← New Books Network
New Books Network
Joelle Kidd, "Jesusland: Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture" (ECW Press, 2025)
00:48:44
Loading summary
Transcript42 lines
- [00:01]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:28]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Hello, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network, New Books in Popular Culture, and today. I'm here with Joelle Kidd, who is the author of Jesus Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture. Joelle, thanks for being here with me today.
- [01:49]
Joelle Kidd
Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:50]
Rebecca Buchanan
Could you start out by talking a little bit about how this book came to be, why you wanted to sort of look at Christian pop culture and write this book?
- [02:01]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, of course, it does feel like a bit of a niche topic, but for me, it was what I grew up steeped in. As I write in the book, I attended a private Christian school basically from third grade till I graduated high school. And I hadn't really considered that a topic to explore in my writing for a long time. But I think what it came out of was, and it was actually prompted by a course I was taking, doing my master's in fine arts and taking a creative nonfiction course, looking for a topic to write about because I Don't usually write about my own life. I have previously written a lot of fiction and journalism. But when I started thinking about childhood, I kind of picked up this thread I've been thinking about for a long time, which was this experience of starting at this Christian school and the strange kind of culture shock I felt going from a secular world into this Christian pop culture and having to learn all this music and watch these movies and hear about celebrities that sort of exist in this parallel world to regular pop culture. So I started writing about that, and it turned into a bit of an obsession for me, and I started researching deeper into these pop culture artifacts. And, yeah, it just became apparent to me that there was a lot more to think about there in terms of the politics and the sort of messages that are being spread through these Christian subculture pop culture pieces.
- [03:52]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you. I mean, you write about today, but you really ground this in, like, the early 2000s. So before we kind of jump into some of the areas that you cover, can you talk a little bit about the early 2000s for you, what you think is really important about that time for sort of this pop culture in Christianity melding together?
- [04:17]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, of course. Yeah. So that also started as this kind of memoir piece, and there is a little bit of my own experience woven throughout the book. But, of course, the 2000s, I'm 33, by the way. I take it as a sign from above that it's my Jesus year that I published this book. But being the age I am, that was the decade where I grew up in Christianity. But thinking about it from a wider perspective, I think it also really represents a kind of pinnacle of this kind of pop culture in terms of its profitability and its kind of, like, incursion into the mainstream. Because the 2000s were really sort of the peak of Christian bookstores, which was where a lot of these products were sold before the Internet sort of swooped in and kind of hampered a lot of these brick and mortar industries. Christian bookstores, Christian publishing, and Christian music labels were really profitable. And so I think that's not a coincidence in terms of how much power these pop culture pieces had, because that decade was also when you saw much greater rise of political lobbying in the evangelical community and also more pop culture crossover. In the book, I wrote a lot about, you know, pop stars who were wearing their purity rings and Christian music that started playing on the secular radio. So, yeah, I just. I see that as a bit of a high watermark of all these things. And as I was writing it, I sort of saw it Also as a bit of a cycle that we're now sort of going back into. And I think a lot of those pop culture crossovers are happening again. There's a lot of Christian artists on the mainstream radio now as well, so it offered an interesting kind of comparison to today.
- [06:25]
Rebecca Buchanan
So can you also sort of ground us in how you. You're looking at evangelical Christianity too. So can you kind of ground and define that and how you are sort of reading? Because there are all different forms of religion and all different forms of spirituality and Christianity, so defining that too can help for listeners to think about where you're coming from.
- [06:48]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, absolutely. I found evangelicalism as a term, as a category, really helpful when I was writing this. But it's also a little slippery because it's not as rigid as certain, you know, sects of Christianity. It's very clear what's the difference between a Catholic Church and a Protestant church, for instance. But when it comes to evangelicalism, there's no sort of governing body. It's not an official denomination. It's more of a type of Christianity that has a bit of blurred edges. But in general, it comes down to this belief in evangelizing, as the name suggests, and kind of denotes, like Christianity that wants to propagate itself and convert others. And because of that, I think it's like really uniquely tied into this idea of pop culture and that those are the segments of Christianity that tend to make pop culture. They also tend to be a bit more traditional or like, conservative, a little bit more fundamentalist. And so a lot of times that goes hand in hand with like, right wing politics as well as, like, I would say to me, the big dividing line in the book was the type of Christianity that's okay with selling itself. Like, that's really tied to capitalism. Because for me, I grew up in a Mennonite church, and of course I have the things that I love and hate about Mennonite Christianity as well, but it was never commercialized in that way. So that's one of the things that I found really interesting and kind of strange about this marriage of religion and capitalism that I wanted to explore.
