ABOUT C.J. LOVEMAN
I went to Bible college to become a minister because it was the truest thing I knew about myself. The faith wasn’t performed — it was real, all the way down.
The problem was that Bible college forced me to come to terms with my true identity. The institution had centuries of practice telling people like me what we were. It had no tools for what to do when one of us actually showed up to serve in the ministry.
I graduated. Got my first pastor job. The stress of being two completely different people inside one body made me fall apart. I got fired.
Then I found a gay minister on AOL — early internet, 1990s — who was Pentecostal, evangelical, and fully himself. No conflict. No apology. He didn’t argue theology at me. He just existed. And something that had felt like an impossible equation my entire life stopped being impossible.
I eventually became a licensed private investigator. It turns out that’s a job entirely about finding what people hide — and reading the gap between what institutions claim to be and what they actually do. Between the sermon and the spreadsheet. Between the mission statement and the human cost.
I write fiction about that gap.
My books are theological noir, bureaucratic satire, and dark speculative fiction. They are about systems — churches, megacorporations, militaries, algorithms — that are very good at making people feel like the problem is them, not the system. And about the moment a character stops believing that.
I write for people who left the church and can’t stop thinking about God. Not the ones who escaped and never looked back. The ones who left and keep looking back — because something real is still there under the wreckage, and nobody has handed them a book that holds both things without flinching.
C.J. Loveman is the author of The Gospel According to P.O.L., Apostate: The First Heresy, and Protocol Heresy: The Limp in the Code. He is the founder of Breaking Light Press and lives in Maryland with his husband and their children.
A Note from the Author
I’ve always been drawn to the moment a person realizes the system they trusted has been lying to them.
For me, that moment came in stages. First in the military — serving during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, learning how to exist inside an institution that demanded a version of me that wasn’t real. Then, in Bible college, I studied to become an evangelical minister until my own identity made that path impossible.
Those experiences didn’t make me bitter. They made me precise. I learned to read the gap between what institutions claim to be and what they actually do. Between the mission statement and the human cost.
That’s what I write about. Every book, every genre, every story — it comes back to that gap.
I write for people who have felt the weight of a system that had no room for who they actually were. People who left something behind — a church, a belief, a version of themselves — and are still trying to figure out what was real and what was architecture.
If that’s you — you’re in the right place.
When I’m not writing I’m making bookish content for my 5,300+ followers on TikTok, chasing after my kids with my husband, and occasionally escaping to somewhere that isn’t Maryland.