Soul Boom - Faith After Doubt: Can Religion Evolve? (w/ Brian McLaren)

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

What happens when your faith no longer makes sense? Brian McLaren, author of Faith After Doubt and Life After Doom, joins Rainn Wilson for a deep dive into the personal and societal crises of faith that many are facing today. They explore the psychological impact of religious trauma, why so many struggle with the rigid dogma of organized religion, and how doubt can actually lead to a more profound, harmonious spirituality. The conversation also tackles the intersection of fundamentalist theology, climate change, and capitalism—unpacking how our deepest beliefs shape the world we live in. Thank you to our sponsors! Calm (40% OFF a Premium Subscription!): https://calm.com/soulboom MERCH OUT NOW! https://soulboom.com/store God-Shaped Hole Mug: https://bit.ly/GodShapedHoleMug Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to soul. This thing of religious trauma is a really, really big deal. And the problem isn't the Bible. The problem is how people who read the Bible bring assumptions about how it should be read and interpreted. I think there's a kind of faith that says, I want the truth no matter what it is. There's depth in our lives. We're talking about this reboot of our civilization on a different energy source. You're talking about a spiritual revolution?

Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Brian, thanks for coming on Soul Boom. So glad to be with you. I'm a big fan. Oh, good.

You should be, because I'm really that good. You wrote a book, Faith After Doubt, why your belief stopped working and what to do about it. I imagine this has to do with this idea of like, I'm so alienated from the church in contemporary society. And I so hate what evangelical fundamentalists are doing to our country and how they've kind of corrupted these beautiful texts and stories about Jesus.

And so what we tend to do is just like, I'm done. Yes. And Dr. Tima Bryant, who was on the show, said that sometimes people talking about their spirituality, they're talking about the thing that has the most kind of meaning and inspiration and uplift in their life. And sometimes when they're talking about faith and spirituality, they're talking about their source of their deepest trauma.

Yes. I've met so many people that because they've been traumatized or just like, oh, I don't want anything to do with God, I can't even think about it. The Bible makes me sick. I don't want to think about Jesus, and it's kind of like this, it's almost an adolescent, just kind of knee-jerk reaction to having had a traumatic experience. And as we know, I know, because I've been in therapy so lonely, you have to unpack traumatic experiences to kind of get at the truth.

Can you tell us a little bit about that part of the journey? Well, first let me say, yeah, this thing of religious trauma is a really, really big deal. And the number of people I hear from in my inbox, I mean, it's just, it's just this steady maybe and sometimes growing stream. And the pain, I think the reason it is so deep-seated is because religion and family often go together. And so when the number of people whose parents treat them like dirt because they're, they've changed one of their beliefs or. Or they come out and they're gay or they're, yeah. Yeah. Or they believe in science and then they're cast out.

And now it gets mixed with politics. So, you know, now your terrible sin is that you aren't voting for Trump, right? So it creates this thing that you can't get away from your family unless they totally cut you off or you totally cut them off. And so the trauma keeps being inflicted. every Thanksgiving or whatever, right? So it's much more primal than just some kind of ideological trauma. Yeah.

It's like it's family members. It's about belonging. Yeah. Yeah. Do I even belong in this family anymore? Yeah. Yeah. So I became interested in theories of human development.

And I started kind of, first I was exposed to this theorist, actually to help me be a better English teacher at a college. And then I just started reading all these different theorists. And I tried to synthesize everything I was reading in these four simple stages, simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony. And it became a way to try to get some nuance and understanding how all of us grow up, whatever we grew up with. Let's unpack that a little bit. I remember reading about it in your book. Simplicity is how you start with an understanding of an issue.

Like there's a bad guy and there's a good guy. Yes, it tends to be dualistic. It's us, them, good guy, bad guy. And it's very authority focused because when you're a child, you haven't been around the block too much. You need somebody to tell you. I find this in Gaza right now where on both sides, there's a good and there's a bad. And it really is very black and white on both the political left and the political right. And we haven't moved from simplicity to complexities.

Like, oh, this actually is a lot more complicated than I ever would have. possibly thought. I was in the West Bank once years ago and a Palestinian said to me, anyone who comes here knows how to solve the problem. After they spend a week, they think it might be harder than they expected. If they spend a year, they'll feel they don't even know, they don't even know where to begin. Yeah, where to begin. The move from simplicity to complexity is when we start to nuance and we start to say, maybe I should learn the history of this place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe I should try to understand the same. solutions that have been attempted and failed.

And maybe I really should listen to both sides and hear what each side's grievances are. So you begin to focus, but you're still in a kind of a fix-it mode. So what's the next stage? Complexity to... Perplexity. Perplexity, which is what the Palestinian friend said. So you're a year-in and you're like, I have no fucking clue how to do this. Yeah.

And perplexity is where we start to even question. For example, it's when people start to look at Israel and Palestine in general, and they start to say, gosh, this was part of the colonial project. And then they start to say, maybe our deeper problem is some of the assumptions about the whole colonial project. And so now they're going deeper and deeper. And oh, the colonial projects happened all over the world. And there's situations like Palestine that exist everywhere.

And then a person says, you know, if what is happening there is genocide, shoot, I'm an American. There was a kind of a genocidal thing that went on here. Who am I to talk about that when I haven't dealt it with it? And so now you, you, and I think some people stay in perplexity the rest of their lives. They're cynical, they're bitter, they're jaded, and it's understandable. And they kind of feel like there's no solution. So they throw up their hands. And then I think some people, the way I sometimes say it is they, if you spend enough time in your cynicism, you become cynical about your cynicism and you become skeptical of your skepticism and you start to judge your own judgmentalism.