- [08:45]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you divided this. You look at what, nine or ten different topics, really, or areas of how this occurs and how you see sort of Christianity coming into mainstream popular culture. And so maybe we can start by talking. You mentioned, like, this was the heyday for you said sort of the bookstores, publishing, the film industry. So your first couple chapters are looking at film and music and also which some of my students remember, the, like Because I said to one of my students, I think would really enjoy your book. And he's like, yes, I do remember the boy Bible and the girl. And I'm a little older, so I was like, yeah, like some of these, I'm like, okay, they're certain. I know who DC talk is. I know certain things are right. But. But yeah, so can you talk a little bit about that? What was going on? Sort of what you kind of saw with music, with sort of selling the, like commercializing the Bible and all of that as well as. Yeah, the box. Like the big sort of film and box office stuff.
- [09:53]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, yeah. It's something that I really remember being pretty pervasive when I was growing up. And I think it ties into, like I was saying that that kind of like high point of Christian culture and. And it being really profitable because there were just so many products and I was sort of a new thing to have, like a sparkly pink Bible instead of the traditional leather bound kind of look. There were a lot of things that came up in my research, things I remembered from childhood or things I discovered that really kind of that were created in the 2000s and really hinged on this. Like, there was a Bible magazine. It was like a teen girl magazine, but it had the Bible, the biblical scripture, I think the New Testament in the pages. But then they also had a bunch of quizzes and tips and things you would find in a Cosmo, except a little less risque. So, yeah, there were a lot of kind of mashups like that that were happening at the time. And you mentioned movies. That was another area. I spent a lot of time writing about the Passion of the Christ for this book because it was such a huge blockbuster hit, but it was. The story is a religious text put to screen. So I think there was an interesting relationship there at the time between Christians and their faith and how they viewed themselves in relation to wider culture. Because at the same time there was a sort of sense of feeling persecuted by regular culture that I think evangelicalism really tends to lean into. But then I found while researching, I found that really hard to square that with this sort of idea that the popularity of things like the Passion of the Christ somehow proved that Christianity was good or was accepted or was something that people should follow. So it kind of felt like a both and scenario where things were more popular than ever, but people felt more marginalized. Whether that was true or not.
- [12:22]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, and you mentioned kind of celebrity culture and like how celebrity culture took plays into some of this. And so Kirk Cameron Comes up often in your book. Right. But like. And so I always think about him too, when it comes to sort of the film in the box office and that kind of thing. And also, like, I found it. I totally, like, forgot about the Passion of the Christ. I was like, oh. And it was really kind of. I'm like, I don't think I want to go back and watch it, but I'm like, it really was kind of horrific, right? It was this horrific, like in. In. And while they did it in, who we had directing it. Right. Like now that we, you know, sort of the anti Semitism within it. And so we have this. But you also talk about films that were made for sort of Christian audiences that kind of bankrolled big mega churches. So. Yeah, can you talk? Because I thought that was really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that too?
