a hundred thousand followers on TikTok. And so that's where I went next. I went to TikTok and I took screenshots and I told the whole story and I basically asked my followers, I was like, “Look, I've got a record that's already sitting there in the Christian genre. If all of us go to iTunes, and if you all go buy the song, Good Day, just focus on that one song, because that's a song that I had written as a worship leader for the church I had been involved in in San Diego. Let's all go buy the song. We can make it chart on iTunes Christian music charts, if enough of us do that.” And again, the only reason I had the instinct to do that was because I had seen Semler do it a year or two before. And it was this fun little point in the timeline where, it's still kind of this way. Like iTunes, buying MP3s, we don't do that. Nobody really goes and pays for an album and downloads the album. We all stream stuff now. But it's still there. iTunes still exists and they still have their own chart ranking. And that also still feeds into billboard charts, right? So there's still digital sales charts. So it's kind of this weird time where if you can motivate enough people to focus on that one platform – I shouldn't say this because it’s really impressive to people that a drag queen had a number one Christian charting album and song, right? – But it's not that hard. You don't have to have hundreds of thousands. You can just have thousands. And so that's what happened. Enough people went and bought the album and bought the single. And the next day, I was sitting there primpy at the top of the Christian charts on iTunes, which did end up translating to Billboard as well. I think it debuted at, I can't remember, it was number 18 or something on the digital sales chart on Billboard. So but just that alone was enough for every publication to run that story because that's clickbait heaven, right? They're like, “Drag queen at the top of Christian music? Publish that story immediately because we want the clicks!” And they ran with it and I mean it was, again, I didn't realize these things were leading anywhere or that they were gonna be so monumental. It enabled me to quit my day job.

SARA: And perform full time?

FLAMY: Yeah, and perform full time. And yeah, I remember there was a moment the day it happened – Well, really like right when the first, because we watched it climbing until we were sitting there in the morning watching, oh my gosh, we're at 18. Oh my gosh, we're at 7 – And when it finally hit number one, I looked at my husband and I was like, I started crying and I was like, “This is what the younger version of me always wanted. To be a charting Christian musician, that's all I ever wanted as a teenager.” And so it was this crazy back-door way, it's like the Bizarro Universe way of doing that, right? To give my younger self a gift that doesn't look anything like what I thought it would have, but it's still this thing that happened. And so I always say in shows, “How can I be anything but grateful to Sean Feucht for his bigotry because it gave me this career.”

SARA: You know, if there's anything we can do to resist, these small little things are both what's working and what's joyful in these moments.

FLAMY: Yeah.

SARA: You often talk about your music and your songwriting as not trying to deconstruct other people's faith but reconstruct your own. And I'm curious what have you discovered about your faith through your songwriting and this whole process? 

FLAMY: I think the biggest thing I've discovered about my faith is that I don't have faith. I don't like faith. I don't like the word belief. I don't like creeds. I don't like any of that stuff. It doesn't work for me and it never has. I was always checking boxes, right? I was always doing what I needed to do in order to be good and belong and not get kicked out of the places that mattered to me, right? That doesn't mean my spirituality wasn't sincere. It just means that I don't know that I ever believed in a literal resurrection. I don't know that I ever – well, I guess I did though. That's the thing. And this is maybe a little too semantical for some people, but just bear with me for a second. Like, the word belief, we have the word belief, and we have the word faith, because we can't call those things true. We can't.

SARA: Right.

FLAMY: Like, by definition, we can't, we can't know. You can't know with absolute certainty, and that's why we put this emphasis and this priority on faith. You have to believe that it's true and that's what unlocks the world of the kingdom, right? That's what unlocks it for you is when you believe in it. And I just never found that to be true for me. Belief wasn't the thing that gave me a spiritual fulfillment or moved me onward in my life. The things that have always moved me and made me feel whole and complete is practice. It's not belief. And if that works for someone else, great. But yeah, for me and my journey, that's not the thing. That's not it. And so I don't believe anymore. And I'm really intentional to tell my story this way, because I don't want to be mistaken for a believer. I don't want to be mistaken for a person of faith. I'm not. I'm not at all. But what I am is a person of practice. And then that looks a whole lot of different ways for me. I still consider myself a Christ-follower in the sense that the Christ archetype is a way of living that I think works really nicely and I think brings about a lot of good in the world, and makes me feel whole, and makes me feel like I'm doing it right. You know? So yeah, thanks for letting me do that whole little verbal acrobatics. But yeah, it's not about faith or belief for me anymore. It was. It was for a really long time.

