Last week, as Christians around the world celebrated the culmination of Holy Week on Easter Sunday, Donald Trump, acting President of the United States, began observing his what I call “Unholy Week.”

Unsatisfied with the mindshare Jesus of Nazareth was receiving on Easter, he posted about his ongoing war in Iran, threatening:

Thus concluded 🤦🏻 Facepalm Sunday, the first day of Unholy Week.

Two days later, he returned to his Temu Twitter and threatened genocide, writing that:

While we all braced for the worst, a ceasefire was reached. We have never been more grateful for 🌮 T.A.C.O. Tuesday 🌮, the third day of Unholy Week.

On Melania Thursday, Trump’s wife took the spotlight from her husband, issuing a statement attempting to distance herself from Epstein, in what some consider a pre-emptive move in advance of an upcoming news story.

Thus concluded the fifth day of Unholy Week.

On Gawdy Friday, Trump unveiled the plans for an unnecessary and tacky Triumphal Arch to be built in D.C.

Thus concluded the sixth day of Unholy Week.

And on Egotistical Sunday, the president unveiled his senility-ridden AI image of him as Jesus...

...the cursed result of the worst Fusion Dance merger the world has ever seen.

He also kept his beef with Pope Leo going for some reason.

Thus ended Unholy Week.

It sure does suck that this guy is somehow still our leader.

Most folks will likely have been receiving emails from me from my new domain, blakechastain.com. At the end of 2025, I left my job and am now pursuing full-time work as an author and podcaster (read more here).

I’ve been publishing podcasts, including video, over on YouTube and elsewhere for the last several weeks. (Subscribing directly to my YouTube channel would be a huge help, creator economy-wise.)

I don’t think I’m going to write a full-fledged “I’m moving off Substack, here’s why” post, but I do want to highlight recent things I’ve been doing, which include having moved the majority of my publishing off of Substack.

I broke down what I’m focusing on in this post.

My first essay of the year was published here.

And in this essay, I elaborated further about why I’m working to expand my focus beyond a focus on deconstruction, etc and endeavor to speak to authors across a variety of genres:

“The reason I am drawn toward speaking to and highlighting the work of authors in particular is because if someone has gone through the process of writing an entire book about something, that means they’ve spent a long time thinking about their topic, and the wisdom and insight they have to share is valuable.

Furthermore, those insights can deepen our understanding of what is happening in the news and in the world beyond the headlines. And in a media environment reading for pleasure has plunged 40% over 2 decades in the US, and 28% of U.S. adults between 16-65 read below a third grade level, encouraging and engaging with reading has its own value. If my interviews get people curious enough to seek out a book, I will consider that a win.”

Most Recent Interviews

All of these interviews are also available as audio podcasts on your favorite podcast app.

Here’s my interview with , author of After Purity:

Here’s my interview with Josiah Hesse, author of On Fire for God:

Here’s my interview with Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies, and God:

Upcoming NYC Event on March 8, 2026

ll be appearing alongside Mattie Jo Cowsert, Josiah Hesse, and B.K. O’Connor in less than a month in Brooklyn for an event at Urbane Arts Club. That event, called From Pews to Prose, will also feature Mattie Jo Cowsert & B.K. O'Connor and is happening on Sunday March 8th.

I’m not clear if Substack will need to be a place I co-publish things to or not, or if the network effect will be strong enough to make me return to the site. For the time, you can find me over at the new site. I hope you’ll join me.

Visit the new site

I love Chicago. I’ve called the region home for most of my life (since my family moved to the suburbs when I was 14), and lived in the city for fifteen years. It’s a quintessential American city & region: it’s the home of the Haymarket Riots and Moody Bible Institute, it’s where Louis Armstrong learned from King Oliver and invented American popular music, where the atom was split, where cell phones were invented, and Playboy, too. It’s where agricultural futures were refined through the Chicago Board of Trade and where Milton Friedman & co. developed the Chicago school of economics, and Robert Bork developed the consumer welfare standard that defanged antitrust law. (Just because a development was influential doesn’t mean that it was good, and doesn’t mean it isn’t part of our history.)

I could go on. There is so much to Chicago & all the suburbs surrounding it, connected through geography and culture and economics and history. And lest you think Chicagoland is some liberal bubble deserving of Wheaton alum & Christian nationalist/shadow president Russell Vought’s punitive and petty punishments, it’s also where Charlie Kirk was raised (Arlington Heights) and went to school for a single semester and where Nick Fuentes spouts his bile (Berwyn).

At the No Kings rally yesterday, Chicagoland showed up in force to demonstrate their displeasure. I was particularly encouraged by the people of all ages who came out.

I saw an older woman in a frog costume using a bubble gun, inspired by the Portland icon.

I saw a man in doctoral robes evoking Galileo.

I saw others evoke the fights against fascism their fathers fought.

It was a great day.

Later, the sitting president posted an AI video of himself in a crown, dropping raw sewage on his own citizens from a fighter jet.

In Chicago, we only tolerate that sort of thing from Dave Matthews Band (and it’s less of a toleration thing and more of a hilarious anecdote).

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In other news, I am going to be in Portland this week.

I’ll be on a panel at the Activists Mobilizing for Power panel alongside Heather Cronk, Tori Williams Douglass, and Lucianne Nelson on Wednesday.

Later in the week, we’ll be having an Exvangelical meetup.

If you’re in the area, stop by!

There’s two lines from The Extreme Self1 that have haunted me lately:

It’s the realities of that second maxim, “the opposite of invisibility is no longer being seen,” that I’ve been exploring over the last several months. Because if you don’t participate online, you aren’t visible online.

At the beginning of the year, I took a different approach to social media that I summed up as “I post here, but I don’t live here.” I posted that on January 14, prior to Trump’s inauguration or the early gutting of the federal workforce by DOGE and the shock and awe with which Trump sought to enforce his cruel vision for America via executive order in those early days of 2025.

Something I haven’t really written about here or elsewhere is that my day job for the last few years has been nonprofit communications in the political advocacy space. It is meaningful but taxing work, and in this climate it has become harder to do—for all manner of reasons, but let’s focus on the emotional side of things.

Nonprofit advocacy groups—ethical, law-abiding ones at least—operate within certain constraints. They do not participate in electoral politics. Different groups have different foci and tactics. Some focus on long-term relationships with politicians while others may employ activist-oriented activities. Groups will encourage direct action, will write and circulate sign-on letters, issue statements, and so forth. This is all laudable work and I am glad to contribute to it.

But on a given day in 2025, our capacity to merely mitigate harm feels minimal, and the accompanying emotions are usually on a limited spectrum between discouraging and demoralizing. On particularly heavy days (like the last few weeks as the Big Ugly Bill was being pushed through Congress) when I let myself sink into the feelings, I write that “the nihilism is winning” to my group chat.

