STRONGWILLED update

a platform transition and what's coming ahead this year

Hello from Krispin and D.L. Mayfield!

Thanks so much for subscribing to STRONGWILLED. Whether you have been here for just a few weeks or for the past few years -- we are so grateful for your support and readership.

We’re making a platform change for STRONGWILLED. We will be moving from Substack to Ghost. If you’re a free subscriber, you will continue to receive emails as you have, from our new platform. Also, if you’re a paid subscriber, you don’t need to make any changes. If you’d like to become one and support this work, now is a great time to join with a 25% off option that will last as long as you’re subscribed.

We started STRONGWILLED as a place to publish our research and insights into what we viewed as a neglected topic in American religious discourse - religious authoritarian parenting, including the punitive parenting methods that bound so many disparate patriarchal religious households together. Our thesis was that these parenting methods impacted not only individuals but societies as a whole. We believed that these parenting methods, targeting the autonomy of children and teens, would create a population that not only voted for an authoritarian government, but actually clamored for it.

And then Trump was elected for a second term.

Unfortunately for the entire globe, religious authoritarians are now in positions of power in the United States and we are all at the receiving end of their “discipline”. Our work helps unpack how they got there, and how parenting methods have been their key to amassing power and ushering in full-blown authoritarianism. While Christianity remains a privileged and protected religion in the United States, the long-term personal and social impacts of their methods of parenting remain understudied. For the past two years we have made our blend of history, social analysis, and self-help for survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods free and accessible to anyone who wanted to read and listen. We are proud to have been able to do this, thanks to the generosity of the small minority of people who support this project financially.

Here’s just a snippet of what we have published in the past two years:

We defined what religious authoritarian parenting methods were, the history of how we got here, how these parenting methods target specific developmental stages like toddlerhood and adolescence. We also wrote and talked about estrangement in evangelical families, how Dr. James Dobson was mentored and worked for an actual Nazi, and recently embarked on a series on how purity culture is pedophile culture (our most-read chapters so far). You can see the full list and get links to all the chapters we have published so far by going to our About Page.

Looking ahead to the next few years, we are going to be making a few slight changes, and we are excited to dive deeper into some of the topics that are most relevant to survivors of these parenting methods.

For now, the biggest change is that we are now hosting this project at Ghost instead of Substack, in a small move to divest from Substack. This shouldn’t impact our current subscribers at all (all memberships have been transferred to ghost), but going forward we will be removing our content from Substack and you will be able to find it, share it, and subscribe to our newsletter at strongwilledproject.com.

If you would like to support us financially as we transition away from Substack, now is a great time to do it. We are offering 25% off of our paid memberships for life (bringing it down to $3.75 a month). Paid memberships enable us to keep investing in this project and keeping it ad free -- not to mention you get commenting privileges, community-only discussion posts, and first access to information about upcoming events like webinars and discussion groups.

Krispin is hard at work on a book about the developmental impacts of religious authoritarian parenting methods and will be sharing parts of his research here in the newsletter. He is going through the impacts year by year -- infancy, toddlerhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and beyond. How does corporal punishment, patriarchal hierarchy, religious guilt and shame, and restricting access to outside sources impact people in each of these stages? Subscribe to STRONGWILLED and you will get a sneak peek into his work, plus some accessible tips for how to heal, find solidarity, and move forward from these intentional developmental delays. We also are looking forward to focusing on gender, sexuality, and even MORE estrangement content in the coming years. We believe that authoritarian regimes naturally lead to estrangement within families, and that this is already a growing issue in the United States and beyond.

The STRONGWILLED podcast will enter a season of interviews and discuss some of these topics in greater detail with guests and experts who have invested deep work into the subject of religious trauma and the social/political impact of religious authoritarianism. D.L. will also be occasionally releasing hopecore episodes where they look at elements of pop culture that can help sustain us in the fight against religious authoritarianism wherever we might find it. If you would like access to our monthly bonus podcast content, you can do that by becoming a paid patreon member for $4.

Despite everything, we are hopeful about the future. So many people are waking up to the harms of religious authoritarian beliefs, politics, and actions. So many people are investing in processing and healing from the harms they experienced in childhood and beyond so they don’t pass on these cycles to the next generation. So many people are sharing their stories of what it was like to be a child in these spaces, including the abuse, exploitation, and developmental trauma they experienced. While the news headlines might be getting grimmer and grimmer, here on the front lines we are seeing incredible folks doing the work to show up for themselves and their communities by committing to processing their childhoods. We are in awe, every day, by the wisdom and bravery of survivors. We are committed to keeping this project going -- not just because we have more to say, but because it’s an incredible group of people we get to write to and for.

If you have made it this far, thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting STRONGWILLED. This project always has been and always has been designed for survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods, those who love them. We also hope it will be a resource for anyone who wants to understand the political and psychological roots of American Christian fascism that is predicated on the abuse and control of children.

Times are tough, but so many of us are accessing our strong inner wills in new and deeper ways.

Thank you so much for being here, and for supporting this work.

If you have any questions, feel free to email strongwilledproject @ gmail.com

Also, a special thanks to Rohadi Nagassar for helping us make this transition and facilitating the technical background work that we didn’t know how to do!

And since this is our last post from substack, you can totally disregard this button here: