Mullinghouse Press: Our Fatal Sincerity

My book is out! It’s called Our Fatal Sincerity, and you can find it HERE. 

I can’t believe I actually finished a book! I finished something! I’ve never been more proud of anything else I’ve done in my life!

What is this book actually about? Our Fatal Sincerity is the result of my wrestling to come to terms with my own loss of belief in Christianity. Up until the end of 2018, my faith in Jesus had been the most important part of my life; as the book gets into, that year a lot of long-standing problems and new realizations suddenly came together and went critical—I was left unable to convince myself that the person I had been trying to talk to all my life was really there. 

The book primarily grew out of the journals I was keeping during this time. Although my loss of beliefs was devastating at first, it also marked the point at which life began to make sense for the first time, and I couldn’t stop writing about all the problematic ideas I had been trying to force into my conception of reality and all the reasons they now seemed so glaringly incorrect. It wasn’t long before I started thinking that I wanted to be able to explain to people why in the world I had changed my mind about the beliefs that used to guide all my life decisions, and the desire to be able to explain myself led me to re-write and expand my journal entries and group them together by categories. 

I ended up with what became Chapters 2 and 3 of Our Fatal Sincerity. Chapter 2 is about how the church preaches about a God full of love who exists as a specific, personal being, but when people doubt if God is real, the church turns to arguments that rest on the ability to generate fear of what God might do to you and that speak of God as a vague concept with no specific personal attributes. Chapter 3 is about how the church preaches the vital importance of truth, but when it comes to convincing people to believe in God, the church falls back on manipulation instead, with tactics intended to scare people away from outside sources of information and make them question their ability to even identify what is true.

To provide background to the arguments presented in Chapters 2 and 3, I added Chapter 1, which tells about the surreal experience of growing up in a community where everyone else seems to be experiencing the supernatural when you don’t experience it yourself and details how it took 17 years of life not working the way my beliefs suggested it should before I finally realized those beliefs weren’t accurate. 

Last, I added Chapter 4 to address the major criticisms I’ve heard against the sorts of beliefs I ended up holding. This chapter is there to acknowledge that these heavily spotlighted downsides to leaving religion do indeed represent complicated and difficult experiences but also to say that, even so, these experiences are far from the miserable catastrophic messes the church wants to make them out to be. 

I have a feeling I’m going to write a lot of posts here that restate topics raised in Our Fatal Sincerity from various angles. It takes a while to get out all the variations on all the things you want to say about what it feels like when you find out everything you thought you knew was a lie, you know?

Here are some bonus points about making the book I thought I should mention somewhere:

What is Mullinghouse Press?

When you publish a book, you can list an “imprint” as the publisher instead of using your own name. That seemed cool, so I came up with a name and logo for an imprint. “Mullinghouse” was inspired by the idea of mulling things over and the similar sound and possibly similar meaning to “milling.” (BTW do you like etymology? This is one of my favorite sites: etymonline.com) I like the idea that you keep thinking about things until you break them down into powder. The “house” part is like how they used to call bakeries “bakehouses” and I liked that if you put it together into one word it just sounds like a name, which you could easily read over without wondering if it’s supposed to mean anything—but if you were wondering what it means, well, now you know.

I used a free stock photo from one of the photographers who kindly share their work on Pexels to derive the logo. I figured a windmill logo made sense, and I know this kind of windmill is for pumping water and not grinding grain, but it looked nicer, and, besides, I felt that the ultimate failure of the image to embody the concept suggested by the name fitted the author’s nihilistic sensibilities. Thus, Mullinghouse Press, an imprint avec logo that is pretty inconspicuous even though way too much thought went into it.

But why self publish anyway?

Honestly because I’m terrified of reaching out to people I don’t know and trying to convince them that something I did is worthy of their time. And because I don’t know if it’s realistic to get a nonfiction work published when you don’t already have a following of any sort. And because I was afraid I might be asked to change something in a way that somehow made it less accurate or less of what I intended it to be. I am trying to work on the first issue and not be so afraid of interacting with people; now that I at least have the confidence of knowing I can finish a book, I want my next project to be something fictional written with the intention of getting it published traditionally and allowing input from the publisher.

Is it supposed to look Australian?

Nope. While I realize the book cover is probably going to make everyone think of the Australian flag, I still really liked the idea of putting a constellation that looked like a cross on there, but I specifically used the Northern Cross (aka Cygnus the Swan) and not the Southern Cross to reduce the resemblance a little. I wanted a clean, simple decorative symbol that related in some way to the theme of the book, and aside from the important fact that stars are pretty, it seemed right to go with something that some people attach so much anthropocentric meaning to while others associate thoughts of randomness and human insignificance to the same object. In the constellations we see representations of earthly creatures and of the gods that occupy human thoughts, but we also see (somewhat) randomly scattered formations of matter that are unimaginably old and unimaginably far away, that have nothing to do with us, that would no longer appear to form the same pictures or even to be near each other if we could view them from a location other than our own solar system. We might see a cross in the sky, but it’s up to us to decide how significant if at all that understanding of what we’re looking at is. There's also a teapot because ... something about Bertrand Russell ... I haven't read him, but I've heard he said something about there not being a teapot in space, so I guess he wasn't right about everything.

Author Caveats:

Our Fatal Sincerity is composed of my retellings of personal experiences, my opinions on those experiences, and my recommendations on how to respond to similar experiences. While this sort of writing is important in its own way, it can’t be treated as if it were a scholarly research piece on the practices of modern Evangelical churches or some such thing. When I say that churches today act like xyz, I’m speaking from within the scope of my own experience; I haven’t conducted a comprehensive study on the practices of churches across the country. There are places in the first chapter where bits of information on scientific and historical questions are mentioned. As I hope the text makes very clear already, I'm retelling what I thought about these questions at specific points in time and how my position at the time influenced my thoughts and actions. I'm not saying that all these bits of information are true. I'm pretty sure that's obvious enough when reading the book, but you can't have too many disclaimers!

Writing Timeline: 

First drafts for most sections were finished by the end of 2020, so there are places that refer to how long it’s been since certain events happened with the end of 2020 as their vantage point. I did a lot of rewriting between that time and publication to improve wording and flow of various sections, but I didn’t go back and keep adding material to bring the timeline up to the present each time I finished a round of editing.