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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

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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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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.

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.

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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.

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

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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

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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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(Yes, this post contains affiliate links; yes, if you haven’t picked up my book yet, please do so! I’m posting this from my phone while traveling for the US holiday.)

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

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This book is arguably Octavia Butler’s most famous work, and there’s good reason why. The novel, set in a collapsed American society affected by climate change, envisions a new form of religion called Earthseed. It draws upon our capacity to “shape God,” and build constructive spiritual practices. So good for so many reasons.

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, by Timothy Morton

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Timothy Morton’s concept of “Hyperobjects” was instrumental in helping me understand the complexity of what white evangelicalism has become over the last two centuries. (A hyperobject can be used to describe something vast, all-encompassing, and hard to pin down, like climate change, or a religion.) The very concept, whether seen as literal or metaphorical, is powerful—especially with the way it can transform the apocalyptic thinking that so many of us still have rolling around in our heads.

The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, by Willie James Jennings

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This book plumbs the history of the concepts of race and racist thought, and how they are tangled up in Christianity. The introduction begins with a powerful personal story—of white evangelists coming to his childhood home, completely ignorant that his family was heavily involved in the Black church nearby and ignorant of the Black church overall—and shows what it took to get to that point.

Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, by Shannon Vallor

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This book is ambitious. It is a comparative study of three different virtues ethics traditions—Aristotelian, Buddhist, and Confucian—and how they can help us adapt in societies undergoing rapid technological changes. Vallor proposes that we must cultivate “technomoral wisdom” that allows us to respond to social change in prudent ways. Vallor also has a new book on AI called The AI Mirror, which is also instructive.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, by Gretchen McCulloch

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This book is a wonderful look at how the internet has affected how we use language. It takes internet culture seriously but is not self-serious—the enthusiasm the author has for the topic is apparent and makes reading it a joy.

Thanks for reading—now get to reading these books, and let me know what you’re reading over the weekend in the comments.

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I published my last post a few days after the election results, and in the intervening time I’ve really tried to think about what perspectives I have to offer in this moment. And what I’ve been drawn toward for quite some time is a more explicit focus on books.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been slowly building out different verticals for this publication. If you head to the website, you’ll see different sections under The Post-Evangelical Post:

• ❌ Exvangelical (my long-running podcast)

• ⚖️ Powers & Principalities (my season of Christian nationalism-focused interviews from 2020)

• 📱Shaped by Tools, for my rare pontificating about technology & media

• 📚The Good Books, for author interviews.

So to that end, I’ll be expanding my focus on author interviews, book recommendations, and other book-related content, under the banner of The Good Books.

Ironically (to me at least), this means that I am finally forcing myself to both learn and publish more video content. I’m loath to film myself, but aside from the seeming rejuvenation of text-based social media on Bluesky, most folks are best reached through video. So yes, please follow me on YouTube and Instagram, if you’re on those platforms—and I’ll be posting things here, of course.

I know that reading alone will not “save” us.1 But reading is how I make sense of the world and its history, and as I wrote in the introduction to Exvangelical & Beyond, “I use history in the same way journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones describes it: “History revealed the building blocks of the world I now inhabited, explaining how communities, institutions, relationships came to be…. It provided the key to decode all that I saw around me.”

I may love reading more than I love writing. Even when I am watching a show or movie or something online, it’s usually a turn of phrase moves me more than the visuals. And I have loved that my public work has connected me to authors willing to talk to me about their books.

Writing a book is not a flippant task: it takes dedication, and focus, and a helluva lot of work. I try to honor that work in each author interview I do, and I will do my utmost to carry that same posture into the rest of this work, too.

PROMOTIONAL BREAK2

Are you looking for an IRL gathering of ex-evangelicals & other like-minded folks? Check out Content Warning, coming to Atlanta, GA in February 2025 - and use promo code EXVIE10 at checkout for $10 off.

Buy IRL Ticket

Buy Livestream Ticket

Content Warning is a unique event with 20+ collaborators who are podcasters, authors, therapists, speakers, and creators that want to reinvigorate the conversation happening around sex and sexuality in faith deconstruction spaces where people are healing from purity culture.

This event is designed to bring forward intersectional topics that we don’t always see discussed in these spaces. We’ll have panel discussions, facilitated conversations, and even a livestream option for those who can’t make it in person. Our hope is to make this an annual gathering in various locations as we continue striving to build inclusive community.

Don’t expect a deluge of content just yet—this is a holiday week, after all—and don’t expect me to completely ‘abandon’ my other areas of interest. Think of this as a more explicit expansion of my work.

As I wrote on Bluesky recently, part of me thought that my book would serve as a capstone to my work on the topics of evangelical Christianity, deconstruction, and all the myriad ways it influences personal and social life. But given where things are headed, I imagine I’ll be talking and writing about it for a long while still.

Still, the exvangelical counterpublic is robust now. People have a shared language to use to discuss their experiences in evangelicalism, and their experiences leaving it. They have sources for news and commentary like Straight White American Jesus. There are podcasts and Instagrammers and TikTokkers. There are books across multiple genres. It has its own momentum and is continuing to expand in a variety of directions.

