An Interview with Joelle Kidd by McKenzie Watson-Fore

ECW Press | 9781770417793 | 344 pages | August 12, 2025

Joelle Kidd’s Jesusland: Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture offers an insider look at Christian pop culture of the 2000s paired with precise, insightful analysis that isolates and examines its inherent contradictions. I grew up within that world, and Jesusland reflected my teenage self back to me and allowed me to see the political and social messaging embedded within those products. Joelle and I sat down over video call to chat about her process of writing the book and the ramifications of Christian culture. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

MWF: Jesusland is both an exploration of Christian pop culture and a critique of its contradictions. How did the project begin?

JK: I’ve written mostly fiction in the past, a little bit of cultural criticism, but I didn’t really think of myself as a nonfiction writer, and I definitely didn’t think I wrote memoir. A lot of the topics that eventually turned into the separate essays in the book were building up in my head over years and years. I even remember thinking about or writing little proto-essays about them when I was in high school or in my early twenties, still disentangling myself from a lot of these things. But the one piece of pop culture that became the catalyst was that “Cartoons” song—the yabba-dabba-doojah song. 

[In her book, Kidd writes, “I’m not sure how to describe this song other than to say the premise is simply three straight minutes of impressions of different cartoon characters saying the word “Hallelujah” . . . kind of jammed into a melody.”]

JK: … That was kind of the thing that started me thinking about Christian pop culture and how strange it was. That turned into thinking about how many messages it was carrying that I hadn’t really thought about at the time, or I hadn’t really processed. 

MWF: It’s terrifying but also empowering to realize, hey, I can go back. Do I want to?

JK: And it’s funny because I think the 2000s is the first childhood time period that’s not been completely lost to time. I actually found this random “Cartoons” song on YouTube. So, it was cool to realize that you actually can go back and you can verify these things, these shady memories.

MWF: You begin with something as absurd as the "Cartoons" Hallelujah song before expanding into much larger cultural contradictions. How did you decide what to include and how to structure the book?

JK: As I wrote it, I landed on that thesis for the book—that there’s an untieable knot, a complete contradiction at the heart of all this stuff, whether it’s trying to convert people and yet hating them, or trying to praise this divine being and also do this silly dance or whatever; somehow that’s all related. It feels like a very consistent contradiction to me.

But in terms of picking the topics, I started out with what things I had clear memories of that I could tie into those topics. During the editing process, my editor and I shuffled a few chapters around. Thinking about the flow of the reading experience, it really does feel almost chronological. That first chapter is a lot of childhood memories, and then moves into more of my teenage years, and then finally—I mean we had to end on Armageddon, but to me, that chapter also moves into my adult brain, in terms of the memoir element. It was an organic process.

MWF: One thing I appreciated was the way you write honestly about your own spiritual life while making the book accessible to readers outside that experience. There are a lot of people writing in the Christian publishing space, which sort of implies religious allegiance, and I think mainstream publishing often has an unspoken bias against anyone willing to admit any kind of earnest religious experience. What was it like balancing personal faith, cultural criticism, and accessibility while writing these essays?

JK: It was tricky. I was trying to be cognizant of a reader who might have no context for these things, because it is such a subculture. There’s such an insider language. I know that if I drop Veggie Tales or say “how’s your heart,” all the Christian kids will get what I’m saying, but it was interesting to try and make it accessible for everyone.

I feel like I’ve seen my experience reflected very rarely. Only now that I’m in my thirties, I’ve started to see and read novels and watch movies made by people in the same generation that resonate a lot more, but previously, a lot of the media about Christianity seemed to present a version I didn’t recognize. So, I wanted to be true to what I experienced, and also the multiplicitous—I mean, there are so many versions of Christianity, even evangelical Christianity; church to church, it’s so different. I tried to keep the book tightly focused on the kind of Christianity that produces this pop culture. Doing that made it more accessible to people who didn’t grow up with any religion. 

Also, I’ve found a lot of people like my family and people that I grew up with that still have faith but are very politically progressive or are in different denominations, they really seem to resonate with [the book]. I didn’t want to be out here, trying to badmouth an entire religion [laughs]. I just have some problems with certain aspects of it! 

I took a lot of inspiration from writers like Miriam Toews and Casey Plett, two Mennonite writers who both talk about having a kind of faith but don’t delve into it that deeply in their writing. But you can kind of see it there; you can tell that it’s informing some of their work. I wanted to stay true to that while being honest about where I’m at and where I came from.