Like millions of other Americans, I feel such anger and frustration that the state of our politics and governance has reached this state, and that the harm being done right now will take years or decades to undo if it can be undone at all. The checks and balances that wobbled but held during the first Trump administration have completely buckled and collapsed. The Supreme Court has shown repeatedly that they will not challenge or constrain Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, and the GOP’s support of the Big Ugly Bill shows that every person in office who voted for it fears the wrath of their President and his supporters more than they care for the Americans they are supposed to represent.

It’s a poor climate to try and promote a book in.

I started my podcast in July 2016. I released the first episode nine years ago in conjunction with the Republican National Convention & Trump’s acceptance of the nomination. So much has changed since then, while others have stayed stubbornly the same.

I am not the person I was then. When I started the show, I was still in a prolonged period of healing from being holy-ghosted by our evangelical church, and trying to figure out whether I still could ‘find a place’ within Christianity. Such things no longer interest me, though I know they remain areas of intense interest for people on different points in their own journey.

The dominant conversations surrounding Christianity in America fall into broad camps (that I have seen here on Substack and elsewhere2): the anti-Christian nationalist conversations, the progressive-Christian conversations, the conversations that center marginalized groups who are trying to forge new spiritualities that benefit them (and likely, all of us, if we can learn with appreciation and without appropriation) and the ever-present evangelical/charismatic/NAR-inflected Christian nationalists who can barely contain their glee that they’re so close to bringing about the end times they read of in the Left Behind series.

I spent years trying to understand how the faith that formed me also formed all this that we’re seeing now. I poured that effort into my book, as so many have before and after me (will) have also done. It is a book I am immensely proud of, but I have conflicted feelings about my capacity to promote it over the last few months.

To boil it down, I’ve been posting less because:

1. I don’t know what else there is to say that isn’t in my book,

2. I don’t know that me saying anything else about what is happening in the US is necessary when there are so many other capable people saying things, and

3. simply saying things to say them won’t mitigate any harms happening, either.

All the things you read here, the podcasts I post elsewhere, those are all done in my “off-hours.” And given that my full-time work has been very demanding and emotionally difficult, I have not had as much in the tank to push through, and I have not been able to just camp out and commiserate and offer takes on Bluesky all the time. But this is where the market realities of today’s internet—as reflected in the quote at the top of this post—I am no longer “being seen.” Because online you either feel hypervisible or invisible with little in-between. And if you can’t put in the time to be seen, you can’t be surprised if your stats start to suffer.

But this is a hard thing to do in “off-hours.” There’s a lot of work and discipline required, and a helluva lot of other things to do besides the creative work that drives it all. This thread by Annalee Newitz is a great example of that.

Years ago, I hoped that I would be able to responsibly transition to more and more ‘full-time creator’ type work. In 2021, when I was dreaming big, I envisioned getting 1,000 paid subscribers and replacing my salary at the time, and I incorporated reparative economics into this model by pledging “to donate 25% of net revenue to organizations that serve populations harmed by white evangelicalism.” It was an ambitious goal that I never met - I’ve never cracked 70 paid supporters at once. And since I’m not writing often here, I’m losing those I do have (understandably so).

As I mentioned above, I am not a full-time writer or author. I have a lot of complicated feelings about that, including no small amount of guilt and shame. Even with all my opportunities and accomplishments, I still haven’t found a way to make it work.

And perhaps it’s time to stop expecting it to work. Perhaps it’s time for this dream to change.

One bright aspect of life over the past six months has been my marriage. My wife Emily and I just celebrated 18 years together. She is my person, my lobster (real ones know), and she has been experiencing a period of rapid growth and change, and so have I. One part of that has been focused on loving myself—something that does not come naturally to anyone raised evangelical, regardless of age—as well as learning to dream again.

Parts of that dream are already taking form. I started the fun, laid-back podcast with Scott Okamoto. I started a new feed called The Good Books. I started publishing to YouTube. All of these are new, and they are all natural extensions of where my interests are leading me. None of them require a clean break from what I’ve been doing, but do allow me to expand into different areas.

I am confident I will always remain interested in religion & society and how those topics intersect with things like technology & media, story & metaphor, and how people change their minds. How I write and share about those interests may change, however.

I’m traveling a lot over the next couple of weeks. This newsletter isn’t imminently shutting down; neither is Exvangelical (though, as explored above, I have moved to a more intermittent release schedule as the other demands on my time increase). But I am learning once again to embrace change, and to be open to dreaming new things.

One of my most strident critiques of modern white evangelicalism and fundamentalism-writ-large is that it is insistent upon there being only one way to act, one way to live, one way to be—and that if you fail at it, you are damned. The stakes are literally life and death. That sort of pressure is paralyzing, and it pares an infinity of choices down to two. I’ve long known in my mind that this is a false dichotomy. I’m starting to see that my heart had not yet learned this lesson, and I am getting around to learning it now: even if I did not “succeed” by this particular metric, I am not a failure. And there are more dreams to pursue.

I’d love it if you’d stick around to see where this all leads.

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The book was published on September 24, 2024. 42 days later Donald Trump would be elected president.

I’m not sure anyone tells you how to feel when you publish a book, and I’m not going to simply unload all of my feelings about its launch and reception—I don’t think anyone would want to read that. But one of the most consistent feelings I’ve had since then is that it feels as if I wrote this book in the hopes of a different outcome.

I had hoped that my book would join the chorus of others that sought to inform, contextualize, and warn the broader public of the threat of Christian nationalism that had taken hold in this country, and that because there would be such an abundance of witnesses, we would be heard and heeded.

But of course that’s not what happened.

Instead, our country re-elected a convicted felon, who empowered a drug addled-billionaire to run roughshod over federal agencies & decimate American soft power abroad by gutting organizations like USAID that is projected to lead to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Oh, and Trump is leading us into further protracted military conflict and his “big beautiful bill,” which seems like a sure-thing, will remove millions from healthcare assistance & food assistance while adding trillions to the debt.

My hope is in much shorter supply today.

I recognize that I am writing this missive in a somewhat fragile & vulnerable emotional state.

I question my own capacity to contribute to any work (commentary or otherwise) that seeks to mitigate any of the harms being inflicted upon our country.

I loathe that the most influential people in our society use their power and wealth to exacerbate inequality, quash freedom of expression & assembly online and in person, tear apart families, and tear down institutions.

I rage at my own inability to make a meaningful difference in any sphere.

I lament the state of conversation around religion & public life and the way it takes place over the internet, and how that online conversation seems completely detached from both fellowship halls and the halls of power. Everyone retreats to their corners—progressive Christians talking to progressive Christians, atheists talking to atheists, evangelicals finding ever more nuanced ways to support whatever the Trump admin is doing but being evasive about it—and meanwhile the NAR and other violent forms of Christianity thrive online and spread their selfish gospel to anyone who will listen.

I’m annoyed at how much these frustrations get to me, and how I struggle to build anything cumulative.

I refuse to give up hope entirely. But today I am deeply, deeply discouraged.

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Step away from the noise. Take a breath. Join me as I listen.