If you’re a longtime reader (or you’ve read my book) you know that I think a lot about media environments—both about how they function as well as how they impact us. This piece from 2022 illustrates some of that thinking, and also has some of the seeds of what I would eventually write about in Exvangelical & Beyond:

So this new endeavor is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I will continue to interview authors who write about religion & society, but I hope that I can expand my coverage to include other works of nonfiction, as well as other genres like science fiction and comics and graphic novels. I am also deeply curious about how we read and write—books like Reader, Come Home and Book Was There fascinate me—and may cover topics related to media literacy, “echo chambers,” and even things like ereaders and other technological aspects of reading today.3

I intend to start small. Later this week, I’ll share a Recommended Reading list of books that informed my own that will serve as a supplement to the index at the end of my book. That will be posted here and to my Bookshop storefront.

Later on, I may break out some of these things into its own podcast feed & YouTube playlist.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less of a poster and become a bit precious about what I publish. In this next phase I may have to shift back into that “learn in public” type of phase of learning new skills. Keep in mind, I do all this work in addition to my full-time job (I shared a little about that in the embeded Note below). If you want to help accelerate my output, you can support me directly by upgrading your subscription.

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I’m excited to read more books, to speak to more authors, to try new things, and to explore them in conversation with you. Now it’s time to get back to the TBR pile.

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In the US, Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer. High schoolers are graduating! Grills are dusted off from their winter slumber! Stores have another excuse to have a sale! And (hopefully) book nerds have some peace and quiet to dive into a book.

Here are some recent releases that have caught my eye and are on my pile. I read multiple books at once. You can find all of these on my “Reading Now” Bookshop.org list (yes, these are affiliate links). Titles are listed here in alphabetical order by author last name.

Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation by Christa Brown

Christa Brown was featured in chapter 6 of Disobedient Women, a book I’ve highlighted before. This is her book, and I’m excited to give this a read. Brown is a longtime advocate for survivors of abuse that occurs in Southern Baptist Convention churches and organizations, and is a survivor herself.

Who Is A True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture by David W. Congdon.

It’s a national election year in the US, and despite the mainstream press getting wiser about how evangelicals act politically (as well as how they use language), one aspect of our political discourse that has regrettably stayed the same, and that’s people accusing one another of “not really being Christian.” ( has been a squeaky wheel on this point for a very long time—if someone says they are a Christian, take them at their word. )

Congdon takes the question of who gets to “claim” the mantle of Christianity seriously.

The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking by Shannon Vallor

Vallor’s book Technology & The Virtues is one of my favorite books that I’ve read in the last few years—I draw upon it in my forthcoming book. That book tackled how various virtue ethics traditions could be adapted to respond to a changing technosocial landscape. This book tackles AI directly—and uses the metaphor of a mirror to explore the promise & peril of building dependencies on AI.

Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy by

Cait West’s memoir tackles her own journey away from Christian patriarchy, which is also known under other terms such as “quiverfull,” or the “stay at home daughter movement.” I am early into the audiobook version of the book, which I also recommend. Memoirs like these do such a powerful job of portraying what life is like under fundamentalist theology and practice. It’s not abstract. It affects people’s lives.

Bonus Pick: The Krakoan Era of X-Men Comics

Since 2019, the X-Men line of comics have been operating in what comics fans call a “status quo” where mutants have had their own island country known as Krakoa. (I wrote about it at length here.) That status quo, which has been a ton of fun and lead to a lot of interesting stories, is ending in the next month or so. But if you like comics, high-concept sci-fi, and soap opera-inflected entertainment, pick up the book that started it all, House of X / Powers of X.

What are you reading? Let me know in the comments.

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Commerce Corner

Reading books and talking to authors is my favorite thing to do, and one of the greatest privileges I’ve had as a podcaster. I want to do more. I currently have less than 100 paid subscribers. If you value my work, including my author interviews, please consider subscribing.

I have a Notion database that is now woefully out of date where I once tried to track my reading. The header image for that database was this frame from the classic Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last,” where the main character awakens to a world that has ended, and he is finally alone with a pile of books. Because it’s The Twilight Zone, at the very end he breaks his glasses and can never read them.

Our world ends anew every day, but there is still time for books.

The last half of 2023 was very busy for me as I worked to finish my own manuscript, and in that time there were some really wonderful books published that I wasn’t able to feature on the podcast or here in the newsletter. There are even more that will continue to come out over the next several months as well. Here is a small sampling of some of those books, and I’ll continue to do this moving forward.

Here are some recent books I’m looking forward to reading/keep reading:

The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by

This book releases today, and I’ll release my interview on Exvangelical with Sarah later this week. In the meantime, you can listen to Sarah talk about the book on Fresh Air—and while you’re at it, check out talking about Christian nationalism on Fresh Air as well.

Devout: A Memoir of Doubt by Anna Gazmarian

This book is next on my TBR pile—it just came out last week, and it’s a memoir dedicated to faith crises and mental health struggles. I’m happy to see these types of stories being published.

God Gave Rock & Roll To You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music by .

This book by Leah Payne was just published in February. There are so many ways to write about religion & society, and I am excited to get to this one in short order. My only regret was this wasn’t already published when I was working on my book (more on that soon!), because I’m sure I would have cited it.

