Jesusland is a great blend of cultural criticism and personal memoir. It’s thoughtful and funny too. A wide range of subjects are covered in depth with the added bonus of content and examples from the US and Canada. If you were a part of North American evangelical Christian culture in the early 2000s or you want to gain some insight into how this seemingly fringe subculture has risen to such power and prominence, this book is for you.

I picked this up while I was waiting to pick up a library book as I thought a non-fiction would be easier to put down.

But I didn’t put it down at all.

I was intrigued by this but wasn’t sure it was for me. I find North American Christianity fascinating but completely unrelatable. I was brought up Catholic but am very much non-practising now.

The first chapter on music absolutely hooked me in. This world is so alien to me that I only found our Relient K - a band I enjoyed in my teens - were a Christian band last year.

I found this utterly fascinating though my favourite chapters were the ones on music, magazines and film and I did find my interest waned in the other chapters.

A perfect mix of personal memoir and retrospective of a world I knew very little about.

4 stars.

This book was so eerily familiar to my childhood. A very insightful read! Highly recommend to anyone who lived the Evangelical life during the early 00’s.

3.5 stars

The copy on this is that it covers Christian pop culture, specifically as it existed in the early 2000s, but there’s a LOT more than Veggie Tales and DC Talk here, which actually makes the book a bit uneven; some chapters are macro, some are micro. Kidd definitely (I think, she’s younger than me, but it appears there was a lot of stuff and she doesn’t even go into the church youth groups, which are HUGE in church culture…or they were for me and I was brought up a Southern Baptist LONG before there were WWJD bracelets.) could have actually filled a whole book with just the pop culture aspects, which is what I thought this would be, but she goes much, much broader on some topics.

Anyway, Kidd was raised an evangelical Christian and was a teenager in the early 2000s. She had lived a fairly secular life in Eastern Europe til she moved to Canada in 1999 then landed smack in the middle of an evangelical school. Soon she was not only getting used to a new country she was faced with Christian girl bands, modest styling tips and was out of step with the mainstream.

In focusing on different areas of pop culture Kidd wants to be clear that some of these things, like purity balls, we’re not victimless crimes. For example, the abstinence quizzes in the Christian teen magazines lay the foundations for attacks on women’s healthcare, gay and trans rights and they create right wing monsters…welcome to America 2025. And the problem is much worse here than in Canada where a far higher percentage of people describe themselves as evangelicals.

Anyway, the book wasn’t exactly what I expected, and a lot of it I had read before, but I still found it worthwhile. Took me awhile to get through it, though.