🎸 Country Star Ella Langley: Brought Up Baptist, Saved (Again) At Judgement House 🔌
Weekend Plug-in 🔌
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• • •
Blame it all on my roots.
I showed up in Godbeat boots.
I love listening to country music. I love covering religion news. And hey, if the two occasionally overlap, that’s even better, right?
Which leads us to the subject of this week’s column: Ella Langley, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter from the small town of Hope Hull, Alabama.
The Wall Street Journal profiled Langley this week, touting her rise to “country superstardom.”
Langley’s single “Choosin’ Texas” has topped the Billboard Hot 100 for six straight weeks and the magazine’s Hot Country Songs chart for 20 weeks. Her song “Be Her” is also in the Hot 100 and ranks No. 2 on the country list.
Billboard points out:
Notably, Langley becomes the second woman to chart two titles in the top 10 of the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs simultaneously — Taylor Swift first did so with “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “Red” for a week in October 2012.
What does any of this have to do with religion? Trust me, I’m getting there.
But first, a bit more relevant context: Langley’s new album, “Dandelion,” came out last Friday and immediately jumped to No. 1 on iTunes.
My favorite song on the album is “Speaking Terms,” an acoustic ballad about faith and doubt.
I carry on this one-way conversation
I'm listening, but you don't say a word
If your answer's in the silence, I'll be patient
But it's hard to know my prayers are being heard
I'm waiting on a whisper, just something to confirm that
You and me are still on speaking terms
It’s certainly a timely subject, as Lifeway Research just last week shared research that found a growing number of churchgoers face doubts.
Langley wrote or collaborated on a majority of the songs on “Dandelion,” but not “Speaking Terms,” which Billboard reviewers rank 12th out of 16 titles on the album. In my humble (and totally amateur music listener) opinion, “Speaking Terms” merits a much higher place on the list.
I’m not saying it’s Garth Brooks’ “Unanswered Prayers” (1990) or Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus, Take The Wheel” (2005), but the emotional, thought-provoking tune rings with authenticity.
While Langley didn’t pen “Speaking Terms” — and while her songs, like much of country music, often gravitate toward drinking whiskey and feeling frisky (see her smash 2024 collaboration “You Look Like You Love Me” with Riley Green) — her lyrics frequently provide glimpses of her Southern Baptist upbringing.
This is the opening verse of the new album’s title track, which Langley cowrote:
Tried leavin' where I come from, but always gonna go back
I tried sippin' on the champagne, but it's always gonna be Jack
There's things I can't change, like how I was raised
The Bible in my blood, and the 'Bama in my veins
Ain’t a pink bouquet in the flower store
I’m OK if I’m a little more
“Be Her,” the hit I mentioned earlier, features this line:
She stays talkin' to Jesus, calls her mama all the time
“Girl You’re Taking Home” (2024), another Langley collaboration, includes this verse:
I saw the pictures, and she gets to cross that county line
I bet she's ridin' shotgun in your dad's old '85
Bet she met your grandma, you took her to church
She gets the cleaned-up, and I got the dirt
“Closest to Heaven,” also cowritten by Langley, opens this way:
They shut the door
Pulled the shade, told us the news
Now, it wasn't long till the pastor came
Read a red line from Luke
• • •
SO IS LANGLEY a person of faith?
Indeed, she professes her love for Jesus.
According to Taste of Country, Langley wrote “Loving Life Again” — another song on her new album — about a time in her life when she "looked at myself in the mirror and I didn't recognize the person that I saw."
Facing cognitive dissonance over her breakthrough success, Langley canceled a few weeks of concerts last year and went home to spend time with her parents.
READ: Top 10 Faith-Infused Country Songs: The ACM’s All-Time Best Honorees
"I got to read my Bible and be next to my family in a way that I hadn't gotten to do since I was 18 years old," she told a concert crowd, as noted by Taste of Country.
