Brooke Fraser is a New Zealand musician most known for her Christian folk albums through the 2000s. She’s performed under a couple of names – her four mainstream albums are released under her maiden name, Brooke Fraser, and over this last decade she’s released mostly Christian worship music under her married name, Brooke Ligertwood. She’s a major figure in New Zealand music from the noughties: her vision of Christian femininity, particularly on her first album (2003’s What To Do With Daylight), was wildly influential, tapping into and amplifying prevalent ideas of the Christian woman.

In essence, What To Do With Daylight is mostly folky love ballads with a strong ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ subtext. You have to check some of the songs closely to know whether she’s singing about a boy or about her relationship with God. ‘Still in Love’, for example, is about the pleasure of discovering a mutual crush – there are lyrics about how she’s in denial, or trying to move on, before the final verse where she admits her feelings and recognises his own in return:

“When you know it’s true
I’m still in love with you
And I love that I am barely coping
When you let me see
You’re still in love with me too”

Other songs, like ‘Lifeline’, are overtly Christian narratives of sin and guilt, where Fraser begs God for relief from her fallen creaturely nature (“Take this ocean of pain that is mine / Throw me a lifeline”). Others again sit somewhere in the middle, between the poles of ‘Still in Love’ and ‘Lifeline’. They’re presented as love songs, rather than churchy redemption songs, but there are one or two specific images that show they’re actually about God. For instance, the album’s opening song, ‘Arithmetic’, seems at first like a love song about a boy, with its key refrain “You are the one I want”. The first two verses are ambiguous – she could plausibly be singing either to God or to her imagined boyfriend. It’s only with the third verse that we get mention of guilt and forgiveness, and the impossibility of reconciliation through her own power:

“I’ve been counting up all my wrongs
One sorry for each star
See I’d apologize my way to you
If the heavens stretched that far”

It’s a salvation motif: there’s not enough space in the sky for us to apologise our way back to God – the only way back is by accepting the sacrifice of Christ. It’s a Jesus song. That revelation is delayed, and it’s not especially overt compared to songs like ‘Lifeline’ – it’s passably boyfriend-coded if you don’t catch all the lyrics. It’s also presented in the format of a love song, impersonating or borrowing that structure and language, which it repurposes to talk about God.

That’s where Daylight operates most comfortably – as a youthful, yearning love album where most of the songs are actually about Jesus. The overlap in topic almost serves as a form of moral self-policing, enforcing conservative Christian dating norms. Fraser uses the love ballad to sing to God, inviting God into the structure of the romantic relationship. Any actual love elsewhere expressed to a romantic partner then exists under that sovereignty. God is in that love. In other words, when the ballads are about God, the love is chaste, because you don’t want to get horny about God. When the ballads are about a boy, they are also chaste, because God has been invited in. God is watching, and so the dictates of conservative Christianity are closely observed. The songs aren’t necessarily prudish – they would fit alongside Faith Hill songs from the time like ‘There You’ll Be‘ or ‘This Kiss‘ – but within the context of Christian femininity, writing love songs about God serves to shape romantic love under the authority of the church.

In this murky overlap between boyfriends and God, it’s probably worth asking whether some of the relationship with the divine bleeds back into the romantic relationship. The relationship with God in this album is characterised by submission and obedience, by consciousness of wrongdoing and insufficiency. We need God, the album goes, because we are not good enough on our own. That dynamic, transferred into the romantic relationship, seems like the foundation for traditional patriarchal gender roles, where the wife is subservient to the husband. Many of the songs about men do have Fraser acknowledging her faults or mistakes: in ‘Without You’, she’s often “moaning” or “babbling” about things. Her lover is depicted as patient with her shortcomings: “And you don’t seem to mind / That I’m so stupid.” The perfect husband is often contrasted against the flawed wife, responsible for everything wrong and called to acknowledge all her mistakes.

This figure of the flawed wife / flawed woman (somewhat tautological, noting that within conservative Christianity, women and girls are simply wives in waiting) is also routinely passive, allowing her partner to set the terms of the relationship. ‘Reverie’ is a song about waiting for him to call. She misses him, she reminisces about having him near – but she also describes the distance as “healthy”, deferring to his decision not to call and construing her desire as a fault – as impatience. The fault is combined with passivity: she’s not impatient and running out to find him, she’s impatiently sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. The initial distance is depicted as her fault as well: “I know I acted selfishly.” In the logic of the album, she makes mistakes, and she has flaws, and he’s essentially perfect. She’s impatient, and he’s enforcing healthy distance. That might not accurately reflect Brooke Fraser’s actual opinions on the nature of marriage, but it does largely reflect the concept of the Christian woman set out in this album.

The narrative of the Christian woman as flawed and passive is briefly complicated by one song on the album – ‘Better’, a surprisingly complex piece about setting a boundary with someone who’s in pain. In concept, the song is about trying to help someone, but having to withdraw that help when they become self-destructive or start lashing out at the people around them. The refrain fits with the typical model of the Christian woman as supporter or helper: “I would give anything / To make you better.” She’s given a great deal to try and support someone in pain (“I loved you till it killed me”), but ultimately has to withdraw for her own safety or peace of mind. The problem is explored through three variations on the phrase “You’re not helping yourself”:

“You’re not helping yourself”
“You’re not helping yourself / To me”
“You’re not helping yourself / By hurting me”

These variations bundle together the song’s central ideas: this isn’t good for you, this isn’t good for me, and I won’t let it continue. It’s not healthy to give unconditionally. Sometimes giving is unproductive – it doesn’t actually support the person in need. The model of Christian womanhood isn’t fundamentally changed – it’s still built around the woman as nurturer, as caregiver, in some sense killing herself to be supportive – and withdrawing that support is posed as a final intervention, accompanied by apologies and justifications (“I tried everything”), and specifically not by any sort of anger or resentment. It’s a very demure, maidenly withdrawal – although to its credit, it does allow for the possibility of withdrawal at all. It’s clearly conscious that sometimes enough is enough. That’s – again, a fairly nuanced, thoughtful texturing of the overall idea. I am criticising a lot of how this album constructs the ideal Christian woman, but I also think (for Brooke Fraser as an artist) there’s this underlying steel to her vision. The Christian woman in this album is passive, obedient, and conscious of her flaws, but there’s a limit.

There’s more to say about Brooke Fraser, and the trajectory of her musical career, but this is where we have to start. What To Do With Daylight is a deeply conservative Christian album, setting out a vision of Christian womanhood that in some aspects is regressive. It imagines the Christian woman as deferential, passive, and focused on her flaws. A Christian might contend that, under Christianity, all people are called to be conscious of their flaws – including men – so it’s not just about belittling women. Really the point is that Christian men don’t directly exist in this album. They sit out of view as hypothetical, idealised figures. They are adored, they receive embarrassed confessions of love, declarations of the woman’s insufficiency (“I’m so stupid”), but they never do anything wrong themselves. They never do much of anything themselves. They are romantic constructs rather than people. The album’s breathy idealism actually works against it here: there are love songs for God, who is perfect and out there somewhere, and love songs to men, who are sort of the same – idealised, beloved, much adored, and free of any of the human failings that characterise the woman. Men are dreamy and in charge, and women are human and make mistakes. That’s a little grim, even for 2003.