SARA: I think it's really helpful for people to hear and to hear from somebody else too. . . 

FLAMY: Yeah.

SARA: . . . who’s also been in a similar journey. As you're talking, I'm thinking about, I didn't feel like all that long ago when you shared on your socials, rewritten lyrics to the long old hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”.

FLAMY: Oh, no, that was Bishop. I did, “Be Thou My Vision”.

SARA: “Be Thou My Vision,” OK, thank you. Very close. But, and still, a hymn that is, in across denominations. It’s probably in everybody's hymnal.

FLAMY: Yeah, absolutely.

SARA: So I listened to it and what I really appreciated in your introduction to it was that basically you made out this whole other theology.

FLAMY: Did I?

SARA: You did! And I thought, “This is amazing. It doesn't have to be about the god out there. It's about your own heart and self and listening and turning inward and know that there's just as much guidance and support there.”

FLAMY: Yeah.

SARA: As, you know, evangelical Christianity would say you have to find outside of yourself.

FLAMY: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a big pivot, a big shift over the course of my lifetime because, yeah, so much of the way of doing evangelical faith or spirituality is vertical. It's externally focused. Like you really can be an evangelical and just say that you believe. That's all you have to do. And you don't actually have to live a life that aligns with the life that Christ lived, right? You don't have to. You don't have to do that work. And it's so easy in some ways to be an evangelical as long as you can keep your worlds separate, right? Yeah. It was a pivot that took time, but once I realized what it was, and once I was able to put names to these things, and use all – fix my language around this stuff, I was like, Oh, like the word intuition to me means so much more than God even. And there's so many ways we talk about Holy Spirit. When other people say the word Holy Spirit, my brain is just kind of automatically substituting intuition. And we're talking about the same thing, divine spark, like the gifts of the divine that make us human, that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. All that stuff that we love to talk about. Yes, so much of it really is just like, let me swap out some words, but also let me just look at this from a different perspective and just as one option, right? There's so many ways to sing “Be Thou My Vision”. And anybody could go rewrite those lyrics in a whole variety of different ways.

SARA: And so many have, right? 

FLAMY: And I just chose to like, well, this is my prison right? I'm gonna use this word intuition and I'm gonna make this whole song that was very much about be thou my vision, God, help me see God and turn it inward. And be like, my inner knowing, my intuition, that divine gift, that's the thing that I'm going to make the song about today. And it's something, I mean, I've rewrote that years ago, or rewriting it, years ago for, again, the church I was involved in in San Diego. And it was the QCF, Q Christian Fellowship, right, that invited me to participate in their Pride programming this month by offering some sort of song or something. And that's the one that came to mind for me. And so I pulled it out the old lyrics, I mean, my old lyrics that I had rewritten years ago. And I looked at it and I was, you know what, I've evolved even more. Let me rework these lyrics even further now. And so that's what I recorded that you saw this past month.

SARA: Aw, that’s great. You were rewriting yourself.

FLAMY: I was rewriting my own rewrite.

SARA: That’s great.

FLAMY: Yeah.

SARA: To me, that is the best part of me constructing religion, faith, for people, is that understanding that you can rewrite it.

FLAMY: Yeah.

SARA: We all evolve. We change. Our thinking, our faith, our belief system can change with us.

FLAMY: Right? Which, I mean, I'm just kind of internally giggling how we started this conversation, talking about my dad yelling at me for rewriting, like the words to the B-I-B-L-E, or whatever it was. You know, because that's what I do now, basically professionally, for listening but also for me. I do it for me and because that is what moves me forward and keeps me hopeful about the world. And yeah.

SARA: So has Amy Grant ever reached out?

FLAMY: She has not, but I am in her – I'm connected to some people in her orbit. And I'm hopeful that there will be a time in not too distant future where I'll get to meet her finally.

SARA: That would be a beautiful concert. If she invited Flamy to open for her tomorrow. . .

FLAMY: Oh my god. Can you imagine? 

SARA: What’s the first song you think you'd play?

FLAMY: That's a really good question. I don't think it would be one of the ones that I typically open with because the ones I open with now are very much the songs that introduce me to an audience as a drag queen musician. I'm trying to bring people in really quickly and immediately into my world at a show, people who've never encountered me or don't know what I'm about. It's like let me introduce you. But I think in that instance, I would want to do something a little softer. A little more in-line gentle, in-line with how she, how she always. . .