By Rev. Angela Denker

Let’s Talk About Text - Ep 1

Elsewhere, we released the first full episode of . Scott & I spoke with Tori & Justin from the excellent podcast Go Home Bible, You’re Drunk.

You can follow all of that directly over here:

Let's Talk About Text

The substack blog for the podcast Let's Talk About Text

By Blake Chastain

Ok. Until next time (tomorrow, if I’m lucky). Let me know what you think of these new shows in the comments.

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In this episode of The Good Books - my author-interview show - I spoke to Lucas FW Wilson about the anthology Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivor Stories of Conversion Therapy.

This is a visceral, moving collection that is another strong addition to the growing catalog of books that documents the harm of anti-LGBTQ theologies and practices. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

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This new series is also available as an audio feed on all the normal places like Apple Podcasts.

As a reminder for long-time readers, I started this new series recently to focus more explicitly on authors author interviews.

I also started a new show with called .

Let's Talk About Text

Introducing: Let's Talk About Text

Read more

a year ago · 2 likes · Blake Chastain and R. Scott Okamoto

When appropriate, these interviews will be re-posted to the Exvangelical feed as well.

After months of not knowing exactly what to say, I’m glad to be releasing interviews and other content again.

If you want to help support my work, you can always do so with a paid subscription.

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If your first, foundational belief is that you are undeserving of love, acceptance, understanding, social standing—that your very existence is the most offensive anathema to the god that brought your world into being unless you acquiesce to the belief that your only value is found when you accept a ‘gift of salvation’ with very specific terms and conditions from the god who would hate you and damn you otherwise—then it stands to reason that it might be difficult to offer compassion to your self or others.

If you believe you are terrible because you believe your god thinks you’re terrible, it makes sense that you would think everyone else is terrible, too. A pessimistic pall is cast over the entire world—a world tinted by fire and brimstone instead of roses. A personal worldview determined by guilt.

Most of my intellectual history has been motivated by a desire to understand, and perhaps legitimize, my own heavy sense of guilt. My first sense of guilt was developed by the evangelical Christian tradition my family was part of. There are plenty of sources, from the scriptures (all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; there is no one righteous; the heart is deceitful above all things; no one comes to the father except through me; for I know my transgressions, my sin is always before me, and so on), to the logic of altar calls and penal substitutionary atonement, to the belief in the rapture and that the world will get progressively worse.

There is no shortage of ways that I, my elders, and their elders were convinced of our own sinfulness and lowliness, that we should despise who we are apart from Christ. In fact, most of us are who are raised in this religion are introduced to the idea of the need to be forgiven and to ‘invite the holy spirit’ into our hearts at such an early age that we develop a sort of bifurcated self. What we call the Holy Spirit acts as a type of inner narc, telling us we do not measure up to the impossible standard God has set, that we failed the test before we were even conscious, and we learn to distrust to our intuition and ‘lean not on our own understanding.’

Despite learning that the two greatest commandments are to love God and love our neighbors as our selves, the very notion of loving our selves is preposterous: “I’m supposed to love myself, the worst person I know, that terrible sinner? GTFO (and forgive me for using an acronym with a swear).”

I know, mentally, that this perspective is harmful to myself and to the world at large. Mentally, I have rejected it. But the heart can go on believing things long after the head has disavowed them.

In that same manner, even as I have moved farther away from white evangelicalism, my guilt (and the accompanying shame) has stayed with me. After I distanced myself from conservative evangelicalism, I still sought to find my place on a different branch of Christianity, and through my graduate studies discovered the Creation Care movement.

It was then that my guilt changed shape. Instead of being a general belief about my lack of worthiness, I developed guilt around my carbon footprint. I felt terrible about participating in destructive commerce. I considered becoming an environmental lawyer.2 I’m not sure if that guilt has ever subsided, even if it doesn’t occupy all of my mind.

A few years later, as greater social awareness was building around the rampant racial injustice in contemporary America (and the centuries of injustice that has preceded it), my guilt changed shape again and became a form of white fragility and guilt. All of the horrendous acts that were done to develop and preserve something as vacuous as whiteness—that required generations of European settlers to cut themselves off from their specific ancestry for a general whiteness that demanded they dehumanize others—it was and is all such a tragedy that has led to such enmity and suffering.

My guilt took on a male contour as well—men, and white men in particular, have been so harmful it is undeniable. I’m not even particularly enamored with concepts of masculinity—I’ve always felt a distance from the concept, and I don’t ascribe qualities like strength or intelligence or kindness to a gender (the very idea seems preposterous). But I know I look male and am seen as male.

There’s a reason I used the term “metamorphosis” to describe this process: I want you to think of the geologic process. All these sediments of shame and guilt have been built up over time, and while their qualities have changed, the pressure I’ve put on myself has been constant and has precipitated those changes.

Over the last few months I’ve felt something similar happening again. I can’t name or articulate it just yet—it has taken me years to be able to identify and describe what I’ve done above—but the process is familiar by now. I think it’s around feeling an anticipated change in my creative work, and also a sense of guilt that I haven’t done enough to help my book/podcast/podcast network/facebook group succeed and thrive, and a sense of overall helplessness about resisting the fascistic turn in our federal politics in the United States.

But what’s different this time is I’m now aware of the process and this predilection I have toward guilt & shame (which I’ve long known but felt helpless to stop). I’ve been having amazingly fruitful conversations with my wife Emily, who has helped me to develop a greater sense of optimism and an acceptance of my self. If I can help direct the process instead of being merely subject to it, if I can integrate some of the knowledge I already have to reframe things, perhaps I can yield a better outcome.

I was already thinking about this piece over the last month. Then I came across a skeet that I quoted, below:

Guilt has, in some ways, also functioned as an excuse. Just as fundamentalists don’t think that taking action on climate change matters because “it’s all gonna burn, anyway,” the belief that I am terrible and deserve bad things is also defeating and limiting. It hinders the ability to see possible presents and futures, for our selves and for the world at large. It denies change even as change is occurring, because fundamentalism at its core is a refusal to engage with a world that changes and insists instead that it is unchanging and eternal.

We are not immutable platonic ideals. We (I!) must be open to change, and find a different catalyst than guilt and shame. Hope can be a catalyst, too. So can love, and care.

That is part of my work now, too.

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Over the last few months, I’ve been teasing that I would be starting a new series called The Good Books. I’ve been interviewing authors on Exvangelical under the same title for a while now, but it’s remained such a persistent point of interest for me that I have spun it out into its own feed.

I recorded this YouTube Short about my vision for the show.1

Well, the day has arrived.

With this show, I hope to explore books and ideas beyond the general ‘release window’ of 6 months to a year that most authors and the media that surrounds them—whether it’s podcasts, tv, or general online chatter—adhere to. There are stories and perspectives that we need to engage with right now, regardless of when a book may have come out.

