CCM Magazine
My American Religions Master’s Thesis from the University of Virginia is on CCM Magazine, looking at the years 1988-2008, and evaluating its role in the culture wars of the 1990s, and the creation of evangelical teenage culture warriors.
Contemporary Christian Music
My undergraduate 80-page thesis explores the music and message of what had been my favorite band, Audio Adrenaline, to understand the way white supremacy is embedded within the CCM industry. I look at the southern roots of the industry, the segregation within the the industry and audience, the notion of heaven as a plantation, creation of collective white identity and appropriation of zombie culture, the White-Savior Industrial Complex, white innocence, and the cultivation of a culture warrior.
A short Substack series about thoughts I had while writing my undergrad thesis.
- Audio Adrenaline and White Jesus
- Michigan Political Religion – What Have They Done?
- The Possibilities of Evangelicalism
- Why Me, Why Then, Why Audio Adrenaline?
Other evangelical pop culture research projects I’ve done:
At The Center of Their Own Stories
An historical essay exploring the connections between the world of fiction and the cult of domesticity among today’s white Evangelical women.
“But instead of letting them fade into the past as unimportant women who were merely prairie settlers, in Oke’s hands these women become sacred examples through their embodied rituals of wife-mother work, the Christ-like sacrifice of a woman for her family. Oke’s desire to put a sheen of holiness on all of this real sacrifice is understandable. Yet idealizing this lifestyle closes off imaginative possibilities for women rooted in anything other than death.”
Grace Livingston Hill
An analytical paper focusing on Grace Livingston Hill, the pioneer of Christian women’s fiction, looking at white womanhood, companionate marriage, wealth, beauty, and eugenics.
“Ultimately her books serve to uphold a heteronormative American standard that is centered on whiteness.”
Steven Curtis Chapman
A paper analyzing the song “Burn the Ships” which looked at settler-colonialism within Contemporary Christian Music, and conservative politics in the 1980s and 90s.
“The danger of this song though is not in the abstract itself, but in the way that this abstract conditions the believer to unquestioningly accept the ideology of conquest, and through that acceptance, to live tangible, political lives that continue to reproduce settler colonialism with its real consequences for real people, in modern times.”