There will never be another 9/11. God willing, there will never be anything like those attacks again. But that’s not what I mean. I mean that spirit of America that watched, absorbed, and responded to September 11 is gone. It is never coming back. It was tied to a particular moment in our media and our politics. No matter what happens to this country in the years ahead, we will not see it, think about it, feel it, or remember it the way we did 25 years ago. We don’t have the same eyes, minds, hearts, or memories we did back then.

September 11 happened at the intersection of digital and mass media. That’s why we still have framed issues of newspapers and the reason we can watch an unsetting number of home videos capturing the explosions. In the hours after American Airlines 11 hit the north tower, classrooms, living rooms, lunch rooms, and just about everywhere else were tuned in to the same handful of broadcasts. There was no serious alternative to the broadcast networks unless you had cable, and no serious alternative to CNN if you did. This isn’t just an interesting detail of that day. It’s a social and psychological fact. The reason we remember 9/11 as something that happened to us, collectively, in a single moment, is that we were all shepherded into the same handful of spaces to witness it. We remember it as something we shared because we did.

Our conversations about the attacks were rooted in the shared experience of it. The conspiracy theories would come, of course, but they would come later, not instantly. The vast majority of the country was bound together in the same finite amount of thoughts and words—the thoughts and words we inherited from places like nightly news, or from talk shows, from newspaper columnists, or from the president himself.

This moment lingered. When President Bush threw the first pitch at Game 3 of the Yankees-Diamondbacks World Series, barely a month after the attacks, America tuned in. That baseball was not America’s favorite sport didn’t matter. That the President had been controversially elected didn’t matter. This moment was happening. We watched not only because we wanted to, but because it felt like we needed to.

The collapse of the towers, the “Falling Man,” “Let’s roll,”—all of these pieces of time found us because we were all standing in the same places.

I’m not suggesting that Americans didn’t have strong disagreements. Nor am I trying to whitewash the real politicizations that would come later and accelerate the processes that would lead our country into many of the pits it has fallen into since. And of course, whether we’re talking about Jon Stewart or Rush Limbaugh, Americans were not completely unified in whom we trusted to talk us through the moment.

The point is that the halls of memory around 9/11 are built out of materials that we all recognize. There were no personally curated feeds, no algorithmic islands, no influencer economies to magnetize attention away from the moment. In just a little while, high speed Internet would claim a majority of American homes, and only seven years later, Apple’s iPhone would radically transform what it means for a people to experience any moment. The attacks of 9/11 were among the last truly formative events for American culture. Soon enough, technology would permanently change what it means to be “formed” at all.

Charlie Kirk was murdered on September 10, 2025. Before you ask, no, I am not comparing nearly 3,000 murders on 9/11 to Kirk’s death. I am contrasting the way a certain generation of Americans experienced that moment with the way we experienced 9/11. Kirk’s murder was almost camouflaged into whatever media source you were consuming when it happened. If you experienced it via X, you saw horrifying, unforgettable footage, and an articulate rage toward the forces that had made it plausible. If TikTok was your choice, you saw something different: Emotionally performative faces, reacting in real time, often with fear but a sense of satisfaction. YouTube? Grief, punctuated by immediate conspiracies (who was that old man?) and accusations. Facebook? More of the same, flanked by advertisements and staged reactions.

And we haven’t even mentioned the AI content.

Kirk was a culture war figure, and it makes sense that his murder would play along culture war lines. But a major part of how his death will forever be embedded into our memory is the sprawl of attention that accompanied it. There is no “moment” of Kirk’s death. There can be no collective memory of it. There can and will only ever be different feeds. Kirk’s death could never be “unifying.” That has less to do with the kind of person Kirk was, and more to do with the kind of people we are.

If the Kirk example is too polarizing for you, we could name Sandy Hook. Rage at gun control opponents is understandable, but why would it replace grief, rather than follow it? Because in the digital age it is impossible to feel a moment without experiencing the commentary around it. Our feeds do not transmit shared experience. They produce curated content. The very concept of a “moment” is quaint. There is only output, only content, only takes. Life on the internet means our eyes can never look straight ahead. We are always turned somewhere else.

Tragedy exposes the limits of online life like nothing else does. The more traumatic the event, the more something in us wants shelter from the content storm. Saying something “just to say something” feels hollow. What we really want in those moments is not noise, but shared silence. We want people to just stand with and bear witness. It’s as old as Job’s friends, who, when seeing his suffering, suppressed their moralism long enough to just sit in the ashes. There’s something very Christian about that. Perhaps that is why, in the months after 9/11, many churches were unusually full. Sitting silently while human mortality and the impossibility of control hit us in the soul is a spiritual event. It is better to go to the house of mourning than the house of feasting.

Perhaps our digital experience of life has become a way to trying to turn all mourning into feasting (when we scroll our way through dark days, don’t we say we’re “consuming” content?). Perhaps all of this just serves the desire to escape God and grief through an algorithm that reassures us that, no matter what, we and the people we like are Right.

Maybe one of the things we can carry forward from our cultural memory of 9/11 is the need to encounter suffering like people instead of like computers. Maybe we just need to sit in one place, with others, and watch in the same direction, accepting that all the info and all the validation is less important than accepting our need to helplessly pray. And then, when we look back at our lives 25 years from now, perhaps we will remember the presence of God and the ones we love more vividly than our feeds.

That’s the way I would quickly summarize the Bible’s teaching on attention. This isn’t mean to be a detailed theology or an exhaustive study. There’s surely more to be said. But whatever else the Bible tells us about attention, it clearly tells us this. What we place in front of us will eventually place us. We cannot behold without becoming.

Scripture is clear that those who worship idols (any created thing that receives affection due to only God) become like them. The question then, is what is the relationship between worship and attention. How far is the journey from our attention to our hearts? I think the answer is, “Not very far.”

Throughout Scripture there seems to be a latent understanding that what we pay attention to has some kind of moral or spiritual power. Psalm 1 blesses the one who does not walk, or stand, or sit in the seat of those who disregard God. Those verbs—walk, stand, sit—show not only a logical progression, but an attentive quality. Where you walk matters because you will be thinking about where you’re walking. Where you stand matters because you’ll hear whatever is being said near your stance. Where you sit matters, because where you sit is where you’ll feel comfortable.

In Deuteronomy 11, Moses tells the Israelites not only to hear or believe what God says, but to surround themselves with his words.

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Several years ago, I worked in the marketing department of a local mortgage company. Part of my job was helping lead new hires through the onboarding process, which included a section on information security. One of the modules concerned “social engineering.” Social engineering in this context means behavior meant to trick or manipulate another into making a mistake. The kind of social engineering we were trained to look out for consisted of a person calling the company and trying to obtain confidential financial information, often by posing as a client, real estate agent, or banker.

The training videos depicted a person calling the office, offering little to no information about themselves, and instead asking a few seemingly banal questions, like “Who is on vacation this week,” or “Is there someone I could talk to in sales.” The point of these questions was to obtain the name of somebody, anybody, who actually did work at the firm. Soon after getting a name, the person would hang up, and call back later, and this time use the name he had obtained to get more information from an unsuspecting employee. “Julie told me to call,” or, “I know Julie’s on vacation, I just need some info.” If you’ve ever seen Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, you get the gist. Some fast, vague talking to a naive worker can get a determined fraudster the access he needs.

The only defense against this trick was to stop treating conversation in a human way. Instead, we had to treat each unexpected interaction as a potential attack. The appropriate response to “Can I talk to someone in sales” was, “May I inquire as to the purpose of this call?” If someone claimed to forget the name of the person they were trying to reach, we had to verify their identity as much as possible before trying to help. If someone reached out and wasn’t able to quickly provide such verification, we had to assume the call was a trick, even if other factors indicated it probably wasn’t. An entire apparatus, consisting of numbers, data, signatures, the like, had to replace a normal interaction for the sake of security.

One of the effects of this training was to make the phone itself a suspect technology. Guarding against social engineering meant talking in a way that was stiff, impersonal, and accusatory. When the phone rang, nobody heard a potentially positive business call or a friend reaching out. We heard footsteps, nefariously creeping closer to our collection of social security numbers and bank statements.

Talking like a policeman or detective isn’t particularly fun. It’s a stressful, antihuman way of responding to the presence of another human being. The psychological burden of having to think, feel, and talk like a security system is real. Many of my coworkers felt it far more keenly than I did. Being forced to behave like a non-person, and treating someone else like a non-person, even for a few moments a day, is not very good.

One of the curious dilemmas of the AI age is that AI bots sound like us because we sound like AI bots. The most intense form of this dilemma is happening right now in magazines, blogs, newspapers, and book publishers. In desperation, many organizations that want to prioritize human writing are turning to software that purports to detect AI generated text. Some software does this better than others. But none do it perfectly, and I’m not just talking about software’s mistaking AI generated text for human-generated. The reverse situation is happening too, wherein text that is genuinely human is being flagged as AI-generated. Why? Because the human-generated text sounds like AI, and the software’s only job is to use advanced algorithms to detect which clauses, phrases, and sentences sound like something an LLM would churn out.

But what does an LLM churn out? The answer is, of course, human writing. All LLMs are trained on real human writing. The reason the way an LLM talks to you sounds human is because humans fed the LLM trillions upon trillions upon trillions of human sounds, and then programmed it to learn the ingredients of those and reproduce them in various ways.

AI companies have made the purposeful, conscious decision to use human language to blur the distinction between humans and machines. For the foreseeable future, it will not be self-evident to anyone what a human sounds like versus what a machine sounds like. Right now, we are hoping that machines themselves can help us spot the differences.

But my point is this. The last few years have been the climax, rather than the beginning, of the robotification of human language and identity. LLMs are bringing what we’ve been doing in the last few decades to a logical, profitable, and psychologically acidic conclusion. Nearly every technological innovation of the last twenty years has resulted in we human beings acting more and more like the bots that we are now replacing ourselves with. We have arrived at the AI era perfectly primed to accept the conditions of life on a planet of bots, because, phenomenologically at least, we’ve been living that way for a while.

Just about everyone I know says they dread the ringing of their phone these days. For millions, spam and junk calls have become far more frequent than any other kind of call. Americans get almost 3 billion spam calls every month, a reasonable explanation for why a lot of people admit they don’t even bother picking up the phone for an unknown number. Amazingly, there appears to be no great fix to this. Certain apps will charge you a monthly fee to screen calls, giving you more info and blocking high-probability junk callers from even getting your device to ring. None of these prophylactics are a sure thing. Most of us just resign ourselves to the three inevitable forces: Death, taxes, and spam.

Customer service, also, has become radically robotizized. Every single industry wants you to use their app, their chat service, or even their social media “help” account, rather than try to talk to a person. A truly human face or voice can, we know, decide to help more urgently and more thoroughly if they encounter a desperate enough person. Bots are unmoved. No hungry children, no sick passenger, no bereaved family can leave one impression on a bot. The bot’s currency of sincerity is data: your order number, your confirmation code, your two and three and ten-step authentication. An acquaintance of mine, adrift in the aftermath of a canceled flight and lost luggage, was even swindled by a fake customer service account. Again, the goal seems not to help customers or solve problems, but to reduce human on human encounters as much as possible.

The one scenario where bots appear to be mildly convenient is when the situation was easy anyway. If you’ve forgot something, for example, that was sent to you in a half dozen emails, there’s a decent chance a bot can simply remind you (more likely, they’ll ask you to confirm your identity a few times, before sending you a verification email, before sending you the email you actually need). Bots excel at doing the minimum possible.

This is a big reason why bots are bad writers. LLM-generated prose is, by virtue the process that creates it, frozen verbal leftovers. An LLM is perfectly capable of imitating a corporate professional’s staid compound sentences, especially the most basic, unsurprising constructions (“This is not that; it’s actually this.”). And because the vast majority of human have no desire for anything better, LLMs appear to be good writers. But they’re not. We are bad writers. The machines we’ve created can do only the bare minimum passably well because the same is true of us.

A little while ago there was a study done on what sources the major LLMs were using when a user prompts them with a relationship question, like “My girlfriend does this, why does she do it,” or, “I thinking I want to leave my husband. Should I?” The study determined that the #1 source of text that LLMs use to predict an appropriate respond to a relationship prompt is Reddit. Reddit is, of course, a notorious graveyard for life insight, for the simple reason that the kind of people most likely to publish regular content on Reddit also tend to be the kind of people who are bad at life in general and at relationships in particular.

Any human with a lick of experience and rationality can determine this with just a few minutes spent on Reddit. It doesn’t matter how much of Reddit you feed to a bot; it will never put this together. You see the cycle this creates? A person unable to navigate basic relationship stuff asks AI what she should do. The AI responds by reproducing slight variations of Reddit’s below-ground lifestyle content. The person follows this advice because she’s only slightly better than AI at discernment. Why? Because long before the relationship, through a long, complex pattern of choices, environment, and values that likely started before puberty, she has learned not to see any real difference between people and machines. She has become a bot.

In 2017, the leftist writer Freddie DeBoer wrote an essay titled “Planet of Cops.” In it, he lamented liberal political culture for the way it was encouraging people to try to catch and cancel each other. “The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats,” he wrote. “Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense.” DeBoer concludes:

See, the panopticon says we all get watched all the time, but there’s still a division between the guards and the prisoners. There’s still people who do the watching separate from the watched. And that’s not real life. No, in real life we’re all guards and prisoners at the same time. We are all informants on each other. Contemporary political culture is an autoimmune disorder. Do you enjoy living like this? Are you not exhausted?

