About

Growing up a child of the 1980s and 90s in West Michigan, where the conflation of religion, politics, and the evangelical subculture was especially potent, I learned that the physical and cultural fabric of a life are intimately connected.

I spent the first half of my childhood as a white kid in a majority Black city. Then we moved to the next town over, where I spent the second half learning I was a poor kid in a rich town.

I was taught by my physical landscape to desire whiteness and wealth, and the evangelical church gave me a version of the Bible which said the same.

I’ve had a wide variety of experiences with evangelicalism. My two most formative denominations were Baptists and Assemblies of God, but I experienced everything in-between, having significant relationships with 11 different denominations by the time I was 30.

I grew up in the evangelical subcultural bubble, and yet what I have come to realize, as I’ve raised my 5 kids, left the evangelical church, and moved away from Michigan, is that the bubble was not a system designed to protect us from the world. Instead, it was a force meant to control it.

The driving focus of my research is understanding how white supremacy is used culturally by evangelicals in order to garner support for their political goals.

Research

I am interested in the way space racializes people, in both the physical and cultural landscapes. This interest illuminates how the racial logics which drive public and private development are reinscribed through cultural products such as books and music. These logics work to cultivate white supremacy in the participants, so that they support a racialized society.

My research interests include, evangelicalism, liberation theology, white supremacy, evangelical pop culture, the racial formation of whiteness, christian nationalism, feminist and womanist theory, purity culture, white femininity, American history, late 20th century politics, and empire.

Not allowed to go to a university after high school, I went back to college in my mid-30s. I received my Associate’s Degree from Piedmont Virginia Community College in 2018, and graduated from the University of Virginia with a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies with Distinction in 2020. My undergraduate thesis, You’re My Scum Sweetheart: Audio Adrenaline, Contemporary Christian Music, and White Jesus looked at the way one Contemporary Christian Music band was implicitly embedded with white supremacy.

Currently I am a Master’s Student at the University of Virginia in the Religious Studies department, where I am writing my thesis on CCM Magazine.

Throughout my time at UVA, I have consistently pursued papers and projects related to my interests around cultural and physical racial spacialization. They tend to center around local history, evangelical pop culture, and other racialized pop culture topics.

Evangelical Pop Culture

Local History

Pop Culture

Posts

Medium

Sporadic posts written after I stopped blogging.