Jennifer Knapp: Miles From Kansas

Editor’s Note: The following feature appeared in the April-June issue of Good Faith Magazine, which is a free resource for all Good Faith Advocates. More information on becoming an advocate can be found here.

1992
Pittsburg State University
60 miles from Chanute, Kansas

Jennifer Knapp had been sober for a few weeks and needed someone to keep her company, to carry her down from the ledge. She asked her friend Ami to spend some time with her.


Several months before, Ami had been standing in the doorway of Knapp’s dorm room after she heard Jennifer was on a bender. Abandoned by her friends after they placed her head near the trash can, Knapp looked up to Ami and pleaded, “Please don’t let me die like Elvis.” This was occurring too often, and Ami had finally had enough. She walked away.

Knapp woke up the following day and knew things had to change. She began to read some of the scriptures that Ami, an evangelical Christian, shared with her during their first months in college. The Lord is my light and my salvation–whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life–of whom shall I be afraid? (Psalm 27)

In her 2014 memoir, Facing the Music: My Story, Knapp spoke of this experience and her initial engagement with these texts. “My ego may have cringed with cynicism,” she said, “but the poetry touched me to the core. I wanted to have my life back, I wanted to be counted among the living again.”

Over the next few weeks, she continued to read the Bible. She also sought help from the campus health center and found a therapist through a county program. There were setbacks, and her therapist gave her a choice between being admitted to the hospital or attending AA meetings. Knapp chose the meetings. Being in a recovery setting helped, but she knew it wasn’t enough, which brought her back to Ami.

Knapp told Ami about her journey toward sobriety. Ami was happy about the progress but clear with her friend that human help could only go so far. She cited 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed, and the new has come.” Knapp received the scripture with the same mixture of cynicism and possibility she had been reading other passages. This time, though, possibility won out.

Knapp asked Ami, “All right then, what do I need to do? How does this work? How do I get saved?” Internally, she asked herself, “What? Who falls for this?” Regardless, Ami led her friend through what evangelicals know as the “Sinner’s Prayer.”

In her memoir, Knapp wrote, “I prayed my prayer, having no earthly clue what I was saying, but I prayed in earnest all the same. And whether it was real or imagined, all I can say is that I did truly feel as if my life began again that day.”


October 24, 2024
Nashville, Tennessee
580 miles from Chanute, Kansas

Last fall, I visited with Jennifer Knapp in a new, almost entirely vacant coworking space just off Music Row in Nashville. We connected over both of us having turned 50 earlier in the year, reflecting on the passage of time, our young-adult experiences with faith, and how so few young people now want anything to do with institutional Christianity. She resonates deeply with this trend. “Going back to my formative Christian years,” she told me, “my discipleship was a battle, with me saying [to mentors], ‘Teach me how to pray. Don’t teach me what to pray.’”

When I told her this reminded me of the story of Ami leading her through the Sinner’s Prayer, her face became deeply reflective, which, I would learn, happens frequently. “Yeah. I prayed that prayer and have spent 30 years trying to make sense of that moment, and I can’t,” she said. “But I do acknowledge that even ignoring any possibility of God, I at least made a decision that day on my behalf to choose to be the person I wanted to be.”

Knapp didn’t grow up in evangelical Christian circles. Still, she’s been around them enough to know the theological hand-wringing her interpretation of that moment may evoke, with all the tensions between faith and works and grace and mercy. Anticipating this, she addresses her potential detractors: “I realize how offensive it can be to a Christian when I say, ‘I don’t know if, in that moment, anything supernatural happened or that the Divine intervened in my life.’ But I can tell you this, without a doubt, I am open to the possibility it might have. If that isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what to say because it has radically placed me on a long journey, even in the most grim days of doubt.”

While reflecting on this journey, she connects herself to the most famous biblical exemplar of running from God. “I see myself as forever a Jonah,” she said. “I just don’t know how any of this [spiritual transformation] will happen in our lives if we are not present and willing. If God gave us free will, then why do we persist in trying to conform instead of taking risks?”

Jonah may be a character that helps frame Knapp’s life, but after our three-hour conversation, I couldn’t help but think that Jacob may be a better connection. She is not afraid to wrestle with God. In many ways, it is a defining characteristic of her life. Unlike Jacob, however, who grappled with the divine for a blessing, she doesn’t assume a predetermined outcome. The struggle is the point. If she comes out of it with a blessing, wonderful. If it ends with greater clarity about the presence (or absence) of a personal God, that is also fine. The only defeat, for Knapp, is to not grapple with the possibilities. 

Since that moment in Pittsburg praying the Sinner’s Prayer, much of her work has been inviting others into this wrestling match.

1993
Chanute, Kansas
580 miles from Nashville, Tennessee

Knapp entered college on a scholarship to study music. As a trumpet player, she assumed her career would involve teaching or performance. However, her conversion experience and being pulled into the Christian community on campus altered that plan.

