Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - What is a Spiritual Atheist? | Ear Biscuits Ep. 466

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

*Trigger warning – talks of depression and suicide.* In this episode, Rhett is solo while Link is on Spring Break – and is joined by Brittney Hartley, an atheist spiritual director and creator/author of No Nonsense Spirituality. They dive a bit deeper into deconstruction, what it’s like from not only a woman’s perspective, but a former Mormon, and how to reframe the world “spiritual” when you live a secular life. Get a $75 job credit at https://indeed.com/ears 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

This, this, this, this is mythical. With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Now streaming on Paramount+. Name's Conrad Harrigan, family man. And if you cross my family, well, you'd better pray. From the underworld of Guy Ritchie,

We shake the right hands, break the wrong ones. comes the next great crime series. And when someone forgets their place, I've got a man for that. For himself. starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. We've got everyone where we want them. Mobland, new series now streaming on Paramount+. Welcome to Ear Biscuits, the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a

long time. I'm Rhett, and I'm Rhett. This week at the roundtable of dim lighting, I'm not talking to Link because he's not here. He's gone, he is on spring break. Well, Lando is on spring break, which means that Link and Christy are on spring break. I'll be doing that in a couple of weeks. But that means that I'm taking this opportunity

to talk to someone that I have gotten to know and really wanted to bring on the podcast because her work has been really transformational for me, and that is Brittany Hartley. I call her Britt because she's my friend. And she is known all over the internet, if you want to find her, as no-nonsense spirituality. She is helping people process what spiritual deconstruction looks like and especially what spirituality looks like after you have a deconstruction. So very useful stuff for somebody like me who is interested in spirituality and spiritual practices but has left behind any sort of religious framework. And she's the first person that I have found

to talk really precisely and specifically about this in a way that resonates. Her book is No Nonsense Spirituality, and all her channels are No Nonsense Spirituality. We're gonna talk to her, get an idea of where she comes from, how she got into this work, and also unpack some of the things that I read about in her book.

If you want to know, I mean, first of all, she has talked about so many things on her YouTube channel, especially she'll go into more in-depth analysis on so many of these issues that you might be interested in if you're the kind of person that clicked on this particular episode and is interested in these topics. So definitely go over there and subscribe, but go ahead and order her book because I

think that while we get into a lot of this in pretty meaningful ways, if you want to get the background and you want to really go deeper, her book does that in a great way without going too deep where it becomes this thing that you can't get through. It's not too heavy. It's just heavy enough to be a little bit meaty, but also super relatable. So, please enjoy my conversation with Britt Hartley. [♪ theme music playing. Brit, welcome to Ear Biscuits.] So happy to be here. Yeah, I'm so glad to have you. We don't technically have you here, we have you in your office.

That's true. In my she shed. This is my she shed. In Boise? Is that... In Boise, yeah. Yeah, so you say the S, not the Z, right? That seems to be a point of pride.

Correct. It's a very big point of pride. Okay, well I picked up on that. Enough people have said Boise, and I'm like, okay, well I'm saying that. Yeah, thanks for being here, having this conversation. I've been talking you up everywhere I possibly can. I know, and no one is more surprised about that than me. I just work in my little shed over here while my kids are at school and had no idea that I had gotten on your radar, but just thank you for all the support that you've given me, especially over the last month.

And yeah, just really honored to even show up on your radar at all. I like to use the analogy of the deep end of the pool. When I talk about how far people go into these subjects that we're gonna talk about today, or really any subject, right? And I think that you've got the vast majority of the population that, even if they think they might be in the deep end, kind of swim in the shallow end, right? People just don't go very deep on a lot of things. And then there are a select few who actually do the deep diving. Now I'm not one of those people.

What I have figured out about myself. You've said that you're a truth seeker. You have truth seeking as a high core value. I'm a truth seeker, but here's what I figured out. I figured out this about myself, is that I'm not in the shallow end, I'm not in the deep end. You know the part of the pool that slowly slopes down to the deep end where you can

still kind of put your feet on the ground, and I can do that because I'm 6'7", I can get pretty deep. But I stay in that middle part of the pool and I ask questions to the people in the deep end. And then I relay them to the people in the shallow end. I feel like that's, over the years I figured out that's my role, right? Yeah. Yeah. Because I actually, my... Is there something about that deeper end of the pool that subconsciously scares you? is my lack of ability to dedicate the time and the focus. So I think it's a little bit of time

just because of all the things that I do, but also I have a focus issue. I think that I see the pattern, even with my deconstruction. I went pretty deep. I went deeper than any of the people around me that I was asking questions to about these deep questions about the core truths of Christianity,

but I kind of saw a pattern developing, right? I started saying everything that I look into as it relates to these issues, I'm finding that this is better explained as a product of people than a product of God. And then you just kind of... Yeah, that was my same thought in theology school. Right. And so, but mostly I was going to people who were reading books, watching videos, and again, we talked about this the other day when we were talking about doing this.

We talked about this the other day when we were talking about doing this. I didn't have a lot of the videos that exist now when I was deconstructing almost 15 years ago. It was mostly books. Are you jealous of that? Oh, for sure. I get jealous of that. So my deconstruction was 15 years ago now. And I was like, well, because I come from Mormonism, I was like reading microfilm about

Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith's polygamy by myself. And no one had even like heard that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. And now like it's so easy, there's TikTok and there's podcasts and people can learn everything. That took me years to learn. They can do it in like two days. And sometimes I am jealous of that. I had to work really hard. Yeah, you did. Well, and all this to say, that's what I appreciate so much about your work is that you have done the deep dive,

but you've also found a way to translate that into really relatable, easily understood videos and a book, your book, No Nonsense Spirituality, which is the name of your brain, of course, that's been huge for me. I've been encouraging people to read it. And so I know how much work, I have an appreciation for how much work it would require to be as familiar with all of this as you have and the way that you processed it personally and develop these really precise communications about it. So first of all, thank you for your service because it's important. It's really, really important

to have people who are willing to go that deep. Now I can appreciate it that I'm really grateful for really my whole story. I really wouldn't change my story. But it's, when I was in it, it didn't feel like, oh, this is part of my story that's going to end up into some meaningful way that I can interact with humanity. And, you know, I have a lot of coaching clients who are in nihilism or religious deconstruction, I'm able to help them. And so, it's led to a very meaningful life. But while I was in it, it felt like I was dying. It felt like sometimes I wanted to die. It felt like I was

isolated. It felt like no one understood. I really, I tell people, people who go like deconstruct into nihilism, I tell them that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, but I'm glad... Selfishly, I'm glad for the company. Like, I'm glad that I can help, but when I was in it, I had no sense that it would be able to be a service in the world. Hopefully, I'm able to do that, because when I was in it, it just felt like dying. Mm-hmm. Well, thanks for going through that. Yeah, thanks for dying. For all of us. Tell us a little bit about your background, where you come from and how you got here. Yeah, so I was raised Mormon and had a pretty typical Mormon upbringing. By the time

was in my teenage years, I was asking questions of my religion and getting answers like, just believe or it'll work out in the next life and, you know, just some kind of, those kind of bullshit answers. And then I was really excited because in Mormonism there was this thing called for the strength of youth pamphlet and it was essentially the prophet getting direct revelation from God for teenagers and I was like, this is fantastic, the creator of the universe is going to talk directly to me as a teenager. And it was basically like, don't drink coffee, don't get a tattoo. And even my 13-year-old brain was like, why would the creator of the universe care so much about the word that I say when I stub my toe? It just didn't

make sense to me. Now, I wish I had the language that I do now and I could have gone to my parents and said, hey, I'm experiencing some cognitive dissonance. But it just came out in rebellion. It just came out in punk rock rebellion. And... Coffee drinking specifically? Yeah, I was drinking that coffee. Actually, to this day, I still don't drink coffee. I just never developed a taste for it. Somehow I missed that Just missed that window. What about that? I do I do have one I do have one tattoo, but it wouldn't have been when I was a teenager at Specifically at the time it was like sexual relationship with my boyfriend

Which then got me kicked out of the house when I was 15 years old. So that's you know a crisis of sorts and I really I had this idea that it really matters what is true. My life is in shambles here. I've lost everything. I've lost my family. I'm struggling with my beliefs. I really just want to know what is so I can pattern my life accordingly, so that shit like this doesn't happen to me was was my thought at 15. So, by the time I was 15 years old, I was what you would call a nuanced Mormon. So, you know, a lot looser on the doctrines and doing some apologetics and really pulling out the beautiful parts of the religion. So, I was doing that by the time I was 15, 16, and then continued on, eventually deconstructed

Mormonism. And so, I just figured, oh, I just have the wrong religion. And so, I went into theology school, and because I'm taking these questions very seriously. Like, if there is a God in correct religion, it seems to me like that would be the most important thing to know. So, I go into theology school, and I had the same thought that you had, which is the more that I study societies and how they create their gods and how their god changes over time, and the more I study individuals and their individual beliefs in God, the more that this really looks like a human project of humans creating gods for their psychological and social needs, more than us actually understanding the nature of God. So that was like a little

nugget of a thought, a little doubt that appeared in theology school. And eventually, as I kept learning, I got really good. Like even now, if you give me a society and tell me how it works, I'll tell you the God that they create and I will be right. And I can do the same thing with people too. If you have PTSD, if you're high in disgust, if you're high in anxiety, if you're, whatever it is that you need, psychologically, you can guess what kind of God that you'll create or what your spirituality is like. And eventually that evidence just became overwhelming. It's so ironic, because I think the thing that people like you and me and anyone who is deconstructed get accused of quite often is that we've created our own God or somewhere along the ways we

didn't like what we saw in God so we started to create the God in our image. But then when you start seeing that that is what we've all always done. Yeah, that's what we're all doing. It's super ironic that, and I remember when I had my first ever friend to begin deconstructing, that was what I told him. I was like, you're creating God in your own image. You're getting this completely backwards. Go ahead, it's just... I mean, we can easily see that, Justin, how Republican Jesus and Democrat Jesus are two

different people. And that's because with your political values, if you value compassion, you're high in compassion, you're really gonna pull out compassionate social justice Jesus. And if you are higher in authority, which means your nervous system calms down when you have strict rules and guidelines, particularly if you had authoritarian parenting, then that kind of God, a Jesus that has really strong rules and lines and these people go to hell, that actually feels safer for you. And so, I just began to uncouple all of that. And for me, a lot of people accuse me on social media of, I went to theology school to try to prove God not true, or I wanted to be an atheist,

or I wanted to sin, or any of these things. I wanted God to be there more than anything. I wanted God to be there. I wanted there to be ultimate truth. I wanted there to be ultimate justice. I wanted there to be a meaning and purpose for all the suffering in this life. I wanted God to be there, but I could never make sense of it. And eventually I'm in this place now where it's time to write my dissertation.

I've completely lost my faith in God at this point as I'm trying to figure out what to write my dissertation on. And then I get stuck because for me, what died with God was a lot of things. My community died, my marriage was dying, my sense of identity had died, and then my deconstruction kept going. I started deconstructing free will and things like that. And that's when I just really went into the deepest end of the pool, completely alone and really hit nihilism where I had no reason to justify being alive. And the most scary thought that I had during this time, because I really

want to be open and honest about what that felt like for me, was that if we're just, if there is no free will, and we're just robots of evolution, and nature is inherently violent, which means for me to live, I have to kill conscious life in order to live, even as a vegan, then there's no way to justify life on earth as it is now. And the most moral thing for me to do would be for me to kill myself. And I was there for about two years, just very depressed, extreme depression, lots of suicidality, intrusive thoughts. And I would wake up every day and I would pretend to be human because my kids wouldn't understand

any of this. And I would wake up and I would pretend to be human like it was a video game because the other characters in the video game cared about my character. So it was a very deep, dark place. And eventually I was able to kind of come out the other side as I separated the dogma of religion from the tools of religion. And when I was able to do that separation, which you've read about, you've read about, read in my book, I was able to rebuild kind of a kind of secular spirituality, which is how do I get the tools of religion, the meaning, the purpose, the awe, the community, the love, the rituals, all the good things that are psychologically good for us? How do I get all of that without having to jump through hoops of faith?

