On April 27 of this year, I posted my very first Substack essay. Today is the half-birthday of Christendom Reborn.
I’ve been trying to think what would be appropriate to post for the occasion. Six months isn’t all that long, but it’s long enough to make some assessment of what I’ve got going here and whether it’s “succeeding.” Here’s what I can say:
1) On the day I launched Christendom Reborn, I set a totally arbitrary goal of getting 1000 subscribers within a year. As of this second, I’m at 395. So I’m less than halfway in raw numbers, but by social media growth metrics, that’s definitely “on track.” Huzzah! And warm thanks to all my subscribers.
2) I’ve put more time into it than I originally “budgeted.” I’m not writing for other outlets nearly as often as I used to.
3) I love it. I badly needed a sustained project of this kind.
I know that some people find it hard to understand why a mom with five kids and a regular day job would continue to write so much. It might feel like an affectation. An indulgence. Aren’t there enough “social critics” in the world already? Do you really think that you’re going to save Western Civilization, Rachel?
These are not stupid questions. We do indeed have far too many would-be influencers in this world. Here’s the thing, though: for certain people in this world, writing is almost a compulsive need. It’s how we work through the questions that trouble and fascinate us. We get ideas and start chewing on them, and if we don’t write them up they eat us from the inside like an acid. We write to communicate, but also for our own sanity. The ideas demand an outlet.
It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good! A professional editor needs no reminder that people’s desperately cherished pet projects aren’t always good. But sometimes you have to follow these things where they lead.
For me, the 2010s were a somewhat turbulent decade, professionally speaking. (Personally speaking, I… had five babies. Different kind of turbulence.) I accepted that an academic career just wasn’t possible, and started building some real traction and earning power as a popular writer. And then was thrown into total discombobulation when the political right blew up. Professionally, politically, but also philosophically, I was really in the wilderness there. For several years.
Of course, there were all the bruising parts: the friends who no longer spoke to me, the difficulty dredging up work, all of that. But one of the strangest things about it, I remember, is that it felt like every single person on the planet had a theory of what had happened, often advanced with great confidence, but after listening to them all I was keenly aware that I did not understand what had happened. I wished I had a time machine, so I could flash forward and read about us in the history books. Everyone was coping in their various ways (some admirable, others definitely not) but it just didn’t seem like anyone really had it. It was a lonely time. “Low and lonely,” you might say.
In January of 2022, I started working as an editor, which was a very good thing. I didn’t do it for personal therapy, of course! I did it because I badly needed the money. But in retrospect, it was one of the best things that could have happened, especially at an outlet like Law & Liberty that feels hardly any clickbait pressure. If our higher-ups have regularly reminded us of anything, it is that they don’t want us to be grossly partisan. Roger that.
In an editorial role, I was able to use my real abilities again, primarily now to help other people unfold their ideas more cogently. That was satisfying. I was still doing a lot of my own writing, but I guess you could call it “a little of this and that.” Book reviews, random cultural pieces. But I really think at this point that it was my work with other people that helped me the most. People tease me occasionally for this, asking how long it took me to recover from “the trauma of Trump.” Honestly, I see no reason to apologize. It was genuinely harrowing, there in the right-wing-media beast, watching so many friends and acquaintances break off, seemingly mid-sentence, to race panting and squealing after a demagogic figure. But that’s not the whole story of the political right, far less of America, or the West. And editorial work helped me get better perspective on that.
I still love being an editor. It’s important work, with real rewards. I may write a standalone essay on that soon, because people do ask sometimes, “What do editors actually do?” A lot, actually! I’d love to explain.
This piece is about the Substack, though. A couple of years ago, quite suddenly (as I relate here), this book idea popped into my head, and I then could not stop thinking about it for several weeks. I finally started writing those ideas up into a book proposal (“let’s just see where this goes”), which led to an agent and a bunch of rejection letters (“cool idea, platform too small”), which then led to this Substack. I’m still not quite sure what “the plan” is for Christendom Reborn, but I think it’s fairly obvious what happened here. After years of “lying fallow,” my mind finally reconfigured a whole bunch of disparate pieces into a shape. Which then demanded incarnation. The idea made word.
My humblest thanks, therefore, to all readers and subscribers. I know perfectly well that I’m not entitled to an audience. My middle-of-night Writer’s Torment is not your problem. I don’t take for granted a single moment of your attention, and I hope my thoughts have been worthy of your time. To me, it is a tremendous joy and blessing to develop some of my own ideas, and put them in a single place. If I am still in the wilderness, at least I’ve built a cabin here.
But I can’t end on that note! After all the high-flown talk, I need to justify my suspiciously clickbait-like title. But in fact, it is true that the immediate impetus for launching this Substack came from right-wing activist Chris Rufo. I was laughing this morning at this funny irony, so I might as well just tell the story. A fun little half-birthday remembrance.
Mind you, I pay almost no attention to people like Rufo, and I certainly don’t expect him to pay any mind to a small fry like me. In mid-April of this year, the idea for this Substack was already rolling around in my head, and I had perhaps written two or three posts, mostly in that middle-of-night “can’t sleep so might as well write” way. Launching a personal Substack felt ridiculously indulgent. How could I possibly justify the time? But the acid was eating at me, so I was leaning towards doing it anyway.
On April 22, Rufo took a very uncalled-for shot at my friend Elizabeth Corey, who had just made an appearance on our Law & Liberty podcast. I wrote a couple of sentences in her defense on X, went off to do something else, and returned to find my “notifications” feed unexpectedly exploding. Now, I’ve had the “being canceled” experience before, not quite on Kat Rosenfeld’s level, but certainly on a “that editor seems to have lost my address” or “Mrs. Lu, we’ve suddenly realized we don’t need you to give that lecture after all” level. That’s unfun, sort of the adult equivalent of being pounded by the playground bully and his goons. So I do feel a certain apprehension when my feed unexpectedly goes crazy, but this time, scrolling back, I was quickly reassured. Because there was absolutely no way this one was going to go badly for me.
Why in the world did he respond to a piddling little 3000-follower nobody? I hadn’t even bothered to tag him. But clearly he saw my critique, which led him to hunt down some very, very old record from my university-adjunct days, and retort:
If you’re so brilliant and accomplished, why couldn’t you get a tenure-track professorship anywhere? I might have began my career as a humble documentary filmmaker, but I’ve learned enough to understand that this is what academic failure looks like.
I’m no social-media virtuoso, but I know enough to have a little fun with an opportunity like that.
Honestly, Rufo’s preposterous pettiness was a remarkable gift on multiple levels. I was truly moved by the many kind things people said about me that day, and all the private notes I received. I hope I can live up to them. My feelings towards him are quite warm at this point! Though, I would recommend that he do better research in future. Literally everything he needed to know about me was right there in my X profile.
Anyway, basking in the warm glow of all that unexpected affirmation, I reflected that the Algorithm Gods don’t give me a gift like that just any old day. If you’ve got something to say, Rachel, now’s the moment.
I titled my first post In the Beginning. Still waiting to see how it ends.
If you’d like a little more Rachel Lu in your day, go read my review at Law & Liberty of Lois Lowry’s latest book. Written at the tender age of 89! She’s pretty amazing. Now there’s a lady who clearly feels a compulsive need to write.