And you say, is there some other way beyond this? And I think that what I call harmony, you could call it solidarity or humility, but it's that deeper, more spiritual love that really I think is at the heart of when you talk about a spiritual revolution. It's this bigger, deeper love that says, okay, I don't have a solution. I can't fix this. But I'm going to try to show up in this situation with some love. And maybe that becomes the catalyst that makes different kinds of solutions possible. I think what happens to a lot of people, they're brought up Protestant, Catholic. But this, I just had a long talk with a Hindu friend about how he's watching his family be in stage one Hinduism.

And if people are given a stage one version, simplicity version of their faith and they outgrow it they might not know that there are other more expansive more thoughtful versions of their faith and so they just throw out the whole thing a whole lot of people i think who hate religion what they what they feel is i outgrew the stage one simplicity religion that was given to me right right or maybe they went into the stage two complexity religion uh that they were and they found some places where they could live and that might work for 10 or 20 years and help them. And then some people feel like, gosh, I feel like I'm sort of done with that too.

And they're not even aware that there are other options for them. How do faith and doubt coexist? And a lot of people that are anti-faith think that faith is just this kind of like blind. Make-believe. Yeah. Kind of sheep. One of the things I've become really interested in since 2016 is I've just been studying bias trying to understand all the cognitive glitches we have where we think we're rational.

It's way harder to be rational than most people understand. And one of the most common biases is called confirmation bias. And confirmation bias is if I have a set of ideas that I'm very comfortable with, anything that doesn't fit in with them will bounce off. I either don't even hear it because I just don't want to pay attention to it. Or as soon as I sense, oh, this is an alien. idea that would disrupt my current arrangement. I have an emotional reaction to it, just throw it out. Can't be true. So confirmation by a super, super powerful. And for many people, a simplicity,

a stage one version of their religion becomes their confirmation bias for the rest of their life. And those are the people we tend to call closed-minded. They have a big, a lot of guards. They have a vigilant system to note any intruding thought that would disrupt. The fact is that can happen anywhere. It can happen for a political ideology, economic ideology. You know, anybody can be closed-minded. I think there's a kind of faith that says, I want the truth no matter what it is.

And, you know, you mentioned therapy. I think one of the things happens in therapy, therapists are people who develop the skill of helping us face truths about ourselves that we have guarded ourselves against and they sort of ease us into it I think or or ask us questions that help us oh so that's what I was doing oh that's how I misunderstood that you know have you had doubt oh yeah yeah what does that look like for you when I grew up I believe the people who told me that the earth was created in six literal days in four thousand 2004 BC. So I had to come to a place where I said that doesn't seem to match with all those

layers of rock you see in the Grand Canyon. So I had to go through a process to say the people I trust, the authority figures who told me this, I am not saying they're horrible people. I don't think they're right about that. And I had to give myself permission to think. What about this most recent journey of you being like Mr. Liberal liberal Christian dude? I think that can continues. I think that continues. I'll give me an interesting example in writing this more recent book, Life After Doom, I was trying to take the very worst news about the climate crisis and all of its interrelated crises, concentration of wealth, all the rest. I was trying to take it as seriously as I possibly could and not hide and not have my confirmation by his guard dogs, you know, defending me.

and I realized that I still have a belief in inevitable progress that I now think, yeah, that's not a real belief. Like it was still there. And I don't think that came from my faith, although there's a kind of more progressive Christian idea in inevitable progress. You know, more traditional Christians think that God's going to destroy the world and burn it all up anyway.

So progress is very limited in that mindset. And I think many progressive Christians have this progressive idea. Progress is inevitable. It will happen. And I think I realized, gosh, we could easily send ourselves back to the dark ages in the next 100 years. So it was this realization for me as a guy, you know, closing in on 70. So that shook your foundational kind of like liberal Christian belief that, hey, things are just going to get better and we're going to have like, you know, more and more kind of like. emotional and political and social progress and evolution and people are just going to learn to

love each other better and we'll get out of this okay that was kind of a confirmation bias for yourself so when you looked at the reality of climate and what potentially awaits humanity yeah that had to have shaken some i had to feel deep inside of myself this tension to say, am I willing to face some realities that I don't want to be true? And I'll tell you what I've noticed, partly because I've had to do this myself, and partly because I was a pastor and people would bring me their doubts constantly. And after I've written books about this, I have an awful lot of conversations with people working through these internal processes.

I had to realize so much of this is part of belonging, because all of us move from group to group where we get our primary belonging. So a person can grow up a conservative, whatever, a Christian, and then move to be a liberal Christian or the other direction. And then they realize, I was okay to differ with those people, but these people, I really like being with these people. If I have a different opinion with them, I wonder if they'll still accept me. And that's a huge part of doubt, you know,

because we have created groups that make agreement with certain beliefs be the standard for belonging. Something you raised in the book, in your book, Soul Boom, you had a quote from Eric Fromm about saying, he thought that the religion of the future would not depend on beliefs. And I just, that's something I've watched myself grow toward through the years. What if we were not, our boundaries, our boundaries. of in and out were not based on agreement with a certain set of beliefs or or and what would be and that's part of what you're grappling with too what would be kind of the essential if we do have beliefs what would they be if it wasn't beliefs what would it be raza aslan talks about this in

terms of Islam that in Islam it isn't like beliefs it doesn't work like Christianity like i believe that there's a father son and the holy ghost and this parable means that and this is literal and this isn't. It's what you do. And he says, religion is what you do. If you're doing shit, then you're in your faith. If you're not doing it, if you're not bowing to Mecca five times a day, if you're not giving to the poor, if you're not fasting in Ramadan, if you're not doing these actions, then you're not a Muslim. It doesn't matter what you, in here, how you interpret this phrase from the Quran or not. Yes. And I do think that, you know, moving past, does it, ultimately matter what we believe? Like it is, it's what we do. And I, and I, I feel that,