SARA: Yeah.

FLAMY: She's just always been one of the most patient, gentle artists, long suffering, I think, describes Amy really well. She's never been someone who's lashed back out at all of the negativity she's received from the world.

SARA: Right.

FLAMY: Which is one of the things I really just admire about her so much. She's been through so much. You know, she was the first victim of cancel-culture in so many ways. Evangelicals just had a field day when she divorced her first husband and went secular or went mainstream pop, people were just – they lost their minds and treated her so badly. And she just was nothing if not full of grace.

SARA: Yes, yes, she was. What's it like to play in so many churches? You play a lot of churches.

FLAMY: I do, I do.

SARA: And some surprising ones. I mean, I think I've seen videos from, like, Flamy at the Baptist Church. I thought, well, that's when I wouldn't have thought of.

FLAMY: Me neither.

SARA: What's that like for you? I mean, on the one hand, I think, oh, Sara, that's a dumb question because you're a seasoned worship leader.

FLAMY: One of the first, right after the thing blew up online with Sean Feucht, one of the first calls I got was from a Baptist Church, Worcester, Mass. First Baptist. And I literally like, “What are you guys talking about?” I thought maybe they thought they had reached out to Amy Grant's team. I was like, what is going on? I had no idea. I didn't know about AWAB, you know, the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, that exists. And I didn't know there were affirming Baptist churches. So that was one of my first experiences was going to kind of high church and performing my songs on a Sunday morning. And I did that a lot. And then I started being able to play my own concerts in churches. Like churches would invite me to do a Saturday night concert and then stay for Sunday morning. It's been many things. It's been many experiences for me. The first experience though, it's just like wow. I was so sheltered that I just had no idea that evangelicalism is not the be all/end all of Christianity, like by a long shot. It's the baby first of all and it's not just the baby but it's the like really stupid, uneducated, it has not learned its history baby. Like it's just the baby that wants to “do things my way” and it's very petulant, frankly. And so to learn about all these other traditions that are centuries, millennia old, in some cases, right, many of which have never had an issue with their queer members. And so that was really eye-opening for me. It was also challenging because I do have my own religious trauma.

SARA: Yeah. 

FLAMY: That's what I process a lot in some of the songs I write. And so being in churches a lot was, it was rough. It was getting kind of rough and so I actually now have a No-Sunday-Morning policy. If a church wants to invite me in for a concert, absolutely, I will come bring my show to you if you want to offer your space for me to do that. But I no longer participate in Sunday morning worship services because that's just for me.

SARA: Yeah.

FLAMY: For no other reason other than like – well, a: being in drag on Saturday night at a late concert and then doing it right like sleeping five, six hours and getting up early to do it right again is just exhausting. But also it's like I just, I don't need to be there. I don’t need to be in your Sunday morning services. In fact I’m a better option for churches as an outreach kind of concert situation, right? Like put me on your stage, bring me into your sanctuary, whatever. But open it up to your community and tell your community that you're the church that's hosting a drag queen.

SARA: Yes. So people come to see Flamy and realize, “Oh, there are churches that will do this and that are affirming.”

FLAMY: Exactly.

SARA: Yeah, that is a huge, huge thing.

FLAMY: Let's do that as opposed to me coming and offering a little bit of enrichment for your Sunday morning service. Like there's so many artists who can do that. And I'm just not the one. I'm just not the one.

SARA: You have a third album.

FLAMY: I do.

SARA: Tell us about that.

FLAMY: Wow, we just recorded it at the end of May, the last week of May, which was a choice to plan a week in the studio, and then immediately leave for Pride tour was, that was an exhausting choice. It's going to be called Glory Bound. I fund-raised for it on Kickstarter. I think they're like 450 folks who helped fund it. I raised like $55,000.

SARA: Amazing.

