i.
When I was 23, I had a Fitness Phase. And during that phase, I followed a rash of Fitness Influencers, whose bodies I wished to emulate (problematic). One of my favorites was @GraceFitUK, now Grace Beverly, who vlogged her workouts, her vegan meals, and her busy Oxford life. I would bring her to the gym with me in my phone when I did my squats, and scroll through her sponsored posts about Gymshark (activewear) and Women’s Best (supplements). Until one day, Women’s Best disappeared from Grace’s bio — and I, frankly, wanted to know why.
It was this cursed Google search — is gracefituk no longer with womens best — that led me to Guru Gossip.
Guru Gossip is a forum dedicated to discussing the lives of influencers — originally beauty gurus, thus the name. But by this point, no one who made their living Posting was safe. All the fitness girls had their own threads, along with BookTubers, cosplayers, and someone called “Young NASA Wife.” Before I ever had the chance to figure out what was going on with the protein powder coupon code, I was deep in a gossip thread about Grace.
“I can’t get over how quickly grace gains weight,” one commenter said. “the image of her in the floral dress made me read the comments to see if she was pregnant, her ass is looking dumpy in her latest ig post with the grey outfit.”
Another said they used to find her enjoyable to watch, but now “each time I visit her page I find her repulsive…especially after the split with her boyfriend.”
Yet another speculated on the nature of the trauma she references in a post about PTSD — “Running out of fake tan? Having an acrylic break? Who knows…”
At first I thought it seemed a little excessive, all this hostility about someone none of us knew. But then I wondered if she had done something to warrant it. The justification from the Guru Gossipers seemed to be that Grace was just another rich kid at Oxford, whose success was a product of both privilege and a genetically incredible ass-to-waist-ratio. She should know by now that this kind of vitriol comes with the territory of Being Online. And when she dared acknowledge the existence of the thread — she should know better than to have looked for it.
I still wonder about the supplements sometimes.
ii.
Guru Gossip is just one of many snark forums — message boards dedicated to trashing the Online Famous (and sometimes, also, the regular famous). Influencers, reality TV stars, OG mommy bloggers, and the like. They are all equally brutal.
There’s snark forums for everyone from Amberlynn Reid (ostensibly a weight loss vlogger, whose existence supports the livelihoods of an entire ecosystem of Amberlynn reaction channels that have documented her 200 pound weight gain over the last decade) to Instagram’s most jean-skirted Fundamentalist Christian Influencers (whose original snark forum FreeJinger is so old and storied it has a history page). There’s now a whole series of offshoot Fundamentalist Christian Snark Subreddits — r/fundiesnarkuncensored is the biggest.
I found my way to Fundiesnark from a Cody Ko video in his series That’s Cringe — where he, and his best friend Noel, cringe at cringey things. In this particular installment, they were cringing at Girl Defined.
Girl Defined is an online ministry by Bethany and Kristen — two very blonde, very Christian sisters dedicated to teaching you about God’s Beautiful Design for Womanhood. It’s by far Cody’s most watched video at 30 million views, which had the accidental effect of boosting Girl Defined from a niche ministry to over 100,000 YouTube subscribers, many of whom are there to hate-watch. I know this because I am one of them.
The Girl Defined sisters feel like AI generated Conservative Evangelicals (aside from the fact that they are both 6’2”, a feature so stunning it had to occur naturally). They’re 30ish and from San Antonio, with 6 more siblings to fill out the extended Girl Defined Cinematic Universe. Their weekly YouTube videos teach teenage girls how they can “Wear Makeup in a God-Honoring Way” and “Break Free from Sexual Sin.” On Halloween, you can find them hosting a “harvest festival” instead of partaking in the Devil’s holiday.
I have cringe-watched just about every one of the 500 videos they’ve posted to YouTube. I’ve learned all about God’s Radical Design for my Female Body and whether Christian girls should send nudes (they should not). I watched the livestream of Bethany’s wedding, where she had her first kiss at the altar at 29. And after years of privately fixating on these two godly girls and their very long list of rules, I found a whole community of people on Fundiesnark who shared this obsession that they, too, could not quite explain.