that same thing about love. Like, let's go back to the topic of love. I feel like, love is not just a gooey feeling you feel in the chest. Love is what you do. Like, how do you harness love and deep compassion into action? And if you're not harnessing it into action, who gives a shit? If like you love like, I, oh, I love humanity and you're not doing anything to help humanity or you, I love nature, but you're not doing anything to help nature, then fuck you, frankly. Here's the problem, though, when we have such huge, powerful, wealthy religions around the world, they are defining it based on what you believe. And so that ends up, I mean, that's something we all have to deal with, even if we don't want to

be part of it. I'm with you. And what's so ironic for me, as a person who identifies as Christian, you know, Jesus said exactly that. You know, by their fruits, you shall know that. And once he says, why do you call me Lord, Lord? And don't actually do what I say. So, and of course, that's been coming up in our politics in recent years so much where people who say that they're, you know, godly, religious spiritual group end up to finding themselves around a set of issues that allow them to not deal with other real problems like, you know, how are they going to treat the human beings who are escaping violence in Nicaragua and trying to get to the United States about it? That's a complicated issue. We could have all kinds of policy discussions about it.

But when you, it's very clear that these people hate those people. And they're supposed to be Christians. People say, that doesn't seem quite. right. So, yeah. Let's move to Life After Doom. Yes. This book is, I have a very complicated relationship with this book. And I admire so much what you're trying to do.

Folks, if you're looking for something that is going to blow your mind and kind of rock your world and really shift perspective, this is definitely the book. What you've undertaken is ludicrous. I can't understand why, like, I just kept reading it and like, why would you write a book like this? This is crazy what you're trying to do. You quote Father Richard Rohr about who, and you work with him at the Center for Action and Contemplation. And I love that coalition of those two forces that you need contemplation and you need action. And that the most important word in that phrase is the and that binds, you know, contemplation and action.

together. And you talk about contemplation being like how much reality can you take in. You start off this book with a bang and you talk about all the different possibilities of collapses. Can you just talk us through all the different collapses you describe in the book that are possibilities of outcomes with humanity facing specifically in this case climate change? Yeah. I think there are four main scenarios that are ahead of us. One is collapse avoidance. We get our act together in time that we don't get so out of sync with our beautiful, with our beautiful environment that our civilization collapses, collapse avoidance. So we limit carbon, we find new technologies, we get our shit together. We don't go to nuclear war with one another. And humanity kind of

lives in a kind of like in a balance. Yeah. Second, collapse, rebirth, where we do not get our act together in time. There is some sort of a collapse. But out of it, we learn some lessons. We say we're not going to do that again. Right. And whatever we were built could be hopefully something better.

A better world. Yes. A more harmonious world. That's what happened in Star Trek. That's right. There was a big conflagration in World War III. And then humanity got its shit together and with technology. Goes to the stars.

Goes to the stars. Fixed racism, fixed income inequality, lives in harmony. Yes. That's Star Trek version. And then the third is collapse survival that blow ourselves up, have a lot of problems. People survive, but they're blasted back into the pre-modern.

It's Mad Max. It's Mad Max Fury Road, is what you're talking about. It could be Mad Max. It could be Hunger Games. A lot of different possibilities. And then the fourth is collapse extinction. where, you know, we know that if we burn all of the fossil fuels that the oil companies currently own, that we will raise the temperature of the earth so much that there will be a mass extinction event

that could very easily include a whole lot of what we might call higher primate life, including our species. Yeah. Right. Okay. And what I noticed, and one of the reasons why I wanted to articulate four scenarios is because what I notice in my brain, as I was doing all this research, and I notice in other people, is we just want two scenarios. One says, everything's going to be fine. We're going to work it out.

And the other says, it's too late. There's nothing we could do. Let's go to Mars, like Elon Musk, like, jetty, and Earth, we fucked it up here. Let's go fuck it up on another planet. Yes. And what I notice about both of those, what I'm suspicious about with both of those, is that They give us permission to just go back to watching Netflix or just go back to scrolling on Instagram. They just give us permission to do nothing. One of the things I say in the book is that I don't think we can know which of those scenarios will happen, which is why we all need to show up and actually keep our agency

intact and hopefully turn toward each other and pull together rather than apart. One of the things that you have personal experience with is the incredible damage that a certain type of conservative theology around the Bible has to do with ecological destruction and its ties to capitalism. I found this section to be really revelatory and staggering. And your passion around it was serious. Can you tell us about what you write? Yes.

So I was brought up in a form of Christianity that, you know, millions and millions of people hold to in this country and around the world. And this view is that the Bible gives us predictions about the future. And it tells us that God plans to destroy the world. And when you believe that God plans to destroy the world very soon, then you have the sense. it's kind of like a going out of business sale. Might as well use everything we can as fast as we can. Yeah. There is, in fact, you feel you're being unfaithful to God,

as you understand it from your religion, to actually plan long term and think, I wonder if we ought to imagine this planet surviving for 1,000 or 10,000 years. So when you believe that the Earth is supposed to end. And where are the Christians getting this? Book of Revelations, there's going to be a mighty fire, and there's going to be this rapture. And is that it, basically?

And let me just say, this is another case where something we talked about earlier, people assuming they know how to interpret the Bible, because authority figures that they trust told them this, I could say to them, look, you don't have to throw out the Bible, just to understand that those authority figures were just dudes. They were just people. Yeah. So what is it specifically?

What does it say in the book of Revelations that says that the earth is going to be? So what they do is they take a little bit from the book of Daniel and the Hebrew scriptures, take a little bit from Matthew in the Gospels, and then take something for Revelation, these different books in the Bible. And they sort of weave it together. They find the most apocalyptic sentences. And they decide it's about the end of the space time universe, which is something that ancient people didn't even have a concept of.

