The 2026 STRONGWILLED Survey!
Welcome to the new STRONGWILLED platform – we are so glad you are here! We created a survey for you all because we’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to read and hear this coming year. The survey is below.
But first, some updates:
We recently made the switch from hosting our project on Substack to Ghost. If you were supporting us on Substack, that has been automatically routed to Ghost with no need to change on your end. And if it seems like nothing has changed between Substack and Ghost, that’s because it’s functionally very similar. We are so grateful to those who are able to financially support this work and enable us to keep investing in this project and find more sustainable ways to move forward.
We will be writing posts here on Ghost available to all, while also investing more in our patreon-only podcast episodes of STRONGWILLED – like D.L.’s Hopecore episodes and more casual conversations about growing up in a high control religion, family estrangement, and queerness.
There are two ways you can access these episodes: one is by financially supporting us here on Ghost and one is by supporting us on Patreon. If you support us on Patreon, you will get your bonus episodes delivered right to your Patreon app. If you support us here on Ghost, you will receive an email with the episode in it. If you like using a specific podcast app to listen to the member-only podcast episodes, we suggest a patreon membership because you can use the patreon specific RSS feed.
If you sign up today for these special bonus episodes, you will get a podcast tomorrow delivered to your inbox all about JD Vance, James Dobson, and why D.L. is in a good mood (for once!).
We will continue to post podcasts on the main feed, and we have a nearly decade-long backlog of podcast episodes discussing evangelical media, religious authoritarian parenting… and the first season of the TV show The Good Place (we’ve tried a lot of stuff over the years). You can access these simply by searching for STRONGWILLED wherever you normally access your podcasts episodes.
And, of course, anyone can read our backlog of chapters and deep-dives into religious authoritarianism. You can see our table of content here.
Speaking of transitions:
D.L. recently wrote a post about divesting from Substack and investing in creative projects. If you are interested in keeping up with them and their work, the best way is by subscribing to STRONGWILLED here on Ghost. They are also occasionally on Threads and Instagram.
Krispin is hard at work on a physical book about growing up in a high control religious community/family and can be found on Instagram sharing about religious trauma as developmental trauma.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff: a reader/listener survey!
After two years of the STRONGWILLED project, it seems like every week there is even more to unpack about growing up in religious authoritarian spaces and the impact of these parenting methods on current political realities. We would love your help as we narrow our focus on a few different topics and modalities.
STRONGWILLED is a survivor-led and survivor-centric project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods gain autonomy and find solidarity, and your voices have always been core to this project, and we’d love to hear from you about what feels most important about recovering from religious authoritarianism.
You can take the 2026 STRONGWILLED survey here.
We have been so impacted by the ways people have engaged with this project and we know that the need for resources to unpack and process the harms of religious authoritarianism are only going to grow in the future. We are so grateful to have this community to process in and we learn so much from those who choose to share parts of their story with us and the wider world.
In the coming weeks and months we are excited this spring and summer to update some of our most formative chapters and also deep-dive the experience of adolescence in RAP communities.
We aren’t going anywhere and we are hopeful and excited about the future of STRONGWILLED -- and the importance of all of us getting in touch with our inner teenagers as we learn to live lives of resistance day in and day out.
Thanks for being here, thanks for making the switch to Ghost with us – and let us know what you most want from this space!
Because Ghost is simply a hosting platform (and not a social media app) we rely more than ever on our readers to get the word out about this project. Thank you to everyone who has shared STRONGWILLED with friends and family members – it means the world to us and enables us to keep investing in this project.