DeBoer pointed out that left politics was unable to achieve robust change in things like policing and criminal justice, partly because its culture was operating like the systems it claimed to be unjust. The “planet of cops” wasn’t just a bad place to live. It was a sclerotic place to live. Almost nothing can be changed for the better if the people trying to change it are constantly at war inside their own tents.

Something very similar is going on with our bots. I suspect the most important reason it is so hard to get a groundswell of consensus against the dominance of AI is that most of us have been living for years as if the singularity were already here. What I mean is that for the nearly the past two decades, our work, our relationships, our self-help, and much of our school and art has been robotified.

Consider your own life. Think about the top five people that you text most often. If you found yourself needing to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these people were real people and not bots, without leaving your home, could you do it? Could you show photos of shared meals, trips, and experiences? Could you go find that book or memento they gave you years ago? How much hard evidence could you really provide, short of actually getting in your car, that the people in your phone exist as more than a name and a thread?

Could most people do this? I don’t know. I think there are a lot of people for whom the idea of an AI friend or therapist makes intuitive emotional sense precisely because for all practical purposes, those are the only kinds of friends and therapists they have anyway. Insisting that people and AI can never have a meaningful relationship just doesn’t mean all that much if “relationship” has largely come to mean sending texts or DMs on a screen. We’ve been living like this for years. The tools of “connection” have become vehicles for faceless content exchanges at best, and relentless spam more often.

And this is to say nothing of the way that we’ve been reconciling ourselves for years to fake, manipulated, brain dead internet content. The expansion of social media sites from “networks” to “platforms” in the late 2000s and early 2010s created an entire economy: the attention economy, where the product is quite literally anything that someone might put in front of their face for a few seconds. If economies produce what they are designed to produce, then the attention economy was designed to produce overwhelming amounts of staged, non-sincere content. The question “why were they filming” became Internet shorthand to ask why a particular video seemed to start right when an outrageous or illegal thing was about to happen—as if somebody might have known what was coming. People pretending to have emotional meltdowns on camera (with the shot being perfectly calibrated to capture both the tears and their “good side”) is common.

You know who else pretends to have emotions? You know who else uses intimate language to sound real but is really just reading from a script? Bots.

The question most people want to ask about AI is, “Is this OK? How might it help me, and how could it hurt me?” We think of this technology exclusively in terms of how I might experience it in the moments I want to experience it. The question we should be asking is, “Do I and the people I love want to live with more bots?” That’s really what’s being offered. We’re not being offered the chance to have a little button in the corner of our workstation that can speed things up or make us smarter when we need a boost. We’re being offered the chance to live with lots and lots and lots of bots. Bots are AI. AI is bots. The only reason to accept this offer is if you think the way we’ve been living for the past two decades—the spam, the phishing, the tricks, the automated voicemail, the mandatory chat, the invisible friends and voiceless counselors—is a good thing.

Here’s what I think:

I’ve written two books, hundreds of essays, and done dozens of talks and interviews about being human in a digital age. In my opinion, in terms of creating actual change, none of this matters, and none of it will matter. At scale, there are only two things that matter: What people are used to. How they live out “normal” (not how they define normal). If talking to and learning from and interacting with real human people is your lived out normal, then you will have a problem with a planet of bots. Even if you’re not ideologically committed, even if you’re not ready to oppose a data center or get Chromebooks out of elementary schools, you will, if that’s your normal, constantly feel as the planet of bots is off. You will feel constantly lied to by it. You will feel constantly ignored by it. You will feel alienated within it. And even if the guys with see-through houses that sell for $100 million manage to convince you are the last person on earth who feels this way, you will still feel that way. You may not say it. You’ll feel it.

It’s a miscalculation to worry about the way AI might disrupt industries or the economy. That kind of thing has been happening for hundreds of years. It might be brutal, but it will balance out eventually. But our lives are a different story. The real worry is not that AI will take our jobs, but that it will make the idea of possessing a job incomprehensible. AI writing our books? Bad. AI reading our books? Much worse. The trajectory we’ve been on for a long time is not merely one where we get machines to make the stuff we love. It’s that we love the machines themselves more than anything they make.

There is no “solution” to the planet of bots, for the same reason there’s no “solution” to divorce, or bad neighborhoods, or addiction. The only thing you can solve is a problem, but these things are not “problems” in that sense. They are lived realities. They are generational, societal, existential cycles that get lived out again and again because what people take as being normal is what they take as being normal for them. These things will persist in the lives of all those for whom they remain normal. And they will change when, and only when, one, or two, or a billion people decide, “This isn’t normal, and it’s not going to be normal for me.” When one person breaks a generational cycle, they are often celebrated and congratulated. When an entire culture breaks a generational cycle, war usually starts.

You know I’m not calling for war. I’m just calling for honesty. We live in the planet of bots. And many of us have already begun the journey of accepting it as normal. We cannot feel ourselves drowning because we’ve been thinking we were fish the whole time.

I grew up in evangelical purity culture. Well-thumbed copies of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Every Young Man’s Battle, and For Women Only lay on the nightstands in my house. My parents consulted Focus on the Family’s movie reviews—which chronicled every sexual line or scene—before deciding whether to let us kids see a new theatrical release. When the Duggar family became famous through their reality show 17 Kids and Counting, we knew they took things further than we did, but we felt that what we shared with them was more important than what we didn’t.

Evangelical purity culture is tricky to define, but it usually refers to a trend of the 1980s and 1990s that prioritized sexual abstinence and modesty and expressed this emphasis through preaching, parenting, and publishing. Purity culture put theological and cultural pressure on families to fight for virginity and temperance.

This pressure was good in ­many ways; it contrasted sharply with an era characterized by peak teenage pregnancy and soft-core ­pornography on cable. But it also left some people bruised and confused. The challenge for evangelicals today is to learn from both the good and the ill of purity culture and live more wisely in light of its lessons.

Joshua Harris’s 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye is one of the representative artifacts of purity culture. Harris wrote it when he was twenty-one, and the book—which Harris, no longer a Christian, has disowned—has all the urgency, zeal, and lack of nuance one would expect from a devout young person. Many evangelical families were ­persuaded by Harris to forbid their teens from dating and to allow romantic ­interactions—in strictly chaperoned ­settings—only when marriage seemed a realistic outcome. “Intimacy is the reward of commitment,” Harris famously declared.