To that end, I’m very excited to share this conversation I had with Melissa Florer-Bixler, author of How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger & The Work of Peace. The book was published in 2021, and it has been a source of wisdom for me since I read it. While it is rooted in the Christian tradition, there is a lot to learn from here. I see it as particularly valuable for Christians who wish to find ways to repudiate Christian nationalism in the public sphere and their own communities.

It’s also helpful for anyone who is trying to articulate their feelings of anger, to find ways to identify who the true enemies of the public good are, and to work toward greater peace.

I am also publishing video to YouTube, for both this show and Exvangelical.

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I’m still very much learning in public—expect there to be changes to format, lots of changes to video editing (a skill I’m learning on the fly), and so on. But I feel the most comfortable in my self when I’m reading and writing. Writers, artists, activists, and thinkers challenge me.

As always, if you want to support this work, you can do so by subscribing to a paid membership here, and also using my bookshop.org affiliate page to purchase your books.

Go give this episode a watch and let me know what you think.

Almost a week ago, I started a draft of this newsletter that I had titled “Remember: All of this is what 80% of white evangelicals voted for. 3 times. (In which my dormant anger and grief finds some expression.)” Here’s what I wrote but didn’t send then:

I’m typing most of this out on my lunch break on April 9, a few days into the meaningless, utterly avoidable economic downturn (which will likely turn into a recession or worse) we are being dragged into by Trump by this tariff nonsense that no one except his most spineless yes-men defend.

Against the general economic backdrop, we have people being detained off the streets, while others are being wrongfully deported for a variety of reasons (and SCOTUS is temporarily pausing attempts to return at least one person) children dying from measles, the foreign aid funding freeze leading to millions of women losing access to contraception, cutting food aid, and children dying in South Sudan because local health facilities were forced to close.

Now, I’ve been on the beat of covering white evangelicalism and amplifying the stories of exvangelicals and others who have left for almost a decade. One of the most common critiques of exvies is that we are just a bunch of extremely-online ragebaited posters with nothing to offer. And sure, that caricature holds some water—because to whatever degree an algorithm feeds you things, it’s going to feed you things based on what elicits a reaction. And what elicits a reaction faster than anger?

Yet that’s not enough to dismiss the fact that this anger (and the related emotions of frustration and grief) is valid. We live in a crueler world made possible by the consistent political decisions of white evangelicals.

This anger doesn’t supersede other valid angers. That’s not the point of anger—to compete with others to see whomst is full of the most righteous wroth.

I didn’t hit send on that draft for a number of reasons: first, by the time I returned to it, the facts on the ground had changed and Trump had suspended most of the tariffs; second, I got pulled back into work (I work in advocacy communications and things have been hectic ever since this administration started); third, I had to pack for a short trip.

I’m sharing it now because, even though it’s half-baked and outdated, it’s illustrative of how quickly things continue to devolve in the United States. Unless your full-time job is to keep tabs on and comment on everything that’s happening, it is functionally impossible to do so.

But the latest developments surrounding the Trump administration’s refusal to return the wrongfully deported father of three Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States after a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling is such an affront to the rule of law that it cannot go without comment.

With every day that passes this administration demonstrates the degree of cruelty and indifference with which they see the American people, not as citizens with rights but as subjects to whom they feel they are owed unquestioning allegiance. They are not kings. They are not chosen by God. They were chosen by people, and it is the people to whom they must answer.

I do not think that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a solitary or unique case or that other people and groups are not suffering. What the Trump administration is doing—or rather, not doing—in response to the demands of the court is what is at issue here. It is consistent with their other illegal and unconstitutional actions in which they have ignored the judiciary, or frozen funds, or refused to unfreeze funds.

And yes, I remain angry and aggrieved, and utterly disappointed that the faith that formed me is complicit in all this. But I also have hope that we can resist the temptation to sort ourselves into clusters and forge meaningful alliances that can fight back against the authoritarianism, autocracy, and fascism.

I say “I have hope,” but I think I mean “I have to have hope.” Because I don’t know if there’s any other way through this. But we have to resist the temptation to retreat into our own fiefdoms. Allow me to explain.

In my slice of the world, I’ve watched as commentators and activists and advocates sort themselves into various camps over the last several years: post-evangelical elites who talk primarily to progressive Christians, exvangelicals who want nothing to do with religion, queer and BIPOC creators who prioritize their own communities out of the necessity, surival, and the pursuit of their own joy.1

All of these things are valuable in their own right, and they serve different needs. My particular brand of ambivalent agnosticism and pointed critique of white American Christianity won’t reach a strong progressive Christian as well as some author who’s heart is still stirred by Jesus and wants to reform a faith community from within. That’s ok.

People talk and write a lot about “bridge building,” as if that obligates everyone to be “all things to all people” like Paul tried to be (Paul sucked at that, btw). But that misunderstands what bridges are and do. A bridge connects two places, not all places. If you wanted to connect all people to one way, you’d be building a hub, not a bridge. You’re centering one way. And that’s what got us into this mess.

I am not a bridge-builder to conservative evangelicals; that’s someone else’s work. (Maybe it’s yours, reading this.) My bridge leads away from evangelicalism, not towards it. But I do need to know the people doing that work, and find ways to work with them if our goals align. They can cross their own bridges, and reach others that I can’t, across a dispersed literal and metaphorical geography.

In these examples, we don’t all need the same spiritual thing, but we all do need and deserve the same rights.

And we are all threatened by the developments we see playing out in front of all of us. Trump is speaking openly on a hot mic about sending “home-grown” criminals to these El Salvadoran prisons.

They have allies. We need allies, too.

And I’m not talking about just allies in flame wars online. Things are a lot more complicated and dire than that. We can’t afford to retreat to our own islands.

In times like this I have a hard time distilling what I want to write or say to a single thing. In times like this, I think of McLuhan’s axiom that “electric man lives mythically and all at once.” McLuhan wrote in the 1960s about “all-at-once-ness” and he never lived through a single day of Trump’s chaotic tariff policy announcements. We all have only so much bandwidth, so much to offer, so much capital, so much we can do in a day. There’s systemic issues tied to personal issues and I see it all in my head and feel it all in my heart but I can’t make it make sense on the page in a way that’s both concise and accurate, so I must resort to mythical and metaphorical thinking and hope that you’ll get the gist. I tried to do so in my book, when I wrote about the need for new metaphors:

“I believe that for those of us who were shaped by evangelicalism—which is so many of us, including those who were not raised within it but have been subject to its influence on politics and culture—it is time to look for new metaphors. In our current environment, the primary constant is change, and the pace of change is accelerating. To hold fast to unchanging belief makes us brittle and hollows us out. As Sophie Strand writes in The Flowering Wand, “Myths that stay the same don’t survive. Or worse, they make sure we won’t survive by reinforcing extractive behavior no longer tailored to our ecosystems. They don’t adapt to changing climate and shifting social conditions.”[2]”

No single post is gonna solve a single thing. But goddammit, we need each other more than ever. I need you. You need me. The people and students being abducted without due process deserve better. The people who struggle to make ends meet and literally cannot afford to stop deserve better. The trans community being vilified deserves better. We all deserve better.

