Christian musician Franni Cash is urging those who have had negative experiences with organized religion to remember that God “can find you anywhere,” reflecting on her own experience with a leader who she said was “misrepresenting God.”
The 28-year-old Cash, who formerly performed with the group We The Kingdom, described her experience with a cult and how it led her to embrace the Christian faith in an Instagram video Sunday.
The video follows the release of her new song “Darken the Doorway,” which she described as a message for “anybody who has been burned by the Church and had a timidity there and needs to know that God … can find you anywhere.”
“I write a lot about church hurt, people who have been burned by religion or had really bad experiences with someone who is misrepresenting God to them and that’s what a lot of my songs are about,” she said. Cash said people often ask her to elaborate on her “story,” and she made the video to answer that request.
Cash said that when she was 6 years old, her parents sought help with their marital problems from a preacher named Wayne Jolley, who she alleged turned out to be a “dangerously smart man who knew exactly how to use people’s vulnerabilities to tether loyalty to him.”
What started as counseling sessions, she said, turned into Bible studies with other families in vulnerable situations. From there, she said it “morphed into ‘you guys shouldn’t go to church anymore.'”
Jolley asked them to treat him as their “spiritual father,” Cash said, and would tell people, “If you make a covenant with me, if you leave or break that covenant, curses will be on your life.”
“He had this proposal that women who disagreed with their husbands were called the Jezebel spirit, and so he really used that to put down and silence women,” she recalled. “It was kind of his idea to solve household problems was to just get women to be totally compliant to their husbands.”
Cash said an article about her father, Christian musician Ed Cash, published during her senior year of high school, prompted her and her family to break free from Jolley’s influence. The article alleged that her father was “using his royalties to fund a cult.”
“It was exposing all of the tax fraud and the allegations that had been against this man, Wayne Jolley,” she added. “We didn’t know about these things, so we kind of started researching and finding them all out to be true.”
After Cash’s parents cut ties with Jolley, she began to fear that curses would be placed on her life.
“I fell into this like really deep depression, really dark place, struggled with a lot of self-harm,” she said.
“Honestly, just being real with y’all, there were a lot of times I didn’t know if I was going to live to see the next day,” Cash continued as she became emotional. “I just felt completely brainwashed and like everything that I had ever known about God had been stripped away, and I also lost my community.”
Calling her departure from the community “devastating not only for me but for my whole family,” Cash said she didn’t know what to believe about God. While her experience with Jolley initially made her not “want to have anything to do with” God, others in her life assured her that “God has not given up on you, so don’t give up on Him.”
“I started to … pray, and it wasn’t like ‘Oh, Lord, you’re so amazing’ kind of prayers, it was like ‘Why God, why?’” she explained, recalling that she asked God, “Why would you allow someone to misrepresent you so horribly?”
Acknowledging that she was “so angry,” Cash said, “In that place, I really felt like the Holy Spirit said to me, ‘Franni, I am not the one who is hurting you, but I am the one who is healing you.’” That experience led her to start reading the New Testament, where she found that “the thing that Jesus got the most angry at was not the sinners or the vulnerable or the broken, it wasn’t people who weren’t morally compliant, it was the religious leaders who put heavy burdens on people.”
“He called them whitewashed tombs because they looked good on the outside but they’re dead in the inside,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of other people in my shoes who maybe have a lot of timidity about organized religion or Christianity because someone has really misrepresented God and said that He’s all these things that He’s not.”
Cash said writing songs helped her “process” the experiences.
“I did not think that I was going to be putting them out, I didn’t think I was going to write songs that were so specific about my story because I kind of felt alone in that,” Cash recalled.
She came to realize that others have been hurt by churches and false religious leaders.
Cash shared a message for those skeptical of organized religion because of people who misrepresent it.
“My heart is that these songs would be ones that validate your pain with the experiences that you’ve had with organized religion and maybe be something that just … comforts you and shows you that I really believe that God loves you and He’s a lot better than I ever thought He was,” Cash said.
The singer hopes “the song speaks” to listeners, adding that she wanted to “give a little more context into … why I wrote it.”
“He is so compassionate, He’s close to the broken-hearted,” Cash said, expressing gratitude that reading the Bible “completely reframed” her perspective.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: [email protected]
