The Exit & The Open Door

EDITOR’S NOTE:
Call & Response pairs two Curious Goldfish conversations, recorded months or years apart, with artists who may or may not know one another. Different paths with the same question running underneath. “Call and Response” is one of the oldest structures in music: Carried from West Africa into American spirituals, gospel, blues, and jazz, where a leader sings a phrase and the community answers. The form survived because music has always been a way for people to talk to each other across distance and time. It's a reminder that music connects people who don't know they're already in a conversation.

That's what shunning is. He grew up a Jehovah's Witness. He was a missionary at 19, knocking on doors in another country seventy hours a month. He left at 20, and when he left, the world he was raised in left him too.

He writes about it, but it's not obvious. The songs sound like angsty breakup tracks, and only afterward will he tell you the real subject is leaving the religion. His next album is seven singles, each one named for a deadly sin. The first one out was called "You're So Fake." That one was Wrath.

Twenty years before Tawnted's exit, Jennifer Knapp was already inside the Christian music industry that had signed her in 1998, recorded the album simply called Kansas, and built her into a late-nineties contemporary Christian crossover. That album, for someone like me who grew up in a tradition of Midwestern conservatism, was an epiphany: real acoustic music that wasn't ruined by overproduction. When she came out in 2010, she ran the math on it in advance. By her own count, she'd "pissed off half of them and disappointed a lot of them."

She was right. She married her wife. She got a master's in theology. She re-recorded Kansas for its twenty-fifth anniversary, with Phil Madeira on keys. Inside twenty-four hours of her posting Phil's name on social media, the Christian haters showed up on his website to give him hell for playing on a queer person's record.

Tawnted was raised inside his tradition; Knapp walked into hers as a young adult. Both found, in the end, that it would not have them as they were. Tawnted walked away and isn't going back. The songs are how he says it out loud, wrapped in pop-hop packaging that lets most listeners assume they're hearing a breakup until he tells them otherwise. The religion is the ex. The seven deadly sins framing is the joke he gets to keep telling.

Knapp stayed near the wall and pried the door back open. She isn't signed to a Christian label anymore, and she isn't silent either. She compares wanting a spiritual community to wanting to get better at yoga: you go where other people know the practice. Her line on whether queer people should walk into a church at all:

The choice between leaving and staying gets framed inside religious communities as a referendum on belief.

It isn't. It's a referendum on what you do with the wound.

Tawnted's wound became the material; the songs would not exist without it. Knapp's wound became the credential. She read the book more carefully than the people who used it to wall her out, and now she gets to argue with them.

Both answers are honest. Both are costly. Tawnted lost his family. Knapp lost her industry. Neither has asked the other to ratify the choice they made.

What connects them across genre and generation is the refusal to perform a version of themselves the sanctuaries were asking for. Tawnted will not be the missionary the religion trained. Knapp will not be the closeted Christian her industry preferred, or the silent ex-believer her detractors expect. Neither will trade honesty for safety, and both still write.
If you have ever been told that the faith community you grew up in is not yours to stay in or leave on your own terms, listen to both episodes. They disagree on the exit and agree on the only thing that matters: nobody else gets to write your story (or songs) for you.

Here they are:

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