- [13:25]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, I think those were less visible, especially if you didn't grow up Christian. But there were these big sort of mega hits. The one directing duo that I wrote a lot about in the book were called the Kendrick Brothers. They're still making films, I believe, but they've moved on from their church at the time in the 2000s, they were like media pastors or they had some kind of similar title for the megachurch they worked at. And so these films were actually also a fundraising opportunity for the church. They made them on a really shoestring budget. They made them with volunteer actors and crew, and they took in tons of money. Percentage wise, they made way more at the box office than Hollywood movies because they had such low overhead. And so again, this is sort of seen as like a proof of proof test that these were sort of God ordained and quality films. Having watched them, I wouldn't necessarily agree with the quality, but they found a really big audience. And I think what's interesting there too is that their audience is mainly other Christians, even though sometimes they're kind of positioned as a conversion tool. I think a lot less than even something like the Passion of the Christian. It's really not going out to anyone who's not already on board. They're really sort of made to preach to the choir, I guess, is the saying. Right? I mean, they're supposed to sort of bolster people who are already Christian in their faith and encourage them to support this sort of filmmaking mission with their money and with their time and attention. So, yeah, that was certainly, I think, a new tactic in the 2000s, and it's kind of continued today. I think. I would say that the film industry and even to Some degree, the music industry, they've kind of diverged. Like secular culture and Christian culture, I think are pretty far apart these days, I don't think. While researching, I signed up for a couple Christian streaming services that I hadn't heard of before researching the book. And I thought, there's no way that someone who's not a Christian will ever have seen these movies because they're so siloed off, you know, At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way. @newbalance.com Running.
- [16:27]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off terms apply.
- [17:22]
Rebecca Buchanan
One thing I thought was interesting that you brought up in the movie section, but it's kind of a theme throughout is that people were doing this for. They were at like a lot of the actors and like the, the help quote unquote, to put the movie together, were doing it for free. So these directors are making, and churches are making sometimes up to a million, you know, like millions of dollars right off of free labor. And so we see some, some concern or issues there as well, right?
- [17:51]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, absolutely. I think like a lot of people who grew up who going to evangelical school, church volunteering with Christian organizations, I think that rings pretty true as well. Just in general, it's great to see people passionate and wanting to support a cause that's important to them, but I think that organized religion can really take advantage of that fact. And so, yeah, in that case, I think it's, uh, it's interesting how many roles were being done by volunteers. And when you think about the kinds of reckonings the film industry's had in recent years in terms of labor and unions and intimacy coordinators, anything really, I mean, that none of that would be there on a volunteer movie set. And so, yeah, I tend to think it's. It takes advantage a little of people's goodwill there.
- [18:52]
Rebecca Buchanan
So one chapter you have is on something that I think most people are very. I don't know if most, maybe I shouldn't say most people, but became a really big thing where there's sort of purity rings, the pledges that people made. So can you talk a little bit about that and what was going on? And I mean, because we did see that throughout sort of secular pop stars using, you know, or, or talking about that. Yeah, so can you talk about the pledges and purity rings?
- [19:20]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, that was something that I grew up with for sure. It was all around me. I knew tons of people had purity rings. And even if you didn't wear a ring, I mean, I was, I was taught abstinence only sex education. I went to private school in Canada, which is why they were able to teach that. But I realized while researching the book how pervasive that was even in public schools in Canada and especially in the U.S. how much funding, millions and millions of dollars of funding that went only to abstinence only education. So I think that was a huge thing for anyone who was an adolescent in the 90s and 2000s. But yeah, purity rings became this sort of symbol of. That rose out of this kind of. Again, as a. It's an evangelicalism tool to, to convert people to Christianity or to a certain type of Christianity. But it was also a political tool. There were so many movements to. There was a big protest in the late 90s. I don't know if protest is the right word, but a big movement to have, you know, thousands of students come and nail a purity pledge into the National Mall. They had all these people signing these pledges that they wouldn't have sex before marriage. And yeah, it's interesting to see this kind of change in Christianity where it almost became like a central tenet of the faith to not have sex before marriage, which is such a kind of strange and niche part of the Christian life. I think if you take the long view, we're talking about like teenagers. And I think it was really about capturing this young base and trying to like shore up a new generation of like right wing evangelicals to carry on Christianity. And so part of that was, yeah, pop culture, these brings to Try and make it seem cool, you know, pop stars, to talk about how it was good to save yourself for marriage. And for me, I think writing that chapter was interesting because I actually ended up collecting a lot of. Doing a lot of interviews and collecting survey responses from friends and friends of friends, all people who grew up in the same kinds of environments and who were taught this purity culture messaging. And even though I was talking to people from mostly my generation, but a fair range of ages, people from the States, people from Canada, even like some friends from Europe, all over the world, they were all getting the exact same teachings and even some of the same strange metaphors about, you know, your virginity is like a heart or it's like a flower. It's like, you know, all these kind of teachings that just bounced around every church at the time. And so it was a very moving chapter to write. It's something that I felt really affected by and had really messed with my conception of my own sexuality. And so to hear from so many people who felt the same was really moving. And it also just highlighted for me this strange kind of power that pop culture has where it seems so silly to. To look at, you know, the Jonas Brothers with their purity rings or to hear this metaphor of a gum being chewed that's no longer your virginity. But then, yeah, in the end, it has a real effect on people and it really, really can harm our psyches and our bodies and our emotional lives. So, yeah, so for me, that was a really powerful kind of chapter to explore.
