Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - 275: Rhett's Spiritual Deconstruction - One Year Later | Ear Biscuits Ep.275

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

It's been a full year (and what a year it has been) since the guys have unveiled their spiritual deconstruction stories. Listen to Rhett's one year follow-up as he discusses how he processed the year that was 2020 post-deconstruction and where he's at now spiritually in this episode of Ear Biscuits! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Welcome to Ear Biscuits, the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. I'm Link.

And I'm Rhett. This week at the round table of dim lighting, I'm nervous again. Of course you are, man. I'm nervous for you. We're doing what we said we would do, which is to give a one year follow up to our deconstruction stories.

And we have talked about some, we've talked on and off about our sort of continued spiritual journey, but we haven't gotten into it specifically and exclusively and also personally and individually in the way that we're gonna do over the next two episodes. Yeah, just to recap, one year ago from this release, minus a couple of weeks,

we decided to launch our Lost Years series where we explained about our experience growing up in the evangelical church, about being fully committed to our faith. You're already yawning. Is that a defense mechanism? I'm tired, I'm bored of you already. Dang, man.

I know this is your episode. I'm gonna let you do all the talking. I'm only gonna ask some questions here and there, but when I do interject, I would just ask that you not yawn in my face. Yeah, I'm sorry. I think it's a nervous yawn. Oh, I'm sure.

Oh, yeah, I yawn. I feel like I have to get more oxygen when I get nervous. So you're not bored with me? No, I'm just a little bit nervous. Okay, apology accepted. Anyway, what was I saying? I was saying that- We told our stories a year ago.

About how we became professional Christians. Well, we were on staff full time with Campus Crusade. We talked about all that. There were two episodes just to go through all the stuff in a span of time from college all the way through leaving our engineering jobs and joining Campus Crusade until leaving. We filled in all of those gaps in our career stuff

we'd never talked about before. Yeah. And then now we knew that that was basically setting the table to then say, to go into more depth about each of our spiritual journeys. And so at that time, you went first, then I went second. And so we're just gonna repeat that. You're gonna go first again.

Yeah. Is that good or bad? I think that's good. It's good for me. I think you're breaking the seal. You know, we're different people. We have, we process, we've gone through so much of our lives together,

but we process things differently. And, you know, our friendship has stayed intact, our love for one another is strong as ever and I'm here to support you today as you give some sort of update. I don't wanna supercharge this any more than it is and I'm curious how you've approached this and how you've thought about it but I'm actually not

gonna ask that question, I'm just gonna let you take it from here unless you think there's something else to fill in the gaps to bring people up to speed. No, because I will, in the course of what I'm gonna try to say today, I'll end up filling in some of the gaps and talking a little bit about this.

But yeah, the only thing I'll say to kind of, before I get started is that I have a lot of notes in the same way that I did when I did it. Like typically, you know, this is not, this is not a scripted podcast. This is just two lifelong friends talking about life for a long time. And we rarely, if ever have any sort of notes

or outline that we're going off of. But whenever I talk about this, and this is the ironic thing is I just, I wanna acknowledge this upfront is that, you know, when I was a Christian, when it was in the church and when I was a professional Christian, there were a number of times that I had to give a talk

or even dare I say, preach a sermon. I preached a couple of sermons in my day. I dare you to say it. And I find myself approaching these episodes like I would getting ready to give a talk. And I don't mean like a preachy sermon, but I'm just saying that like, you wanna make sure that you got all your stuff together.

And so I'm going off notes as if I'm giving a talk. And so I just apologize for the, if the tone is a little bit different or readier than normal, but I just feel like it's my way of getting the right information out there. Go for it. Are we ready? At some point we'll stop and have a little ad break,

but just keep that in mind. Okay, so again, a year has passed and the way I kind of approach this is I wanna talk about some things that, as I've reflected on telling our story at the time that we told it, how I've kind of processed both the response, but also the way 2020 unfolded.

And then as I'm gonna spend a lot of time on that, but then I will eventually get to sort of the update where I'm at spiritually, is kind of what I'll end on, which we've touched on a little bit on a few episodes, but I think we'll get into it a little bit more deeply. So going back to the initial sort of like laying it all out there a year ago,

putting it out into the world, the initial reaction, very, very supportive and encouraging on the whole. Like I'd say the vast majority of people, even people who disagreed, were super supportive and encouraging. But my response to the minority of negative responses

was very informative about who I still am and how much growth I still have yet to do. So, we have both received a lot of negative feedback. Doing what we do for as long as we've done it, being in this totally democratic platform where you can put whatever you want to on this place and have whoever wants to say anything,

say whatever they want to without any sort of check and also with anonymity, we have, I don't know, we never like talked about it that much, but we have developed a thick skin. I mean, let's just be honest. Well, I'm not gonna admit to changing my hairstyle years ago because I got fed up with the comparisons to Velma from Scooby-Doo. Yeah.

Or Thelma, whatever her name is. Well, because you look just like her. And I think it is Velma from Scooby-Doo. Yeah. Or Thelma, whatever her name is. Well, because you look just like her. And I think it is Velma. Yeah. And I kind of look like Shaggy, so that's not that big of a deal. And you talk like Scooby-Doo. But so we got a pretty thick skin.

People will say anything about you. Everything that can be said. They'll misunderstand you and misconstrue lots of things that you intend as an artist, as a creative person. An artist, yes. We do consider ourselves artists. We have created some art. You mean comedians, talkers? Everything that can be said about our videos,

everything that can be said about our style of humor, everything that can be said about what we look like, every aspect of what we look like, every aspect of our bodies, our hands, our feet, literally, like, literally, like, anything that can be said about any part of us has been said publicly. And I've just kinda gotten over it.

If you think, well, that's probably great, then you're not thinking about it enough. Yeah, but the one thing that telling my story, my deconstruction story in the fashion that I chose to tell it, that one thing it invited that I have never really experienced is a critique of my mind, right?

So I chose to tell my story, which centered around sort of, it was a largely sort of the unraveling of my intellectual underpinning when it comes to Christianity. And I condensed about a 20 year process into 90 minutes. Therefore it was not exhaustive. And it was not meant to be a dissertation or some sort,

you know, that was not what it was meant to be, but that was how many people interpreted it because I told this story with these steps and I used some examples and I actually talked about some of the things that were convincing to me that sort of changed my view. And so what that did naturally- People poked holes in it. Yeah.

But what you're saying is that given the nature of the presentation, it was presented with holes in it. Well, I'll say two things. It was presented with holes so that any sort of like, hey, let's take this and break this down and show all the places that he's wrong is, I wouldn't say it's a totally fair way to treat it, but I will say, I mean, listen,

I understood that by saying these things, I would be open to criticism and my thought process would be open to criticism, even if you're seeing sort of just snapshots of my thought process. So are you complaining about that? No, the point that I'm making is that I was just reminded that like, oh wow,

you've actually grown a pretty thick skin about what people might say about the way you look or what people might say about the things that you do on the internet. But you- How funny you are. You, yeah, I know I'm not funny to a lot of people. So, but what I'd never done because I've just been doing dumb stuff on the internet for 10 years is sort of said,

hey, I'm putting my mind out there in this way and have people critique it and critique my thought process and that my pride was wounded. And I was just reminded that I still got a lot of pride. I have pride in the way that I think about the way that I think. So ultimately I think that's a good thing. It's like, if I can keep having those edges, sand it off.