Bethany and Kristen are fixtures on Fundiesnark. But there are many others, documented in great detail in a Fundie Wiki. There’s Christian relationship advice gurus Paul and Morgan (who famously threw up during her vows), Instagram Poet and Little House on the Prairie Cosplayer Kelly Havens-Stickle, and the bible-tract-printing and MLM-pink-drink-shilling Rodrigues family. Their choir of 12 children travels from church to church in an RV, collecting donations for their worship performances.
The snark on Fundiesnark is similar to Guru Gossip in some ways — there’s plenty of nitpicking people’s outfits and facial features. But there’s also snark, if you can call it that, about their fundamentalist beliefs: sexual repression out the wazoo, entirely suspicious homeschooling, having as many babies as God will give you within the confines of a traditional marriage, a genuine belief in the devil, modest swimwear.
Plenty of Fundiehood is snarkable regular sense — like, there’s an activewear brand called Snoga that makes long athletic skirts so the Fundies can do a Christian-approved yoga called Praise Moves. This is genuinely hilarious. But Fundie beliefs are snarkable in a way that almost feels politically productive, like condemning their views on abortion. But it all blends together, some comments referencing Bethany’s bigoted beliefs and the size of her chin in one fell swoop.
“Gossip subreddit about Christian Fundamentalists” is not the kind of thing you tell people has become a fixture of your morning scroll. I relished in private, following the storylines of the Fundie Families, imagining what I would do if I was raised in one of them and had to get out. It was a little mean, but that was kind of intoxicating in its own way.
iii.
In high school, my best friend joined Young Life and found God. She promptly made a bunch of new Christian friends who were not me, so I joined Young Life too. I was an atheist raised by lapsed Catholics who gave up on the whole thing shortly after my First Communion, but I was also jealous, so to Young Life I went.
Young Life is basically a youth group, but it’s not attached to any specific church. It’s just Generic Non Denominational Christian. There were weekly Club meetings held at the homes of the members, where we did Youth Group Stuff — blending fast food together and drinking it like a smoothie, bothering neighbors while doing scavenger hunts, and annual extremely sticky Donut Olympics. And at the end of Club, during the last 10 minutes, they’d proselytize.
The Young Life sermons were pretty bare bones Jesus Loves You stuff, a beginner friendly Christianity that touched on the kinds of things the average teenager was going through. More-involved teens talked to us about getting through bullying and loneliness, or how Jesus helped them get on a better path when they were going down a bad one. Even if the talks didn’t resonate, the rest was fun enough to keep going. But the point, of course, was for the talks to resonate.
Every few months, during The Talk, they’d have everyone close their eyes and ask the group if anyone was ready to accept Jesus into their heart. This is what many Christians consider to be the moment of conversion — when you’re born again, saved, ready to live your life for Jesus. If you found God at Club, they’d invite you to another weeknight meeting called Campaigners, which was a much more straightforward bible study.
I’m not sure what compelled me to raise my hand in that backyard when I did.
After 6 months of Young Life, I was like…..half bought in. I liked the idea of a God that loved me unconditionally. I liked the idea of becoming closer friends with my best friend’s new best friends. I liked hearing the stories of transformation from my peers, who described a life with Jesus that left them feeling more secure and confident and loved at an age when it is hard to feel those things. I liked that the leaders were kind and paid attention to me and asked me about my life.
I didn’t quite believe the Jesus stuff. But I wanted to.
The main thing that held me back was the political conservatism that I associated with Christianity. Young Life itself wasn’t overtly political. They were actually quite apolitical — gay marriage was one of the big cultural debates at the time, and I had no clue what the leaders thought about it. Or about gender roles, or premarital sex, or any of the things I had independently come to some not-particularly-Christian conclusions about.