On Easter, Langley posted an Instagram video of herself singing the hymn “Because He Lives” and wrote, “Even though I’ve been a believer in Christ my whole life, my relationship with him has changed drastically over the last year. I started to have ‘faith.’ I started to view the days we have been given as a gift instead of a chore. I am so grateful for a God who leads with love and compassion. Thank you Jesus for giving me a way to spend eternity with You 🩶”
Last week, on the “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von” podcast — which has 4.53 million subscribers on YouTube — Langley talked about growing up in church.
“Really, really small church,” Langley, who was homeschooled for several years, told Von. “It started in a barn. The house that I also grew up in, my dad grew up in, and there's an old barn across the street, and it started in hay bales on that barn. Then they moved it to a church. And I mean, every Sunday and Wednesday (I was there) until I was 18 years old.”
Later in the podcast, Langley said to Von, “Deviled eggs are amazing. Have you had them?”
“I’ve had them once or twice,” Von replied.
“They had a rule at church that you could only have two deviled eggs on your first go because people would fight over them,” Langley said. “They really would. We'd have potluck every Wednesday. So like, the best Southern food you can think of — like, all these old women, and they’re just (coming in there) with cobblers and casseroles.”
Langley sang a lot in church and with family.
“I learned how to read from singing hymnals,” she told Von.
• • •
IN A 2000 EPISODE of the TV drama “The West Wing,” President Jed Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen) has to figure out whether a group of Chinese stowaways found in a container ship in California are truly evangelical Christians facing persecution.
Eventually, one of the Chinese believers uses the term “shibboleth,” which helps Bartlet find his answer.
READ: Preach It, Jelly Roll: Emotional Singer Celebrates Another Big Award
In the case of Langley, how do we confirm — 100% — her Bible Belt street cred?
For me, that moment came when she asked Von if he ever went to Judgement Houses.
“No, what was it?” he replied.
“It’s like, they do it around Halloween,” she explained. “It’s like a haunted house for Christians, I guess. Very scary. I remember our youth group took us. You get in there, and it’s like this car crash scene, and it’s pretty much like convincing you that, yes, you could die the second you walk out of here. So you better settle up.”
“You better get saved, huh?” Von said.
“You better get saved,” Langley confirmed.
The interaction brought memories of the first Judgement House story I wrote, back in 2001 for The Oklahoman.
This was my lede:
PERKINS — It's hot in hell.
It's not so much the machine-made smoke or even the illusion of flames created by a fan blowing silk against colored lights.
The rising body temperatures have more to do with the First Baptist Church cranking up the thermostat to make this place of eternal damnation seem more real.
When Langley visited a Judgement House, she said, “I had already been saved.”
However, the hell house experience affected her “so bad,” she noted with a chuckle, that she decided to get saved again.
Langley recalled going home that night and telling her dad.
“You did what?” he responded. “Well, you are kind of a dumba— because that’s the whole point of being saved” in the first place.
But she stressed to Von, “I was so scared. It was so scary.”
Ella Langley, 26, has risen to country superstardom and released her new album, “Dandelion,” last week. (Shutterstock photo)
Inside The Godbeat
The week’s biggest religion news — as so often seems to happen — involved President Donald Trump.
Trump clashed with Pope Leo XIV over the war with Iran and then posted an AI-generated image on his Truth Social account — later deleted — depicting himself as Jesus.
To understand the conflict over faith, war and power between Trump and Leo, check out executive editor Clemente Lisi’s insightful analysis here at Religion Unplugged.
“It is a revealing confrontation,” Lisi writes, “between two fundamentally different kinds of power — moral authority and political force — and a window into how both are evolving in an era of polarization and conflict.”
The Final Plug
I ended last week’s column about Artemis II pilot Victor Glover by suggesting, “As Glover offers his post-mission thoughts, don’t be surprised to hear more about his faith.”
So what did Glover say in his first public appearance upon his return from the moon mission?
“I wanted to thank God in public," he said at a briefing Saturday in Houston, reflecting on the journey’s beginning. "And I want to thank God again, because even bigger than my challenge trying to describe what we went through, the gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did and being with who I was with ... it’s too big to just be in one body."
Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy the weekend.
Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 20 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.