Hell Is a World Without You by

This novel by Jason Kirk, published in December 2023, will drop you into the tumultuous headspace of a teenage evangelical. The inner monologue that Kirk employs for the main character is sometimes a little too real—especially the intrusive thoughts that take the form of being “convicted by the Spirit.” Kirk donated the first three months of sales to The Trevor Project, which is incredible.

Disobedient Women: How A Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning by

I have been reading Stankorb’s book, published in August 2023, for quite some time. It’s well-reported, inspiring, and heart-breaking all at once.

That will do it for this post - let me know what books you’re excited about in the comments!

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If you haven’t already, please subscribe to keep up with my work:

I’m still easing back into recording after a difficult 2023; I’m also wrapping up copyedits on my book, which I will be happy to tell you more about as the release date gets closer.

I was also compelled to re-share this episode after reading the incredulous piece by John Fea in The Atlantic called “What I Wish More People Knew About American Evangelicalism.”

I say it’s incredulous for several reasons—not least of which because Fea lifts up James Dobson as an example of “the good in evangelicalism,” even though his emphasis on corporal punishment and staunch anti-LGBTQ+ stance has been incredibly damaging to generations of children and parents—because he credits his own father listening to Dobson with making his father “a better father and husband.” What’s truly surprising about these anecdotes is that Fea later writes that he himself “did not take James Dobson’s approach to child-rearing…Nor did we listen to much of his marriage advice, especially as it related to male headship and female submission.” (Insert millennial whaaa??? gif here)

The piece argues that, because in recent years there have been an increasing number of books that have criticized American evangelicalism, he has not seen stories like his father’s represented. He then uses this as a reason to criticize two successful authors, Kristin Kobes Du Mez & Beth Allison Barr:

Du Mez’s and Barr’s work is part of a narrative—perpetuated by scholars, memoirists, and journalists—that evangelicalism is bad for America. Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and sexual abuse have given the “good news” of the Gospel a bad name. Some of this criticism is necessary, a form of what the Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny calls “moral chemotherapy.” She describes it as a “reaction to a potentially life-threatening distortion in ordinary, day-to-day moral discussion” that “threatens to undermine the very possibility of moral and political reasoning within the community.”

But some of it is unfair or disproportionate. Journalists don’t sufficiently distinguish Christian nationalists from conservative evangelicals who simply and reasonably want to bring their faith to bear on public life. Brands and platforms are built upon calling out evangelicals for their sins. Overemphasizing the negative is also unhelpful to anyone outside the world of evangelicalism who wishes to understand why so many Americans are part of this movement.

Americans deserve a fuller accounting of evangelicalism’s role in our country’s life. By focusing solely on the moments when evangelicals behave badly, we miss the way most evangelicals practice their faith. Every day, you can find evangelicals serving their neighbors, addressing injustice, promoting the common good, and doing the things necessary to keep American democracy strong and compassionate. In the same way that the anti-evangelical narrative about gender, patriarchy, and racism fails to explain my father’s story, it also fails to account for these moments.

This is truly perplexing, as Fea wants to have it both ways. He’s displeased with criticism, and yet he wants to hold bad actors accountable—something that is done in part by focusing “on the moments when evangelicals behave badly,” as many more people are doing.

This increased scrutiny, criticism, and attention on evangelical behavior in political and social life is a direct result of their actions in political and social life, and it is often levied by current evangelicals and exvangelicals/post-evangelicals who know how the evangelical world works. This criticism is viewed as persecution, a key part of the American evangelical worldview. Melani McAlister is even more specific, saying that it is the combination of enchanted internationalism and victim identification:

Both enchanted internationalism and victim identification are double-edged. They allow American evangelicals to construct an image of themselves through a particular image of others. Those others are simultaneously glorified and abject; they are positioned as less powerful, but also as less encumbered by materialism. American believers’ identification with idealized and suffering Christians elsewhere also allows them to see themselves as persecuted by a secular American public, making them fellow victims in a global assault on Christianity. This sense of identification can also mobilize an ethic of responsibility. Although American evangelicals often have exhibited a sense of benevolent self-satisfaction in their ability to help needy and presumably pliant sufferers, they also have identified with believers who were poor or persecuted, and have claimed them as Christian family. It is through an embrace of both enchantment and victimization—orientations that are religious, political, and emotional all at once—that American evangelicals have come to understand their place in the world.” (emphasis mine)

McAlister, Melani. The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (p. 12). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Criticism is not equal to persecution.

I take issue with other parts of Fea’s piece - for instance, where he says that many evangelicals will “hold their nose and vote for Donald Trump,” omitting those who will gladly vote for him, and who may have heard a pastor say “Let’s Go Brandon” from the pulpit. Even in this piece alleging that the whole story isn’t being told, he is not telling the whole story.

As Du Mez wrote herself, in response to the article:

No single book tells “the whole story.” One person’s story shouldn’t cancel another’s. Some stories have been kept hidden for a very long time, by design.

Let’s tell Fea’s dad’s story. John could tell it himself—I’m sure plenty of publishers would be lining up for something like that. And let’s also tell the stories of survivors. Let’s tell stories of exemplary leaders and corrupt leaders, of good intentions and unintended consequences, of blind spots and power grabs, gatekeeping and cowardice, of those in charge and of those kicked out, paying attention to power dynamics and tensions, to resistance and complicity. And let’s grapple with how all of these stories exist within the movement side-by-side, within communities and within churches, and sometimes within families.