- [23:25]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, you talk, I mean, you talk about this in your last chapter too, but some of that fear mongering that happens. Right. As well as even with the. In this chapter that the Bible really doesn't say, don't have sex before marriage. Right. So, like, where does this come from? Where do these stories. And I've heard, you know, similar stories. Like, I was like, yep, I've heard that. Right. But those stories and those narratives, like, continue, even though it isn't really. If you read through the Bible, if you look through the Bible, that is not what's being said. Right. And so we see this kind of instilling fear in young people as a way to keep them in line. And so it kind of, I think, was it somewhere or someone kind of said that it's one of the reasons why young people often go to school or they leave home, and then they really question their spirituality or their Christianity because they are not taught to think for themselves or think about it in really critical ways before that time. Right. So, yeah, you know, along that, like, you also look at sort of creationism, and so you talk about sort of how. I mean, I think that we still see that in many schools here in the United States, and we're returning to it this narrative of abstinence only education. Right. And so I think that the. And what's going on when you look at creationism, that also goes into, like, what is being taught in schools and how is that being approached and taught in schools? So can you talk a little bit about that and sort of what you were seeing happening in the 2000s and even now with what was going on about teaching. Yeah, Creationism versus. Or intelligent design, maybe I should say.
- [25:16]
Joelle Kidd
Yes, the rebrand. Yeah. It was one of my favorite kind of facts that I learned in the course of researching this book that one of the main textbooks that was being questioned at the Supreme Court level about whether it should be allowed, whether it was teaching creationism or science, it actually lost its case because it was revealed that they had done a search and replace on the phrase creationism to replace it with intelligent design as a kind of COVID for what they were teaching. And one escaped the search and replace. But yeah, so it's definitely something that I think unfortunately is still around and is being more and more returned to. But I tend to think that, like, you identified that a lot of it comes down to fear and to this idea of kind of keeping people in check. I always felt like, I mean, the chapter on creationism, a lot of it is really about this kind of crisis of faith that I felt as a teenager going to Christian school, where I found some of these teachings so hard to swallow. But I really did want to be a Christian. And I think there's just a real sense of fear. Not only that is being imparted to you when you grow up in that environment, but also that even the adults around you have where it just feels like they're holding onto this belief with a white knuckle grip. And if one thing is wrong, the house of cards comes crashing down. And so there's not really a lot of room for differences of opinion or different critical thoughts. And I think that really lends itself to being used as a political tool. I think that's why there is such a push towards these kinds of laws around schooling. I think that's a big thing we're seeing right now. The Christian right is kind of using laws around schooling to segregate itself away from society, to make sure that they can teach whatever they want and still receive funding. They can, you Know, just finding loopholes for ways to keep their agenda going under the guise of things like parents rights or choice of education. So, yeah, I think it's always been a bit of a proxy battle. I'm sure that, like, while a lot of people genuinely believe in young Earth creationism, I think it comes out of that kind of political fight, especially when it comes to the level of regulation and of what's allowed to be taught in schools and things like that.
- [28:22]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. One thing that is really important for this sort of time period you're looking at that comes up is that 911 happened right. In the United States especially, but sort of around the world, Canada, everybody sort of dealt with this. And so we see this in kind of. You talk a bit about this sort of the. The martyrdom of the Christian faith, but also how what happened with 911 sort of fed into some of this sort of Islamophobia and racism that was going on. So can you talk a little bit about why that was 911 was so important and sort of what was going on post. Right. Like after 9 11, because, you know, in the Christian. What you saw going on in the church.