Though she has spent many seasons trying to make sense of the prayer she prayed, one of her interpretations has remained consistent: Regardless of what actually occurred at that moment, it was genuine, sincere, and transformational. It placed her on a path of seeking. It also inserted her into a community that would both nurture her newfound faith and introduce her to a strange world of confusing expectations and suspicious social structures.

In her memoir, she writes about an early experience walking into a campus ministry event, taken aback by everyone’s interest in her life. “There are few things that get evangelical Christians more excited than new converts coming into the fold,” she wrote. “It’s like chum for sharks.” Without Knapp’s knowledge, Ami had been sharing Jennifer’s experience with her friends in the group, and it was evident in that first encounter with them. “The fact that everyone around me seemed to be in on some kind of conspiracy to get me to know God was killing my salvation buzz,” she remembered.

Regardless, she consciously chose to set aside her criticisms and be thankful for their excitement. She also became a part of their world, allowing them to introduce her to the spiritual practices many had grown up with. It was an alternately transformational and troubled relationship, one that would mark the next decade of her life.

Without the means to stay in Pittsburg the summer after her first year in college, Knapp returned to Chanute, where a job and a free place to stay at her grandmother’s house awaited her. During those months, she spent much of her time in her room, reading the Bible and books by C.S. Lewis and Oswald Chambers. She began to memorize scripture, as many of her friends back at school had encouraged her to do.

Knapp also picked up an old guitar she had lying around. She could only pick out a few tunes and wasn’t technically proficient with the instrument. Still, she remembered something Ami had suggested to her, that she should try to write songs based on what she was learning from God and the Bible. Knapp had written poetry since she was a kid and loved music, but had never considered combining the two. She began to put her prayers and memory verses into melodies, altering the course of her life and the lives of many others.

2001 or 2002
On stage, somewhere in America

When she returned to college, it wasn’t long before her friends started asking her to play her songs for them, eventually being invited to sing at church and in the campus ministry worship band. She changed her major from music to psychology, freeing her up to join a band that traveled to other churches playing Christian music. Eventually, she became a stage mainstay at New Earth Coffeehouse, a Kansas City venue that emerged in the 90s as a regional launching pad for Christian artists. Among them were Dakoda Motor Co. and Sixpence None the Richer, groups whose sounds departed from the saccharine, pop-infused melodies of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) industry. By 1998, her touring and two independently released albums caught the attention of TobyMac, who invited her on the road and signed her to a contract with his newly formed Gotee Records.

Between 1998 and 2001, Knapp released three critically acclaimed albums: Kansas (1998), A Little More (2000), and The Way I Am (2001). Together, they sold over a million copies and earned her critical acclaim and multiple Grammy nominations. Each album showcased her gritty, folk-rock style and introspective, evocative lyricism usually reserved for those with a lifetime of hard-earned wisdom. She sold out ten-thousand-seat arenas and, riding the wave of the late 90s “Girls With Guitars” renaissance, was invited to step out of the CCM confines to join the famous Lillith Fair tour.

In just a few short years, Knapp’s career had skyrocketed. But the uneasy tension between her own spiritual experience and the simplistic, sometimes soul-stealing interpretations of faith she was being asked to conform to was festering under the surface.

A defining feature of CCM concerts, a vestige of its history in the church, is an expectation that artists will talk to the audience about the spiritual themes behind their songs. In a 1998 recording from a side stage at Cornerstone, a popular Christian music festival, a 24-year-old Knapp can be seen honing this practice. Her “sermonette” revealed the same level of deep introspection her albums would become known for, but didn’t stray far from the evangelical aphorisms she was being discipled in.

By 2002, that had changed.
The title track for Knapp’s 2001 album The Way I Am is a slow-building rock anthem that hearkens to the biblical themes of sacrifice and “dying to yourself.” The central lyrics allude to Jesus’ commands in Matthew 5 to “cut your left hand off” and “gouge your eyes out” if they cause you to sin: It’s better off this way/to be deaf, dumb, and lame/than to be the way I am. She intended the song as satire, a commentary on the ways Christians seek to punish themselves, denying the reality of grace in our lives.

Knapp doesn’t remember the city or date, but the visual is seared in her mind. While touring to promote the album, she reflected on The Way I Am in front of a crowd of thousands. After speaking about the song and encouraging the audience to be more introspective with their faith, she was met with confused silence. She invited her fans to join in the wrestling, and they refused. In her memoir, she wrote, “I was missing the connective thread that allowed others to join in my wandering, but had no strength left to find it.”

The experience still evokes raw emotions, which she tearfully expressed in our Nashville conversation: “I remember talking about how there was something profoundly wrong with this theology. I said all this, and I swear to God, I looked out and saw this energetic throng of consumers staring at me like I had lost my mind. This was so utterly heartbreaking. At that moment [and recording the album], I was starting to exercise some theological thought in my faith-based writing. I put a lot into that, and it was met with silent stares.”

That moment solidified what Knapp had known: It was time to step off the stage, which she did in September 2022. 

 

2006
Sydney, Australia
8,765 miles from Chanute, Kansas

Jennifer Knapp walked into an antique store in Sydney, Australia, to clock in for her shift. Some of her coworkers were gathered around a computer screen, watching a YouTube clip with music that sounded vaguely familiar. When they looked up and saw her standing there, they couldn’t contain their amusement. She walked around the desk, embarrassed to see they had found old clips of her performing.

As soon as she stepped off the stage for her last show in 2002, she put all her guitars in their cases. There, they would gather dust and slowly become distant memories. She flew to London, where she rented an RV and took off to explore Europe for several months. During that time, she read everything she could get her hands on, including books on world religions and Christian theology, hoping to make sense of the story of faith she had been swept up in. A medical emergency in Italy sent her back to Nashville, where she would recover and sell most of her earthly possessions before taking off for Australia. She landed in Sydney and spent the next couple of years roughing it around the Outback before circumnavigating the entire island continent. The experience quieted her soul.

Returning to Sydney, Knapp wanted to settle into a more steady rhythm of life, so she took a job at the antique store within walking distance from her house. To her coworkers and other friends in Sydney, she kept details about her prior life to herself. Even she had begun to forget who she had been, and the CCM world was niche enough for one of its stars from years ago to go unrecognized while walking through a Sydney neighborhood.

Looking up from the computer, her coworkers were as confused at her embarrassment as they were at why she had kept the information about her music career from them. They let her know that they thought she was good–real good–and that she should start singing again. They saw past her practiced excuses, mainly that she could no longer see herself in an American, evangelical setting. “Play normal music, then,” they told her.

This, along with other serendipitous experiences, made her start eyeing her guitars again. She dusted them off, plucking out old tunes. She also put her pen back to the paper and wrote songs that were more true to her lived experience, to the raw, unfiltered wrestling she had always thrived in.

Knapp compiled some of her new songs, sent them to friends in Nashville, and began to plan what she now refers to as Career 2.0.


April 23, 2010
Larry King Live Studio
Los Angeles, California
1,487 miles from Chanute, Kansas

In her memoir, Knapp reflected on the type of music she wanted to sing in the second iteration of her career: “My aspirations were not just to write songs about my faith; I wanted to write about everything. All of life’s simultaneous beauty and brokenness. I wanted to be able to end a story in defeat if the narrative called for it. To be free to lose hope for at least three minutes of unredeemed free-falling. If Jesus were to ever inspire a lyric again, He’d have to hold his own without the predictable cliches.”

Even though she didn’t plan to reenter the CCM world, she knew her return to music would rekindle curiosity about her long absence. For almost a decade, her fans had wondered what happened to her, with the speculation sparking rumors ranging from the partly true to the fantastically sensational. She wanted to get all the necessary self-disclosure out of the way so she could return to what she loved–writing and performing music.

One element of that self-disclosure included the revelation that Jennifer Knapp was gay.

Around the time she stepped off the stage in 2002, she began a relationship and fell in love. The two had been together every step of the way, from Europe, back to Nashville, and then to her partner’s home country of Australia. Even though Knapp believed the personal lives of musicians are not public property, a conviction she still holds, she knew the songs she would be singing and the venues she would be performing them in would leave enough scraps of biography to reveal this particular aspect of her life. To get this out of the way, Knapp’s team developed a plan to release her “coming out” story in a Christian publication (Christianity Today), an LGBTQ+ outlet (The Advocate), and a mainstream news site (Reuters).

The news gained more attention than she expected, rekindling the public conversation of whether someone can be gay and a Christian. This led to a fourth media appearance, this time on live television with legendary CNN personality Larry King, who invited Knapp on his show to tell her story. Unbeknownst to her, however, he also invited evangelical pastors Bob Botsford and Ted Haggard. Botsford was there to offer a counterpoint to Knapp’s story, while Haggard, who had been through well-publicized gay sex scandals, attempted to take a middle-ground approach. King, a secular Jew, mostly seemed baffled at the strange evangelical contours of a conversation he assumed should have already been settled.

If you’ve ever been in dialogue about LGBTQ+ inclusion within Christianity, you’ve heard all the talking points that were ticked off during the hour-long show. What was clear, however, was that Jennifer Knapp was a person of deep faith who had wrestled for years with God, Christian scriptures, and her own human experience. She knew the Bible as well, or better, than Botsford, her pastoral sparring partner. She showed herself as someone who had swam through deep waters of curiosity and grace and had come out on the other side more sure of herself and the God story she had chosen to be written into.

