About Bitter Scroll: Decoding the culture swaying American Christian identity
As my friend
puts it: If you're a 90s kid who loved Kurt Cobain even though you were steeped in True-Love-Waits Evangelicalism (with a touch of Nationalist fervor), then Bitter Scroll is for you.About Orphaned Believers
Orphaned believers are Christians looking around the American Church and wondering where Jesus is. If that’s you — or if you’re looking to pull back the curtain on modern American Christianity from the perspective of folks moving towards Jesus in the presence of a lot of cultural complications — then you’re in the right place.
About Sara
Sara Billups (MA, Seattle University; D.Min candidate, Sacred Art of Writing at Western Seminary) is a writer and cultural commentator. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Christianity Today, Aspen Ideas, and the BBC. She serves on the vestry at an Anglican church in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Orphaned Believers, is out now from Baker Books. You can order a copy here. Her second book Nervous Systems is forthcoming from Baker in 2025.
Sara writes about a range of topics impacting Christian culture, including being out of place while growing up a Gen-X evangelical with a Jewish Christian father waiting for the rapture in the conservative Midwest, the dissonance of identifying as a Christian publicly in the progressive Pacific Northwest, and the grief of a changing American church reeling from Christian Nationalism in the wake of the Trump era.
After earning a B.A. in creative writing from Taylor University, Sara moved to a small town an hour north of Indianapolis, IN, where she was awarded an Indiana Arts Commission grant to publish the literary magazine Country Feedback. She later started Bellywater Press, publishing titles including a reprint of the 70s hippie translation of the gospels, Letters to Street Christians. She has lived in Seattle with her family for more than 18 years, working as a journalist, editor, and nonprofit communications director.
From a failed summer spent evangelizing on the streets in San Francisco, finding life in community in a dying Rust Belt town, and moving to the Pacific Northwest as a part of the missional church movement in the early 2000s, Sara’s writing encourages young and mid-life Christians to claim a wholehearted identity in Jesus.
Follow Sara on Instagram and Threads.
