Crossroads Podcast: Paying Serious Attention To ‘Girls Gone Bible’
What do you know? If you go to a typical online dictionary and look up the verb “drawl,” you will find, “to speak slowly with vowels greatly prolonged.”
OK, but — speaking as someone raised in Texas who now lives in Tennessee — what about “drawl” as a noun? A few mouse clicks found this, “a way of speaking slowly with vowel sounds that are longer than usual.”
What do you know? If you go to a typical online dictionary and look up the verb “drawl,” you will find, “to speak slowly with vowels greatly prolonged.”
OK, but — speaking as someone raised in Texas who now lives in Tennessee — what about “drawl” as a noun? A few mouse clicks found this, “a way of speaking slowly with vowel sounds that are longer than usual.”
Really now? And where, pray tell, do people tend to speak with a “drawl”?
I raise this question because of a laugh-out-loud (at least for me) moment early in the story that served as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, an interesting feature at The Free Press that ran with this double-decker headline:
The Girls Who Found God in a Podcast
Remember the two gorgeous blonde women who said a prayer for Trump at his ‘victory rally’? They’re on tour — and their fans say meeting them is like coming face-to-face with Jesus.
I loved the overture for this piece, which does a great job of illustrating the style of this story. while hinting at its major themes. It will be easy to spot the moment where I laughed.
“You’re gonna leave here set free!”
It’s Friday night at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and two gorgeous buxom-blonde, glossy-lipped starlets with Valley girl drawls stride onstage, hand in hand. Their names are Angela Halili and Arielle Reitsma, and they’re not models or singers; they’re podcasters, hosts of the wildly popular show Girls Gone Bible. I’m here for the launch of their national tour — a multicity trek, stretching through to December, with stops in San Francisco; Morristown, New Jersey; Atlanta; Portland; Seattle; and LA. The energy is intense.
“Anyone else in the room just love the Bible, like, so much?” said Arielle, beaming.
The audience—500 women sporting milkmaid dresses and bouncy blowouts, clutching iPhones and the Good Book — screamed, tears flowing, mascara streaking, hands reaching upward. The girl next to me began to shake with sobs right then, and didn’t stop until a couple of hours later. Most of the women in my row were locals from Philadelphia — a teacher, a barista, a law student — but the line outside the theater had been full of pilgrims; there were girls who’d flown in from Texas, driven from Ohio, taken a bus from New York.
“I couldn’t miss this,” one told me. “They just get it.”
Now, I admit that while I have lived and worked in some radically different parts of America — from the Rocky Mountains to the Acela Zone in the Northeast, from the deep Bible Belt to South Florida — I have never lived in California. I have, however, taught quite a few students (female and male) from the Golden State and I have never heard anyone with an accent that I would call a “drawl.”
Trust me, I am not mentioning this vocabulary issue as a way of criticizing reporter Kara Kennedy’s work in this feature. In a strange way, my intention is quite the opposite. I appreciate the tone and content of this story, even if there are a few places in which it appears that Kennedy was venturing into, well, foreign territory.
Most of all, she took the Girls Gone Bible fans seriously and listened to what they had to say. Ditto for listening to their critics. I was worried that this would be another mainstream media hit piece on Southern evangelical-Pentecostal culture, with a dose of MAGA stereotyping thrown in as a predictable bonus. This feature was much more than that.
It’s also interesting that the event Kennedy attended was in Philadelphia, even though some Sunbelt folks travelled all the way there to take part. Look at the other cities in the Girls Gone Bible tour — San Francisco; Morristown, New Jersey; Atlanta; Portland; Seattle; and Los Angeles. Yes, Atlanta is in the Deep South, but that’s another deep blue urban center, culturally speaking (the suburbs are kind of moderate purple, these days). That isn’t a Bible Belt list.
The story includes a few other interesting word choices, such as this observation about the few men seen in the crowd — “a handful of God-fearing boyfriends hovered at the edges, toddlers on their hips.” I would assume that some of those guys were probably husbands, at this point.
Oh, and consider the images and information in this passage:
Girls Gone Bible launched in 2023, with a weekly show, and has since amassed more than 20 million listens, and nearly two million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined. The title is a deliberate wink at Girls Gone Wild, that 2000s franchise that encouraged hot, drunk college girls to flash for the camera. … The episodes stretch to around an hour and a half long; the tone is at once confessional and didactic, and the message simple: If you’re a young woman, scripture and sobriety is far more fulfilling than partying and sluttiness. …
Like so many shows hosted by young women, Girls Gone Bible tackles topics such as “Lust and Deception,” “Overcoming an Eating Disorder,” and “What Men Look for in a Wife.” Unlike most of those other shows, this one includes lengthy Bible readings, and serious reflection on how the word of God can guide girls through the jungle of modernity. Halili and Reitsma are earnest and animated — about Jesus and sin and evil forces. Though their aesthetic is more Hooters than holiness, this is moral instruction pure and simple, delivered with the giddy verve of two sorority girls telling you about their latest crush.
Looking at pictures of these rallies, methinks the atmosphere has more of a cowgirls, farmhouse cottage and even “trad” wives vibe.
However, for a reporter seeking a news story, the key facts are the size of this duo’s audience, the fact that the Donald Trump team noticed them (#DUH) and, finally, the growing evidence that many young American women are tired of lives baptized in anxiety, depression and despair. Yes, it’s ironic that some of the women in attendance at the rally were convinced that God steered them to Halili and Reitsma through the algorithms on Instagram and TikTok.
As it should, the story includes commentary from experts who see this phenomenon as a nightmare caused by patriarchy and hostile to sane, modern, intelligent feminists. There are also some questions about when, precisely, these two young women cleaned up their acts and launched their profitable work in Bible study and evangelism. Their ministry motto is: “Two imperfect girls who serve a perfect God.”
In terms of other voices in this feature, I would have welcomed insights from sympathetic and critical evangelical and Catholic women in academia, parachurch groups or denominational offices. And, yes, I wanted to know more about the faith backgrounds of the two stars, since both were raised as cradle Catholics and one key act in this drama took place in a Catholic sanctuary.
Reitsma’s story is: a broken relationship, depression, then a transcendent moment, in which all she had to do was fall to her knees:
I would say I lived most of my life in fight or flight, with worrying, anxiety, just in complete fear. I’ll never forget it, I was driving, I hadn’t eaten in, like, 10 days. . . . There was this little Catholic church by my house, and I went in there, and I just fell to my knees. I looked up and I was like, “Who am I supposed to be? Where do you want me to go? I don’t know what to do.” And in that moment, I had felt this overwhelming peace, this love that I truly have never felt before. . .I was so heartbroken, and so I just kept praying, I was like, “Please bring me a godly friend.”
Surely enough, three months later, on Reitsma’s birthday in November 2022, Halili walked into her life.
In an age of crushing loneliness, and social-media certainly does not appear to be the cure, that simple prayer may be the heart of this interesting story: “Please bring me a godly friend.”
Among the voices quoted at the rally, one young woman offered this description of her reaction when she first began listening to Girls Gone Bible: “It felt as if I was listening to a big sister talk to me.”
Yes, there is a story here. In fact, in the podcast, I argued that there are several news angles here worthy of follow-up reporting.
Meanwhile, this feature certainly offered more evidence that The Free Press team recognizes that religion is an undeniable force in the lives of millions of ordinary Americans and that this reality creates news, even the stories are only tangentially linked to politics.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.