Raised as a Preacher's Kid, Now She's a Black Butch Lesbian Writing Jesus Songs

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

I was driving down a gravel road near my home in rural Georgia on a Sunday afternoon this spring when I heard a voice singing on Mountain Stage on my local NPR station. She was singing about a church building adorned with pride flags and the words “Black Lives Matter” posted out front: A scene I don’t see in my town. She sang: “So this one's for those fishers of men / not the people putting 'evil' in evangelical again / ‘Love one another,’ his commandment from the start / so keep spreading the good news with open minds and open hearts.” By the end I was singing along to the catchy refrain, “That’s my kind, my kind of Christianity,” and I was a new fan of Crys Matthews, a Nashville-based singer songwriter who has been singing folk songs since the late '90s. The song that caught my ear, “Like Jesus Would,” is from her new album Reclamation, which also has tender love songs, a new twist on cancel culture, and a banjo heavy graveyard song.

I don’t know what it is about driving that gets those tear ducts pumping, but when you find music that speaks to your heart and soul, music that “speaks to my condition” as we say in the Quaker tradition, sometimes the tears just fall. Matthews ended her set with “Sleeves Up,” which was released on inauguration day Jan 20, 2025. “Wipe your face dry, roll your sleeves up / Even when they knock you down you get back up / You don’t give up.” I wiped my face dry, thanked God for Matthews’ voice and wanted to learn more.

In her personal mission statement, Matthews says she strives “to amplify the voices of the unheard, to shed light on the unseen, and to be a steadfast reminder that hope, and love are the truest pathways to equity and justice." Influenced by Bernice Johnson Reagon, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Melissa Etheridge, Ani DiFranco, and, of course, Tracy Chapman, to whom she has often been compared, Matthews brings her whole self into her work. She spoke with me about being an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) preacher’s kid, coming out when she was 18, her commitment to teaching social justice songwriting, and leaning into hard conversations.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Josina Guess, Sojourners: Tell me what inspired you to write “Like Jesus Would.”

Crys Matthews: Two Junes ago, I was going up to New Hampshire to teach social justice songwriting. I've lived in Nashville for about three years, and I was noticing church marquees around town with really hateful stuff on them because it was Pride month. I'm a preacher's kid, was raised in the AME tradition. My mom is a preacher, her brother is a preacher, my grandpa was a preacher. We come from a family of preachers and so to see such a drastic disconnect between what passes for Christianity these days versus what it's actually supposed to be is always so disheartening.

My mom — I always call my mom The Rev — The Rev is always saying to me, “Baby, all things work together for good.” It is definitely one of the joys of my life watching that bear out in very unexpected ways.

The route the GPS had me take from Nashville to New Hampshire was crazy and convoluted. When I got about 40 miles from where I was supposed to be, I came around a bend on this little two-lane road and saw this church in the middle of nowhere just covered with pride flags. They didn't have just one. They wanted everybody to know they were wildly affirming, they didn't want to be mistaken for tolerant. It was just such a lovely contrast to what I had left in Tennessee. When I got to where I was going, I wrote that song. I'm so bummed that I didn't pull over and take a picture of that church because I want to go sing that song for them. I'm playing in New Hampshire on Juneteenth so I'm hoping I'll be able to track it down; it's between Concord and Meredith.

I play in a lot of churches. It's lovely to see so many spaces of faith reclaim that narrative about what Christianity is supposed to be. But that church just found me at the exact right moment.

Being a preacher's kid (PK) can mean so many different things. What does it mean to you?

PK is a mantle I wear proudly. I'm so proud of my mom, coming from the AME tradition. She's a boomer, she did not come from a very progressive generation. So, to have the foresight and temerity to put herself through divinity school and answer that call was just such a beautiful thing for me to watch as a teenager.

The tradition of justice and faith has always been a very intertwined marriage in the Black church in the South. You know the Black church has still got a ways to go with regards to LGBTQ equity. They're making strides, some folks more than others, but they are at least making those efforts. But with regards to Civil Rights, the Black Church was at the forefront of so many of those justice movements. I'm very proud of having been raised in the AME church.

Every time I perform there's always at least one other PK in the audience and so we always joke about it. We're either absolute choir boys or we are absolute hooligans; there's not a lot of gray area with PKs.

So, are you absolute choir boy or hooligan?

I'm pretty much a choir boy. I have never even smoked pot. I used to have dreads and people would offer me pot all the time and I'd be like, “I'm so sorry, your offer is so generous, but it's just so wasted on me.”

I came out when I was 18 in 1998. At that time, what it meant to have a daughter who was a lesbian was not what it is now. It has been a beautiful thing to watch my mom unpacking and unlearning and digging into the truth of what she used to always say which is, “A parent only has one job which is to love their child, that's it. The rest of it doesn't matter. That is your charge as a parent.” Watching her find her way back to that after the fallout from so many of her peers in the faith community being so horrible to her about me, about having a kid who was very out.

She is just now starting to talk to me about that. We always hear that soundbite “It gets better.” It's so hard for kids who are LGBTQ who are in the throes of being disowned by the parents, by the people who are supposed to love you the most, the people who are supposed to make you feel safest in this world. It has been a beautiful thing to be able to look at them and truthfully say, “It actually does get better. Let me tell you my own story. Let me tell you about my journey with my own mother.”

The relationship that she and I have now is so beautiful. She is my biggest champion.

One thing I love about your music is that you just mix Christian music in with justice and love songs. Tell me about that decision.

It's not even a decision, it's just me. I check a lot of boxes: I am Black, I am a woman, I am a lesbian, I am a proud Southerner, and I am a person who was raised in an AME church. Those things come through in my music.

