The Ways Catholicism Can Shape Us: A Whiplash Podcast Recap
Unpacking our conversation with Jessica Gerhardt
We’ve spent a lot of time on the Whiplash podcast talking about how certain expressions of Catholicism shape us before we even realize or become aware of it. Sometimes that happens through youth ministry’s expectations, or the power of aesthetics, or the music that cracks us open, makes us vulnerable, and helps us connect with God. For both Emma and I, growing up queer in conservative, fundamentalist Catholic environments profoundly influenced how we understood what it meant to be Catholic, who got to belong, and how faith was supposed to look and feel.
So this week on the Whiplash podcast, we spoke with Jessica Gerhardt, whose story weaves through all these themes and more. Jessica’s journey traces a path of spiritual formation and queer embodiment, confronting codependency and rigid roles, and ultimately reclaiming faith on her own terms.
A queer Catholic singer-songwriter from Los Angeles, Jessica’s music reflects her mixed Catholic-Jewish upbringing and a deeply inclusive spirituality. Her latest album, Alight Beyond the Sea, centers on Psalm 139 and the search for God amid both sorrow and joy. She wrote every song and hand-embroidered the album’s cover art, making it a uniquely crafted work of both sound and vision. Beyond music, Jessica is a sponsored Lanikai Ukuleles artist, co-founder of the arts collective Parnassus & Co, founder of the house-concert series Friday at The Fox Den, and a high school theology teacher. Follow her on instagram here.
Early Formation and the Seeds of Identity
Catholicism often shapes our identity before we even realize it. For Emma and I, growing up in the Midwest, this often looked like a conservative faith that demanded outward performance over inward transformation. But Jessica’s early experience was different. Raised in a mixed Jewish-Catholic household in Santa Monica, her faith was nurtured in a loving, inclusive environment. Her mother’s welcoming vision of Jesus resonated with Jessica’s queer relatives (her grandfather is gay and she had a lesbian godmother as well) and gave her a foundation grounded in community, friendship with Jesus, and rituals like baptism and communion that felt intimate and real.
Yet as Jessica grew older, she began to encounter the broader Church culture’s more complicated and often exclusionary stance toward LGBTQ+ issues. Though her youth group at Saint Monica’s emphasized friendship and service over rigid rules, the contradictions and tensions of Church teaching on sexuality and gender loomed large. This early openness, set against later exclusion, planted seeds of dissonance that shaped Jessica’s understanding of faith and identity–a struggle familiar to many queer Catholics.
The diversity of queer Catholics’ experiences is fully on display in this podcast episode. Some of us were raised in incredibly affirming communities before encountering greater exclusion and homophobia as they became more involved in Catholic ministry and leadership. In Jessica’s case, she knew affirmation before encountering conservative Catholicism. Others, like Max and I, were raised in deeply homophobic and transphobic environments and had only known exclusion. The idea of affirmation was, for us, a discovery in queer Catholic circles and the wider LGBTQ+ community. Both experiences necessitated unlearning harm and relearning self love and acceptance but are indicative of how queer Catholics face a diversity of experiences.
The Performance Trap and Breaking Free
As Jessica’s story unfolds, we see how Catholic spaces, especially youth and young adult ministries, often promote a performative model of faith. This “ideal Catholic” is less about authentic relationship with God and more about visible signs of devotion and conformity. One of Jessica’s ex-boyfriends, once a punk rebel, eventually became a priest and swung into a rigid traditionalism that reflected fear, shame, and scarcity thinking—a pattern she observed in many converts who overcorrect from youthful freedom to strict control, from what they construct as secularism to radical traditionalist aesthetics.
It’s an ongoing problem in the Catholic Church–of an increasing divide between conservative young Catholics deeply devoted to the Church (yet also challenging it by aligning with some far-right policies) and young people raised in the Church who are pulling away. Emma highlighted how part of this problem stems from the exclusion of young people in the synodal process, showing that they have a vested interest and hold power within the Church. Young Catholics are increasingly bending conservative and young priests are increasingly “theologically traditional and politically conservative.” Catholics aged fifty and older strangely hold more liberal views on contraception as opposed to Catholic Millennials.
This disconnect between young people and the Church manifests sometimes through radical traditionalism that denied and criticized Pope Francis and a more liberal, inclusionary Church but also through sharp decline in Church attendance among young people raised in the Church who refuse to remain tethered to an institution that tows a homophobic, transphobic line.
The pressure to perform a certain type of Catholicism intersects deeply with purity culture and narrow gender roles, which especially impact queer youth. Despite outward devotion, many carry a quiet sense that their queerness disqualifies them from belonging fully. It mirrors how for many women, they uphold the Church’s purity culture lessons while internally doubting and self policing to the point of self harm. Jessica pointed out that some of these dynamics are fueled less by love for God and more by fear of sin and exclusion. The result is a Church environment where moral policing overshadows genuine spiritual encounters.
Jessica challenges this cycle by advocating for a spirituality rooted in accompaniment rather than conversion. Drawing on 12-step principles like “progress, not perfection,” she calls for reclaiming conscience and fostering mature, self-aware faith. She critiques the codependent ministry models that prioritize external outcomes over internal transformation, and she highlights the need to move beyond performative masculinity, performative devotion, toward authentic justice and solidarity.
