Heretic Hereafter Podcast

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As a kid, when non-Evangelical adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was always confused. Why ask when the correct answer was clearly “homemaker”? Certain aspects of the job were appealing. I could exert control over the domestic sphere—things like meal planning, child rearing, decor, and my personal favorite, home organization. There’d be no pointless meetings and good job security. Fresh out of college, I was lucky to marry a great guy, who (after I put him through grad school) earned enough to support our fledgling family. But while I was ecstatic to become a mother, being home with a baby all day was not, let’s say, as stimulating as I’d imagined. Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Not only was I socially isolated and bored out of my mind, I felt confused: wasn’t this supposed to be God’s plan for families? And if so, why was it driving me up the wall?What I didn’t realize was that the story I’d absorbed (a woman’s highest calling is full-time motherhood) was a recent invention. Pre-Industrial Revolution, most families lived and worked all in one place. Farms and shops were worked by the whole family. Elementary-aged kids learned their parents’ trades, how to run the home, and how to care for younger siblings. Only once adults were leaving home to work in factories and large offices during the Industrial Revolution did we start to see the gender norm of upper-class women not working outside the home. (Low-income women have always taken on extra work for money.)The Industrial Revolution’s emphasis on efficiency and productivity elevated certain types of work over others: work that made products which could be sold was deemed more important than maintenance or care work. Under neoliberal capitalism, work is valued primarily in terms of money—not in family or community necessity.As a woman, I was presented with two choices: make money via Lean In-girlboss capitalism or opt into full-time motherhood. But neither solution really satisfied my own ambitions, nor the needs of my family/ community. Lefty girlbosses (Sheryl Sandberg chief among them) conveniently ignored their reliance on other women (usually women of color, always low-income) to take care of the domestic and care work they were too busy/important to do. Not to mention that communities (and especially public schools) rely heavily on the unpaid labor of mothers.Meanwhile, the Religious Right’s take on full-time motherhood/tradwifery has myriad issues. They, at once, elevate the value of unpaid domestic work (yay!) while also strictly reassuring us that men are biologically incapable of performing it (boo!) It’s a thoroughly hypocritical argument: this work is sooooo important that men just have to do something more stimulating/prestigious/well-paid. Masculinity is equated with earning enough money to support a family, while femininity equals “being taken care of” financially while being a 24/7 domestic servant with no breaks or benefits. Men in such arrangements get to enjoy the benefits of capitalism and the gift economy without ever labeling it as such (or needing to reciprocate.)It’s a system ripe for abuse. Even among full-time mom friends in “good” marriages I’ve heard of women being told they didn’t get a vote in major family decisions because they “don’t earn any money.”Perhaps it makes sense, then, that marriage and birth rates have been falling for decades. We’re feeling the squeeze of capitalism and rising inequality, with less community to call upon for help. As more and more work gets shifted from the community to the couple (think of the decline of free-range kids since the 90s), couples are burned out and exhausted. That makes the prospect of additional children less and less appealing. If the Right is actually serious about boosting marriage and fertility rates (instead of merely controlling women), they’d do well to help the 36% of American adults who’d like to have kids but don’t think they can afford to. According to survey respondents, this could look like:* subsidized childcare (a friend in Spain pays €100 per month per kid!)* cheaper higher education/help with student loans* more affordable housing* universal healthcare* legalized abortion (this one may seem counterintuitive, but knowing abortion is an option if a pregnancy becomes dangerous = more women willing to get pregnant)(Note: Trump’s $5000 ‘baby bonus’ did not make the list.) We feminists must recognize that the discourse around women and careers has, for far too long, been dominated by wealthy white women. By listening to intersectional feminists, we can escape the tradwife/girl boss binary and start reimagining a system that actually works for everyone.Books like Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism and Angela Garbes’ Essential Labor challenge us to expand our definition of “feminist” issues to include things like food security and domestic workers’ r

I was having my monthly “Should I go to grad school?” meltdown last week while at coffee with a friend. Faced with my midlife panic, V calmly asked, “What would you even go to grad school for?” So, I presented this month’s top five: teacher, social worker, nurse, therapist, or pastor. (And “nurse” is mostly because I’ve been watching The Pitt, not due to any natural aptitude.) Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.V, with her characteristic bluntness, said, “Basically those are all the same job. Therapists are just pastors for atheists.”And I laughed, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about it: are therapists just pastors for atheists? On the one hand, BAD CHRISTIAN COUNSELING. “Oh you’re depressed? Why? You have Jesus! Buck up!” Therapists certainly receive a lot more training and are (unlike most Christian counselors) actually qualified to recognize and treat serious mental illness.But serious illness aside, one of our primary existential tasks is finding meaning. Most humans, at some level, believe in fairness, that consequences should follow actions. People should be rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad. And yet, the universe often fails to comply to this neat directive. Billionaires get rich denying their workers bathroom breaks while schoolteachers have to take on second jobs. American religiosity has cratered in the last 20 years. But even as fewer of us identify as “religious” or attend weekly services, we still need meaning. Enter the gurus.I’m as susceptible to these gurus as the next chronically self-doubting midlife Millennial. I’ve read the self-help books and watched hours of Instagram reels by writer/influencers who seem to have life figured out. I eyed Bikram Yoga before that turned out to be a cult, and wondered about NXIVM before that turned out to be a cult, too. I felt mildly inspired by Glennon Doyle’s Untamed even as I noted the deception in how much she publicly presented a happy marriage while, behind-the-scenes, she was falling in love with someone else.And now it’s Elizabeth Gilbert’s turn. Her new memoir, All the Way to the River, reveals the dark side of her supposedly magical love story with her friend, Rayya. I heard about the story of Gilbert romantically sitting by Rayya’s bedside on NPR, which somehow failed to mention the years of enabling Gilbert did, including procuring and injecting heroin for her lover. In her review of the book (which releases 9/9) Jia Tolentino writes: If you’ve read any celebrity profiles about youngish female stars during the past decade or so, you may have noticed that each woman, no matter what, is always stepping into her truth and power—she will also be stepping into her truth and power three years from now, when she promotes her next thing, and she will certainly be stepping into her truth and power five years after that. Every time, the person you’re seeing will really, finally be her.The marketable, brand-able guru must always present herself as having figured things out and thus able to inspire and instruct us on how to do the same. They point to themselves and their own stories as models for our own lives.But…they’re not done living yet. And just because they figured something out in the past doesn’t mean they’re living well now. We can admire the way Gilbert moved on from her divorce in Eat, Pray, Love and look at her recent past with shock and horror, wondering, “Where do you get off trying to teach me anything?” Perhaps this dissonance is due to the fact that humility is incompatible with our age of self-branding and free-market capitalism. Humility is one of the most important spiritual virtues, because humble people are teachable. But it doesn’t sell.And maybe that’s why religion, for all its many problems, continues to stick around. While gurus say, “look at me,” great religious teachers direct our attention upward. They encourage us to follow principles, allegories, stories of truly remarkable people, not just those with the loudest voices and biggest audiences. They push us to expand our concern past our own self-actualization and towards loving others, even those who are very different from us.Which brings us back to therapy. Good therapy, like good religion, points us back to a set of principles: things like honesty, reciprocity, accountability. Bad therapy (like the kind offered by ChatGPT) offers us endless ego-boosting validation and can even induce psychosis in some users. Meaning is something we all must seek in order to have a fulfilling life. There are many ways to get there, but, hopefully, that meaning we find is bigger than ourselves.As for myself, I still toy with the idea of going to grad school. But, to paraphrase John Lennon, life is still happening as I make other plans. My debut novel comes out in 4 WEEKS! (Eeeeeeeep!) One thing you won’t find me doing: claiming it solves all your problems.If you enjoyed

Did you miss part one of this topic? You can find it here. Confession: I hate the phrase “scarcity mindset.” I do a fair amount of work in lefty education advocacy circles and if there’s two things that are guaranteed at any such gathering, it will be a.) some weird ice breaker involving coloring and b.) the phrase “scarcity mindset.”Is there a $100 million dollar budget deficit in our school district? That’s just a scarcity mindset. Our afterschool program is being cut? Seek abundance! This was especially egregious during pandemic school closures. I was stunned to hear many respected educational advocates suddenly saying that kids were learning plenty while schools were closed.Too often this phrase feels like a way to dodge the problem before us and gesture vaguely at “the system” while paying lip service to some far-off day when taxes will be fair and we won’t need prisons, and all children will attend free, full-day anti-racist Montessori outdoor school, complete with organic, vegan lunch.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.But it’s August now, and the Pacific Northwest is abundant with wild blackberries. When I first moved to Seattle and began foraging them, I always made sure to be clearly on public property and not to pick a bush clean. Always I was anxious that some property owner would appear and accuse me of stealing.Of course, no one has ever cared. We are overflowing with blackberries. We have more than any person could ever eat. That’s abundance.In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer delineates between gift economies and capitalism. Gift economies operate on a principal of abundance, while capitalism requires scarcity—you can’t price and sell something that’s freely available.Unless you can manipulate people into buying it.Capitalism creates scarcity. Marketing fools us into thinking that bottled water is better than tap, that blackberries from the store are superior to the ones growing on our street. Hierarchies create scarcity. Having food, clothing, and shelter isn’t enough, we have to have trendy and fashionable items. It’s not enough that college has become widely accessible, it’s Ivy League or bust for our kids. It’s as if we distrust abundance. Is this the scarcity mindset everyone is always telling me about? Is it possible to break free of this mentality?The authors of The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism would say so. In this paper, the authors posit that there are four categories of reaction to neoliberal capitalism:* Strivers: these folks believe they can make it; they just need to try a little harder, find the right productivity hacks, align their chakras, or maybe go back to school? The authors also put those interested in Wellness and Self-Help (WASH) culture into this category, and talk about how wellness can become a pipeline to more dangerous ideologies (*cough* RFK Jr. *cough*) * Innovators: these people see the problems in the system and look for alternative arrangements. We’ll come back to them in a sec.