When I was a kid, I knew where fossils came from: they were left behind by Noah’s flood, which covered the entire earth less than 10,000 years ago.
This was not a metaphor.
I learned it at my evangelical mega-church, where I once sat in a darkened sanctuary as images of dinosaurs flashed across a giant projector screen, and at my Christian school, where the science textbooks checked every observation against Scripture. And I wrote about all of this in my book The Exvangelicals, in a chapter called “Were You There?” It takes its title from the question creationists taught us to ask of anyone who claimed to know what happened millions of years ago based on research, as opposed to their reading of the Bible.
Filmmaker Katy Scoggin grew up inside the same story.
Her documentary Flood, which premiered this week on PBS’s Independent Lens, anchors itself in Scoggin’s family home videos and clips from old Christian cartoons about the Bible, as she introduces the young-earth creationist family that raised her.
Watching it, I felt like I already knew these people, right down to the father who can explain exactly why all the scientists are wrong.
Scoggin spent years working on documentary films before focusing on her own family, including as a co-producer on Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning Citizenfour. Poitras is an executive producer on Flood, Scoggin’s first feature as a director.
The film began with phone calls between Scoggin and her father, a young-earth creationist who taught math and science at a public elementary school. They’d been mostly out of touch for years when she started recording their conversations, initially as research for a screenplay. Those calls turned into several years of filming, following the family through a move across the country and several slow realizations about her family.
After watching Flood, I wanted to ask Katy about how she created it, and what she learned about herself and her family from that process. We talked about what it felt like to make her life and family her subject, and why telling her parents where her spiritual journey had taken her turned out to be preparation for coming out as gay.
Our conversation via e-mail is below, lightly edited.
Sarah McCammon: How did you decide to start filming your family, and at what point did you know it would be a documentary?
Katy Scoggin: I knew it once I started picking up the phone and talking to my dad again. I’d been estranged from him for a few years, but during that span, I’d been trying to write us as fictionalized characters in a screenplay.
I knew the script wasn’t working — I couldn’t get the dialogue right — but I didn’t know how to fix it. I began calling my dad and recording phone calls to do “script research.” I was writing a creationist father and an evolutionist daughter, so I steered our conversations toward questions about the age of the earth. The “research” aspect of my phone calls helped me to stay curious and to listen, not to react so emotionally that we could no longer talk.
These conversations, though challenging, felt real and purposeful. The stakes between us felt less high. We sometimes laughed a little. I felt more listened to by my dad than I had before, maybe because he could tell I was making an honest attempt to connect. And we could nerd out about topics we both cared passionately about: for him, young earth creationism; for me human evolution.
This inspired me to pick up my camera. I had to ask his permission first, which felt awkward — you can surreptitiously record a phone call, but you can’t secretly film a documentary! — but he agreed to participate.
I was already working professionally as a doc filmmaker, so I understood how much the form can ask of its participants. I was far more comfortable behind the camera, but to be fair to my dad, I figured I would have to play an on-camera role too. And once I was filming at home, and I observed my family’s dynamic as an adult, I leaned into incorporating my mom, sister, nephew, and nieces into the film. That way, the family as an ecosystem could begin to emerge, and I could explore all of our intersecting, oftentimes clashing, truths.
SM: As both the filmmaker and a central character in the film, how did you navigate being inside the family dynamic while also documenting it?
KS: Initially, I kept the boundaries of “film shoots.” I would make a trip home for a short stint and treat it like a production period for a film I was working on: go for a few days, know who my anchor characters were, what I was tracking, what the story was that I was trying to capture, and stay open to things unfolding a little differently than expected. But I’d always go in with an objective. “The school year is ending, and I want to capture the stress and poignancy of that in a classroom scene.” “I have a cameraperson coming along, and Dad and I will go on a hike together to look down at the former headquarters of Campus Crusade for Christ and talk about his seminary thesis.” “I want to film in Dad’s math and science classroom and see what kind of science he is teaching. Is he teaching creationism?” There was always an objective, with clear boundaries, and I had a purpose and timeline.
