Bookwild - When Faith Becomes Fear: Hell, Control, and the Loss of Love with Brian Recker

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

This week, I talk with Brian Recker about his book Hell Bent, which examines how fear-based teachings about hell distort Christian spirituality, replacing love, connection, and moral discernment with control, shame, and punishment avoidance. Drawing from his upbringing in fundamentalism and later work as an evangelical pastor, he shares how early indoctrination around hell fractures relationships with God, self, and others, discourages intuition and questioning, all while propping up systems of domination—from abusive religious authority to political movements rooted in fear. Rather than abandoning spirituality altogether, he reclaimed Jesus from these systems, reframing faith as a practice of love, justice, and liberation in this life instead of an anxious fixation on the afterlife. Check Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mba 

This week I got to talk with Brian Rucker, who is the author of Helbent, How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love. I loved this book. There's a lot of great stuff in it, but here's the synopsis. A former evangelical pastor explains why we can stop worrying about hell and start focusing on love. There's a black hole at the center of Christianity, the doctrine of hell. No matter how hard we try to believe in a loving God, the fear of eternal torment always lurks at the back of our minds, warping our sense of what love

means. We're still, many churches act as if the point of Christianity is not to follow Jesus, but to secure a get out of hell free card, and to save everyone you know by converting them to your religion. For many of us, the whole story of Christianity has punishment at its very center. But does the Bible say we're really going to hell if we don't do or believe the right things? In this taboo-shattering book, former evangelical pastor Brian Rucker takes an honest look at scripture and reveals what has always been true. Hell isn't real, and God's universal love is radically inclusive in this life and the next. By removing punishment from Christianity's center, Rucker boldly reimagines the core questions of faith,

such as why Jesus lived and died and what it means to be saved. You can imagine how much I loved this, taking the focus away from fear, and guilt and kind of being pushed into a relationship. It's a really, really, really powerful book if you grew up around it. It's also very powerful if you want to understand how American Christianity got to where it is today. So, that being said, let's hear from Brian. I am super excited to be here with Brian Rucker to talk about his book, Hellbent, how the fear of hell holds Christians back from spirituality of love,

which is like right up my alley so um welcome brian and i'm super excited to see what all we get into hey kate good to be here yeah it is there is this funny coincidence and i'm sure you have at some point run into the fact that there's a book called helvent by lee bardugo that is also like one of my favorite books of all time i have not you know i haven't actually talked to anybody who's read it so i have seen that obviously yeah i'm looking at my book or whatever it always pops up because it's a pretty big book yeah very different though this fiction so i feel like i was running into too many uh conflicts there's such a different genre yes yeah it's so different but i was just laughing because i was like now i have like two favorite books named helbin at this point

glad to join the hell bend pantheon of good books yeah the other ones like on the very bottom my bookshelf back there um but so as people can probably tell from the subtitle this you wrote it kind of specifically to talk about how hell and fear the then the fear associated with it have kind of have have distorted the possibility of a loving relationship with God and with even with each other in some circles of Christianity so can you kind of give and it doesn't have to be brief brief but uh kind of like your story that basically led you to wanting to write about this right yeah like you just said this book does explore not just what does the Bible say about hell, which it does. I do get into

that a little bit. But to me, this is much bigger than, oh, like the Bible might say some more things that we weren't aware of about hell. And we need to reframe some of these Bible verses and see this from a new perspective. That's part of it. But like what you just said, hell actually affects our ability to love, believing that I am worthy of hell, that everybody actually by default is worthy of hell and needs to be saved from hell by becoming my religion by being changed to be more like me being converted. That's my mission is to be the kind of person who's going to heaven instead of hell and to sort of fix everybody else's spirituality to make sure that they're going to heaven instead of hell. That has a way of

actually robbing us of what I think is the true purpose of spirituality. It leaves you with something that isn't really a spirituality at all. It's a fear-based religion. And as a result, what I mean by spirituality, how I define it in the book and talk about it in the book is simply our relationship with God, ourselves, and other people. And really this exclusionary belief that people have to be my religion or they're going to go to hell, that has a way of sewing disconnection instead of connection at every level of our relationship with God, self, and others. And so that's really the first part of the book is kind of exploring for those of us, especially who grew up. in a fear-based religion to really validate and name and explore what happened to us and how this affected us, how this affected our spiritual lives. Our very understanding of God was shaped by this. I mean, you might be similar to me that I learned about hell at a very, very young age,

and in some ways I learned about hell at the same time that I learned about God, that those concepts were very interlinked. The reason I needed to, the matter of God was very urgent to me because of hell and these were connected and so yeah that fear sat in the very foundation of what it meant to be human what it meant to be Christian what it meant to be spiritual was all connected not so much to growing in love in this life but to believing the right things so that we could avoid punishment in the afterlife and that is a real tragedy for a lot of reasons that I explore yeah it really is I've been reading a few books about this subject to matter So I might, I think you mentioned this, but it might have been someone else too.

But like it keeps us from even kind of like enjoying life here when we're so obsessed with the afterlife versus like what what could we be doing here and with each other that would like, you know, make us feel connected and happy versus judged all the time. So yeah, I really resonate with that. Yeah. Somebody recently said to me very similar to that. that since they've deconstructed, they really struggle with finding purpose in life and being able to just enjoy their life because they were so indoctrinated with this idea that everything we do counts for eternity. And in other words, you know, this is a blip.

This world is going to burn. This is a blip. This is a test, really. What really matters is eternity because that goes on forever. This is just this tiny little segment. But once you die, boom, that eternity goes on for. forever. So what you do now really only matters in the sense of how it contributes to that heaven and hell story. And that what I, it's hard to live that way, right? Like a lot of us struggled to

actually live that way because we're in our lives. We can't see heaven. We can't see hell. And yet we often felt guilty that we weren't more focused on the afterlife as opposed to feeling guilty that I'm missing out on my loving connections in this life, which I think that if I was going to worry about, anything. What will you think about on your deathbed is not I should have thought more about heaven and hell, but I should have pressed into these relationships that were right in front of me and love people right where they were at without trying to change them. Yeah. And that hell belief actually makes that very impossible. The thing that actually makes for a satisfying life, it robs us. Yeah, I completely agree. You do, you also talk about kind of like at the beginning

because you're kind of like setting the stage for, you know, how how you, how you, ended up with the beliefs you ended up with which uh typically starts in childhood for all of us so um you kind of mentioned some of the tactics your parents would use um but you also kind of have like an empathetic portion of it where you're like I understand like they thought this was life and death this was heaven and how like they thought they really needed to hammer this into my mind and like make me choose or help me maybe is even their perspective choose the right choices. So can you talk a little bit about kind of how like there is this intense desire or like being communicated to parents to get this in kids' heads so young?

Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate. You know, in evangelical churches, in a typical evangelical church, you're not necessarily even going to hear about hell on a Sunday morning. They try to be secret sensitive and not, you know, turn people off with fire and brimstone. For the most part, fundamentalist churches, yes, but kind of a more culturally engaged, secret sensitive evangelical church with like a good band and a pastor with, you know, skinny jeans and good graphic design. They're not going to just be shouting about hell typically. But where you'll often hear about it is children will hear about it because it's typically used to describe really, first of all, the fundamental sort of initiation

story of becoming a Christian is that you're told that God is holy, that you deserve hell by default because you're a sinner and you're going to stand before God one day and be punished unless Jesus is punished in your place. And so really we learned a story about punishment and a transactional substitution that we had to sort of receive in order to not be punished in order to be put in that category of safe and heavenbound. And that transaction, you want kids to do that at a very young age because under their theology, everybody deserves to go to hell. Right. Not just serial killers, not Hitler. Everybody, children deserve to go to hell. And, you know, I talk about this in the book that there's this made up idea of the age of

accountability that they'll throw out and say, well, maybe God won't send like toddlers to hell because God is so merciful. Like maybe there's an age of accountability. We're only after a certain age and Nobody knows what it is because, again, it's totally made up. But it's kind of made up to make hell more palatable. So maybe at 9 or 10, 11 or 12, who knows, but maybe after that age, then kids are cleared hot for damnation. But because you don't know what that age is, it really is. Parents are made to feel like they should try to get their kids to be saved as soon as

possible, as young as possible. And so it's not unusual for churches to kind of celebrate like, oh, and our five-year-old kid got saved last night and everybody's oh that's so yeah i was on staff at an evangelical church and when people it was a pretty large staff team and you know obviously in a lot of kids uh that came out of the weddings and marriages of the people on that staff team and so when they would have one of their kids would become a christian would have this born again experience and pray to receive jesus as their savior yeah we would like celebrate that and you know we're talking about four or five six-year-olds. And what that ultimately means is that those children were told that they needed to

receive Jesus as their Savior or they would go to hell. And that is really the story that they accepted. And when you think about that, a child being told that to make a choice, hey, do you want to be with God or do you want to be separated from God in hell? Like which one kid? It's up to you. So totally up to you. This is no choice at all, really. And that is what God is to to that from a very early age that's what it means to be spiritual yeah and that's sad it is you don't want to start there like it's so it's it's it's coercion like it's not it's not coming to a relationship like on your own terms or out of your own interest um and yeah it just sets up I just remember oh there are a couple things I remember but I remember being like four five years old and they would

have like there's like children's bibles i mean this is in like the 90s so who knew what it looked like necessarily um but it had like a lot of like illustration on the front cover but it also had like the crucifix there as well like jesus actually nailed to the cross and i remember like my dad giving it to me in like his office and i just like left it there and didn't want to take it home and when we're at home they're like why aren't you like picking it up and i just like started crying because it made me so sad to see someone just like dying on the cover and i was like this is just too much for me and i like i hadn't thought about it in a while and sometime last year something happened that reminded me of it but i'm like when you were like so young you don't need you you

you really don't need like the crucifix you like the crucifixion story shoved in front of you either it's just so it's so intense not even just shoved in front of you but then you would have probably been explicitly told that that was your fault right oh totally that jesus was on the cross for your sins the bad thing that you did are why jesus had to die and so you were made to feel as a as a small child that that everything that you did was so wrong so wicked so detestable to god that this guy had to die over it i know it's so heavy and like it the way like that mentality to me because there were a couple of things going on there was also emotional there's abuse going on in my household too from both parents um and it so i've now like learned a lot about

abusive relationships or i did a lot in my 20s and there's like that's like kind of textbook manipulation if you were in a relationship with a person who was like i'm doing all of this for you and you're so ungrateful or like just so much of it lines up with like if if you were dating someone if you were married to someone who was treating you that way like we wouldn't be we would not be okay with it and like for me it kind of started to feel like it helps people be lazy parents where it's like just like put all of this fear and like no explanation of the world and just be like yeah like just make sure you're completely perfect and you're good and it's the older i get the more it just feels really lazy on top of the fact that it's like similar to abusive relationships

yeah there's a lot of gaslighting um for sure and you made to feel crazy for questioning that like yeah because you're told that this whole you know that's who god is that god could punish you in that particular way but then you're told that this is all about love that god that from you know you love don't you because God love you first and so you do you do love God wait you love God right because you know what happens if you don't yeah exactly there is a sense of like oh I'm supposed to love this this guy this this potentially toxic abusive punishing you know going to burn children that doesn't get on the right side of him but so you don't ever you feel like you have a lot of questions but you just have to go along with it yeah and you kind of assume that the people that are older than you that are in this

that they have your best interest in mind. You know, you're a child. But one of the things that that robs you have, and I explore just the various ways that this affects us. And one of the things it does is it takes away your ability to really listen to your intuition because a lot of times you feel like some of this stuff doesn't really, like, add up or make sense. But you also know that you are desperately wicked.

Your heart is deceitful. And so you're kind of trained to not listen to that conscience, that voice of conscience, and to instead just go along with what your spiritual authorities are telling you. Right. Which is so damaging in so many ways. I'm like kind of working on like maybe a blog post or I'm just journaling about it. But I kind of developed like what I would have called like religious OCD, not in the sense that it was like all about. I mean, it was about heaven and hell.

