Getting Free
Notes on Beyoncé's "CHURCH GIRL"
Although I was born in New York, I spent most of my childhood in Maryland. My mom and I spent a few years in Baltimore before moving between there and Washington, D.C. to Columbia. Even with the move, my mom would take me back to Baltimore most Sundays to attend New Psalmist Baptist Church.
The church was huge. And if you’re familiar with Black Christian churches, it featured a lot of the images you might think of. A charismatic, sweaty male pastor. Black women in fancy hats. Black men in big suits. And of course, there was the choir—probably the reason a lot of congregants came to New Psalmist.
In the Black church, choirs feel like home. When I first listened to Beyoncé’s album Renaissance, the three-track onslaught of “CUFF IT,” “ENERGY,” and “BREAK MY SOUL” paved the way for “CHURCH GIRL.” The song opens with a vocal sample from the Clark Sisters, the legendary gospel group whose melodies have probably been sung by nearly every Black church choir. With production credits from No I.D., The-Dream, Beyoncé, and Stuart White, “CHURCH GIRL” then flips to a beat that necessitates cake-clapping, twerking, and throwing it byke.
As Beyoncé begins singing, “I’ve been up, I’ve been down / Felt like I move mountains / Got friends that cried fountains,” I can almost hear a church mother up near the front row of the pews tilting her head back and speak-singing, “Welllll…” Then, the song starts to tread into territory that would probably make that church mother do a double take:
I’m warnin’ 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 but me
I was born free
I can already hear the muttering. The whispers. I can see heads turning. And then, all hell breaks loose:
I’ll drop it like a thottie, drop it like a thottie
I said now pop it like a thottie, pop it like a thottie
Me say now drop it like a thottie, drop it like a thottie
Church girls actin’ loose, bad girls actin’ snotty
Although the church mothers shoot up out the pews and begin protesting, they’re quickly drowned out by the pastor’s kids, the girls who love God but want to twerk a lil’ something, and the women who are tired of being silent about what they like, what brings them pleasure—surprisingly, but also maybe not, some of the church mothers are among them.
That flip into a faster tempo during the chorus of “CHURCH GIRL” feels reminiscent of a praise break—the music picks up, the vocalists’ cadence increases, the choir’s claps are joined by church folks jumping up and down, two-stepping, three-stepping, running out of breath, and yelling. Lots of yelling. It’s the moment a church service begins to unravel the most, where the pastor often has to reel it in—not before getting in a few shouts themself.
Although it is often deemed sinful in Christian churches, engaging freely and healthily with one’s sexuality, with one’s sensuality, being at home in one’s body is an act of praise, an expression of one’s faith in God and love for one’s self. Love thy neighbor as thyself—even if it gets a little sweaty. Or a lot sweaty.
For Black women, Beyoncé has long represented the girl raised in church—a member of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas growing up. But Beyoncé also embraces her body and sexuality in a way that exudes unflinching confidence even if it contradicts the restrictive instructions about sexuality many of us, especially women—and especially Black women—are handed in Christian churches.
One of my favorite childhood movies is The Fighting Temptations. Released in 2003, the film stars Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyoncé alongside many others, including The O’Jays and even a young Chloe Bailey as the kid version of Beyoncé’s character, Lilly.
Lilly grew up in church with Gooding Jr.’s character, Darrin, and had a special relationship with Darrin’s Aunt Sally. Even as Lilly grew up and the church ostracized her for working as a lounge singer and having a child out of wedlock, Aunt Sally treated Lilly like one of her own.
When Aunt Sally dies, her will states that Darrin must direct the choir at his childhood church and win the annual “Gospel Explosion” choir competition. Darrin’s search for people to join the choir leads him to the nightclub where Lilly works. She delivers a sultry cover of Little Willie John’s “Fever,” and Darrin quickly realizes he needs Lilly in the choir if they’re going to have any chance of winning the competition.
Despite some pushback from a few of the churchgoers, including the pastor’s judgmental sister played by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Darrin eventually persuades Lilly to join the choir. Later in the movie, there’s a scene where the choir has to perform for a group of men in prison. Beyoncé’s ‘‘church girl” really comes out in this scene.
After one of the older choir members, played by Lou Myers, attempts a solo and gets booed off stage, Beyoncé steps in and begins to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to save the choir’s performance. She starts slow, really drawing the crowd in with her vocals. Then, the choir begins to join her before Beyoncé’s cadence speeds up, as do the claps. The atmosphere starts changing—to the point the prison guards run in, donning riot gear, thinking the imprisoned men have gone free.
Praise break. Twerk break. Jail break. Either way, it evokes freedom—the freedom to get lost in movement among others, to be overtaken without worrying whether those around you approve or disapprove. Because you’re going to get yours.