Because as an ex-Mormon, ex-Mormons are much more likely to be atheist because we understand how scripture gets written, we get to kind of peek behind the curtain, we understand how prophets become prophets and myths become manuals. And so ex-Mormons are much more likely to be atheists because there's just less mystery. You can actually see how a church becomes nothing to something. And so I had to- And do you think that there's a part of that? Go ahead.

Do you think that there's also an element of, as a Christian, you can kind of move to a progressive Christian body. But in Mormonism, it's a little bit more like this is, most of the church believes this one thing, so there's not as many places to go. So yeah, because Mormonism is a younger religion, our spectrum of what's acceptable is smaller. Like for Judaism, which is even older than Christianity, you can be an atheist Jew in New York City, you can be an atheist rabbi, that's not even really a problem. But because we're such a young religion, we just don't have that kind of room. So yeah, that is a part of also why we tend to be

more atheist. So I had to figure out how do I get all the tools of religion and a rich, meaningful life that is worth living without having to jump through any faith hoops or have to believe things that are unbelievable. And so, that project really saved my life and I find myself now thriving on the other side of nihilism, even though I still believe that I'm going to die. I still believe that maybe the universe doesn't care that we're here, but I've been able to kind of gather these tools, wipe off all of the dogma and faith requirements, and really rebuild my life from the bottom up rather than the top down. And it resonates so much. It resonated with me as I was reading it, because I think that...

And I found your work originally through your TikTok, so everything is no nonsense spirituality if you want to find Britt online. And I think that just because through your TikTok. So everything is no nonsense spirituality if you wanna find Britt online. And I think that just because I tend to dabble in the deconstruction space, you started popping up. And every time you talked about something, I was like, I just love the way she articulates this. At the beginning of the book, as you are talking about essentially what you just outlined of this being able to have a meaningful

spiritual life without believing in some grand narrative or unverifiable truth claims. It unlocked something for me because I think that I had this sense that in order to continue to have a meaningful spiritual life, I have to at least let a little bullshit in. You have to have some meaningful spiritual life, I have to at least let a little bullshit in. You have to believe some stuff that you can't verify in order to have the meaningful spiritual life. I think where I'm at right now is I recognize that that's not true. I still have a little bit of this reservoir of I'm willing to believe in some bullshit just to kind of keep my options open or as, you know, William James talks about to not close

my accounts with reality. But that's really just sort of a fun philosophical exercise that has very little impact on my spiritual practice. But having those things decoupled and seeing someone who's actually, you know, you've done a lot, not just in diving into this from the knowledge standpoint, but you've had a lot of spiritual experiences too. So for someone who might be like, okay, atheist spirituality, that just sounds like the craziest thing I've ever seen. You guys are so desperate. You're so desperate to just reject God in every way that you can and still get all the good stuff that religion...

Let's tease that out a little bit, because I can see people getting defensive about that. Yeah, some of this is just that the language is difficult. We don't have secular words for a lot of these things. And so, my rule when I use the God rule, my rule for myself is, if someone is using the word God to explain an experience that they're having, a human experience, I can meet that because they're just using a mouth sound to describe a human experience. When someone walks into an old cathedral and says, I feel God here, I as an atheist have no problem saying I feel God here too, because what they're feeling, I'm still feeling too, that there's something about this architecture and the stained glass, it brings me to awe,

I have a reverence for it. Einstein sometimes talked in this way that he would use religious language to talk about his awe for the nature of reality. But when someone says God is this, or God says this, or this is God's special book, or we're God's special people, those are truth claims. That's not an experience thing. Those are truth claims about the nature of reality. And for that game, I need to have my skepticism and my rationality on board, because we are historically bad at this game. Like, we have created millions of gods. Even if you believe that you have the right God and everybody else is wrong, that still means that historically we are bad at this game. And so, skepticism is going to be our best tool.

So, for me, what atheistic spirituality is, is spirituality at its core, because some philosophies like Buddhism don't really have a lot of supernatural aspects to it, spirituality at its core is a connection to self and a connection outside of self. And so this is why in spirituality there's usually like eyes we see a lot in spirituality and also spirals, because you're always digging deeper inside and connecting deeper outside of you. For some people that includes a higher power or the supernatural, for me as an atheist, it doesn't necessarily, that I can really connect to the outside world without a sense of the supernatural. For me, I connect to the story of humanity and to nature and to people and to ideas and to conversations. So I'm very connected in my life in a way that I

can say that I live a very connected life. I'm always digging deeper, exploring more of my inner world and connecting deeper outside of me. And it just doesn't include a supernatural because of, you know, where I landed with my beliefs on that. So atheistic spirituality to me, or even just secular spirituality in general, has been the spiritual path that has most paid off for me because I get the most benefits with the least amount of dogma and downsides. Mm-hmm. And there's this element of the way that you're able to see people who do have a spirituality that is rooted

in religion. I think this can be confusing for people a lot of times, you know, if I have Christian friends or family members who really want to communicate the depth of experience that they have had. Somebody who might want to tell me their testimony, like, but you don't understand my life changed. And when I say, I don't deny that your life changed, I don't deny that that was incredibly meaningful, I don't deny that that change was real,

I'm just saying I have a different opinion about the foundational truth there. I think that that can all be really meaningful and there's nothing supernatural that's actually happening. I think that's really well understood and explained using human psychology alone. Now that can be really condescending. I don't say it in exactly that way, but I think when we say, yes, I know that you've had this meaningful

experience, sometimes that doesn't compute. I've noticed that they're expecting me to be like, everything within your system of religion or faith is bad, and, or that it doesn't work, but as you've said many times, it does work because we created it to work. You know, we created these systems because we needed them. And so I think this, I want to talk about some of, you know, how you've explored those spiritual experiences, but I also want to get into

the idea that you put forth in the book, which is the myth of it all really helps most people. Having the shared myth, a lot of times creates the ability for these practices and rituals and practices to really take hold in someone's life. How do you wrestle with the fact that you're unable to believe in a myth, but you still, you're kind of at the buffet of... Mm-hmm, still playing in them. Right. And so, which I completely relate to, and find myself in a very similar place, my question is always, how sustainable is it, right? Like, where are we headed?

We kind of live in this point in time in which the religion still exists, but we have all this access to information that then makes it challenging for certain people to continue believing these things, but you want to have these practices in your life, and you want to have these meaningful experiences. How do you wrestle with that, not having the myth? Yeah, it's a very complicated question. So for me personally, my approach is, most people when they have an experience, they have an experience and then they say, therefore, X is true. So a Mormon will have an experience with the Book of Mormon that I fully believe

that they had. I'm not discounting anyone's spiritual experience, or alien story, or communion with God, or near-death experience. I take people at their word, and I've had some of these experiences too. People think that because I'm an atheist that I've never had spiritual experiences. I've had a lot. But what humans tend to do is say, I've had this experience with the Book of Mormon, therefore, the Book of Mormon is true. Therefore, the book is a historical document. Therefore, there are aliens. Therefore, there are 16 spiritual dimensions. Therefore, whatever the therefore game is. And so, what I want to do is, I want to value the experience, which is what mysticism does, and there's a mystic branch to every religion, I want to value the experience without

getting caught up in the dogmatic games of the therefore truth claims that we are just bad at, we just don't know enough to be able to say that. And then if you think that your experience is true, you kind of have to do some cognitive games in order to make everybody else's spiritual experience not true, in order that your truth is true. And that just never made rational sense to me. Now, the problem that we're running into that you're pointing to is that it is easier, so religion is this vessel for all of these things that humans need, and if you just believe in the myth, you get the vessel of tools.

And so, it tends to be the easiest way that we go about this. And so, the problem that we're running up as far as secular spirituality is maybe it never grows beyond the individual level because the myths aren't sticky enough in order to create something like an atheist church, where you get all the benefits of religion with none of the downsides. I've watched now, I did a project on this when I was in my doctorate program, where I tracked a lot of these churches who are trying to do that. Within five years, they fail. Because without that myth, you just don't get the pouring in of resources and money that can sustain something like an institution. So, it may be the reality for what we are as humans, that maybe there is always something like religions and power structures and political religions just because it's just too addictive to our brains.

But even if that were true, I would still keep doing what I'm doing because anytime any individual is able to create an authentic spiritual path where they don't have to shut down their rationality, they don't have to force themselves to believe things that they don't believe. Even if it was just that one person, I would still do what I do because I find it meaningful. So, this is kind of where we're at where people are leaving organized religion. We sometimes replace them with other religions or with political religions, because it's very difficult in the secular world to create something like Secular Humanist Church. It would be great if that existed. Even the Secular Humanist organizations that do exist, they don't raise children. We don't sing together. We don't have

a liturgical calendar where we value, you know, Einstein's and whoever, you know, Christopher Hitchens or anything like that. And so, it's becoming this difficult thing where either you have to work with religion and deconstruct the religion to get to a healthy spirituality, or you have to kind of build up from the ground up. And that's going to probably take more work, but in my experience, the people who undertake that journey come out with a much more authentic and thriving form of spirituality because it really fits them and their core values and all of the parts of them. I've been on both sides. I've turned off my rationality in order to value

experience as a Mormon and as a Christian, but I've also been on the other side. I've been a cold stone atheist nihilist where I value my rationality but kind of turn off experience. But when I can do both in secular spirituality, even though sometimes it's harder because I don't get to just walk into a building and get these tools instantly, it's been a journey worth taking. Pete Is this why you say that this is not for everyone. We talked about that. Yeah. There's this, and I've become, but I think, I was never super evangelistic about this

new way of thinking, but simply being vulnerable about it on a large platform is being evangelistic about it. Like I would be stupid to deny that. But my desire for people to think like me has really lessened. And I think you're getting at some of this because it's not really for the faint of heart. If you really value what's true, but you also value these experiences, it's going to be harder. Yeah. Right? So how do you...