Mysticism, Queer Joy, and Spiritual Freedom
When the conversation turned to mystical experience and authentic encounter with God, Max observed how some charismatic events (such as the Steubenville Youth Conferences) use music, lighting, and choreography to stage the Spirit’s presence—creating a powerful but often scripted experience.
When one person shared a view of a stadium packed with thousands of Catholic kids on Twitter, many people called this out as emotional manipulation–the clapping and parading of the monstrance around the space and young women fainting when it drew close. It reminded people of Evangelical Megachurches, where service became a spectacle with giant television screens, light shows, and more the vibes of a tech conference than church.
And it’s no coincidence that a Catholic space that closely mirrors an evangelical one is also well known for its traditionalist bent, and for the conservative young Catholics it matriculates. It also mirrors how with a shortage of Catholic priests, some parishes are growing in size, generating large Catholic churches that rival neighboring megachurches including St. Charles Borromeo in California. The Fresno parish seats 3,200 people, and over three Sunday services, more than 8,000 people according to katholisch.de will attend Mass.
These large, scripted and staged productions of faith contrast with historic mysticism, which often unfolds quietly and personally in stillness and dryness. Big, constructed settings can limit individual expression and often exclude queer identities. Even spiritual frameworks that might seem liberating at first, like Gnosticism, can carry hidden costs.
Rooted in the belief that the material world is flawed or corrupt and that salvation comes through secret knowledge (gnosis) and spiritual detachment, Gnosticism doesn’t typically fixate on sexual orientation. But its sharp divide between body and soul can echo the harms of purity culture and conversion therapy. Gnosticism argues that it is only by denying our bodily experiences and sacrificing the body that spiritual enlightenment can be achieved: holiness itself requires the denial of one’s body. This is an especially painful message for those whose identities have already been policed or erased in the name of God.
Some ideas in Gnosticism are similar to the belief that gender is something society made up—so it can be taken apart or left behind. But that view can ignore the real experiences of people who grow up in a world where gender shapes so much of how we live, relate to others, and understand ourselves. It’s true that gender is a social construct—it can look different in different cultures, and ideas about gender, including trans, nonbinary, and intersex identities, aren’t the same everywhere. But that doesn’t mean gender isn’t real or meaningful. For many of us, gender is deeply woven into how we see our bodies, tell our stories, and make sense of the world.
When people say our bodies are obstacles to spiritual life, they ignore the fact that our bodies are how we survive, connect with others, and find meaning—including in our faith. For queer and trans people, this kind of thinking can be especially harmful. The idea that we should disconnect from our bodies is used all the time to argue against gender-affirming care and against open conversations about queer and trans lives. But that argument doesn’t hold up—not even within the Catholic tradition. Catholic art and theology have long wrestled with the meaning of the body, showing that spiritual experiences are often deeply tied to our physical selves.
This kind of spirituality—one that treats denying the body as something holy—is deeply harmful. It’s tied to purity culture and even the diet culture of the early 2000s, both of which taught that control and shame around the body were signs of virtue. For queer and trans people, this mindset can erase our experiences and cause real harm. It’s especially dangerous for children, as purity culture often targets them early, limiting their access to honest, age-appropriate information about their own bodies. At its core, it sends the message that knowing and understanding your body is wrong—when in reality, it’s essential to being whole.
Coming Home to Ourselves
All of this—staged mysticism, Gnostic detachments, purity culture’s shame—sets the stage for why Jessica’s story matters so much. Rather than simply critiquing harmful practices, she models a different way forward: one where the body and spirit are held together, where queer identity and Catholic faith converge rather than clash. On the podcast, we reflected with Jessica on what it looks like to live into that fuller, freer vision of faith.
Jessica shared how she witnessed youth ministers avoid LGBTQ+ topics out of fear—fear of controversy, of stepping outside rigid norms, of saying the wrong thing. Emma and Max reflected on the uneasy tension between emotional vulnerability and theological welcome, noting that when vulnerability is paired with shame, it wounds rather than heals. Jessica’s story—reconciling her queer identity with her Catholic faith, navigating ministry’s contradictions, and embracing her spouse’s transfeminine identity—models a faith lived fully and freely, beyond the narrow confines of performative belonging.
Emma reminds us that liberation comes not from fitting neatly into rigid categories, but from refusing the false choice between body and spirit, queerness and Catholicism. Max echoes this truth: that real spirituality does not ask us to divide ourselves but to come home to who we are—beloved, embodied, and whole.
In tracing this journey—from early formation, through performance and control, to the spaciousness of queer joy and divine encounter—Jessica’s story becomes more than a testimony. It’s an invitation and a reminder that our faith can hold complexity. That God meets us not in our perfection, but in our becoming. And that the Church will only be whole when it honors every body, every story, every sacred contradiction.
You can listen to our full conversation with Jessica on Whiplash wherever you get your podcasts. Her music is available at https://www.jessicagerhardt.com/music, and it’s well worth your time. As always, we welcome your thoughts and reflections in the comments.
 | A guest post by
|
This is a terrific summation. Thank you, Max and Emma. On first reading and prior to listening, the idea that resonates with me is that of outward performance over inward transformation. I'm sure the pod and another reading will expand and enrich that idea.