* Dropouts: these people have lost hope. They don’t see a path towards getting what they want in life and often leave the workforce or are extremely dissatisfied/burnt out by work. The authors attribute many “deaths of despair” to this category.* Rebels: this group embraces political solutions to their problems. The authors spend a lot of time talking about the MAGA movement and conspiracy theories like Q-Anon, but I also wonder if leftist populist movements fit into this category.All of these reactions have pros and cons. Is it better to strive all your life against a system you can’t beat, or to accept that your ambitions will never be satisfied? Is it better to organize politically? If so, to what end? I confess, I’ve been a striver most of my life. I’ve read every habit hacking and productivity book you can get your hands on and spent hours taking seminars to help my business and make me a more efficient cog in the machine. Sunk cost fallacy makes this worldview an especially hard habit to break: once you’re so deeply invested, how do you admit that maybe you were wrong? But the more I butt up against the system, the more I find innovation appealing. Where and when is it possible to opt out of competition and exploitation and into cooperation? What can we organize for that will help the whole instead of pitting us against each other?And here I think orienting towards abundance is helpful: I can’t control the system—I can’t self-help my way into being richer or more successful, but I can strive to be happy with what I have. As long as our work is honest, there’s honor in it. It might not be prestigious or well-paid, but we can take pride in doing our best at it. Work doesn’t have to define who we are.Yes, budget holes and program cuts are reality. We can’t wish our way out of these problems, that is all true. Also true: we often overlook the abundant things in ou

For many of us growing up, “Christian” was synonymous with “Republican.” It was a given that we followers of Christ supported a political party that was not only anti-abortion, but pro-free market capitalism. Even long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the menace of godless communists and their authoritarian regimes loom large in our collective imagination. I was raised to believe in government incompetence as much as the American Dream. America was the great meritocracy, and a comfortable, middle-class life was available to anyone with the gumption to work for it. In my young life, this proved true, again and again. Hard work and honesty pleased God and guaranteed to lead to material abundance under God’s preferred economic system: capitalism. Wasn’t my life proof of this? My parents worked hard and we had enough money for everything we needed. I worked hard in school and got good grades. If I wanted a spot in advanced choir or an afterschool job, my efforts always yielded results. Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I was born towards the end of Ronald Reagan’s first term, a time when Neoliberalism was ascendent at home as well as in the UK under Margaret Thatcher. Neoliberal politicians emphasized deregulation, privatization, free markets, and free trade, along with paring back social welfare programs. “So what?” You may be asking. “I’m not an economist, why should I care about Neoliberalism?” Economics seems like one of those abstract topics only tenured nerds care about.But Neoliberalism’s impacts go way beyond academia and politics. By shaping our economy, Neoliberalism has altered our incentives and our sense of security. In “The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism,” a paper out of the progressive think tank The Roosevelt Institute, the authors argue that “The key tenets of neoliberalism…have shaped and been supported by a range of cultural practices, beliefs, and worldviews.”In other words, Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic system, it’s a culture and a worldview.What are these Neoliberal beliefs that shape our culture? * The individual is the primary unit. This individual is rational and self-interested. Thatcher said, “there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.” * Free markets will solve all our problems. Once government regulations are removed, market efficiency will give us all the products and services we need. Reagan famously said, “Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.”* Self-reliance and personal responsibility are the ultimate virtues. If the meritocracy is real, then the only thing standing between you and your dreams is hard work. Any obstacle, be it racism, sexism, poverty, or disability, just means you have to work harder. Fairness is not assured, nor should it be.And how do we see these beliefs showing up in our culture?* Everyone for themselves. If everything is a competition and there’s no social safety net, then you better look out for you and yours above everyone else. Intensive parenting is a direct response to Neoliberalism and the shrinking middle class. To paraphrase Nikole Hannah-Jones, even nice, Liberal parents want their children to have “every advantage.” Rarely do they stop to ask, “advantage over whom?” This competition-over-cooperation mindset leads to distrust and weakened community ties.