It just wasn't what I was always thinking. But some of my OCD, my like rumination that gets really. intense is because I was every kind of like you're saying every single decision felt like it was heaven or hell like I felt the weight of eternity and every single decision that I made and then the way that kind of translated into adulthood is and I'm better at it now but I used to need to like over explain every decision that I made to people so that they like knew that I did this is why I think I did the right thing here or um would just be paralyzed trying to make sure I made the absolutely correct decision um where am i going oh and so then to your point about intuition it's like

you're not learning to trust any like gut reaction you're you're trying to make decisions based off of like okay these are all the things that i've been told so i need to make sure that i align with these completely and so then that's exactly what you're doing and you're not trusting your intuition i feel like that's where I feel like that's where with religions they can get people into that really cult like mentality where you're scared to even in your own thoughts question stuff because you think God can hear your thoughts too and so you're like are my thoughts even good? Oh yeah I mean there's a lot of fear I mean one of the things I was even surprised of that I've heard from people who have purchased my book was that even the act of purchasing it was quite scary for some people. Oh yeah

Because this is a book that questions traditional theologies around hell that suggests that maybe God doesn't send people to hell. So people were drawn to that idea because I think even many Christians in those conservative spaces, there's a lot of us that are still in those spaces that feel like, I wish that wasn't true. But they assume that that part of them that's saying, I wish that wasn't true, that's like either the flesh, the devil, like that's something to silence. And so when you see a book like that that confirms some of those feelings, but you're like, oh, but is that, am I allowed to think that? Am I allowed to read that? And so I've had somebody DM me and they said, I bought your book after a deep internal wrestle.

And I ultimately had to tell myself, okay, just because I buy it doesn't mean I have to agree with everything. I'm allowed to just buy it and expose myself to the information. And I can think, I can try to think for myself. And that doesn't mean that I agree. It doesn't make me a heretic. Yes. And so they had to kind of do this thing because otherwise it's like, wait, to question hell,

does that mean that maybe I could be going to hell? Because what if I'm wrong? And so the stakes are really, really high. Hell is used. And once you have a little bit of distance from it, it becomes pretty obvious that, oh, this is a control tactic to keep people from questioning the entire system. And what better control tactic than to say that if you step outside the lines that we've drawn, you're going to be tortured for eternity.

Correct. Pretty conveniently, it's the worst possible thing that could ever happen to anybody for the longest possible period of time. Yes. And that's what's going to happen to you if you walk away from my religion. Yes. And so even though a lot of these churches don't talk about hell very often, they roll it out, not just for children, but the other time that they'll frequently roll it out is when people are questioning when a lot of times gay people get the worst, when they're thinking about coming out and being their authentic selves. They're told, you know, listen, like, it's okay. to have struggles. We all have struggles, but you can't give yourself into that sin because if you

give yourself over to that sin, you know, the Bible says that homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God and they'll weaponize a proof text that is very much out of context to really tell people that basically if they come out, they'll go to hell. And, you know, that same thing is not really brutalized with, I very rarely see heterosexual couples being told that even when they struggle with, you know, premarital sex or something like that. I know. So it is, it does really, it tries to keep, you're trying to keep people in line. Yes. Yeah.

The shame is so heavy. And yeah, when, when, when you think that's, that makes sense that there are people. Like, I'm thinking back to me like 10 years ago, I would have been nervous to just buy the book as well. Because when you were kind of saying that part, that was what started to happen to me. I mean, this was like, I was probably like 24 would be my guess, like that age range. where all of a sudden I was like, I don't think I buy into this stuff. And like, to be fair, I was having moments like that in like high school. But like we've kind of discussed, like I was, I truly thought someone was in my thought. So I was scared that I even was thinking about it.

But later on when I wasn't living there anymore, and I started questioning it, it was that huge. The biggest rush of fear that came up for me was like, but if I, question this and I get it wrong. Like if I get it wrong, this is really, really, really bad. And it helped me kind of see, and I know religion does great things for some people too. I think neither of us are discounting that actually. But how you can feel in control if you feel like you know exactly like everything that's going to happen and that you even know what's going to happen for you in the afterlife so i felt so out of control and super scared when i first started questioning it and then like you're saying it was like kind of sitting in that that helped me be like

if i saw this in any other name of religion i would call it a cult like i would like this kind of ideology but it just like cults it's it's so scary to break out of that yeah it's really hard to question when the stakes are that high um and again yeah it seems obvious in retrospect but when you're in it, it's not obvious at all. And, you know, that's one of my favorite things about deconstructing hell is that. And that's why I think for me that in some ways that was like the first step of deconstruction because it's really hard to question anything else when the stakes for questioning could result in something like that. And, you know, I think that really robs us of the ability to ask the questions that really matter about spirituality. Because we're, you know,

when you're wrestling with that, it's not like you're wrestling with what's going to make me the most loving possible person. What's going to help me like do the most good in this world? What's going to help me become the most wholehearted, you know, really good of myself? Instead, you're just worried. Am I, am I right about things that you can't know for sure? Exactly. So you're like, oh, could I have supposed to be certain about this thing. But that's fake because nobody's certain about what happens when you die. Nobody is. If anybody tells you they are, they're selling something or afraid. Or yeah, they're afraid of what could happen if they're not, if they're not certain.

Yeah. And so it's, it's really silly. We're all, you know, pretending to be certain about this thing in order to feel safe. But like you said, there was a safety there. You know, you would think that taking apart hell, because, yeah, a lot of people really feel like, well, that, that feels bad. I don't want that to be true. But, oh, I think it has to be true because that's what the whole system demands.

