A Small Name Change, Nothing Else

America, Humbles Yourselves & Pray is now

JesusIsRisen.org is the new name — nothing else is changing.

Long story short: Nothing is changing except the name. You can just file this under “fussy creative guy wrestles with naming” and go about your life.

In case you’re a little disoriented, this (Substack) was America, Humble Yourselves & Pray. If you’re curious about why the change, I’ll explain.

Why the Name Changed

To be exceedingly clear, I haven’t changed my views. I’m a Christian Reconstructionist, and I believe that America — along with every nation — should humble itself before God, repent, and seek His face, with society ordered according to God’s law as the standard for ethics, justice, and righteousness. That’s what this blog has always held, even back when it was FYRE.IS (anyone remember that name? I actually named my business after that…).

What follows is a lengthy history and explanation. If for no other reason than to document parts of my life I’ve never documented. This is one of the few times I shift from analytical intellectual and into just… me. So, if you’re curious, and coming along for the ride, this is a rare glimpse. Hi, I’m Matthew.

Nullify Abortion

Short story long, in 2014, I started writing for Nullify Abortion. For nearly a decade, ending abortion was almost exclusively what I wrote about. Over time, I also began trying to understand what was happening in society and in the church, which eventually led me to Christian Reconstruction and the application of biblical principles at every level of life. This wasn’t tangential to abolishing abortion, but a necessary step in understanding it.

The unfortunate truth I had to accept was that I wasn’t an abortion abolition organization. At the end of the day, it was me on social media, and me writing, and I flew a banner called “Nullify Abortion”, and despite having a board and bylaws, 99 percent of the labor and personality and work, and 99.99% of all the words were me. But I operated and functioned as an organization. At some point in my journey, I realized “I am Nullify Abortion and I am not an organization.”

I realized I couldn’t continue to operate as Nullify Abortion.

Not because I didn’t believe in what I was doing, but because I was trying to pretend to be something I wasn’t — an organization.

FYRE.IS -> HumblePray

Around this time, I had started FYRE.IS and had been writing successfully on a bunch of different topics. When I formally closed Nullify Abortion, I chose to “rebrand” FYRE.IS (a name that had no meaning) to America, Humble Yourselves & Pray (HumblePray) for short. HumblePray was a name I had created as a Facebook page in 2012 after Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama. I had realized after investing my hope in a presidential candidate (ugh, a bad one) that America’s best hope wasn’t in presidential candidates but in individual, personal repentance and prayer. It’s not flashy, but it’s what Scripture calls us to do. I had run this page for many years and so it seemed to fit well with Christian Reconstruction, which I had recently adopted. But I had run into the very problem I had run away from.

Old Error, New Name

Unintentionally, I had created an ad hoc organization about Christian Reconstruction — and I’m not an academic systematizer or institutional voice for the movement. I’m a practitioner, a Christian writing from a Reconstructionist framework about whatever I encounter in life, culture, theology, and politics. I believe Reconstruction is a valid interpretation of Scripture and a biblically faithful application of God’s word. I’m living it out, but I don’t have the role — or the desire — to serve as an organizational mouthpiece writing weekly primers on the subject. What had been weekly and bi-weekly articles started becoming monthly, then multi-month breaks. Before long: I wasn’t writing at all.

Correction, I was writing, just mostly on my Facebook. Which was exactly what I had created FYRE.IS to avoid. Because on Facebook you write something and then it disappears into the social media ether, never to be seen again. I want there to be a record of what I write, my labor, to build something, something I can link to, and people can find. I want my effort to amount to something. But where do I post it?

JesusIsRisen.org

This is where the name change stops being cosmetic and starts explaining why everything now lives in one place.

@PEACE’s Cool Christian Website

When I was little, literally, 11 years old, I started a website called @PEACE’s Cool Christian Website on TIR.net (The Internet Ramp) in 1997. My username was @PEACE, and that was important back then. That transitioned to Christian-Embassy1.net, unbeknownst to me, a glimpse of postmillennialism before I had the vocabulary to call it that. And then, sometime in the very early 2000s, I got my big boy domain name: JesusIsRisen.org. This became my personal blog, and despite my best efforts to hide the most embarrassing content on there, I’m sure there is still plenty of my angsty, searching, and sometimes confused teenage writings on there.

Big Boy Website: Jesus Is Risen

As an adult, I wanted a new website, but I felt uncomfortable using JesusIsRisen.org as a personal blog. I didn’t like using Jesus’ name anymore as my domain. Something had changed between early 2000s Internet and today and what it originally signaled felt like it had changed to me. Part of me felt unworthy. So, that’s where FYRE.IS came from, an attempt to just do something “me”.

As to why I chose JesusIsRisen.org, it’s because I loved the apocryphal story of the priest walking out onto Red Square under Communist rule in Russia and one morning defiantly shouting, “He Is Risen!” Whether true or not, that image stuck with me. That type of defiance for Christ defined my early life and adulthood.

Coming Back Home

What convinced me to come back was the realization that JesusIsRisen.org had been where I had written over half of my adult life. It was, it is, my public witness. Christ’s resurrection booms through time as evidence of who Christ is and what He has done. And I hope that in my writing, Christ is magnified, so that the reality that Christ didn’t just die, but is now risen and reigning is evident, even in the writings of this humble servant.

Integration

I’m not an organization, I’m just Matthew. And Matthew is enough.

The result is that I’m trying to bring all of my writings under one roof. I’ve been writing for about 30 years, and sometimes I forget just how long I’ve been doing it. I’ll be pulling in my articles from Nullify Abortion, Humble Pray, and anywhere else and incorporating them into JesusIsRisen.org.

Continued Support

The Substack will continue to operate, just with the new name. I’m using Substack primarily as my newsletter, and secondarily as a way for people to support the writing if they want to. I don’t have any plans to paywall content here. I write because it’s what I love to do.

How I do make money is by making things and selling them. FYRE.IS has been reappropriated as my furniture business — where I burn things, with fire, and sell them. If you’re interested in supporting that side of my work, you can keep an eye there.

If you’d like to just chip in a few dollars because you like what you’ve read, as part of this transition, I’m also applying 80% off all paid subscriptions. No code is needed, it’s applied automatically. That works out to $1/month or $10/year depending on which subscription you take, and the pricing lasts for 12 months.

If you’re already subscribed, nothing changes for you except the name at the top.

This is mostly a behind-the-scenes correction that removes a mental block and lets me write more freely and consistently — which matters more than whatever label happens to be attached.

— Matthew

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