We need each other. And we need to find our way through this dark time to a time of mutual flourishing. We won’t do that if we stay isolated.

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I selected books that would provide some inspiration:

• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer;

• Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch;

• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown

• re-reading portions of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine by Sophie Strand;

• And I dabbled in and out of Maria Ressa’s How to Stand Up to a Dictator, Francis Spufford’s speculative fiction Cahokia Jazz, and some others.

Prior to my vacation, I was in a pretty discouraged place. (There’s ample reasons to be discouraged.) But in order to maintain any semblance of resiliency in this climate, you have to find ways to feed your soul, too.

I spent time with my family, and found solace in authors who dared to dream of better futures. And for that I was replenished.

Of all the things I read, this passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer stuck with me:

“The question that’s often asked is how do we take gift economies from individual relationships and scale them up? I have to say that I’m not sure that’s the right question. Why does everything have to be expanded? It’s the small scale and context that make the flow of gifts meaningful. But if gift economies are to have impact, I’m willing to think about what that might look like on a community scale.” [emphasis mine]

Given the way we are all so interconnected now, I often have a hard time knowing how to delineate between what is appropriate at an individual level versus a more systemic level.

This is complicated further given the speed at which Musk, Trump, and the GOP seem to be dismantling systems that were built up over decades and which millions of Americans depend upon (as well as millions of others abroad who received aid via PEPFAR or USAID or similar programs).

Complicating things further still, I also think that since our primary interaction to the broader world is through our phones—and the fact that our society was so rapidly and thoroughly changed by the smartphone and social media—I think a lot of/most of us assume that all substantive change has to come all-at-once or not-at-all.

While on vacation, three different ideas started to dance around each other:

• The first was “why does everything have to be expanded?” From the Robin Wall Kimmerer quotation above.

• The second was an insight shared at the 2024 Election Postmortem organized by . At that event, Elizabeth Neumann (who has worked for DHS and is National Security Advisor for ABC News) said “you can mass radicalize, but you cannot mass de-radicalize.”

• The third was a quote from that I cannot directly cite (despite searching through my copy of Dear Revolutionaries to find), but I hope they will forgive me for loosely paraphrasing: ‘you will have the most meaningful impact on the 300 mile radius area you live in.’

And it’s in those thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of individual local efforts that I think we will find our paths forward.

Paths plural.

Because it will take more than one path. And those paths won’t be provided by online platforms. Mutual flourishing and liberation won’t be found with a free Facebook account.

While I’m largely certain that tools like social media will play some sort of role in building awareness—as it has in so many ways, through things like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo and #ChurchToo and #exvangelical and on and on—we cannot look to these platforms for much else. Their proprietors have decided they prefer the taste of boots. Even if they seek to downrank content they don’t like and spend millions on trying to buy elections, we’re (re-)learning, slowly and surely, what it takes to secure the present and the future we deserve.

We may see lots of big, immediate changes happening in front of us each day. When we see injustices, we have to stand against them to the best of our ability. Yet some big changes take time, and take place much closer to home.

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Today marks 6 months since my first book, Exvangelical & Beyond, was published. I’ve shared—somewhere, I think on Bluesky—that I was worried that the book was written for a world that in some sense no longer exists because Trump Admin 2.0 has already upended so much. I now recognize that for the dark thought it was—wrapped up in the emotion of the moment when I wrote that particular missive. I think the book has much to offer, and hold fast to the belief that it will find its way to the people that need it, when they need it.

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to publish the book, and thankful for every chance I’ve had to talk about it.

I am also grateful for a better sense of self-awareness. Historically, March has been a difficult month for my family; we had several years where the worst things to happen in a given year would happen in the space between February and April. Even when something bad doesn’t occur, the memory of Marches past linger. Things slip, rituals and habits fall to the wayside. Even things like posting updates here or on my podcasts simply don’t happen.

To that end, I’ll start officially recognizing this reality. I don’t have a pithy term for it, whether it’s ’sabbatical,’ or ‘hiatus,’ or ‘break,’ or whatever. But come March, I’ll be scarce.

It‘s good to know one’s limits.

With that, I’m going to return to my vacation. I’ll be back soon to share more about some exciting projects I’m working on.

Be well.

The GOP has capitulated to their “strongman”. The Democratic party is failing to form effective modes of opposition. DOGE employees are running roughshod over multiple agencies with no accountability or oversight. Trump himself is starting trade wars and trying to humiliate President Zelensky (and only succeeding at humiliating America).

Meanwhile, the same forms of disconnection that have plagued American society don’t seem to be getting any better. Within Christianity, progressive Christians talk amongst themselves, moderate evangelicals bemoan the fascistic turn that the majority of evangelicals have taken, and Christian nationalists of all stripes look upon the rapid deterioration of “the administrative state” with glee. And the rest of the country not caught up in these internecine Christian battles looks on with confusion, disgust, and rage. We are all Yabushige from Shogun:

Somehow, it feels as if the people that need to talk are still not talking. I’m not talking about depolarization or some mealy-mouthed bipartisanship here. I mean people with vision being connected to people with means. It shouldn’t just be red-pilled billionaires who get to enact their will on the world.

I feel disconnected from all but my own immediate family and close friends. I sense disconnectedness in a number of ways. I know and trust that there is a lot of advocacy and activism happening. And while I see the phantom connections that need to be forged, at least in part, that vision isn’t yet clear. I’m clearly depressed.

Destruction is quick. Building things takes time. Time I fear we don’t have.

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I’ve got a new interview for you today with Matthew D. Taylor, author of The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

We talk about the growth of independent charismatic Christianity, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and its role in J6 and ongoing support for Trump, as well as what's happened in the first month of Trump 2.0. This interview was recorded on 2/19/2025.

It’s already published on my YouTube channel as well as embedded below (and will be published to the Exvangelical podcast feed - and the new The Good Books feed - very soon).

As I wrote this past November, I’ve been planning to expand my coverage to more explicitly focus on books & author interviews for some time.

Well, that day is here. And given the state of things, I’m going to be publishing videos that may lack polish but have valuable content that deserves to be shared. This will absolutely feature a lot of me learning in public, but I hope that you will follow along and support the work.

Subscribe on YouTube

Here’s the script I used to make a promotional Short about the show:

We read in all sorts of ways now. In fact, we read and write all the time, whether it’s for work or pleasure, to inform or entertain. We read commentary and takes on social media and in newsletters, as rolling captions or in single-sentence missives on Threads or Bluesky.

And I’ve always loved books. Over the last several years, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of being able to talk to authors as part of my podcast, Exvangelical. I’ve even had the incredible opportunity to write my own book. Both of those experiences have only deepened my appreciation for what it takes to write and publish a book today.

That’s why I’m starting a new series called The Good Books, focused on authors, books, publishing, and how we read now. The title itself is a nod to my prior work focused on religion and society, as well as an indication of what I want to highlight—books I consider good, and authors who I consider compelling. It’s not going to be critical or harsh, but about books worth celebrating across a variety of genres.