But like you said, when you start to take it apart, it's not necessarily this big, amazing liberating thing even though taking apart hell seems like that would be very liberating actually you were that illusion was providing something for you it was providing us with the safety of certainty while this horrible thing might exist at least i have the system figured out to where i'm on the right side of that line yes and now all of a sudden when you've erased the line you've kind of erased like what i thought the whole thing was about like i was told this was the purpose of my life exactly and so a lot all a sudden is taken from you. That's why it's very hard for some people the longer you're in it to question some of these things because for, I mean, for many churches, this is the point. And one of

the most common questions I get and one of the other main reasons I wrote this book, not just to describe what hell did to our spirituality. But the other common question I get is, if there's no hell, why be a Christian at all? Why follow Jesus at all? What's the point of Jesus if there's no hell? Didn't Jesus come to save us from hell? And if there's no hell, why did Jesus come? Why did Jesus die? Why does any of it matter? Why be a Christian at all instead of something else? And what those questions made me realize is that, well, I mean, just on the face of it, like, just turn it back around on them and say, oh, that's interesting. So you're only a Christian because of hell? Oh, so for you, Jesus is just to get you out of hell. Like, as soon as you sit with

that for a moment, you realize that's a really empty spirituality. This is just about punishment avoidance. Surely spirituality is more than that. And if you ask them that, they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like I get so much from following Jesus, you know, love, joy, peace, the fruit of the spirit. But the reality is you have this punishing fear-based thing, kind of in the foundation under it all. And if you took that away for a lot of people, they're like, wait, that was why I got into this in the first place. And I might have found other reasons to hold on to, like, you know, community, love, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, like, I maybe would have tried to find those things in other places, but I entered into this framework specifically because of that fear of hell.

And so when you're released from that, all of a sudden, you realize, like, did I choose this at all? Yeah. Yeah. And that's what can be very scary, too, is like thinking that you could be so sold on something that you really didn't. It wasn't your choice at all. Because, again, that's like another version of feeling out of control. So I know you were an evangelical pastor as well, but for the listeners, can you kind of talk about, was it, can you kind of talk about like what happened for you that kind of shifted stuff at that point? There were a lot of moments.

Yeah. I think the most pivotal was Trump's nomination in 2015-ish. Yeah, during that year watching, you know, I think I had, I had rose-colored glasses on towards evangelicalism for a while. Yeah. I was actually raised in fundamentalism. So just long story short, I was raised as an independent fundamental Baptist, very, very sheltered, where like even contemporary Christian music like Chris Tomlin and Stephen Curtis Chapman was considered too worldly. We didn't have drums or electric guitars in our church. King Games Only.

My dad wore a suit and tie to preach every Sunday. You know, no pants on women, just dresses, that kind of vibe. So very, very fundamentalist. And in college, I went to a fundamentalist school, Bob Jones University, but I began to leave fundamentalism because of how just isolated and separated it was. And I just, you feel like a weirdo in that world. And I was tired of feeling that. So I kind of broke from that and entered mainstream evangelicalism, which is, you know,

what we're talking about, which is more culturally engaged, but really still holds all all these same fundamentalist theological positions, like you have to believe in Jesus in this particular way or else you're going to go to hell. So I held on to all that theology while losing a lot of the sort of very constricting cultural aspects and entering a more mainstream. So in evangelicalism, at first, it felt very buoyant, very life-giving, very open because it's like, well, I could wear jeans to church. This is amazing. You're right. We could sing some of these more contemporary songs i wasn't even allowed to listen to secular music of any kind so like i was just enjoying the fact that i could be more of a normal person right and still be a good christian you know

within evangelicalism yeah um and so i i dove all in and became a pastor quite young and then it really wasn't until the trump trump's elevation that that was the first breaking point for me where i realized oh i broke from fundamentalism because i saw the flaws there but then i is this so happy hunky dory in evangelicalsman until trump's ascendancy in evangelicals been watching so many evangelical leaders get behind him many really the majority of the people in my church were excited about him which i was surprised by i wouldn't be surprised by that now i think one of the big shifts i've made over the last 10 years uh-huh is when this first started happening in in 2015 i was surprised and i was like this is not who we are you know that was like my i was like

this is just not who we are. And now, 10 years later, I'm singing a different tune. What I would say now is, yeah, that's exactly who we were. And Trump, I don't see as an aberration within the evangelical movement as much as its logical conclusion. But it took me some time to get there. But so things started to fall apart for me during those years. And I just began to do some of my own digging because I think for me, how I summarize it, and there was a lot going on, but I think to simply summarize it to say that if they missed it with Trump, if they didn't have the moral discernment to see through one of the most blatantly wicked people to ever be on the public stage, if they thought, oh, that's a good godly man, when really he's just the exact opposite

of that in every way possible. So if they didn't have the moral discernment to see that, I think I was just like, well, where else are they missing it? And that gave me permission to really just kind of go back to the drawing board on some things. And one of those things was hell, while I was a pastor around 2017, 2018, I was doing a deep dive on hell myself and began deconstructing some of that. And my sort of efforts around that issue as well as other things like women in ministry and queer people ultimately led to me leaving evangelicalism at the end of 2020. Yeah. Yeah. Trump has been, that was one of the big eye openers for me as well. because I remember being like there's no way these people who are obsessed with adultery and I mean even just that one like he is like he's prominently been known as like a playboy for decades.

Yeah. And I remember being like there is no way this will happen. And then he got elected and I was like that was really weird. And then in this second round last year when we were when we were in around voting time almost exactly a year ago, I was having some conversations again with people who I thought there was probably no way they would vote for him. Just based off of even how I'd heard them judge other people, I'm like, there's no way you're going to vote for this guy if you're talking about these people this way. and they did so it really it really got to me last year too and then that's what kind of it was similar for me i started um reading oh jesus and john wayne was the first that was like the first one that i read that helped me like you're saying it helped me understand how like trump is where this was all going to land no matter what like since about the 60s is what that that that does a really good job It did the same thing for me.

I read that in 2020 during the pandemic. I was reading that. Oh, wow. And I was already incredibly disgruntled about a great many things. But that book did bring a lot of those strands together into one cohesive picture. I mean, that's the power of a good historian. You know, Kristen Dume wrote the hell out of that book. And she just had such a clear vision for these are not a bunch of little isolated things.

