GIRLS CAN PRAY HERE TOO
The idea for the Girls Can Pray Here Too project began in December 2020, when I saw two books respectively titled Power Prayers for Men and The Prayer Map for Women at the Barnes & Noble in my local mall.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
^^^READ ME!!!^^^
This gave me the idea to do a men’s Bible study and a women’s Bible study at the exact same time and explore the differences between the two.
While doing research on what resources to use, I learned of this social media trend called “Bible journaling,” which entails scrapbooking and journaling in a Bible, rather than rigorous study of the text. I noticed immediately that the participants in this trend were all women, and it reminded me of being a girl in evangelical spaces, often not allowed to engage deeply, and certainly not critically, with the text.
My bastardization(?) of the "Bible journaling" social media trend.
The meat of this project is an artistic expression of my frustrations of formerly being a girl in evangelical spaces, incorporating photographs, drawings, writings, and comics, as well as erasure and found poetry to describe my struggles in religious settings.
In the tradition of gospel tracts and other religious pamphlets, incorporating zines into this project felt like a no-brainer. Though the zine was produced and is displayed online in color, the zine ought to be printed in black and white. It is only when the reader follows the QR code or link on the back (or stumbles upon the website while surfing the irreverent internet) that they can see the full color. Printing the zine in black and white is to harken to the binary thinking of the evangelical. Everything is either good or evil, either sacred or profane. There is no middle ground.
As evangelical fundamentalism is crawling into the cultural mainframe, I hope there are more people now aware of its gendered shortcomings than there were nearly 10 years ago when I left. In my deconversion and enduring interest in the fundamentalist culture of my youth, I propose a space of both artistic expression and rigorous curiosity where girls and women can play (and pray) too.