I [dressed as Christian Girl Autumn] as a joke… but I don’t think it’s a joke anymore
Halloween was something we didn’t celebrate living in Nicaragua, so I’ve tried to make a point of taking every opportunity to make up for the lost time. I’ve been cartoon characters, like Wirt and Jughead Jones, and I’ve been GQ cover shoots and the Arthur meme, but this year was the furthest stretch yet.
I chose to become Christian Girl Autumn. (for $15 at America’s Thrift!)
One of the great memes of the 21st year of the 21st Century is Christian Girl Autumn. For more about the meme, check out this Know Your Meme entry. She stands for pumpkin spice lattes. She stands for fall vibes. She stands as the successor (or the foil? the antithesis?) to “hot girl summer.”
For me, she’s a cultural referent worth critiquing. How do people interpret her as she appears on social media, and how do they read into what this woman stands for? Christian Girl Autumn hits close to self-identification for some, but for other people, she represents a culture of optics and bullying that shut them out of a community, not genuine spirituality.
The comments section of my Instagram post does the explaining better than I can. “prayers at church on Sunday[,] gossip at starbies on Monday” wrote my sister. “just WAIT until you hear who just submitted an unspoken prayer request at the small group,” a fellow ex-MK wrote, referring to “unspokens,” a method of signaling (often petty) that a specific person outside the prayer group needs prayer for something undefined (and presumably so bad it’s unmentionable) by the person who’s asking on their behalf. Christians in the comments, including people I’ve worked in ministry with myself, contributed to fleshing out that vibe themselves in the comments.
(Here’s my point):
Therein lies the irony of Christian Girl Autumn. She’s a stereotype— but she’s also real. The image of her doesn’t represent the type of Christian who’s doing the real work. Instead, she’s the person for whom “Bible study” is more of an aesthetic. She’s culturally (white American evangelical) Christian and she speaks fluent Christianese, but her Jesus isn’t radical— He’s more likely whitewashed and suburban. The Bible verse reference in her Insta or Twitter bio doesn’t extend into her life much further than just that, especially in context with how people outside the Church experience her.
As someone who is both a Christian and exists on the margins of the well-off white American expression of the faith, having grown up mostly outside of it, dressing as Christian Girl Autumn means two things for me.
First, it’s about owning up to the jacked-up misrepresentation of the Gospel we’ve got going on in a serious way: it’s theologically horrifying (yet understandable) to me that the closest-accessible cultural referent for Christianity is a scarf, boots, and the pumpkin spice latte, and not, I don’t know, an organization turning guns into garden tools.
Second, it’s REALLY important that we (Christians) be able to laugh at ourselves when it’s appropriate— to not take ourselves so seriously and to be able to laugh along with people at the sillier aspects of white American evangelical culture. As a homeschooler 8th and 9th grade, it was great to joke about the ways I fit the stereotype. Christians were making content about it then (on YouTube, c. 2010s), and they still are now (Babylon Bee). (But, like the pages I linked show, many Christian content creators have a way to go in learning there’s a difference between punching in at ourselves, and punching at people outside our circles). What does Christian Girl Autumn actually DO?
This is where I want to conclude: there’s a balance to be found between taking one’s faith seriously and not taking oneself too seriously. We need accountability. Obviously. We need to loosen up and critique ourselves, because the first step to making meaningful change is recognizing we can be wrong— and a first step towards that is to be able to acknowledge the ways we’ve been silly. Because putting 1 Corinthians 13 in my bio but being ruthless in real life is a similar kind of blasphemy to cursing Jesus by name.
Because the call too often is coming from inside the house.
What I’m reading rn…
I just finished a poetry book by Forrest Gander called Twice Alive, and WOW was I impressed by this book. Gander’s work is so alive, as the title suggests— it’s scientific and raucous at some places, steamy in others, and critical in hard-hitting moments. Twice Alive, as a short critical essay in the back explains, breathes some of the essence of Sangam poetry, which originated in South Asia: it shares themes, approaches, and vibes with a certain strain of the tradition called akam. (For more, buy the book!! or in the meantime, read here). Gander’s work, however, takes place mostly in Southern California, Mexico, and the landscape of the bodies of the speaker (a lover) and their beloved.
I don’t have permission to reproduce entire works from the book, so I’ll link to a section of the book that was published virtually by Emergence Magazine here, and share just a couple of snippets that really struck me.
The first is from a poem called “Sea: Night Surfing in Bolinas” :
“… with you I became • aware of an exceptional chance • I don’t
believe in • objective description, only • this mess, this experience, the
perceived • world sometimes shared • in which life doesn’t • en-
dure, only • the void endures • but your vitality stirred it •
… I’ve risen from the bottom of • myself to find
• I exist in you • exist in me and • against odds I’ve known even
rapture, • rare event, • which calls for • but one witness” (Lines 23-29)
The second is from a piece called “Post-Fire Forest” :
“Shadows of shadows without canopy,
phalanxes of carbonized trunks and
snags, their inner momentum shorted out.” (Lines 1-3)
[.…] If this landscape
is dreaming, it must dream itself awake.
You have, everyone notes, a rare talent
for happines. I wonder how
to value that, walking through the wreckage.” (Lines 19-23)
One last thing…
One of the feature-length films that was required viewing in my senior Bible class in high school was the movie Saved! It’s a satire of Christian School Culture told through the perspective of a teen girl who gets pregnant while trying to “cure” her boyfriend of being gay— and that’s just the first fifteen minutes.
I bring this up because I’m thinking of starting a subcolumn that people may subscribe to separately if they’re interested — “Saved! to Drafts” — that deals specifically with issues of faith. I have plenty of thoughts haha: would you be interested in something like this? Let me know!
Soon,
~ pd