Downstream research strategy (2026-04-24)

How the research program connects to recruitment and publication.

Vela·Pipeline·source: people-analyst/vela/docs/research/downstream-strategy-2026-04-24.md

Downstream Strategy — Three-Project Research Portfolio

Date: 2026-04-24 Context: ASN-575 (visual), ASN-594 (text-aesthetic), ASN-595 (Christianity/sex/shame) literature maps + their paired formal reviews and public intros are all committed. This doc preserves the editorial + intervention strategy conversation between Mike and Claude Code on 2026-04-24, and names the follow-up assignments.

The stakes argument — why anyone should care

The three literature reviews say the same thing about different subjects:

The response you've been told is ineffable has structure. Your body stops at a painting, a sentence, a passage — that is a measurable event with a documented mechanism. Your forearm hair rising at the end of a poem is the same physiology music produces. The reward circuit fires. The default mode network activates. Someone has taken the experience seriously enough to find its shape.
The shame you've been told is deserved is installed. The research on moral incongruence (Grubbs) and sex-guilt mediation (Woo) says the distress religious people feel about sexuality is not produced by what they do — it is produced by the gap between behavior and an internalized standard. The theology is doing more causal work than the sex. If the standard was installed, the standard can be examined.
The preference you've been told is trash has a population. The Kraxenberger study on erotic-novel readers: mostly women, highly educated, avid readers, reading for distraction and ease, who consider the genre emancipated and progressive. That's not apology. That's measurement.

The stakes for the reader are not "science validates your experience" (condescending). They are: someone has found the name for the thing you couldn't name, and the naming is a relief. And for the reader's circle: the friend you've half-understood for years — the one who is moved by strange things, or still dreads her body after years out of her family's church, or cannot explain why a certain novel undoes her — the research is a way to take her seriously.

Not empathy-as-abstraction. Empathy-as-measurement.

The counterintuitive finding (Mike's observation, 2026-04-24)

Claim: People can improve the pleasure they experience from desire and sex by improving the internal consistency of their own theology. A dedicated course on this subject may incrementally heal their dissonance, increase the experiences they get out of life, and make them feel closer to God and more spiritually fulfilled.

Verdict: correct, and the data are explicit.

The mechanism is moral incongruence (Grubbs). Shame is produced by the gap between behavior and internalized theological standard. There are three ways to close the gap:

Change the behavior (often not possible, not wanted, or not healthy).
Change the belief (deconversion — socially and emotionally costly, not what most religious people want).
Find or build a reading of the belief that doesn't condemn the behavior. This is the path Mike named.

Leonhardt, Busby & Willoughby (2020) measured path 3 directly: same tradition, two pathways. When religiosity operates through the sex-guilt mediator → worse sexual outcomes. When it operates through the sanctification mediator → better sexual outcomes. Which one a person gets depends on which theology was emphasized in their formation, not on whether they leave the tradition.

Hernandez-Kane & Mahoney (2018) tracked this longitudinally — the effects aren't cross-sectional artifacts. Anderson & Koc (2020) found religious gay men who achieved identity integration show measurably lower shame than those who didn't. The SMRII scale (Etengoff et al. 2024) makes integration directly measurable as a dependent variable.

What the evidence currently supports

Correlational: sanctification beliefs predict higher satisfaction, lower shame.
Longitudinal: the positive pathway is durable (Hernandez-Kane 2018).
Clinical case evidence: Schermer Sellers' model works in case histories.

What the evidence doesn't yet support

Causal intervention: no RCT has shown that teaching the sanctification framework reduces pre-existing shame. This is precisely §K.5 of the Christianity literature map — the open intervention question.

The mechanism is documented. The intervention is untested. The gap is publishable.

One-sentence summary

The shame religious people feel about sex is not evidence that religion is wrong; it is evidence that the specific theology they were handed is internally inconsistent, and the cure may be better theology rather than less of it.

How this reframes Vela

The standard cultural assumption is: religion is the problem, secularization is the treatment. The data don't support that framing. Religion is a double-edged instrument; secularization is one resolution but not the only one and not the one most religious people want.

This means Vela is not in opposition to religious frameworks. Vela is potentially useful to religious people who want to resolve shame without abandoning their faith. That's a larger, more honest, and more ethically defensible position than "we offer an alternative to your repression." It's also a bigger addressable audience.

Four follow-up assignments (scoped 2026-04-24)

ASN-599 — Magazine Measurement Arc (four-essay anchor series)

Four cross-project magazine essays that braid the three literature reviews with Vela-voice writing. Each ~2,500 words, Vela-voice, footer link to /research.

"The Measurement of What Moves You" — visual. Silvia + Vessel + the opinion-splitting-is-signal insight. Testimony: Laing on Hopper; Berger on looking.
"What Your Body Knows About a Sentence" — text. Wassiliwizky chills + Miall & Kuiken foregrounding. Testimony: Lockwood on the moment she understood poetry; Smith on reading.
"Augustine Didn't Say That" — Christianity. O'Donnell + Brown on the actual doctrine vs. caricature. Testimony: Klein on what the caricature produced; Machado on aftermath; Bolz-Weber on reclamation.
"Can the Shame Be Undone?" — the open question. Leonhardt 2020 (sex-guilt vs. sanctification) + Anderson & Koc (identity integration). The piece where Vela's research stance becomes explicit and the reader is invited to stay.