It's gonna be harder. I think usually people, you really can't control it. There are certain personalities that are gonna respond to this information in one way, and others that are gonna respond in another way, but how does this impact the way that you talk about it? Like you, it's something that I've kind of changed over time and I've softened over time. So I did kind of go through a brief, more militant atheist phase. And then I had someone who was kind of deconstructing too fast and not... A friend of mine who was deconstructing really quickly and he had a suicide attempt. And it kind of shocked me out of my militant atheism, to be honest. And then I got more into

kind of the research that sometimes atheism is a privilege, and we need to bring that into the conversation. There are some places in the world where the social cost of being an atheist actually will kill, like, it will not produce human thriving. Like, in no way will it produce human thriving, like, the cost is too great. And Neil Brennan has a great, you know, comedy clip about this where he says that atheism is the peak of white privilege because, you know, you go to a white person who has a lot of tools and resources and community and say, you know, oh, can I interest you in an afterlife? And, you know, he goes, oh, how much better can it be, you know, oh, can I interest you in an afterlife? And, you know,

he goes, oh, how much better can it be? You know, because they're at the peak of white privilege. Of course, I butchered that comedic timing wise, but he's playing comedy, you know, can play with these truths, these kernels of truths in really fun ways. And so we have to bring privilege into the conversation. And also, you and I both have a high core value of truth seeking, which means as a personality type, we're more likely than others to want to pay the harsh cost of truths. We're willing to pay that cost. Now, there are some truths that we know, and this goes down to the deeper question, deep

end of the pool question, which is how much truth is worth knowing, which is a hard question, because the more you read philosophy, the more you're depressed you get. Some truths, like losing free will and things like that, can really psychologically unhinge you and not produce human thriving. We have some science that shows that ignorance at some level really is bliss. And so, if the truth makes you more unhappy and produces less human thriving, then how much truth is worth knowing. So, for me, I've gotten better at saying this is a path for the people who are hurt by religion, who are highly skeptical, who have gone into nihilism, who have deconstructed, things like that,

because these people have more of a tendency of having truth-seeking as a high core value. Now, if you don't have that, it may not be worth it to you to take this path. For example, I have a brother, he's very high in loyalty. That's a core value of his. So, this path is not going to be as beneficial for Him. He's also an addict, and from what we know of addicts, He kind of found Jesus as part of His, as part of, you know, His religious experience. For Him to go into something like nihilism would be devastating to His sobriety, devastating. So, how do I deal with that? How do I preach something that would actually do, I think, would make my brother's life and his children's life worse? And so, my answer to that now

is what we're trying to do is get everyone to a space in between fundamentalism and nihilism. Both places will kill you. Both places are bad for the world. Pure nihilism is very self-violent, lots of suicide or slow suicide, fundamentalism, very others violent, but both are very bad for us. What we want is to be in the middle of that, for people to have tools and resources, but also with room to grow. And so, for me, I build that by ordering the chaos. For some people, it may be more appropriate to start in something like a religion that has more order and structure that they psychologically need,

and deconstruct it to a more healthier Richard Rohr kind of form of Christianity, something like that. And you end up in kind of the same place, the difference between the most spiritual atheist and the most deconstructed Christian. The difference between them when you look at their lives, it's just a hair. And like, maybe that's an important hair to both sides, but it's just a hair. So that's, you know, this is one path to that place, but it may not be the most appropriate path for everyone. Pete And I think that really speaks to the fact that while truth is very, very important to you,

that while truth is very, very important to you, love is actually a little bit higher in your hierarchy. You know? Yeah, it's a tough question. Sam Harris answered this question recently, which is, do you value truth more or wellbeing? And he had to say wellbeing. And that if it turned out that humans couldn't function without religion because we'd become too nihilistic, and maybe that would be worse for humanity, he said that he would pull his books, like his critical books on religion, because we do have to value well-being at some point, which is tricky for me because my truth-seeking wants to always know the truth, but maybe for a lot of people, some truths really aren't worth knowing. And what purpose is truth if it doesn't tend towards human thriving and human wellbeing?

That's tough. It's a tough, gray place for me, yeah. Yeah, and I think it is a case-by-case thing with people that you're talking to. If you're running a business, you're passionate about what you're trying to do. And you need people who are also passionate about it and can do it in the way

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Hiring Indeed is all you need. Over on The Mythical Society, I am learning to be a better songwriter by sitting down with some amazing musicians and discussing all things music in my new three episode series, That Song, Song, song, song. You can watch episode one out now, featuring Orville Peck.

We talked in depth about his popular song, Dead of Night, and how he feels about being a gay icon, as well as whether he's wearing his mask on Broadway. Watch it now at mythicalsociety.com. Um, yeah, I find it, I think a lot of us go through that phase where we're sort of just pissed at being hoodwinked and also got a lot of other people involved. I was in ministry, so I was bringing a lot of people along for the ride. So I think you have this urge to sort of undo some of that. I think I've at this point maybe more than undid that. But in the book, you talk about these four

existential fears that Irvin Yalam talks about, death, freedom, loneliness, and meaninglessness. Can you talk about how faith and religion answer some of those fears, but how maybe they don't do the best job at answering it, and how these are things that actually keep people in those faith communities, and then are really the things that we confront head on in deconstruction. 11

Yeah, and this is one where my bias towards secular spirituality is definitely going to show, because I do think that secular spirituality does this better than religion, but essentially, psychologically, we have deep hopes and desires, and we also have deep existential fears. The four that show up the most commonly in humans is fear of death, which a lot of religion is just processing our fear of death and stories for our fear of death. Fear of isolation, that we're actually alone and no one understands what it's like to be us. And again, God, I'm doing theism for Lent, where I take on being a believer. And the biggest takeaway that I get when I do that, I do it with a friend, she does atheism for Lent,

and I do theism for Lent. But the biggest takeaway is remembering what it felt like to feel like God was watching and proud of you when you did did something good or understood what you were going through when you were crying. And so, that definitely shows up in our religions is our fear of isolation. Fear of freedom is the one that confuses people the most because you would think that we all value freedom, but when we actually look at human behavior, we really don't. We actually, people like to think if we just like, killed, like if all the cult leaders and political leaders and religious leaders died one day that the world would be free, but the reality is we would recreate them tomorrow because it's so overwhelming to be a human that when someone confident who has like the air of

competence and confidence comes in and says, I have a 12-step plan for your life. We're like, oh, thank God, somebody's figured it out. He seems smarter than and happier than me. I'm going to follow this 12-step program to my best life. Because it's just hard to be a human. And so, we actually don't like freedom as much as we think we do, because it's overwhelming. We get paralysis when we have too many choices. So someone giving you a path is actually something, it's not that cult leaders always like keep us from freedom, it's that we create cult leaders to take away our freedom. We freely give that to people because it's just overwhelming to be a human. And then where am I at? Last one is...

Pete Slaus is meaninglessness. Yeah, and this one was the hardest for me. If there's no ultimate story, no reason that we're here, the universe doesn't care that we're here, no matter what I do, I'm going to die in three generations and be forgotten. What's the point of even living? That kind of thing. Religion can do a lot for meaninglessness because it gives you a story that this life has meaning because whatever the story is. So, religions really do a lot in giving us security blankets for our fears. The problem is, the downside for the modern world now is that it's a short-term gain that everybody has their little supernatural security blanket story that makes them feel better. But now our stories are bumping into each other and our gods are fighting against each other, and we literally cannot solve modern problems,

because everyone is caught up in their own supernatural story of reality, and now we're paying a cost to that. So, if I can get people tools and resources for these existential fears, the hope is, eventually, we'll get to a place where we can converge on a common enough reality that we could actually make this life worth living for people, that we could actually create societies that are built for human thriving. We're not anywhere near being able to do that yet, because we're too lost in our supernatural stories to even converge on what the problem is, or what the problems are. And so we're paying a cost for this evolutionary tool that we've built, which is this ability to believe in myths and

stories. And now in the modern world, we're paying a cost for that because now our stories are competing against each other and we can't solve problems. We can't even talk to each other anymore. Right. And this is such an interesting dynamic with what's happening, and we've lived our adult lives through this. I remember the first time I ever really got on the internet was in high school, and then really started looking at people talking about anything related to faith was right after college. That's how it worked for me. And I think that you talk about bumping up against these other ideas, these other philosophies, for me, it was bumping up against other ways of thinking about Christianity. It was just all the different options of the way that you could see Christian faith. And I think that, again, depending on your personality, for me, it just eroded my confidence in what

I believe, but other personalities feel the need to double down on what they believe. And this is the thing that's so fascinating to me about Christian apologetics and apologetics channels. It's just in the midst of all that we can know now and all the really good reasons we have to doubt our particular version of reality, even our ability to come to objective conclusions based on what we as an individual perceive about the world is so fascinating that they've become convinced that their particular view is the thing that is the answer to the problems that you're talking about. And it's a bit scary. It is scary, and this is where sometimes I'll push the religious, even though I understand that maybe religion is helpful or beneficial in some ways.

This is a place where I'll really push against religion because there was a documentary that I watched, I think his name was Gabriel Hernandez, and it was this little boy who was abused by his parents and killed by his parents. Just the most awful life that you could imagine. This boy knew nothing but torture. And it gave me, and I watched this documentary after I lost my faith in God, and then without that security blanket buffer, I was like on the couch for two weeks, just like with an emotional flu, because I no longer had a blanket to say, this little boy's with Jesus,

now it's going to be okay. I actually had to sit with the full weight of the fact that so many children really just come to this life and suffer and die. So, even though it's harder, and that can be difficult, I do think it changed me. It changes how I show up in the world. If everybody went through that, even though it would be hard, I feel like we would be more mindful about bringing children into the world. I feel like we would pay social workers more. I feel like the world would change if we actually had to sit with that and process it, rather than everybody just grabbing their blanket story and saying, you know, karma or he's with Jesus or whatever your story is, it actually stops us from fully processing what's going on in this world that maybe we could do things about if we actually

sat with that. And so, that's where sometimes I'll lean into, you know, secular spirituality a little bit more, because I do think if you want to get to a place where we are collectively trying to make a world a better place, I can't see us doing that with competing religions. I mean, try to talk to a prepper and in your world, try to find some van diagram where your worlds collide, where you can actually solve a problem together. It's almost impossible. Yeah. And I think that the biggest one for me, you said it was big for you, is this, the fear of meaninglessness.

I think this is the thing that so many people ask me. It's like, where do you find your meaning? Can you, let's talk more about this idea of building it from the ground up and why, A, that's not any different than what is happening for a religious person, and B, how much more meaningful that can be when you divorce it from this grand narrative. Yeah, meaninglessness was definitely... There's usually one that's more scary to you than others.

Fear of freedom didn't bother me very much. For some people, they'll get really stuck on fear of death. And like you, for me, it was fear of meaninglessness. And it's also harder the higher you are in neuroticism. So if you are low in extroversion and high in neuroticism, this is the community that's going to struggle with this the most because their brains just suffer more just as a basis. And so, they're going to need more meaning to be able to justify living their life. And I'm in that group where, like, there's some people who come across nihilism, and

they just like instantly move to like, oh, I'm just going to enjoy my life. And they're just thriving, like they're just vibing. I was not that person. I was very suicidal. I tend to be more neurotic. I needed more meaning in order to justify life because I'm low in extroversion and high in neuroticism. So for me, this is a place where I really got stuck.

And the shift for me that really saved me was being able to build from the point of view of experience, which is different than my rational brain. To my rational brain, I couldn't make sense of meaning at all. And the experience that I had that sort of changed my mind was I was in a place where rationally I couldn't justify life. But then my kid got off the bus and looked for my face and his face lit up when he saw me. And my body was screaming, this is meaningful. Now, my rational brain had no sense of this. In a million years, all of this, we're going to blow up and the earth is going to blow up and

nobody's going to know that we were here. What does it matter? But in my body, seeing that child's face light up when he sees me, it was screaming, hey, this is meaningful. And so, what that pointed to for me was, is something that seemed so obvious, but it just wasn't obvious to me, which is that we can build meaning from experience. So rather than building sand castles that will last forever and outlast the wave, which rationally doesn't make sense, it becomes about what are the sand castles that are worth building just for the experience of it, like we were when we were kids. When we were kids, we didn't wake up and say, what's going to be my legacy and ultimately meaningful?