FLAMY: Crazy. But that enabled me to just rent out a studio for a week, hire a whole bunch of musicians. And so we knocked it out, most of it, in a week. There's still some more work to be done. But I wanted to record an album here in Asheville, North Carolina, my hometown. I wanted to bring in a lot of the influences that were part of my young childhood and also influences that I'm appreciating among singer-songwriters that I follow these days. And I really wanted to lean heavily into an Appalachian mountain string jamboree sound. And so it's very much that. It's like a folk and gospel still. But there's a really strong through-line of bluegrass and mountain music and fiddle and strings and mandolin and banjo. So I'm really excited about it because I feel like it is a – it is, it's a pivot for me, sonically. And it's going in a direction that I’m just really personally excited about right now and that's the kind of stuff I listen to right now. I kind of pitched it on Kickstarter and just as I talked about it online, I pitched it as like, “Hey, I'm calling this the conclusion to a trilogy.” You know, I put out the first record Bible Belt Baby. That was my, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just writing songs in drag and we'll see what happens. And it came together beautifully. And I had a great producer. Ben Grace produced that. And it just came together really well. I'm so proud of that record. But it was very much an accident. It was not intentional. And then the second record, Church, was like, okay, I know how I'm perceived in this sphere right now. And I know who I am. And I want to dive into this story of mine that people seem to be resonating with. And I want to tell the hard parts. And so it's like Church is my “Empire Strikes Back”. It's like, let's get a little darker. Let's go into the roots, the origin story. Let’s tell all the crusty little crunchy bits. And it also has songs like “Sparkle” on it. But it's like, if you're really listening to that record, to Church, I think it goes to some heavy places. And so with this one, I kind of wanted to wrap up this period of where I'm really intentionally singing about the topics of religious trauma and the topics of what it means to be queer and coming up in fundamentalist religious, high-demand religious spaces because I don't want to sing about that forever. There's so much more. But at the same time, I wanted to honor the fact that the whole reason I'm here is because people responded to those parts of my story. I wanted to write a record that would come bring it back up. Like let's come back up from kind of the heaviness of Church and let's make this really declarative, let's take up some space. That's what a drag queen does best. We are larger than life. We are here to draw attention. We are here to pull focus. We are over here waving our arms and saying, “Don't miss me.” That's what drag is. It's this exaggerated exploration of gender and identity and humor, of course. And so I was like, let's make a nice, fun, drag-y record that hopefully will leave people empowered, particularly queer folks who've come up in the same kinds of spaces I have. I want them to know that they do have power, just in and of themselves. And also I want them to know that they don't need the institutions that are trying to regulate us. We don't need it. That was one of the big things I learned in this whole journey, right? Is it like, oh my gosh, evangelicalism? Let's just let it go. We don't have to save that stuff. I almost did it there. We don't have to save that stuff because it truly is, it's insipid and it's useless. And it's, actually it's worse than that. It works against our wholeness. Evangelicalism prevents us from being whole, reconciled, healthy, happy people. And to me, joy is the point. That is why we are here. We don't have to delay that. We don't have to wait for some day in Beulah Land, to finally experience our joy. And not to say that life isn't hard and that we don't have to reckon with the reality of oppression and the harm that we do to each other and all of these things. But we can still live a life of joy now. And frankly I think that is so much more worthwhile than hanging our hopes on a belief that one day we’ll have all that joy in some imagined version of paradise that no one knows.

SARA: Amen.

FLAMY: No one knows and I don't care what they say. They do not know. So yeah that's kind of what Glory Bound is about. It's like, yeah, we're bound for glory. But, I'm just going to put the drag spin on that too. And it's not going to be the heaven you think it is.

SARA: Amen, that is a great sermon right there, Flamy, thank you for that.

FLAMY: Oh, thank you.

SARA: And you know as you’re talking I was like – and you know. I think this is true about drag, but particularly true about artists like you and your particular journey is that, to sit through a concert of yours, I think for a lot of folks who have religious trauma or who are part of a church, but for those folks, especially, that are seekers, whatever that is, that we get from being part of a religious community. Both the worship and the community – because sometimes those are separate or sometimes they come together – that exists in a place like your concerts.

FLAMY: Yeah.

SARA: We can experience those same things that we experience in our church community in spaces like drag shows and concerts like that, that are telling stories and doing it with a lot of joy but also in building community at the same time. It’s kind of a cool thing.

FLAMY: Yeah, you put the point on, or you put the period on my point earlier. For me, it's about practice. A drag show is me practicing my spirituality.

SARA: Yeah.

FLAMY: Doing drag brunch? Like, that's, yeah. We're building community. I'm not the first to make the joke, but I always say, “It's a very thin line between Sunday morning and church and Sunday morning at the drag brunch.”

SARA: Absolutely.

FLAMY: There's a lot of similar things happening in those two spaces. But if church is a place where you can practice your faith, which it isn't always – I would argue in evangelicalism largely it is not. It's a place where you perform your faith maybe.

SARA: Oh yeah, good distinction.