Off-air, she invited Botsford to one of her shows so he could meet people in the LGBTQ+ community who had deep, expansive faith, loved God and their neighbors, and were bearing witness to the story of Jesus in dynamic ways. In subsequent years, she extended similar invitations.

Botsford has yet to take her up on the offer.

November 20, 2024
University Baptist Church, Austin, Texas
574 miles from Chanute, Kansas

Since 2010, Jennifer Knapp has released five albums, including a 25th anniversary re-recording of her groundbreaking debut album, Kansas. She received a degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School and created Inside-Out, a non-profit that nurtures more inclusive spaces for people of faith. Knapp is hesitant to call herself a “Christian,” but is now more comfortable saying that Christianity is her “mother tongue.” She no longer plays shows in ten-thousand-seat auditoriums, but in smaller venues, pubs, and the occasional church. Some who attend her shows have discovered Knapp’s music during “Career 2.0.” Still, most of the audience includes longtime fans who are more likely to engage with the on-stage questions and reflections of an artist constantly wrestling with her story of faith.

One of the features of her shows is the interaction she has with the audience, both during and after. People will tell her that she helped save their faith. Others will say they don’t want anything to do with God or church anymore, but her music connects them with community and allows them to extend a little grace to those who still believe, and to their past selves. She’ll talk knitting to fans and give them loving embraces when they tell her their lives have fallen apart.

Last November, Knapp played a show in Austin to help raise money for University Baptist Church’s work of providing safe spaces for student protest groups to rest and plan. Less than a hundred people were in attendance, but it was evident that most of them had invested decades in a relationship with Knapp’s music. One of those in attendance was Janessa Tomberlin, who allowed me to eavesdrop on her conversation with Knapp after the show. Later, she shared more of her story with me.

Tomberlin began to listen to Knapp’s music around the age of 13. Her involvement in an evangelical megachurch introduced her to CCM music. It’s what all her friends listened to, so she started listening to it as well. She bonded with a close friend over their shared love for Knapp’s music.  This was also at a time when she had just completed a season of therapy. “Middle school was a rough time,” she said. “I was deeply closeted and scared that someone might suspect I was gay. I ruined a lot of relationships because of my self-loathing.”

She stopped listening to CCM around the time Knapp disappeared, so she hardly noticed. But later, after she had come out of the closet, she began to long for some of the earlier elements that connected her to her faith and rediscovered Knapp’s music. “I added all her albums back into my musical rotation and discovered she had released a new album [2010’s Letting Go] and written a book,” Tomberlin said. “I wept through my first listen [of the album] and read that book cover to cover, twice. For the first time, I connected to someone whose story was not unlike my own. Similar fears…similar rejection…similar hopes for the future. Seeing Jenn being unapologetically herself, loving who she loves, being brave in the face of judgment, and living authentically gave me the courage to do the same.”

In a conversation earlier this year, Knapp reflected on both iterations of her musical journey. “My critique of the CCM industry and the way we wrote songs was that we were always expected just to give you the answers and tell you how the Christian life was supposed to be lived out,” she said. “I was just really uncomfortable telling people that because, one, I just wasn’t a certain kind of human, so giving those kinds of directives wasn’t natural for me. But also, I’ve always had in my mind, even as a 20-something writing songs, was the question, ‘what can I do that moves this conversation forward without telling everyone what the end of this story is, because I don’t know what the end of this story is.’”

After more reflection, she added, “You know, if God is benevolent, if God is a liberating God, then surely living in that direction makes more sense than trying to define how it will end.” 

1980s
Chanute, Kansas

Jennifer Knapp’s childhood wasn’t always easy. There was divorce and family separation. There were the typical pains of growing up and trying to make sense of the world. A music teacher who came to Knapp’s small country school once a week gave her a tool to help make sense. With limited resources, she used tape to mark off a musical staff on the gym floor. Knapp learned melodies and harmonies, as well as tone and beat. She also began writing in her journal, an experience she documented in her memoir:

“In many ways, what I wrote in those pages were my prayers to God….There seemed to be a kind of spirit weaving it all together. A sensation. A knowing. A presence of some spiritual nature that acknowledged my presence in the universe.

“I would find myself sneaking outside in the middle of the night to try to find it. I would lie on my back, beneath the big Kansas sky, and imagine myself as a single star. I would toy with my childhood understanding of God, search the black expanse of the heavens, and write.”  

She may still be trying to make sense of that prayer she prayed so long ago. But whether a Jonah, Jacob, or simply Jennifer, Knapp’s words and melodies have traveled far from the fields underneath the big Kansas sky. They have given a generation of wanderers and wrestlers permission to turn on the light, ask challenging questions, and embrace more expansive expressions of faith than the ones they had known before.