July is the month when we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Annaka’s last post. She has been writing with us since August 2019.
“From what I’ve read online, Calvin College kind of has a fundie reputation, but to be fair, I didn’t do much research into it, so if that’s your school and it’s actually awesome, then I’m sorry.”
I was standing in my kitchen in my PJs, making tea with my laptop next to me on the counter. The YouTuber talking from my screen was in the middle of introducing that video’s topic, a tradwife influencer named Mrs. Midwest. I scrolled back a few seconds to make sure that I’d heard that right. I had—Mrs. Midwest attended Calvin College. She was born in 1995 and had therefore almost certainly been at Calvin the same time I was.
It was one of those moments when two parts of your life—things that have nothing to do with each other—collide. The first thought I had was “is Calvin’s reputation really that fundie?” and the second was, “I need to write about this.”
“Fundie,” in internet parlance, is a shortening of “fundamentalist,” i.e. “Christian fundamentalist.” The term is popular in the “fundie snark” community, a collection of generally online twenty- and thirty-somethings who are deeply invested in observing (and, let’s be honest, gossiping about) the celebrities of the Christian right. Popular subjects of conversation include the Duggar family, Girl Defined, Abbey Shapiro, and the other figures (some more niche, some less so) that are the face of the online right.
Many, but not all, of the people involved in the creation and spreading of criticism of this kind of content used to be a part of the community that creates it. They grew up religious or watching Nineteen Kids and Counting. Their families attended IBLP conferences or listened to Focus on the Family’s radio shows. They’ve since realized that the brand of Christianity that they grew up with, or at least parts of it, hurt them deeply. And now they’re recontextualizing (the common term used is “deconstructing”) those ideologies by critiquing the media complex that supported them and their successors in the internet age. A lot of them are also queer.
I don’t consider myself part of any snark community, but I share much in common with those who are. I grew up Christian, I consumed media produced by right-wing Evangelicalism, and I’ve been deeply scarred by religious people thinking that they were doing right by me. And I love hearing gossip about online weirdos—especially anything with the whiff of the cult about it.
Which is how I ended up putting on this video and hearing the name of my “kind of fundie” college from the speakers.
I didn’t experience Calvin as fundie, but I can see how someone would. After all, I took classes in the Prince Conference Center. This is the college that Betsy DeVos graduated from. My Black roommate once got told that “she looks like someone who would like R&B” at open mic night. And there was that time someone wrote “white power” in the snow on cars in the KHvR parking lot. (Not to mention what Synod has been up to the past few years.)
Which brings us back to Mrs. Midwest. Her early output focused on stay-at-home wife and mom content, with a special interest in how to be feminine and occasional tangents into how she feels discriminated against for choosing not to be a career woman. In addition to her generally retrograde views on gender, most of her notoriety comes from the fact that she has been featured on manosphere podcasts and white nationalist social media pages (while also liking posts from and following said pages and posting in red pill subreddits). In other words, while we don’t know that she’s ever posted anything racist, we can be pretty sure she has racist friends.
Someone like that went to Calvin the same time I did and learned completely different lessons. That’s the piece, I thought.
And then an alt-right YouTuber filmed me at work, and I never wrote it.
If I’m being kind to myself, I don’t see this choice as a lack of courage. After all, I did write about that experience, even if I left out identifying details. But I wouldn’t have been able to do that with Mrs. Midwest, and all it takes is once glance at a newspaper to know what courting the wrath of the right gets you in this climate. Plus Mrs. Midwest still lives in West Michigan. So do I, and there’s such a thing as too close for comfort.
When I first started writing for the post calvin, I was fearless. I wrote about liking gay porn. I wrote about religious trauma and Donald Trump and my period and mass violence and being asexual and not being afraid of anything. And I do still write about some of that (especially the smut thing), but I’m not fearless about it anymore. I’m just barely in my thirties but I’m old enough to understand why so many revolutions are led by students.
I don’t mind not being fearless. Fear is useful, which is why it exists. But I worry that fearfulness will metastasize into silence. Silence is actionlessness, and I don’t ever want to live in that place.
I know that the post calvin is small. I know that there is little chance of the things that I have said here being anything more than my own personal bulwark against the silence (and the first things that show up when you google me. Hello, potential future employers!). I thank anyone who’s ever read my posts for the times when it’s been more than that. But I also acknowledge the times when that’s been enough.
I never wrote the post about Mrs. Midwest. There are so many things that I never wrote about, and sometimes that’s been because of fear. I hope that it’s never been about silence. I hope that it never will be.