So if that sounds like something you’d be interested in, subscribe today.

I will, of course, continue to share these videos here and explore other forms of content as well.

Let me know what you think either here or in the comments on YouTube.

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And if you value my work, consider supporting it with a subscription.

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PEP Talk is generally available for paid subscribers, and in 2025 I hope to publish this extemporaneous show on Tuesdays. You can support my work for $5/month or $50/year, and 25% of net proceeds go to support White Homework and The Religious Exemption Accountability Project. Paid support has declined by 25% lately, and I would greatly appreciate it if you are able.

And yet, Wesley reportedly delivered the barn-burner line “Your God is my Devil!” in a debate with a contemporary Calvinist preacher.1

That line resonates deeply in recent days.

In my book I wrote this:

“The steadfast evangelical commitment to never changing is not a virtue but a vice, and one that is costing them and us dearly. It is not a good thing that Harry Emerson Fosdick’s description of the fundamentalists of his time in the 1920s applies just as well to the fundamentalists of the 2020s. By routinely refusing to revisit what they have deemed “orthodoxy,” they have reduced themselves to circling the same issues again and again, methodically rejecting new information and reinforcing their worldview. Their commitment to remaining in the 1920s alienates and isolates them. It leads to a faith that stifles growth instead of encouraging it.”

Within American Christianity,2 the internecine battles of the “fundamentalist-modernist controversy” during the late 19th/early 20th centuries set the stage for what would become our never-ending culture war. While the original arguments were doctrinal—about whether the Christian scripture was “without error”—the staunch ideology of the fundamentalists encouraged a reactionary response that outright rejected new information (but, interestingly, never questioned new communications technologies) that conflicted with their worldview.

Following the Pyrrhic victory of the Scopes Monkey Trial where fundamentalists won in the court of law but lost in the court of public opinion, the fundamentalists began building or expanding their own alternative institutions: schools, presses, radio stations, stores, and denominations.

Over time, their power, wealth, and influence grew. Through the neo-evangelical period of the 1940s where key figures like Billy Graham ingratiated themselves to business interests and the National Association of Evangelicals was founded (by only white evangelical groups) apart from what is now the National Council of Churches, a nominal evangelical public formed in opposition to the “mainline” denominations. The Civil Rights era drove a further wedge, and by the 1970s, the modern Religious Right was primed to take shape.

This is a broad-strokes retelling—there’s a reason entire shelves of books have been written about this topic. But my point remains: at least two very different visions of Christianity have been vying for power in the United States for well over a century.

A very particular vision of Christianity is being enshrined in American politics, one that most white evangelicals—80% or more voting for Trump across three elections is enough to say this without reservation—are comfortable with, as are many conservative Catholics, Pentecostals, and charismatics. This nationalist version of Christianity is the one benefitting from the executive order on “anti-Christian bias,” even as mainline Protestant and Catholic charities are targeted by the likes of the vice president, Elon Musk, and disgraced General Michael Flynn.

These actions make blatant what many people (like myself) who have participated in both conservative evangelical and progressive mainline denominations know innately: Christian nationalists do not see other Christians as valid, and instead see & treat their fellow siblings in Christ as enemy combatants. A common courtesy of shared faith is not extended. Fundamentalists and nationalists do not believe they worship the same god, and they are comfortable enforcing their view of God on people through governance. Their actions belie their motivations: that they want dominance and compliance more than they wish for any other aspect of the story of Jesus and the long and diverse history of Christianity.

I wrote last month about the ‘clash of Christianities,’ and I must say I can’t muster any enthusiasm for theological nitpicking of any kind at the moment. I’m not interested in whether “Christian nationalist” is the right term to use, or to stipulate between evangelicals, charismatics, Pentecostals, and hard-right Catholics, or the gradients of difference between various progressive strands of Christianity. What is self-evident is that there is Trump-approved Christianity, and there is everything else, and these forces are in opposition.

Their God is my devil. And they feel the same about me.

They likely read “woe unto them who call good evil, and evil good” and think of someone like me, an exvangelical apostate leading others astray, while I think of the Christians who cheer the reduction of USAID (an agency they likely never thought much of at all before Musk targeted it) despite the massive deleterious effects this will have on global public health.

It’s just the Spider-Man meme, stretched over an entire century—but one of these Spider-men has control over the Presidency and no interest in the equitable pursuit of freedom of religion.

There are a handful of things that keep circling in my mind: the song “Wolves At The Door” from David Bazan’s album Strange Negotiations, Melissa Florer-Bixler’s book How to Have An Enemy, and Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works. But those thoughts will have to wait for another time, when some positive chemicals can counteract the negative ones holding sway this evening.

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By the time I arrived back home, Elon Musk’s lackeys had gained access to the Treasury’s payments systems.

By the end of the weekend, Musk was boosting comments made by the disgraced former general Mike Flynn (who pled guilty to charges but was pardoned by Trump) to his 215M followers about services provided by groups like Lutheran Social Services and Global Refuge to refugees, asylum seekers, and others navigating the US immigration process.

Further, USAID is under attack and at serious risk, not from any legal process, but by the illegal and unconstitutional actions of Elon Musk, his cohort of Musk Youth doing his bidding, and the sitting president.

I haven’t even touched on the tariffs levied at China (which are halting shipments from USPS already), or Trump’s claim to “take over” Gaza, or the plan to dismantle the Department of Education (a stated goal of Project 2025), or pulling out of the Paris Agreement again, or the revocation of an immigration program that endangers 350,000 Venezuelans who sought refuge here.

I am not sure how to feel, let alone what to do. I am just one person, writing a woe-laden post for a newsletter that, if past performance is indicative, somewhere between two-to-five thousand people will read.

I am not sure what to do when the institutions that we place our trust in, and the leaders entrusted to guide them, also do nothing.

I am not sure why the leaders best positioned to resist these illegal, unconstitutional actions are so reticent to use the powers entrusted to them. Why stay in a fight this dirty if you aren’t willing to get dirty yourself? Don’t they see what’s at stake, and that no sense of decorum or “business as usual” will meet this occasion? Are leftists and liberals so caught up in decades of purity tests that they can’t see that mere participation in this endeavor is enough to sully oneself? They are failing the Criminal Interview, and are being victimized and brutalized.

I make no excuse for any member of the GOP who also stands by, but they have spent years ignoring the angels of their better nature. The GOP that put country over party in the shadow of Watergate is a mere memory; in its stead we have McConnell’s GOP, willing to take cover from and take cover for Trump. All of this could have been avoided, had McConnell & his colleagues had the courage and integrity to impeach Trump and bar him from office.