She drew it together in a tapestry. And you could see clearly the violent patron. patriarchal misogynistic white supremacist history of evangelicalism that this is again like i said before this is who they've been yes and really i was a part of that and i that so that was what i needed to see like okay i got to i got to get out of here i got off this bus yeah yeah yeah if it feels shocking to anyone that uh he got voted in twice um that book it just explains so well how essentially politicians in the 60s kind of realized and it's crazy because of course everything goes back to even like racism um we like uh the civil rights act gets finally gets into law and politicians are like

how are we going to get people excited to vote like how are you get like we can't use racism as our platform is was almost a big part of it and then they realized that religion was such as it's not the first religion to realize that either or it's not the first politician to realize they could use religion to control people um but they really just kind of started taking jesus which is why it's called jesus and john way it's called jesus and john wayne more toward like this john wayne hyper masculine uh i don't know figure that uh to your point uh aligned better with what you're saying that it's the more i read the more i'm like the patriarchy, misogyny, racism, even pedophilia, and, like, greed, all of it's all wrapped

together and, like, kind of taking care of each other, essentially. Like, there's a reason all of that came together so well and that they all kind of co-mealed. And unfortunately, in the last five years, that book has only become more relevant. Yes. Yeah. We're seeing that very powerfully on the, really shaping our whole country. actually yes yeah it totally is um and yeah the way that people can just like be like uh well he hasn't been completely um he hasn't been put in jail yet that's what i that's what i was hearing a lot of

they're like so i i can't pretend to know what he's done and i'm like there's some things you can know though yeah i mean just the the the testimony from the deposition of i want to say Katie Williams is the victim that she dropped her accusation after there were, she received death threats, but she has continued to say that all of that happened to her when she was 13 years old, raped by Trump and Epstein. Yeah. There's just no reason to believe that that's not true. I mean, there's enough data, like, that points in that direction that, like, why would that be not true?

That's what blows my mind. It's really, it's really awful when you sit and think about it for even just the people. Yeah, like we can believe the hundreds of women who have talked about this. We don't need a dead man's, like, emails. We shouldn't need it, but I guess here we are. Here we are. Here we are. So, okay.

Yeah, I'm also listening to Virginia Roberts, you phrase, nobody's girl, her memoir. Oh, wow. Same thing. Like, you're hearing this harrowing story from a woman who, what like was there for years there's photographic evidence of it and it just makes it makes me angry all over again when I think about how these women are having to live in a country run by their rapist yeah which by the way is probably not the first it's almost 100% probably not the first time that's ever happened um I'm sure they're how that even what we're

talking about high control religion fear based religion really does indoctrinate you from a very young age to not listen to that voice and listen to who, to the typically white man who's speaking for God. I mean, this was not explained to me. It didn't have to be said out loud. The people that were always talking for God were white men. In fact, it never even occurred to me as strange that we didn't have female pastors or, or, you know, I had a very masculine mental model for God, like a punishing guy in the sky. And of course, like it never even occurred to me that that was a wrong model or that was idolatrous in some way or didn't capture the fullness of God because God was only spoken about and for by men in the world that I was in. I was

not in a world where there were allowed to be women pastors. And I think that's pretty typical for the most part. I think the numbers, even now, even if you include even the progressive denominations, I think it's less than 10% of pastors in the country are women. And so in my world, it was white men that were shaping how we talked about God. And I was meant to kind of silence those parts of myself that would show resistance. And that really does set you up to be an abuse victim, to also excuse victimization and to not center the voices of victims. And to listen and add to this sort of hierarchical domineering authorities who are saying, this is the way things are. This is the way things go. And also, there's institutional protectionism that you see, too. Like, if you question this,

then it's going to, it's too big to question or this will cost too many people. We're doing too much good. So like the Southern Baptist Convention to the Catholic Church, they've all had these sex abuse scandals for the same reason. You can't question the organization. You can't throw it under the bus because this is God's thing. We're saving people from hell. And so if you make us look bad, then you are sending people to hell, really.

You can't make us look bad. So you've got to protect the organization. And the logic behind the Trump cult is very similar that a lot of people right now are having this crisis because, you know, this guy who ran on exposing pedophilia and taking down sex trafficking rings now is implicated at the very center of the most prolific sex trafficking ring. All the signs are pointing to this guy. And right now, they're like, but wait, you know, but he's going to do so much good. Do I protect him? Do I not protect him? Well, they've been indoctrinated their whole lives to protect that white guy in authority and to silence the

questioning voice. And so in many ways, fear-based religion prepared. paved the way for kind of a cult around Trump. Yeah, you just don't question anything. And that's what I can't, I imagine I know not everyone has all the same information. And so

I know that some people maybe haven't even seen like the quotes of him saying like if I were ever going to run for president, like I would run for with Republican Christians because like they'll believe anything, they won't ask you anything. Like

that's what I would do. And he was saying that in like early 2000s in a random interview. And then it's it I, the other thing that I always think of is the beginning of Jesus and John Wayne. She opens up with when he's like, I could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and in broad daylight with witnesses and nothing, nothing would happen to me. And I'm like, that alone, there are so many things for me that are like that alone should have like January 6th should have. mean, should have been enough. Grab them by the pussy should have been enough. Women saying he raped them should have been enough.

But then we can even go. When you did that thing, imitating the disabled guy. That was, that should have been enough. Like, so many moments where it would, yeah, no, it should have been enough. Yeah. Yeah, I know. And it's, yeah, it's, it's really, it's confusing. It has still been confusing for me.

Because again, it's like some of these people I'm talking. about I even though I was not a part of Christianity anymore I knew they were and they seemed like very loving people and so that was what was so hard for me to reconcile yeah I think about this a lot it's like why why are they supporting Trump who is clearly un-moral and for the most part most Christians do actually try to live out the morality of their religion I don't think I don't think Trump is actually representative of the way most Christians are I agree but they're putting up with him and why are they putting up with him or even centering him in that way and i mean i think there's a lot of things you can point to but in terms of the theme of my book

one of the realities is that when we received the spirituality that we received was not so much like what is our goal our goal is not so much to bring flourishing to the world this world is falling apart this world is going to burn human nature is so desperately evil that things like socialism will never work utopia you can't dream about utopia it really was about preparing for the next world. We had a spirituality of escape. Jesus is going to come back soon, take away the Christians. We're really just getting ready for that moment. So we're not trying to really make the world a better place. We're trying to get as many people saved as possible before Jesus comes back. That was the marching orders. And so Trump, he's not going to make the world a better

place. He doesn't, you know, he's ignoring climate change. They've removed global aid, which is leading to millions of deaths internationally like burned food instead of giving it right but what he is doing is he's he's telling christians i'm with you i'm on your side i will make christianity great again i will give power to christian institutions i will platform christian leaders i will stop the advance of islam and you know encourage the advance of christianity so he's taking sides in this sort of spiritual war. And for Christians who believe this is ultimately about heaven and hell, for them, the power of Christian institutions matters more than the flourishing of the world because