Although I struggle with Beyoncé’s class politics and the exploitation required to become a billionaire, I admire what Beyoncé represents for Black women—especially Black women who grew up in church, who know what it means to be judged for being “too fast,” for not wearing enough clothing, for being “too big” in all the “wrong” places.
I’ll never be able to fully understand that experience as a cisgender, heterosexual man. Cishet men are put on a pedestal in Black churches. We’re often the pastors, the ushers, the choir directors, the ones who get to sit up on stage and look down at all the parishioners. In many Black churches, women serve the men. They make way for the pastor and keep the kids in line while also cooking the after-service meal. This rigid, constrictive environment attempts to keep us imprisoned, searching for any glimpse of freedom.
I regularly attended a Black church for the last time five or six years ago when I lived in Colorado Springs. I started going to the church because I felt the need to be surrounded by more Black people. The organization I moved out to Colorado to work for was predominantly white, and most of the people I knew in the Springs were also white.
During my first service, I felt at home when the choir began singing. I couldn’t help but join in—harmonizing and dancing, getting lost in the music. I got so caught up that a few choir members around my age came up to me after the service. They asked if I sang and wanted to join the choir. Not only did we become fast friends, but they took the place of my Colorado Springs family. Even with how open they were with me and how visible they were in services, most of them had to hide their queerness at church.
In her book, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, author Deesha Philyaw speaks to this “secret life” many of us—especially queer people and women—are forced to conceal within the Black church and “God-fearing” families. Philyaw’s book is actually the first thing I thought about when I heard Beyoncé’s “CHURCH GIRL” for the first time. It felt like the song was made for the book, or Beyoncé’s experiences were captured in its tales somehow.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a short story collection, explores the lives and inner worlds of “four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions.” All of these characters are Black women.
The first story focuses on the complicated relationship between Eula and Caroletta, two best friends turned lovers. The narrator Caroletta describes Eula as a “true believer,” stating, “She doesn’t walk around with questions lingering in her throat like I do.”
On New Year’s Eve heading into the year 2000, after one of their secret hookups, Eula shares her resolution: “If I’m still alone come Valentine’s Day, it will be the last one I spend without a man who belongs to me and me only.”
Eula goes on to share that she doesn’t want to die a virgin, which Caroletta finds funny after the sexual experiences they’ve had together. As the conversation continues, Eula is shocked to find out Caroletta has had sex with men outside of marriage, and that she isn’t “clean,” which leads to a tearful exchange in which Caroletta asks Eula:
“Do you think God wants you, or anybody, to go untouched for decades and decades? For their whole lives? Like Sister Stewart, Sister Wilson, Sister Hill, my mother after my father died—all those women at church who think they have to choose between pleasing God and something so basic, so human as being held and known in the most intimate way.”
When I hear Beyoncé’s “CHURCH GIRL,” I hear freedom—or at least the practice of freedom. I question whether any of us can be truly free under imperialist, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. But I believe we can practice freedom. We can begin living into the future many of us are doing our best to fight for—a world that requires us to be at home with ourselves and within our bodies, accepting of our sexuality.
I draw a parallel between the "CHURCH GIRL" twerk breaks and Fighting Temptations praise breaks because both represent letting go. They are physical embodiments of how we might practice freedom—especially for Black women.
People look down on women exercising their sexuality in public, especially outside the boundaries of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. Patriarchy teaches us women should be small. Controllable. Reserved. Purity culture says women who act outside of the strict limits it has set are less than—and even when they behave according to purity culture's rules, they still have less power than men. And this multiplies for Black women, especially Black trans women, which is why I’m thankful for what Beyoncé and her music mean to them.
When Beyoncé sings, “Nobody can judge me but me / I was born free,” it’s an invitation for Black women to declare, as Deesha Philyaw does in her story “Instructions for Married Christian Husbands”:
“You can’t save me, because I am not in peril.”
In Beyoncé’s lyrics, the church girls who dare to “drop it like a thottie” are “actin’ loose,” which is to say they’re practicing freedom. They’re not allowing others’ judgments to make them smaller. And it’s the girls “actin’ snotty,” like they’re better than everyone else, that are characterized as “bad.” Sure, Beyoncé could mean bad as in good or sexy. But within the walls of the church, snottiness traditionally looks like looking down on others.
How can you be free when you’re so consumed with other people’s behavior?
In the words of Beyoncé, “Let it go, girl / let it out, girl / twirl that ass like you came up out the South, girl.” For blessed are the ass-shakers, the ones to whom Deesha Philyaw dedicates The Secret Lives of Church Ladies: “Everyone trying to get free.”
May you be unshackled, free to proclaim:
“I’m finally on the other side
I finally found the extra smiles
Swimmin’ through the oceans of tears we cried”