As time went on, I made the choice to put my own things into storage and move home for a stint. I figured it would give me closer access to my subjects and allow me to capture my family’s last few months in California. What I didn’t realize is that it would make all the boundaries become blurred, and that I would lose sense of time. During that stage — which lasted a few months but felt like a lifetime — I had a lifeline, Karen Duffin. She’s a radio journalist and a friend who was raised Mormon but left the church after college. We would talk on the phone, always recording our calls, and she’d ask me questions: What is this film about? What feels the same, and what feels different for you, now that you’re back home? She shared insights, based on her own lived experience, that buoyed me. Our connection helped me feel like I was still a “professional, working on a film,” not just a grown kid, back at home in my teenage bedroom, and kind of drowning in all of it.
Throughout the entire filmmaking process, adherence to my filmmaking practice and craft kept me afloat. There’s a certain protocol in film production, a reliance on team, that reminded me: I am making a film. I am using my craft. I have a project I will one day finish, a team I belong to; this isn’t just me talking to my dad, and my family, which feels scary. I have to show up for the work, and for my team!
SM: How did you go about collecting archival materials such as home videos and family photos to anchor the story? Did anything surprise you as you were going back through those archives?
KS: We never had a video camera growing up, but visiting family members did. I pulled some of that material from my grandmother’s house during a visit to North Carolina for her 90th birthday. She often played family home videos on her TV, and the tapes were easy to find and well labeled. I brought a cable with me that I could use to digitize VHS tapes from her VCR and convert to Quicktime videos. I shared the digitized videos with extended family, in case they wanted to watch, and pulled clips for Flood.
In the tapes, I was surprised to see my dad fussing at my sister more than me when we were kids. She was more of a ham and would often taunt whoever was behind the camera. I was quieter but also the older sibling, and I can see myself wanting to be quietly “in charge” in the videos.
“But oh, how joyful it feels to walk in your most comfortable shoes, as your full self, with your head held high. That is worth it, I think!”
~Katy Scoggin
There’s a spot on a tape where my grandfather is filming, and he chides my dad for “runnin around, late as usual.” My dad retorts, “I’m five minutes early.” As they go back and forth, my mom puts her hand on my dad’s shoulder, as if to protect him from his dismissive father. My sister and I are in the scene, but we’re small and not paying attention to the adults. Only during my own filmmaking process did I learn that my dad had often felt ignored and dismissed by his father.
The Christian cartoons, Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) archive, and Henry Morris young earth creationist archive is material I found on YouTube. Those cartoons brought me right back to Sunday school. Cartoons were one of the primary ways I learned Bible stories, so it felt wild and visceral to rewatch. I especially remembered a Hanna-Barbera series called The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible. It’s a mash-up of Bible stories and teen characters with a Scooby-Doo vibe. Except these characters are time-traveling archeology nerds, not a group of friends investigating crimes.
The Campus Crusade for Christ archive is from a mass conversion event called Explo ‘72. My mom was there in person. She recruited a busload of kids from her home town to travel to Dallas. She remembers locking arms with other Campus Crusade members and marching through the streets of Dallas and singing. She remembers sitting in the bleachers at the event and feeling very passionate about what was happening. She’s described that and other parts of the Jesus People Movement as a reaction to Vietnam, political assassinations, and a lot of other societal turmoil taking place in the 1970s. My dad was not quite in college yet, so he wasn’t there. Both of my parents remember and shared the Four Spiritual Laws — a pamphlet disseminated by Campus Crusade for Christ to quickly and easily share the Gospel with others.
SM: There’s a particularly striking moment where your father expresses absolute certainty that his beliefs are right and everyone else is wrong. How did you approach filming those conversations without the documentary becoming an argument?
KS: Having recording devices rolling kept me (maybe both of us!) civil. There was an observer in the room, a camera, this thing was being documented.
A lot of my dad’s beliefs have historically led to my feeling angry, even enraged. That daytime hike we had, I can see myself messing with my audio gear — my batteries were dying, I felt like they were ALWAYS DYING, I was barely keeping it together — but my focus on recording sound gave me a buffer and the veneer of professionalism. So instead of yelling, or falling apart, I listened.
During the editing process, I had to watch and listen to all of my footage, many, many times over. This gave me greater perspective on what my dad was saying — or trying to say, even if I didn’t agree.