The feedback is a good thing. That's good for me personally. Now, you know. You heard it, bring it on. So one of the things that, now I know more so than you, I've been, and again, I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that a lot of the critique and a lot of the conversation

about our stories was kind of centered around my story because my story was much more open to critique because yours was very personal. And who's gonna argue with your personal experience, right? You told a lot of stories and it was personal and it was super relatable. And I was kind of saying this thing that is like, here's how the faith began to fall apart for me specifically.

So I have against my better judgment, most likely, I've read some of this stuff, right? I've read the blog posts, the Facebook posts and watched some videos. And again, I haven't watched anything all the way through. I've kind of gotten the gist of some things. But- You generated a lot of content.

But one of the things- For other people. It did, it did. But one of the things that I noticed was that it seems that the sort of general evangelical conclusion about us is that we were never Christians, right? That's where the majority of evangelicals have landed. That's like, okay, this is how I interpret this.

And this has been pretty fascinating for me personally, because this is exactly what I would have said about us, you know, 15 years ago, if I were to watch and hear the stories that we told, I would be like, well, I guess those guys were never Christians, or they are still and they will come back to a full faith and full relationship with Christ at some point in the future.

And I was thinking about that and thinking about the way that I used to think about things like this. And it was very much, it was a commitment to Christianity. It was a commitment to the Bible, but more so than anything, it was commitment to an ideology. It was commitment to a system of ideas that yes, have their roots in the Bible. But me and you both came from a reform background.

You like, you came from like a specific, like your church was specifically like, hey, we are reform background. You came from like a specific, like your church was specifically like, hey, we are reformed. And my church was like, we're not a reformed denomination, but this particular expression of this non-denominational denomination is reformed, right? Post-college, newlywed, the churches we were involved in. Yes.

Right, so we basically, even though I was uncomfortable with it, I kind of subscribed to sort of Calvinism light, you know, like what John Calvin taught. So you've got the P in TULIP, which is Perseverance of the Saints. This is deep cut for those of you who don't have any experience with this.

At least you skipped to the P. But- You left the TULI on the table. That's good. Essentially, it's this once saved, always saved thing that again, there's biblical support for it. There's also some biblical, there's some stuff that might bring it into question, but the general sort of consensus of the churches

that we came from and the sort of the part of the evangelical church that we came from is that once saved, always saved. And so I just find it interesting that, you know, you hear a couple of guys who talk about their experience with Christianity, how they were all in for Jesus. They recognize that they were sinners in desperate need of the grace of God

that comes only through accepting the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf. And we made a decision, in my case, multiple decisions, just to make sure it had taken to accept Christ. And you say, those guys were never Christians because that is what you have to believe. The power of ideology. But the thing that I really wanna get into

is the timing of us telling the stories. So before you move on, so I mean, you're obviously asserting, and I'll agree from my perspective too, that I'm experienced that, yeah, I believe I was saved. I mean, period. I don't know what else to say. I don't look back on that experience

and I'm very critical of myself, but I just don't think that, yeah, I don't look back at my former self that way. And that's what you're saying too? You think you were as real as you could be? I mean, did we miss something? What I would say to committed evangelical Christians who are listening is the way that they feel

about their relationship with God and the way that they experienced their relationship with God. Is I would say as well as I can, without being in your own, without being inside your body, I would say, I get it, I relate, I understand, I had the same experience. And now I think very differently about that.

And we would have fundamental differences as to what we think was actually going on at that time. But I'm saying that I understand that if you subscribe to, if you're still in and you subscribe to this particular ideology, you do not have a choice but to believe that we were never Christians or that we still are and we will return someday.

That's all I'm saying. So I'm not, I'm just saying it's interesting that that's where people landed and the power of, you can actually, the way that it has been discussed in a couple of places, the way that we have been described is like, you know, you can kind of tell when you listen to them that they never really came to a saving faith. They never really repented.

They never really understood grace. It seems like it was cultural. It seems like it was, maybe there was an intellectual commitment, but it doesn't seem like they had given their hearts to Jesus. And as somebody who made those same arguments to lots of people who talked about,

it's not about a religion, it's a relationship. It's about, it's the gift, it is the undeserved gift of God. Grace through faith, that's the only way. That's what I believe, that's what I lived, that's what I experienced. And to be told, no, you didn't. I'm not mad at those people for saying that.

I'm saying I understand that when you've completely bought into the ideology, you have no choice but to believe that. Just an observation. But the timing, the timing of our stories, what are the chances that we told these stories at the onset of 2020, just before the world fell apart? And listen, I'm very grateful that we were able to do this

at the beginning of what has ended up being basically the most difficult world for the, or difficult year for the world at large in our lifetimes, right? Oh yeah. Some people have suffered a lot more. Me and you have had the privilege of being in the position that we are

and having the jobs that we are so that we were able to get through this year relatively unscathed. A lot of people didn't and the world didn't and the world is still suffering. Two things about that. First thing is, having been open and vulnerable about our spiritual journey

gave us an opportunity to then speak open and vulnerably about the things that happened in 2020. And two guys who had been in the public eye for a really long time, who had kept this most significant thing secret and off limits, we had kind of become experts at navigating interviews without talking about the elephant in the room,

which is like, but weren't you guys like Christians and not just Christians, but like big Christians, like professional Christians? Didn't you guys write like some Christian songs for kids that were on like DVDs that were in constant rotation at Christian bookstores? Yes, yes, yes and yes. But not talking about that.

It was this weird thing that as we continue to get more vulnerable on this podcast and just in life in general, continuing to try to balance that, not sharing that thing. And then what became a year where there were certain things that our nation and our world faced, where the expectation was, if you are a public figure with an audience at all,

you're going to speak into these things. Like you can't really get away. In 2020, you couldn't get away with just staying on the sidelines about a lot of things that we went through as a nation. Yeah. But boy, it made it a lot easier to engage in that conversation having gotten vulnerable.

It would have been weird to not have had that conversation at the beginning of 2020. I honestly can't imagine our interaction publicly with the year that was 2020 without having told our stories. I'm surprised that we're, just as this is a side note, that we've been as successful as we've been and gotten to the point in our careers we have without being vulnerable to that level

because that's kind of a big part of being an internet personality. We wrote a whole book that was about us. I mean, let's be honest. We wrote the book of mythicality. Right. a whole book that was about us. I mean, let's be honest. We wrote the book of mythicality. That was full of stories about us. It was memoir-ish, but yet it didn't talk about any of this stuff.