We just put our feet on the grass and learned how to play and learn how to play in our bodies. And you can actually build from that place. And so that's when I started to get more in touch with my body, which is really key when you hit nihilism, because a lot of the people who hit nihilism, their body is just the thing that moves their head from place to place because they're very head oriented people. And that was true for me too. And so I started to pay attention, when does my body suffer less? Oh, it really likes to move when it listens to Weezer music. I'm going to start going to more concerts. Weezer concerts are my pilgrimage, that's what I do for my pilgrimage. It's a spiritual experience for me. I really love conversation, and so now I built

my life so that I have really deep conversations with people because this is what this bodysuit likes to do. It likes to skip 10 years of small talk and talk about what it's really like to be a human. I found meaningful work. I left theology school, I left teaching seminary, and I said, I'm going to be an atheist spiritual director. That's going to be really weird for a lot of people, but I'm going to die. It's what I most want to do. And so I started, and it was maybe about a year process of really building on what is actually a life that is fundamentally worth experiencing for me, even though it ends. Then it makes my life more like a game or a ride or watching a movie, like you know it ends, but you still are valuing the experience of it. And when I was able to do that, my life fundamentally changed from top to bottom, or I guess from bottom up, and I was able to build a

life that I wake up and I'm excited to experience the day, even if everything that I think is true, even if I die and I'm forgotten and this earth is forgotten, even if I could know that that was true, I would wake up tomorrow the exact same way and do exactly what I'm doing now. That's great. One of the things I'm thinking about is the, when you were in your faith system, and for you, you were deconstructing much younger, right? So, I was a strong evangelical Christian through college and into my 20s and well into my 20s. The doubts didn't really start coming until around 30 or so. So I have the benefit of being able to look back on adult experiences of meaning-seeking and meaning-experiencing with that grand narrative of the Christian faith in place. And I think that we so easily talk ourselves into this

idea that the meaning is coming from the philosophical grounding, but really the meaning was also coming from the experience. It's just the philosophical grounding and the community and the ritual created the setting and sort of lined those experiences up in a certain way and contextualized them. But it was still happening on the body level. Singing praise music and being just overwhelmed with what I would have called the spirit. You know, I had very specific physical things that would happen to me that felt supernatural. I didn't come from a charismatic or, you know, Pentecostal background. It was evangelical and mostly very Baptist-y. But during praise and worship music, I would have this thing that

would happen where it just felt like my whole body was shaking and buzzing and like my ears would get hot. And I always had this, it was like, that's the spirit moving through my body. And now being able to look back at that and say, oh, I was having this very meaningful physiological, emotional, psychological experience

that I rooted in this idea. I think that's the thing is that there's so many people who are maybe at the beginning of a deconstruction and the midst of the deconstruction and they think that they're gonna let go, they have to let go of the meaning and they're gonna just be in this sea of nothingness. And ultimately what you're saying is that it was already happening on the experiential

level. Yeah, and now that I know that, like you're saying, I can actually build on that. So my spiritual experiences, those moments that you're talking about that, I have that more on this side of religion than I did in religion. Yeah, because now you actually have the power and ability to orchestrate that based on your actual preferences, which is wild. Yeah, like what actually makes my body buzz and feel connected and feel all those feelings. And it's funny on TikTok, there's so many people who say that they lost their faith the first time that they went to a secular concert and were feeling the same things at the concert that they did in church. That's a very common

experience. People talk about it a lot on TikTok. But yeah, nobody turns into a Mormon because they study all the world religions equally, and they think, you know what, I'm going to go with the treasure digger from the 1800s. I think, you know, rationally, that just makes sense out of everybody. No, people fall in love with a way of life. Being a Mormon is a highly communal way of life. You instantly get best friends for husband, wife, all the kids, mentors for children, rituals, singing together, service, love, meaning, purpose, inspiration. It is just built in. And so, rationally, we do all these apologetic games, not because that's what led us to these religions in the first place, but because our brain is trying to justify

a way of life that we fell in love with. And so, for me, let's keep that way of life, but let's maybe not leave rationality at the table, because that's a part of you too. And you're never going to experience wholeness if you have to shut down your rationality in order to enjoy that way of life. So let's take that way of life and like really fine tune it to you, which religions are also not good at doing. And then, yeah, that spiritual, love-filled, service-filled, awe-filled life I experienced more as an atheist than I did when I was religious. You've had a lot of success in piecing this together

and finding your people. And I know you've talked about how you, over a period of like a year, sort of recreated your closest connections and you've had many different experiences in different spiritual communities. Again, there's a lot of work involved in that. There's a lot of intentionality.

There's almost a tenacity. Now, you had to go through that really, really low point. This is a journey to get to this point where you're able to do that. For someone who identifies with the way that you think about these things on a rational level and is like, yes, I want the meaningful spiritual experience, my bullshit detector is just always going off if I'm in any church setting or whatever, but I don't have the patience, the time, the willingness to create this sort of hodgepodge. So what I'm gonna do is join this spiritual community

that I think I can tolerate to get these things. What do you say to that person? Because I feel like in some ways, I think about this and wanna approach it in the way that you do and and I'm kinda doing that, but then this is why I always flirt with the idea of being a part of some sort of spiritual community that has service sort of built into it, ritual, whether it's like the Quakers or a UU community or, you know, a progressive Christian community.

I haven't done that yet. I don't know if I will. But what do you say to someone who says, okay, I think I can hold my nose from the irrational stuff, but I want the benefit of the systems that they've built? Yeah, and this is one where I do think it's appropriate to bring in privilege into the conversation. You know, I had the privilege to be able to study these things deeply and talk about people about these things so that I could kind of find my way through it.

And so I'm not going to use my privilege to then judge other people as less than. There are many times where like you can look at your school district and you're looking at the district and like the best school here is the Catholic Church School. And I have atheists that will, you know, call me or message me and say like, is this okay? Am I bad? Because like this is just kind of the reality. And so my argument would be, I think it's okay to recognize that we are finite creatures and that not every person needs to do what I'm doing or go on the same journey as me. But I would push a little bit and say, if you do have a little bit

of time and a little bit of resources, every time a secular person has to go back to church or send their kids to church, that's one more person that's not helping this project, which is how do we better build secular societies and secular communities? Like if you put that time and money into that project, then I think the world would become better. So for the people who do have either the privilege or the time or the education, or sometimes it can be a money thing too. Like for Mormons, we pay 10% of our income to the church. When I left Mormonism, I put that money into karate and Girl Scouts and other things. So, sometimes even money is involved. So, it's a complex thing. But if you can, things, so sometimes even money is involved. So it's a complex thing, but if you can, if you can, I think the world is better when the people have the moral courage to say,

I don't support this, so I'm not going to support this with my actions. Now, if it's not applicable to you because of a variety of concerns, then you do your best from the inside. And there are people who are doing fan, we need religion to get better. Religious people don't listen to me anymore. So we need you in that religious community making it better because there are people, I mean, the majority of the world is religious, they're not going to listen to people like me, they're not going to listen to Sam Harris, they're not going to listen to Hitch or any of these other people. And so we do need people who are doing that work from the inside. So, that feels like the place where you can, that better fits your life and your privilege and your time, but also you can do meaningful work from that place of making religion healthier. We need

you to do that too. So, you know, that's a case-by-case basis that I work with individuals to try to find what's the best place for you individually and as a family, and also a place where you can do good in the world. And that's gonna be inside or outside of religion. We need people doing, you know, making spirituality healthier for everyone. Right. The question of constructing a moral framework from the ground up, which is not unlike constructing meaning from the ground up. You devote a chapter to this in the book. I think this is so pertinent because I think that this has become... The moral argument for God is sort of the favorite apologetics argument that I see on the internet at this point,

because I think that it's been effective. I think people have recognized that, well, the average person, you start talking to them about why they believe what they believe, you know, from a moral standpoint, and then you kind of convince them that there's no objective, you know, lawgiver in this situation. Then you can kind of, if they haven't thought about this on a deep level, you can kind of quickly get them to admit that they kind of need a God for them to be morally justified. What's your perspective on that and how did your morality change? Did you just become an absolute heathen? Lauren Ruffin Yeah, no, it's a good question. And like you said,

you're totally right that this is kind of the majority of the online conversation. We're not even having really debates anymore over like, is God real? The debate has turned into, is religion good for society? That's kind of like new atheists, we used to kind of debate God and religion. Now it's like Alex O'Connor, Ben Shapiro arguing, is religion good for society? So it is really the conversation. And what people will argue is that if you don't ground your morality in anything like ultimate goodness, God, something, if you don't ground your morality, then everybody can choose to do whatever they want and there will be essentially mayhem. And the reason that this doesn't work is one, because we've never had objective morality,

even in the Bible, if you do even, you don't even have to go to the deep end of the pool of deconstructing the Bible to know that the Bible does not give us objective morality. It's a very complex, contradictory document, collection of documents. So, not only have we never had objective morality, but then it goes down to the question of what's worse, people who are kind of are doing whatever they want, or doing whatever they want in God's name. of are doing whatever they want, or doing whatever they want in God's name. And then that, the debate kind of goes to that question. For me, a really easy analogy is that if you are in a classroom, and the classroom morality is that there's a teacher who has a camera in the corner and is watching you all the time, and you build your morality on that, the teacher's always watching, then yes, there may be a moment when the kids realize that the camera doesn't work, that they will go crazy, because that's the morality

that you've built it on. You've built it on a vertical morality that it's right because God says so. And so, people fear that if, hey, if people don't think that someone is watching, they're just going to go crazy, but you've built it that way. What if you had a classroom where from the time they were kindergartners, they learned that their actions affect other people? You know when your feelings get hurt, that hurts, right? Let's not do that to other people. You can build horizontal morality, meaning it's good or bad based on whether it helps

humans thrive or suffer because there's an experience to being a human. We can thrive more or less or suffer more or less. And so, if you build that, you could actually have a classroom where the teacher can leave the room and the kids won't go crazy, even the teacher will come back because they've built their morality on, I know what it's like to hurt, therefore I won't hurt others. And if you build a morality from that, I can't see any way where rationality and empathy and conversation does not give you a better moral system than, I know what God says about this thing. I just can't, I can't imagine that that would ever give you a better moral system. And so, I do think that there's a way to build morality from the ground up. It just takes a shift. If you've been raised in religion,

it's going to be a shift. And if I'm going to be vulnerable here, I feel like now I live a very highly moral life. But I will say, I had some issues when I lost free will, which is common. Daniel Dennett talked about this before he died. He was worried, he didn't think that people should know that they don't have free will because some of the data that we're seeing shows that there's a dip in morality, because it feels like you've lost autonomy and that whatever you do, the universe is just doing it. So, I did have a few monuments like at a self checkout where I felt like when I lost free will, and there's going to be no consequences where I had that temptation. But I would say now I'm in a place where I would openly open my books to my life and feel like I could justify my actions as moral because being moral is a key

to having a happy and healthy life and happy relationships. So, it's in your best interest to be a moral person for both you and for the world. And so, we can build on that without me having to only be good because I'll be rewarded in heaven, which I think is less moral to begin with because you're being moral for a reward. I'm trying to be moral with no thought of reward, which I think is actually a better way to do morality. And I think, ironically, even the most significant moral teachings of Jesus really are appealing to the same dynamic. They're not really talking about the God is watching. That's, you know. Yeah, he talks about the law written on your heart. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that that's why for me, my motivations, like you said, there's some things that change and there's some of the edges that move a little bit just based

on no longer adhering to, not really a biblical view, but just what your particular brand of Christianity had said was right and wrong, and then tried to justify with the Bible. But I think that the type of person that I want to be has never really changed throughout this process. And I just heard and said alongside many fellow Christians back in the day, man, if God doesn't exist or we're not right about this, I would do X, Y, and Z. And it's like, well, actually, no, you wouldn't. Yeah. I have seen debates, and it's kind of shocking that they'll admit this,

