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Jesus Girls: True
Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical
edited by Hannah Faith
Notess
Eugene, OR: Cascade
Books, 2009, ISBN 13 978-1-60608-541-7, 224 pp., $28.95 paper.
"I was raised in a loving Christian home . . ." Thus began so many baptism services in the church where I grew up, to the point where, when I began to think about my own baptism, I was grateful that I would not have to think of an introduction to my own faith story. After all, the introduction is the hardest part, as any burned-out university student will tell you.The writers whose essays make up Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical know the formula as well as I do. The collection, edited by Hannah Faith Notess, features stories from a diverse group of female writers, united by their experiences with the evangelical church, whether from inside or outside. It's a timely topic in an age where evangelical mega-churches are exploding and Billy Graham-type crusades are winning millions to Christ in every major urban centre. And, as anyone who has had experience with the evangelical church can probably tell you, churches that are nominally anti-traditional on questions of church authority and worship style can be all but medieval in their attitude towards women. Even now, as Notess notes in the introduction, the overwhelming majority of evangelical voices in the media are male. Jesus Girls is an attempt to make women's voices heard, whether they be praising or denouncing the evangelical church, or, as is so often the case, ending up somewhere in between.
The collection is divided into sections of four or five essays organized by topic--community, worship, education, sex and gender, story and identity. The voices in each section and throughout the collection vary from light-hearted and snarky (Audrey Molinas's "Catholic Club" recounts her experience as a Protestant teenager enthralled by the mysteries, rituals and rebellious teenagers of the local Catholic school), to lyrical and poetic (in "Keep the Feast" Nicole Sheets artfully portrays the struggle between the reverence of her newfound liturgical church with the comfort and familiarity of the Baptist church she grew up in, ultimately finding herself in a place of ambivalence), to slightly bitter (Anastasia MacAteer's "Exorcising the Spirit" is a striking example of the way certain beliefs characteristic of the charismatic church can cause deep-seated emotional injury), to downright terrifying (Kimberly George's "Feminist-in-Waiting" opens with an exposition of gender roles not uncommon to the more conservative sects of evangelicalism). All of these essays are tinged with an inevitable hint of nostalgia for members of the target audience, i.e., women familiar with evangelical subculture--while reading "Going Way Against the Flow," in Anne Dayton unabashedly confesses her adolescent passion for awful Christian pop, I found myself laughing out loud and even humming some of the songs she references.
Any examination of the evangelical movement tends to be fraught with emotion, especially for those who have abandoned it, and I was initially afraid a collection of essays on the topic--especially by women, for whom many evangelical churches have done no particular favours--would devolve into reactionary tirades. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that, although most of the writers no longer call themselves 'evangelical' (many of these stories, in fact, could be subtitled "How I Outgrew The Evangelical Church and Discovered the Liturgy"--another story common to many former evangelicals), these women acknowledge that evangelicalism has had an enormous influence on their personal development, and in most cases this acknowledgement is made with the healthy respect that comes with distance.
What makes Jesus Girls really worth reading, though, is its function as an examination of the role of storytelling in the life of the church. Notess begins her introduction by telling us that "[g]rowing up in an evangelical church meant I was trained from a young age to tell the story of my life" (xi). In one of the most striking essays in the collection, "Inventing a Testimony," Melanie Springer Mock relates the hunger for spectacle in the practice of telling one's testimony. Finding that her faith story lacks the alcoholic binges and one-night stands craved by her listeners, she takes the petty sins of her youth and expands them into dramatic escapades that ultimately have only a kernel of truth in them. Mock reveals in this essay the thesis of the entire collection--that all of faith and life is bound up in the narrative practices of the community to which you belong. Jesus Girls is an attempt to reveal the narrative traditions of a church culture that claims to renounce both tradition and narrative, and to have a grasp on truth that transcends 'mere' storytelling. As the writers in this collection make clear, however, rejecting the story of tradition doesn't free you from it--it simply makes you blind to the incredible power of story.
Annalee Giesbrecht has three-quarters of an undergraduate degree in English, and thus believes herself entitled to all sorts of opinions.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.