And then we weren't ready. And I do think there was feedback like, okay, they have more to gain by sharing this story than keeping it to themselves. And the people that are suffering are the ones who are their faith is not strong enough yet. So they're capitalizing on vulnerability for their own to boost their popularity even further

at the expense of people who are floundering spiritually. And it's, you know. I'll talk a little bit about that in a little bit. We'll come back to that. But okay, I'll just wait then if you're gonna talk about it. But the bigger significance. I'm grateful that, to your point, back on point,

I'm grateful that the timing worked out the way it did, that we were able to talk about that. And then it led to the conversation we were, in the episode we had about Ben. I mean, was- We couldn't have had the most, I mean, again- I just felt like it was so important. The biggest episode of Airbiscuits,

and that's not what this is about, but like, yeah. We had no clue. We had no clue that people were gonna watch it to the degree they did. But it was important for us to process that and to make it, for people to take it how they would, for us to process that aspect of our lives and how our spiritual journey had an impact

on one of the most important relationships we had growing up with our other best friends. And we can talk all about Ben and Ben's death, but to talk about Ben's death without talking about what we were trying to do with him on his deathbed and trying to bring him to a decision for Jesus in the way that we process that now would have been a totally different story. And yeah, to be in this medium

and not be able to be true to yourself will eat away at your soul. Yeah. And that's why I'm grateful for it. Yeah, and I mean, it feels, I don't know, I would have exploded. Yeah. I would have exploded this year.

I feel emotional about it just because I'm grateful. I mean, it's, I got a lot to process in the next episode. I'm not gonna, but I'm grateful for it. And yeah, everything that we've gone through as a world and as a nation that I, you know, I'm grateful that we were able to bring more of ourselves to that than before the Lost Years series, we were, I felt like we were ready or capable

or had the confidence to do. Yeah, right. But I think that the bigger significance for me was the way that my story and us telling our stories intersected with the evangelical church's response to 2020 in general. Okay. And I am going to spend a fair amount of time talking about that today. Shop Best Buy's ultimate smartphone sale today. Get a Best Buy gift card of up to $200 on select phone activations with major carriers.

Visit your nearest Best Buy store today. Terms and conditions apply. Okay. My story in a nutshell, just to set the stage. Grew up in a, just in case you have, you just decided to not go back to the original story. Why wouldn't they do that? I think they need, they'll do that. Go ahead, go ahead.

Grew up in a Christian home, made my own decision for Christ at a young age, starting in high school, got very serious about my faith, along with this guy right here, which continued through college, then after we got involved with campus ministry, then after college, we eventually went on staff with Campus Crusade to train students in evangelism.

Now, my understanding growing up and also well into adulthood was that what the church believed, which was largely based on what the Bible said was true. And many things that the world, those outside the church thought, the things that they thought were true were actually lies, right? So what we had inside the church was the truth

and what the world had was lies. And more specifically, when it came to the Bible, everything that it touches on, it is true. It is true in, right? So anywhere that science and history and archeology, et cetera, appears to contradict the Bible, either that is not an actual contradiction or the worldly philosophy or perspective is wrong.

Like that's kind of what I was rooted in, right? And then, but I was also very curious and I constantly sort of re-derived my faith and we go back to the beginning because as you get exposed to other perspectives and worldviews, which is kind of impossible not to in this day and age with the internet, you continually sort of check yourself and go back

and try to rebuild the foundation and make sure like, okay, I wanna make sure that this is, that I can derive this, I can explain this, I can communicate this to myself and others, right? But over the course of my adult life, I came to think that Christians might actually have it backwards. I, when the secular scientists, historians,

archeologists, et cetera, questioned the truth of something in the Bible, they most likely were right, right? That was the process, was a slow and steady shift. And then coming to that conclusion, which I finally got all the way on the other side of that, coming to that conclusion gave me permission to question what I kind of call the underlying cosmic principles

of evangelical Christianity. Namely, people are born into a broken relationship with God and if they don't reconcile that relationship through Jesus, they will spend eternity in unthinkable torment in hell. And when I started thinking like, that's not even something that I want to believe. I had given myself the permission to not have to believe it because I no longer believe the underlying sort of ideas

that led to that, right? And at that point is when I was like, okay, no longer consider myself a Christian. And that happened, I can't remember what year I said that was when I went back to my story, but you know, at least several years ago. Now, a lot of people pointed out that it seemed like the two of us were not rejecting Christianity per se,

but we were rejecting evangelical Christianity. Okay. Right? And maybe more specifically, Southern evangelical Christianity. And I'll say I somewhat agree with that. Because that is what we had. Because that is what we had, and that is what we experienced, that that was our story.

And that is what we rejected. But I will also say that, you know, I don't think that Jesus rose from the dead. I don't think that God's ultimate true manifestation is in the person of Jesus. And so I would say that that puts me safely outside of the Christian camp. I believe so, yes.

So I would also say that. So I have also come to that conclusion. That's where I'm at right now. That's my thinking about it. Having said all that, I will say that most of what I'm gonna say today is intended for the evangelical church and more specifically the white evangelical church

in America. Because again, that's the world I come from. That's the world I know. That's the world I left. And I am going to say some things that are difficult to hear if you are in the white evangelical church. they're difficult to hear if you are in the white evangelical church. And again, I do not say any of this to be like,

to like get back at anybody for saying anything about me. Again, I'm grateful for the criticism that I received. I am pre-grateful for the criticism I will receive for this because- Pre-grateful. It continues to make me a person who cares less about the opinions of others, which is a healthier person. And it may be hard to hear this,

but I'm not lying when I say that I say these things out of love and I say them with a true hope that they will ultimately have a positive impact. You just have to take my word for it. Okay. Now I haven't been part of the evangelical church for many years, like six or seven years probably. But before we told our stories,

there was a lot of speculation about us that we might still be evangelical Christians because there was lots of public evidence of that from our past. You could pull it up. Cumulative, yeah. You could come to that conclusion. And the actions of white evangelicals in the year 2020

served as a strong confirmation for me personally to have publicly disassociated myself from the church. Now, again, I left because I came to what for me was an inescapable conclusion that the church had a spurious relationship with the truth. And I feel had a spurious relationship with the truth. And I feel like that spurious relationship with the truth was born out in 2020. But it's more than just a spurious relationship

with the truth. I think the church demonstrated that it has a spurious relationship with justice as well. So on the issue of racial injustice, and I'm gonna pull some data from the Public Religion Research Institute. This is all- Shout out.

This is all straight from there. White Christians are nearly twice as likely as religiously unaffiliated whites to say the killings of black men by police are isolated incidents rather than part of a pattern of how police treat African-Americans. White Christians are about 30 percentage points

more likely to say monuments to Confederate soldiers are symbols of Southern pride rather than symbols of racism. White Christians are also about 20 percentage points more likely to disagree with the following statement. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that makes it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.

Author Robert P. Jones, who's also associated with the PRRI, created a racism index that was generated using 15 questions designed P-R-R-I, created a racism index that was generated using 15 questions designed to get beyond personal biases and include perceptions of structural injustice. So basically this is a racism test. White evangelical Protestants had the highest median score on the racism index.

