“You’re gonna leave here set free!”
It’s Friday night at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and two gorgeous buxom-blonde, glossy-lipped starlets with Valley girl drawls stride onstage, hand in hand. Their names are Angela Halili and Arielle Reitsma, and they’re not models or singers; they’re podcasters, hosts of the wildly popular show Girls Gone Bible. I’m here for the launch of their national tour—a multicity trek, stretching through to December, with stops in San Francisco; Morristown, New Jersey; Atlanta; Portland; Seattle; and LA. The energy is intense.
“Anyone else in the room just love the Bible, like, so much?” said Arielle, beaming.
The audience—500 women sporting milkmaid dresses and bouncy blowouts, clutching iPhones and the Good Book—screamed, tears flowing, mascara streaking, hands reaching upward. The girl next to me began to shake with sobs right then, and didn’t stop until a couple of hours later. Most of the women in my row were locals from Philadelphia—a teacher, a barista, a law student—but the line outside the theater had been full of pilgrims; there were girls who’d flown in from Texas, driven from Ohio, taken a bus from New York.
“I couldn’t miss this,” one told me. “They just get it.”
Another said Girls Gone Bible “literally changed her life.”
Before the live show had begun, many had posed for selfies in front of the stage, while a handful of God-fearing boyfriends hovered at the edges, toddlers on their hips. A DJ blasted worship karaoke that rattled the floor. All this hype, for a show that’s barely two years old.
Girls Gone Bible launched in 2023, with a weekly show, and has since amassed more than 20 million listens, and nearly two million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined. The title is a deliberate wink at Girls Gone Wild, that 2000s franchise that encouraged hot, drunk college girls to flash for the camera. (It could also be an acknowledgement of the hosts’ less than holy past, but more on that later.) The episodes stretch to around an hour and a half long; the tone is at once confessional and didactic, and the message simple: If you’re a young woman, scripture and sobriety is far more fulfilling than partying and sluttiness.
