Julien Baker: “The Church made me feel powerless. Even if I was Mother Theresa, I would still be gay”
Singer-songwriter Julien Baker talks to Sarah Carson about God, queerness, sobriety, and why the confessions on her exquisite third album Little Oblivions make her cringe | iNews, February 18, 2021
She used to think writing music was her humanitarian obligation – to repurpose pain for a good reason.
... A few years ago, she started to wonder if the metric she had been using to determine right and wrong didn’t exist. “Imagine playing a game for two decades of ‘get into Heaven or go to Hell’ and then finding out that that game is made up. You just feel like, ‘I just wasted two decades of my life’.”
... She spent her early 20s on tour, and at the end of 2018, after three straight years on the road, and even more of being labelled as the gay, Christian, sober face of indie-folk and bearing under the pressure prove to others in those communities that those identities didn’t need to contradict each other, she stopped. She cancelled her tour dates and in the “slowness and the stillness”, she started to wonder: “why do I adhere to these beliefs?”
“It would be reductive to call it a crisis of faith,” she says, from her home in Nashville, “or re-evaluating my sobriety. Because, man, I just re-evaluated who I was – all of it.”
She paused her career, went back to college, and finished her degree. She tried drinking again, realising that her only interactions with drugs and alcohol were when she was very young, in traumatic circumstances, and that she’d chosen sobriety out of “principle”. Things quickly got out of hand, drinking cost her, and she decided that sobriety was the better choice after all.
As for her faith, she no longer wanted to be a spokesperson on a subgroup. “So many problems that I have in my psyche come from an American evangelical internalised understanding of the world. I now feel a little weird about having so zealously supported [Christianity] – as far as the institution of religion goes. I mean God? Sure,” she pauses. “But, yeah. I was very young and vulnerable and super green.”
... Does she still believe?
There’s a long pause. “I think I would define God differently. If I thought it were useful or possible to define God at all.” She chooses her words carefully. She says belief is a slippery notion. “I don’t think of things as so literal anymore. Maybe [I used to] because I felt, ‘I’m a person who believes and is queer so it’s up to me to be super well-versed in the language of scripture and theological argument’. Now it’s like, man… Don’t believe in Hell.”
She repeats. “Don’t believe in Hell. I can’t – I don’t think that’s real. I don’t even know if our understanding of the afterlife is accurate.” She laughs, and then shouts. “I mean, OF COURSE IT’S NOT! That’s freeing to me now, instead of terrifying.”
... Growing up in the church, Baker says she internalised – and perpetuated – a lot of homophobia, “feeling so much self-punishment and ostracisation and self-loathing.” ... “It’s hard to unlearn those things,” she says.
... “Because if I accept that I am queer and that’s an innate part of how I was created, but the church and popular culture and all the people that I see screaming at Planned Parenthood and advocating for the Defense of Marriage Act are giving me the information that something I cannot change is not right, well, why would God do that? It made me feel powerless, like I had no agency to be good. Even if I was f*cking Mother Theresa I would still be gay.”
It wasn’t until she went to college that she stopped thinking about “whether I was going to hell for being gay, or not. Now, more than just saying ‘I can be loved’, and that I’m square with my identity as a queer person, I’m square with my fallibility, and a lot more merciful with myself.”
Is she able to love herself? “It makes me feel insane, but I have to do a thought experiment multiple times a day. ‘If I’m a human being and human beings are deserving of safety and compassion and respect and dignity then I am worthy of all those things’.”