Purity culture had many expressions. The True Love Waits campaign encouraged Christian teens to commit themselves to virginity until marriage, and to demonstrate their commitment through chastity pledges, purity rings, and other rituals. By the late 1990s, internet pornography was an urgent topic within evangelical culture. Stephen ­Arterburn, Fred Stoeker, and Mike Yorkey’s Every Young Man’s Battle, which advised the regular confession of porn use to “accountability groups,” sold millions of copies. Christian contemporary music caught the wave. Rebecca St. James’s pro-abstinence song “Wait for Me” was a number two Christian radio hit in 2001. The 1990s arguably represented the peak of youth ministry, and much of youth ministry focused on getting teens to remain sexually chaste.

There are many valid criticisms of purity culture. The stress on purity sometimes led to an excessive stigmatization of sexual feelings and sexual fallenness. Many women recall that girls who lost their virginity often felt like second-class Christians. Conversely, the pleasure of future marital intimacy might have been talked up as an incentive for teen abstinence and resulted in unrealistic expectations for sex. Several writers who grew up in purity culture have testified that their marriages were burdened by either shame over libido or disappointment in a much-­heralded experience.

Another valid criticism holds that purity culture generated undue awkwardness and tension. Teen boys and girls sometimes struggled to relate normally to one another, given their hypervigilance against lust and immodesty. In her memoir Counting the Cost, Jill Duggar tells of how her parents required all their kids to look at the ground whenever a woman wearing a crop top came into view. Was Jill’s older brother Josh disposed toward sex addiction and criminal behavior by this paranoia about sexual temptation? (Josh has confessed to molesting his sisters as a teen and was convicted of child pornography possession in 2021.) The memoir suggests he might have been.

Teens raised in purity culture might reasonably have concluded that everything depended on getting the sex issue right. It would have been better if the chief scribes of purity culture had heeded C. S. Lewis, who wrote that, important as chastity is, violating it is not the worst sin. Pride—even in our purity—is worse.

That said, most published criticisms of evangelical purity culture—many of them authored by self-described “­exvangelicals”—are not compelling. Much of the anti–­purity culture literature calls on Christians, especially women, to abandon traditional teachings about sex and marriage. Jen Hatmaker, whose Christian books for women sold well a decade ago, is now divorced and has written about her youth in purity culture and the sexual freedom she enjoys with her current boyfriend. Likewise, Nadia Bolz-­Weber, a writer, preacher, and a “pastor of public witness” of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, urges Christians to reject purity culture and embrace extramarital sex and “­ethically-sourced pornography.” A search of “purity culture” on Substack yields ­hundreds of articles, ­many by women, offering first-­person perspectives on the harms of purity culture. A high percentage of these articles also advocate positively for LGBTQ identity.

These critiques fail from the start because they don’t heed Scripture’s clear teachings about sex. They discard these doctrines as repressive or patriarchal, conflating purity culture’s excesses with its biblical origins. The authors may have valuable psychological insights, but their rejection of Christian teaching puts a hard limit on the usefulness of their testimonies.

The best critiques of purity culture hold firm on traditional sexual ethics while calling on Christians to minister better to the sexually broken. Unfortunately, even the best orthodox contributions have fallen short of offering a viable alternative.

One problem is forgetfulness of the past. Theologically faithful writers who criticize purity culture often raise crucial points about the centrality of the gospel. But rarely do they articulate a positive vision of what Christian discipleship should look like. They speak of their evangelical forebears as well-meaning but clueless, writing and speaking as if their parents and youth pastors should obviously have known better. “Morality tales and false identities aren’t the stuff of a real marriage,” writes one Christian feminist author. “The sheep and the goats are not divided on the basis of their virginity.”

But evangelical purity culture did not appear out of thin air. Evangelical Christianity in the early 1990s was responding to a spike in sexual libertinism and a coarsening of the public square. In a helpful essay, Joe Carter summarizes what evangelical parents and pastors were staring down:

By the early years of 1990s, AIDS had become the number one cause of death for United States men ­ages 25 to 44, and the teen pregnancy rate had reached an all-time high. The number of premarital sex partners had also increased substantially since the 1970s. For example, in the 1970s only 2 percent of American women had more than 10 sexual partners before marriage; in the 1990s that percentage had increased to 10 percent (in 2010 it was 18 percent).

These trends were discernible in pop culture, too. Movies like American Pie and There’s Something About Mary topped the box office despite their soft-pornographic content. Even tamer fare, like the PG-13-­rated Pleasantville, evangelized for masturbation. Cable television, which was reaching its zenith in the late 1990s just as most of the nation was getting home internet, put a bourgeois veneer on explicit sexual content. In other words, the ­Clinton–Lewinsky scandal wasn’t just a political story. The fact that the entire country spent years discussing the details of the president’s receiving oral sex was a fitting symbol of the state of the union.

The urgency and intensity of purity culture was an attempt, however imperfect, to counter the urgency and intensity of the sexual revolution. Honest assessment of this phase of evangelical history is necessary if parents and churches hope to counter the intensity and urgency of our own secular moment. The time for litigating the old purity culture is over. Our task now is to create a new one.

If the evangelical purity culture of the 1990s had issues, why use the term “purity culture” at all? Isn’t it too compromised? “Purity culture” is a term worth salvaging, because purity culture was a worthy endeavor. The word “culture” denotes something bigger than one best-selling book or theological tribe. Purity culture encompassed families, denominations, parachurch organizations, and popular music.

What I experienced as an evangelical teen was not fundamentalist separatism, but a habitat that made Christian conviction feel natural and normal. Christian books, music, and conferences are often accused of watering down difficult or unpopular doctrine in order to make Christianity cool or relevant. But the best expressions of Christian subculture beautified theology, trying to bridge the gap between the truth we confessed and the experiences we felt.

The purity culture of the 1990s was a plausibility structure, a system of language and habits that made chastity and faithfulness feel good, true, and beautiful. A new evangelical purity culture must do the same. It must captivate, not just condemn.

In the 1990s, purity culture emphasized the physical and spiritual risks of sexual impurity—a rational emphasis in view of the rates of teen sexual activity and pregnancy at that time. But American culture looks different now. Generations Z and Alpha are far less likely to date, pair off, party, or experiment than their Gen X parents were. The cause is not spiritual awakening but digitally conditioned risk aversion. Today’s teens don’t need to be warned off sex; they need to be taught the beauty of conjugal love.

The most effective way to promote purity is by promoting marriage. A new evangelical purity culture can promote marriage by facilitating friendships between men and women and training consciences to prioritize family formation over economic concerns or career ambitions. Too often, the old evangelical purity culture accepted secular society’s preference for late marriage, all the while insisting on chastity. A new purity culture will not only insist on chastity but help Christians achieve it by treating marriage as an absolute good, not an accessory to material life.

A new evangelical purity culture must take a new approach to shame—using it as a protective tool when necessary, but never as a motivational tool. Shame is legitimate when it is just. Men who cheat on their wives and abandon their children should be shamed. Women who use their sexuality to entice men should likewise feel shame. But when shame is unjustly applied, the results can be devastating.

My experience of men’s “accountability groups” fits this description. To help men resist pornography, many church cultures encourage regular meetups at which men confess their weekly lapses. Fear of having to confess is considered a motivator to purity. The fact that such groups are devoted exclusively to pornography (I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a man confess anger or laziness in these contexts) reinforces the sense that porn consumption is a special sin. Likewise, immodesty effectively ranks as a special sin for women, so that policing swimsuit style or skirt length becomes a way of sorting the acceptable girls from the unacceptable girls.

This kind of shame is counterproductive. Nobody wants relationships that are grounded in embarrassment over one’s vices. By contrast, the deeper a friendship goes, the more likely it is that honesty and mutual care will follow. Isolation and habitual sin often go together. Rather than suppress sin so that people can be pure enough to join a community, Christians should see community as part of the cure.

Community will be especially important as we enter the era of AI. It is likely that in five years, just about every evangelical church will have at least a few members who are in relationships with chatbots. Simply anathematizing those members will not do. A Christian purity culture for the AI era must recognize that digital philandering is often a symptom of aloneness.

Finally, a new evangelical purity culture will recover a holistic theology of sexuality. Joshua Harris’s observation that “intimacy is the reward of commitment” was true but incomplete. Intimacy not only follows commitment but ­creates more of it. The evangelical purity culture of the 1990s tended to approach sex as an isolated phenomenon. Many evangelicals asked their teens to show impressive self-control by delaying sex until marriage—and delaying marriage until the establishment of a career. As one evangelical pastor observed, many Christian parents seemed more afraid of their children’s failing than of their ­fornicating.

Sex does not happen in a vacuum. It is the consummation of marriage, and marriage is the foundation of society: the first covenant, the primal relationship, the metaphor for Christ and the Church. Sexual purity exists not for its own sake, but to preserve the husband for the wife, the wife for the husband, and both for the children—who reward intimacy with more commitment.

Regarding sex as integrated with community and commitment, rather than as a discrete good that must be “paid for” by the marriage vow, is a way to motivate purity without invoking shame. Purity is worthwhile because there will be a spouse and, Lord willing, children to be blessed by it. Nor is it something that can be lost forever in one sinful act. Though virginity is precious, it is not more precious than love, and love comes to every sinner who repents. Impurity is not cleansed by self-loathing. It is washed by the blood of Christ.

As Christians who were raised in evangelical purity culture raise our own children in a different but no less broken world, we should feel what’s at stake. Our goal should be to protect our children from harm, and to help them see sexual love not as either animalistic or angelic, but as a celebration of our Savior’s desire for us. We must not only teach these things in our households, but create a community of forgiven sinners who can live out God’s narrative of salvation through the symbols of marriage and sexuality.

Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three children. She has confessed to the killings, but has pled insanity. Her defense argues that she had been suffering from an extreme case of postpartum psychosis and was hearing voices in her head telling to kill her kids.

The Internet is, of course, very interested. And the way particular social media platforms and groups are participating in the discourse illustrates again one of the most important things anyone can realize about the modern Internet:

It’s a place where each sex is learning to loathe the other.

TikTok has become a hub for people, mostly women, to show support for Clancy. The idea is that postpartum depression and psychosis are real but not taken seriously by many (mostly men). A certain block of women on TikTok see Clancy as a symbol for unappreciated maternal struggle. They empathize with Clancy’s mental struggles (she was on a shocking number of antipsychotic medications when she strangled her children) and believe that, however horrible the outcome might have been, Clancy is first and foremost a victim, both of biological illness, and of a medical, political, and sexual system that ignored it. In the words of one woman who spoke to NBC:

“Women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored when we speak up,” said April Vincent, a 52-year-old paralegal from Providence, Rhode Island. “We’re scared because nobody takes us seriously. Nobody wants to hear us and really we just need to be heard. I’ve been dismissed plenty of times.”

TikTok is chock full of pro-Clancy content. Users have donated close to $1 million for her defense fund. There are also viral trends currently in which women will demonstrate their own postpartum symptoms as a way of making the point that Clancy’s illness must be taken more seriously. One viral video shows a woman throwing things and screaming in her home, “to help emotionally regulate.”

TikTok’s therapy culture content is well-documented, to the point that even mainstream therapists and psychologists worry that users who consume a lot of TikTok content are probably getting a ton of bad advice. Prevalence of therapy culture content tends to correlate with gender demographics when it comes to apps. Websites and community apps tend to skew male, but TikTok has a percentage of regular female users comparable to that of Facebook. Notably, the most female-heavy social media app, Instagram, likewise features a lot of mental health and therapy culture content. In other words, social media algorithms tend to pair mental health content and female user base together. One tends to be evidence of the other.

One of the biggest challenges facing younger Americans right now is that life has not only migrated online, it has migrated away from “social” online spaces. When I first got on social media in the late 2000s, the main reason anyone did that was to see what their friends posted. This is not how Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha uses the Internet. Instead, online life has become content-driven. Younger guys and girls use the web for watching videos, listening to podcasts, following influencers and brands, etc. This is a big shift, not only because it reduces overall social interaction, but because it places men and women in content “silos” that are algorithmically curated in gendered ways.

In other words: the “female internet” and the “male internet” are now very real, very active, and very different sources of information and opinion.

The Clancy trial and discourse around postpartum mental illness illustrate both of these content silos. Matt Walsh’s primary platforms are X and YouTube, both of which skew heavily male. In the last week or so, Walsh has been posting increasingly absolutist takes on postpartum depression and mental health, rebuking Clancy’s supporters and suggesting that the mental ailments they complain about don’t even exist.

You can see how the heavily gendered dynamics of social media work in real-time. When women log onto Instagram and TikTok, they see a sizable helping of mental health related content, which feels honest and relatable. Pundits like Walsh appear aggressively ignorant and insensitive, especially if compared to all the people in the videos talking about their own struggles with mental health. Meanwhile, when men log into YouTube and X, they see viral posts of women throwing things and screaming in a very performative way. What’s more, influencers on X and YouTube can be quite good at scanning the entire Internet for the very worst examples of feminism and therapy culture, and these clips tend to be what floats to the top of the algorithm. They don’t resemble the content that the women are watching on Instagram or TikTok, just like most husbands or pastors are not thinking about these issues like Matt Walsh is.

In the end, both sexes think they are seeing how the other one thinks. And they don’t care for it.

The Web’s disembodied nature means all of us lose an important connection to reality when we encounter the world through the Internet. None of us are just “users” in the abstract. We have opinions, relationships, duties, experiences, memories, beliefs, loyalties, etc. And all of those things are inflected by our gender. I have no experiences as a daughter or a wife. I have experiences of knowing and seeing daughters and wives, from the perspective of a man. To know the real me, you would have to know me as a man with these realities, not just a user who posts.