Nearly three years ago I wrote a bold piece called “The End of White Evangelical Hegemony.” In that piece I wrote that evangelicals had lost control over the national narrative of religion in America. But that is not the sole aspect of hegemony, and likely not even the most important. Evangelicals, especially elite evangelicals, may feel persecuted. But they still hold considerable sway over 1 of 2 major parties, are well-funded and well-connected, and one of their own is second in line for the presidency. They are still part of the dominant public, even as a counterpublic has arisen to criticize them.

That counterpublic is an essential part of telling “the whole story” of American evangelicalism.

I’ll have more to say in this vein in the coming weeks. I also plan to write about the fact that Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett wrote a whole book chapter about a blog I wrote years ago—but that will come have to come later.

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Re: the Substack of it all

I’m still looking to move off of Substack, but each viable option comes with new expenses (no one offers the same terms as Substack - 10% of revenue for access to all features). Once it is economically feasible, I will migrate. In the meantime you can still support my work with a subscription (free or paid), and if you sign up for the Exvangelical Patreon I’ll comp you here.

I love high-concept sci-fi, and for the last several years my favorite sci-fi has been happening in Marvel’s X-Men line of comics. In 2019, Jonathan Hickman rebooted the franchise with interlocking series, House of X and Powers of X (pronounced “House of Ex, Powers of Ten” and colloquially called HoxPox).

The reboot kicks off with some big changes:

1. Mutants have established their own island country called Krakoa,

2. They have created life-saving medicines they will give to the human populace in exchange for recognizing their country’s sovereignty,

3. They have defeated death by combining various mutant powers that backup a person’s psyche and recreating clone bodies—a reliable form of resurrection.

They announce these changes (except for defeating death; that is a closely-guarded secret) in dramatic fashion, sending a telepathic message to the entire world that “while you slept, the world changed.” They offer amnesty to all mutants, and that brings some prior villains into the fold. From the very beginning, these drastic changes bring about a long-standing conflict between mutants, baseline humans, and machines (this is Marvel, and there are several android-type entities that have gained sentience—including the Sentinels, long-time X-Men foes).

I think the Krakoan Era of the X-Books have worked so well is that from the beginning, Hickman established a writers room and allowed other writers to work in the vast sandbox he built. The parameters were wide enough that it enabled all sorts of stories: mystical stories in books like Excalibur, black-ops stories of protecting their new nation-state in X-Force, superhero stories in X-Men, space-faring stories in New Mutants, political stories in X-Corp, and so on.

Further, the cumulative ideas underlying the concept were so novel that writers & artists were able to put these decades-old characters through their paces and push them to change. This is no small feat in “Big Two” comics (Marvel & DC), where the illusion of change is part & parcel of the whole endeavor. And it is wholly appropriate for a franchise whose key feature is mutation.

One of my favorite stories, which has worked its way across multiple books, centers on Nightcrawler. Like most characters who’ve been around nearly 50 years (he debuted in 1975), he has a convoluted backstory. The son of a demon & a mutant with stereotypically-demonic physical features, he has been consistently portrayed as a theologically-curious and philosophically-inclined character. In fact, he was at one point a Catholic priest, though that story has been retconned.1

At the start of the Krakoan Era, Nightcrawler (aka Kurt Wagner) begins exploring the need for a new religious or spiritual practice for a new state. In the first issue of theWay of X series, author Si Spurrier & artists Robert Quinn (pencils/inks), Javier Tataglia (colors), and Clayton Cowles (letters) show what’s at stake: Nightcrawler goes on a mission with young mutants who do not fear death, he witnesses a ritual known as the Crucible in which depowered mutants are killed in ritual battle and are resurrected with their powers restored, and a super-scientist named Dr. Nemesis challenges him on what faith means in his changed world:

Dr Nemesis: “Alien life, metaphysical entities and the overthrow of mortality itself. What does a credulous little believer do when all the big questions have been answered?”

Nightcrawler: “…I suppose they…they find better questions.”

Dr. Nemesis: “That’s more like it.”

Confronted with this reality, Nightcrawler sets aside the idea of finding a unified belief, and pursues a new way of life.

This journey takes many twists and turns. As is common in contemporary comics, The Way of X paved the way for another book called Legion of X, which features the character Legion, Professor X’s son, who has all-powerful dissociative identities—a helluva metaphor for mental illness, among other things.

Throughout Legion’s publication history, he has gone from an out-of-control threat to a character with profound self-awareness. Throughout both Way and Legion of X, Legion and Nightcrawler serve as supporting characters for one another.

Eventually, Nightcrawler discovers his new philosophy he wishes to share with his fellow mutants, a people defined most essentially by their capacity for change. He calls it The Spark:

“This is not a mutant religion.

This is a way of living. Of loving and expressing and fighting and being. It moves us to adapt without restraint. It does not require prayer nor veneration. It does not demand that you put away your old gods. The spark is not jealous.

The spark is innovation and risk and mischief and courage.

If we allow it to guide us -- if we invite it to inspire our thoughts and actions -- I truly believe it will save us. The spark is anathema to meaninglessness.