MWF: For so long, it did feel like people of varying stripes of belief didn’t show up in common media—which makes sense because Christians don’t show secular people in their pop media. I feel like there’s this mutual commitment to pretending the other doesn’t exist or isn’t worth taking seriously, which is a huge part of why the book was so validating to read. It reiterates why representation matters. I love that you made the choice to write toward an unfamiliar reader, because it gives you the freedom to call out many of the absurdities that might otherwise be taken for granted. Even after doing a lot of work to extricate myself from my former evangelical assumptions, I could imagine an earlier version of myself reading this book and thinking, Oh. I never noticed that before. Did writing for readers outside that world change the way you understood your own experiences?

JK: That’s a really good point too. I wanted to defamiliarize, or to recreate that feeling of defamiliarization, when you do have a moment like I talked about with the Cartoons song. When I was writing this, I was telling a friend who has no religious background at all about the Voice of the Martyrs book [a compendium of Christians throughout history who have been brutally murdered for their faith], and she was like “you read that?! As a child!?” And I was like, oh yeah, I guess that is weird…

MWF: Christianity continues to perpetuate this sort of fetishization of persecution and suffering, and you capture the idiosyncrasies of teaching that to children. Since writing this book, how have you continued to see the glorification of martyrdom?

JK: It’s become depressing how timely some of this feels. I’ve been thinking a lot about that chapter recently. It was one of the ones that took a little longer to write, but the longer time goes on, the more I’m like, yeah, this is all related. Having read so many of those martyrdom stories and then seeing the reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination, I see it all repeating again. People are narrativizing these deaths in a way that’s so familiar. 

I think my favorite takeaway from that part of the book was something I learned from the scholar Candida Moss, who wrote “The Myth of Persecution.” She has this idea that to cast someone as your persecutor is to eliminate the possibility of coming to an agreement in any way. You can’t negotiate or bridge the gap between the martyr and the persecutor. There’s no chance for reconciliation or mutual understanding; it’s just a straight demonization of the other. That is something I keep reflecting on since the book came out. I keep seeing that in everything that’s happening around the world. Definitely in right-wing Christianity, but even in mainstream and secular culture, the way we’ve been demonizing and dehumanizing people around the globe. I keep thinking about that martyr-persecutor dichotomy.

MWF: It seems to me there are different subsets of Christians. Some are deeply invested in this political framework, while others seem unaware of how these ideas shape culture and politics. I see your book as part of the work of making those connections visible, even in seemingly silly artifacts of pop culture. What conversations do you hope the book encourages? Both of my parents came to Christianity in their twenties, and with that, I think they assumed religion is good; “here, have some culture; it’ll keep you out of trouble.” I believe to an extent they weren't aware of all that was happening behind the scenes.

JK: I had a similar experience where my parents didn’t experience all the culture that I consumed. Even when they read my book, they were like, what?! What did you learn at this school we sent you to? It really made me feel like there’s too much benefit of the doubt that people give to religion in general, and definitely to religious pop culture. 

For people who are Christian but not in that [far-right/Christian Nationalist] world, or have a less charged framework around politics, I would hope that those people would bear some responsibility or put their foot down, draw a line in the sand. I would hope to see a more pluralistic kind of Christianity that can accept other religions as well, that is more open to difference across an entire society, instead of this domineering desire to take over. 

That’s also where that sneakiness comes in, because if you’re smuggling your beliefs into these pop culture products, then you know on some level that it’s controversial or damaging, because you’re not just saying it!

MWF: I love the way you pair these familiar media objects with what's happening culturally, especially in the final chapter, where you bring the book into the present. What was it like ending the book there?

JK: Writing that chapter actually provided good closure. It did feel relevant to what was happening around me, but also because of the narrative arc of the chapter, which is that I was so scared [laughs] of the end times as a kid. It’s not a fear I had thought about for a long time, so when I was researching the chapter I read the Book of Revelation. It really didn’t affect me at all in any way, and so that was, in its own way, cathartic. 

The whole process of writing the book was a good way of working through some of the last things I hadn’t really addressed: how I feel about faith, whether I still have faith, and what that means to me now. But at the same time, there’s a lot of darkness in that chapter, in terms of addressing the genocide that’s happening right now, talking about environmental destruction and the end of the world, all these horrible things. But I hope there’s a little bit of hope in there, too. The vision of the world that this kind of Christianity puts out is trying to be inspirational, but I don’t find it very helpful. I think finding another way to look at those things is actually kind of hopeful.

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About the Interviewer

McKenzie Watson-Fore serves as the executive editor of sneaker wave magazine and the inaugural critic-in-residence for Mayday. Her work has been published in Full Stop, Barrelhouse, the Revealer, and elsewhere. She writes regularly about white American evangelicalism and the female experience at mwatsonfore.substack.com.