- [29:10]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, yeah. Again, I think, yeah, fear is a big theme here. And I think there's a real. A lot of this comes down to the conflation too, of that Christian nationalism brings to the table of this idea of America as a Christian nation, which is sort of faulty premise. But, yeah, I think I was surprised to find such a strong connection. I think going into my research, I thought, thinking back on the time period, I thought there was a connection there. But when I actually started reading books and sermons from the time, there was such a strong. There were so many pastors who were outright saying it, you know, that were saying, we're too weak, we need a masculine, warmongering Christianity, that to fight back, we need to, you know, crush our opponents and all sorts of things I won't repeat about. About Islam as a religion and different people groups around the world. So it was very overt. And I think, yeah, it just signaled this big shift into a new kind of way of thinking about Christianity that was much more militarized, I guess, being in the Lord's army, I guess. And so, yeah, in that chapter, I really wanted to look at that kind of weird conflict between that mentality and this idea of martyrdom, because again, I think that's something that always seems to be rising in parallel. The more sort of aggressive Christianity gets, the more there's this narrative of, oh, we're being attacked, we're being silenced. We're martyrs to the cause. And so, yeah, it was an interesting thing to look at and to look at the history of martyrdom, which has always been a big part of Christian traditions throughout history, but is not necessarily very true, not really documented. You know, like there are martyrdom stories in the Bible, but not a lot of them have been sort of proven. There's a researcher, Candida Moss, whose book I cited, who I think she, through looking at the history of early Christianity, found something like six stories that she could, that she could actually prove. So they certainly had a much larger impact than what the reality might be. And I think a lot of that again comes down to the political framing of the time. And just like you see a big push toward stories of martyrdom saw that in the 90s and 2000s and you're kind of seeing it now, it was the same way in the time of Fox's book of martyrs after the Reformation, you know, so when there's a political agenda at play, that's when those kinds of narratives become even more prominent.
- [32:28]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, it's interesting because you even, you have a chapter on comedy and I think it even comes up in the comedy chapter. Right, this like, right, like, so it's this. I was like, oh, this, you come back to this idea that. And I appreciate how you talk about how there is this so push that people who are more left leaning or liberal comics are not like they can't take, they take everything too seriously and they're not funny. But on the other hand we see the same thing. But. Yeah, so I think that like seems to come up in these other areas too that you examine and explored.
- [33:00]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, exactly. I feel like I was really. That was one of the threads that I was kind of preoccupied with throughout the whole book because it always felt like illogical to me, like that I just couldn't where this kind of defensiveness and aggressiveness that was always at play. So.
- [33:16]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, so one thing you talk about and you have a chapter on it, but I think it comes through with all of this is where capitalism fits in with Christianity. Right. You, you do really look at how the role of money and how. And sort of two, two differing kind of views that came to light in the 2000s. I grew up in the, you know, 70s and 80s and so I really do remember those sort of Jerry Fowler, like that big kind of, you know, the Pat. I can't even think of his last name. But right, like, like that whole. Yeah. Tammy Baker. Right, like Tammy Lee, like all of that you know, and coming. But you can. You. Can you talk a little bit about how you saw and how you started. How we started to see this kind of the sort of capitalism and then the pseudo pushback on it, I guess maybe call it that from some young people.
- [34:12]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think that was sort of the first, like you're saying, like a wave and then a backlash because there were so many televangelists. And the movement kind of all falls under this name of prosperity gospel, or name it and claim it religion, where the idea is that blessings from God are financial in nature, not just. Not just emotional or your health, but also how much money you have. And so it became sort of a direct correlation to pray and to receive financial blessing. And of course, there became a whole cottage industry around that. People asking for donations that would. They were supposed to come back. What was it, 12 fold or something? So interesting investment opportunities. Yeah. And so I think, because people. My generation grew up seeing that and kind of seeing that curdle into unhappy people who didn't receive that money they were promised or just kind of like the changing tides of what was popular. I think by the time I was a teenager, you know, Tammy Faye was a bit of a maligned figure, a bit of a laughingstock. You know, all of these televangelists are seen as corny hucksters. And so the Christianity that I was most familiar with became this kind of attempt at being radical that became all about, well, let's go back to the source text and let's see, Jesus didn't live like that. And so we're gonna give away all our possessions and we're gonna help the poor and all these sort of noble ideas about rejecting money and rejecting capitalism, I guess. But what I found that surprised me, returning to it now was how. How little of capitalism was actually being rejected. It was sort of just an aesthetic shift, I think, in retro, um. And there wasn't a lot of grappling with what it would actually mean to reject the system entirely, because it was a system that was propping up all these large churches and all their fundraising initiatives and the. The books and the sermon series that were promoting these ideas. So, yeah, to me, when I looked back on it, I. I don't think there's as big a gap between those two streams as there seemed to be at the time.