As Jones summarized, "'While most white Christians think of themselves "'as people who have warm feelings toward African Americans, "'holding racist views is nonetheless positively "'and independently associated with white Christian identity.'" I don't, having spent most of my life in the white evangelical church, I don't need these stats, but you might need them in order to understand that racism

has a very comfortable home in the white evangelical church today. And also Newsflash and people who know their history know that this is, this is not new, right? It isn't like 2020 made the church racist. The church has been, the white church has been, has held up racist ideas and defended racist ideas

and perpetuated racist ideas for hundreds of years. The church, now what we were told, what we grew up thinking is that, you know, the only reason that slavery ended was because of the Christian abolitionists. But what that fails to account for is the only reason that slavery continued for so long was the white Protestants who were justifying it and doing it, right?

And not only that, not only were they instrumental in the justification of slavery, the church was instrumental in the justification of segregation that follows slavery. And Sunday morning remains the most segregated time of the entire week in America. 2020 just pulled the curtain back. 2020 just pulled the curtain back on 2020 just pulled the curtain back on something that lots of people have known for a long time.

I will say, you kind of alluded to it. I'll just say, I'll refer to your Medium article, Letter to a White Man, because that's where you explored your own experience and you wrote the letter to your former self. I think that, again, you made a statement earlier that like, given my experience and your experience growing up when we did where we did,

including in the church, but just when and where we did in general as white guys. Yeah, I know a lot of, this rings true for me from personal experience and being close to it to the point where I personally am sorry for being so close to it and unwittingly involved many times, more than I even care to reflect or completely understand

because it's scary to think about. But I talk to my kids about it, you know? Yeah. So just wanted to throw that in there. Well, my, this rings true from my personal experience. And the reason this is such a tricky thing is because as a white Christian, I didn't think that I had racist ideas.

In fact, I felt I had been inoculated to racist ideas because I believed in a gospel that was for everyone. There was no slave, there was no free person, there was no man, no woman, there was no race. The gospel, it doesn't discriminate. And I thought that because that was true, therefore racism can't really exist. But what I failed to see until I left

was that so many racist ideas were not being challenged and actually were being perpetuated within our church in ways that we were blind to. so many racist ideas were not being challenged and actually were being perpetuated within our church in ways that we were blind to. But when it comes, we come back to 2020, as opposed to being on the front lines of calling for racial justice in America, white evangelicals reliably deny or minimize systemic racism.

And they also point out the problems with racial justice protests, rather than acknowledging the problems that are being protested, right? And this is what I talked about in my letter to a white man. What does a typical white Christian, white evangelical Christians say about the protests? Ah, violence is never the answer.

That's, right, that's the first thing, a lot of times the only thing they say. But okay, yeah, violence is not good. We don't want violence. Violence is not productive most of the time. But what are people upset about? Can we talk about that? No, well that's, well, that doesn't exist.

That's what we heard from, again, if you're a white evangelical and you're like, well, I don't believe that. Well, a lot of people you go to church with do. Simply put, white evangelicals have been on the wrong side of the fight against racial injustice. Okay, what about COVID? Let's talk about COVID.

Let me just stop and acknowledge that for many of you who are already down the rabbit hole, who subscribe to a Christian nationalism and have mixed Trumpism and Jesusism together, nothing that I say is going to be compelling. In fact, everything that I say is going to be compelling. In fact, everything that I say is going to just confirm to you that I have completely departed from the truth and now live in a world of lies.

I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the person who sits next to you in church who knows better. What was the last thing that filled you with wonder that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic? Well, for us, I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is anime. Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. And I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show with the best celebrity guests and hot takes

galore. So join us every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. COVID, despite clear evidence showing that mask wearing helps slow the spread of COVID, white evangelicals are the group least likely to wear a mask in public.

Least likely. If you throw a dart wear a mask in public. Least likely. Throw a dart at a demographic in America, who's least likely to wear a mask? White evangelicals get that award. Although the COVID mortality numbers are within the range predicted by scientists at the start of the pandemic, and hospitals have been as predicted, overwhelmed in many parts of the country,

white evangelicals are the most likely demographic to deny the seriousness of the pandemic. White evangelicals are also much more likely than the average American to question the efficacy of vaccination in general, and more likely to believe false information about the COVID vaccine. All this is added up to being one of the key reasons

that America has had such a tough time with COVID. In short, white evangelicals have been on the wrong side of the fight against COVID. I don't wanna get into too many more details. I'm not trying to give you evidence and argue if you don't believe that COVID's a real deal and you don't believe in masks or whatever. I'm just saying that this is what is born out in America.

So in summary, white evangelicals, largely, not all, again, not all, but largely, and more than anyone else, represent an intersection of science denialism and racist ideas that have made them an impediment in the fight against both COVID and racial injustice. And instead of worrying about the poor and the black and the brown, who are more likely to suffer from both the pandemic

and racial injustice, white evangelicals have been preoccupied with their own personal freedoms, spending more time and energy talking about their own persecution rather than those actually being persecuted. Sorry. I don't, I'm not exactly sure why I get emotional about it, but I think it's because I was such a part of it for so long.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I just, I can think of, I can see myself there. And so I don't, it hurts and it's embarrassing. Yeah, there's a lot of shame. Yeah. And it, yeah, and it's just not, oh, look at how good, look at how righteous we are now, look at how righteous we are now.

Look at how woke we are now. It's just not. I mean, it's like, because I'm not thinking about, when you say that, I ended up thinking about my former self. I'm talking to myself. Yeah, and it's... Yeah. But perhaps the single issue that best captures

white evangelicals dubious relationship with truth and justice is their overwhelming allegiance to Donald Trump. Do I want to talk about Donald Trump? No, I do not. I'm so glad that I do not have to see him in the news cycle. You probably don't want to talk about him either, but we can't talk about 2020.

We can't talk about white evangelicals. We can't talk about the last four years without talking about Donald Trump. By far the most reliably supportive group for Donald Trump, Donald Trump holding steadily at around eight out of 10, eight out of 10, that's a lot. You tell me there's an eight out of 10 chance it's gonna rain today, I'm like, I'm bringing my umbrella.

Eight out of 10 of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump, both times around, 2016 and 2020. And I can think a few people, not just presidents, Both times around, 2016 and 2020. And I can think of few people, not just presidents, but just few people in general who are less Christ-like than Donald Trump. I mean, okay, right? I'm not being far-fetched. Yet he has enjoyed more evangelical support

than even George W. Bush Bush who was actually an evangelical. Right? And let me just say again, I hesitated putting this in there, but listen, I'm no longer in a part of the church, but things could have fallen different, a little bit different. And I could still be in the church, right?

If the multi-world theory of the parallel universe is true, there's billions of RETs that are still in the church. Let me tell you what those billions of RETs are saying right now. Well, you're annoying them, that's for sure. Well, no. The RET that is out there in a parallel universe who is still in the evangelical church

would not have gone along with this Donald Trump bullshit. I can tell you that right now. And I lost so much respect for so many people who did. Now, for me, the most personally disturbing thing is the way that Christian, talked about this before, Christian nationalism and Trumpism have kind of combined to create something that carries the name of Jesus. Literally, if you look at the Capitol protest,

you see there's Trump 2020 flags and literally Jesus 2020 flags. I don't think he was running for president, but there's a flag that says Jesus 2020 right next to a Trump 2020 flag. Not uncommon at all to see that. But they've combined to create something that carries that name of Jesus,

but looks nothing like the Jesus that I have seen in the Bible. Journalist Carol Kuruvia did a good job of contrasting the words of Jesus with those of Donald Trump. So I'm gonna do that just quickly, just take this in. Jesus said, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you.