There is a bit of intentionality in this moment as a performing songwriter. So many people are so turned off by what seems to be Christianity. We have so much toxicity around that word because some of the most hateful people that are in some of the most powerful positions proclaim to be Christians, but they are not really embodying what Christianity is supposed to be. They're very antithetical to that. A lot of folks, especially a lot of younger folks are feeling very repelled by the notion of faith and by candid conversations around spaces of faith. So, it is a pretty intentional thing to make sure that people know what the truth is and don't let something that isn't the truth be confused for it. Because it isn't that you have a problem with Christians. It's that you have a problem with hypocrites who call themselves Christians, who couldn't be farther from it.

You have a mission statement. That seems like such a preacher's kid thing. How did you form that?

Many years ago, when I first heard my friend Kyshona, play — she's an absolute changemaker — she started her set with a mission statement. It was such a clarifying thing to see an artist lay out the lens through which you will view their art.

It took me many years to figure out what my mission statement actually would be. But I think it was after Changemakers came out in 2021. That album was entirely social justice. Touring those songs, getting to share those songs with people and having conversations with people about the way those songs impacted them, and gave them tools and language to talk about things that they have really been struggling to talk about with folks who maybe feel very differently than them, it was just like, “this is what I want to do, this is all I want to do, and this is the way I want to do it.”

The language is an important thing for me, even the first line “amplifying the voices of the unheard.” So many people who do this work come into it from a place of feeling like they need to speak for someone. So many white people who feel like they need to speak for Black people, so many folks who are not immigrants feeling like they need to speak for the immigrant community. No one needs you to speak for them.

Your only job, if you want to be an ally, if you want to be an accomplice in their strides for justice, your job isn’t to speak for them, it’s to amplify the voices that are not being heard.

I was struck by your commitment “to be a steadfast reminder that hope and love are the truest pathways to equity and justice.” And are there times when you don't feel like being that reminder?

I don't think there's ever a time I don't feel like being that. I think there definitely are moments that are more human than not. There's a lot happening in this world to make a Black butch lesbian mad. So, there are definitely days where the set list is going to be nothing but fire.

Because of how I was raised and of all the love that has been poured into me, it is very easy to pour that back out to others. That feels like an easy thing to do most days. There are days where I'm just like, “I cannot believe that this is who is running this country right now.” There's an awful lot to be upset by and hurt by and thoroughly disappointed by in this country and in this world right now. But you know, if the goal overall is to try to get to the other side of that, that means having to stay focused on the mission, you know, in the Black faith tradition, “Keep your eyes on the prize.”

The thing that helps keep me focused and disciplined in that work is remembering everything my ancestors went through. As horrible as this is right now, I'm still out here able to freely sing these songs, these very controversial songs, and I'm not sitting in a prison somewhere as a political refugee. So, we can do it. It's hard, but we can do it.

And as you pour out, how does your creative process feed you?

I have this song called “Suit and Tie,” which is about gender expression and gender diversity. A mom wrote me saying, “I'm the mom of two trans kids. And I just want to thank you for that song and just say how incredibly powerful that was to hear last night.” If I have a hard day, if somebody's sending me weird, random troll-y things on the internet, they just pale in comparison to the number of moments like that. To be able to help people feel seen and to feel like they are worthy of love in this world and that somebody is fighting for their right to be loved and to just be in this world. There are way more moments like that than anything else. I get poured into every day.

How did you get your start as a singer-songwriter?

I started band in 6th grade, and I was dead set on being a high school band director. One night, my college roommate says, “Hey, we got a gig coming up. Our keyboard player can't do [it]. Can you do the gig now?”

I am an AME PK. My chops on the keys are pretty decent because somebody's got to fill in for the church lady when she calls out sick. So, I was like, “OK, no problem. I can get you through the gig.”

And she says, “OK, great. And you also need to sing one song.”

I was like, “That's fine. I mean, I don't sing, but I can sing. So sure, I'll sing this song for you.”

That night changed my life. I went home and wrote my first song. I entered it in the campus talent show, won first place, like $500, which is a lot of money for a college kid, and was just like, “Oh, my gosh, maybe I can write songs.”

So, I kept writing, kept sharing them. People liked them. People responded to them. I love being able to share them and commune with people in that way.

It wasn't a hard sell to The Rev. Most parents, you come home and you're like, “I think I want to be a folk singer.” They'd be like, “Oh, no!” But because it was only going from a band director to a folk singer, she's just like “All right, you got a good head on your shoulders, I trust you.”

Without question, the moment Trayvon Martin was killed [in 2012] shifted something deeply in me as a songwriter. I'm the oldest of my grandparents’ nine grandkids. [We] grew up more like siblings than cousins. My boys, they're both eight years younger than me, they're like my kid brothers. Looking in [Martin’s] sweet face, the only thing I could see was both of them. I'm from the South. I know what Black people go up against in this country. Seeing that happen in modern time broke something very deeply in me. I wrote “Don't Forget My Name” for [Martin]. And after that I realized night after night, all I'm doing is singing to rooms of [mostly] white people.

I need to be talking to these white people. These are the conversations I would like to be having with. That was the thing that activated me.

Many people Black people say, ‘It's not my job to have those conversations with white people,’ How did you get clarity that you would take that on as your job?

I absolutely love that question. It's almost a labor of love for my people, so that they don't have to do it. I have the space and capacity to do that. These little cute baby cheeks make me very approachable. Folks just want to just give me a big old hug and talk very openly and honestly with me, and I love that so much.

I will be the one to go into those spaces and talk to these folks, get them together, and then tell them to get on out there and do this work, because Black people are so tired. It's important for me to be able to go into those spaces, give them food for thought, lead with empathy, lead with love, and open up dialogue for so many folks that are just sitting there quiet.

You can't be quiet right now. You've got to figure out how to talk to your neighbor next door about that horrible flag that they're flying. I need you to go do that work.