Retiring the Monthly Newsletter

Aligning Volunteer Effort With Impact

The Separationist will no longer be published as a monthly periodical. At our recent retreat, the SHL board decided that we will continue to post our calendar of events monthly on Substack, while publishing all other community-generated content on a rolling, ad hoc basis. News, updates, and features will now be shared as they are created, rather than bundled into a monthly issue. You can receive these posts via email by subscribing to our Substack, or by reading them in the Substack app.

This change reflects a simple reality: most of our members do not read or engage with the newsletter, and the amount of work required to produce it is not justified by its impact. For the past two years, I have worked to resurrect The Separationist after it became a casualty of the pandemic. While I have appreciated having an outlet to write, the process was often rushed and burdensome. Assembling each issue was not work I enjoyed. I had hoped someone else might eventually take over production, allowing me to contribute occasional pieces—but it makes little sense to ask another volunteer to invest time and energy in something that does not engage members or help the organization grow.

I also came to realize that the problem is not just execution, but format. A monthly periodical is no longer how most people consume information. I struggle to read magazines and newsletters I genuinely care about; if I weren’t writing The Separationist, I am certain I wouldn’t read it either. The newsletter was born in an information environment before widespread use of email, and media consumption has undergone multiple transformations since then.

While preparing to write this piece, I spent time reviewing old issues of The Separationist in the archive on our website. Like many archives, it is an underappreciated treasure. We have scans of the first year of publication, beginning with the inaugural issue from September 1994—eight letter-sized pages, printed and mailed to members. At that time, before the ubiquity of the internet, digital and social media, a printed newsletter was essential to building and sustaining the fledgling humanist community in Charleston. It was published from September through May, reflecting the academic calendar of many of the group’s founders.

The first page of the first issue of The Separationist

Our archive is incomplete after that first year, missing all issues until September 2000. From 2000 to 2003, the issues we have are in an archival format, presumably different from what was produced and distributed. Starting in September 2003, we have PDFs of the newsletter as it was distributed. The archive is largely complete from then through May 2017. After that the archive becomes sparse: nothing from 2018, only a handful of issues from 2019 and 2020, with the last issue dated July 2020. I do not know if there were any issues published after that, but my understanding is that The Separationist was a casualty of the pandemic.

Even with these gaps, the archive tells a powerful story. It documents the growth and evolution of our community, the enduring struggle to defend the separation of church and state, and the consistent effort of people trying to support one another and live lives of purpose and service. Reading it fills me with pride—and some regret that I lived in South Carolina for nearly a decade before finding SHL. It would have helped me enormously after moving to South Carolina from California to have been part of a vibrant, secular community.

I joined SHL in 2022 after my therapist suggested I needed more of a social life and encouraged me to try Meetup. That advice changed my life. I attended a few happy hours before becoming a dues-paying member in May 2022, just a few days before the annual picnic. At the picnic I was recruited to join the board as treasurer, and started getting more involved. Eventually, I began managing the Mailchimp email list, and in February 2024 I began compiling those emails into a monthly newsletter, adding features and trying to build content around themes. I had learned that SHL once had a newsletter and wanted to bring it back.

In January 2025, we restored the name The Separationist. Mailchimp was never a good fit, so we explored alternatives and eventually moved to Substack in July 2025. While Substack is not designed for monthly periodicals, we made it work—for a time.

Both Mailchimp and Substack provide detailed analytics on readership and engagement, and those numbers were consistently disappointing. It is fair to consider whether that reflects shortcomings in the content itself. SHL is an entirely volunteer-run organization. I am not a professional writer or editor, nor do I have training or expertise in producing a periodical that would be more engaging for our members. Like most volunteer organizations, we work with the skills, time, and capacity that people are willing and able to contribute. In that context, the newsletter has always represented a best-effort project rather than a polished publication.

Given the history of The Separationist, letting go of the monthly format is difficult. It makes me very sad that there may not be any future issues of The Separationist. But we have to assess the return on effort. Producing each issue required substantial labor without achieving appreciable member engagement or growth for the organization.

In retrospect, I think that my efforts to resurrect The Separationist over the last two years were misguided. I won’t call it a waste. I do know that there is a small community of people that appreciated the work, and I am quite proud of some of what was produced. But the time and energy that went into this project would have been better spent on other strategies to serve our community. And that is where I am going to try to focus going forward.

All good things must come to an end.