But the Internet repositions us as consumers and posters. Our “self” is abstracted from our embodied life. We post, therefore we exist. We “like,” therefore we believe. This de-gendered, decontextualized way of encountering the world doesn’t make us more likely to be patient with others. It makes us more likely to see things in the starkest, most simplistic terms. Those who post like me are like me. Those who post unlike me and are unlike me. And since the algorithms of social media know that anger is most profitable online emotion, they bombard us not only with the constant sensation of people “like and unlike us,” but with the feeling that those unlike us are our enemies.

Men and women are different. Their differences can either blossom into mutual sympathy and complementarity, or stagnate into alienation and suspicion. Meaningful relationships, marriage most of all, are the only way men and women can truly accept and even be thankful for their differences. But as modern society loses those relationships, as people become less willing to date, marry, and grow old with the opposite sex, it is losing not just family formation, but empathy formation. Men and women resent each other because as they stand next to one another in the digital age, they are not embodied persons encountering the true other, but disembodied users sorted into respective echo chambers.

It’s not that men do not care about mental health. It’s not that women do not believe in personal moral agency. And it’s not that holding people accountable for their actions is intrinsically “male” and empathizing with suffering people is intrinsically “female.” Nevertheless, men and women come to the world with particular (embodied) instincts that can and frequently do force a particular preference. Those instincts can meet without colliding, but only in the context of relationship, rather than content production.

We’re on the threshold of a vicious cycle. Men and women are declining relationships with each other, which means they are more likely to be suckered in by the algorithmic gender silo. But the more they take in a biased, imbalanced view of the other, the less interested they are in relationship. Christians should eagerly want and work for this cycle to stop. And that means being conscious of the ongoing formative effects of digital life.

1. Holistic depornification

2. The ruthless pursuit of “above-ground living.”

3. Mentorship and “honest affirmation.”

4. Family reconciliation.

Today, the topic is the ruthless pursuit of above-ground living.

“Simply Playing a Game”

In 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported on the tragedy of a 14 year old Orlando boy who killed himself. Days before, he had told his AI chatbot “girlfriend” of his plans. The bot exhorted him not to follow through. But the illusion of romance continued. According to their chat logs, the boy seemed to think killing himself might actually unite him with the bot.

What about the people around him? A short paragraph tells a big story:

According to transcripts, Sewell began to feel that the time he spent with Daenerys [the bot] was more important, and certainly more satisfying, than the time he spent in school or with his friends and family. His mother was concerned by his withdrawal—he always seemed to be headed to his room and to his screen, where he’d chat for hours. But she figured she needn’t worry too much. Her son was simply playing a game.

The last two sentences invite reflection. A young teenage boy’s radical withdrawing from friends and family wasn’t enough to worry his mother, since he was just playing a game. My guess is that most people who read this story will come away thinking the lesson is that parasocial relationships with AI bots are dangerous. True. But the real takeaway is before that. When young men recede from the in-person world, when they tuck away in corners away from family, friends, and real life, bad things—sometimes tragic things—are inevitable.

Disappearing from real life into isolated silos of consumption is what I call “below-ground living.” Below-ground living doesn’t mean merely a lot of time on our phones. It’s not merely a measure of screen time. Nor is the opposite of below-ground living purely a life without social media or streaming. Below-ground living is a mode of life, a rhythm of existence that gravitates toward the ephemereal, the meaningless, and the elsewhere. It’s a pattern whereby a person develops a discomfort with in-person life, opting whenever possible to substitute a digital alternative.

Below-ground living makes days without conversation or meaningful work feel normal, even therapeutic. In below-ground living, digital devices are not tools, but furniture, the things that play the most active role in supporting day to day existence. Virtual communities become the “real” friends, who get access to personality while the family, coworkers, and classmates are left wondering, “What are they up to?”

In addition to holistic depornification, young men need “above-ground living.” If below ground living is a rhythm of steady retreat into consumption, above-ground living is a rhythm of production. It’s a life of meaningful work, genuine friendship, and confident identity. Above-ground living is living that’s fruitful for others, yes, but also a powerful antidote to despair and delusion in oneself.

The Movement of Manhood

My friend and colleague Champ Thornton once shared with me a definition of manhood he has used with his (now grown) sons: “Manhood means moving toward people and problems in love and wisdom.” This doesn’t encompass everything about being a man, but it does capture the movement of manhood. Healthy manhood is on the move, not inert. A healthy man does not crave safety most of all. He feels an urge to step into new experiences, new responsibilities, new areas of the world that he can leave better than before.

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The Law of Diminishing Restriction

Stipulate the following:

1. Guidelines about AI use are an absolute good, both at the personal and the institutional level.

2. Tech guidelines are in general unpopular and difficult to maintain over time.

3. Thus, most guidelines about AI use will, directionally at least, “broaden” rather than “narrow” over time. In other words, if an institution’s AI policy in 2026 is “Try not to do X,” the odds are good that by 2029 the policy will be “Doing X is OK but try not to do Y.”

Cultural examples of #3 with regard to smartphones are everywhere. Fifteen years ago, most churches and classrooms did not bother addressing whether phones were welcome, but you did get scolded if your phone went off. Today, everyone accepts that you will be on your device. Can you at least mute it? Yes, you can text right outside the concentration camps; can you at least not snap a selfie?

Technology is not linear (don’t let anyone tell you it is). But the law of diminishing restriction is pretty reliable. Most technologies get their strictest regulation and stigmas in their very early years, for the simple reason that not enough people are demanding access yet. Once the controls start falling, they fall quickly and in batches.

This is why I think The Gospel Coalition’s recently published AI policy is, on the whole, pretty good.

To be fair, I think the category of “research” requires more nuance than their published essay gives. That aspect of the policy seems like it doesn’t quite take seriously enough the changes that Google and other online engines are making to fully integrate AI into their results. It seems implausible that a regular person, without expensive access to paid databases or university libraries, would be able to utilize a search engine without experiencing some kind of AI-generated help.

But let’s put that aside. The reason the policy looks good to me is that it draws lines around AI and creative work that will, by virtue of their harshness, resist the law of diminishing restriction. This is an AI policy intended to alienate those who want to reap the benefits of not doing the work. The policy isn’t meant to make it easier for creators to get read at TGC. It’s meant to make it easier for readers to take seriously what they’re reading.

Aim Small, Miss Small

Here’s a quote from Brett McCracken:

We’re not looking for perfect writing. We’re not looking for meticulously organized information full of suspiciously pithy one-liners or vague examples that don’t feel like they originated in a human’s real life.

