When Dreams Change
I’ve been inconsistent here online over the last six months. This entry is my attempt to explain why.
There’s two lines from The Extreme Self1 that have haunted me lately:
The opposite of vulnerability is no longer strength.
The opposite of invisibility is no longer being seen.
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:
I don’t know what else there is to say that isn’t in my book,
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
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.
The Extreme Self is like The Medium is the Massage for the AI era. Just as McLuhan & Fiore explored the impact of the then-new technology of television on society, Coupland & Basar & Obrist take on the subsequent effects of the internet, and they do so in the same sort of declarative maxims-slash-koans that McLuhan was so good at.
I don’t presume to know of every single type of conversation around Christianity in America or the world. Please always presume that if I don’t mention something it’s from ignorance, not malice.
So relatable.
It sounds like you’re doing what you need to in order to endure these awful times. Whatever you end up doing I hope it brings you joy and rest.