Once you see through it, it's sad, it's tragic. Look, what people were talking about is what we're talking about is what we're, we're facing. They were talking about the collapse of their civilization. Everybody knows the Roman empire had this long, illustrious career, and then it collapsed. The Egyptian empires, you know, the great dynasties of China. They had their day, and then they collapsed. And I think what we're seeing in the Bible is people talking about the collapse of the system that they're part of. We, in a sense, absolutized this to be the end of the universe. And what people don't realize, is that belief in a strange way,

I wish I didn't understand this, but I do, because how I grew up, it brings a certain weird kind of comfort. It brings a lot of psychological damage as well. If we were able to heal the planet, that would prove fundamentalism wrong, therefore healing the planet really isn't not an option. We'd really rather not happen.

We'd rather the planet just, we suck up the resources of planet Earth, which goes to the book of Genesis and the idea of having dominion over the earth. Can you talk about that? In the book of Genesis, there's this phrase that we latched onto. Now, how it originally was intended,

we could have a great debate about that. But the way it got latched onto is that God says to the original humans in this creation story that I think is incredible poetry, rich and full of meaning, making really powerful political statements in its day that we don't get. But God says, you can have dominion. And we hear that we're dominion, and we think it means domination.

What do we know about when the book of Genesis might have been written? Exactly. We're talking three, four, five thousand years ago, one of the most ancient kind of texts. By the way, if I could just play with that for a minute, to just help people see how fascinating when you bring a literary approach to the Bible it is. The story of the original creation starts with hunter-gatherers, naked hunter-gatherers living in a garden. They're the people who are the image-bearers of. God. In the time when this was written, hunter-gatherers were dirt. The people who mattered were the

kings and pharaohs and everybody sitting in their thrones, fully clothed with a lot of servants, right? So when you say that God sees the dignity of naked hunter-gatherers living in a garden, you're saying something very political. You're saying these people who treat people like slaves don't understand the dignity of people. So that word dominion could have had this super liberating meaning in the original context, but we interpret it for our uses and it gives carte blanche to human beings to suck out all the oil and burn it as fast as they can without any thought of even the fact that it would run out, you know. When I first started being sort of concerned about global crises, I wrote a book about this years ago, peak oil was a big

fear because we're so dependent on oil. Before people were worried about climate change, they were we'll run out of oil and our economy will have nothing to run on and we'll have a collapse that way too. So, yeah, we're in this situation where we've interpreted those texts. So how do you connect dominion over the earth and kind of end times apocalypse in kind of longing for an end time apocalypse with Jesus coming down and the salvation and the rapture? How do you connect that to capitalism? When people have been taught from birth, a different kind of fundamentalism, a fundamentalism of economics, that says it's your right, maybe your responsibility to make and hoard and keep as much money as you can. Yeah.

That is a theology of the materialist West. Yes. When that is your understanding from home. You can't even debate it. If you debate it at all, you're a communist, socialist. you put into some kind of false dichotomy. Oh my gosh. In your book, I think you quoted Jijek, who said

it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Right. The world is based on markets. We're a part of market forces. Yes. And those market forces are larger than God himself. I remember having an argument with somebody once. He said, I think that

recycling is stupid and evil. And I said, why do you think that? said because the time it takes you to clean out a plastic container and throw it away, you could make a lot of money during that time that's worth more than the money that you're saving from the plastic bottle. And I just remember thinking, this is perfect sense. If your only measure of everything, time equals money. And that's your cost benefit analysis. And when you do that, nobody notices that the earth is being plundered and pushed to the edge of stabilization, where our own children and grandchildren won't have a world that is as good as the world we inherited,

which wasn't as good as the world our grandparents inherited and so on. And just going along with that, you talk about how life is about gathering wealth in this world and seeking salvation. And huge social impacts from that too, because if my moral mandate, I mean, even deeper than moral, It's just what life is about is me making as much money as I can, then it's just not my responsibility to think about how this might hurt other people. It's about me. And I'm doing wholly righteous work when all I worry about is me.

And a capitalist would say, hey, listen, if people care about ecology, then companies are going to care more about ecology and they're only going to buy stocks in companies that care about ecology and they're only going to buy products from companies that care about ecology. And then the market itself will correct and become more green. What do you have to say around that? In our current crisis, the markets and technology are doing a lot more good than politics. In other words, there really is some truth to the fact that people are seeing there's money to be made in making solar panels. And so we're going to make a lot of solar panels. There's money to be made and switching to electric cars or electric heating for our homes.

And that's working, not fast enough. And the part that we're not dealing with is it takes a lot more fossil fuels to make a whole lot of electric cars faster. So, yeah, it's complicated. But my hunch is, and I think it's pretty hard to argue against this, if money is our ultimate value, Well, one of my mentors said to me, what you focus on determines what you miss. And if all we are measuring is profit and we don't have a way of measuring harm, harm to the earth, harm to people, then we won't see our harm and we will see our profit. What is more important than financial gain and market forces? If we said that well-being, the well-being of the whole is what's really the greatest gain, I had to do a lot of thought experiments when I was writing this book, if we said we could get another three generations of people

living really nice, pleasant lives like we live, like many of us live. If we could get that for three more generations, how many millions and billions of people for the next 500 years after that would have to live horrible, horrible lives? We have no way of taking those future lives into account. This is where, you know, an indigenous wisdom, they said, never make a decision without thinking seven generations into the future. And we could do this. We could learn to think longer term.

We wouldn't get it 100% right, but at least we would try. We don't even have a way of trying now. I saw this great Native American saying from the Cree Nation, you've probably heard it before, only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money? That's it. And this is where people think, oh, this, some people think, oh, this sounds hard to make this change.