The spark is creative. The spark is patient. The spark is bright and beautiful, despite having no form or mind. In truth, the spark is barely real at all. The spark is just an idea.

And yet?

The spark will burn to ash anyone who $*&$ with the right of mutants to pursue happiness.”

There is something beautiful captured here. A spark is small, but can spread—not unlike a mustard seed. A spark is bright, and should not hide under a bushel. A spark is warm, but its warmth fades in a moment if it is not fed and tended to.

I love that, within the context of the story, Nightcrawler fashions this philosophy out of his own experiences of faith and doubt and all the points of life between those two binaries. He is Catholic, yes; he is the son of a demon, yes; he is a mutant, yes; he is himself, yes.

The gift that these fictional religions give us is that we can see our own experiences mirrored in them without all the associations with our faith of origin (this is also the gift of fiction overall). Wrap it in something fantastical like being the mutant superhero Catholic priest son of a demon, and suddenly the multitudes of our own experience don’t seem so far-fetched.

Yes, these comics also rule because they are fun superhero shenanigans, and honestly there is more to the stories of Nightcrawler & Legion.

But if this has sparked your interest, go read them for yourself.2

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Mary Oliver’s poetry burrows. That’s the best way I can explain its effect on the reader, tunneling inside their mind and making a home for her words.

I learned about Mary Oliver somewhere on Twitter when someone posted “Wild Geese” and it spoke to some unexpressed need that had yet to be comforted.

The first declarative line, “You do not have to be good.” is revolutionary for anyone raised with the doctrines of original sin and substitutionary atonement—regardless of where you fall on the Arminian-Calvinist spectrum, and no matter how much one believes in grace, there is a nagging guilt that you caused Christ’s suffering simply by existing. While there are other theological models that position the crucifixion and redemption differently, the spectre of that first understanding lingers like an unwanted ghost.

Here is the poem in full:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

This entire summer, I have been wrestling with my supposed “lack of productivity” here and on my podcast, as demands closer to home make it difficult to follow or be part of any broader online discourse.

One day, I spontaneously wrote “You do not have to be online,” and recognized the cadence & word choice as Mary Oliver’s. So I followed this notion a little further, and wrote an adaptation of the first few lines of “Wild Geese,”

Echoing “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be online.
You do not have to post on your feed
more than a hundred times in the hope of engagement.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
     be where it is.
Tell me about despair, yours; I’ll tell you mine in time.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Adaptation by Blake Chastain

The line “you only have to let the soft animal of your body” is unchanged, because what could be more comforting than those words?

One of the most salient critiques of digital media is the way it is ‘discarnate’ and can make us less aware of our bodies and direct environments. (And if this evokes an air of religiosity for you, you’re right: McLuhan’s own concern about this tendency in media was rooted in his Catholicism - I spoke with McLuhan biographer Nick Ripatrizone about this last year.)

Evangelicalism fosters an unhealthy sense of obligation, rooted not necessarily in a benevolent desire to give back or to serve, but in a sense of insurmountable debt in the form of sin-and in the cost paid by Christ in the substitutionary atonement model. I use the word “sense” here because it is nebulous, emotional, and imprecise, but ever-present nonetheless (just like a functioning physical sense). For some people, including myself, this sense of obligation transforms into guilt and shame.

Yet even as we move out of evangelical communities and practices, beliefs linger. That same emotional sense of obligation-turned-guilt-and-shame can be transferred to another sphere of life, even if it makes no logical sense.

If you are or were involved in ‘discourse’ at some point, especially if you were a terminally online Twitter or Instagram user, it can be comforting to remember: you do not have to be online.

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Over the weekend, I speed-read (sped-read?) through The Extreme Self by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. It (along with its predecessor The Age of Earthquakes), is a spiritual sequel of sorts to McLuhan & Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.

McLuhan communicated in maxims and axioms—definitive & declarative statements intended to elicit a response in the reader and listener. The authors of The Extreme Self channel the same energy, and utilize the same sort of artbook graphic design that as McLuhan & Fiore, but updated for the internet age.

Re: Mcluhan - As a long aside, whether you agree with McLuhan or not is immaterial (he is even alleged to have said “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say,”). I understand McLuhan first and foremost as an agitator who uses language to get certain ideas stuck in your craw—why the hell does ‘electric man lives mythically and all-at-once,’ or ‘first we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us’ and other imagery live rent-free in my head?

He has been valorized for helping form the field of media studies, and can be rightly criticized for his blind spots—work that has been built upon in collections like Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan. In one instance of McLuhan agitating a reader, Jeff Jarvis recounts speaking to eminent book historian Elizabeth Eisenstein in his recent book The Gutenberg Parenthesis:

“In the early 1960s, Elizabeth Eisenstein, then a professor teaching history at American University, read Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy. “It blew my mind,” she told me in an interview for an earlier book. On the one hand, Eisenstein wanted to refute McLuhan when he “seemed to take mischievous pleasure in the loss of familiar historical perspectives.” She was offended that he dispensed “with chronological sequence and historical context altogether.” On the other hand, his theses intrigued her as “I had long been dissatisfied with prevailing explanations for the political and intellectual revolutions of Early Modern times.” She wanted to do proper research into the effect of printing. But as she began work, Eisenstein was shocked that “I could not find a single book, or even a sizeable article which attempted to survey the consequences of the fifteenth-century communications shift.” “For the next two years,” she told me, “I was a little crazy.” She was critical of McLuhan and wary of being dismissed as McLuhanite.”

