Megachurch Nation, Colorado to Kiev

The best journalism on evangelicals in awhile comes not from a writer but from a French photographer named Johann Rousselot. Check out these photographs of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and then go to Rousselot’s main page to find an equally stunning series on New Life’s sister church in Kiev. What makes these photographs special? They’re filled with the cliches of evangelical America — sublimated sex, suburban banality, naivete, ecstasy, spectacle. Cliches = bad, right? Not in Rousselot’s photographs. He reveals the lush complexity within these basic themes of a megachurch nation, and then twins them halfway around the world, in the Ukraine, further challenging our assumptions about Christian nationalism.