If we actually started loving the things that we depend on, you know, that matter to us so much, oh, my goodness, life would be better. Something that we're in great agreement with, because I do a lot of work in climate. I do a little bit of work in climate. And climate is, it's like Gaza. And it's like Palestine. It's like once you, at first blush, it's like, oh, reduce CO2. It's not that hard.

Then you start to dig in and it gets a lot more complicated. You know, my great addiction is the Amazon one-click purchase where all of a sudden I need a new iPhone case and I've pressed a button and for $3.99 at my door the next day is a nice cardboard box with bubble wrap inside. and a little iPhone case that's in a case, the amount of plastic and petroleum that's used to make my petroleum-based iPhone case is there. And mom-and-pop shops have been put out of business and these Amazon workers are getting $17.32 an hour

working like drones to deliver me my iPhone case. That's another aspect of climate change. And it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper. So we're in great agreement that, you know, when you start to unpack the climate crisis, gets very quickly into perplexity. Yes. And if you're going to move to harmony,

I think we're in great disagreement. You kind of tar and feather hope into being something that is contrary to action and that hope can be incredibly dangerous. And can you tell me, tell us your thesis around hope? Yeah, well, the way I said, the chapter in the book is hope is complicated. And I think what my assumption was going into the book is that hope is just one of the few purely good things in life.

I had a pretty intense bout with depression in my teenage years. And so I sort of realized if I'm not careful, I'm going to get sucked into despair and cynicism long term. So this sense that there's a way we can orient our lives that's positive and not sucked into that gravity, is super important to me. So I was surprised when I came upon this whole big bank of literature that talks about the downsides of hope. And I noticed it in my own brain as I was doing the research. And here's what I would feel.

As soon as I would find one story, people are finding out how to expand kelp forests in the oceans, and that's good for climate change and good for all kinds of creatures. I'm like, oh, everything's going to be fine. And that hopefulness that everything will be fine, in a sense, lets me sink back into a kind of denial, even though I might still acknowledge there's a problem.

I'm off the hook for needing to do anything about it. On the other hand, you realize in a moment. See, that's what I just fundamentally disagree with. You draw this kind of like false dichotomy that hope, necessitates in action. And time and time again, you go to like, you'll feel hope and you'll be passive. You'll feel hope and you won't do anything. You'll experience hope and you'll think, you'll live in denial like you just said, and everything

is going to be fine. Whereas for me, I see the opposite as I see hopelessness and despair. Yes. There is no way to function. There is zero way to, um, undertake action if you're feeling hopelessness and despair and pessimism and cynicism. There is not a way out if you feel those things. So can someone live in kind of like blind hope?

Can someone live in a kind of a dopamine kind of like, what is that in Brave New World, like where they're all eating the drugs and they're just kind of like these doped out denial filled hope creatures that aren't do anything? Is there a possibility of folks doing that? Yeah, but if you don't have hope as a foundation to undertake and build action, you're really fucked. And I, because I think there's a, well, I have another point, but go ahead. Yeah, no, and I fully agree with you. And that's the flip side, that if people reach a place of despondency, then they are similarly inactive. And it seems to me between those two extremes is this place where we keep our agency

and we in a sense have to live with a commitment to do all we can and everything we can with the best attitude that we can. And what I disagree with is living between those two extremes because I feel like you live with hope and you undertake action. It's the same as love. Yes. If you feel love and you're not taking action, for the love that you feel.

If you love your brother and your brother gets cancer and you're not showing up and quitting your job to be at their side and give them meals, then that's not really love. If you are feeling hope, but you're not doing anything about it, that's not really hope. It's something else.

I don't know what you would call it. So that's where I disagree with you that there's the two extremes. And what I think it is, is this is where I get a little conspiratorial. I think it's a little bit of like hope, is the, it's the place where the privileged get to sit. They get to kind of sit in their ivory tower of privileged hope

and not do anything. And maybe there is some truth to that. You know, I think there might be in suburban L.A. cul-de-sacs near here. There might be a lot of very hopeful people that are just one-click buying countless things, not doing anything about the climate and living in a kind of like a,

a stupefied hope. Yes. Which I can understand that some more radical elements would kind of be like, fuck you, you and your hope. Like get out there and do something. But again, that's not really what hope is. Hope has to be a motivator. Otherwise, it's just, it's something else.

But it's not hope. Yes. I don't think we disagree. I agree with you on that. I think the right kind of hope, the healthy kind of hope that we all need, I think it enthuses our action. And in fact, the people who, like I quote Jane Goodall in the book,

who, you know, she wrote the book on Hope. Yeah, she's called The Book of Hope. Yeah. And I revere her. I love her. And look at her action. She's still like. Exactly right.

Now she's in her night. Do you know what I heard about Jane Goodall? She's in her 90s. She can't really travel anymore. Although I did an event with her on climate. and she was doing like whiskey shots backstage at like 94 or something. It was pretty, it was pretty badass. I was like, wow, I wish I wasn't an alcoholic and could do shots with you backstage.

But now I heard that she is going to do hologram events. She's going to go and there's going to be a hologram of her appearing and speaking because she can't physically do it anymore. But she's going to give until she drops, she is going to work at healing there. Yes, I should say she exemplifies that and another woman in her same decade of life, Joanna Macy. I don't know her. And she wrote a book called Active Hope and that's exactly what she was trying to say. So they, I think, exemplify this.

