Amy Grant’s Divorce From Hell
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Christianity, Music, Spirituality, Feminism, LGBTQ

I’ m thinking back to 1999, when the woman who’d been the face of popular Christian music for two decades got a divorce.

Seventeen years and three kids into her marriage, she’d fallen for another man—country singer Vince Gill. Or as she says: “We got along like two peas in a pod and made no bones about it.”

If she was Cinderella, this was her midnight. Christian radio quit playing her music and Christian bookstores took her products off the shelves. That she kept her record deal was front page news. As far as Evangelical America was concerned—Amy Grant was canceled.

Her soon-to-be ex-husband, Gary Chapman, was out raking her over the coals for the crime of liking somebody else.

“Since the beginning of 1994, they had what I would call an inappropriate friendship, which was destructive to our marriage,” he tells People in 1999.

There were rumors of Grant and Gill being secretly married. “I guess people are so anxious to have some news that they kind of create news where there necessarily isn’t any,” she says.

And a 38-year-old woman with hardly any theological training turns to her own religion, and takes them to church.

“Let’s get real,” she tells CCM. “You want to know what my real black ugly stuff is? Go look in the mirror and everything that’s black and ugly about you, it’s the same about me. That’s what Jesus died for.”

How little we knew about the private lives of other people? Funny how that works.

A year after the divorce, Chapman, for a profile in his next career as a talk show host, gives details to Texas Monthly about the “drug habit” he’d had since age 20, doing “cocaine and marijuana” since the time he’d known his wife. “I had two distinctly different lives,” he says. “Different sets of friends, different likes, dislikes, actions, everything.”

The reporter notes that Amy, typically mum about contributing factors to the divorce, let drop “that after a lifetime of anticipation, her wedding-night deflowering wasn’t quite what she had hoped. In fact, she termed the first four months of connubial romps a ‘yawn.’”

I sit with the story of the most famous Christian marriage in the world? An addict husband, years of bad sex and counseling, living separately while she’s profoundly drawn to someone else.

And what matters to the faithful—what always matters—is the “rules.”

Grant and Chapman met in 1979 when she was a freshman at Furman University, already with one album.

He asked her out. She said no. He was a singer-songwriter, and she’d be the most gifted interpreter of his music. His song “Father’s Eyes” became the title track off her second album, and her first big hit.

Grant looked then like a girl folk singer with bushy hair. In a 1981 appearance on The P.T.L. Club, she chatters about dating, and sings “Father’s Eyes.” I have to remind myself the song was written by a man she’ll marry—

I may not be every mother’s dream for her little girl

And my face may not grace the mind of everyone in the world

It’s like Amy had stepped out of his creative imagination, the girl of his dreams. Chapman kept calling her, sending tapes of his music. In the summer of 1981 he got a spot as her opening act.

“I guess I didn’t realize he was courting,” she says. “I thought we were great friends, that’s all. He became a part of my family. They took him in because they thought he was just a companion to their little girl. It was pretty sneaky.”

In June 1982, they married. Years later, typically vague on details, she later recalls it “had been rocky from the get-go. I’d been holding steady for 15 years in something that was not easy to hold steady.”

Two years into her marriage, she knew it was in trouble? Two years down, fifteen to go. Of course she was busy—being a superstar.

“I am really striving as an artist to be relevant and to communicate,” she says in 1985 to the Washington Post. “I don’t want to cling to the past. You become a musical has-been if you keep trying to make the music what it used to be.”

As I flip through photos and interviews of her over the years, I realize how un-Christian she seems, in being dynamic and alive. In many churches, they were solemnly singing hundred year old hymns, as women didn’t speak, and their clothes were patrolled to make sure they were ‘feminine’.

By her fourth album in 1982, Age to Age, Grant was blazing her own trail.

“That album is one wild ride,” as a Christian memoir of the time recalls. And she brought the Evangelical world along with her.

However gifted a performer, it wasn’t all her doing.

With the rise of Madonna as a cultural force, riding the repressed gay subculture to white-hot stardom, even Evangelical Christianity needed to keep up—and there was Amy Grant.

She changes from folky girl to electric performer with transvestite edges, regularly wearing male clothing. Being called the ‘Christian answer to Madonna’ is part of her life, and wears on her. “I don’t guess I’m trying to be an answer to anything,” she says in 1985. “It’s kind of cheap to say, ‘Uh-oh, there’s a Madonna. There’d better be a flip side.’”

A 1985 letter to the Sacramento Bee reminds me that Madonna vs. Amy Grant was a subject of public debate. “Grant is such a welcome relief, and her lyrics provide not only an alternative to moaning and groaning, but they tell of something real, something deeper and more meaningful in life.”

Grant read as ‘spiritual’, but she was also sexual. Remarkably, in the public mind, she could be both at the same time. Religion turned around, and started going forward.

Her interviews are full of her pro-sex stance.

She comes off boy-crazy and sexually precocious. A 1985 interview in Rolling Stone was more noted for her recalling skinny-dipping in the ocean, but she also talks about how she’d gotten into the Bible study—for the boys. She goes to one to hunt down a boy she liked, and “I encountered the Bible in a way that really affected my life.”

Her idea of Jesus seems mostly to be, however, that people should get along, and be a community having ‘fun’ together.

Evangelicals were getting nervous. In 1985, Christianity Today sends a reporter to interview her pastor. “She’s not always wise in the way she says things,” the guy sighs. “She doesn’t want to be a sex symbol, but wants sex to be seen as a good thing, a godly thing.”

Her career seems like a ministry to bring sexual awareness to Christian people. “It seems to me that people who are most adamantly against premarital sex have experienced some kind of pain in their own lives,” she observes in 1985.

She advances a new idea of the Christian woman.

“I feel that a Christian young woman in the ’80s is very sexual,” she says, though “it’s never been taking my shirt off or having my tongue sticking out.”

Like Madonna, Grant’s act continues to be notably ‘queer’, as when she’s singing Rich Mullins’ gender-free and arguably gay love songs, “Doubly Good to You” and “Love of Another Kind.”

She’d say she wasn’t a religious figure. “I’m a singer, not a preacher, I’m not looking to convert anybody,” she tells the L.A. Times in 1984. But it’s theology to tell people it’s okay to be sexual, gender-bending, and fun. If the Catholic Madonna was the ‘bad cop’, Protestant Amy was the good one.

Her husband travels as part of her band.

There’s lots of talk he was jealous of her career. Some of it is from her. “It gets weird when I’m always in the forefront,” she says in 1986. When he got a recording contract, she says, that “has really been a boost for our relationship.”

The Texas Monthly profile is a portrait of a Gary Chapman who spends years simmering that his wife is selling out stadiums and he’s out with the band or the kids. He takes to performing during her intermissions, but nobody is paying attention.

“I had a lot of reasons to be angry,” he says. “I don’t think any of them were valid, but they were to me at the time. I know that I felt overlooked.”

I’m browsing Grant fan memories in newsgroups. Giving a concert in the early 1980s, one recalls Chapman playing, coming off poorly, as the audience starts booing him. He throws down his guitar and shouts, “You’re just jealous because I’m married to Amy Grant!” And storms off stage.

The reviewer adds: “Then he hit on my friend backstage when she was trying to interview him. Told her she was ‘nice and curvy.’”

Another memory, from a concert in the mid-80s. Amy comes out at the end to take her bow. Gary comes out to take her hand, and she snatches it away.