Donald Trump said, when people wrong you, go after those people because it is a good feeling and because other people will see you doing it. I always get even. Jesus said, for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me.

I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me. Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in or needing clothes and clothed you? When did we see you sick or in invite you in or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?

The king will reply, truly I tell you, whatever you did for the one of the least, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. Donald Trump said, I'm putting people on notice that are coming from Syria as part of this mass migration that if I win, they're going back. I could go on about other things he said

that would contrast with that. Jesus said, those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted. Trump said, sorry, losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest and you all know it. Please don't feel so stupid or insecure. It's not your fault. Yeah, I'm not laughing anymore.

That's almost funny. Yeah, but I'm not laughing anymore. Jesus said, do not store it for yourselves treasures on earth where moths and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store it for yourselves treasures in heaven where moths and vermin do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Trump said, part of the beauty of me is that I'm very rich. Okay, she actually did a lot more. That's all I'm gonna do. I could go on. Cheating on his pregnant wife with a porn star, then paying her off, bragging about grabbing women by the pussy,

bragging about being able to shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. Again, this is, none of this is new. You've heard it from so many people. I would say, I'd be tempted to say, you know what? It's a little late for this, isn't it? And that's just the shocking thing is that it's not. There's still so much, the allegiance is still there.

Right. Now. Yeah, the allegiance is still there. Now, listen, I know many evangelical Christians who recognize these quote unquote flaws in Donald Trump, but they say that he stands for their interests and he stands against something that's worse than him and therefore supporting him is justified, right? That's the position by many people.

Now, personally, I find it hard to square Jesus' words to turn the other cheek with an almost obsessive insistence that civilians be able to carry an AR-15. I find it hard to square Jesus' words about feeding and clothing the hungry with separating children from their families at the border. I find it hard to square Jesus' words to the rich to sell their possessions

with supporting tax policy that concentrates wealth in the top 1% and gives corporations the rights of individuals. I can't make those two things line up very well, but even then, there are still people who say, listen, look at what he did with the judges. He got three conservative judges on the Supreme Court. He got hundreds of federal judges appointed,

good constitutional Christian conservatives, and therefore, all in all all he's done good, even if he's a bad flawed person. Here's what I say to that. My friend William Matthews made an astute observation about this desire for Christians to have power, for their interest to be represented in the quote unquote kingdoms of the world.

In Matthew 4, you may remember this story, after Jesus had fasted for 40 days, Satan took him to a high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, all these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me. Now there's a lot to that story.

But the idea is that Satan himself was saying that like, where I exert my power is in the traditional kingdoms of the world. And he's asking Jesus, are you interested in exerting your power there? And that was the temptation that Jesus said no to. And it seems to me when I look at white evangelicals in 2021, they have fallen to the temptation

that Jesus himself resisted. Here's one way to see it. If you're a white evangelical in America in 2021, you're no longer represented by Jesus. You're represented by the MyPillow guy. I mean, that's what I would think because that's what I see. because that's what I see.

So again, so thankful that I was able to say that I'm not a part of this group heading into 2020. But I wanna address another aspect of the story. One of the common responses to our story was a sense of like fear and panic that the two of us were leading kids astray, that these YouTubers who have this big audience that has a lot of kids in it are causing these crises of faith

to happen all over the place, right? Mm-hmm. And that in turn led to a lot of people talking about how churches and parents need to do a better job to train and educate young Christians to protect them from people like me and you, right? Yeah. I have an alternative theory

about why so many young people are leaving the church because they are leaving the church like never before. I was gonna say, I'd like to take credit for it, but I'm not gonna say, what I'm saying is, I don't think it's because of me and you and here's why. And I say this, I mean it, I say this out of love and respect because I do believe that there is hope for the church.

Your kids are not leaving the church because you didn't train them enough. Your kids are leaving the church because you train them well enough to develop a sense for truth and justice. You let them read the words of Jesus and they got it. And they've recognized that the church doesn't seem to be interested in those words.

They're not leaving because they don't know the truth. They're leaving because they do. This isn't even necessarily something that they would articulate. This is something that is happening on a soul level. Because me and you didn't give any, we didn't give people new information that they never considered.

There wasn't anything revolutionary. There wasn't anything even particularly insightful about what we had to say on our podcast, honestly. Nothing that we said was never, it all been said before. But I think the thing that we did is we demonstrated that it is okay to question. It is okay to question at all. Your kids were already questioning it

because it's pretty questionable, okay? It is. And now they're seeing that leaving the church might not ruin your life. In fact, you might find a new life. You know, when Lando was nine years old, one of his favorite people on earth was his teacher from last year.

And she's a lesbian. She has a wife, they have two kids. We went to Legoland and we happened to run into them. This is before the pandemic hit. And it was, you know, I got a kick out of Lando seeing his teacher who he loved so much in a different environment. There's always that funny exchange between a student and their teacher out in the wild.

And it feels weird. But his love for her was so strong that it had the power to overcome that weirdness. And like, we got a picture together and we would see each other in line and we'd talk to each other and like, you know, it was amazing. Just that he has that type of relationship

with his teacher. If I would have instilled in him what was instilled in me, he would have not, he would have felt deep down within himself that he didn't have permission to love her. That was my experience, you know, because, and I know that that's, you know, that's, you can pick that statement apart easily because like, well, there's a difference between love. Love the sin or hate the sin.

Yeah, but I know what the experience is like and I know how I looked at people who weren't straight. But the thing is, and to your point, But the thing is, and to your point, Lando knows, he knows what it's like to love somebody. That's not something that- It's inherent. It's not something that I had to teach him. And the fact that he's free to love her

is a beautiful thing that I- And to love her fully, I think. To love her fully. Yes. Because when you love, because again, I'm not saying that Christians who, there are Christians who believe based on their commitment to the Bible

and their interpretation of the Bible that being gay is ultimately wrong, but they say that gay acts are wrong, but the person is lovable and can be redeemed, et cetera. But the thing that that mentality- It just doesn't work out that way in your heart. You're invalidating a huge part of that person's identity and existence.

And also in your teacher's case, the relationship in her family is not a valid or a legitimate family. And therefore that's not full, it's just not full love. And I didn't have to teach him that. Yeah, right. He knows what full, wholehearted, true love for somebody is. And I'll leave it at that. So if you want your kids to stay in the church,

again, this is unsolicited advice. I don't know if anybody's taking it, but this is not a, hey, I want all your kids to leave the church. That's not what I'm saying at all. If you want your kids to stay in the church, you don't need to change your kids. You need to change your church.

