- The birth of her daughter in 2015 is what Julianna Glasse calls the “first thread pulled” in the unraveling of her views as a conservative evangelical
- “This faith was all that I knew. It was really the imprint through which I saw the entire world,” she says
- This week, Glasse started a new project focused on women — on “freedom,” on “transformation” and on “courage”
After Julianna Glasse gave birth to her third child 10 years ago, her entire world began to change.
In the days and weeks following her daughter’s arrival, Glasse, then a noted Christian pop singer and lifelong conservative evangelical, knew one thing to be true.
“This is not a child of wrath,” she recalls thinking — and feeling profoundly sure about — despite the fact that her upbringing should’ve led her to believe that “all humans are born evil,” the now 40-year old tells us .
The birth of her daughter in 2015 was what Glasse calls the “first thread pulled” in the unraveling of her personal religious views.
“This faith was all that I knew. It was really the imprint through which I saw the entire world,” says Glasse, who was born in Florida and grew up in Iowa as one of six siblings.
“It’s like if you have a tattoo on your eyelids: that’s kind of like what it’s like to grow up in this space,” she says. As Glasse got older and became a mom, however, she began to find the confines of her religion unbearable.
In her opinion, “the liberty and the freedom of a woman was contained to the structures of the word of God and this sort of authoritarian perspective on religion,” she says. “And then as a woman, you’re born and essentially your proximity to God is in direct correlation to your proximity to a man, whether that be your father or then, very quickly, your husband.”
Julianna Glasse as a child.
Courtesy of Julianna Glasse
For most of her life, Glasse — who declined to share specific details about her family, to keep them out of the spotlight — was a devout follower of her faith, and she began her career as a Christian pop artist while in college.
She studied music and, before every performance, she says, she often would sign a “statement of belief” before being allowed to take the stage.
“These statements would come over to you from the pastor, and it just got to the point that I couldn’t sign it anymore. I realized in a pretty profound moment that I was an active participant in the oppression of women and in the oppression of [the] queer community,” she says. “I was like, ‘I don’t even want my girls coming to my show.’ “
It was a friend of Glasse’s who, sensing her inner turmoil, recommended a book for her to read, she says.
“I picked up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and that began this just intense love of literature and philosophy and spirituality,” Glasse explains.
However, “the more liberated that I became intellectually and spiritually, the more threatened the world around me got.”
Julianna Glasse performing during her time as a Christian pop singer.
Courtesy of Julianna Glasse
Glasse was taken to “Christian therapy” and was told she had “an unhealthy obsession with love” because she read the work of poet Rumi. Her beliefs were colliding — and they were counterproductive.
“I was feeling this incredible sense of conflict internally because you don’t want to disrupt the world that you’re in. I wanted to keep the peace in my house. I wanted to not ruffle all of the feathers,” she says, “but I couldn’t continue to align with something that I knew was actively harming people that I loved and actively harming me, actively limiting my intelligence, limiting my exploration, limiting, essentially, my liberties.”
In 2016, a year or so after the birth of her third daughter, Glasse says there came the second of three major events on her journey away from her church: She met a gay couple next door to where she and her family were living in Chicago. (She has since split from her husband.)
The couple quickly became two of her closest friends and biggest inspirations — upending beliefs that had long surrounded her — she says.
Julianna Glasse.
Elliot Morgan
“I’ll never forget them coming up to me together and asking me to dinner. I didn’t really know how to answer because in the world that I was raised, in the world that I was in, it was — you don’t get close to sin. You protect yourself,” says Glasse.
Still, she decided to accept their invitation.
“We went to dinner and they were, No. 1, honest with me about their own hesitancy [toward me]. They were like, ‘We are being really brave and bringing you in.’ I just said, ‘I’m here to listen. I just want to listen,’ and they shared with me their incredible journey,” she says.
Still, that was 2016 — an election year, and Glasse felt compelled to vote in line with her family, casting a ballot for then-candidate Donald Trump.
“I voted for him, and then I was the artist that [Trump] had come sing at the National Prayer Breakfast,” Glasse says, referring to the 2017 performance. “What should have felt like an honor in that moment was a real conflict of integrity to me because I knew I was voting against myself. I knew I was voting against my girls and just humanity in general.”
Julianna Glasse during her time at Oxford.
Courtesy of Julianna Glasse
Glasse now sees these moments in her life as milestones: the birth of her daughter, meeting (and befriending) her first gay couple, singing at the National Prayer Breakfast.
The dam finally broke, says Glasse, when “a man in my life pointed at me and said, ‘This is what happens when women read,’ and it was like the runway of my life lit up. I left that whole world behind that day.”
Glasse, who went on to study and graduate from the University of Oxford and splits her time between New York and Tennessee, describes herself as “spiritually private,” with “no relationship to religion.” She left Christianity in 2019.
On Monday, March 10, she celebrated the launch of her nonprofit, This Is What Happens When Women Read.
The organization is focused on women’s rights, education and self-actualization.
“This is actually what happens when women read,” Glasse says.
“It’s freedom, it’s transformation, it’s courage,” she says. “It’s even demanding the raise or opening up the door or applying for the job. I feel so ready. I am so thrilled just to hold this banner of liberation for women — it’s not a perfect one, it’s messy and complex and hard — but what I love about watching women set themselves free is that that happens when they know that they’re worthy.”