to them it's those Christian institutions that need money and power in order to get more people converted and baptized and going to heaven. And so they're able to justify a lot when he's on their side. So yeah, he's doing some bad things. But ultimately, like this is going to be for the greater good. They see that they're able to populate heaven this way. And I think they're obviously missing it for a lot of reasons. And what I ultimately get into in the book is the way that while focusing on getting

into heaven and out of hell in the afterlife, they are explicitly creating hell for people in this life and missing the very point of spirituality and also misrepresenting the entire message and ministry of Jesus. And so I don't just think that they're bad in general. like they're specifically actually going against the very guy that they say they're following. I don't think that they're following at all. And so in the second half of the book, for those who are like feeling upset because they feel like their faith has been hijacked, they feel like, you know, there's a lot that I appreciated

about Jesus, but I feel like I've had to lose all of that because the people representing Jesus are doing it so badly. Jesus felt like he's been taken from us. But I don't personally, I don't want to let go of Jesus because I think that he's too good for the worst people to define who he. is and what he's all about. And so I think for people who are looking to hold on to Jesus in some capacity, I'm not saying how you have to label yourself or what doctrine you have to hold. But for me, I still call myself a Christian. And primarily, you know, sometimes people ask why I call myself

a Christian since a lot of people call me a heretic. And there's a lot of ways I approach that question. But the simplest one is that I still seek to follow the spirituality of Jesus. That what Jesus' priorities were in the world still makes sense to me, how he lived, what he lived for still makes sense to me. And spirituality, in other words, how you relate to God, yourself, and other people. I would love to have the relationship to God, other people, and myself that Jesus had. And so that's why I still seek to follow him. Yeah, it's gotten a point for me where I'm like, I think Jesus is one of my favorite activists. Like, that's even like part of what it's gotten to for me where I'm like he was helping strangers or immigrants if we like however you want to

like people the um verse about like welcome a stranger like they're your own like seems seems pretty cut and dry that like we should not be treating people so poorly and specifically one of the things he was confronting is exactly what we're seeing now the way that religion itself is often used as a tool for empire because in Jesus' day, rather than standing with the marginalized people being crushed under systems of domination, religious systems were being used to further entrench those hierarchies of domination, to further crush people at the bottom and elevate people at the top. And religion is one of the most useful things to actually baptize those hierarchies and say, oh, yeah, those people at the bottom and us at the top, that's actually God's way.

So they're going to use religion not to liberate the oppressed, but to actually. oppressed them. And so Jesus went in and he turned over tables. He went into the temple and he staged a protest. And by the way, that happened just a few days before he died. And most scholars would say that that action in the temple is what directly led to his execution, that he was killed for resisting the way that religion is being used not to welcome strangers, but to exclude them, et cetera, et cetera, down the line that the least of these, the people that Jesus said were supposed to care for in our spirituality. He said, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, visit the imprisoned. When you do that, you're doing those things for me. And if you go down that list of things, those are still the people that our society

refuses to acknowledge and instead excludes. We don't see God in those people. And the spirituality of Jesus wants us to see God in everybody, especially the people, primarily being excluded by society. Yes. Yeah, that's the story that I keep coming back to lately is him flipping the tables because exactly what you're saying and greed that's that's the other component of it that i think is so similar to what's happening now like it is the one percent against us it's not even in my opinion it's not even republicans versus democrats like i also feel like both have failed in so many different ways i could go on a rant trashing the democrats and i've just to be clear i've only voted democrat for quite some time, but I'm not happy about it. I know. It's like that's it. It is the one. It's,

it's class warfare more than it's anything at this point is how I feel about it. And so that's the other thing that's so powerful to me about that story of him going where they've basically turned church into, uh, like business was even kind of part of what was happening there. Like, people were making money outside of the church as well. Um, And I feel like it's hard not to connect to those two. Like he died so shortly or was murdered so shortly after that for questioning institutions that were getting corrupted. And one of the problems with making Jesus's death primarily a transaction about the afterlife is that it totally misses the entire reason that he was killed. What I say in the book is that the starting point for why.

Jesus died, you have to start with why Jesus lived. What was he on about? What was his purpose? What was he doing in his ministry? For many of us as Christians, the life of Jesus hardly mattered at all. He didn't even need to live. He just needed to die as a sacrifice, as a substitute for your sin so that you could believe in that death and then you could die and go to heaven. And that completely ignores the stated purpose of Jesus ministry, how he lived his life, who he lived for. And ultimately, because he didn't just die, he didn't give himself as a sacrifice. Maybe metaphor. you could see some of those undertones as a metaphor, but Jesus was executed as an enemy of the state as he agitated for what he called the kingdom of God, which was a vision

of God's dream for the world that was a critique of the way that empire was ruling the world. And that invites us to imagine our world, a world that actually reflects God's love for everybody. And unfortunately, religion and spirituality are not often used that way. They are often used in the same way that the religion was being used, that Jesus was protesting that he died protesting to again to reinforce and baptize systems of domination rather than dismantle them yes that's the other thing that has come up for me because i've just been reading more nonfiction in general is also like uh the amount i mean we just had thanksgiving and i think there are a lot of wonderful reasons to practice being grateful for things and i think

that's how a lot of people approach it now but even the myth making uh around Thanksgiving when we're in school and the whole idea of manifest destiny like God wanted us to just have America like we were just supposed to have it even though there were already people there is like it there's there's just been so much mistreatment of people in this country like it's been going on for like 250 years that we were doing it in the name of God. Yeah, and listen, and I get into this in the book, how fear-based religion, hell-based religion, explicitly justified that. The doctrine of discovery was the official doctrine of the Catholic Church that gave spiritual justification for the project of colonization, basically saying, hey, these different civilizations, they're pagan, those people are going to hell. We, we Christians, us Europeans, civilized Christians, what it meant to be civilized, basically was to be the kind of person who was going to heaven.