If your kids can't find Jesus, the Jesus that they know from the Bible, the Jesus that you've taught them about, if they can't find him within the walls of your church, you know what, they will go looking for him elsewhere. And that may not be what they say they're doing. That may not be how they articulate it. It may not be how they describe it,

but I believe that that's what's happening. And it's interesting because, you know, people made assumptions about me and you, and they're making the same assumptions about their kids. Let me explain. So a lot of people assume that we left the church because there was something out there, something outside of the church,

whether that be fame, fortune, cultural acceptance, whatever, that we ultimately wanted more than Jesus, right? Like we fell to the temptation and we went after that thing instead of Jesus. And you also think that your kids might want something out there, something outside of the church more than they want Jesus. I think it might be simpler than that.

I think maybe your kids who left the church just wanted Jesus and they saw that you wanted something else. They see that the church at large seems to want something else because in my experience, in just looking at it, and again, regardless of your conclusions about the nature of the historicity of Jesus and the specific words

that are in the Bible, but if you just take the words of Jesus, the life of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus at face value, you have to do some very athletic, very athletic mental gymnastics to find a way to reconcile the way the white evangelical church looks in America today with any of those words. I just can't put those puzzle pieces together

in a way that makes sense. Okay, I stepped into a giant pile of bull crap and we'll see how that airs out on the internet. But let's move on. Okay. In an effort to kind of finish this up, with where I'm at spiritually, right? So I've covered some of this ground,

but just by way of just kind of putting it all together. You know, when I was a Christian, I was obsessed with having it all figured out, like understanding my faith, re-deriving my faith over and over again. It was a relationship with God, but the way that I fed that relationship was with knowledge, knowing scripture, knowing more truth,

teaching, that kind of thing, especially in the traditions that we came in, came from, you know, it's a very mind based tradition, sort of the more reformed you get in the white evangelical church, the sort of mind based intellectual it gets, and the more you kind of move into more of a charismatic Pentecostal experience, it gets a little bit more

heart based and I never really had that. I went to those kinds of churches at times, but didn't have, that wasn't my personal experience. But today, I see spirituality as an openness to things that transcend my conceptual understanding, but are still deeply meaningful, right? And I think that most people, now some people don't, some people are like,

I don't need faith, I don't need religion, I don't need spirituality, full stop. I think that the majority of people do need something that they might describe as spirituality. And, you know, religion sort of represents a human effort to systematize those glimpses of connection that we have with something deeper, that leaning into the mystery.

And one of the reasons that it's so effective at it is that it happens in community, right? The religion happens in community. It's like community and culture together kind of meets faith and the places where it's more embedded in the culture and more embedded in the community, the places where it is the strongest and like last the longest, right?

And there's this really interesting thing that's happening all around the world, but it's happening in our country as well, is that more people are moving into a new religious category every single year, and that is the religiously non-affiliated. And there really isn't a community for that. And I think that my prediction is that

those chickens are gonna come home to roost. And this idea that everybody's gonna be disconnected and just religiously unaffiliated is not, I don't think it's a sustainable way to move forward and it may take a generation or two, I don't know, before things come back around and I don't have any predictions as to what that is, but I kind of feel myself in that group right now.

But as it applies to me personally, so- You're going to start a church. No, no, I'm not personally, so- You're going to start a church. No, no, I'm not. I'm very much not going to start a church. But the way that I kind of think about Christianity now, and again, this is all like, I'm just kind of opening up my mind and heart a little bit and just saying that this is some of the way

that I think about it today. But are you saying, just to point of clarification, that you think that when you say it's gonna come back around or to roost, you're talking about the church will change to a point where then people will be willing to go back in? That is one of several options. That's one of several options.

I'm just saying that I don't think that religious unaffiliation is a sustainable condition for the average person. And I'm not, again, that doesn't mean that it means a return to traditional understanding or traditional religion. Might just mean a resurgence in 4H. I'm just saying that if you look at the human makeup, right?

If you just look at the composition of a person and you had a way to break them down, you would find something within them or just something that you would interpret in the whole that is a need for a connection with something beyond themselves. Social component. Well, yeah.

A relational component. It might be that is strictly biological and it can be satisfied with human connection alone, but I just don't, for me, I think that it feels deeper and bigger than that. And so. But you're saying at this, you personally are missing some inexperience.

No, I know, well, I'm not missing it. I'll get into that, I'll get into that. So, okay, so I think a lot of people in the West, including me, we think about religion in a deeply personal way, meaning that we think about it in terms of our individual experience, our individual destiny, our individual soul.

And Christianity is very individualistic, right? And there's a lot of reasons for this. Some of it has to do with how much Greek philosophy influenced the writing of Paul, but it's been reinforced over thousands of years as the West has become even more and more individualistic. I mean, there's the printing press where everybody had their own Bible and that kind of thing.

And it kind of, the authority kind of shifted away from just a few people reading. But this personal relationship that we talk about in Christianity, it's not something that you find much in Eastern religion. It is kind of a Western phenomenon, right? There's much more of a collective sense of identity and also religious identity in the East

than there is in the West. But there's this other aspect of the way Greek thought has influenced Christianity, and that is this distinction between body and soul, right? And this distinction between God and his creation. And it tends to be this idea of separateness from God and separateness of soul and body. And then I think that that leads,

that continues this dualistic thinking leads down this road where there's a distinction between the church and the world. This is just an observation about the church. And if you don't know, if you're not in the church, you may not know that this is what most, all evangelicals believe. You know, and this is what I believed,

which is the church and the people, the Christians within the church literally have the spirit of God inside of them. And everyone who isn't a believer is ultimately left to their own devices. That's another thing that makes it hard to validate someone else's experience. When I believed that I literally had,

so there's three parts of God, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And when you make that decision to become a Christian, the Holy Spirit indwells you. You literally have the spirit of the almighty God within you leading you, guiding you. And when you're not a Christian, you don't have that. And so you're just a human left to a human's devices

and human's way of thinking. It's one of the reasons that Christians tend not to trust people who aren't Christians. It's one of the reasons that Christians tend not to trust people who aren't Christians. It's one of the reasons that Christians tend not to trust authorities like the scientists and what's the government up to now and you know. Or a plumber without an ichthus fish on the back of his truck.

Yeah. I mean, well, it is a secret code that I think does go that deep. Well, how can it not? Holy Spirit's in you, Holy Spirit's in me, okay. If I think that I've got the Spirit of God in me and I think that you don't, that we're kind of in a different place.

Oh yeah. Right? That's consequential. I think that's consequential for humanity and I think it's one of the reasons that And I think it's one of the reasons that, I think it's one of the reasons that you can interpret, and I do interpret a lot of the actions of Christians in 2020 as supremely selfish, right?

You know, again, regardless of what you think about a mask, again, the whole principle of the mask is that it's not foolproof, but that it to some degree, depending on the nature of the mask, which is important, it slows the spread of COVID. But what does it do? It mostly prevents the spread from the person wearing it, right?

So it is a supremely selfless thing to wear it. And it is a pretty selfish thing not to wear it, right? When it comes to the vaccine, again, the whole idea of vaccination When it comes to the vaccine, again, the whole idea of vaccination is that the collective gets vaccinated to a certain rate in order, individuals get vaccinated at a certain rate to protect the collective.

