Lesbian folk singer Emily Saliers, one half of the “Indigo
Girls” duo, joined with her Methodist theologian father, Don
Saliers, to write a book published last year called A Song to
Sing: A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual
Practice. The book strives to meld her “secular” lounge music
with the ethos of her father’s sacred hymnody.
“Is there just a plain and simple message of love and caring for
each other and the world?” Saliers asked, in a recent interview
with Jim Wallis’ Sojourners magazine about her book.
“There are some so-called secular texts that speak to that with
more passion and power than some of the most well-known sacred
texts.”
Saliers and her dad created a minor dust-up when they were
featured speakers and performers at a United Methodist Women’s
convention in Anaheim, California last month. (You can watch their
performance here.) Seven thousand church ladies listened to Emily
perform anti-war folk songs and then join her father to sing some
Psalms. Don Saliers teaches music at the Methodist seminary at
Emory University in Atlanta. Emily is ambivalent towards religion
but credits her childhood in the church for inspiring the music she
now makes with fellow lesbian Indigo Girl (but not romantic
partner) Amy Ray.
Traditionalist church ladies (renewnetwork.org),
citing Methodism’s official disapproval of homosexual practice,
protested Emily Saliers’ featured role at the assembly, which was
attended by 7,000 Methodist women. But a news release from the
United Methodist Women’s organization, while admitting that
Saliers’ “self-avowed sexual orientation” had “generated
controversy,” nonetheless affirmed that the father-daughter team
was invited because of their “spiritual and theological
understandings and their commitment to justice for women and
children.”
The leadership of the 700,000 member United Methodist Women’s
organization still holds fast to old-fashioned Social Gospel
liberalism. Although it has lost several hundred thousand members
over recent decades, tens of millions in endowed funds help the New
York-based group ignore conservative trends in American religion.
The Indigo Girls’ brand of social activism is seen as a good fit
for the Methodist women, or at least their elites, among whom
Hillary Clinton is a prominent and much extolled member.
“I want to hang with the Methodists!” Saliers told the crowd in
the Anaheim convention center. Her theologian father responded to
his daughter, “I love my Bach. But your stuff has taught me so
much.” She shared an anti-war song about “blood drying in the
desert” that she recalled having provocatively performed before a
New York audience immediately after 9-11. He then joined her in
singing Psalm 139.
It was an unusual duo, with the straight-laced Daddy Saliers
looking somewhat like John Ashcroft, and the red-haired, slightly
grungy daughter living up to her counter-culture reputation. The
Saliers’ book is unusual too, as they attempt to combine their
contrasting stories. She explained to Southern Voice last
year that “there is a spiritual path to both secular and sacred
music and how the deep human yearnings in them are one and the same
sometimes.” Describing herself as a “religious mutt,” she attempts
to find commonality with her Methodist father.
Don Saliers teaches theology and worship at Emory’s Candler
School of Theology for Methodist clergy. In contrast, she espouses
social and gay liberation through her songs. “I can never separate
my thoughts and feelings from my identity and the rest of my queer
community,” she told Southern Voice. “When you hear a song
that expresses what you’ve struggled with for so long, it can be so
liberating.”
Emily Saliers’ Indigo Girls website has an
“Activism!” section, which urges various causes from “Making
Shelters for Transgendered People” to “Say No to War with Iraq!!!”
to “The Moratorium Campaign” against capital punishment and “Honor
the Earth” vigils. Among her travel memories, she recounts a 1996
visit to Cuba and a warm meeting there with Fidel Castro.
“I was visibly shaking and my eyes teared up as I introduced
myself,” Saliers recalls. “I know that this man has participated in
his share of violence in the name of the revolution, but his ideals
(a ‘man of the people’) seemed to overshadow the reality of war.”
Similarly, she admires Che Guevera for “fighting the brutalities of
imperialism” but who was ultimately lost in “machismo and
violence.” The Zapatistas of Mexico seem to be the “purest
movement” she has witnessed, having visited Chiapas some years
ago.
Although nervous, she was impressed by Castro. “I told Fidel
that I appreciated what he stands for and that I would go home with
a bigger heart, then I kissed his hand…hmmm…I don’t know what
got into me, and I don’t even remember his response,” she
remembers. “He had a peaceful demeanor and struck me as an old
spirit who had been through a lot and sometimes may have lost his
way. He was very otherworldly yet human.”
No less cordial than Castro, the United Methodist Women’s
Assembly received the Saliers’ with generous applause. “Tell them
that you belong to an organization that refuses to offer religious
excuses or legitimization for violence, vengeance, deprivation and
discrimination,” United Methodist Women’s president Jan Love told
the crowd, which also heard from Kenyan Nobel laureate Wahu Kaara
of the Kenya Debt Relief Network and leftist Bolivian Minister of
Justice Casimira Rodriguez Romero, herself a Methodist. There was
also a fashion show called “Fashion Resistance to Militarism,”
which spotlighted the supposed “subtle examples of militarism in
popular culture.”
Some juicy stuff, no doubt, but Emily Saliers remained the star
of the event, despite her ambivalence about religion in general and
her father’s church in particular. “Without your witness…we’d be
immeasurably impoverished,” Daddy Saliers chirpily told the
well-dressed and well-coiffed Methodist women. Emily Saliers
thanked the church ladies for “being welcoming.” Father and
daughter sang “Let Us Break Bread Together on our Knees” from
The United Methodist Hymnal before departing.
