sometimes it’s unbelievable to me how little the average person knows about evangelical pop-culture. like there’s so many levels to this whole big world and no one would know what im talking about. even some evangelicals. like how do i begin to explain that the Jonas brothers did a curriculum that taught that the earth was 6000 years old but also had really fun comics in it and had founders that defended Jim Crow? how do i explain the 2010s christian techno-pop dj remix fever? what about the Christian cover-song fever of the late 2000s? no one knows about the TBN evangelical version of Disney Channel’s Shake It Up (and the boyband Mission 6 that came out of it). Mr. Whitaker from The Odyssey series? y’all had Dan & Phil and whatever Vine influencers went on to have YouTube careers, while I had BlimeyCow and Goodnight Kevin. normal people had MCR and I had ReliantK. you had LMFAO and I had Group1Crew. Family Force 5, even. you were not there when Christian Kendrick Lamar came out as gay and you only just learned who Cain Culto is. you weren’t there when he had long hair and was fighting Christians in his comments over his music video choices with his band Ecclesia. you weren’t there when he also came out as gay. you don’t know the depths of the Left Behind series and Joel C Rosenberg (and its contribution to antisemitism and Islamophobia in post 9/11 politics). you don’t know the chokehold Frank E. Perretti had on Christian readers when it came to his thrillers. or how Francine Rivers was the most “raunchy” of the respectable Christian romance writers (she wrote hella steamy Bible fanfic like omg and they were bestsellers). you weren’t there during the whole Christian teen suicide pact culture that formed after the Columbine shooting (like people were taking pledges to not deny Christ should “their time come”). and the role Tobymac and his band DC Talk played in making it a fad (Christian goth culture fr). you have not followed and deconstructed two-decades worth of David A.R. White movies (he’s doing Christian action movies now). or the time Lecrae was in a Lionsgate comedy movie that pissed half of the evangelicals in America off. or when Kirk Franklin called out the racists at the Dove Awards and caused a whole controversy. what about how Adam from Capital Kings went on to make one of the biggest dance club hits “The Mac” after he split the duo???? you don’t know about the magnificence of Hillsong Australia’s Brooke Fraser and her song “Psychosocial” that also lost her Christian listeners. or her song about Narnia and CS Lewis. don’t even get me started on the apologetics YouTube space or the discography of For King & Country and their terrible human trafficking movie. none of you know what in the goddamn hell I’m talking about 😭😭