We had the keys to heaven and hell. And when you believe that you have the answers about the afterlife and everybody else is damned, you can kind of justify anything. And so they went into these civilizations and basically said, listen, like, yeah, this colonization is probably going to cause some havoc. Probably some people are going to die. You might have to do some kidnapping, some minor genocides. But here's the thing. Right now, they're all going to die and go to hell. So even if some of them die as we conquer their lands, at the end of the day, we're going to Christianize them.

We're going to save them. them. Right. And so they'll be in a better, they'll be in a better place. And these justifications are still being used. Just the other day, J.D. Vance in a speech said that, well, the indigenous people, they were doing child sacrifices. These lands were pagan. And we actually liberated them from these sort of these things of child sacrifice, which it doesn't even make sense. Because even if that was true, and there's not, I mean, that's very debated whether that was true. But even if it was true. To say that we came in and we slaughtered an entire people because they were committing child sacrifice. Like, wait, wait. So they were killing a few children. And so you killed all of them. Like,

how does that? And that's better? Like, I'm confused. Yes. God, he makes me so mad, obviously. Yeah. It's wild how much people resist knowing the truth about that too. But I think to what we were talking about earlier it is it's a lot of it is all interlinked like if you don't want to question any parts of your religion or your spirituality then you also probably don't want to question any version happy version of the united states that you have in your mind i think that is one of the biggest steps of deconstruction that might actually be harder i yeah that deconstructing the myth around america for american christians is maybe just as hard as taking apart the myth that we received around Jesus and the afterlife.

It's kind of, they're part and parcel. And one of the things that I love about deconstructing is it does kind of get you questioning a lot of those assumptions. Yes. So I'd like to think that that will be the next domino to fall for a lot of people. I think right now is a tough thing. And there's still in this, a lot of people are still in that state of like, well, this is just not who we are.

You know, like ICE doing what they're doing throughout the country, you have mass secret police it's reminding people of the SS you have militarized cities and you know and this a lot of people are just like well this is not who we are and i think that yeah everyone who's not white is looking at us like yeah this is this is who we've been yeah and i don't think we're going to have meaningful change until we reckon with the fact that the systems that we have built let us here and by the way this isn't just a republican party problem no no it's not do you run into i can't remember do you run into people who just are like i just don't think there are systemic issues have you ever yeah for sure i mean that's that's a very common

conservative thing they they do want to make everything about individuals and they don't see the systemic issues yeah and a lot of that is connected to this particular vision of spirituality where every person has to become a believer on their own and they're it's about your individual salvation project right right you can't be born into a family you have to get saved for yourself you can't just inherit that um and so everybody is kind of on their personal salvation project and the main thing that they're asking is well yeah is that person and christian are they born again did they receive the gospel as opposed to asking bigger systemic issues yeah yeah is this all there it's like um we were we were even i read um what is it called harriet tubman live in concert bob the drag

queen basically wrote this really fun kind of like speculative fiction where like some historical figures like come back into the world like in present day and he basically helps harriet tubman write like a musical about her experience incredible he uses that as a really yeah a really cool way to talk about, I mean, cool way, to talk about how harrowing the history of that is. But he also, like, does a really good job of, like, pointing out how we even, uh, were like, like, scriptures about how being a servant is the most, like, valuable thing that you can be is what was used to, like, be like, you're not enslaved. You are serving. Like, you are a servant for this Christian God and it's just it's it's indigenous people like we took the lands from

indigenous people and then we built our entire country off free enslaved labor and kept and used a lot of Bible verses to like justify so much of it and it's wild it's so wild and unfair absolutely yeah and again I think that a fear of hell can cause you from to you from questioning a lot of those systems because it does start to feel like if I start to take some of this apart, my entire world is going to collapse around me. And so that can be very disorienting. Yeah. Yeah, it really it is. It's like it is just like the foundation of everything you learned. If you like grew up Christian and grew up in public schools, like you're like was was any of this true? Like what what's real here? That's what that's what really helped or that's why books really helped me over the

last couple years is I was like I just want I want knowledge like I want I want to know things that happen in the past I want to hear from other perspectives and then you feel like less like you can be gaslit when people are like we should take this out of the museums and children shouldn't learn this it's just that part's wild to me that they just like even like excluding our actual history from curriculum like one of the things that we all that most of the world respects with I was just reading cast by Isabel Wilkerson. And she was bringing up how, like, one of the things the world respects so much about Germany is like they, it is heavily in their curriculum what, what happened with like the Holocaust. We have never, we have never really done that with our civil war.

Never. With our history of slavery. We've done everything we can to avoid anything remotely like reparations. Yeah. And we wonder why there's still just this cry for justice. It's never been justice. Totally. Well, and for me, I was just talking to one of my friends yesterday, kind of in the context

of like people who think like racism is gone because the Civil Rights Act happened or whatever. And her dad is one of, he's literally one of the Little Rock Nine. So he was one of the first black boys at the time to go to a non-segregated school. And it's like everyone he was in school. with they didn't just go away like that generation of people didn't just like disappear and if he's still here and like living living through like just everything that has happened in his life like the the people who thought he shouldn't have been allowed in their school are some of

them are still alive today too but so many people just want it to feel like and I I I realized that about myself until I don't know a few years ago when all of a sudden I I was like, wait, that was 1964 or 1965 when that got passed. That was not long ago. And I think a lot of people are like slavery ended forever ago and just have no concept of like, sometimes even that Jim Crow was a thing for so long. Every year when I, on Ruby Bridge's birthday, I always see a picture of her and I'm always like remarked that she looks so young still. You know, like, yeah. I mean, this is not distant history.