And in fact, I really, because I revere Jane so much, she defines hope as the will to keep working, the will to keep trying, the will to keep living. that's the kind of hope exactly that I think we need. And when you're defining hope that way, exactly right. I don't want to problematize that kind of hope. I want to problematize the other kind of hope. I should also say, in my experience in the climate change world, there are a lot of people who have been working super, super hard for, you know, not just in a superficial way, but five years, 10 years, 15 years, and they're so disappointed in our political leaders for not getting us more, getting us farther down the road, that they find that hope, their hope fails because they had a, yeah, a psychologist friend of mine who's a research psychologist who studies hope, says, you know,

hope is one of the most powerful psychological markers of a good life that you can find anywhere. The evidence of it is far, far reaching. And he said in his research, he tends to define hope as having a will and having a way. But he says, where we get in trouble is when we have the will, but we lose the way. We don't see a way to get from here to there. And I think that's going to be one of our big challenges in the coming years. One of the things that I have gained from my Baha'i faith is that there's a concept in the Baha'i faith. is that there's a concept in the Baha'i faith

that has to do with the three stages of action, which is knowledge, volition, and action. So part of the problem is that center one, volition is the issue, which is like you have all this knowledge about climate. We know what's wrong on a number of different levels, and you can read 27 different books and get 27 different viewpoints,

all addressing the same question. we kind of know what the action is that we collectively need to take. We need to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce or eliminate our emissions. Yeah. But then what's that will piece? Without hope, you won't have the will. Yes. So you've got to have that volition piece that makes you want to do something.

Yes. But going into the action on an individual level, this is where it gets so tricky. And I get lost myself. I put in, you know, I'm rich, I've got some money, I put in solar panels. That's great. Yeah. I try and recycle better, even though that's kind of a crock of shit. You know, what do we do?

You're a college grad, you're 26, you're working in a Starbucks, you're living in your parents' basement, you're trying to find your career, you're despondent over the state of the world. You're like, well, what the hell can I do about the climate? So what is the action? I guess I'll pose that to you. What is the action that we can take? And I know you get there a little bit more in the end of your book when you talk about your light and shedding your light and bringing your light to the world.

Yes. You know, Bill McKibben, who I think is one of the heroes of he's been beating this drum for a long time. Bill says, if you're asking, what can I do as an individual to make this better? It's to stop seeing yourself just as an individual and to take your individual strength and link it up with others. Nice. He's very wise in what he's saying there. Because the individual actions that we do, I think, are important, but it's not going to get us where we need to go.

We're talking about this reboot of our civilization on a different energy source. Are you talking about a spiritual revolution? It's stop talking about a spiritual revolution. Exactly. You're kind of a Christian rock star, but I want to know about this transition. went from growing up evangelical to having kind of an altogether different idea of what it means to be a Christian. I think a lot of people will be interested in that story. You know, when you grow up

something, you just think it's normal. I learned later that I had grown up in a fundamentalist family. It wasn't the fighting fundamentalist carrying angry signs, loving people, but I knew I was in trouble in middle school. I loved science. I would go to the library and bring home piles of books about trees and snakes and stars and weather. I just loved all that stuff. I loved nature, anything having to do with nature. And evolution made so much sense to me. And my Sunday school teacher one day said, well, I must have asked a question. I don't remember asking it. But I remember his answer. He said, well, you have to make a choice. You either believe in God or evolution. And I remember thinking, okay, you know, four more years than I'm out of here. And plus, I loved music. And I played in a rock and roll band

when I was a teenager and that was now fundamentalists like rock and roll, but then they didn't. Literally, the question was the church that you went to was like the earth is 3,000 or 6,000 years old or whatever. And there's no way that evolution and God and the Bible can coexist. Yes. People would be surprised how many people are still in that camp. I mean, I meet people all the time who are 17 or 22 or 30. And they say, yeah, that's how I'm still recovering. from being taught that. And what happened to me is I think in my mind, I kind of had my escape route. And then I ended up having this very kind of powerful spiritual experience at age 15 or so.

Let's talk about that. What happened exactly? I want to do a deep dive. Some friends invited me on a retreat. We didn't have retreats in my church, but they had something called a youth retreat. I think the main reason I went, I certainly wasn't going for the spirituality. He was more social, and there were a couple of very pretty girls. Sure.

It's always about the pretty girls when you're 15, isn't it? That's right. One of the things that happened I'd never experienced before, the leader of the retreat sent us off for an hour to just be quiet by ourselves. And kind of told us, you can pray and see what comes up. And I wasn't really sure I believed in God at this point. And so, in fact, I remember exactly the prayer I uttered, I said, I don't even know if anybody's there.

I don't know if you're real. I said, but I guess if I'm going to ask for something, I hope before I die, I will see the most beautiful things and experience the most beautiful emotions and be able to do something good in the world. And I sort of said that prayer and then swatted mosquitoes

and brushed off bugs because I was sitting in a tree. And so later that night, a couple of my friends and I snuck away as people do on retreats. And we were sitting on this hillside. It was dark, beautiful. I think it was October. No drugs involved?

No drugs, no alcohol. And I went away from my friends a little bit, and I just sat looking up at the stars. And I just had this feeling, I am looking at the stars, but I am being seen. That was sort of the feeling. I wasn't expecting it. It was very emotional. I started to cry, started to laugh. I thought, am I going crazy?

I was a little nervous about it. So you felt kind of the presence of the divine in the sense of the divine looking down on you, witnessing you? And I'll tell you that... Because I'd love to get in a little bit deeper. Yeah, well, I'm happy too. I always love the mystic transcendental experiences because I think that there's such an important part

of being a human being. Yes, yes. Like what exactly happens in the thought processes? Like, talk us through. Okay, well, I'm having this feeling first that I am loved. I just feel I am seen and I am loved. You know, I think for a teenager to actually feel that on some deep level is kind of a big deal. But I also looked around and I thought every blade of grass on this hillside is loved.