* Your salary = your value. Remember when actors were just actors? It was enough to be a great artist; they didn’t sell tequila, books, or diapers. And why does every Real Housewife need to start a business, instead of just enjoying being, like, ridiculously rich? Being rich used to be the goal, but it’s not enough anymore, we all need to prove our value by becoming an entrepreneur. Meanwhile, we don’t value unpaid work like caretaking, even though LITERALLY EVERY HUMAN BEING has needed/will need it at some time. Likewise, if the meritocracy is correct, then unemployed/underpaid people simply aren’t trying hard enough. (Never mind that capitalism does actually require a certain percentage of unemployment to function.) Ergo, if they simply “refuse to work hard enough” then we don’t owe them any sort of social safety net.* All institutions and pursuits ought to be modeled on business. Have you ever, upon joining a gym, been instructed to fill out a SMART goals worksheet? Or attended a church that was obsessed with growing its membership? Because we hold up free markets as the answer to all our problems, other institutions are slowly becoming business-ified. Likewise, social media and gig work pressure us into monetizing every hobby or passion. * Consumer choice = freedom. Instead of acting like community members, we act like consumers. We treat choosing a school for our kids like buying a fridge,

Despite many pastoral proclamations of God’s love, church is not a place I learned to love myself. Instead, I learned to distrust myself, see myself as evil, and feel guilty/responsible for Jesus’ murder. Prayers of confession were meant to assuage this constant guilt, but they couldn’t touch my underlying Calvinist beliefs that I was bad.At home, I witnessed this shame fuel both my mother’s religiosity and her alcoholism. It makes sense, in a supremely messed up way: if a person truly believes they are evil, then alcohol and drugs are one of the few ways to escape this pervasive shame.As a younger person, I tried to use shame as fuel to improve myself. It worked like this: I’d berate myself for not being thinner, swear off sugar, deplete my willpower, binge eat Double Stuf Oreos, feel even more shame. Every time the cycle repeated, my shame grew stronger.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And in Evangelicalism, almost anything could be a sin—not just your actions, but even your thoughts. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount equates being angry with someone with murder and lustful gazing with adultery. This list of thought crimes includes the stark admonishment, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)For many of the Christians I knew growing up, this passage was a big source of not feeling good enough. Get angry with someone? Congrats, you’ve just NAILED Jesus to the cross!Although I didn’t learn how to love myself in church, I was lucky to have good therapists, dear friends, and books to help me, particularly Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Dr. Kristin Neff.In it, Neff identifies three main components of self-compassion:* View your shortcomings with kindness. Try to treat your own pain and problems as you would a friend’s: not by ignoring or judging, but by choosing a generous interpretation.* Recognize the universality of your experience. Say you’re ruminating over something weird you said at a party. Remind yourself that most people, the world over, have said something equally embarrassing in public. You are not alone.* Maintain a mindful distance from your suffering. Mindfulness means being able to observe and accept our thoughts without overidentifying with them. (This might look like being able to interrupt a thought spiral with a contradictory idea.)Not gonna lie, when I first read this book, learning self-compassion felt impossible. Mindfulness was something I’d been struggling to learn for a few years (a journey made more complicated by my C-PTSD). It’s only five years later that I can look back and recognize how much progress I’ve made and marvel that self-compassion is often my first response to negative feelings.The funny thing is, after taking a long break from Christianity and reading the Bible, when I return to it now, I can see in it a more complicated picture than what I learned as a kid. Those scary “thought crime” verses? They come after the Beatitudes—a list of attributes that Jesus values even when other people don’t.One of life’s paradoxes is this: every human being is worthy of love. We don’t need to do anything to earn love or justify our existence. That is true, AND it’s also true that it’s better for us, individually and collectively, to strive towards becoming more compassionate and more just, wiser and more generous. It’s acceptance + growth.And now, when I read the Sermon on the Mount, I see this acceptance + growth paradox. The Beatitudes tell us “You are beloved and worthy, even when others discount you,” while later verses present an enlightened ideal.I no longer believe in suppressing feelings like anger or lust, nor in feeling guilty for having them, but I can also imagine growing into a mindful state where these responses are not my go-to.Whether or not you’re a Christian, I think self-compassion is something most of us lack. I wonder how much kinder we would be to others if we could learn to be kinder to ourselves? Is that another meaning of “love your neighbor as yourself”?Science has proven that self-compassion is good for us. The question is, can the church learn to stop policing people’s behavior through shame, and instead, teach us how to love ourselves?BONUS MATERIALS* my old link-saving app is being discontinued, but I discovered this great recipe saving app* Loved this recommendation from Emily Edlynn that parents should schedule one “vacation day” without kids* 3 short self-compassion explainer videosHeretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Heretic Hereafter at heretichereafter.substack.com/subscribe