We’re looking for writing that comes from a human heart, born out of real passion, nagging questions, persistent burdens; writing characterized by human affection more than perfectly calibrated linguistic inflection. We delight in the hallmarks of truly human writing: a bit messy, unexpected in the way real life always is, somewhat scattered and less efficient than machine-rendered words—yet pulsating with life.

To be clear, this doesn’t foreclose the possibility that genuinely human writing can stay human even while getting help from nonhuman tools. It rules out the possibility that people who see zero intrinsic value to human writing can produce writing of value.

The bar is worth setting here for several reasons. First, the AI revolution is a question of human identity before it’s a question of human ethics. By that I mean that the most important question anyone needs to ask when they’re thinking about AI is not, “Am I allowed to do this,” but, “What am I, and what is this?” The law of diminishing restriction starts by getting people to forget to ask. There is only one path toward coexisting with AI technology in a non-destructive way, and it goes through this question.

Already there have been folks online bewailing TGC’s policy for being too strict. I’ll be honest: I don’t know how to stake out common ground with people who have no interest in asking the existential question with regard to tech. I’m perfectly comfortable living and working with people who come to different conclusions. But people who believe there is no meaningful reflection to be done are taking themselves and others into a dangerous corner. People who don’t care about a meaningful anthropology, who don’t do any work to answer the question, “Why replace humans this way, but not that way,” are just volunteering their own abolition.

Second, the operative principle here is “Aim small, miss small.” If a marksman gives himself a wide target area, that might feel like increasing his chances of success, but it’s also increasing his chances of complete failure. Aiming for any of the target means if you miss, you’ve hit none of it. On the other hand, if you aim for the bullseye, you may miss, but it’s far likelier you’ll end up hitting something. An overly strict AI policy will miss, but it will miss in a better way than the alternative. It will miss in a way that still gives people the spiritual categories to understand who and what they really are. It will miss in a way that preserves human agency and relationships. And again: this is all contrary to the force of cultural gravity. Our relationship with technology will, all variables being equal, slacken, not sharpen, over time.

A Not-Normal Revolution

If restrictions seem strict, consider how extreme our experience of the technology really is. Is it not insane that we can summon entire book-length pieces of content for no other reason than we asked for it? Is it not insane that people can develop intimate and romantic relationships with voices and icons, whose output would fool the greatest minds in world history? Is it not insane that we need not go anywhere, touch anything, or learn from anyone, in order to “create” whatever we can imagine? It’s insane. Doesn’t such a “not-normal” normal demand at least some meaningful reflection about it? How severe are such restrictions really, compared to the power of the tool?

Here’s my point: If you’re not actively thinking about what this tech cannot be or do, you’re not being “realistic.” You’re being transhuman. You’re taking less than five years of innovation as a new baseline of human existence. You’re moving the goalposts of your own personhood. But you don’t have to. You don’t have to have all the answers or the perfect plan. You just have to really do what AI only pretends to do: Think.

Anthony Fauci and Donald Trump are very different people: in their mannerisms, in their beliefs, and in the company they keep. They are not, however, very different kinds of leaders. The similarities between the two become more obvious with time. Each one is deeply confident in his abilities—a confidence that easily shades into arrogance. Both of them crave attention and affirmation, especially from those sitting high atop their preferred social ladders.

Neither one seems to occupy a mental universe in which it is possible they’re wrong. They neither admit nor apologize. At the very most, they may change course when cornered, but this change never means they were wrong to begin with. It means either that untrustworthy people led them to this place or else that the mass of humanity cannot yet comprehend or appreciate their genius. Both Fauci and Trump have an army of full-time critics, many of whom make good and important points, but too many of whom seem to have made such criticism their entire personality and worldview.

In fairness to Fauci, his record consists not of eight years of presidency, but of one to two years of real but limited power during the COVID lockdowns. But Fauci, with help, crammed an impressive amount of failure into a limited window. His testimonies before Congress have been earnest, and I do not doubt that Fauci himself believes to this day that all of his recommendations, assurances, insistences, and rhetoric during COVID were still the best anyone could do. But if sincerity is not a measure of truth for people who start wars with Iran, neither is it for people who want to keep schools and churches closed indefinitely.

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I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on its opening weekend. I liked it, but didn’t love it, and wasn’t sure why not. So I went back a few days ago and watched it again. The second time around, I liked it even less, and I knew why. It just has no emotional center. Once the awesomeness of the spectacle wears of—and it is an awesome spectacle, no question—the stakes of the whole thing evaporate.

Ideology is the least of The Odyssey’s problems. A woke adaptation of Homer would probably have been more interesting, if for no other reason than it would have required a character-centered screenplay rather than just a trauma-informed one. No, The Odyssey isn’t woke. It’s not sure what it is.

It’s a shame that the media buzz and disappointments of The Odyssey have buried the twentieth birthday of what I still consider to be Nolan’s best movie: The Prestige. The Prestige is not Nolan’s smartest or most ambitious project. It doesn’t have the cultural currency of The Dark Knight, the inventiveness of Inception, or the craft of Oppenheimer. Rather, The Prestige is a subtle and sneaky undressing of human nature with the help of Nolan’s favorite narrative device: The puzzle.

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First off, I sincerely want to thank everyone who wrote an email, comment, or text checking on me after the PSA earlier this month. I got a lot of very kind, very concerned notes, and the amount of genuine friendliness and neighborly care was a blessing. Thank you to all who did that.

Second, I (who am perfectly fine!) owe a bit of an explanation. On July 4 weekend I published an article that, while not untruthful or un-Christian in any way, was not my best work. I wrote that article not because I was moved by a particular insight, or had been mulling something carefully and thoughtfully, but because I felt a compulsion to get some piece of content out there for the holiday. The result was an article that was “shooting from the hip"— which is one thing if you’re talking about pop culture or hobbies, and quite another if you’re making a point that people may and probably will read as politically coded.

I received no unkind comments in response to that post. I did receive some pushback. And the pushback made me realize that I had no good answer for it. It was at that point that I realized I had fallen into a trap I had long struggled to avoid:

I was trying to become a content creator.

The realization that I had put my name on something I wasn’t proud of, simply to make a splash in the online ecosphere, frustrated and embarrassed me. I pulled the article down from the site, and hastily put up a “Out to lunch” sign. Why? Not just because of one moment, but because the moment seemed to me a capstone of what has been a prolonged season of uncertainty and unfruitfulness in my writing.

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As I mentioned previously this year, after I finished edits on my forthcoming book this past winter, I felt something that was equal parts exhaustion, writer’s block, and depression. I was “tapped” in a way that felt unusually aggressive. Long story short, I think this season may be starting to lift, and a part of that lifitng has been some core realignments I’ve been thinking through.

One of those changes has been a deliberate change in how I relate to this newsletter, and to Substack’s ecosystem in general.