- [36:55]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Martha listens to her favorite band all the time. In the car, gym, even sleeping. So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live she saved so much. She got a seat close enough to actually see and hear them, sort of. You were made to scream from the front row. We were made to quietly save you. More Expedia made through travel savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are at all protected.
- [37:25]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. And a lot of, again, martyrdom like this or fake martyrdom or plaint. Right. So I'm gonna play homeless. Right. And. But I'm not really going to learn from it, but I'm still staying in the same system. And I'm going to complain about the people who I'm surrounded by because I'm kind of better than them, even though. Yeah, yeah.
- [37:48]
Joelle Kidd
Of a high horse.
- [37:49]
Rebecca Buchanan
And I lived in Philadelphia for a while, and I had a house in Kensington area. And so, I mean, that space is still going strong. Like, he's still going strong there. So, I mean, some of this continues. Right. You and you. So you end with. Of course, because as. As everything should sort of biblically end with is like. Right. Like the ra. Like the Rapture and Armageddon and this kind of feat. You know, you've talked about this before, but you really talk about this fear of. Not only, like, a fear of dying and what happens when you die, but also this fear of, like, continuing to live and, like, what happens at any time. Like, everyone's gonna be, like, whooshed away. And I never read these books that you're talking. What was it?
- [38:33]
Joelle Kidd
Left behind.
- [38:34]
Rebecca Buchanan
Left behind. But, like. Yeah. How scary. Yeah. So can you talk about. About that? Sort of like, you know, your final chapter and this sort of like. Yeah, the rap. Like, what was going on And. And this idea that you have to live every moment in Christ because at any point you could just disappear. Right. Even baby. I think there was one where you're like, babies are going to be ripped out of mother.
- [38:59]
Joelle Kidd
Like.
- [38:59]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:01]
Joelle Kidd
That. That shocked me when I read that in the book. Like, apparently babies are gonna ascend to heaven and. Or feed us, like, unborn babies. Yeah. Very, very wild. Yeah. So, yeah, I did want to kind of end with that just because that was such a pervasive teaching when I was growing up. And I think I was talking to someone recently who was just saying, oh, man, it must have been exhausting to be a teenage Christian. Which I think is true not only because you have so much pressure on yourself to meet these high standards of morality and all these good things you're supposed to be doing in the world and all these beliefs you're supposed to hold that are so difficult to hold on to, but also because there's this pressure and this shame at all times of being a good enough Christian to achieve this kind of ascension into eternity. And that really was taught as like a pressing concern that you should be thinking about a lot in your life, that everyone might just be whisked up to heaven at any moment. And I think for a lot of people who grew up with that, it became a fear or even, you know, a trigger for a lot of anxiety. And so for me, it certainly was. It was just sort of something I just didn't want to think about because it just seemed so, I mean, like you were saying, this idea of eternity is so huge and so overwhelming that I didn't even want to think about heaven, let alone hell. But yeah, returning to it as an adult and reading these books again. Another crossover hit, extremely popular books. They sold billions of copies, but they were written by Tim LaHaye, one of the founders of the Moral Majority, a friend of Jerry Falwell, like kind of a little bit based off of sermons of Jerry Falwell's about what he envisioned the Rapture would look like and taught this extremely narrow theological idea of what would happen at the end of the world that isn't really contained in the Bible as sort of an extrapolation based on a very small number of verses. So, yeah, again, a really niche thing that became really widespread and popularized through pop culture. And yeah, just like thinking about the effect that had on so many young people, well, people of all ages really, and how it's sort of shaped, you know, not only how people think about eternity, but I think how that plays out in practicality the way that, you know, evangelical Christian blocks kind of tend to block initiatives that are meant to help the environment, for instance, or protect, you know, our planet as it faces so much, you know, danger in terms of climate change. That becomes not really a concern if you think the world is just going to end and you're going to be whisked up to heaven. There's. I talk briefly in the book about this idea of Christian Zionism which hinges on Israel having a temple at a certain time and place before the end of the world. And that's leading right now to support for Israel as they are perpetuating a genocide against Palestinians. And it's sort of, it starts to seem really callous because this is all motivated by a desire to escape the world and live this perpetual good life in heaven. But how sort of self centered that seems when you consider the amount of destruction and death that happens to our Environment and to our world and to other people on the back of that desire. Yeah.
