The news that Christian rocker Jennifer Knapp has come out as a lesbian has been picked up by the gay-oriented magazine The Advocate and the evangelical beacon Christianity Today. I suspect a tug-of-war brewing between their respective readerships and hurried potato-sack races to condemn her from the Christian side. With any luck, I’ll be able to avoid it.
I liked her first album, Kansas, very much. In fact, that’s where “phenomenal” comes from in the header — it was unlike anything I’d heard in Christian music and very much like the best stuff I’d heard from secular music. I saw her in concert about five years ago and thought she was a breath of fresh air. Her stuff is edgy, and I never thought she was cut out for the Prairie Muffin, Diva-Lite, or Earnestly Relevant categories most female Christian artists find themselves shoehorned into.
So she’s acknowledged who she is and that she’s in a committed relationship. Let’s do the radical thing and assume that our sister Jennifer is dearly loved by a God who will guide her through the Spirit now as before, and just as lovingly, urgently, and completely as he does you or me.