Substack has been a wonderful place to write and read. But it is not quite the same place it was when I joined. The roll out of the Substack app in early 2022 was a major warning shot about the kind of platform Substack was aspiring to become. I was an early adopter of the mobile app, and soon had stopped receiving most emails and instead was redirecting my subscriptions through the app. This alone was a radical departure from the very reasons I had embraced Substack in 2020. Email was, and (in my view) still is, a powerful antidote to the mess that has become social media. Asking people to subject themselves to algorithmic tyranny, with its attendant outrage and brainrot spectacles, just to read a particular writer, is outrageous. Email newsletters were and are a better way. But Substack’s app was a major step backward, toward algorithmic social media and the wild jungle it invariably forms.

My biggest regret as a writer is how deeply shaped I’ve been by social media my entire career. For someone who’s written at length about the need to resist digital formation, more often than not, I’ve relied on heavy social media use to both bring me interesting pieces of writing and tune the hum of my thinking. This, I’m sure, has resulted in my becoming a less deep, less interesting, less patient, and less confident writer than I might have been otherwise. I see a pattern of choosing short term algorithmic boosts over holding patterns where an idea can mature and words can season.

Substack’s app is a social media platform, plain and simple. The main Substack feed is a collection of short pieces of content that are, most of the time, attempts to go viral. Substack’s algorithm works just as tirelessly as Instagram or X’s to bring you posts you didn’t search for and accounts you don’t actually follow. The goal, as with all alogorthmic social media feeds, is to make the user feel perfectly content in Substack’s app, and unwilling to spend clicks anywhere else.

And the app has done its job. Substack’s social media feature is high-quality; the posts there are wittier, more interesting, and generally more positive than any other place. If there’s ever been an argument that you can build an algorthmic social media feed that doesn’t make you want to burn down America, Substack has got it. But, as Andy Crouch once wrote about technology, “can” tends to become “should." And the possibility of going viral, of getting a ton of new subscribers or followers, based on some pithy, zero-sum, or flesh-feeding piece of content, haunts the writer’s conscience. It did mine. And I think for a while I lost my way.

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For a long time I’ve tried to avoid looking at these facts in the face:

1. I’ve almost certainly accomplished most or possibly all of what I will accomplish as a professional writer.

2. My season of life—vocation, family, church, education, etc.—is, right now, forcing me to choose between quantity and quality.

3. My gifts and my abilities are from God, and it’s honor and his glory that matter more than mine.

If I put these facts together, what comes out is not radical or shocking. It’s just a simple, quiet, honest accounting of my life and my work that I was avoiding. The desire to go viral or become very famous is both a spiritually destructive desire, and a very silly one. That’s just not how the online writing economy goes. Writers do not blow up the internet anymore (and if they did, A.I. is already here to take that away from them). Content creators do, but only after (in many cases) sacrificing their convictions, their mental health, and their dignity. That’s not me. So the book of fame needs to be shut and not reopened. It’s not the goal, and it’s not going to happen whether it’s the goal or not.

By God’s kindness, my writing has found a small but dedicated corner of the Internet. What I want to do in this new season is cultivate this corner, rather than try to expand it. I want to make it better: deeper, healthier, and more vibrant. I want to break away from the demand for quantity and instead provide something of real value, even if it doesn’t map onto the algorithm or track with what’s trending. I want to focus on those topics that really matter and will really matter next year, and the year after that, and by God’s grace to write about those topics with a carefulness and substantiveness that is befitting their seriousness.

To get about this new season, I’m making a few changes. One of those changes involves pulling out almost entirely from the Substack social media feed. I’ve deleted the app and will not be present on it. I’ve redirected my subscriptions to once again come to me via email. While I am staying on Substack for now, I’m taking deliberate action to make the platform the way I want it, rather than the way it wants to be for me.

But one of the changes I’m going to make on the newsletter side is: Starting in August, all of this newsletter will be behind the subscriber paywall, with the possible exception of 1 free post per month.

I know how people feel about this before they tell me. So let me explain how this fits into everything I’ve just said.

First, I have to confront the reality that writing is work, and that continuing to produce massive amounts of free work is unwise from the perspective of a family breadwinner. Particularly if I am committed to doing the kind of work that will not attract cheap attention, I owe it to my family to amplify the value of my trade as much as possible. I want this newsletter to be an active place, but I can’t do everything. The paywall is a small but real way of keeping it active.

The paywall isn’t just a way for me to make money. The paywall is what its name implies: A wall. As a friend has eloquently put, what’s needed in the online world today are not massive commons like Facebook, but “little walled gardens” where people can pursue the true, good, and beautiful intentionally. The paywall is a way of focusing my attention and efforts in a way that frees from me the anxiety of whether my efforts will “grow my brand.” In a word, I am no longer writing for the entire world. I’m writing for those who find something valuable in this walled garden.

I understand that the paywall will, by definition, exclude a lot of people who enjoy reading. I also understand that right now is not a great time to ask people to pay for online writing. Let me assure everyone that I do not expect everyone to be able to do this. This is not a fund raising post. It’s a new direction. Of course, I really do hope many will consider subscribing, as many of you already do.

The new season of this newsletter will feature longer but less frequent content. I do hope for 2-3 posts per month at least. I also may add a link roundup to the regular schedule. My goal is to extricate myself from both the algorithmic impulse and the grind of content regularity. I’m not trying to get big. I’m trying to think out loud faithfully.

I deeply appreciate this space’s readers. And I’m very excited about what lies ahead.

SDJ

Thank you for reading.

SDJ

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Last June, the Presbyterian Church in America’s General Assembly, under the leadership of moderator Kevin DeYoung, commissioned a denominational study and report on Christian nationalism. That report has now been released. I’m not a Presbyterian, but I have several friends who are pastors and teachers within the PCA, and I ser…

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This has been reinforced for me as I’ve read two books simultaneously. One book is by a pastor. The other is by a career writer and literary editor. The pastor’s book is simple, not artful. It has short sentences, plain arguments, everyday anecdotes, and a tight organization. The …

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Here are two questions I think about a lot:

How does Christianity restrict someone’s use of technology?

How does Christianity restrict someone’s stratagems in politics?

These questions come from a conviction that the claims of Christ in Scripture are such a nature that one cannot believe and obey them without experiencing some kind of limiting principle on…

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Richard Dawkins exists. I know this only because one of my senses, my vision, has confirmed it. Around junior year of college I went with a small group to a lecture Dawkins was putting on a couple hours away. He was at a local university to promote his book The Magic of Reality, a children’s book that uses interesting word pictures and fun illustrations…

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My prolonged absence from this newsletter taught me two things. First, I have a wonderful community of friends and readers here. Second, I’m not a content creator. I’m a writer.

I think I’ve known this for a while, but I didn’t want it to be true. Part of me wanted to master the algorithm, embody the influencer rhythm, an…

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