A note before you read this.
If you follow me here, you know I spend most of my time in the world of dating, attachment, and helping women build love lives that actually reflect their worth. That is still my work and my calling.
But today I need to step outside that lane — because something is happening in the world I came from before this one, and I cannot be quiet about it.
I spent twenty years in Christian radio. It shaped me, it formed me, and ultimately it broke something in me that I had to rebuild from the ground up. What is unfolding right now in that world is not just a music industry story. It is a story about power, silence, and the real cost of both — and I lived it in ways that are deeply personal.
I am a dating coach. I am also a mother. And sometimes those two things collide with a bigger story that demands a megaphone.
This is one of those times.
An Open Letter to the Program Directors of Christian Radio
To the teams at K-LOVE, Air1, WayFM, KSBJ, WGTS, and every station that has chosen silence this week.
I spent years as a Christian radio DJ. I played “Testify to Love” probably thousands of times. It was everything CCM claimed to stand for: grace, redemption, love that transcends. I believed in it. I believed in the format.
What I also knew what everyone behind the mic knew and nobody said out loud — is that gay artists were being quietly pushed out of Christian music while their voices were still being used to fill airtime and collection plates.
We just didn’t talk about it.
This week, Michael Passons, one of the original voices of Avalon, one of the voices on that song revealed publicly that he was ousted from the group in the 1990s because he is gay. He has re-recorded “Testify to Love” with country artist Ty Herndon and an all-star queer chorus. It is sitting at #1 on the iTunes Christian Music Chart.
The people are speaking. Loudly.
And Christian radio? Complete silence.
K-LOVE. Air1. WayFM. KSBJ. WGTS. Not one of you has added the song. Not one has issued a statement. Not one has acknowledged that the #1 song in your own genre exists.
I want to be precise about what this silence is. It is not neutrality. It is not a caution. It is a choice made in board rooms and donor meetings to protect revenue at the expense of human beings.
I know this because I have been in those rooms.
I have sat with program directors and station managers who, away from the microphone, will tell you privately that the evangelical church’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people is wrong. Who will tell you they have gay friends, gay family members, gay colleagues they love and respect. Who know that Jesus’s ministry was defined by going toward the people the religious establishment rejected not away from them.
You know. You just won’t say it on air.
Because the donors will call, and pull their donations. Because the financial model of Christian radio depends on never, ever making a conservative listener uncomfortable.
So let me say what you won’t:
This silence is not protecting anyone. LGBTQ+ youth who grow up in evangelical households face dramatically higher rates of depression, self-harm, and suicide not because of who they are, but because of how their communities treat them. I don’t say this from a distance. I say this as a mother who discovered her own daughter was trapped in self-harm, an eating disorder, and suicidal ideation because the church I raised her in, and the radio stations her mother’s show aired on for twenty years, told her she was sinful for who she was. I left that world to save my daughter’s life. Every time you choose donor comfort over a gay teenager’s sense of worth, you are making a moral choice. A deadly one.
The deconstructed evangelicals flooding the charts with streams this week? They left the church because the church made them choose between their faith and their dignity. Many of them still believe. Many of them still sing. They are telling you exactly what they need and you are refusing to hear them because it might cost you a pledge drive.
The #1 song in your format is a song about love and restoration. You will not play it because the man singing it is gay.
That is not a programming decision. That is a theological statement. Own it.
You cannot be a secret ally. Silence in the face of harm is not a neutral position. It is a position.
You know what’s right. The #1 song in Christian music right now is proof that your listeners know too.
The question is whether you will still have their trust when they figure out you knew all along.
And to the listeners —
If you love this song, if it moves you, if you believe that the church should be a place of restoration and not rejection — call your station. Request “Testify to Love.” Email your program director. Post on their social media. You have more power than you know. Christian radio has always claimed to play what its listeners want to hear. Make them prove it. This moment does not have to be defined by gatekeeping and fear. It could be something far more beautiful — a massive, public act of restoration. A format that spent decades quietly pushing gay artists out of its doors, finally welcoming one home. On the #1 song in the country. Imagine what that would mean to every LGBTQ+ teenager sitting in a pew right now wondering if God loves them. This is the moment. The song is already there. All it needs is for someone to press play.