I worked with an editor — for the hiking scene, with Rabab Haj Yahya — who had a miraculous knack for cutting long, freewheeling stretches of dialogue down to size. She helped immensely to hone the scene in which my dad expresses that sentiment, that his beliefs are right, and that he prays for all of his loved ones to come around and see things his way. There and throughout the film, we cut a lot of fat to get to the core of what each scene was about — and, hopefully, to craft the characters as complex, full people.
SM: Your mother’s move toward a more progressive faith is an important theme in the film. How has she described that evolution (for lack of a better word!) to you, and have you been surprised by that shift?
KS: This was such a surprising shift! The film compresses everything in time, but her evolution…I think it’s such an accurate term…took place over many years.
Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru), a parachurch organization, required staff to make income only through their “support raising,” as we called it. But my mom heard about a loophole through a friend: if you held a professional license, legally, you had the right to work in order to stay up to date in your field. And my mom was an RN. So when it had become too hard for my folks to make ends meet purely through Christian fundraising, my mom began working as a floor nurse at a local hospital. This allowed our family to live with more ease, and it allowed my mom to get out of the Cru “bubble,” as she calls it.
She eventually went into endocrinology — my sister and I both have type 1 diabetes, and our mom began working for our pediatric endocrinologist as a diabetes nurse educator. This doctor had broken from her own medicine-resistant Seventh Day Adventist upbringing, and she helped my mom to see patients, particularly trans people, through a different lens. This was during the 1990s, long before trans identities were being politicized in the country the way they are now.
My dad was also working for the public. He went into public elementary school teaching, where he joined a union. But he kept his private beliefs to himself and showed up neutrally in the classroom, whereas my mom changed and softened her beliefs.
SM: Your parents have taken such different spiritual trajectories. How has that affected their relationship, and what drew you to exploring that dynamic?
KS: This is so tough, maybe truly the deepest divide in our family. I think I was drawn to it because it was so disturbing to me as a kid growing up under their roof. I love and can empathize with BOTH of my parents.
My mom started visiting a different church when her mom moved to an assisted living place in our city. My grandmother was a Methodist, and my mom used that opportunity to find and join a different church. This enabled her to spend time with her mother during her last years alive, and it gave my mom a spiritual community that fit her better than evangelical Christianity. Meanwhile, my dad went to an evangelical megachurch, Harvest Christian Fellowship, where he felt spiritually at home. My parents have attended different churches ever since.
I don’t see any difference in my parents’ beliefs in the core tenets of Christianity. But I know it must be terribly challenging for them to tolerate each other’s evolving understanding of Christianity over time. For my dad, my mom’s expansion of what counts as Christian is a betrayal of the fundamentals he believes they both signed up for, for life; and for my mom, it is vexing to feel called to “radically accept” my dad’s rigidity.
This dynamic between my parents has long been a rift for us kids — my sister and my nephew (who was raised by our familial village) and me. There’s probably a part of me that wanted to capture it on camera and show it to both of my parents, as if to say, “Do you see? I love you so much. Why is it so hard? For you…and for us?”
SM: Your sister pushes back when your father describes her as a radical leftist, saying he doesn’t know her political views and has never really talked about them. What do you make of that gap between how family members see each other?
KS: That gap goes back generations in my family, and I find it a gendered one.
In the scene where that convo takes place, my dad is talking to his mother, Nana, on the phone. He jokes with her at a certain point that he’s surrounded by “radical leftists.” My sister felt burned by our dad’s dismissal of her as a full person, especially when speaking to a family elder to whom my sister always showed respect. She did not appreciate being cut down.
To my dad, it was a joke, no big deal. But to my sister, this was an erasure of her right to show up as herself. To use her own voice. And it cut deeper than politics, into her sovereignty as a parent. So “radical leftists” was triggering for my sister.
In terms of the politics, this convo was filmed during Trump’s first term. My sister had been relatively apolitical until 2015, but she became activated in a feminist direction by Trumpism. Politics gave her yet another thing to disagree with our dad about. Like a lot of Americans, I saw my family grow further polarized from 2015 onward.
SM: Your nephew seems almost like a foil to your father, representing a different trajectory for the next generation. What do you think his path says about the longer-term viability of your father’s worldview, and what else does it reveal about your family’s dynamic?
