The premiere of a new documentary — “Safe For the Whole Family: How to Make a Christian Superstar” — was just announced for the Nashville Film Festival. Screening Sept. 27, the film explores damaging treatment several former Christian pop stars received as they charted careers through their industry’s inextricably intertwined commercial and evangelistic priorities and its exacting image standards.
Michael Passons, one of the artists whose experiences the film focuses on, recently reentered the spotlight by doing some musical reckoning of his own.
In the late 1990s, Passons and the rest of the adult contemporary vocal group Avalon were riding high in Christian music. They scored numerous No. 1 hits, including “Testify to Love,” which also won them a Dove award, the name used at the time for the Christian equivalent of a Grammy.
“I really worked my whole life for that moment,” Passons says now, seated in the living room of his Nashville condo. “I started piano lessons in the third grade, and by the seventh grade I was taking piano at college level.”
By singing and playing in church throughout his small-town Mississippi youth, he tailored his skills to a specific use: stirring an evangelical Christian audience. After completing his music degree, he moved to Nashville, took entry level industry gigs, made a demo and auditioned. A record label selected him as the first member of what would become the successful coed quartet Avalon.
“But you don’t really think too much further ahead than your goal,” Passons points out, “as in, what may be the repercussions later on once you step into the spotlight and come under scrutiny. I didn’t calculate that.”
‘Deafening hypocrisy’
As Passons shares in the film, he navigated his Christian pop career as a polished pro who embraced music-making as an expression of faith, and who also happened to be closeted gay man. His singleness drew increasing notice as his bandmates married and started families.
“I was in my 30s, mid-30s, and never dated, that they knew of, and so that was raising suspicions,” he recalls.
The bottom line? His reputation might harm the group’s commercial prospects.
“The Christian music business is a business,” Passons emphasizes. “And in that culture, being a gay person was bad for business. So, everyone was gonna lose money.”
“I was very aware of the deafening hypocrisy of the whole thing,” he goes on, “that there’s so many gay and queer people who have sung and composed amazing religious music, some that’s still sung today in every church in America.”
Passons was forced to go to conversion therapy, and participated in the sessions for a couple of months, despite considering them futile. He felt increasingly alienated. Still, he wasn’t at all prepared to be ambushed by the rest of the group in 2003. When they forced him out, he was effectively blacklisted from the entire Christian music industry.
Pivotal scenes in the documentary depicts those traumatic experiences.
“All my eggs were in this conservative basket,” Passons says. “All my connections were with people who would share like-minded views of the people that just threw me off the bus.”
Reclamation
With the career he’d once pursued so passionately now ended, Passons couldn’t bear to listen to music, much less play it. Gradually, though, he resumed performing. Last summer, during Ty Herndon’s LGBTQ-affirming CMA Fest concert, Passons revisited “Testify to Love,” a signature number from his old group.
He made clear that he was performing the song with different intentions: “I’m reclaiming it for myself and anybody else out there who felt like they had to give up their love for God to be who they are.”
Afterwards, Herndon proposed that they re-record it together. Passons insisted on including a third voice: that of Melissa Greene, a former Avalon band mate who’s become his supportive ally.
In May, the new version of “Testify to Love” debuted at number three on Billboard’s Christian Digital Song Sales chart and rapidly reached the top of the iTunes Christian chart too.
Passons is quick to clarify: “That was not my intent. I did not want to get back into that world. But the algorithms don’t know what to do with the song that says ‘God’ other than to put it in the Christian category.”
He and Herndon positioned the song as a Pride anthem by releasing a club remix from producer Dave Audé in June. And that same month, Passons, Herndon and Greene performed their arrangement of “Testify to Love” on the Grand Ole Opry.
“I wanted to reclaim something that I thought was taken from me,” says Passons. “But also I felt like that song had been kept in a small box, and it’s a song so much bigger than that.”
Since the prospect of a solo career is new for him, the response the track’s received holds added significance. “I’m very, very proud now that I’ve now recorded something with my name on it,” he says. “Because all these years, I’ve just been that blonde guy in that group. Now it’s time to be Michael. It’s time for me to tell the story of who I am.”
Passons will do more of that in the documentary, as well as through an original song called “Not Broken” that he’s preparing to release.
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