In their book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, the philosopher Timothy Morton states that we have passed beyond “the end of the world,” and further, that humanity is hypocritical, weak, and lame. Here’s further context:

Hyperobjects are directly responsible for what I call the end of the world, rendering both denialism and apocalyptic environmentalism obsolete. Hyperobjects have already ushered in a new human phase of hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness: these terms have a very specific resonance in this study, and I shall explore them in depth. Hypocrisy results from the conditions of the impossibility of a metalanguage (and as I shall explain, we are now freshly aware of these conditions because of the ecological emergency); weakness from the gap between phenomenon and thing, which the hyperobject makes disturbingly visible; and lameness from the fact that all entities are fragile (as a condition of possibility for their existence), and hyperobjects make this fragility conspicuous.³ Hyperobjects are also changing human art and experience (the aesthetic dimension). We are now in what I call the Age of Asymmetry.

I was surprisingly comforted while reading this book, because as an exvangelical, it helped redeem (or at least make use of) the irrational fear of the end of the world that survives in the basement level of my psyche.

But it’s the other element of the book’s thesis - about our individual hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness - that I’m feeling in these last few days.

Things feel so big and I feel so small.

I know that means their strategy is working.

I also know that this feeling will pass (that is, after all, what feelings do). Last Friday alone I went from feeling invigorated to feeling despair.

Yet Morton’s book tells us to resist cynicism:

Cynicism is the worst hypocrisy: hypocrisy squared, since cynicism is hypocritical about its hypocrisy. The hypocrite understands that she is caught in her own failure. The cynic still hopes that if he vomits disgustingly enough, things will change. The cynic hopes: he is not beyond hope—he is a hypocrite. He is trying to escape doom.

I won’t presume to try and distill Morton’s book-length philosophical treatise into a single post here. But for a while now, it has given me the comfort to try anything, because the world has already ended and begun again and again.

But I am human, and under the weight of all these events, I feel discouraged by the early success of Trump and Musk to foment chaos in the administrative state.

I am trying to find ways to make a difference. I need leaders of institutions in media, government, and elsewhere to try too. They need to communicate clearly and loudly what they are doing. We can’t all lose hope all at once.

Find courage to match your despair, and things that feed you while you work at things that drain you. That’s my advice to you and to myself.

Tomorrow I’ll feel different. But today I’m sitting with all of it.

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When I make such things explicit, some people assume that this must mean that I am anti-theist and have nothing to do with religion or religious people. This is not true. Both the public work I do through this newsletter, my podcast, and my writing, as well as my day job (as I am not a full-time writer) brings me into constant contact with Christians and Christianity.

I struggle every single day with the fact that Christianity is a force for both oppression and liberation—that the same religion, ostensibly worshipping the same deity, is used as the means to justify drastically different ends. Through my work on Exvangelical, I see the harm that Christians cause women, queer people, people of color, and anyone who does not conform to the script that patriarchal Christianity gives them; through my other work, I see women, queer people, people of color and those who do not conform to patriarchy emboldened to create a more just and equitable world in the name of Christ. It is an utter mindf*#!.

The discordant strains of American Christianity clashed in spectacular fashion this week following the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral. The whole sermon can be found here, uploaded to YouTube with comments turned off, which is a commentary of its own:

Through her measured and thoughtful comments, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington drew attention to the state of affairs in America. Her comments were subtle where others might have been barbed, but they were still pointed remarks. After opening with a meditation on the idea of unity, Budde said this:

“Those of us gathered here in this Cathedral are not naive about the realities of politics. When power, wealth and competing interests are at stake; when views of what America should be are in conflict; when there are strong opinions across a spectrum of possibilities and starkly different understandings of what the right course of action is, there will be winners and losers when votes are cast or decisions made that set the course of public policy and the prioritization of resources. It goes without saying that in a democracy, not everyone’s particular hopes and dreams will be realized in a given legislative session or a presidential term or even a generation. Not everyone’s specific prayers – for those of us who are people of prayer – will be answered as we would like. But for some, the loss of their hopes and dreams will be far more than political defeat, but instead a loss of equality, dignity, and livelihood.

Given this, is true unity among us even possible? And why should we care about it?

Well, I hope that we care, because the culture of contempt that has become normalized in our country threatens to destroy us. We are all bombarded daily with messages from what sociologists now call “the outrage industrial complex”, some of it driven by external forces whose interests are furthered by a polarized America. Contempt fuels our political campaigns and social media, and many profit from it. But it’s a dangerous way to lead a country.”

There is boldness here, in speaking this sort of truth to the power that had sat in her pews. I do not know that I would have had such bravery.

But the bishop’s comments did not stop there. She concluded with a direct plea for mercy to the president.

These pleas were met with derision.

The sitting President of the United States said this:

“The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!”

The President could not even deign to respect the bishop’s earned honorifics, let alone the content of her message, which again were framed as a plea not a challenge.

And of course, the chorus of Trump-faithful had to chime in. Noted plagiarist Mark Driscoll, whose Mars Hill Church imploded a decade ago in a series of credible allegations of spiritual abuse too long to list here (which did not stop him from relocating to Arizona and rebuilding) got in on things:

Meanwhile, over on X, Christians warned against ‘the sin of empathy,’ a point of contention for sites like Desiring God since 2019 (and a topic which Desiring God OP Joe Rigney is expanding upon for an entire book, building upon others by published by Allie Beth Stuckey).

All of these people are Christians. All of these people have different relations and access to power in today’s political climate.

And while I have largely been considering the words and deeds of all these people in strictly religious terms thus far, I see parallels in another arena: that of nationalism and fascism.

I am currently reading Jason Stanley’s book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, which I recommend. (It’s not an encouraging read, but it is an insightful one, written in accessible language.) In Chapter 6, “Victimhood,” Stanley highlights the way in which nationalism—not unlike religion—can have different motivations:

“In the face of discrimination, oppressed groups throughout history, have risen up in movements that proclaimed pride for their endangered identities. In Western Europe, the Jewish nationalism of the Zionist movement arose as a response to toxic anti-Semitism. In the United States, black nationalism arose as a response to toxic racism. In their origins, these nationalist movements were responses to oppression. Anti-colonialist struggles typically take place under the banner of nationalism; for example, Mahatma Gandhi employed Indian nationalism as a tool against British rule. This kind of nationalism, the nationalism that arises from oppression, is not fascist in origin. These forms of nationalism, in their original formations, are equality-driven nationalist movements….at the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or in a word, nation. But, in stark contrast to a version of nationalism with equality as its goal, fascist nationalism is a repudiation of the liberal democratic ideal; it is nationalism in the service of domination, with the goal of preserving, maintaining, or gaining a position at the top of a hierarchy of power and status.”

One form of Christianity—that which champions this administration—pursues dominance, while the other aligns with those who pursue equality. Qualifiers and equivocations and exceptions can be made for these binary claims, but the fascistic live and breathe in broad strokes while their opponents get bogged down in specificity (both sides obsessed in their own way with notions of purity).

I’ve grown tired of seeing oppressive Christianity ascendant. I am ready to make allegiance with those who wield the message of Jesus of Nazareth as a tool for liberation, with those Christians who do not require a reciprocal declaration of faith to expect equality in society, and who stand side by side with those the powerful threaten, regardless of whether they wield the power of the state.

