An extended review of a 2025 book by Joelle Kidd
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ECW Press, 2025. 344 pages. $25 (e-book $10)
Like Joelle Kidd, I came of age around the turn of the Millennium and we share a common experience of Canadian rapture readiness and Y2K anxiety. Her book Jesusland is a sharp critique of evangelical church culture from that time. I opened this book expecting to feel instant camaraderie, which I did, but I also found something more troubling: a robustly researched testimony of how evangelicalism has failed my peers.
Kidd is a Toronto-based writer, journalist and editor with several essays under her belt. Jesusland is her first book. Kidd did not ask to become an Evangelical. Her family returned to Canada in 1999 after several years abroad, and she landed, as a preteen, in a Christian school. Her immigration into evangelicalism gives the book its particular flavour: she remembers the worship albums and purity pledges with a concoction of nostalgia and lament, even as she investigates exactly what they were building in her.
Across these nine essay-chapters, Kidd traces a line from the ephemera of 2000s Christian pop culture like rip-off-girl-group worship albums, stylishly designed teen Bibles, and modesty checklists tucked into youth-group newsletters, to the political weight the religious right now throws around. Her case is that none of evangelical culture was ever only about music or fashion. Evangelical kids were a generation grown inside a “political movement rather than… a community defined chiefly by its theology.”
The chapters on purity culture elicited the most visceral and relatable sense of regret and disgust. The objects of Kidd’s critique – the Every Man’s Battle series and Josh Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye – are both deeply flawed blueprints on evangelical purity, and I remember them sitting next to my Bible like some kind of evangelical apocrypha for teens.
For Kidd, purity culture wanted even more power over her; it managed her skirt length, it managed creepy statements from adult men, and most of all it sought to control her body rather than holding men accountable for their own behaviour. “The implication that my friends and I were nothing more than things over which men and boys could trip was not lost on me,” she writes. Evangelical purity culture had a cost for both the girls and guys growing up in it. But after reading Kidd’s account, it’s clearly the cost for women was greater.
Her chapter on the prosperity gospel and its stranger cousin, muscular Christianity, was the location of my own deconstruction too. We both watched Mars Hill rise and fall, and were impacted in distinct ways by Mark Driscoll’s strongman approach to church leadership. I am ashamed to admit I had been one of the men drinking from that well of blatantly dehumanizing and sexist content.
Years later we’re both angry about how our faith has been used to manipulate us, but again, the damage was primarily directed towards her as a gay woman. Kidd is a uniquely helpful critic because she was uniquely targeted by evangelicalism in a way that demands reckoning with.
Another thing that sets Kidd’s experience apart from my own is that I am still serving inside institutional evangelicalism as a pastor whereas her deconstructive work has led her away from the Church, and that is understandable given everything she experienced as a youth. One thing I deeply wished for from Kidd’s book was a point where working and longing for good can burst forth from the ruins – a wondrous and hopeful What if it were like this, instead? But that isn’t Kidd’s work to create – it’s ours.
The biggest flaw in Jesusland is that Kidd repeatedly draws conclusions that extend well beyond what her evidence can support. Her essays are a compelling account of experiences within particular streams of Canadian evangelicalism, but they often move from describing that experience to implying judgments about Christianity proper without adequate justification.
For example, Kidd names her sense of eschatological smallness – “That feeling of a beautiful too-small-ness was hollow. Is that all there is?” – but extends from “critiquing the cultural output of this religion" to "critiquing the religion as well.” She rejects C.S. Lewis’ descriptions of heaven as too descriptive but then postulates herself that heaven is perhaps eating “a perfectly ripe peach.” Kidd rejects one image while advancing another without articulating a thoughtful basis for treating one as right and the other as wrong.
Kidd also exceeds her scope in that individual experiences are levied to imply far more significant conclusions than they suggest. And why shouldn’t she? She was raised in the kind of Christianity that likes to “have its cake and eat it, too... The power that refuses to acknowledge its own power.” Kidd’s experiences provide strong grounds for criticizing particular expressions of evangelical culture and the ways Christianity can become entangled with politics, power and identity. She makes a jump to imply that they reveal that Christianity is fundamentally deficient, however.
I’d recommend Jesusland to anyone willing to sit with some discomfort, but I will warn you that Kidd does not pull any punches and will force you to separate the wheat from the chaff in your Christian faith. I closed it feeling sobered, but also wanting a way forward. Deconstruction is no doubt a helpful way to explore the costs of our evangelical heritage, but it is only half of the work for those of us who have chosen to stay and work with what remains.
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