Hi, I’m Chrissy.

I’ve led a pretty weird life up to this point. Born in rural northern Indiana and raised right-wing evangelical mostly in a north suburb of Indianapolis, I went on to earn a PhD in modern Russian history from Stanford University and spent the years 2012-2015 teaching in a Russian university in Moscow. That gave me a front-row seat to Russia’s surging Christian nationalism and the rapid decline of that country’s relations with the West (not to mention the value of the ruble, in which my salary was paid). It was painful and difficult to watch, particularly as some people I considered friends went all in for the revanchist madness .

My relief in returning to the United States as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of South Florida was short-lived, however, as we soon got stuck with Donald Trump for president amid the ascendance of an increasingly powerful Christian nationalist movement here at home that I, as someone who studied authoritarianism in grad school, am comfortable describing as fascist. And now, as Ron DeSantis’s Florida itself spirals into an ever more hellish dystopia, I’m glad I was able to make it out to Portland, Oregon in 2019, where I began my MTF gender transition a few months after coming out as a transgender woman.

My unusual combination of lived experience and academic expertise prepared me to leave academia with unique insights into the American Christian Right, and I’m now a full-time writer and speaker with a focus on religion, politics, and secularism. I’m prominent voice in the exvangelical community and movement, or, as I like to put it, I’m slightly famous for yelling at Christians on the internet. To be clear, though, while I am an atheist, I am not an anti-theist. I’m proud of my record of working with both secular and religious organizations toward the common good, and I believe that embracing pluralism is crucial for good democratic citizenship.

If you’ve made your way to this page, you might have read about me in The Guardian, The New Republic, The Economist, or The New York Times, or you might have listened to one of my guest appearances on any number of podcasts. Or perhaps you know me from my work in outlets like openDemocracy, Religion Dispatches, The Boston Globe, Playboy, Political Research Associates, Eurasianet, or Dame Magazine. Maybe you’ve never heard of me, and you simply followed a link or got here through a keyword search. In any event, welcome to my site! I no longer update the blog here, but I’ve left the vast majority of my old posts up as a record of my intellectual development between 2017 and 2020.

If you’d like to book me as a speaker or to get in touch for some other reason, click here. I’d also love for you to check out my Substack, The Bugbear Dispatch, or join my Discord community!

If you appreciate my work, please consider supporting me with a monthly pledge via Patreon, or making a one-time donation via PayPal. My heartfelt thanks goes out to those of you who support me, as I can only do what I do thanks to readers like you!

This page was last updated on August 14, 2023.