It’s been almost a month since I’ve posted here.
That’s a little bit because of time. Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day is a sprint for pastors, and I have been busy with all of the holiday things, plus all of the usual church things, plus all of the budget concerns, plus all of the future-of-the-church things. It has been hard to find time to write anything of any quality. Even a first draft.
That’s a little bit because of depth. This project started as a way to process being a pastor in the not-really-post-pandemic mainline church. And I think that I’ve done all of that work that I want to do in this secret public forum. I still have work to do. This just isn’t the place to do it.
And that’s a little bit because of Nazis. Because while a few things are a lot of bit about Nazis, a lot of things are a little bit because of Nazis.
Like most social media platforms—and Substack is absolutely a social media platform—there are Nazis here. And because Substack doesn’t moderate its content, that means that Substack allows Nazis to monetize their content on the platform. That means, in effect, that Substack either pays Nazis or makes money from Nazi content. And while authors with more pull than me have asked them to stop doing that, Substack has refused. Here, in fact, is what co-founder Hamish McKenzie had to say about the idea of de-monetizing or de-platforming Nazi content:
I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.
In summary, I don’t have the time to give energy to this project at the moment, I’m not sure that this project is useful to me anymore, and this is a platform that refuses to remove—or even de-monetize—Nazi content.
So I think that this is a good time to end this project. This will be the last post of honestly in this format. Maybe, after the New Year and after things have settled down a little bit, I will start something else. If I do start another project, you will almost certainly find it on my website (which, as a note, I’m also hoping to update after things have settled down a little bit).
Thank you for reading!