but I have seen debates where the Christian says, if there was no consequence, I would go around raping people. And I was like, that says a lot more about you than it does about God. But okay, buddy. And yeah, that's kind of a scary thought. But it goes back to on social media, probably every day I get someone who says like, just you wait, Jesus is coming and then you'll know. And it's like kind of this vindictive, right? Like, you know, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess, I told you so. I get a lot of that from Christianity. And to this day, like if we were in the middle of this conversation and Jesus starts descending from heaven, right now, I wouldn't hide under a rock. I wouldn't have that response. From what I understand of Jesus is when I read the Good Samaritan story, the Samaritan did not have

the correct religion. He did not have the correct priesthood. He did not have the correct beliefs. But he sat with someone when the priest walked by and the Levite walked by. And the majority of what I do is sit with people who have been hurt on the road by religion. And I sit with them and I witness them and I mourn with them and I try to help them. And that is what I read in the Good Samaritan story. And so, I have no fear. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to be wrong. If there's pearly gates and I get to go meet Jesus, I will not be ashamed at all about my story, because I am trying to be what I saw Jesus do, sitting with the marginalized, flipping tables of the institution, trying

to be the good Samaritan for the people who have been wounded by the church when the church walks by. And so, I have no fear of meeting Jesus, even though the Christians really want, you know, me to have this moment where I'm hiding under a rock because I was wrong about Jesus. I really have no fear to meet Jesus. Right. Now, how does the deconstruction process differ for women? Yeah, that's a really good one. So, a couple things that we can say in general, which is women tend to pay a higher cost for being in religion. They're going to give up more of their life, especially if you're in a patriarchal kind of religion

where you get married and have children before you kind of know who you are, which is the case in a lot of kinds of Christianity, including Mormonism. And so women will often, when I have female clients, we have more to grieve. We have to have a funeral for the woman who never got to be because she was set on this path so early. Another thing is women don't get to finish

their human development in ways that men in patriarchal religion often do. So, the most common thing that I come across is that men will say, you know, I don't believe this religion is true, but it was beneficial to me in some ways. You know, I don't really regret, even like Mormon men, they won't regret their time in religion. You know, gave me order, gave me structure, gave me a community of men. I don't really regret it. It's just not true. Whereas women, when they find out it's not true, I have to mourn that I had five kids. I don't even know who I am. I have been, there's always been a man in between me and God. I don't even know who I am. I have been, there's always been a man in between me and God, I don't even know what my beliefs are. I have no idea who I am because women,

their voices are a lot more controlled in patriarchal religion. And so, that's just a different experience. And so, what happens often to men is that their spiritual enlightenment path post-religion includes a lot of ego dissolving and realize that the universe doesn't revolve around you. That tends to be common for men. Especially for men, this is why psychedelics tend to be very helpful for men, because they get to, for a time, step out of their ego, because patriarchal religions is really built for a male ego. And they got to be full people, even if they had kids, they got to have careers, and so they actually need to reduce some of that over attachment to their ego. Whereas women will need to have the opposite journey. They need to actually take up more space and date themselves and get louder and start talking and figure out who they are.

And they actually need to start to center themselves. So, the most common thing that I see, and this is not true across the board, but the most common thing that I see is that for men, they have to kind of go through a decentering process and realize the way that they were kind of an asshole when they were in religion. And for women, and psychedelics can be a part of that especially. And then for women, they actually need to do the opposite. They actually need to finish growing up. They need to say, I like this. I was 35 years old before I ordered the kind of pizza that I liked. And it's a small thing, but it's representative of the way that your brain works as a woman when you're raised

in religion, which is you serve others, you decenter yourself, you decenter your own needs, and your value comes from your service to others. And so you have to unpack a lot of that. And I was 35 years old before with my own family, instead of just getting in what everybody else usually wants, I actually said, I want this, I want pineapple on my goddamn pizza. And I will die on that hill. But I was 35 before I even did that. And that's just like a small piece of everything that was going on in my life, my marriage, how I raised children, how I showed up in the world. So men and women often have to do kind of, they

get to the same place and maybe spiritual enlightenment, we can talk about being genderless and being the same place, but they get there from the opposite sides of the spectrum. So, women build themselves up and men often have to kind of break themselves down. Yeah, and I can so relate to this. I've said many times- I'm curious if that, yeah, how that lands in your marriage. I'm curious if that is true for you guys. Actually, so this is a dynamic that Jessie and I have talked about many times

because I've seen how she processes her time in Christianity and how I process mine. And I've talked about this many times on the podcast, just about how I got to, you know, I was looked to as a spiritual authority. I mean, Link and I got to essentially begin our career in the context of the church, and we're given this incredible privilege to invent our jobs, essentially, because that was just the role that we were able to play, right? I was, even though I was believing things that I don't think are true, I was like fully self-actualized in a way that Jesse has, you know, when you articulated

this, actually I think I listened to you on the Mormon Stories podcast is the first time I heard you articulate this aspect, which I think you basically just did again. I think it's wonderful and women need to hear it. And Jessie has been talking about this exact same thing of like figuring out in her adult life what she likes, who she is, what her career is going to be because that wasn't what the expectation was. And of course, that doesn't mean that

all of the responsibilities of being a wife and a mother go away. Just like you said the other day when we wrapped up talking, you're like, well, I gotta go put my kids to bed. I don't, you know, I don't. I don't have a wife and a secretary. Exactly.

So my career is limited. Right, and I think the way that men continue to attempt to dominate even the post-religious space that you've talked about this aspect as well, they were so used to being looked at as the leader or the guru, and men are the ones that have the time to say, well, I'm gonna do a month-long silent retreat because my wife is gonna be the one who's gonna take care of the family. I just think that the patriarchal mindset doesn't

just evaporate when you leave the patriarchal religion. Right. Right. Yeah, it's like the... I can do most things like taking emotion out of it or taking my own triggers out of it and try to, you know, be rational or meet people where they are, but the thing that makes me like the hottest, like I'm gonna, I feel like I wanna die on this hill, is this idea that the man who goes to India for a month, he comes back and he goes on podcasts because he's a spiritual guru, he's got a man bun, he's gonna teach us about spirituality.

Well, tread lightly, tread lightly. I know, I know. I don't have my man bun today, but. I know. I do, I am kind of rough on the man bun guys. No, no, no, go for it. But it's because you know the type. You know what I mean? You know the type. I'm rough on myself when I see myself with one. I'm like,

oh, I would have judged the hell out of that guy. Aesthetically, I actually like them, but if I want to point to this kind of person, I feel like Instagram yoga man bun guy is the quickest way for me to communicate the same person. I feel like Instagram yoga man bun guy is like the quickest way for me to communicate this. I will say, we had, there was a guy working on our house and he met with me about some construction that he was doing. And then when he came back, he was talking with Jessie and he had brought his son, and then he was like, you know, my son was asking me about your husband, and he said, do you know what he does for a living?

And I said, I don't know, he looks like a yoga instructor. So, I definitely, I'm guilty, I'm guilty of that. Of the aesthetic. If you go on Instagram and you start doing yoga poses in Bali, you know, with your man bun, I might text you and be like, Rhett, come back, buddy. Come back, buddy. Oh, listen. I'm probably not as conscious about it as I need to be, but I've been in California too long, but yeah, keep me in check. No, I do like the aesthetic. But yeah, and then the woman who is, and then he'll do

all this talk on podcasts about doing ego work, about choosing love over ego, but he did it by himself on a mat, which for a woman with young children is a vacation. That woman who's at home thinking that she's not spiritual, it got up in the middle of the night and cleaned up shit and diarrhea and vomit when she's sleep deprived. And we won't call that spiritual, we won't call that ego work. We don't call, you know, we praise the guy who went to Bali to do it, but we don't recognize the work that that is. And that is a hill that I will consistently die on. I can't tell you how many women I see who come from patriarch religion and say, because I don't do two-hour meditations and take ice baths, I'm not spiritual,

and I'm looking at their life, and it is deeply spiritual, deeply service-filled. Lots of deep inner work, you're holding your shadow and your inner child, and you're holding, you know, your spouse's inner child in shadow too and you're negotiating, like that's hard work. That's much harder than meditating in Bali. So that is one where I do kind of die on that hill. Matthew 16 Well, there's this aspect of even some of the work that is given to men in these spiritual settings, like if you're at a monastery and you've got the like manual labor,

I've heard you talk about the manual labor of a woman with her hands in the sink or cleaning up shit or whatever the latest thing that she might have to do. That being, that's a spiritual practice, that spiritual work that a lot of times when a man does that kind of thing, he's like looking for credit.

Right. And it's the hardest spiritual path too, because if you're in a family, you're constantly being triggered, you're constantly having to do inner work, which is why there's that great quote, I think it's Ram Dass who says, if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family. Like, yeah, tell me that you're always enlightened, go sit with your parents at dinner and not want to shoot yourself in the face. So, yeah, tell me that you're always enlightened. Go sit with your parents at dinner and not want to shoot yourself in the face. So, you know, I had a woman, even just, I think, two weeks ago, she had eight children, and she had healthy adult relationships with all eight of her children, meaning all eight kids call mom, value mom, whatever. And she

told me in our session, I'm not a spiritual person. And in a bizarre world, she would walk into a church and say, I'm a woman who has healthy relationships with eight adult children. And they would give her a microphone and say, teach us the lessons that you've learned along the way, because that's incredible. But she said to me, I'm not spiritual. And that just breaks my heart, to be honest. Matthew 11 You know, it's funny because Link and I have had a similar conversation. When we talk about our deconstruction, a lot of times, Link will be like, I don't want to really talk about this as much as you do. I don't think about it as much as you do. And I had this moment last year, we were doing our

update where I was saying, but you're a spiritual person, and I think a lot of people interpreted that as me trying to put something on him or to tell him that he should think about these things. But I think the point I was trying to make that I didn't articulate very well was that spirituality is not watching apologetics YouTube channels or thinking about the stuff on a philosophical, that's philosophy, right? That's philosophy and religion. So what do you say to somebody who's like, okay, I deconstructed, but I'm not interested in spirituality. So when you talk about atheist spirituality, it's just something that doesn't even get me going

because I just want nothing to do with any of that stuff. Yeah, sometimes that word is just too triggering, and if it is, then we just need to use a different word. There's just not a great secular word as an umbrella term for all the things that spirituality covers. And there's also a little rebellion in me that religions tend to like take everything for their own purposes. So this is kind of like an inquisition in reverse to try to reclaim some of those words. But if that word is just not resonating, like let's just use a different word because I think the lie of atheism is that if you just leave religion, you'll just stumble upon your

best life. Like you'll just know what to do in your relationships, you'll know how to raise children, you'll know how to live your best life, you'll know how to build a moral system. And it's like, I don't think we're as damned as the Christians say that we are, but I don't think that we're, you know, we're just going to stumble on our best life on our own either. I think the truth is kind of in between those two. I don't think that we're fundamentally broken, but we certainly need help. We certainly need things. And so, if someone says that word spirituality isn't resonating with me, I say, okay, let's talk about human thriving. Let's talk about living your life where you go to your deathbed and you have the least amount of regrets. Let's talk about the good life. Let's talk about the science

of happiness. And usually we'll find something where it's like, yes, I am interested in that, because I could, like, no human is so perfect that they can't improve something in their life towards their own thriving. And so, there always is something, there's some way to connect deeper to you, and there's some way to connect more deeply outside of you. Now, if you don't want to call that spirituality, that's fine. But as a human, when we talk about human thriving and the science of happiness, that process is good for you. And there are tools that can help with that. Yeah, you had the, I'm trying to see, I took a picture of it. You were talking about this on your channel, and there was this, the tree from the Center for contemplative mind in society.

