Bad Religion: The Religious Cannibalization of Ethel Cain in ‘Preacher’s Daughter’
Religious imagery pours out of every song on Ethel Cain’s debut, from the sins of a family to a betrayal that rivals Ptolemy’s.
Bad Religion explores the relationship between music and spirituality, from Christianity and Islam to the paranormal and the occult.
Written by Olivia Abercrombie
Illustrated by Caroline Pastrano
Hayden Anhedönia’s cheery disposition and quick-witted banter don’t match up with the morbid gothic aesthetic of her slowcore, alt-pop debut, Preacher's Daughter. However, a childhood buried in the throes of a restrictive Southern Baptist community birthed her alter ego, Ethel Cain. After taking on the moniker of the preacher's daughter, Anhedönia’s music lyrically and sonically began to bleed with Christian allusions that eventually formed the narrative concept of her debut. The story of Preacher's Daughter follows the life and death of Cain as she faces the religious pressure of growing up in a devoted Christian family, and the resulting trauma that can last for a lifetime. While Ethel Cain is a fictional character, the inspiration for these struggles comes from Anhedönia’s very real struggles as a transgender woman who had a highly religious upbringing. This album has become a messiah for the queer community’s members that have dealt with similar struggles growing up.
The album opens with the slow-burning, moody "Family Tree (Intro)," where Cain uses the allegory of Christ and the Virgin Mary to grapple with the transgenerational religious trauma passed down from her family. The track builds ominously, opening with a slow bassline combined with Anhedönia’s rich, pleading tone, warning of Cain’s fate. In The Bible, Jesus was born solely of Mary. Anhedönia argues that Jesus cannot escape what he has inherited from his mother, the good and the bad. "Jesus can always reject his father / But he cannot escape his mother's blood. He'll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers / But he'll never escape what he's made up of," Cain cries out to prophesize the painful journey she will endure as she grows up. The droning eeriness of the track, coupled with Anhedönia’s pure gothic tone, captures the foreboding message of the track.
The poppy Taylor Swift-esque second track, "American Teenager," introduces Cain's rejection of the faith she grew up with while simultaneously attempting to preserve her father's legacy as a church leader. Even with its bright and anthemic energy, this song marks the beginning of Cain's downfall as she strays from Christianity. In the next track, "A House In Nebraska," we meet the first of Cain's lovers. Cain calls out to her past lover in this piano-driven melodic track, wishing she hadn't ruined their relationship, crying out, "I'd kill myself / To hold you one more time." After lamenting about her All-American boy, we learn about Cain’s rebellious second lover in the gothic ambient track "Western Nights." Cain describes her second lover by crooning, "Trouble's always gonna find you baby." Her love for this man is a product of her rejection of faith and going down a darker path; while she still loves him, he will never be like her pure first love.
After diving into her adolescence and relationships with men, Cain returns to the impact that her family and religious pressure have had on her flawed relationships with "Family Tree," an extension of the opener. The song follows Cain’s path to womanhood, from being a devoted Christian in her youth to fulfilling her role as a wife, the necessary last step to becoming a woman in the eyes of God. She explains this transition by crooning, "These crosses all over my body / Remind me of who I used to be / Give myself up to him in offering / Let him make a woman out of me." This song is her grappling with this crossroads in her life: Stay and be a devoted wife, or flee to break the family cycle of submission. Cain also describes giving herself over to her second lover almost as a baptism in the sedated yet stretching verse, "So take me down to the river and bathe me clean / Put me on the back of your white horse to ride / All the way to the chapel, let you wash all over me." After exploring her relationships with men, Cain must face the guilt of exploring love without the church's blessing. This song is her justifying those actions with the potential marriage to her second lover, which would cleanse her of any sins she committed before their potential marriage.