Were the Young Life people fundies like the Duggars I watched on TV? It didn’t seem like it. If anything, all the preaching about the unfailing love and acceptance of God sounded pretty lefty to me. I just wasn’t sure. I think the ambiguity was the goal. With my eyes closed, in the backyard, I raised my hand so I could join for bible study on Thursdays.
It was pretty clear, pretty quickly, that I was wrong. Not just about their politics, but about the idea that someone like me would fit in at a bible study. Club was for Everyone. But Campaigners was for Christians, and Christians weren’t supposed to try alcohol or wear short shorts or cuss or watch MTV’s The Jersey Shore, let alone be adamantly pro abortion, which, surprise!, was not Young Life’s viewpoint.
I guess the expectation was that God would change my heart and convict me to not want to do those things anymore. But nothing about those things felt particularly wrong to me. I didn’t feel like a sinner for my teenage experimentation with Mike’s Hard Lemonade. And no amount of mealy-mouthed love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin talk could convince me that gay marriage wasn’t like, entirely good and fine. I was not Transformed in Christ™, mostly because I didn’t feel like I needed to be.
I still gave the Book of Galatians, as assigned, an honest try. But it just did not click. I felt entirely silly writing down verses on index cards and trying to relate them back to my teenage life. I liked the entry-level-Jesus-Loves-You stuff, but I did not want to actually Be a Christian. And in turn, I don’t think they wanted me there either.
iv.
Bethany and Kristen’s first book, also called Girl Defined, defines the Three Pillars of Counterfeit Femininity as: Liberation, Independence, and Sexual Freedom. The true pillars of biblical womanhood, of course, are Helping Others, Producing Life, and Nurturing Relationships. In laywoman’s terms: being a Girl Defined by God is about getting married to a man, submitting to him, and having his children.
Neither Girl Defined girl has had the most traditional path to this sort of womanhood, as far as their own books are concerned. Bethany wasn’t married until she was 29 (ancient) and clearly felt bad about it — so much so that she bought a wedding dress at her sister’s appointment a decade earlier, assuming a marriage was right around the corner. She later tried to sell it on Poshmark.
Kristen got married at 19, but had trouble conceiving — which must’ve been especially painful in a culture that considers producing life to be your gender’s, like, whole thing. She eventually adopted two older boys from Ukraine.
Part of me feels for them, seeing how oppressive this mold is, and how hard it was for even them to fit inside of it. But part of me loathes them, because they don’t just practice. They preach. Their books — Girl Defined, Love Defined, and Sex, Purity, & the Longings of a Girl’s Heart — contain a cacophony of repressive purity rules, the kinds that leave people with a lifetime of shame for doing entirely normal things. Kristen details her teenage struggle with masturbation, which she was “set free” from by confessing it to her parents. I’m shriveling up like a raisin just thinking about it.
I go back and forth between pity and anger, pity and anger, then back to pity again. But the anger really hits when I see videos from people who left this sort of Christianity and have to figure everything out from scratch.
There’s a whole #exvangelical community on TikTok who talk about this — the shame, the fear, the joy — of leaving a religion that touches every part of your life. Born again, in a way. As someone who used to ask my mom if we could adopt a Duggar Girl (preferably Jinger) and get her in a pair of pants, I have found myself deep in a hole of Deconstruction Videos, watching ex-Mormons put on their very first tank top. Utah!
It turns out that the “Freedom in Christ” so many Evangelicals describe is, well, just a lot of rules. But watching people explore their newfound freedom — and talk about what it feels like to have your entire worldview collapse — makes the appeal of those rules make a lot more sense. Kristen and Bethany think Satan is lurking in pop songs and the Home Depot 12 Foot Skeleton. If I believed that, I’d find comfort in rules too.
v.
Sans a religion to follow, I went out into the world to make sense of it on my own. I did most of that, in those years, on Tumblr.
It was on Tumblr where I first became a feminist. I know that all the middle schoolers are Socialists now, but things were different back then. This was not just pre-Trump, but pre-Instagram. Feminism was a radical new idea to me. And I dove into reading and learning about it with a fervor.