And it's essentially, you know, you've got like communion and connection and awareness as the roots and then ritual movement, relational activists, creative generative stillness. I think when you start reading off some of these practices with anyone, regardless of their philosophical religious standpoint, they'd be, oh yeah, I want those kinds of experiences and that kind of meaning in my life. So I do think sometimes it's just, it might not just be, yeah, using that specific

word because I think what Link was doing is he was assuming that I was talking about supernatural things, but the whole point of your deal is that, no, we're not... We're decoupling all that. Yeah. So for the people who are listening, he's referring to the Tree of Contemplative Practices, which is a major study that we did in 2004 to see how do humans do this, like this connection thing, how are humans experiencing it. And we did find things like meditation, but we also found some people were doing it with movement, some people were doing it with political activism, some people were doing it with creation,

the people who are artists, sometimes some people were doing it with like rituals, like always returning to themselves for solstice or, you know, witchy people who get into that kind of cyclical nature of things. And so, when I show that tree to people who just don't know where to start, usually they do say, actually, yes, I prefer this over this. So, when I did this with my husband, my husband is not a philosopher, doesn't read books, wouldn't probably call himself spiritual. He's just a very practical kind of guy. But as I was doing this research and kind of sharing things with him along the way, he realized that his Ironman training, his triathlon training, it's not because he hates his body or he wants to lose weight, it's because it's his spiritual

time. That two-hour bike ride in the sun where he gets into a rhythmic breathing, it's an incredibly spiritual experience for him. It's not for me. I would want to die the entire time. It's not my thing. But he, for the first time outside of Mormonism, got to claim that my two-hour Sunday bike ride is my church. And he got to claim that. And then his pilgrimage is going to Ironman's. And he, this year, kind of claimed that as part of his spiritual practice and said, I'm going to set aside some money and time to go to Kona and volunteer at the World Championship Ironman. And he was one of the volunteers that kind of helped his family, helped the family kind

of meet the runner and they got to reunite. And he cried the entire time. It was an incredibly spiritual experience for him. But because we know that about each other now, now I can support him in his spiritual practice and he sets aside time to support me in the retreats that I want to do or sometimes I'll go speak or whatever my thing is. And so even though he wouldn't call himself a spiritual person, and he doesn't really get into a lot of this stuff, it did benefit him because he was able to claim, this actually really resonates with me, and I want us as a couple to find ways

where we can support each other better. So, even people who don't call themselves spiritual, or don't even, you know, my husband's not a, he's a brilliant guy, but just not a reader. He's an entrepreneur, Iron Man kind of type of guy. But he benefited from this as well, because he got to claim what actually resonates with him and connects him outside of himself. And there's a real hesitancy to get to that stage after deconstruction because of the way that we looked at people who said those kinds of things when we were on the inside. Right.

I judged so many people who talked about spiritual experiences or spiritual but not religious or said that my church is when I go on a hike, I'm like, well, get real, right? And I think that it is about reclaiming. Reclaiming that is so important. It's a huge, important step to be like, listen, when you realize that we were all making it up as we went along, we were just agreeing with each other in this group. It's okay for you to come out here

and make it up as you go along as well. Okay, Martin, let's try one. Remember, big. You got it. The Ford It's a Big Deal event is on. How's that? A little bigger. The Ford It's a Big Deal event.

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The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca today. Yeah. What would, what would old Rhett, like if old Rhett listened to our conversation, what would he say? Oh God. I've thought about this many times because I've actually thought about what, if anything, I could say to the 25 year old Rhett who was in the midst of his ministry and so ready for all these answers and so sure that he had the truth upon the truth

upon the truth about basically every single issue. Yeah, I think I would be like, oh, Satan got to me. I ended up putting some value for my own pursuit above my service to God, or I'm just deceived and I'll come back at some point, I'll come to my senses. There'll be some life experience that will bring me to my knees or something like that. I think that's what I would say, that's what the old version of myself. But I basically don't think there's anything I

could say to my 25-year-old self. Which is strange, right? It's strange that you've changed so much that you couldn't even talk to yourself. I was a little bit less fundamentalist, I think, when I was younger and in religion. So I think I would have said to myself now that she's still doing God's work by helping people find spirituality who have been hurt by religion, but she doesn't know that she's still doing God's work and she's exactly where God wants her. She just doesn't recognize it. That's probably what I would say about myself now, I would have said then. Well, that's charitable.

Yeah, I think, I hope I would have been that generous, but I was really doing like a lot of nuanced apologetics when I was in both Mormonism and Christianity. So, it was something that gives me a lot of peace now is, to me, secular spirituality, I just have to do less mental gymnastics. If I don't know, I just say, I don't know. And if there is something, then I look at the data and I speak to my experience and it just requires less mental gymnastics. I was a gold medalist, mental gymnast. Yeah, oh yeah, with the best of them. You mentioned that you had some questions for me. So if you want to get into those, we could talk about this forever.

I was curious about a lot of the clients that I have, even though they really rationally don't believe in their religion anymore, they still have an underlying fear of hell. So would you say that as you're deconstructing, were there times where rationally you didn't fear hell, but emotionally or irrationally that was still there for you? It's funny that that wasn't a really big issue for me. When I began to see that this was a human enterprise, which I think is actually, sometimes it's easier to see when you take one example. I mean, you've got a great video on the origin

of the concept of hell and the evolution of that concept over time on your YouTube channel. When I was able to see how, when you take the magic out of it, when you see how it developed, for me that was just so powerful that I think, I was like, oh, this isn't a thing. Like this really isn't a thing. And the moment that there was a rational acceptance

to the fact that hell is not a real thing. It was actually made to, it wasn't like one person came up with a concept, it was like this collective thing, amorphous thing that developed over time. But it's always been about control consequence, right? And it's very effective at doing that. But when I saw how the magic trick was being done, my mesmerization with it just went away. Nicole Soule-North Oh, yeah, because you did get into like, you were reading a lot of Bart Ehrman and things like that. Yeah. What parts of Christianity, like, what part of Jesus do you still take with you? Like, do you still take with you, like, I'm going to take this parable from Jesus with

me in my journey. Like, are there things like that that you take with you? Or I still love this song, or I do this at Christmas time. Like, I'm curious what you took with you? I think that the, this is funny because we, you know, we talked about my appearance on Rainn Wilson's podcast when we spoke the other day and I was talking about how anytime I talk about this stuff off the cuff I get a little bit nervous because I don't use super precise language and then certain YouTube channels

will just take it. And one of the things I said on that podcast was, because Rain was saying, like, so you don't call yourself a Christian. And I was like, well, I don't, because what I consider to be a Christian in believing this and believing the supernatural side of it and all this, isn't true for me. But if you're talking about the teachings of Jesus, well, okay, I'm a Christian. And then of course, the comments are like, well, Jesus said that he was the way, the truth, and the life, and then when comes, you know, it's like, Jesus said he was God. I know. And I'm like, well, clearly what I was talking about is the moral teachings.

The part that I actually think someone like Jesus probably said something like that, right? So I think that, I've actually never read the Jefferson Bible, but I assume that the Bible that I would place my hand on if I were swearing into office, not that I have any plans to do that. God help us, yeah, God help us. It would be the Jefferson Bible in terms of the moral teachings of Jesus,

you know, divorced from the miracles that were fabricated. So I would say that, because Jessie and I actually, we find ourselves, because it was so ingrained in us, just the idea of, I think we tend to attribute it to Jesus, and like my ultimate moral aspirations of putting other people before myself and being someone who is driven by compassion and isn't selfish, who is selfless and who finds their meaning and purpose in service of others. That's what I aspire to.

And I think that Jesus talks about those things in really powerful ways. I also know that, okay, well, we can look at those things from a completely rational standpoint and see why this is why, from an evolutionary perspective, you serving others is so satisfying. Right? And I'm like, well, okay, that's also true, but the way that he talked about these things and the way that he challenged the institutions of his day, I think I hold on to... In fact, Jessie a lot of times says she is trying to rescue Jesus from the way that he is used today. She's like, I've never felt myself having to defend Jesus more on this side of Christianity

than I did when I was... Because we weren't the types of Christians who got super offended at people who did sacrilegious stuff or talk shit about us and the religion because I didn't think that God needed me to be his defender. But now that it is this, you know, on this side of it, we just are like, oh, you're doing that in Jesus' name? It's like, are you paying attention? Yeah. Sometimes I do feel like that on social media too. I probably on social media spend more time defending Jesus

and what was actually said in the scripture. Now as an atheist with Christian nationalism, so, you know, obviously in view than I ever kind of felt like I had to defend Jesus as a Christian. Right. So yeah, I do a lot of that too. And there's kind of a new movement too. There are secular Christians, but also I've noticed a lot of people, the people who really want to follow Jesus and are concerned with Christian nationalism or concerned with the God that we created out of Jesus, I've heard them call themselves followers of Christ rather than Christian. And there's like this new kind of like language that they're using that

like, no, I'm not Christian, I'm a follower of Christ or I'm a follower of Jesus. So it's like, now we're starting to see some linguistic differences because people don't want to be seen as like that kind of Christian. So it's interesting what's happening. My next question is, if you had like, let's say Jesse pops out four kids in the next four years, you got four kids, new kids, because your kids are older now, they're doing their own thing, four new kids, you've got to raise them in some kind of something, community, moral education, ritual, all these things are good for everyone, but necessary for children. They need that nest period.

Do you feel like you would be more incentivized to go to like a UU or something in order to kind of help raise children? Or like, how would you do that now? How would you parent children now? That's a great question. Because our experience was in those formative early years, the kids were still in the, especially

the older one, they were in church for those formative years. And then we deconstructed kind of throughout their childhood and continued to hold on to some aspects of things and would do things at Christmas or would tell the story of Jesus. Thank God they've turned out great. And seem to have been a little bit ahead of me on a lot of these things in one sense, because they never got super locked in. But yes, I think that if we were starting right now, and we are not,

but if we were starting right now, I think we would say, okay, we've got to make a choice. We're going to have to get very intentional about what these rituals and traditions and the community, we're gonna have to answer these questions that religion has answered very well. And we're going to have to seek out other people who have the same values as us and want the same things for their kids, but are trying to do this from a secular standpoint, we've got to find those communities so we can do this together. And if we can't, then we've got to find one of these tolerable spiritual

communities. Yeah. That's what we would be saying. It's interesting watching my kids who at this point have been raised mostly secular, is that you know, my son will hear something about Mormonism, like the craziest thing, and he'll just be like, that's the most insane thing I've ever heard. And I'm like, listen, you little shit, it took me 10 years to work that out. But to him it's just like, what? No, listen, the first time that my oldest son heard about Joshua's conquest, like he came home from church and he was distraught.