KS: My nephew simply does not take my father’s worldview seriously! Andrew pushed back at my dad’s “my way or the highway” at a much younger age than my sister and I could, and with fewer consequences. Andrew had my sister and his dad protecting him. My sister set strong boundaries with our dad about spankings, for instance — corporal punishments were off limits.
My nephew has a way of connecting to my dad in a loving way that doesn’t seem to raise his hackles as much as it does my sister’s and mine. It feels like magic to me — I don’t know how he does it. There’s an ease in their relationship, which I appreciate.
In terms of the family’s dynamic, my nephew was raised by a village! He is a product of ALL of us, including his bio dad’s family. I think this is a beautiful thing. When he was a teenager, I could see him being stretched between different worldviews — this made him pretty anxious — but I think he’s found his way, and I believe he has an expansive and unconditional picture of love and repair. He also has one of the driest senses of humor I’ve seen, and that comes naturally to him. He lived with my parents till he was seven or eight, as my sister was getting through college and becoming an adult herself. It was important to my sister to be able to raise him as soon as she felt financially and educationally secure. Her second husband, Andrew’s step-dad, did a lot of his raising too. Andrew is still connected to his bio dad and his family as well.
I think my nephew points to the importance of unconditional love in my family. He is a living testament to that.
SM: You mention in the film that coming out as non-Christian was preparation for coming out as gay. Can you unpack that connection?
KS: I am a lesbian, but I usually call myself gay.
It is dang hard to break from Christianity in some families — very much like a coming out experience. The consequences can be incredibly high! People can lose their closeness to all of their family members. They get looked at differently, in some cases ex-communicated. The experience can feel excruciating.
Coming out can be that way too.
Telling my folks I was no longer Christian was hard. I felt far more comfortable telling my mom. I knew it would hurt her, but I wanted her to know who I was. So the pain of hurting her by breaking away from my family’s belief system felt worth it — and I knew she would love me through all of that.
I didn’t say a word to my dad. I felt more comfortable sneaking around. He overheard me speaking negatively about Christianity on a phone call with one of my college friends, and he confronted me about it. I felt indignant and shamed, as if he’d caught me in some terrible act, and he was demanding that I come clean.
Coming out can be very awkward! For me, at 43, it felt like a strange litmus test. It weirded some people out, embarrassed some, and delighted others — especially my LGBTQ+ friends. It kinda blew up my personal life for a little bit…then, over time, made everything SO MUCH BETTER. I am happier now and more honest. More me. I was fully grown, thus had “less Fs to give,” so that helped in some ways, while nevertheless creating some painful initial rifts.
Almost all humans I’m connected to in my adult life are affirming of LGBTQ+ people, so while I might have surprised some folks, it wasn’t like I was burning the house down, or shocking people with the reveal that I would now be going to hell, or making a choice that some part of me realized was sinful.
My sister, who had a teen pregnancy and later divorced her first husband, ALSO had experienced telling very hard truths about herself! I don’t believe my trajectory, at least within our family dynamic, was any more challenging than hers. Getting pregnant out of wedlock, divorcing a spouse, coming out as gay…revealing yourself as no longer Christian…none of those things were comfortable to talk about because they were too worldly. As Christians, we were meant to be in the world, not of the world.
So yeah, stepping out as exvangelical feels akin to coming out as gay. I recognize how difficult it is to break away from any high control religion or ideology, and how dreadful it can feel to share that with your family and faith community. The stakes are high, especially for young people who are dependent on their parents, not just for love and care, but for food and shelter. The experience changes relationships, sometimes for a lifetime.
But oh, how joyful it feels to walk in your most comfortable shoes, as your full self, with your head held high. That is worth it, I think!
Stream Flood on YouTube or watch live on your local PBS station. Check out pbs.org/tv_schedules for your local listings.
Looking forward to seeing it. It was already on my (lengthy) watchlist.
Thank you for this!! Watched Flood last night and am glad to see it here in conversation with your own work and story. Much resonance with BOTH your journeys, and especially for me with particulars in Katy Scoggins’ “Flood.”
However we find ways to explore and share these stories (fiction has primarily been mine), it’s important that we do so.
Appreciate this conversation so much!