And there was cows behind a barbed wire fence and the cows are loved. And I just had this feeling of being in the presence of divine love. And what was powerful for me about that is I think the fact that this sort of deep personal experience was primarily about being loved and wanting to respond with love. I think that kind of set the stage, you know, for what followed. I went over and my friends were talking a little ways away. I got up and went over to them. And when I arrived and sat down, I'm getting emotional thinking about it now.

I heard one of my friends say to one of the others, I really love you. And it was just this friendship expression of love. And I thought, back to my prayer, I thought, I think I'm seeing and hearing the most beautiful thing in life right now. And it was just, yeah, it was a night that sort of shook me up. Wow. A deep cosmic love. Yes. I say in soul boom about how the hippies and the Christians were right, where God is love, you know, as opposed to God is a bearded, judgmental old white man.

Yes. I know for me, too, when I get that kind of cosmic connection, which I don't think you need ayahuasca to have. Yeah. I think that you can cultivate it and experience it. Nature certainly helps. Yeah. It's hard to have that in a break room, in an office building, in a strip mall off the interstate. It's much more difficult to have that experience, I imagine.

Yeah. But in every faith tradition in the world, you know, this idea of interconnectedness, and the power and mystery of love to bind us. And I think when we become sensitive to it, we become vulnerable to it. It sort of hit me the other day I was getting on a plane going down the aisle. And I just had this feeling I was looking, you know, in the ABC roads and the DEF roads and just looking at faces and thinking,

every one of these people is precious. And I remember about halfway down the plane, there was a mom, I would say, you know, maybe in her 50s and a son, I'm assuming it was a son who had some special needs. He was probably in his late 20s and she was attending to him and helping him and getting him settled. And I just had this feeling, there is that love. I was a pastor for many years and I know one of the things I have some sensitivity to

is parents who are caring for special needs children, just what heroes they are and how, you know, there's just a whole. depth and range of life in that and suffering and gentleness and terror and everything else. And I just, as I'm walking down the aisle, I'm getting choked up thinking I'm surrounded by amazing people, you know. So yeah, it, it. And that's hard to do on an airplane. Father Gregory Boyle told an airplane story about realizing that path of loving service in a Christ-like devotion is best found on an airplane and helping people put their bags away

because everyone is fighting now for the overhead space. So no one talks about how the airlines started charging for bags. And that's the reason everyone has their bags and they're trying to carry them on and anxiously trying to board quicker so they get the overhead space. But I remember one time flying, I think the airplanes are such a good metaphor

for the human condition. Yes. It takes this like random assortment of humanity and like sticks them together in a metal tube for, you know, anywhere from two to 12 hours. I remember I was flying to New Zealand for a job. And the plane was laid and I was going. You know, my travel plans had changed and there was a thing I had to do.

And I was just so in my, in my own shit, you know. I had a similar experience where then there was like, they kind of stopped the loading. I'm like, why are they stopping the people filing on? And because they had to wheel a guy in a wheelchair, but it wasn't just a guy in a wheelchair. Like he had lots of physical special needs. He had like catheter tubes and maybe like oxygen. And like, you know, he could only move a couple fingers and they had caretakers with him.

And again, it just, it's a moment like that just shifted my heart so much. Like, oh, I'm so grateful I have use for my limbs. But, you know, God bless this beautiful. spirit and the people taking care of him. Yes. Voting all those hours to the care of like changing a catheter bag and like it stops in your tracks. It does. Yeah, it does. And sometimes in surprising places, I've always been a big fan of a singer-songwriter named Bruce Coburn and he has a line around. Canadian. Yeah, around every evil there gathers love.

Bombs aren't the only thing that fall from above down where the death squad lives. And when you just see, here's pain, here's suffering, here's evil, but love rushes in, you know. But Bruce Coburn also said if I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die. So you're picking and choosing the Coburn lyrics. In fact, that's a relevant example because I've always wondered how he intended that song, you know. Is it ironic or is it a statement on kind of militarism or something? Exactly, yeah. I remember him playing it in concert.

And when he started singing it, all these people started like shouting in a sort of bloodthirsty, yeah, go get him away. And I thought, I don't think that's how he intended this song. Right, right. It's kind of like Springsteen and born in the USA. It's kind of like a cultural commentary. A quote of yours that has to do with this that I shared with like everyone that I know last night. Love all of God's creation, both the whole of it and every grain grain of sand, love every leaf. every ray of God's light.

Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire universal love.

So I love how specific that is, because you're just like, start with a leaf. And I'm quoting Dustyevsky, there, yeah. Oh, this isn't you? No, I wish it were. I told everyone it was Brian McLaren. Well, I wish I could take credit. That's Dostoevsky. The only thing I can take credit for is appreciating the quote, just like that. And he was kind of a sick fuck. But that's an amazing quote. Nonetheless, there we go, Dostoevsky. But can you talk a little bit about this? Yeah, and that's one of his characters who's saying that. Is that from Brothers Karamazza?

Yes, okay. And what drew me to the that quote was this sense that when you appreciate a specific thing and you see its beauty, it's glory, its uniqueness, it's fleetingness, but it's wonder still. I mean, simple things like that can take us to then see, oh, you know what, there's depth in our lives. This isn't just about checking social media hits. And, you know, it's not just about my IRA. or, you know, all the things we obsess about.

There's this depth. And I feel like that's part of what, you know, the kind of spiritual revolution that you write about. We want to help people see that there's some depth there. And there's humor and silliness and outrage, but there's also this depth. Well, I kind of feel like life and consciousness is what you pay attention to.