You know, he was like, I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was essentially like, I don't want to worship a god that would command that. And then I'm like, okay, well, I have to go. And again, I didn't have the Christian apologetics videos that exist right now. I'm entertained by all this. I'm entertained by the smart, well-meaning Christians who are trying to figure this stuff out and the ones who are trying to justify the conquest, right? And the latest apologetic scheme is this is hyperbole,

essentially, right? Like that's the thing that they're hanging their hat on, which is ironic on so many levels. But I didn't have that, so I had to go to the, well, yeah, but these people were really bad or whatever. Yeah, I heard that one. And I was like, what am I? Oh, no. It's a mercy because they were bad. Yeah, what am I saying now? What did I just tell? I just told my kid that there is a time when it's justifiable

to annihilate a culture. Right. Right. I think like six months ago, my daughter came to me and said, Mom, there was something inappropriate that came up on my iPad. So I go into mom mode, I'm thinking like some corn popped up or something, and it was actually a picture of bleeding Jesus on the cross where he's like, you know, mostly naked. And it's like, but I've been so indoctrinated that when I see that, I see there's Jesus on the cross. But for her, who has not been raised in religion, she saw a guy who's mostly naked, who is bleeding and like ripped to shreds and the thorns and all of that. And she sees this as extraordinarily violent to the point that I need to go tell mom about this. Right. It's a murder scene.

Yes. And it was like, and I too, like in that moment, it just shocked me because I did not see it as violent because you're just raised with pictures of bleeding Jesus everywhere. But to her little brain, that's the most violent thing that she, that's the most gory scene that she had ever seen at eight years old. And so to be expecting to see something really inappropriate, you know, sexual or something, and just to see Jesus, like it actually blew my brain in that moment of how different it is when we see religion from their outside ways. Oh yeah, well, we were...

I told you a little bit about this and I'm not gonna spoil anything for the audience, but in one of the things that we're working on for Wonder Hall, season two, there's the episode that we were discussing that gets into some interesting religious themes. I'm so excited. I'm gonna cover it. It's gonna be so great. It's gonna be so great. But it is interesting to look at it without sad eyes.

Well, cause as we were rewriting this hymn, the hymn that we were rewriting was, there is a fountain, so which the original version is there is a fountain filled with blood that flows from Emmanuel's veins. And, you know, our producer TJ, who was not raised in the same setting, because the lyrics changed to,

there is a hot tub filled with love, and that'll make sense. That'll make sense when this episode comes out. But when he saw the original lyrics, because we were listening to it for the tune, he was like, filled with blood? And I was like, man, you don't know the beginning. You don't know about being completely washed in the blood? Like we talked about getting washed in the blood. It's so funny that if we're not benefiting from that religion, it's so easy to see it as superstitious nonsense. Like, we go to other countries and like,

oh, this is superstitious nonsense. But like me as a Mormon, it's like, oh yeah, the prophet had a magical stone and he put his head in a hat and then he was reading about this ancient people like, yeah, of course, you know? And it's so hard, our brains are not, they're terribly bad at being skeptical or seeing the superstition in any system that we're benefiting from. And so it makes us very, yeah, it's very, and I can see it now when my children kind of come across religious things and it's just so absurd to them. And I almost feel like an idiot because it's like, well, I studied that for 10 years in theology school to realize that that was absurd, but good job, guys.

Yeah, yeah. I tend to be a little jealous of them at times. But then there are times when in the midst of parenting, I just want to say something, and this happens less and less, I've only got one at home now, I was 16, but when I just want my fatherly authority to be the final word because that's the way that it is, and I'm not able to play that card, I actually have to use reason now

and I have to answer the question behind the question. And it's much easier, much easier to be a parent of young children when you have that authority that you can rely on and appeal to. Now, they have to go to therapy and figure it out later in life, but it makes your job as a parent much easier. 11.30 My son got suspended right before spring break. And even now to this day, I've been out of religion for a long time, I had the thought, do my kids need more order and structure? Am I doing something wrong? Am I a bad parent because my kid's getting suspended and my husband and I, we never would have done anything in our childhood to get us suspended from school.

We wouldn't have done any of that shit. And when I'm reading the report of what happened, it's like, Riker, my son doesn't show respect for authority. And so now my son is like, well, why do I have to respect authority when it's a bad teacher, it's this or that? And it would have been so much easier in a religious system to just have built in that you respect authority and then you don't get suspended from school. But now I'm having to reason with this 13 year old about how and when and why to show respect to people who are older, who have positions of power over you. And now it's this long drawn conversation. But when I was a kid, you just know, you just knew it was just built into you that you don't say things

like that to adults. You don't do things like that to adults because it was just built in the system. So in that way it is harder. And I even had that thought of like, you know, is he, do I need to go take them back to church? Because like they're apparently missing something because I wouldn't have said that to a teacher or whatever it is. And yeah, it can be harder, but I hope that when it comes to therapy time and adult relationships that you know, we'll have healthy adult relationships with my adult children. I hope it goes there, but I'm in it. My kid is suspended from school and it gives me feelings and it gives me doubts and all kinds of things. But I hope that's part of what a real learning process looks like, but it's scary because it hasn't been modeled for me. And so I'm not like floating above this talking about perfect parenting.

Like I'm, I'm in this with doubts too. I'm just trying to do the best I can. Yeah. There's no, there's no manual. Yeah. I mean, it used to feel like there was a manual, you know? Right. Yeah.

It used to feel like that, but yeah, now, now it doesn't feel like that anymore. I think the thing that has been encouraging is you think about, especially with my older one, thinking about the way he was already responding to the things that he was learning, and how if I had never deconstructed, I would probably be dealing with him deconstructing or just completely rebelling

and seeing right through the system that I was trying to pass on, right? So I think that maintaining the lines of communication and respecting the things that the questions that they have and doing your best to answer them. I think that's all, that's all we can do. Yeah, or just saying, I don't know together, you know, modeling that we can love each other

and still not know a lot of things. All right, my last question and then, yeah, I think we're coming up on two hours here. Like I was listening a little bit to some of the books that you were reading in your various, like, rabbit hole dives and your kind of Bart Ehrman phase, because you were reading quite a bit during that phase. Looking back now, what was the rabbit hole that you would say, like, was the most damaging to your faith or, like, set the dominoes in your brain,

you know, in that direction, looking back, what would you say that was? Matthew 15 For me, the biggest thing was evolution. And that may sound a bit crazy, but the reason that it was so impactful is that it took something, you know, I had really strong feelings about why evolution could not have happened, both from like a quote unquote scientific standpoint, I would have told you, but also because I would have told you. But also because the alternative that God was

tangibly involved in creation, the whole theistic evolution thing, which many Christians believe, I know so many Christians believe that. For me, it just felt like giving up this really big piece of territory. Because I think that many Christians who say that they're theistic evolutionists don't, they don't think about this very deeply.

Yeah. I think it's like, okay, so you've got somebody like Tim Keller, who would acknowledge that evolution happened, but then he would make this argument that Adam and Eve needed to be real people in order for atonement to make sense. And there's just not a way to... You can't honestly reconcile those two things, right? Like the idea... It's almost like pushing, it's like pushing a magnet together. It's like, yeah, you can hold it there, but like, that's a tenuous thing.

It's like you don't, and then when you think about the, just the nature of the way that people became people through the process of evolution and all of the, what we would call from a design perspective, the imperfections. I mean, just looking at the laryngeal nerve alone and the routing of the laryngeal nerve, you just start seeing all this stuff that's like, okay, this feels like a natural process. Now, is there some way for a God to be involved in the

beginning of that or like loosely guiding it or somehow making himself known in the particular mutation, the randomness of the mutation. When I started trying to find a way to fit God in that way, it felt like I was really doing some gymnastics at that point and I started recognizing it, right? And so it just felt like in a chess game, the queen was taken for me at that point. And the other thing that it did at the same time is it really impacted the nature of the primeval history, you know, those first 11 chapters of Genesis.

And you've got, okay, now the flood definitely didn't happen and this idea of, oh, it was just local, it's like, well, that's not how it's written, you know? Tower of Babel being the explanation for language and culture. And so all of a sudden, you know... The dominoes were falling, yeah. Yeah, and it really started with that. And it was like, okay, that's when the pattern of, oh, this is actually best understood.

The primeval history is much better understood as an adaptation of other myths that they were reading. Right? It wasn't the first creation or the flood story or any of that. It's like they were adapting these Mesopotamian ideas and making them ideas for Israel. And so I think that for me, that was the big piece. Now, that happened really early in the deconstruction process, and I ended up finding ways to reconcile, but that

was the moment in which... Looking back, yeah. This thing that I was so sure of my perspective... I think that's another piece of it, I was so sure of my perspective on it. I was like, you have to be desperate to think that evolution happened. Like that's where I was, right? And I had some really good arguments for why evolution was impossible. It made absolutely no sense. And I could sit down with 99% of the population who really doesn't understand it and make a really good case. But when I was like, okay, I was wrong about that very big thing, and also, I think a lot of things happened, right? I realized

that I could be wrong about something fundamental. I realized that Christian apologists were wrong about something fundamental because so many of them were wrong about this. And then I realized that it actually had a really significant impact on my view of the Bible. That doesn't mean that there's not Christians who find a way to maintain it and are like, well, you gotta hold that a little bit more loosely and it's really about Jesus and there's like a whole bunch of people in between on that spectrum.

But then I just started, when I moved to the next issue, it was like, oh, the same pattern just revealed itself. The apologists were wrong. They were dishonest, maybe not knowingly always, but they were wrong. I was wrong about this thing that I thought was really important, and also the Bible is not true in the way that I thought it was. And that pattern just moved, it propagated all the way through the Bible until I got to Jesus and the same exact thing happened with Jesus. Yeah, it is strange to listen to apologists on this because it's difficult to try to squish

together these opposing magnets of God being the one who delivers the Sermon on the Mount, that the meek inherit the earth, but the tool of how, you know, God chooses to start life on this earth is evolution, where the meek and the weak die and the strong survive and the violent survive. So, that seems to be incredibly contradictory for God to want to do both of those things. For me, I could see how that, like, that took out a lot of dominoes for you, because there's the Bible wrapped in that, there's authority wrapped in that, there's humility of the ability to be wrong about your intuitions, like that is like a lot of dominoes going down. I could see why that would be so influential. I think for me, in theology school, it was really this idea that you watch the

society change first and then God changes in predictable ways. And that pattern, just having that pattern for whatever reason, was really difficult for me. And then what it opened up for me is that if humans, kind of this evolutionary idea, if we've been humans in this form for, let's say, 300,000 years, then for 300,000 years, we were just superstitious, confused humans before religion, before modern religion even shows up, suffering and dying for no reason. And then to extend that more, the thing that really obliterated my faith was, so there's then billions of years of animal suffering, violence, brutality, starving to get death, being eaten alive for no salvific reason. Because with the Atonement, you can kind of

make that work for humans. But we're talking about now billions of years of animal suffering, hundreds of thousands of years of confused human suffering, just so that, you know, in this last chapter, you know, God could reveal Himself and you could be right. All of that suffering was so that you could be right about the correct religion and that just broke down. Pete Hey, Brit, God's ways are higher than our ways. God's ways are higher than our ways. You're overthinking it. Brit I know, but that was the moment where I said, even if there is a God, that God is

evil and I'm not worshipping that God anymore because I just couldn't justify suffering at that level in order for me to be right about some truth so I get to go to heaven. It just made no sense to me. Yeah, it's funny because some of those things like what you just described, those started coming after I was already,

had more than one foot on the other side of the fence. And the pattern that we've always observed is the idea that things that have supernatural explanations end up having scientific explanations and it never goes the other way, right? I've heard you talk about this as well. The real fascinating thing that has happened for me as I've continued to be really interested in this space and I still watch a lot of apologetics channels and I still see a lot of these arguments and I watch a lot of biblical scholarship. I'm a big fan of Dan McClellan and the way that he breaks these things down. Is that since having left it behind and no longer believing it, I haven't encountered one thing that has caused me to question the decision. I've only encountered thing after thing after thing. I'm like,

well, if I'd have known that earlier, you know, and again, some people might be like, oh, this is just confirmation bias. You just want to continue to believe the thing. You've got the momentum of belief and now you're just doing it in this direction. And obviously, I'm a human. I have this general human psychology. I'm a victim of all the same cognitive issues that humans have. So sure, there's part of it that is cognitive bias. But I was able to question something that I held much more sacred than I hold my current worldview. You know, my Christian worldview was much more important to me than my current whatever the iteration I'm in right now. And I was able to let the truth lead me out of that. And so I hope that