And for every person who says, "'Well, I'm gonna see what happens. "'I'm gonna see what happens with other people.' "'I'm not doing that.'" Again, whether you think that vaccines are safe or not, like if you think that they're not safe, you're still putting your own safety and security above the collective because you know that without it,

I'm just saying that it's a selfish act. And I'll even say, I mean, we're talking about having a spirit and then looking at those that don't and what that does deep down, I've never thought about this, but I do think it does have an impact. It alters the equation in how you love somebody. I mean, it's something that you have to navigate.

You know, it just, you know, if you really think about it, how it impacts the nature of loving somebody. And you might say, well, yeah, I want them to be indwelt with this Holy Spirit as well. And I'm motivated by that, but there's, it's dicey, right? There's another side to that psychologically. I'm just raising the question. We, you know, we don't have to, we shouldn't get into it, but I'm just raising the question, we shouldn't get into it,

but I'm just observing that it's a complicating factor to someone who believes they've been indwelt with a spirit to love somebody who's not, like wholeheartedly. And I think that the thing that I'm seeing is that it's not just difficult to fully love them, it's more difficult to trust them. I think that that's what we're seeing in our country is there is an inability to trust people

who are outside of the church. That's why it's been fascinating to me that when you talk to an evangelical Christian in light of 2020, they think that the biggest problem is that they are being persecuted. They think that the biggest thing is that there is this socialist Marxist movement

that is out to get them to eradicate Christianity from the earth to literally like, if you were to ask the average evangelical Christian, like what are the chances that being a Christian will be illegal in 25 years? I think you would get some, I think they say pretty high. I remember thinking like that. I thought that it was all headed towards this place

where Christianity was gonna become more and more illegal. And I think that's basically- There are biblical interpretations that take you to that place. Right, and everybody who's living always thinks that they're in the end times, of course. But really what I'm getting at is this dualistic, individualistic approach to faith

is something that I've had my fill of. I've did a lot of that, right? And so naturally, as I kind of move, continue to try to lean into the mystery and be a spiritual person and move towards spiritual things, I'm naturally a lot more attracted to more inclusive ways of thinking that focus on interconnectedness of humans with each other

and with the earth, you know, with nature in general. So that's what I tend to explore right now. And I know that sounds sort of ambiguous, nebulous, whatever, ultimately what I'm saying is that faith systems that are built on an us versus them, or it's like, I have something and you need it versus we've all got something and we've all got a connection to not only each other,

but to something beyond us. I feel like not only I'm personally more inspired and attracted to that right now, but I also think it's better for the world and where we're at as a species. Now, when I told my story, I used the infamous analogy of saying that Christianity was the ship in the ocean

and that I jumped off of the ship into a sea of uncertainty and I dragged my wife and my children with me. I talked a little bit about this in the Christmas episode about how I regretted that analogy for a number of reasons. Chiefly is what it made it seem like I was saying about my wife. I was making it seem like my wife and my kids, but especially my wife had no agency that,

well, whatever the guy decides, the girl has to go along with it. It's like, and I regret even implying that because my wife, Jessie, has, just go to her Twitter account if you're interested in seeing her exercise her agency. Lost fam-jilus, lost fam-jilus, L-O-S-F-A-M-jilus. I hope she adds that to her Twitter bio,

exercising my agency. Meaning that Jessie has her own story that I think she'll tell at some point. And Jessie is, she is, to characterize what she went through is some sort of me leading our family down a road to question Christianity and her coming along for the ride is a very large misrepresentation of what actually happened.

I may have been the first person to ask some of the tougher questions, but she has had her own distinct journey in many ways, much deeper and more significant than my own. And she's challenged me in a lot of ways and also been really instrumental in my own personal spiritual growth. So it isn't about me leading my family into despair.

But I also regret the analogy a little bit because I didn't fully explain what, you know, having reflected on it, the point that I was trying to make was also that the ship on the ocean of uncertainty that seemed to have a purpose and seemed to be like, there's a bunch of people on that ship. I believe that was an illusion of certainty and security.

I don't believe that the ship existed. It was just a collective of people who decided to gather together. And I don't believe that it actually represented the foundation that I thought that it did. That's why I jumped. But I was recently listening, one of my favorite philosophers is Alan Watts.

And he's like a 60s based writer, professor. I don't even know really what his background was. But he's just a trippy dude who says a lot of things that sort of expand your mind and make you think about things differently. And I enjoy listening to him and just, again, just like having my mind kind of like challenged and expanded because of the way that he sees the world.

And I wouldn't say that it's necessarily a spiritual practice to listen to Alan Watts. It is somewhat, but for me, it's kind of just fun. It's certainly a philosophical practice. Yeah, right. And it is an expansive way to think, and he does talk a lot about things that I relate to as I consider where I come from

and where I might be going, spiritually speaking. He'll filter the Western point of view through Taoism, Buddhism, he'll kind of give you a primer on those things. So he was talking specifically about this and he used the same analogy of jumping off of a ship. So, or he may have said a rock, but what he was saying is that if you read the Bible,

the analogies used for Jesus and just the faith in Christianity, it's a rock, it's a foundation. It's a steady, stable thing that you need to be on. You need to be rooted. You need to be planted in a sea of uncertainty so that you can kind of withstand all the things that life would bring at you. And he was saying, in contrast to that, you know,

Buddhism kind of represents jumping off of that foundation into a sea of nothingness. And he says, and the only way to survive in the sea of nothingness is to swim. And the only way to swim is to relax. You know, if you're drowning in the ocean, a lot of people say that if you can't swim, don't just go, you'll sink if you just start trying

to tread water. Most humans float. If you just relax and float, your head will stay above water. And I was like, man, this is a great way to sort of reinterpret and reapply my analogy because I don't feel like I'm in a sea of uncertainty. I feel like I'm free, right? I would mostly describe where I'm at right now

as there is a sense of lightness and a freedom. Ironically, that is the way many Christians, especially people who have, you know, we didn't have the privilege of having like a hardcore testimony. Like some people, you know, every once in a while when people did testimony time, you got like the guy who was like,

I was in the church of Satan and I was a biker and I killed a boy. And then I found Jesus and now there's a sense that a burden has been lifted off of me. And when you grow up in the church, you don't get that. You don't have that, I was crazy and did all this stuff and now I've got Jesus. But the way a lot of people describe the moment

of coming to faith is a sense that a burden has been lifted off of them and there is a lightness and they feel free. I'm not arguing with that, especially if you've got a background where you were all about yourself and then you gave yourself to something else. But I just find it to be ironic that for me, the leaving and also being vocal about my leaving And I find it to be ironic that for me,

the leaving and also being vocal about my leaving has been the sense of freedom, the sense of lightness, the sense of not being burdened, the sense of being open, and the sense of not feeling threatened. I think one of the things that was so true of my experience as a Christian was that everything was a threat. Everything was a threat. You think this?

