Why Allendale Embraces Drag: A Theology of Liberating Joy and Healing Presence

Drag is an art form that uses costume, makeup, character, exaggeration, storytelling, and performance to reveal deeper truths about identity, power, and joy. Drag is creative resistance, communal joy, queer wisdom, and embodied storytelling all at once. It frees people to play, to imagine, to become, to express what the world has forbidden. Drag makes room for the fullness of humanity and invites people to show up in their bodies without shame. And at its best, drag tells the truth about who we are and who God made us to be.

At Allendale, we embrace drag because we believe in a gospel that rises in real bodies. God comes to us in bodies, messy and glorious and outrageous and aching and honest. Jesus showed us that liberation happens not through doctrines but through embodiment.

Jesus entered Jerusalem in a metaphorical drag show of his own, a holy lampoon of imperial masculinity. He used street theater to expose power, uplift the marginalized, and proclaim a kin-dom where bodies matter, justice matters, and joy matters. Drag uplifts the people the church has historically crucified. It proclaims a kim-dom where queer bodies are not merely tolerated but treasured. As a Queer poet said, “Blessed are the queers who love creation enough to live the truth of it.”

Allendale Drag Performance in 1962

Because drag heals. Because drag tells the truth. Because drag turns “I am sorry for who I am” into “Thanks be to God for who I have become.” Because drag does what Jesus did, it uses parody to expose the powerful. It uses joy to disarm fear. It uses embodiment to reveal God. We also do it because of what one visitor told us. They said, “I thought I would never be welcomed back into a church. I am straight and cisgender, but I have done a lot of bad in my life. Then I saw you were having a Drag Sunday. I realized that if you will welcome drag queens, you will welcome me.” Drag became their doorway to grace. And we do it because in order to be the Body of Christ, we need everyone and all their gifts. We cannot be the Body without queer joy, queer art, queer resistance. We cannot be the Body without people who have been harmed and healed and restored. We cannot be the Body without the fullness of God’s diverse creation showing up as they are. Allendale embraces drag because it is gospel in glitter. Because it brings people back to themselves. Because it makes God believable again. Because it opens the doors of the church that trauma tried to close. Because it gives people back their tears and their laughter and their bodies and their belonging. Because drag, like Jesus, saves lives.

The Christmas season reminds us that God does not enter the world through respectability, safety, or power, but through the margins. The first ones trusted with the good news were shepherds—night workers, outsiders, people whose bodies and voices were considered unreliable and unclean. God chose them anyway. God chose them because of who they were. Drag queens stand in that same gospel lineage. Like the shepherds, they live outside polite approval, keep watch in the long nights, and tell the truth with their whole bodies. They arrive radiant, excessive, and unignorable, carrying joy forged through survival. When Allendale embraces drag, we are not being provocative or trendy—we are being faithful. We are trusting marginalized bodies with holy truth, believing that joy born in the fields still has the power to change everything. This is not a departure from tradition. It is Christmas lived out. It is an incarnation still unfolding.