The queen of Christian pop is weighing in on proposed cuts to the successful HIV/AIDS program the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
On Wednesday night during a concert at a Nashville-area church, she made a phone call to Republican senator Bill Hagerty’s office on speakerphone. She left a voicemail.
“Hi, Senator Hagerty, hi, this is Amy Grant,” she said. “I’m standing on stage singing to over a thousand people, and I wanted to speak on behalf of all of us to say that President Trump’s budget suggests that funding for PEPFAR should be cut by 50 percent this year. We want you to know that here in Nashville we want to see full funding of PEPFAR so we can stay on track to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030.”
The crowd cheered.
Grant performed at the concert with a few other Nashville artists like Charlie Peacock in an evening billed as a celebration of the millions of lives saved through PEPFAR. She has described it as a “pro-life” program.
This year, PEPFAR programs, including faith-based organizations providing treatment on the ground, have experienced sudden and devastating cuts under the Trump administration as part of the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Congress is now considering long-term slashing of the program that currently treats 20 million people living with HIV/AIDS.
“Blow on the embers, the fires in your own heart and conscience that need to be stirred,” Grant said in an interview with CT right before sound check at the concert. “Nobody is just eating bonbons, staring at YouTube all day, and making the world a better place. Engage, come on, come on, engage!”
The Christian world of Nashville music has a surprising history of engagement with the HIV/AIDS program over the decades.
In late 2002, before PEPFAR first launched, U2 lead singer Bono did the final stop of his Heart of America tour in Nashville. The year prior, 2.3 million Africans died because of HIV/AIDS. The medicine to save people’s lives existed, but it largely wasn’t making it to those in need. Even one USAID official then considered the main problem in Africa “overpopulation.”
Activists like Bono—and eventually President George W. Bush, who launched the program—disagreed.
Across America, Bono had been speaking and pushing for a program to address the AIDS crisis—including at Christian colleges and churches. On that tour Bono had said there is “nothing worse than a rock star with a cause” but he felt an urgency about the millions who were dying. Bono told churches the HIV/AIDS epidemic was “the defining moral issue of our time.”
“I think our whole idea of who we are is at stake. I think Judeo-Christian culture is at stake,” Bono said in a press gaggle at Wheaton College on one stop of the tour. “If the church doesn’t respond to this, the church will be made irrelevant.”
Bono’s American Prayer
The church did respond. In Nashville, Bono and Grant, along with other Christian artists like Steve Taylor and Michael W. Smith, met at Peacock’s house to discuss HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Peacock remembered in his memoir, Roots & Rhythm,“The Spirit of Justice blew through Music City, and people felt the wind blow.”
At the meeting of musicians at his home, Peacock said Bono prayed and Peacock remembered feeling that “prayer is a way of breathing when the worst of disease, hunger, and poverty has sucked the oxygen out of people and the planet.” Then Bono picked up Peacock’s son’s guitar and played the song “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love.”
The artists got behind the cause. Jenny Dyer, who works alongside Grant on the PEPFAR issue with her organization The 2030 Collaborative, said the artists “started talking about it from the stage, talking to their pastors, and we had Christians take a stand for it.”
Not long after in 2003, Congress created PEPFAR, which is now widely credited as a successful program that saved millions.
“So much good and life-giving change can be traced back to the December 9 gathering,” Peacock wrote in his memoir about the meeting of musicians at his house with Bono. “It took an Irishman to stir our hearts, but we got there. More importantly, hurting and dying global neighbors got desperately needed, tangible help from America.”
Grant told CT she and Bono have not crossed paths many other times—she’s bought tickets to his shows—but they did have dinner once to talk about advocacy. She said it made sense that musicians like her and Bono were drawn to advocate for a program like this.
Musicians can see “a group of people walk into a room feeling disconnected from themselves and from each other, and in the short span of a handful of songs, suddenly everybody is moving in rhythm,” she said. “Sometimes people in music want to put their talents and energies behind a cause they believe in because they see the minor miracle of what something as simple as music can do to a community.”
Grant also has a personal connection to one of the architects of PEPFAR in Congress: former senator Bill Frist, a Republican from Nashville.
Frist’s dad was the doctor for Grant’s parents and grandparents, she told CT. When Grant went through her divorce from Gary Chapman in 1999, Frist’s parents’ house was sitting empty because they had both recently died, and she rented it.
“Bill Frist was my landlord. We had time to sit around and chew the fat,” she said. That naturally drew her into the world of PEPFAR.
“It’s so crazy,” she said. “What circles does each of our lives naturally pull us into? Because how we invest in the world around us shouldn’t be a big mystery. … None of us do live isolated.”
Frist, Bono, and motherhood all drew her toward the program—“to have carried children and know how important my health was to me and the health of my children,” she said.
“The gift I bring to the table is empathy and the creativity to turn it into a song,” she said. “You have an illness that’s affecting the world, and it makes total sense to say, ‘Well, first off, let’s do the easiest connect through music, and then we’ll talk about the bigger issue.’”
Dyer, who has worked alongside Grant on this issue, spoke at the concert about the legacy of Nashville musicians: “Here we are 23 years later—and it worked. … We are almost at the end of the HIV epidemic status. We need your voice.”
