Church (it’s a bar!): Theological parody(?) at Sister Louisa’s CHURCH of the Living Room and Ping-Pong Emporium

This paper considers where theological and/or religious knowledge is being made through an analysis of the Atlanta bar, Sister Louisa’s CHURCH of the Living Room and Ping-Pong Emporium. The bar is imperfectly described as “Christian kitsch-themed,” opened by Grant Henry (aka, Sister Louisa), a Princeton Seminary drop-out, on Edgewood Avenue in East Atlanta in 2010. Statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, hanging right out of a church, neon cross lights, a hymn board menu, a nun doll hanging by a cable from the ceiling, a triptych of gaussian paintings of Elvis–MLK Jr.–Jesus in Gethsemane above the bar. The bar is deliberately confused. Henry explained to them magazine, “I want people who walk in to sort of scratch their heads and say, ‘Is that a religious place or is it a sacrilegious place? Is that a straight bar or a gay bar?’”

But CHURCH might be just as well be described as a performance art gallery. It is filled from top to bottom with Sister Louisa’s art, much of it Christian kitsch watercolors that “she” has annotated in oil paint marker with messages like “Fuck fear,” “The higher the hair, the closer to God,” or “Jesus [heart] a crackwhore.” Henry often claims that his annotations are “just words,” words he once found himself unable to say anymore. “My art doesn’t tell anything about me, but it does tell something about the person who sees the art,” he said to Rough Draft Atlanta. For all that, the art of Sister Louisa’s shows a deep familiarity with the language games those words belong to, be it regendered Trinities (“Mother, Daughter, Holy Spirit”), quotations from Augustine (“Sin boldly”), sendings-up of the virgin birth (“Who’s your daddy”), sharp critiques of pastoral abuse (“He touched me too, Mama”), the sexual economies of ecclesial piety (“Nothing harder than a preacher’s dick”), or personal renarrations of Paul’s letters (“In my confusion, and stumbling attempts to free myself from everything, and live an authentic existence, I find it is I, and not the other, who is the fool”). In one particularly arresting example, above the karaoke organ hangs one of Sister Louisa’s art pieces: A cross made from wood paneling on which a naked baby doll, with a large ring of thorns around its neck, has been pinned, with the words “Ladder of Success” pained on the arms of the cross on either side. As queer a bedfellow as Karl Barth would join Sister Louisa here: “This [kenotic] formulation of the message of Christmas already includes within itself the message of Good Friday.” Sister Louisa thinks kenosis, incarnation, and the passion altogether, too, drawing on this vision to criticize the capitalism of the corporate ladder and idea of wealth as success, and of Christianity as prosperity and self-protection.

Drawing on Melissa Wilcox’s notion of serious parody and Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading, this paper considers how Sister Louisa’s queer parody of American Christianity does not merely subvert or resist their normativities paranoically but re-presents and re-imagines theology in ways that reactivate its teachings, precisely where much of contemporary Christianity has become inured to it. As Henry explained to them, “I want people to come in and think because then they grapple with who they are, and then they grapple with themselves and become more authentic…I love playing with symbols of what people believe, and I love it when someone’s faith is larger than their brain.” In deliberately queering Christian symbols, Sister Louisa provides in CHURCH a space of serious theological reflection, wrapped in what may only seem like a kitschy bar on the outside.

According to Henry’s own biography on the CHURCH website: “‘Sister Louisa’ was born out of a need for Grant to process his thoughts of Religion, Politics, and Sexuality, having grown up in the proper South. ‘She’ realized that art is not necessarily pretty, it is more about the liberation & preservation of soul, making it visible for contemplation & lubrication for us to evolve. CHURCH is an outer expression of Grant’s inner fuck-up-ness.” In this bar space, marked by his own mixed grasping toward liberation and flourishing through the art of Sister Louisa, Henry offers parodically rigorous theological reflection in campy sacramental terms. In the beginning of Queer God, Marcella Althaus-Reid explains: “There are many sexual dissenters whose theological community is made up of the gathering of those who go to gay bars with rosaries in their pockets, or who make camp chapels of their living rooms simply because there is a cry in their lives, and a theological cry, which refuses to fit life into different compartments.” CHURCH serves as one space where Althaus-Reid’s imagery takes on dazzling, physical form. In this way, CHURCH performs in space what queer theology has claimed in text: to consciously pose to theology a serious of questions that expose, destabilize, and repurpose its sexual, political, and economic investments and sureties. And perhaps, even more than that, it may be church in more than name alone.