Another year…

On January 1st, 2014 I pushed the virtual “go live” button on Christianity Without The Insanity. I had gotten the idea — stolen, swiped, copied, call it what you will — from so many other online politically left-leaning social media brands were… well, they didn’t seem to PRODUCE anything. I mean they did a good job of being news aggregators, sharing relevant news to the liberal Christian community from mainstream news outlets. And they did a good job of swiping memes from each other (downloading and re-uploading, often cutting off the original attribution or even erasing the author/artist's name so it looked like they originated it when it got ‘shared’.) And occasionally they even had a relatively decent status update that was a sentence or two long. But other than that, none of them really seemed to MAKE anything that could be called “an original Christian-liberal production”.

I wasn’t aware, yet, of some authors and bloggers that were out there, soon to break into the social media market, but this was January 2014. Obama had been in office 5 years, there were whispers about who might run in 2016 but the election was still basically 3 years away. Trump was out there, but he was still a TV show host and not really a serious candidate in anyone’s eyes.

What we in the Christian liberal community were all focused on was the so-called Christian Right and its influence on American politics. People like Dr. James Dobson (who had left his Focus on the Family ministry for a soapbox dedicated to complaining about how bad the black man in the White House was), Jerry Fallwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, and worse the people they were influencing in American politics, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, and others who found it ‘convenient’ to use their faith to get what they wanted from their constituents.

So I started CWOTI, not to copy what other social media brands were doing, but to start PRODUCING original content that those brands could then use and share and spread. For free. Not for my own fame, because that doesn’t interest me at all, but to give a voice to the ideas and feelings that we all have about the Conservative Christian Right, politics, and the world in general.

And of course, the language of the Internet is memes. So I started making memes and sharing them. And letting everyone else sharing them. With no real care if they got downloaded and cropped and re-edited. And I started writing. I’ve been less prolific at that than the memes, but I feel I’ve written a few good things worth sharing.

And in the last 7 years, we’ve been through a lot. I mean OMG have we been through the wringer together. The rise of Trump and Trumpism, the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement and the unbelievable pushback from the ‘other side’, all of it building to the pressure-point that exploded with the invasion of the Capitol Building on the 6th of January.

Where do we go from here?

I’ve taken some time off from posting memes and such to consider how I want CWOTI to look and sound going into 2021. Do I want to continue being the angry anti-christian-right voice, posting anti-gun, anti-Ted-Cruz memes? Or should I consider going the route of so many others and post happy, uplifting things all the time?

After watching hundreds of Trumpians storm the Capitol Building and then have Trumpian politicians blame ‘antifa’ rather than owning the violence they, themselves stirred up, I think I know my answer.

CWOTI will continue to take a stand against the insanity of the right, the Christian Right and everything they stand for. If anything, I will be turning it up to 11 and ripping the knob off.

In spite of Trump’s tenure in the White House coming to an end, he, or at least what he stands for, still has ENORMOUS, support in Congress, in many state legislatures and governors’ mansions, and obviously in the hearts and minds of thousands of people who hang on his every word and will continue to do so even after he’s no longer President.

And I cannot sit by and do nothing. So I will do what I can. I don’t have the good health and ability to travel and march, but I have a creative mind and some photoshop ability and I can write some.

So I will continue to do that. And more so.