- [43:14]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you've written this, like, what do you want people to get from it? Right. In reading this, like, even though you're looking at the 2000s, like one of the things that struck me was how so many mechanisms were put into place in order to become a really strong part of it, especially in the United States. So the right wing political culture and climate. Right. Like, so all these things, we might look at them as, oh, there were purity rings or there's this Christian, Christian rock or this kind of thing. But we now are seeing the results of that here in the. Right. And so can you talk a little bit about like. Yeah, what are the, like why is this, I mean, why is this important?
- [43:57]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, I think it is important. I, yeah, I remember when I was first pitching the book a couple years ago, like trying to justify it that way and being like, oh, I gotta make sure this seems relevant. And then, you know, the way that time has gone on the last couple years, I was, every successive edit I was adding in more, oh, Donald Trump did this. And you know, so it's feeling, unfortunately it's feeling really relevant. Yeah, I, I kept finding so many ties to today, like even in the things we're talking about, not only in, yeah, current geopolitics and things like that, but even just, you know, we're talking about prosperity gospel teachings. That is the segment of Christianity that Donald Trump grew up in. And that's like his, I think, professed belief. You know, there's so many laws like being proposed and enacted in North America right now to change the way that schooling is done. There's so many anti trans bills on the table right now. There's all these movements toward restricting young people's ability to identify the way that they as the gender they belong to. Like, there's just so many things happening now that when I started looking at the 2000s, it was such a clear line to say, oh, that's where that started or that's what's mutated into this thing now and history repeating itself. And so, yeah, I think the lesson for me of this book in a way is that some of these pop culture items seem innocent and in fact they're carrying some pretty loaded messages. And I think that's true as well when we extrapolate it out till today. And I think it's kind of a bit of a hope that people will see those roots and be able to kind of see where they can be cut off and find some hope in that. And also to reframe maybe how we're looking at our pop culture right now. Whether that's, you know, now. I think Christian influencers have probably taken the role that a lot of this pop culture had. A lot of it's moved online or onto streaming services or Spotify, but it's still there and it still has these kinds of messages. Maybe they don't have purity rings anymore, but they're still perpetuating this idea of purity culture. Or, you know, maybe we're not going to the Christian bookstore, but trad wives are teaching the same teachings through Instagram, you know, so there's. It's all still around and it's just kind of changed form. So, yeah, I hope that looking back at the past will be a way to kind of see that in the present as well.
- [47:12]
Rebecca Buchanan
So one last question. So the book is out now. So self promotion, anything that's going on with the book you want people to know? Anything else you're working on you want people to know about, what do you want to say?
- [47:25]
Joelle Kidd
Yeah, the book is out. It's available at local bookstores. You can order it also through my publisher's website. It's ECW Press, and through Simon and Schuster in the States. And, yeah, I'm online on Instagram Oelkid and my website's joelkid.com I believe. And yeah, I'm just promoting the book right now, and I'm hoping to return to some other fiction writing that is not about Christian pop culture in the future.
- [48:01]
Rebecca Buchanan
Oh, it's a good thing. Again, Joelle Kid, thank you so much for talking with me about Jesus Land Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture on Nu Books Network.
- [48:12]
Joelle Kidd
Thanks so much for having me.