The Extreme Self is an even more direct descendant of McLuhan’s decades of agitation, and it has agitated me over the past couple of days.

In a period where Elon has so successfully broken the spell of what was once Twitter, when we can see the media environments we inhabit with a bit more clarity, I wonder if it will give us an opportunity to re-evaluate how the internet makes us think and feel.

For instance, how quickly fatigue sets in (I am already tired of the Barbenheimer discourse):

In the same way that The Medium is the Massage agitates, so does The Extreme Self. It made these broad pronouncements about the political right and left:

Q: What is micro-othering?

A: Micro-othering is the use of ever-thinner slices of identity to define, deplatform, and limit the agency of others.

Micro-othering has turned the Left into a circular firing squad - to the glee of the Right.

‘Call-out culture’ feels like the loudest form of culture today.

Calling for nuance has become the same as admitting guilt and complicity.

Q: What is microfascism?

A: Microfascism is when online aggression spills into real world aggression - tiny or large acts of aggression and confrontation used to define, deplatform, and limit the agency of others.

Microfascism has turned the Right into a circus act - to the disgust of the Left.

‘Outrage culture’ feels like the loudest form of culture today.

It’s actually astonishing how much the Left and Right have in common.

One does not have to fully agree with this premise. But it is compelling, and speaks to at least some of our personal experiences with making people upset online.

Other koans include the following:

I do not know why “the opposite of invisibility is no longer being seen” feels so true. But it does.

I think the reason why these books, both The Extreme Self and The Medium is the Massage, are so effective is their use of synecdoche. Our experience within digital culture (‘digital culture’ being an increasingly redundant phrase) is so pervasive that only by isolating & exaggerating parts of it can one hope to signify the whole.

I don’t know that one can escape ‘digital culture’ any more than one can escape the realities of climate change and the consequences of fundamentalist beliefs. Which is why I find myself drawn to these books. They don’t make life easier, but they at least make them a little more comprehensible.

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Hi, all. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, other parts of my work & personal life are demanding more of my time at the moment, so my regular publishing cadence has been thrown off. So it goes.

I’m working on some things that aren’t quite ready for primetime, but in the interim I thought I’d share part of my current reading list.

The icon of my ever-expanding reading list is, of course, this still frame from the “Time Enough At Last” episode of The Twilight Zone:

My reading follows both my interests and my moods, and I dip into multiple books simultaneously—nonfiction, especially. Fiction can carry me away, but I take my time with nonfiction.

Here’s what’s on the pile right now. (Note: yes, those are affiliate links to Amazon & Bookshop.org)

Reading: Books & Ebooks

Asian American Apostate by R. Scott Okamoto.

's memoir of teaching at an evangelical university is incisive and insightful. (I said as much when I provided a blurb for the book; disclosure: we’re friends.) Okamato shares the difficulties, frustrations, and joys of being tasked with teaching in a place that has such firm rules and expectations about what is deemed “acceptable.” It gives substance to the spoken and unspoken cultural pressures of evangelical higher-ed, and highlights the ways Whiteness permeates and governs such spaces. I am re-reading it in advance of an interview with Scott for Exvangelical.

An excerpt:

Bookshop | Amazon

The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand

For a variety of reasons, the evangelical example of masculinity didn’t resonate with me because I couldn’t perform it, and often didn’t want to even if it would afford more acceptance in male spaces. 's book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine builds upon books like bell hooks’ The Will to Change. Where hooks highlights the emotional consequences of patriarchal masculinity, Strand utilizes mythologies, stories, and fables to expand what the masculine means, and reframes it as something less concerned with asserting dominance than with fostering growth and seeking exploration.

An excerpt:

Bookshop | Amazon

Finding the Fool by Meg Jones Wall

I’m in a stage where a lot “spiritual” things don’t resonate with me as they once did. Those nerve endings are shot. That being said, I still remain fascinated with symbolism & metaphor, and tarot is chock full of it. I also appreciate that, just as the enneagram before it, many exvangelicals have turned to tools like tarot to become familiar with intuitive knowledge after being told to not trust one’s self. Finding the Fool byis going to serve as my personal 101-course into this tradition.1

An excerpt:

Bookshop | Amazon

Listening: Audiobooks

I’m currently slowly listening through The Heartland by Kristin L. Hoganson. It’s a fascinating look at the history of what we now call the Midwest, and why it is associated with “the heartland.” As a lifelong Midwesterner, I have a well-worn chip on my shoulder about being considered a “flyover state,” as if culture and history does not and did not happen here. But more importantly, learning this history is also valuable (for me) as a way of reckoning with Whiteness.

Bookshop | Amazon

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What are you reading? Let me know in the comments or on Notes.

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We do not worship God. 
We perceive and attend God. 
We learn from God. 
With forethought and work, 
We shape God. 
n the end, we yield to God. 
We adapt and endure, 
For we are Earthseed 
And God is Change. 