If we are to be witnesses for anything, let us be witnesses of our shared humanity.

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If you want to read more of my ideas, and why I care so much and struggle so often with these issues, read my book Exvangelical & Beyond: How American Christianity Went Radical and the Movement That’s Fighting Back.

You can support my work with a paid subscription. I donate 25% of net proceeds.

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Hello and welcome to Evangelical, a show that, for over 8 years now, explores the world inside and outside the evangelical subculture. I’m your host, Blake Chastain.

I’m recording this episode on January 20, 2025. It’s Martin Luther King Jr Day, as well as Trump’s second inauguration. The mood is very different than it was during the first inauguration. During that first go-round, there was a lot of anger and shock that someone as dishonorable, vulgar, and loose with the truth. In retrospect, it seems like a much more innocent time. In the intervening time, Trump has completely transformed the Republican Party. His first administration was prone to normalizing chaos. He stacked the Supreme Court with a conservative majority. He completely fumbled the COVID-19 pandemic. He incited an insurrection. He stole confidential documents. And throughout all this, very few people within his own party tried to hold him accountable to any measure of ethics or commitment to anything beyond himself; those that tried to were ostracized, called RINOs, and forced out of the good graces of Trump’s political machine. When he won re-election in 2024, there seemed to be a resignation to the reality, but also a quiet resolve to meet that reality.

But oddly, Trump himself is the constant here. What’s surprising is the way that the rest of our politics has molded around him. Trump has emboldened the most powerful in our society to be even more blatant about their goals. The masks are off and gathering dust. In 2022, during Elon Musk’s messy acquisition of Twitter that he tried to back out of, Elon claimed that he wanted to “upset the left and right equally.” By 2024, he Elon said he was “dark, Gothic MAGA” and spent over an estimated $250 million on Trump’s campaign. Mark Zuckerberg, who has made a concerted effort with his latest edgelord-coded rebrand—getting into MMA, streetwear, and lying up a storm on Rogan—has gone all-in, too, completely gutting the fact-checking apparatus that Meta had built to manage misinformation, and rolling back hate-speech guidelines, such as making explicit cutouts for calling LGBT people mentally ill. Meta has also decided that its apps are for politics again now that a conservative administration is in power, after downgrading what they considered “political” content during the Biden administration, and done some blatant culture-war type things like removing the transgender and queer theming options from Facebook Messenger.

It’s not just Elon and Zuck, though. The entire tech oligarchy is falling in line, paying to play by donating at least $1M to Trump’s inauguration. Companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and their respective CEOs have all lined up to play ball. While it’s not a surprise, it’s also not encouraging.

This very show has its own relationship with Trump. I released the first episode during the 2016 Republican National Convention, when Trump secured the nomination. At the time, I believed that the evangelicals who had such a formative influence on me would not give Trump their vote; history has proven otherwise, with them supporting him at a steady 80% in the three elections he has been part of.

The truth is that the most powerful factions in government, and increasingly, the corporate philosophies of some of our most influential and powerful companies, are far more palatable for and amenable to conservative white evangelical notions than it was when this show started. And I am not sure where things go from here. Over the weekend, access to TikTok was disrupted due to a law that demanded the app be sold to a US-based company or face a ban that was upheld by the Supreme Court. The ban was ostensibly due to national security concerns, though the details of those concerns have never been made available to the public. Service to TikTok was reinstated after Trump insisted he would find a solution and after TikTok’s leadership made fawning comments about Trump.

By the time this is posted, Trump will have already started taking action through a flurry of executive orders that will disrupt the American way of life. In the past, activists would take to a platform like Twitter to raise concern, organize, and develop public responses, with the opportunity to create counter publics. One thing I’m not certain about is where such counter publics can take root today, and whether they will have the same opportunity to grow as they did previously. What does it mean when the owners of so many of our supposed public squares align themselves with thin-skinned individuals like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, who show no concern for bias or altering their algorithms to whatever they dictate?

But the uncertainty of this moment also presents an opportunity. There is already some momentum behind Bluesky, the twitter alternative that began as a research project at Twitter itself that is based the AT protocol. There is an effort called Free Our Feeds that wants to build upon the same AT Protocol. Bluesky is launching its own video feed, and third party apps like Flashes are sparking a lot of interest, even as established companies like Flipboard create apps like Surf to build upon the fediverse. I’m not sure if any of these services will see mass adoption. But there is a hunger among the most online of us to have a bit more independence over our digital experiences, free from the whims of billionaires who have made a habit of showing their disdain for the people who make their networks worthwhile.

There is much more at stake than whether or not a noisy online public can find its place online. We face multiple simultaneous crises—a housing shortage, food insecurity, the changing legal status of immigrants, climate crises, and further threats to democracy here in the US and abroad, amongst others. But one of the crises we face is an information crisis—one that is only looking to get harder and harder to navigate. We will need a counterpublic, or multiple counter publics, to respond.

1/21/25: Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivor’s Stories of Conversion Therapy

Buy on Bookshop.org

When Meta announced last week that they would cease fact-checking in the United States and make their Hateful Conduct policies much more lax, they carved out allowances for attacks on LGBTQ people. GLAAD highlighted several examples of what is now allowed, but I want to focus on this one:

• Allowances for attacks on LGBTQ people, women, and immigrants: Specifically, Meta now states: “People sometimes use sex- or gender-exclusive language when discussing access to spaces often limited by sex or gender, such as access to bathrooms, specific schools, specific military, law enforcement, or teaching roles, and health or support groups. Other times, they call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality. Finally, sometimes people curse at a gender in the context of a romantic break-up. Our policies are designed to allow room for these types of speech.”

People raised in non-affirming homes who were sent to conversion therapy—a discredited and traumatic practice of trying to “treat” queerness that anyone who spent time in evangelical circles is familiar with—know the damage that comes with being told their religion finds their sexuality unacceptable.

People have been sharing their stories of survival, recovery, and reclaimed joy for years now. But they must keep being told. I am glad that Lucas F.W. Wilson has compiled these stories. They will become a lifeline to the people who need them.

This type of work is so important it’s why for the past three years I’ve donated 25% of net proceeds from paid subscriptions each year to the Religious Exemption Accountability Project & White Homework. When you support my work here, you also support their work. You can read more about why I do this in this post from 2021:

If you find that work valuable, consider signing up for a paid subscription:

2/18/25: Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy

Buy on Bookshop.org

Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers was an incredibly insightful book when it released in 2020, and I was privileged to feature Stewart in my limited-run series Powers & Principalities. (She also graciously provided a blurb for my own book.) I have an advance copy of this book, and I am eager to see how it will inform the public of these massive, influential—and yet somehow still underestimated and poorly understood—networks of influence and power.

The reporting in this book will help interested readers understand how we reached this political moment.

Let me know what books you might be anticipating in the comments.

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