Cain’s decision becomes clear in the gloomy, gut-wrenching track “Hard Times,” where she divulges the abuse her father put her through that finally pushed her to escape her hometown. She confesses his sins over a moody, acoustic melody by singing, “I was too young to notice / That some types of love could be bad.” Ready to leave these painful memories behind, Cain flees from her restrictive hometown to find a life outside her small religious town. After she meets her third and final mysterious lover in the hopeful, smooth track "Thoroughfare," she learns that her religious trauma continues to follow her. The new man takes her down a dark path of sex and drugs in the sultry, melting riffs of "Gibson Girl." She explains how her lover lures her in by lamenting, "Obsession with the money, addicted to the drugs / Says he's in love with my body, that's why he's fucking it up." Her religious guilt starts to make her question her lover's intentions. Growing up, sex before marriage was sinful and never for pleasure. She rationalizes her feelings by singing the justification her third lover gives her, "If it feels good / Then it can't be bad / Where I can be immoral / In a stranger's lap."
Cain then faces the consequences of these decisions in the haunting "Ptolemaea," aptly named after Ptolemy's designated place for traitors in hell from Dante's Inferno. With a wretched groaning, the beginning of the track mumbles a chant of love in a demonic voice, cut through with Anhedönia’s light, angelic voice for the first verse, crying out, “Suffеr does the wolf, crawling to thee / Promising a big fire, any firе.” The quiet intensity of the track is disrupted by the echo of a stinging riff, once again falling back into the dark, demonic presence from the song's opening. Upon first listening to the album, one might think that the traitor in question is Cain for abandoning her family and Christian values for a man who dragged her down into addiction. However, the real traitor is the man she fell in love with, who took her innocence and led her to a drug-induced stupor, almost killing her. “Stop!” Cain screams in a gut-wrenching frenzy as a spiraling disarray of guitars surround her as she tries to escape his grasp. The droning instrumental track “August Underground” — a reference to the 2001 snuff film of the same name — reveals that Cain’s escape attempt was futile, and the melodic painful cries represent her final moments on Earth as she then ascends to heaven in the soft, instrumental piano of “Televangelism.”
Cain’s story isn’t over yet, though. After losing her life by trusting a man who did not share her Christian values, she laments about her lost faith in the piano-driven spiritual, "Sun-Bleached Flies." Cain regrets trying to escape her family and religion, singing, "What I wouldn't give to be in Church this Sunday / Listening to the choir, so heartfelt, all singing." Even after all the trauma the Church instilled throughout her youth, in her last moments, she looked to God for help — but received no answer, dying alone. She grapples with this abandonment, eventually reconciling her faith with her lack of support from the Heavens: "God loves you, but not enough to save you." The regret of leaving the church only truly hits her once she is dead because, in life, her religious upbringing was painful and abusive, so almost anything seemed better than following the same path as everyone she knew. She longs to return to how simple things were with her first lover before she renounced her faith by crying, “I'm still praying for that house in Nebraska.”
The final song on the album, "Strangers," reveals Cain's final fate after all her sinful choices. The man she fell in love with killed and then ate her. The song opens with a prayer from a priest quietly reminding us: "God is telling you and I there is death, for all of us / But then we find that the scriptures also tell us that we have a great promise, that there is a better place for those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ." Cain then spends the song pondering if her choices were her demise, even though she tried to live the best way she could, considering what she went through, wondering, “I tried to be good / Am I no good?” Watching from the afterlife as this man cannibalizes her, Cain still somehow sees the beauty in the situation, crooning, “You're so handsome when I'm all over your mouth.” Then thinking of those she left behind, Cain pleads to her mother that none of this was her fault and that she cannot blame herself, as she, too, was a victim of their circumstances. From the afterlife, Cain sings, “Mama, just know that I love you (I do) / And I'll see you when you get here.”
Through Cain’s story, Anhedönia reconciles with her own childhood in the Church. Exploring these themes of abuse and rejection as a transgender woman has made Anhedönia's music a haven for the experiences of so many young queer people who grew up in religious homes and have also related to the pain on Preacher’s Daughter. While they may not be falling in love and cannibalized by their lovers, they can relate to Cain's desire to escape the trauma they have faced through growing up in a repressive environment. The album portrays this rejection of the church through the slow burn of doom that ends in cannibalization, a theme throughout The Bible indicating one of the final judgments of sin used as punishment to those who have sinned. Anhedönia picking this as Cain’s final fate is poetic as her rejection of the faith that was supposed to save her no matter what her sins were, led to one of the greatest sins of all befalling her. This gothic, harrowing album may have been an exercise in coping for Anhedönia, but it also created the tragic story of a girl that will burn into the minds of her fans for eternity.