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Butler, Octavia E.. Earthseed: The Complete Series (p. 26). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition. 

Some time around 2020 or 2021, Octavia Butler began to be mentioned by a number of people I followed online. Given the timeframe, I think that it was likely due to the uptick in attention given to racial justice following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests that erupted across the globe.

Butler’s body of work was already prophetic, and had been (re)introduced to a broader audience within the context of adrienne marie brown’s book series that began with Emergent Strategy; brown’s work is highly influenced by Butler’s vision.

For me, it was one of those planted seeds that I didn’t get around to for a while, then all of a sudden Butler seemed inescapable: a graphic novel adaptation of Kindred was made available by my library, and then her work just kept getting mentioned. Eventually, I started listening to Parable of the Sower while mowing the lawn.

Reader, I wasn’t ready.

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And come see me, Brad Onishi of SWAJ, and Tim Whitaker of The New Evangelicals in Philly on 2/11!

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I first discovered Vonnegut’s writing while in undergrad. I attended Indiana Wesleyan, and while I graduated with a writing major, I never took any lit classes that actually assigned Vonnegut.1

I’m fairly certain that my first Vonnegut book was, predictably, Slaughterhouse Five, which I loved. There was something about his prose that was so economical, but evoked a type of emotion that other minimalist authors like Hemingway couldn’t touch. I had read A Farewell to Arms, but that pessimism was different than the fatalism I found in Vonnegut.

Many of Vonnegut’s books are about protagonists stuck in inescapable circumstances: the unstuck-in-time Billy Pilgrim, Howard Campbell, Jr. awaiting his trial for war crimes, Jonah on assignment in San Lorenzo, the entire goddam universe experiencing locked-in syndrome for 10 years in Timequake. But it’s in Cat’s Cradle where Vonnegut gives his characters a religion to cope with the circumstances they find themselves in. That religion is Bokononism.

Bokononism is a false religion. It makes no bones about that, even within the fictional text:

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I originally learned of the series from a WIRED profile of Palmer published last February, and just wrapped up reading the last book in the series last week. It has dominated my imagination for some time.

The plot of the series, which takes place in the 2400s, is hard to summarize—but the world in which it takes place has several key features:

• the defining moments of the 22st century were in the aftermath of The Church Wars, after fundamentalists went to war and religious houses, meetings, and proselytizing were banned globally.

• simultaneously, autonomous hypersonic eco-friendly flying cars made differences of distance and geography moot—the whole globe could be reached in under 2 hours.

• as people became less bound by geography, they formed “Hives” instead of geographic nations—Humanists (people who are into human achievement), Masons (people who like order & hierarchy), Utopians (futurists), Gordians (nerds of the highest order), Cousins (caretakers), Mitsubishi-Greenpeace (real estate barons), and Europeans (who have a vestige of monarchy). Some geographic nations still exist, but this is how most people identify. They have their own laws, and it gets more complex from there. (A similar idea is explored in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.)

• The nuclear family is superseded by the concept of a ‘bash’—larger groups of people that live together, in various couplings & configurations, and finally

• In addition to banning organized religion, public discussion of gender is also banned—everyone is referred to with they/them pronouns (the primary POV character eschews this tradition and uses gendered pronouns, but does so in order to offer commentary.)

At the opening of the first book, the Earth has known peace & prosperity for almost 300 years. Suffice to say, both gender and religion are sleeping dragons that are awoken and cause all manner of trouble within the narrative.

But it is the Sensayer tradition that speaks to me, and speaks to the very human desire—the human need, for many of us—to explore meaning.

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This is an entry in The Good Books. I’ll be writing about various fictional religions on Tuesdays for the next few weeks. Subscribe if you haven’t already for just $5/month.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about fictional religions the last few months.

When your faith of origin is also the origin of a grievous wound, there’s an odd solace to be found in knowingly made up things. Fiction, the old adage goes, is a lie that tells the truth—and there’s a lot of truth to be found in fictional religions.

I don’t mean “fictional religions” in the sense of religious fiction you’d find at a Christian bookstore; and I don’t mean the “all religions are fictions, bro” atheist hot take, either. I mean religions invented by fiction authors for their characters to inhabit and practice. These are religions & practices invented, often by a single mind, to express something. Sometimes, as in the case of Octavia Butler’s Earthseed, they are invented in knowing juxtaposition to a religion of our world; sometimes they are entirely fanciful. But they each offfer something to their reader—an opportunity to explore something of lesser “real” consequence than the beliefs that burden us here. Each fictional religion provides a window into what religion and spirituality are for—which is first and foremost for the well-being of the practitioner. (They should be, anyway.)

Religions don’t merely offer worldviews. They offer comforts large and small, the rituals we tuck our bodies into.

Today I am thinking of Allalae, god of small comforts, from the Monk & Robot books by Becky Chambers. Allalae is represented by a summer bear.

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Here in the US, we are returning to work after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Thanksgiving is, like much of life in the United States, a historically and emotionally fraught holiday. It is rooted in American myth, which aims to be one-size-fits-all, but is ill-suited and ill-fitting for all the expectation we foist upon it.

And sometimes holidays serve as a reason to get together and have a huge meal with loved ones. (We hosted this year, which explains the relative quiet round these parts while we prepped both the house and the food.)

