My latest: a plea to teach college students about God, in The Raised Hand

The Raised Hand is a Substack run by the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and edited by Daniel G. Hummel of the Lumen Center (Madison, WI) and Upper House (serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison). This school year they’ve been running monthly essays written by Christian academics asked to respond to the following prompt: “What does every university and college student need to learn?”

Yesterday they published my entry, titled “The Knowledge of God.” Here’s how it opens:

I am tempted to begin by saying that the first thing every university and college student needs to learn is how to read. But I’ve written about that plenty elsewhere, and you can’t throw a stone on the internet without hitting someone writing about the crisis of literacy on campus and in the public schools. Since I’m a theologian, moreover, there’s some low-hanging fruit (no pun intended) just waiting for me to reach up and take it.

Here's my real answer: If learning is about knowing, then every college student needs, through teaching, to come to know God. Another way to say this is that every student needs to learn how to pray.

Click here to read the whole thing. Thanks to Daniel for the invitation. And thanks to Sara Hendren, who already read and kindly boosted the piece. It was a fun one to write. Watch for a follow-up podcast conversation (sometime in the next week or two) that discusses the essay, also hosted by The Raised Hand.

Writing without a platform

Is it possible? That’s what I’m wondering.

I can be a moralistic scold about social media—I’m aware. I’m also aware that, for many writers, social media feels like the one and only way to reach, much less build, an audience; to make a name for oneself in a time when anyone on earth can publish millions of words and just about no one pays for the privilege to read them.

I myself, for a time, benefited from social media. I was on Twitter from 2013 to 2022, with maximal usage coming in the span of years from 2015 to 2020. (Those dates are … interesting.) As it happens, I was ABD and dissertating from fall 2014 through spring 2017, then a newly hired professor starting later that fall. In other words, my Twitter usage peaked when (a) I was spending many hours daily staring at a laptop screen and (b) I was trying to get my life as a junior scholar and public writer off the ground. I got a handful of early writing gigs through Twitter and I made many more personal contacts through it, some of whom I still count as friends, colleagues, or nodes in my professional network.

That’s a long way of saying: I don’t have the luxury of strutting around on the moral high ground, looking down at folks building their platforms through X, IG, Substack, and YouTube. I did the very same thing, albeit to a lesser degree, and it undeniably helped my career, above all my career as a writer.

Hence the question. Is it possible, today, to write, to be a writer, without a platform?

A few thoughts.

First, credentials play a role. I was just telling an editor the other day that the academy is a backdoor into publishing books. My PhD opens doors. That’s a fact. Weirdly enough, since academic books aren’t bestsellers, it’s easier for me to creep my way into popular publishing than it is for someone who only wants to write popular books, since he or she has to make good from the jump. Or before the jump, in fact, through amassing followers and fans via “socials.”

Second, gender plays a role. I’ve written about this before, but the politics of women Christian writers was already complex before the rise of the internet and social media. Now it’s positively Byzantine. If you have a PhD, that’s one thing. If you’re employed in the industry—at a magazine, say, or at a publishing house—that’s another. If you just want to be a writer, though, your options for finding an audience and outlets are limited. If, further, you do not have a clear denominational or political tribe; and if, still further, you are not a culture warrior; and if, still further, you are not willing to post pictures of and share private information about your husband and children (assuming that you have them and that they are photogenic)—the circle just keeps getting narrower and narrower. I know exactly one contemporary female Christian writer who “broke through” without credentials, institutional home, tribal affiliation, or online platform, including Twitter. Otherwise one or more of these factors invariably determine the likelihood not only of getting written work into the world but of a sufficiently large audience finding it.

Third, expectations play a role. Almost no one makes an actual full-time living as a writer. Outside of those rare authors whose names we all know and who sell millions of books, writers either have a day job, or depend on a spouse’s income, or hustle like a maniac, or fundraise/crowdfund, or hit the speaker circuit, or live hand to mouth as a starving artist. Or they did one or more of these things for many years, probably decades, before reaching a threshold to just be able to pay their bills. This is not unjust. It’s just the way it is, and ever was it thus. Anger or resentment at lack of remuneration for the writing life is both a professional nonstarter and the product of a fantasy. A writer’s first rule is to live in the real world, and the real world doesn’t care about writers or what they write. The sooner one learns that, the sooner one can get started with what matters: the writing! Isn’t that what we’d be doing anyway, even if we knew we’d never get paid a dime?

Finally, the industry plays a role. This is the part where we get to complain. It’s common knowledge that trade presses use social media metrics as a gatekeeping mechanism. In plain speech, they ask first-time authors how many followers they have. If the answer is “a few thousand,” then they say “thanks for playing” and politely shut the door. If the answer is “zilch, because I’m not on social media,” then they laugh hysterically before slamming the door. (You can still hear them on the other side, doubled over in tears.) This is, it goes without saying, a new phenomenon, since social media is a new phenomenon. And writers eager to break through have followed these incentives to their logical conclusion: drumming up an online following by every means possible: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Spotify, Substack, Threads—you name it, they’re there. Posting, re-posting, replying, commenting, replying again, sharing, re-sharing, streaming, recording in the car, recording on the run, recording with the kids, walk and talks, live tweets, and more. Always on, extremely online, creating memes, mocking memes, revising memes: keeping the content coming, letting the spice flow. And eventually, with a pinch of success come subscription deals, and after these come sponsorships, and after these come ads. And before you know it, you’re celebrating the free swag you got in the mail or reading an on-air advertisement for skin cream.