Social Justice Internet was a balm for a big, complicated world. It had an explanation for why everything is the way it is. It had rules. It had a language. And all I had to do was learn it, to help make the world better.
As I learned, I wanted to make sure that my online presence reflected those learnings. I reblogged and retweeted slogans about smashing the patriarchy and checking privilege. I shared callout posts about celebrities and locals alike. I couldn’t just come to understand things for myself — I needed people to know that I knew them. I needed people to know that I was Good, and thought Good Things, and watched the Right Things on TV.
Over the years, I felt uncomfortable with some aspects of Social Justice Internet. Not the big ideas, but the way they played out online. I saw Collages of Problematic Tweets from 2012 that were supposed to define someone’s character in 2022. I saw interpersonal callout posts with vague accusations of harm between former friends. I saw people surveilling what others Posted or Didn’t Post. I increasingly didn’t feel Good about participating in any of it. I couldn’t tell what any of this had to do with socialism, or organizing, or making the world better. Nothing that had drawn me to the left was present on Twitter at all.
It was hard to look out at The Internet, a decade after my Tumblr years hit, and feel like following the rules hadn’t amounted to much of anything, as far as actual social change was concerned. It felt like all we had done was correct one another, mob people we mostly agreed with, and make a small handful of insane billionaires very rich by doing all that on their little websites. Which felt Good to finally let myself feel, until it felt Bad, because of what the feeling was. I went to The Internet and all I got was this stupid anxious fixation with being a good person that made me act like a bad person. What was all that for?
But I’d been told, for years, that this discomfort was Bad. That it made me Complicit. That it was a slippery slope to the alt right — that you can’t abandon this kind of Posting with your values intact. I felt paranoid that people could smell it on me, because for years, I’d been trying to sniff it out in other people too.
I deleted my Twitter, and started trying to get back in touch with what drew me to the left in the first place. It was painful to let go of something that had been so meaningful to me, and to feel like I had failed at it. But it was freeing to take stock of what mattered to me and define my leftism for myself. I hadn’t even known it was an option to do that. It was a balm, in itself, to be okay with being wrong.
vi.
A lot of the r/Fundiesnarkers have deconstructed Christianity themselves. A lot of them are as angry as you’d expect them to be. They feel lied to, forced to repress themselves their whole lives in fear of a Hell they no longer believe in. The Fundies are a reliable place to send that anger without feeling too bad about it.
Because, why would you? These are not the internet’s most sympathetic characters. They’re Westboro-level bigots who think that the desire to masturbate comes from, literally, Satan. These people are Bad, and so are their Rules, and we are Good, because we recognize that they are Bad.
On a picture of Bethany, a snarker muses, “Is the nose scrunch supposed to be cute or intimidating? Bc I’m a little scared that she’s going to build a house out of candy and eat my children.” Another says that her nose gives “Snow Miser vibes,” while another’s brain “went right to Hotel Transylvania.”
“Her cabbage patch eyes are too much.”
“Every time I see her stupid open mouth, I wanna smack it with a dick.”
“Her eyebrows are tragic. How can she spend so much time and money pretending she’s still a natural blonde and have eyebrows like that?”
This is all on one post.
“Appearance snark” is technically against the rules. But the line where “appearance snark” begins is defined by the moderators as “you’ll know it when you see it. Saying X Fundie looks like Y is fine (Ex: Bethany looks like the Grandpa from The Munsters.” This is all justified, of course, because Bethany is “ugly on the inside” — the bigotry just “seeps through.”
There’s a phrase in Snark communities referring to a snarker’s favorite subject — “Bitch Eating Crackers,” BEC for short. As in, this Bitch could be doing nothing but Eating Crackers and I’d still find something to snark about.
Bethany’s bigotry comes up reliably on the BEC posts about her, almost like an anxious justification. It’s okay because we’re healing from our fundamentalist past. It’s okay because we believe the right things. It’s okay because we are Good, and they are Bad. We are nothing like them. It’s okay because it’s us. Right?
vii.