Well, that might be scary. You might be out to get me. You might be bad for me. I know where that leads. Yeah. Kind of a thing. And what I have found is that, you know what? When I jumped out of the ship of Christianity into the sea of nothingness,

which still may be a bad analogy, it's not like my moral compass was on the ship. I think a lot of people live with the understanding that, well, no, the compass is on the ship. If you leave the ship, you don't have the compass anymore. It's like, no, you still, you got it. It's actually, unless you're just biologically predisposed to be a horrible person,

most people have a pretty intact moral compass and that sense of truth and justice that your kids naturally have, that your kid, that Lando naturally has. And it's been interesting to navigate the world in a way that it doesn't mean that my guard is completely down. I still, in fact, one of the things that I've gotten better at recognizing,

especially through therapy, is malignant narcissism. As someone who is at least somewhat narcissistic myself, you know it when you see it. But malignant narcissism and the idea that somebody is ultimately about themselves above all things is something that any organization, any system is a breeding ground for narcissists to rise to the top. And the church is no exception.

The story of the mega church pastor who falls from grace, which is just, oh, you know, every month or every year, there's gonna be another big story like that. It's a case of malignant narcissism being rewarded in the church. And I think that I've actually gotten better at recognizing people who are out for themselves and people who actually are a threat to me,

my family and my wellbeing. And then to realize that a lot of the people that I thought were threats and a lot of the ideas that I thought were threatening are not. And that is, I don't know, man, I'm just having a lot more fun as a human than I did before.

And that doesn't mean that I'm doing a bunch of wild things that would blow your mind if I told you and compromise who I am and end my marriage. No, not, far from it. And, but I will say that, so the idea that Christianity is kind of about, you know, it's foundational, it's a rock, you kind of got it figured out and you go from there,

moving away from that into a more open place that doesn't have a system or a structure, I don't know, this may be a season because I also don't think necessarily that a systemless way of going about things spiritually is sustainable, which kind of gets back to what I just said, which is this whole religiously unaffiliated. So I don't know what this means for me personally. Right now, it means that I'm reading

a lot of different things, listening to a lot of different things and having what I would describe as significant spiritual experiences. And again, a lot of these things are not things I wanna talk about explicitly. They're kind of ineffable. And I feel like you take a little bit of the magic away

from them when you start trying to explain them and put them into human words. a little bit of the magic away from them when you start trying to explain them and put them into human words. But I do think that spirituality is best experienced in community. And I think the idea that I'm just some guy who like listens to something on my headphones by myself,

and that's my spiritual experience is not the end all be all. I think one of the things that the church does very, very well is community. And I think that we need community, we need connection. And I think that any true religion, any true faith, any true spirituality is going to be about benevolent connection between people. It's not going to be about hierarchy.

It's not going to be about one narcissistic dude making all the rules and charge, which a lot of happens in systems a lot of times. But true benevolence and grace with from one person to another. And like my wife and I experienced that, as we have spiritual experiences together. But again, I think that ultimately,

and I don't know when this will happen, but I think that it's gotta happen in the context of community. But as soon as you apply labels and systems to it, humans get involved and end up doing the things that humans do, which is they establish the hierarchy. They reinforce the patriarchy. The narcissist rise to the top.

So there's some interesting conversations going on and have been going on for years about what does this mean for the church? Like if the church, you know, really wakes up from the nightmare. And again, there's lots of people who would say, listen, guys, you're just still talking about the evangelical church or Protestants,

or, you know, there's actually a lot of people who call themselves Christians who are already where you're just still talking about the evangelical church or Protestants or, you know, there's actually a lot of people who call themselves Christians who are already where you're talking about and come be a part of that community. I'm not saying that I won't, I'm not saying that that's not gonna happen. So far, I haven't gotten to a place

where I feel like I could comfortably reenter that kind of environment that is saturated in Christian language, ideas, and imagery, and not just go back to the individualistic, dualistic way of thinking about things. So maybe there's a community out there where you can kind of experience the openness and the expansiveness, and it's about connection with each other and something beyond your collective self.

Because I'm not interested in saying, I'm gonna go be a Buddhist. I'm gonna go and be a part of a tradition that I have no knowledge of and have done. And you know what I'm saying? Like, I don't think the answer is to go find another system or subscribe to some new faith and become like a inductee into some other,

you know what I'm saying? Like that doesn't feel right right now. So I don't know. A lot of it is up in the air, but I don't feel an emptiness right now. And I don't feel like this great desire to immediately define what it is that I'm experiencing to try to invite other people into it.

I'm not, I'm trying not to be evangelistic about it. I tend to be evangelistic in general, meaning that I try to share and persuade and I'm trying not to do that with what I'm experiencing. And probably the fact that I don't, you can't even really put your finger on what I'm saying about it. It was probably helpful to that end.

But yeah, that's kind of where I'm at right now is there's just this anticipation that we're all moving in a direction and I wanna be where the magic's at. Oh, okay. That's a good place to end with magic. You're gonna become a magician. Yeah, right.

Well, you know what? Thanks for coming in, Rhett. We will talk to you again a year from now. I mean, how do you feel at this point? I don't know, man. Okay. I don't know. I appreciate, you know, I appreciate you pulling all your thoughts together

and I think you put a lot of care into it and I appreciate the honesty in the way that you're processing it and yeah, I'm here if you wanna talk some more. But I mean, to that end, I mean, next week, I need you to hold my beer, right? Yep. You know, I've been putting a lot of thought into it

and I think that, you know, as you've talked about your experience, I'm gonna kind of pick up from that spot, you know, like the last section and just kind of run with it with my own experience and just process. It's been a difficult year in a number of ways. So dealing with suffering loss, there's been a lot of tests,

tests of faith, I might call them. I definitely would have called them that in the past. Yeah. So I've got some experiences I wanna share and process in terms of my spiritual journey. And if you're willing to join me, that'll be next week. So I'll give it a go. And like I said, we're not always gonna devote

an entire episode to talking about these things, but we'll keep talking about these things in general as well. And your words on the internet about this conversation and entering into this conversation are encouraging. And again, it's not, it doesn't have to be encouraging. It could be a critique. It could be a question. Hashtag Ear Biscuits.

Just get involved in the conversation. And incorporate that so that it'll be easy for us to find. In my rec, I'll end with a rec. I've kind of already made it. And I think that that's gonna be Alan Watts. There's a number of ways that you can find his work. But one of the ways is if you just go, Alan Watts is an artist on Spotify.

And someone, I know that his son is involved in like maintaining his foundation, but- Yeah, that's alanwatts.org and.com, I think. Someone has taken some of his, he just did a bunch of lectures that were recorded. Somebody has taken some of his lectures and put them with music on Spotify. And again, if you're just looking for a mind opening,

expanding experience, it's just a trip to listen to this dude and the way he chooses to think about things and chooses to communicate about them. And I highly recommend it for anybody who just is up for that kind of experience. All right, you did it. Go take a shower or something, I don't know.

Do I stink? No, I'm just trying to just give you just something to look forward to. Okay, all right, well, lunch. Hashtag Ear Biscuit, y'all. We'll speak at you next week, get ready.