How’d you end up here?

That’s the question you should be asking. That’s the question I’m trying to pose in my repeated missives against social media. It’s why, although I’m anti-anti-Substack, and I’m no longer stridently anti-podcast, I’m still hesitant about the knock-on effects of podcasts’ ubiquity, and on certain days, if I’m honest, I’m anti-anti-anti-Substack.

What I mean is: Substack is an ecosystem, and one of the ways it forms both writers and readers is to make every writer a digital entrepreneur hawking a product. Further, it encourages a relationship between writer and readership on the model of celebrity fandom. (After all, you gotta give the people what they want.)

Put these together and the model becomes that of the influencer. The podcasting live-streaming YouTuber with a newsletter and a Patreon is a single genus—the hustling entrepreneurial influencer with fans in the hundreds, thousands, or more—of which Christians, including writers, become only one more species. They are different from Kim Kardashian and MrBeast only in degree, not in kind.

I’ve written elsewhere that there are wise, thoughtful people doing this in ways I admire, in service to the church. They’re digital lectors taking the gospel to an entire generation of (to be frank; I love them) uncatechized functional illiterates addicted to digital technology, and God be praised they’re finding a hearing. I don’t retract what I wrote. But we are fooling ourselves if we don’t step back and see clearly what is happening, what the nature of the dynamic is. Writers are being co-opted by the affordances of newsletters, social media, and audio/visual recording and streaming in ways that corrode the essence of good writing as well as the vocation of the writer itself.

A writer is not an influencer. To the extent that participating in any of these dynamics is necessary for a writer to get started or to get published, then by definition it can’t be avoided. But if it is necessary, we should see it as a necessary evil. Evil in the sense that it is a threat to the very thing one is seeking to serve, to indwell, celebrate, and dilate: the life of the mind, the reading life, the life of putting words on the page that are apt to reality and true to human nature and beautiful in their form and honoring to God. Exhaustively maintaining an online platform inhibits and enervates the attention, the focus, the literacy, the patience, the quietness, and the prayers that make the Christian writing life not only possible, but good.

In a word: If writing without a platform is impossible, then treat it like Wittgenstein’s ladder. Use it to get where you’re going, then kick it over once it’s done the job.

Substack vs. blogging

Everyone has a Substack these days. Is that a good thing?

I’ve toyed with starting my own this past year. But I keep pulling up short. Here’s why.

Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.

Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative. It is inexpert, even when written by experts. It is off the cuff, even when polished and thought through.

And it is conversational, at its origins and in its form. It’s constantly linking, talking, referring, thinking out loud by bouncing ideas off of other ideas, typically found on other blogs. The so-called “blogosphere” really was a marvelous time to be on the internet. And it never died, though it shrunk, and its spirit lives on in various ways.

I understand how and why certain Substackers treat their new medium as a kind of Blog 2.0. But I don’t think it qualifies. Whatever Substack (along with its many peers and predecessors) is, and even if it is here to stay, it isn’t blogging.

I’m gratified to see Substack succeed, and I think all writers (and readers) should be grateful for its continued viability. The larger ecology of writers and writing has benefited tremendously from it. Writers are getting paid for their labor. Niche subjects are being funded by committed readers. I have more than a few friends who are finding and growing a readership by means of Substack. I subscribe to at least one or two dozen Substacks, and some of them make for essential reading.

But it’s not a blogging replacement, a blog-killer. And inasmuch as writers flock to Substack as the one real option today, I do think it has a certain distorting effect. For what Substack does is impose a certain discipline on its writers. The writing becomes formal, focused, and routinized. Writers produce at least one entry weekly, but typically two to three (or more) per week. Series abound. The word count is expansive. Not only are editors few and far between; quality, as in GRE grading, is tied to length. After all, it’s hard to justify subscriptions without regular, “meaty” posts.

Put charitably, it’s as though everyone is now a writer for Harper’s or First Things or the NYRB or NYT Magazine, only they produce copy at an outrageous rate. Put less charitably, the Substack-ification of writing makes an op-ed columnist out of everyone—except twice or thrice as prolific, minus the journalistic chops, and lacking in editorial oversight.

Hear me say: The net effect of Substack remains good. I don’t want it to go away. What I want is a diverse publishing environment, which includes but is not limited to Substack. Sure, it would be nice to lock in a concrete number of readers who chose to sign up for my newsletter. It would be lovely to start making one or two hundred bucks per month for my writing. It would be reassuring to my sensitive writer’s soul to know that, when I press “publish,” the post I’ve just crafted wasn’t just being launched into the void but into 50 or 500 or 1500 (or more!) inboxes the world over.

But my writing would suffer. I’d start writing like a Substacker. And I don’t want to write like that. I want to write books, journal articles, and magazine essays. And when I’m not doing that, I want to blog.

Kudos, then, and all good things to friends and colleagues who’ve found a home and an audience on Substack. As for me and my writing, however, we’ll stay here, on my own turf.