It was a very nice weekend, and it ended with rest—which, after several weeks of prep and house projects, was absolutely necessary.

Christianity is ostensibly a religion that should prioritize rest. Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, modeled after the Jewish Sabbath. But burnout has become a standard feature in American life, and pastoral & volunteer positions within churches are not exempt. (In a society like the United States, with such feeble social safety nets, it’s no surprise.)

This imbalance has plagued life here for a long time, but despite the persistence of “rise & grind” culture, an upswell of people have rejected the upsell of relentless capitalism—none more so than Tricia Hersey, creator of The Nap Ministry and author of the new book, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto.

The book, which I have just started, pulls no punches early on and expands on the work that the Chicago-based theologian has been doing since 2016 on Instagram and elsewhere. In the preface, Hersey writes: “If we are not resting, we will not make it. I need us to make it. We must thrive.”

No holidays are universal, but they offer an opportunity all people need: an opportunity to rest.

The Solace of Fiction (& Fictional Religion)

I love the inventiveness of the sci-fi and fantasy genres. While religion is not always the first thing one thinks about when they think of sci-fi or fantasy, I love when sci-fi & speculative fiction authors invent new forms of religion. Because they are usually the vision of a single author, they have a particular point of view; because they are invented, they are seeking a novel solution to particular human problems.

I first developed an appreciation of fictional religions from Kurt Vonnegut. The Bokononism of Cat’s Cradle was so refreshing when I read it just after graduating Christian college. It had a sort of lightness to it that I could no longer have to my Christianity at that time, and the hopeful cynicism that marked Vonnegut’s work was just what I needed.

Our faith of origin can cause us pain. In those times, the fictional practices of invented religions can be a source of comfort.

Lately, I’ve been finding comfort in the Monk & Robot series from Becky Chambers.

Over the last month, I’ve read both novellas in the series (the 2021 book A Psalm for the Wild Built and the recently-released A Prayer for the Crown Shy) and been absolutely entranced. The books take place in a world where robots gained consciousness during The Factory Age; the robots came to an agreement with the humans where they would no longer work for humans, and they were free to go out to the wilderness and explore the world they had woken up in—and humans were free to remain in the settled areas.

The books take place about two hundred years after the robots left for the wilderness, and human civilization has become much kinder and ecologically sustainable. There are all manner of hopeful sci-fi touches—a post-capitalist economic system, a non-binary understanding of gender, advanced but sensible technological affordances, etc.—but I love the religious elements, too.

The POV character is Sibling Dex, who serves as a tea monk. They make their rounds around villages serving tea and providing a listening ear to anyone who needs one. Their religious order serves the “child god” Allalle, among a family of six gods who are named in the prologue to A Prayer for the Crown Shy:

Praise to the Parents.

Praise to Trikilli, of the Threads.

Praise to Grylom, of the Inanimate.

Praise to Bosh, of the Cycle.

Praise to their Children.

Praise to Chal, of Constructs.

Praise to Samafar, of Mysteries.

Praise to Allalae, of Small Comforts.

They do not speak, yet we know them.

They do not think, yet we mind them.

They are not as we are.

This monk who serves the God of Small Comforts eventually becomes restless within themself, and they venture into the wilderness on a pilgrimage to an old temple that was reclaimed by wilderness. Along the way, they meet the robot Mosscap. The robot has been commissioned to travel among humans and learn what they need.

Through the story, the human and the robot learn about each other’s culture. They learn what they both need and desire. Dex devoted their life to providing comfort to anyone who needed it, and while happy still felt restless. But it’s in the small acts of devotion, and of exploration, that I find solace.

I’ll have more to share later.

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In All The White Friends I Couldn’t Keep, Andre Henry rejects the separation of personal and political. To be able to separate them at all is a function of privilege, and that privilege is not readily available to everyone.

In this book, which covers an incredibly active six years from 2014-2020, Henry shares the hope and hard pills he has learned throughout his journey as an activist, artist, musician, and author. The amount of vulnerability he shows as an author is remarkable.

The narrative is driven by Henry’s experiences becoming more vocal about anti-Black violence and racism in America. While his story intersects with evangelicalism (he attended evangelical churches, and has a degree from Fuller Seminary), it is not limited to that world.

Henry’s story is not told for the benefit of a white audience, and white feelings or education are not his concern. But white readers should consider what this book reveals about how whiteness and racism work in spaces like white evangelicalism and other forms of white Christianity. I would do a disservice by retelling the particulars of Henry’s story here, but the way his white friends—the ones he couldn’t keep—drew upon Christianity to defend racist beliefs should give white readers pause, and encourage them to interrogate why that is. That’s a lifelong work—but to quote Tori Douglass, that’s our white homework.

All The White Friends I Couldn’t Keep balances the personal and the political, the hopes and the hard pills, while celebrating Black life and offering useful advice to anyone who is invested in long-term resistance to the racism inherent in social structures & institutions like policing & the prison system. As readers, we benefit from Henry’s wisdom as he has learned how to make this necessary work possible. The world is overwhelming, but as Henry reminds us through music and through online activism and now through this book - it doesn’t have to be this way.

Buy the Book on Bookshop.org

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