Franni Cash, the Grammy-nominated singer who helped launch We The Kingdom, spent this week explaining the story behind her haunting new single, “Darken the Doorway.”
It starts with a Nashville-area cult that nearly cost her family everything.
“I think there’s a lot of other people in my shoes who maybe have a lot of timidity about organized religion or Christianity because someone has really misrepresented God and said that he’s all these things that he’s not,” Cash said in an Instagram video posted this week.
Cash writes songs, she explained, to process an experience she once thought she’d carry alone. “I did not think that I was going to write songs that were so specific about my story because I kind of felt alone in that,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Ah, no one else has been hurt by church.'”
“Turns out, unfortunately, a lot of us have,” she added.
Cash is the daughter of Ed Cash, the Grammy-winning songwriter who co-wrote “How Great Is Our God,” and she formerly fronted We The Kingdom, the family band she started with her father, brother Martin Cash, uncle Scott Cash and family friend Andrew Bergthold. Movieguide® profiled the group back in 2022, when Ed Cash said the band actually grew out of wounds inflicted by the church. “I think one of the greatest dangers is to put on the face of God the pastor that hurt us,” he said at the time.
We The Kingdom earned two Grammy nominations in 2021 for “Holy Water.” Franni left the band in 2023 to launch a solo career, and she recently opened for Brandon Lake on his “King of Hearts Tour.”
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The story behind “Darken the Doorway” goes back to when Cash was 6 years old, when her parents sought marriage counseling from a man named Wayne Jolley, who led a group called The Gathering International outside Nashville. Jolley died in 2016 at age 64, after building what Christianity Today described as a decade-long operation that pulled in more than $10 million from a small circle of followers, Ed Cash among them.
“He was extremely, extremely overweight and used that to kind of victimize himself and create a force field around him from any accountability so nobody could say anything, question him at all,” Cash said of Jolley.
Jolley cast himself as a spiritual father who demanded covenants from his followers, then cut them off from outside churches and community. Cash said he used the idea of a “Jezebel Spirit” to silence any wife who disagreed with her husband.
“It was kind of his idea to solve the household problems, was to just get women to be totally compliant with their husbands,” Cash said.
The Cash family’s exit came only after Christianity Today published an investigation in December 2015 naming Ed Cash among Jolley’s followers and detailing allegations of financial misconduct and spiritual abuse. Ed Cash and his brother left the group within days, publicly citing “troubling allegations” against Jolley.
For Franni, freedom did not arrive painlessly. “I fell into this really deep depression, a really dark place,” she said. “Struggled with a lot of self-harm, and honestly, just being real with y’all, there were a lot of times I didn’t know if I was gonna live to see the next day.”
She eventually found her way back through Scripture, reading the New Testament and noticing who actually drew Jesus’ anger. “It wasn’t people who weren’t morally compliant,” Cash said. “It was the religious leaders who put heavy burdens on people. He called them whitewashed tombs.”
“I really felt like the Holy Spirit said to me, ‘Franni, I am not the one who is hurting you, but I am the one who is healing you,'” she said.
That distinction between God and the people who distort him now anchors her music. “My song ‘Darken the Doorway’ is for anybody who has been burned by the church and had a timidity there and needs to know that God can find you anywhere,” Cash said. Her debut solo album arrives Sept. 18, built on the same conviction — that church hurt is real, and so is the God who never caused it.
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