Publication cadence: one per month over the launch window.

ASN-600 — Corpus expansion (ten priority books)

Run npm run ingest:dual on ten books to unlock testimony for every downstream Mosaic piece. ~400 new research-bulk-chunks. Priority list:

Klein, Pure (2018) — purity-culture testimony
Febos, Girlhood (2021) — bodily shame + aesthetic prose
Machado, In the Dream House (2019) — relational aftermath, narrative form
Lockwood, Priestdaddy (2017) — religious formation + aesthetic awakening
Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2011) — evangelical upbringing
Bolz-Weber, Shameless (2019) — reclamation register
Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972) — foundational visual-aesthetic writing
Laing, The Lonely City (2016) — aesthetic experience + solitude
Schermer Sellers, Sex, God, and the Conservative Church (2017) — clinical reclamation
Smith, Feel Free (2018) — reading-as-aesthetic-experience essays

Mike: buy digital copies (~$150–200 total). Agent: run dual ingest + embed + density check.

ASN-601 — Mosaic pilot (three testimony-plus-research pieces)

One Mosaic piece per project, drawing from the expanded corpus. Tests the workflow before scaling.

Visual Mosaic: "The Moment You Couldn't Leave" — moments-of-being-moved testimony (Laing, Berger, Schjeldahl, Solnit) + Vessel 2012 DMN finding as connective tissue.
Text Mosaic: "Reading That Changed You" — transformative-reading testimony (Lockwood, Smith, Winterson) + Wassiliwizky poetic chills.
Christianity Mosaic: "The Gap and the Girl" — Klein's testimony + Febos' prose + Machado's aftermath + the Grubbs moral-incongruence finding + Coates 2025/2026 purity-culture × CSA finding.

Testimony speaks in subject's own voice; Vela's analytical voice provides connective tissue. The two registers must be clearly distinguishable per VELA-MAGAZINE-VOICE.md.

ASN-602 — Theological Coherence Intervention Protocol (K.5 pre-study)

The intervention study no one has run. Pre-register a tradition-specific theological-coherence course as an RCT against active comparison. Outcome: does theological reframing measurably reduce sex-guilt-mediated shame?

Protocol v0.1 shipped with this doc at docs/research/protocols/theological-coherence-intervention-v0.1.md. Three arms (evangelical / Catholic / queer-affirming), 8-week structured course, validated measure battery pre/post/6-month.

Mike's commitment (2026-04-24): "I want the courses and I will work with local priests to adapt them, test them and install them." This unlocks the ministry-partnership arm of the study — the clerical facilitation side is Mike's network, the research design + measurement is Vela's side.

This is the single highest-leverage follow-up from the three-project portfolio.

It delivers:

A publishable RCT (top-tier journal material for Psychology of Religion and Spirituality or Journal of Sex Research).
A candidate Vela product (course, book arc, or /healing surface — evidence-backed, non-predatory).
A ministry-partnership channel (progressive churches, pastoral counselors, Christian therapists — real demand, mostly unmet).
Portfolio evidence for Mike's PhD narrative.

Mosaic editorial strategy note

Vela's docs/magazine/VELA-MAGAZINE-VOICE.md already defines the Mosaic mode:

These assemble real testimony — memoir, oral history, interview — into pieces that surface the pattern nobody has named. The platform's voice is present in the connective tissue, not in the testimony itself.

The research findings become the patterns; the Mosaic testimony shows what those patterns look like in a life. Research finds the mechanism; Mosaic finds the face.

The feedback loop (magazine → /research → magazine) is the strategic center. Each magazine piece ends with a link to /research. Each research artifact surfaces at least one magazine piece that animates it. Neither works as well without the other.

What Mike unblocks

For ASN-602 to move from protocol to execution:

IRB pathway. Options: partner university (Pitt, CMU) for PhD-linked submission; private/commercial IRB (Advarra, WCG) for independent submission. Estimated cost: $500–2,500 one-time.
Clerical partnerships. Mike's side. Two to four priests / pastors across traditions willing to pilot the intervention module in their communities. Names of candidates go in the ASN-602 doc.
Funding envelope. Measurement battery licensing (Mosher Sex Guilt, DUREL, PCBS: mostly free; SMRII: free per published validation; AESTHEMOS: free). Compensation for participants (pilot: ~$20 per session × 8 sessions × 50 pilot participants = ~$8k total for a compact pilot arm).
Institutional home for the data. If Pitt PhD admission comes through, their infrastructure is the default. Until then, People Analyst LLC as private research entity is the alternative.

For ASN-600 to move: buy the ten books. That's it.

For ASN-599 and ASN-601: no Mike blockers — these are agent-authorable once ASN-600 density arrives.

The one-sentence strategic claim

Vela's research program, its magazine, and its intervention arm are three expressions of a single thesis: experiences resistant to measurement are not unmeasurable — they are unmeasured — and when you measure them carefully, the thing you thought you knew turns out to be either more complicated (good) or more fixable (better) than you thought.

Go figure. Let's fucking go.