#exvangelical

#exvangelical

“A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something.” --George Marsden

I was raised in a family of evangelical fundamentalists who were living in Colorado Springs at the same moment that James Dobson founded Focus on the Family, whose dogma figured prominently into my upbringing. Their subsequent indoctrination and religious fervor created a stranglehold on my life and experiences that cannot be understated. Decades later, I have unexpectedly found myself living in Colorado Springs again—which has since become an evangelical mecca—and in a current political moment whose very origins, I contend, can be traced to this place.

How did modern Christianity get so angry? How did its outer-most fringes become the center of contemporary American life? How did a relatively small group of people come to dominate our current political discourse, shifting policies that disenfranchise vast swaths of the population based on race and class? Where did it all start and how can we begin to understand it?

I am photographing all of the physical structures that house Christian church services within the city limits—there are nearly 400 of them. Taking the notion of the typology as point of departure, I am subverting its conventional meaning for the purposes of investigating what sensations these spaces evoke for those who left them. Upending any notions of sanctuary, I have conceived these images to reflect what others have shared with me their experiences of them to be: spaces that encourage senses of alienation, bewilderment, fear and the uncanny.

Of equal and vital importance to this project is finding, speaking with and archiving the stories of those who, like myself, were raised in markedly religious Christian households whose tenets they then rejected as adults. As I continue to be involved with this community and identifying with our similarly traumatic and frankly bizarre stories of collective upbringing, I recognize that the importance of these accounts being shared serves as an in-roads for the rest of our society to understand the context of our current political moment, and how it affects those harmed or otherwise influenced by policies driven by fundamentalist evangelicalism. The story of the #exvangelical is the story of the end of a way of life for this community of people, but it is also an account of the fall of what we’ve collectively recognized in our society as The American Dream—which those who identify as #exvangelical consider themselves finally, irretrievably and gratefully awoken from.