We can only know things for certain in hindsight.

I know for certain that I ate Kirkland oatmeal with maple syrup and blackberries for breakfast.

I know for certain the last album by The National felt too similar to the one before it to feel like I was actually listening to a new album.

I know for certain that everything in my house is covered in pollen. (Ok, maybe that last one is a stretch, but it sure seems that way.)

The rest? I’m not so sure.

The last three years I have been writing this newsletter have been instructive for me. For over a decade now, I’ve written privately (in journals, on every blogging platform there is, in endless word documents) about everything from my complete outrage at the Mumford and Sons album Wilder Mind (an album I happen to like now) to short stories that I hope never see the light of day to poems that I should probably just burn.

When I started this newsletter, I was certain that I had found my thing. Writing about my Christian fundamentalist upbringing was going to be my thing. My beat. My Brand. And that was true, for a while anyway.

Then something strange happened.

I started this project thinking that I (myself) was strange and that I had been part of a strange fringe group. People had told me as my much my entire life. I was the sideshow at every party and small group. And who am I to doubt People? I can’t, after all, trust myself, because I am from a fringe group and therefore can’t be a judge of what’s “normal”. So I thought.

2022 bled into 2023, faded into 2024, and as I watched Trump become more popular, and religion become di rigueur in Silicon Valley, and trad wives become the most beloved and hated people on the internet, my experiences started to feel less fringe and more like a small piece of a large puzzle that I will call “American Evangelicalism.”

Sure, my experiences were “abnormal” by many of the basic markers we use to measure “normalcy”. Yes, a lot of it was culty af, but can you really call a belief system “fringe” when it’s basically what the Pilgrims believed? Or can you continue to say it’s fringe when it’s basically the platform of the 2025 Republican Party? It’s all Fundamentalism. Sure, this new fundamentalism drinks, and lets their women wear pants, and loves the Marvel movies, and sells vibrators on Tik-Tok, but the ideology behind this modern façade is the practically identical to what was drilled into me.

My experiences are unique and not, just like your experiences are unique and not.

I guess what I’m saying is that my view of myself and my relationship to Evangelicalism has changed. I used to see myself as as someone who has to “pass”–pass as a liberal-but-not-too-liberal Christian to my Christian friends, but then also somehow pass as a completely normal to people who had normal childhoods. This newsletter was an attempt at a line in the sand, to say, “I’m not OK with any of this. *gestures frantically at American Evangelicalism writ large* And you shouldn’t be either.”

I’ve always been a projection of what other people expected of me and I really needed to find out what I really thought, but I’ve realized that I’m not good at being what people want me to be. I’m not good at having a Brand or being confined to an expectations box. It was something I thought I could do and I’ve discovered I’m actually really quite terrible at it. (People, come to find out, can tell when you’re pretending.)

All that to say, this project has run its course. The Internet makes us believe that we have to keep building on our Brand and keep churning out Content until, well, I’m not sure. The Unlimited GrowthTM that late capitalism preaches makes us think that we’re supposed to do everything we’ve started until the day we die or we’re abject failures. Or at least it feels that way sometimes. To everything there is a season, whether those chasing ROI want to believe it or not.

So, this project in its current state is on indefinite hiatus. Maybe I’ll take some of the ideas I’ve explored here, build on them, and turn them into something else one day. I don’t know.

What I do know is that absolute certainty is dangerous. We can attempt, essay, to know things and understand things, but for the most part we only ever get a some of the story because we’re blinded by immediacy and time and our own biases and ignorance.

Writing changes the writer. I am not the same person I was in when I started writing on this platform. (Heck, this platform isn’t the same as it was three years ago.) Standing up to my pastor of twenty-something years changed me. It changed how my community viewed me and cemented my status as an outsider. It was the first step in a long journey of self-reflection, research, and grappling with the reality of modern Christianity in a post-Trump America that I am still on. It changed my relationship to myself.

I’m not interested in beating the drum of “look at how bad Fundamentalism is” anymore because I think that we’re in a post-Fundamentalist America. Mainstream Evangelicalism is essentially the Christian Fundamentalism I know with a new haircut. It’s a problem. But it’s a problem that’s bigger than sectarianism or separatism or snarking: it’s a problem that begins with the very idea of a Christian Nation.

I’m less certain about a lot of things since I started writing about Fundamentalism, so, I guess, in that way, I’ve become less of a fundamentalist myself. (This is 100% the only way, walk ye in it … or else.) I don’t think there is a Way anymore. But I understand the appeal of Knowing and I understand how people in power use our desire to Know to exploit the most vulnerable parts of ourselves.

Thank you to each and every one of you who has read what I wrote. I cherish all the conversations I’ve had with you about these topics and hope to continue to have them.

We’re all on a journey. Thanks for being a part of mine.