Sean Feucht gets a Bible belting from a drag queen

Hello and welcome to Modern Relics, the newsletter about religion, pop culture and the internet. Today the vibe is…

Just kidding, I don’t set out to make fun of anything, but you’ve got to admit there’s a lot of religion online and it’s pretty funny a lot of the time. Documenting that is what this newsletter is for.

If you see a post and you think it might be good to include here, send it over! And if you want to write a whole newsletter one week, please get in touch.

Sean Feucht gets a Bible belting

This week, MAGA worship pastor Sean Feucht was shocked by this article in Church Leaders about how Christian musician Plumb liked Derek Webb’s collaboration with Christian drag musician Flamy Grant. He tweeted apocalyptically about the whole thing.

During a back-and-forth with Grant about her work, Feucht sniped, “Well good for us hardly anyone listens or cares what you do.”

Grant responded by going to TikTok to encourage viewers to stream her song “Good Day” on iTunes. Grant’s album Bible Belt Baby rapidly hit #1 on the iTunes Christian music charts, where it stayed for several days.

The achievement was covered by Newsweek, Rolling Stone and People, among others, including Christian masthead Relevant. Conspicuously absent: Christianity Today.

Flamy Grant is of course not the first person to have done this — I’ve written multiple times about queer Christian artist Semler pulling this exact move. On one hand it makes me wonder how easy it is to brigade the iTunes Christian charts and get a particular song or album to the top.

But on the other, the same artists have dominated the top 10 Christian songs for decades. When I saw the band For King & Country pushing into the CCM charts in the twentyteens I thought they were previously unknown, but no — they’re brothers of 90s/00s Christian pop megastar Rebecca St James. From 2018 to 2021, Lauren Dagle’s song “You Say” was either #1 or #2 on the Billboard Christian year-end charts each and every year. It’s not a bad song, but this is a market so resistant to innovation it hasn’t had a new idea in practically my entire lifetime — if you don’t count the swing towards worship music around 2003.

So, if the Christian iTunes charts are easy to exploit by upstart musicians, the industry only has itself to blame. Frankly, in a market this stale, these queer intrusions are a breath of fresh air.

Today, Grant is selling merch with Feucht’s dismissive tweet printed on it. Feucht has blocked Flamy Grant and Derek Webb on Twitter/X.

In other Feucht news, his Kingdom to the Capitol worship concerts held in and around various state legislatures have now opened the way for The Satanic Temple to do exactly the same thing.

Completely unrelated:

I need a moment

Houston Coley on Greta Gerwig on Barbie on the Bible

Ok I know you are probably sick of Barbie content on here for now, but  made probably the tidiest summary of the theological themes in the Barbie movie I’ve seen so far.

If you saw the links I posted last week but never got around to reading them, watch Houston’s YouTube video instead.

John Safran makes a golem

Sorry for the Twitter/X-only video, this doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere else.

John Safran is a Jewish-Australian comedian who makes stuff about religion a lot. His late-night show with Father Bob on triple j was well-liked by millennials during its 10-year run.

Anyway, on the SBS show Who The Bloody Hell Are We, John makes a golem to protect a Jewish-Iraqi falafel shop owner from vandals wrongly accusing him of cultural appropriation.

It hasn’t been done in 600 years, but thankfully he has a Kabbalah Rabbi to help him out.

One of the greatest sins of all

Fleming Rutledge weighs in on Twitter/X

I don’t know about you, but I’m not having much fun on Twitter/X anymore. I’d completely delete my account, but I want to keep running my newsletter and that website is a big part of all of this, so I intend to stay until the energy goes elsewhere.

Thankfully, Fleming Rutledge — Episcopal priest, theologian, Tolkien scholar and Orlando Bloom fan — has a word for me in this trying time.

I love her.

So biblical looking

Lastly, a venn diagram

Thanks to Moose for the submission. See? I include them!