I tried psychedelics for the first time this year. My goal going into it was very simple: just let yourself enjoy it. Don’t control it, don’t try to explain it to yourself as it happens, just let it take you wherever it goes.
Perhaps this sounds not that hard, and is, in fact, the entire point of this class of drugs. But I like Rules, and Order, as previously established, and have never once “gone with the flow.” I’m working on it. I took the mushrooms to challenge that, but mostly to see some cool colors.
Sitting in my backyard, staring at fractals on the ground, I found myself thinking about the Fundies. I thought about how they live their lives so rigidly, so guided by fear, so controlled by rules that don’t make sense the second you start to poke at them. And then I thought about myself, and my brush with Christianity, and my much longer brush with Social Justice Internet. I thought about how I was attracted to those things because the world is scary, and my brain desperately wants to organize it. Or at least find some rules that I can follow, so I can be Good.
In any other moment I would’ve immediately stopped that thought and said, you’re nothing like those people. But I let myself follow the thought down the trail. I saw myself in people I’d spent years reading about with scorn. I live so rigidly, and for what? Because I like what it says about me as a person? Because it’s scary not to? Because what if I try and figure it out for myself and I’m wrong? Again? What if there’s no answer? What if there’s no set of rules that makes it all make sense?
I laid in an empty bathtub like a little egg, cackling, thinking, Oh God, the shrooms are making me feel empathy for the Christians. I ignore my intuition because I am worried, deep down, that I am Bad. They ignore their intuition because they think it’s Satan. They’re probably scared too.
viii.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Kristen and Bethany’s younger sister Elissa was there in Kiev. She had moved there a year before, after marrying a Ukrainian man she met through her church. He said in an interview that he likes women who follow orders. They’d only met IRL a few times before getting married, and she left her sheltered life in Texas to follow him to his home country to support his Soccer ministry. She didn’t speak the language. And now she was on the run to find a safe country to give birth to her first child in.
Fundiesnark ate her alive. For not evacuating sooner, for her husband not staying behind to fight in the war, for making a GoFundMe, for her family contacting the news back home, for saying they were looking for a Christian family to stay with in particular. Because she is a bigot, and so is her husband, and they will go on to raise this child to be one too, and repeat what their parents did to them in each new branch of the family tree.
For every snarker who found their way out, there is an Elissa who probably never will. They see snark as persecution — the more the world derides them, the more Godly they must be. It’s a self-reinforcing-doubling-down, but the call is also coming from inside the forum.
This year, the sisters took their old book Project Modesty down from their website. It had a strict set of rules around what was Modest and what was Not. Some snarkers noticed that Bethany had been wearing some clothes that were not kosher in the book, like (gasp) shorteralls. The girls eventually talked about this in a podcast episode, saying that they had come to believe that modesty doesn’t need to be a hard set of rules, but a conversation between you and God.
Bethany’s husband had encouraged her to try some clothes she would’ve previously deemed immodest, and it helped her become less anxious about the arbitrary rules she’d grown up with. She said that she’s not deconstructing. She’s still a Conservative Christian. But she’s asking questions about why she believes what she believes, and why she does what she does. She changed, publicly, when she realized she didn’t have good answers to those questions. It’s hard to see it as anything else.
It’s the kind of thing you’d hope snarkers would celebrate, knowing how many of them went through this process themselves, starting with the same sorts of questions. But to them, it was hypocritical. Like they want her to suffer some sort of existential punishment of permanent jean skirthood for all those years she preached the wrong thing. Like she had a chance to believe anything else, growing up in a house where her dad wrote the dress code.
But they snark, on her new outfits, her husband, her face, her newly minted Sex Course for Christian Wives (which they do, hilariously, call The InterCourse). And she reads it, and she doubles down. She is not deconstructing at all. Those people are nothing like her.
Being a Hater in a God Honoring Way was originally released as a zine.
