You Are Not Your Own: Searching for Sky Daddy
Date
2023-07-06
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Abstract
You Are Not Your Own: Searching for Sky Daddy aims to showcase the long-term effects that Evangelical ideology can have on an individual. Through the use of creative nonfiction, I explore how Evangelical Christian doctrine, particularly in the context of education, can cause warped understandings of gender, race, class and sexual activity. The teachings of so-called “purity culture,” which attempt to control the sexual agency of individuals, particularly young women, through shame and guilt, can and does have a detrimental effect on self-esteem, confidence, and relationships. Invoking aspects of the literary theory of deconstruction, alongside the recent development of religious deconstruction and the “exvangelical” movement, this project documents a firsthand experience of growing up under Evangelical Christian ideology, having a crisis of faith, and the subsequent deconstruction and restructuring of one’s selfhood. Through a negotiation of past and present beliefs, this project’s creative component, You Are Not Your Own, showcases deconstruction through form, invoking deliberate fragmentary structure and blurring of generic boundaries to illustrate the crumbling away—and subsequent rebuilding of— one’s identity. The exegesis of the project contextualizes the religious deconstruction movement, the histories of Evangelical belief systems, and the Canadian Evangelical experience. A reflective and urgent work, this project examines the thin line between freedom of religious expression and personal liberty, the pitfalls of Evangelical doctrine, and the slipperiness of faith in the contemporary context.
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evangelicalism, creative nonfiction
Citation
Purchase, S. E. (2023). You are not your own: searching for Sky Daddy (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.