Jesusland: Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture

Journalist Kidd’s first book explores evangelical Christian media created in the early 2000s. As a young child in Canada, Kidd attended a private Christian school and was immersed in an unfamiliar culture as she strove to fit in. First, Kidd introduces readers to the belief systems of evangelical Christians. Then she looks at media produced by evangelical Christian outlets and creators—music, magazines, television, movies, and books. She analyzes the messages these media artifacts enforce using scholarship, close reading, interviews, and her own experiences. Several topics recur in her analysis, including purity culture, creationism, culture wars, evolution, martyrdom, the prosperity gospel, comedy, and the apocalypse. Along the way, Kidd comes to terms with herself as she struggles within the evangelical belief structure as a self-described queer leftist woman who is, however, reluctant to shed the religion that her community shares. She is honest about the lingering effects of evangelical beliefs and the media it spawned and presents her changing impressions as both a child and an adult to show how her thinking evolved over time.