Finally On the Other Side: Church Girl Reflections

If you know me, you know it is only right that I reflect on Beyoncé’s “Church Girl” from her latest album, Renaissance. No, we do not need another think piece on anything pop culture, but I wanted to share why this song is so important to me. You will deal (lol). 

I believe in my very first blog post I expressed my identity as a church girl and for sure it is always peppered throughout my writing because it is a lens that I use to make sense of Black Girlhood Spirituality. My grandmother raised me and she was the most saved person I’ve known. I remember in her final days she was in deep praise and worship. During what was such a grim and sad time for her loved ones, my grandmother laid on her bed of affliction proclaiming how much she loved God. Years before that I recall telling my grandmother that I never wanted her to die. She could not leave me! Her response was not one of compassion, but one of anticipation. “Shay, we all have to die…I can’t wait to just sit and rest and walk the streets paved with gold…it’s gonna be such a good time.” Lurine Garner was the living epitome of “for God I live and for God I’ll die.” As such, she imparted the ritual of active church membership into my cousin Kiera and I. 

Sunday two to three times, occasionally Wednesday night bible study, and Thursday evening for choir rehearsal. Sprinkle in an occasional Tuesday night choir rehearsal for youth Sunday and you get accustomed to and acclimated to church culture. Enter the church girls. I call myself a church girl because I subscribed to a lot of the culture of church in that I wanted to be a virgin until I married, I judged people who were different from me and thought I was better than folks. For sure I was  every “phobic” and thought Christianity was the only way to believe. 

Enters college. By the time I arrived at U of I, I was walking fully into my role as a 4th generation cusser. I had convinced my dad that I needed to smoke weed right after I graduated because I was just “too good.” I needed to live on the wild side. His trunk party gift to me was a joint that my roommate and I smoked before a union party and didn’t get high at all. But, I wasn’t folding on purity or my -phobic ideologies. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sexually attracted to men, I’d just been so afraid to express that part of me that it took a lot to get beyond. It was easier to just ignore it. 

The summer before my junior year of college I met and started building a friendship with “the hoochies.” This group of girls were very opposite of my other friends in that they lived their truths out loud. That’s the interesting part. It wasn’t that the church girls were not hoochies, it’s just we were in the closet about our dirt. The hoochies however made it a sport to play niggas, have sex with them, explored their sexuality in same gender relationships, spoke up when wronged, and did I say played niggas?! “The Hoochies” started Students for Choice on our campus and they signed me up for it. I didn’t know where I stood on issues of sexual health, but they knew best to get me on the right side of the conversation. These powerhouse women called me out on my homophobia and really challenged me to expand my frameworks. Together we rallied around campus and the community in the name of Black girlhood celebration and freedom. My quality of life and intellectual self is so much better because of them. 

“Church Girl” is the song the church girls needed. It provokes many emotions and desires in me including twirling my ass and having a baptist fit because of the irony of the song. Bey croons “I was born free” and what I know is church girls are anything but free. In thinking of my experience as a church girl, Bey sang my life in that the church is in me, but I have come to know God for myself and not the one patriarchy says I should know. 

I often tell people I did not grow up in a homophobic church. I really only heard homophobic sermons when we went to church while visiting “down south.” My home church focused on their disdain for Black women and girls. Too many sermons, on youth Sunday at that, telling us not to have children out of wedlock and expect others to raise them, criticizing our attire, and how good wives should be to their husbands and households. I also praised-danced and a few times our uniforms were not appreciated by elders as they were too revealing or didn’t cover enough. While our choreography set out to glorify God, too much ankle could distract and entice the deacons. I internalized this as it was best for me to blend in as best as I could and not call any attention to myself. I was going to please my grandparents and the adults in my life by being quiet, pious, innocent, and obedient. I would be what they wanted me to be even if that meant I was not free. 

Matters of freedom are the nucleus of the Christian faith. For example,we believe that Jesus Christ was murdered, yet ressurected for our iniquities and because of his resurrection and our belief we are born again. See, 2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” We can also see 2 Corinthians 3:17 “...where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” What Beyoncé describes on “Church Girl” is the freedom we all desire to have. 

Throughout the song Bey offers warnings, “I’m warning everybody soon as I get in this party I’m gon’ let go of this body, I’m gonna love on me nobody can judge me, I was born free…” In thinking of the literal and spiritual aspect of this stanza I imagine her dancing young wild and carefree, doing the moves she mentions in the next stanza and letting go. In this regard you have to be in the body in order to let go and be free. I also hear this stanza as a letting go of the body as in letting go of the natural and living in the spirit which is free of judgment and as the bible states there is liberty. 

Movement and dance is so important to Black girlhood spaces. For me, dance helped me get back into my body. I’ve spoken previously about the ritual of “The Baty Dance” in SOLHOT, but I just can’t highlight its significance enough. At a certain age the dances that little Black girls do are not seen as innocent and child’s play, but they switch to being seen as sexual, even if they are the same moves they have always done. So, in SOLHOT we always dance at the beginning of our time together and in my work with A Long Walk Home we dance and host twerk workshops as selfcare. This allows any shame and fear about the ways that our bodies move to dissipate. We are safe because we are with one another. 

Beyoncé also mentions bodies of water made from tears cried and I understand this to also magnify being born again through baptism. Baptism represents the metaphorical rebirth that Christians experience when they decide to follow Christ. In this way, the baptism of church girls is one that traverses the pain we experience from the fake ass norms and rules of church culture that allow us to be who we are confidently in our bodies. 

Elders of the church were dismayed by the song, some even offended. The easy answer is it is not for them. Their analysis has begun and ended with sex and sexuality, but it is so much more than that. Yes, exploration of sex and sexuality may come with this freedom, but being satisfied with who you are without the limitations of others gets us to a freedom founded in pleasure and choices that are the right choices because we made them. Further, freedom and pleasure found in being free places us exactly in the center of God’s will for us. The Clark Sisters’ “Center of Thy Will” was the perfect sample for this song. 

For church girls like myself who make it to the other side, we do so by really learning who God is for ourselves. It’s challenging because the misogynoir is so deep in us that it does seem like the gospel of our faith. I questioned everything and found God in myself and loved her fiercely. I leaned into my friendships with women like “the hoochie” and became open to ideologies that differed from mine. I learned that I am a hoochie too lol. 

Enters freedom. At the end of the day, I am still a church girl and some old habits will never die. I believe that “the world” just can’t teach some things. I am an excellent public speaker because of church. I know that sometimes you have to go to the department store to get the good panty hose. I fully believe in slips, girdles, good bras, and good shoes. I know my wardrobe is not complete without a power suit. Now, much of what I named is class oriented (another blog post for a different time), but I first learned those skills and modesty at church. I am not saying that others should be held to this. What I know is I am better because of my experience as a church girl and I am my best self because I’ve chosen to love myself and “bring the life up in [my] body.

For more on some of the themes I mentioned see Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown and Red Lip Theology by Candice Benbow. Candice Benbow is doing a great work that will get even more free.