I still have the openness for the truth to continue to lead me wherever it's gonna lead. But what I find is time and time again, the truth keeps pointing to this overarching idea, which is that this is humans playing a game, trying to figure out why the hell we're here, and these are the ways that we've done it through religion. Yeah. And that's the best explanation. And I don't regret, yeah, I don't regret studying theology because for me, it was the best place to learn about human nature. It teaches us what we

need and what we hope for and what we long for and what we fear. And so, I don't, even now as an atheist, I don't regret my time at theology because it was a fantastic place to learn about humans and to learn about myself. But people accuse me not only of cognitive bias, but also accuse me of like, oh, you're doing this and you continue to find these things because you're making money. And it's like, if I was driven by making money, I don't know what money you think is an atheistic spirituality. It's not great. I'm not selling any magic pills. I don't have a cult following. I don't have any branding. I don't claim to be special. If I really wanted to make money in the spirituality space, I would go back to teaching seminary, I would do apologetics videos on YouTube, or I'd jump into astrology and give people readings. You can make a ton of money on

TikTok doing that. So, that argument just kind of falls flat for me because there's just, I had no incentive to lose my way of income and lose my marriage and lose my sense of self and lose my community. I lost everything. Now I've rebuilt, but yeah, that cognitive bias argument just doesn't land for me quite the same way because if I was driven by cognitive bias or money, I would be doing something different than I'm doing right now, I feel like. Oh, yeah. I mean, listen, I of course get accused of, even though my deconstruction happened almost entirely before I moved to California, because we talked about it in 2020, people just assumed that's when it happened. So in little old Fuqua Verena, North Carolina is where I was struggling alone and losing my faith.

And actually moving to Los Angeles rekindled my faith because I came to a place where people talked about faith in much more nuanced and gray areas and I was like, I think I can get down with this. And so it actually prolonged my faith that then ended up collapsing again. The story will always be that Lincoln and I moved to California and, you know, fell in love with fame and fortune and then that's why we left. No matter how many times I dispelled that rumor. Does that still hurt? Like that's still, like, I still experience a little bit of pain. Like,

like you, you always have to, especially you, you're a much bigger public figure than I'll ever be, where you have to just accept that people will have misunderstandings of you and you just kind of have to accept that, but does it still hurt at some level? Oh, sure. Not being misunderstood, but also being misunderstood and having your motives questioned, not just questions, but having incorrect motives attributed to you, I'm just not mature enough yet to not let that hurt a little bit. But I've gotten much better. I don't know if we ever, yeah, I don't know if that ever not hurts, because if it didn't hurt, I don't know, it would, like, especially I'm thinking of like family members. So in Mormonism,

if you fall away from the church, there's this kind of quote that you were a lazy learner and that you wanted to sin. This has been said over the pulpit. And that like still to this day hurts me because I was nothing, if not, like I was not a lazy learner. I took this very seriously. And I also like look at my life, it's really not much different morally

than the life that I was living as a Mormon. Maybe I just, you know, use psychedelics more than when I was a Mormon. But yeah, it still stings a little bit. I don't know if it ever doesn't, especially from people you love or something like that. Yeah, well, and the thing that, you know, again, this isn't anything I calculated or understood would happen. I guess if I had a thought about it, I could have predicted it.

But you know, Link and I had become one of the prime examples of what you don't want to have happen to your kids, right? If you're gonna write a book about deconstruction, you better put us in it. But I find, the way I'm able to kind of deal with it is, you know, if we are brought, deconstruction is discussed in a really dismissive way and very, the analysis of deconstruction is very shallow in all the books that I've read

about it. And also the way that our motives are attributed to us and what we are actually up to and what this is actually about in a way that's really dismissive and demeaning. But the problem is, is if what really happened with me was primarily about me taking a hard look at the foundational truths of Christianity and finding them lacking, and that's really what happened to me, and it didn't have anything to do with sin, and it didn't have anything to do with desiring to be accepted or liked by the culture or whatever. Then that's just a much more difficult thing to argue. It's a much more difficult conversation to have. And so I don't blame

them for trying to attribute, and some of the smartest, most well-meaning people who are really trying to have a good heart about this and would probably have great conversations with me where they didn't actually purposely demean me or dismiss me, I think it's the only way that they can deal with what's going on. They have to make it about sin on some level or confusion on some level or priorities being in the wrong place or lack of teaching. It can't just be, hey, bro, it's

not true. And it's actually not that complicated to figure that out. But it would be devastating if that were the reality. And so I have a lot of forgiveness and understanding and compassion because every deconstruction book that I read, I can imagine myself writing it. And back to your question about this whole, you know, people accusing you of doing this for money. Obviously people have accused us of doing this for money because we're in Hollywood, right? And if we, like, especially with the way things are today, can you imagine how much money me and Link could make if we...

If you switch teams right now? If we switch teams right now. We came back, the book sales would be out of this world. The movie that we could make. The speaking gigs. Oh gosh. Oh my god. You could do a tour. I would clean up. And then the faith-based movie studio, TV and movie studio that we would start.

Right. Yeah. It would be phenomenal how much money we can make. And so it's laughable. There's just a lack. It's not about thinking it through. It's about, well, this is obviously what it's about, because it's just an old narrative and it's easy to grab that narrative off the shelf, because everybody's saying it. You know? Yeah. Like you, I find myself in a more compassionate space now where I understand why people are doing what they're doing.

So the analogy that I use is like, if a 10-year-old kid comes up to you and kicks you in the shins, you're like, kind of, what the heck? But if the mother comes and says, hey, my kid is autistic, there was a loud noise, he's having some hard times, instantly, because I understand know, what's happening. I instantly move from what the heck to like compassion. And I feel like I'm in that place now where like, I understand that when your identity and your belonging and your meaning and purpose and community, when all of that is built on this being true, then there's something even at a subconscious level, there's something scary about me and their ego's only choice, that brain's only choice

is to play defense. And so I can be compassionate to that and I can understand that. But it doesn't mean that my shin doesn't still hurt sometimes. Sometimes it's still, I can understand, I can be compassionate. I've gotten a lot better at how to talk to people in ways that bring their ego down so they're not playing defense so that we can connect human to human. I've gotten way better at that. My family relationships with active, you know, Trump Mormons. I've been better at that so that I'm able to have relationships with people that I truly care about. But yeah, to this day, there are family members where we're raising our

children together here in Boise. They've never once asked why I deconstructed or how my book's doing or anything about that. And there's a part of that that I just can't imagine that ever not stinging a little bit, but it comes from a place of love. Like I love this person. We're family and I can be compassionate and I can understand, but there may be always that element of a little bit of hurt. Yeah, yeah. I think that's just human. It's natural and normal, yeah.

So last thing for you. Yeah. This all has happened pretty quickly for you in terms of like what this, your public work looks like with the attraction that you got on TikTok and now you're doing the long form thing on YouTube and you've got the book. How do you see your, what we will call, ministry? Yeah.

Because I know you've been doing the spiritual director thing for a while and counseling people and helping people who are going through this. How do you see your future in terms of what percentage is this public work and what is, you know, helping clients? Yeah, it's a good question because I'm making this up as I go, right? This is an unchartered path and I talk to a lot of people in this space who are trying to make money in some way doing healthy spirituality with people. And we're all kind of doing it in different ways because there's certainly a market for it. There's a meaning crisis. There's the growing nuns that are, you know, still need resources but are not getting it from religion.

But we're all kind of making it up as we go. So for right now, my focus is, I'm in the middle of writing the next book, which is specifically on existential crisis, which I think I really just want to write a book that if I could have just given myself when I was in the deepest of suicidality and existential crisis, I want to be able to write that book to be able to give to my previous self, because I think it'll be helpful. And then I want to kind of move into, I have an opportunity with the Center of Non-Religious Spirituality, which is where I did my spiritual director training, to be able to now coach coaches. And so, I do, even though I love seeing clients one-on-one,

because I'm a mother of four children, there is kind of an emotional, I pay an emotional cost to hold all of that. And so I'm limited in what I'm able to do there because I have to make sure that I have enough emotional reserve in my tank to be able to be present when my kids get off the bus. My kids are still quite young.

So I'm wanting to move away from clients and move into kind of this new book that I hope will be helpful for people who are in the meaning crisis, but then also going into teaching spiritual directors how to do what I do so that we have more people that are kind of in this work of healthy spirituality without forcing you to believe things. I really believe that there's a lot of people that can benefit from that, a growing population of people that could benefit from that, and not enough people who are trained in that. I'm now to the point where I'm training therapists because therapists aren't trained in nihilism. They aren't trained in religious deconstructing

to nihilism. They aren't trained in religious deconstructed to nihilism, they aren't trained on existential fears, they aren't trained on the deep philosophical questions that kind of you and I were asking when we were in our kind of dark night of the soul. And so now I'm getting to the point where not only is there a need, there's also a gap where therapists don't really know how to deal with this with their clients sometimes. So I want to get more into the space of teaching the teachers and that might be kind of more of a sustainable model for me with the age of my children currently. So that's what's on the horizon. But thanks to you, next week I'll be on, thanks to you in three weeks, I'll be on Soul Boom with Rainn Wilson, which I'm super excited about. I'm gonna be flying to LA for that.

And then next week I'm on with John Vervecky, who's the expert in the meaning crisis. So this is all very exciting for me. I just, yeah, like I said, I just do this from home in my shed when my kids are at school, but I'm excited to be in these rooms, having conversations with people like you, these kinds of conversations that I just love to have.

So thank you for your support in my work and it's absolutely helping and that's what's on the horizon for me. Well, I'm excited for what's next, excited about that book. I think that one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you was I spent a lot of time talking about these things from a maybe From a perspective that might cause people to deconstruct or be interested in deconstruction

But I haven't been great at talking about the tools that you need in the midst of and after a deconstruction and there's not enough people doing that work and I think that That's why I want to point people to you. And so No Nonsense Spirituality I guess is what people can google and they'll find you. Across the board, yeah. I'm on Instagram. I spend a lot of time on TikTok just because it's always easy three minutes at a time to kind of post a thought here and there. And then my book No Nonsense Spirituality is available on Amazon. It just got uploaded to Audible as well. And my website also has courses, so my coaching schedule is often full, so if you find that you wanted to do coaching and it's full, the

main things that I work with with clients I have made into courses. So I have courses on religious deen construction, nihilism, feminist spirituality, things like that. So yeah, and just thank you for the support, Red. I so appreciate it. Thanks for being here, Britt. Hey guys, calling our even newest deconstruction episode. You started off talking about how it might be boring and you're getting tired of maybe having to talk about it. But I just was listening to it and went from fist pumping in admiration and agreement with Rhett

and his thoughtfulness and intellectuality about just spirituality being the nature of being a human who cares about other people in this timeline to having to pull over and cry after listening to Link talk about his ultimate gesture of empathy towards his wife. You guys kill me. You do not need to stop. Never stop. Love you. Bye.