Jen Tullock’s “Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God” has been hailed as a searing examination of how evangelical Christianity wounds its queer children. Critics have called it “the best solo show in years,” praising Tullock’s tour-de-force performance as she embodies multiple characters to tell the story of Frances Reinhardt, a writer whose memoir about growing up gay in Louisville’s evangelical community has ignited controversy. But what Tullock has actually written—and what she performs with undeniable skill—is a family drama set in a religious household, not an institutional critique. It’s a crucial distinction the play never acknowledges. Frances wasn’t wounded by “the church” as an institution; she was wounded by parents who weaponized religious doctrine to justify their psychological abuse, including having their teenage daughter exorcised. When Agnieszka—the Polish woman Frances claims to have fallen in love with on a Christian mission trip—confronts Frances and insists their relationship wasn’t what Frances wrote in her book, the play reveals its true subject: the unreliability of memory, the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and the difference between lived experience and public narrative. The difference matters.

The conflict with Agnieszka becomes the play’s central tension, and Tullock navigates it with remarkable skill, embodying both women—the confident public intellectual and the woman insisting her story has been misappropriated. Playing all the characters (Frances, Agnieszka, Frances’s mother Raelynn, her brother Eli, church officials, her literary agent Aubrey), Tullock operates multiple cameras and live looping systems herself (video design by Stefania Bulbarella) to create a fractured, layered narrative that mirrors Frances’s contested memories. Director Jared Mezzocchi’s staging keeps the focus squarely on Tullock’s virtuosic performance while the technical elements enhance rather than distract. When Agnieszka says, “I don’t remember what happened the same way you remember it,” we’re forced to question everything Frances has claimed. Did they have a romantic relationship, or did Frances construct one retrospectively to serve her escape narrative? The play wisely refuses to answer definitively, instead exploring how we all shape our pasts to make sense of our presents. But this ambiguity about personal memory makes the institutional church abuse claims even more uncertain. If Frances can’t reliably remember her most significant relationship, how reliable is her account of institutional harm? The play wants to have it both ways—celebrating Frances’s courage in “speaking her truth” while simultaneously revealing that “truth” is contested, constructed, and self-serving.

To be clear: what Tullock and Winters have created is powerful and deeply felt. As a portrait of growing up queer in an evangelical household with psychologically abusive parents, the play succeeds completely. The exorcism scene—where Frances describes her parents sitting in the adjacent room, hearing everything, and choosing not to intervene—is devastating precisely because it captures the unique cruelty of parental betrayal disguised as spiritual concern. Tullock’s performance is technically astonishing (she seamlessly shifts between a dozen characters without costume changes or obvious markers) and emotionally transparent; we see Frances struggling to control her narrative even as it slips away from her. The family dynamics feel lived-in and true: the mother’s manipulations, the brother Eli’s well-meaning but inadequate attempts at reconciliation, the way religious language gets weaponized in everyday conversations. This is an important story about how parents can wound their children in God’s name. But it’s not a story about institutional religious abuse, and the distinction matters profoundly for the LGBTQ+ community the play claims to speak for.

The difference between parental abuse in a religious context and institutional religious abuse isn’t semantic—it’s the difference between a family that failed you and a system designed to exclude you. Frances’s parents weaponized evangelical doctrine to justify their cruelty; that’s a profound betrayal. But institutional abuse looks different: it’s evangelical denominations like Northeast Christian Church, that write discrimination into their official policies. When plays conflate these experiences, they obscure the machinery of institutional harm and let religious institutions off the hook. LGBTQ+ people wounded by their families need validation and healing. LGBTQ+ people wounded by religious institutions need something else entirely: accountability, systemic change, and acknowledgment that the harm wasn’t personal—it was policy. “Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God” offers a powerful meditation on the first kind of wound. But by claiming to address the second, it misnames the problem and offers the wrong solution.