Return Of The Pumpkin Spice: The Repurposing Of Christian Girl Autumn

For reasons no one can explain, there’s just something about fall that makes the internet go crazy. Perhaps it's simply the fact that it's home to Halloween, or Spooktober as the meme world calls it, and the eagerly awaited hijinks of spooky season. Maybe, it's merely that it warns us of the impending winter and all the long, dark nights ahead of us with only our phones for company.

We have another theory however — it's because it allows the terminally online to make fun of one of their favorite targets: those perceived as basic. Once the first Pinterest ready maple leaf hits the windswept sidewalk, there is no better time to start dusting off opinions on pumpkin spice and prepping punchlines about a cliched white girl’s most treasured time of year.

The mockery of those who conform to "offline" stereotypes has a rich history in meme lore. Sure, most people you know use social media, but maybe they don’t know how to do it as you do, and it shows in their everyday lives. It is a theme that has thrived over the years under slightly different names and categorizations. For example, it drives the idea of the normie and the basic bitch. It shows up in the memeification of what we consume, working on as broad a level as the phenomenon of starter packs and in as much detail as the internet’s branding of White Claw. It’s the gap between your edgy private meme Instagram and your former school classmate curating a careful, public, color-coordinated one that seems perpetually stuck in the early 2010s.

The concept, then, was well-established enough to ease our transition into Christian Girl Autumn last year. Created by @lasagnabby’s tweet in August 2019, the reaction it provoked ushered in a new era for dunking on the normies.

Christian Girl Autumn was an imaginary reactionary movement, riffing on Megan Thee Stallion’s anthem turned seasonal lifestyle choice, Hot Girl Summer. Swapping the unapologetic emotional and sexual freedoms of the song for prim tote-bag clutching and latte-sipping, it represented an attitudinal change as well as an aesthetic one. As Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos explained last year, “Twitter has made the image a symbol of political myopia … [and] the country’s push-pull around race and sexuality. For anyone looking to project their frustrations with these concepts onto something, Christian girl autumn came just in time.”

Coming a few short months before Karen reached peak infamy, the first round of Christian Girl Autumn memes gave us an introduction to many of her older, angrier counterpart’s more undesirable traits. Her personal style is similarly stereotypical of a subset of middle-class, suburban white women, as is her behavior, which ranges from mildly annoying to wildly offensive. However, where Karen is openly selfish and self-righteous, the Autumnal Christian Girl misrepresents her beliefs to allow her to judge the kinds of people she doesn’t like. Offering the sweet spot between tackiness and hypocrisy, she provided the perfect imaginary scapegoat to pave the way for Karen’s grim reality.

Dragging ourselves into the final quarter of 2020, the reemergence of our much loved seasonal memes came as a comfort. A recent favorite, it was not a shock to see Christian Girl Autumn live another day. This time though, its perspective seemed different. While meme users had roleplayed with the characters before, it had now been taken to a new level, one which showed genuine appreciation for them. The excitement that meme users had before dismissed with social commentary was now something that they were willing to take part in with only a hint of mockery. Despite everything, there seemed to be a longing attached to it all. “I just know her life peaceful asf,” sighed @itskeyon in response to a particularly cliched first day of fall photoset by Caitlin Covington, one of the women starring in the original post.

The attitude change was a little superficial, for sure — there’s still a joke to be found in their matching outfits and dated photoshoots, and there are a whole host of Twitter users out there now convinced that rapper Future considers them his unlikely style heroes. But ultimately, Christian Girl Autumn has segued into resembling what Hot Girl Summer did before it: an aspirational lifestyle.

There are a couple of reasons behind this shift, which began soon after its first wave of popularity. One of these is the girls themselves and the way in which they distanced their aesthetic from the bad things people attributed to them. Covington and fellow Christian Girl Emily Gemma spoke to Buzzfeed to dispel some of the more uncharitable assumptions about them when the meme peaked last year. While undeniably white and Christian, Gemma said, “None of it’s true. We don’t ever want to speak to the manager!”

Covington also confirmed on her Twitter account that she herself was not a Republican, as some had suggested, and far from possessing the homophobic beliefs many memers associated with her. She continued the wholesomeness with the meme’s 2020 resurgence last month, donating to and publicizing the transition fund of @lasagnabby, whose real name is Natasha.

While the real personalities of the women behind the meme kickstarted its rethink when it first became popular, it has been the seismic changes of the past year that have consolidated its place in the semi-ironic, semi-wholesome meme canon. The pandemic has put a dampener on most things, including Hot Girl Summer 2.0, and while Cardi B’s "WAP" may be a worthy successor, many have lamented how it is a club banger yet to actually see the inside of a club.

In its place, many of us have been embracing the calmer side of life, as evidenced by the runaway success of Cottagecore. Once a niche cultivated on the fringes of TikTok and Tumblr, it was no coincidence that its promises of a romanticized homestead life were most popular in the early stages of pandemic panic — a pretty and harmonious narrative to replace an existing one that was anything but.

The Christian Girl Autumn ethos doesn’t quite align with that of this lifestyle aesthetic, being a little more small-town McMansion than countryside chalet. However, it has come to operate on the same soothing level, offering the outlet of Hot Girl Summer without the pressure to perform.

Better still, there is a sense of realism about it. Unlike the Cottagecore devotee, the Christian Girl isn’t trying to live in a complete fairytale. Instead, she’s just living her life and enjoying it, unperturbed by the opinions of strangers on social media. After the struggle to adjust to the events of this year, there is an undeniable attraction to the idea of being able to carry on as we always did. With her style, hobbies and carefully constructed carefree attitude remaining year after year, the Christian Girl embodies that feeling of safety, backed up by the relief of a wholesome backstory. In a world that doesn’t promise to get any simpler, it seems like "back to basic" is one of the nicest ways of dealing with it.

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