FLAMY: But you don't practice it. You don’t practice it. But there are churches that do get what it is to practice faith. And queer community is so much the same. We have to be so intentional as queer people about finding our chosen family. Again this is all language I'm borrowing. I haven't invented it. But we do that because we have to. You know, we get kicked out of our other communities so often. And, yeah, it's what it is. That's how that's how we practice our faith, or our spirituality, whatever you want to call it.

SARA: All the above. Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing your story with us and for practicing your spirituality in the way that you do that I think just speaks to so many people. It's really, and it's delightful. You’ve got just a little bit of that satire in there to be like, oh yeah, I know this. This is familiar. And yet it's so different and fun. This has been a great conversation. Thank you.

FLAMY: Yeah, thank you for having me; that flew by. I didn't realize we were an hour deep already. Wow.

SARA: I know we are. Before I let you go though, I would love to try to incorporate a song and so I’m wondering if you do have one in mind if, I would love to end by leaving our listeners with one of your songs, if you will introduce it for us.

FLAMY: Yeah. I'd love it if we could end with a song that I actually ended the album Church with.

SARA: Right.

FLAMY: And it's a song called “If You Ever Leave.” And I wrote that song specifically because I did not see a lot of people modeling an option for walking away from toxic, bad theology and religious institutions. I saw a whole lot of people talking about how we reform them or fix them or save them or what can we do? How can we make this better for people? And I was like, you know, there's another option here. And the option is that we just invite people to walk away and to leave those spaces. And yes, there's a whole thing about, what are we inviting them into? Are there other spaces that we're making for those people? But the first step is still leaving. And leaving is one of the things that, I mean, anybody who has done, well, you know, the word is deconstruction that we use to talk about pulling apart our inherited beliefs and examining them through our own lenses and our own filters instead of just accepting what we've been told, right? Like that's what that is. But the hardest part for almost everybody who does it is like, if I leave, where do I go? What's on the other side for me? Because all I've ever been told is that I'm bound for hell. I'm bound for isolation. I will be, I will probably be sick, spiritually sick for sure if not even physically sick, and I will suffer. I will suffer if I leave. And there is some truth to the suffering piece. You will suffer because loss is suffering. And you will lose people. You will lose a community that might have been everything to you at one point. There will be people in your life who you thought were your ride-or-dies who you will very quickly learn are not. And there will even be family, there will even be family that lets you go. But that song for me, I wanted to write that to, again, just as a means to empower people to know that if you choose that path, if you choose to leave – And that's why it's called If You Ever Leave. Again, I am not out here dictating to people how to live their lives. That's not my goal. – But if you choose to, let me tell you a little bit about what you might find. And it's different from what you've been told.

SARA: What a perfect song for our Mama Dragons community. I'm so excited to send them out with this. Here is, “If You Ever Leave” by Flamy Grant.

If you ever leave
 I hope you leave a light on
 Just enough to see
 The open door you left from
 Before you go
 Deck the halls with something bright and queer
 A big rainbow
 They'll pull it down but they'll still know
 That you were here
 Only taking what you need
 A little time to grieve
 If you ever leave

If you ever go,
 Please go easy on yourself
 'Cause everything you know
 Was planted there by someone else
 There's no such thing
 As a true religion, babe
 A god who makes you cling
 To hatred for yourself is not
 A god who saves
 It's mirrors and smoke
 Remember all of it's for show
 Should you ever need to go.

You became the martyr they groomed you to be
 Bleeding on the altar of fraud
 It's the greatest love of all but if you ever leave
 You'll never see the face of God.

So if we get to heaven
 And Jesus stops us at the gates
 If he calls our love transgression
 And says I didn't die for gays
 Don't lose hope
 I will take your hand in mine
 I'll pull you close
 And with my other hand I'll give
 That God a sign
 Gladly walk away from him
 We're better off in sin
 If he doesn't let us in

I'd fight to see you leave your shame
 And I think God would do the same

SARA: Thanks so much for joining us In The Den. Did you know you can connect with our Mama Dragons community on our own free private, secure platform. In addition to our main support group we host regional groups for more localized connection and support and affinity groups to connect moms with shared identities and experiences: including groups for gender diverse parents, political advocacy, mamas of transgender children, mamas of children with special needs, Madres Dragones – our Spanish-speaking moms – and moms of color. We also offer religious-based groups from those grounded in faith to those navigating transitions out of it. Wherever you are, there's a group for you. You can learn more and join by visiting our website at mamadragons.org/join.

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