Many of us, our parents, this was in their lifetime. you know the very the boomer parents that are like voting for trump and saying you know DEI shouldn't be a thing like that like in their lifetime and so yes it is it is a little maddening that that they don't see it and yeah um yeah not not to like make it all about the theme of my book but i think it's just one thing there's so many different way pathways to like breaking some of this stuff down but i do think that for many of us we received a version of Christianity and spirituality that was primarily about believing the right things to become one of those insiders that was going to heaven. But for me, the work of spirituality is exactly what we've

been talking about, seeing this stuff in the world and trying to build a world that actually reflects God's love for everybody, breaking down these forces of domination like segregation and white supremacy, anti-blackness. The Apostle Paul talks about the principalities and the powers, the spiritual forces that shape this world. And when I think about the demonic, that's what I think about. These forces, these systems that shape the world in ways that do not reflect love, that don't reflect our common humanity. And, you know, it's not just, our wrestle is not about against flesh and blood,

Paul says. In other words, it's not just like the Trump supporters aren't my enemy. There is a spiritual blindness. I think of Jesus's statement, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they do. They don't know. And actually there are forces and very powerful forces. I mean, literally the richest people on the planet with all of the surveillance technology

and brainwashing technology that they're using to divide us and force us to not think about the things that actually make for peace and unity instead to keep us very divided and ultimately not fighting for justice and liberation for the least of use. But to me, that is the work of spirituality. And I think for a lot of people, we're not ever going to get there until we have this very small world of spirituality is about being a part of the right religion, having the right answers, having certainty around what happened with Jesus and his death and resurrection. And when I believe those right things, I'm spiritually safe and I'm in and I go to church and I live my merry life. And it doesn't actually connect you to this big work of liberation that I think God has always been about. Yes.

I love that. That's the kind of stuff that makes me like when people in church would be like, amen, like while someone was talking, that's the stuff that has brought that back into me. And I'm like, oh, that's what it feels like to be like, yeah, I agree with that. Like I get excited about that vision of doing something. So yeah, I that that when I say like Jesus has become one of my favorite activists, I do mean it in the sense that like everything he said, like we should be taking care. care of people and that's just it's not the focus right now anymore but it'd be nice if we could kind of get back to that for sure so um i do feel like any your book is very helpful for having conversations with people about this stuff or even just like we were talking about if you've had a couple thoughts come up and you've been like huh i don't know how i feel about that like even like you said with that person it's you don't have to believe it all and i even approach a lot of books that way sometimes i read books or i'm like i don't know if i'm going to agree

with any of this but i'd love to have the knowledge so you can even approach it as like i just i just want to have this i want to read it and i'll see what resonates dude after that person sent me that um and said that you know that the fear just there was religious fear and guilt uh that kept her from buying it i posted i asked her if i couldn't i posted that in my stories with a poll saying hey how many of you that bought my book felt triggered, felt afraid to buy it for this reason. And 70% answered that they experienced some level of religious guilt. And what I would kind of say to them and anybody else is, man, for some of you, just the act of buying it is going to be a really powerful thing. Yeah. To let a controlling system say you can't expose yourself to information,

you can't think for yourself, you can't listen to your conscience. And if there's a part of you saying God might be more loving than I thought, maybe a loving God doesn't damn. God's beloved creatures. In fact, according to like an evangelical estimate, if only Christians are going to heaven, that's the majority, not just some people going to hell, but like two-thirds of humanity at minimum. So the majority of people, God's going to burn in hell. And maybe you're just like, man, I don't know, that just doesn't seem right, that doesn't feel right. And if you're struggling with some sense of, am I allowed to listen to that voice that says maybe I should question this? I think it's actually really, really important to listen to the voice

that's inside of us. I think that's where God is speaking. And hey, you can always disagree with it, but I just check it out. Yes. Yeah. I think I agree with all of that. It's just worth having it. And as someone who had to, not had to, got to learn how to trust my intuition and myself and not just like put all the power outside of myself. It's a worthy journey. It's nice to feel it's nice to feel like you can trust yourself even if that doesn't mean you're like certain of things all the time. so yeah i obviously think everyone should go read this book i do always ask at the end if you have any books that you always recommend or anything that you've read recently that you really liked through this book tour season last few months i have struggled to read but let's see here um i have read some things i've really enjoyed lately where is it this um oh yeah i've really enjoyed this this book by Richard Roar Adams Return, the Five Promises of Male Initiation.

There's been a lot of talk lately about like the male loneliness epidemic and what makes for healthy masculinity. So this is basically a book about healthy male spirituality. And I found it very compelling. He wrote this back in the 90s. So he would probably say some things different now, just like the way that we use language around some of these topics can feel a little bit outdated at times. But in a landscape where, you know, we talked about Jesus and John Wayne, Christianity in

particular has this very violent patriarchal vision for masculinity based in hierarchy and domination. And this book is kind of about undoing that and taking them apart and inviting men into a spirituality that is about connection. And actually, the ways that we're actually more alike and not just necessarily all rooted in difference. I really appreciated it. And I think I'll probably revisit it as I continue to wrestle with some of these things. Yeah. Because I was also raised in that world with a pretty bad vision of masculinity. Right. Richard Roar is great. I do tend to resonate with him often. I haven't, I think I've mostly read excerpts from stuff, but I might have read one of his books a few years ago, but I do, I do love his

approach normally. This one is not like, this is very specific in some ways. My favorite Richard War book, if you're just trying to get like a big vision for spirituality is the universal Christ was really beautiful. That came out a few years ago. But he's a great spiritual writer. You know, in some ways, my book, I definitely have enjoyed a lot of Richard Roar, but I felt like a lot of what he has to say was going to be confusing to people who grew up in the kind of thing I grew up in. It was like a book too far. Like, wait, this doesn't make sense because what about hell and what about these things?

Yeah. So there's some work that had to be deconstructed first. So in some ways, my book would be a really good prequel to the work of other spiritual writers like Richard Roar because I try to do some deconstruction work to move you to a more expansive vision for spirituality where the sky's the limit i try not to give a lot of the answers like i'm not trying to say here's the way you're supposed to think now the beautiful thing is it's about deconstructing a punishing a punitive spirituality is it gets rid of a lot of those supposed dues yeah here's a list of what you should believe you're allowed now to wrestle with

what what leads me into the presence of love yeah yep i completely agree um that's a great point too though because yeah he's kind of maybe like a Christian mystic I think is almost what he's considered so yeah that would be like a big jump to go when I first read him I was like oh this is heresy I'm not allowed to read this right right yeah yeah well thank you so much for coming and talking about it um it's helped me a lot in feeling a little more grounded which has been huge this year so I'm sure some other people are going to pick it up and have that same experience. But thank you for coming on and talking about it. Thanks for having me, Kate.