So if you love a leaf and then you love an ant crawling on the leaf and you love the light falling on the ant on the leaf, and that's where your focus is, then that love spreads out as a ripple. And this is so hard in contemporary society with all the anxiety and depression and loneliness, it's hard for young folks to shift that focus on love. I'm just thinking about this sitcom I used to watch called The Office. And one of the things that I think made it so delightful is that you have people who are somewhat annoying and cloying at times. But nobody ever sinks into permanent disdain for their office

mates. I mean, that's a certain kind of redemptive triumph, I think. Yeah, I love the redemptive triumph of the office. You heard it here. That's fantastic. And I think, too, there's, in the leftist circles, love has become very unpopular because if you love things, then you kind of accept them the way they are. And how can you have love? and revolution happening at the same time, even though Martin Luther King managed to do it quite well, as did Gandhi and affect kind of the largest social transformations that civilization has ever, they've affected larger social transformation than a lot of the, than any of the, like, revolutionaries have, but love is kind of unpopular on the political right and the political left. So that's a true

revolutionary act as being in the center and loving things with as deep a possible compassion as one can muster. You know, as the old quote from Nietzsche, I'm not sure if Nietzsche has ever been quoted on Soul Boom, but he said, that's about to change. It's about to change. He said, beware when fighting the monster, lest you become the monster. So that's, and that's a big, you know, lesson from the left. And I talk about it in Soul Boom. And maybe I've talked about it on this podcast, forgive me if I'm repeating myself, folks, but I grew up in Nicaragua for three years. And got out right before the revolution, right before the Sandinista Revolution. And, you know, all of these great ideals were going to overthrow Samosa, who's an authoritarian dictator,

we're going to take control of the resources, we're going to distribute them to the people. And thereafter, quickly, there were a lot of health clinics in schools that were opened. Of course, it doesn't help that they were attacked by the contras and isolated economically, so they didn't get really a chance to thrive. But, you know, Ortega, the head of that revolution, is still in power and is one of the worst authoritarian on the planet. Yes. So it's like if your goal is just seeking power and the overthrow of power and you're putting

everything down to power dynamics in a very kind of like Foucault, Marxist postmodern way, where you just break everything down to politics. because politics is literally the study of the dynamics of power. Then you get power and then what do people do with power? So I think we have to have a whole new paradigm of getting out of this kind of endless discussion about who's empowered and power and empowered. And that's kind of a radical thing to say. I mean, there's probably a lot of activists that are like, wait a minute, you're a white male and you've got all this power and privilege.

The other people need power and privilege. It's like, yeah, but if we're not. we don't change the inner dynamics and bring some kind of deep, true revolutionary love to our interactions, then we're just going to create a situation like happened in Nicaragua. I think when we talk about that kind of deep spiritual revolution kind of stuff, I think a whole lot of people say, oh, my gosh, it's so idealistic, it's so unrealistic. And they're right. I mean, the fact is people who have inspired us over the last however many thousands of years, right,

2,500, 3,000 years for almost all of our great religious leaders. They had these ideas thousands of years ago, and it's questionable how much progress we've made on some days. So I think also just the holding up of a mirror to us to say, you can succeed in having a violent, revolution against a violent regime and not realize, well, as someone I quoted in my book, Baya Kamalafe says, your solution to the problem can perpetuate the problem. So if we really want solutions, it does require some kind of slowing down and going a level deeper. Yeah. Let's go back to your story here. You have this mystic experience at 15, but then all of a sudden you're at loggerheads with the fact like, hey, I love science and how can I?

either choose the Bible or evolution. I became a lit major in college, and now that sort of makes sense because in many ways, I think my instinct was the problem isn't the Bible. The problem is how people who read the Bible bring assumptions about how it should be read and interpreted. Just like Bruce Coburn, if I had a rocket launcher, is what he's trying to do there actually advocate violence, or is what he's trying to do is say, look, when you see other people feeling being violent, you can very easily just want to respond in kind, right? And so what that,

I think, was part of my struggling with is, are we allowed to read the Bible literarily rather than literally? Well, let me, I'm going to put a pause here. Yeah. Okay. I was just on this Christian podcast, The Heretic Happy Hour. Do you know them at all? I've heard of it, yeah. I love Christian. I have a love, hate relationships with Christian. But I really do admire, as a Baha'i, so much of the devotes. of Christians. Yeah. But this is the thing I don't get is, and I really don't get this. In the Bible, all it talks about at the beginning of Matthew is like, he teaches in parables.

Oh my God, all he talks in parables. He's talking parables. Jesus, why do you teach in parables? Why do you always talk in parables? Parables, parables, parables, parables. Similes, metaphors, illusions, stories. And Jesus explains it. And then who decides?

It just seems so random to me what phrases and what stories are literal and which are metaphorical. Because there's tons of stuff in the Bible that Jesus will say, like, I am the path. Well, we know he's not a path. Yes. He's a human. Yes. Well, he's in human form. Yes.

But that's been decided, oh, that's a metaphor. Yes. But they say, oh, Jesus will come on the clouds. oh, he's actually going to be sitting on clouds. Like that's, he's not going to be coming in metaphorical clouds. He's going to be sitting on a cloud. That's just been decided. But here's the deal.

Liberal Christians do this the same as other ones. There are, oh, no, no, no, but that's real. Well, who decided that? Well, that's metaphorical. No, but no, no, but that's real. And like the resurrection, like I challenged this pastor about it. Like, aren't we, isn't the resurrections, is the most beautiful thing.

Like it's, you know, that's what happens in the fall. Like the leaves fall and the plants seem to die. And then they are resurrected. The phoenix from the ashes. We can be lost and then we can see. Yeah. We are dead and we are found. We are lost and found.

We are resurrected. Jesus was resurrected. Did his body, did his corpse with the holes in it, like flowed up and up? Why is God up there? Wouldn't God be here or there or? or whatever, like, and I'm not trying to, you know, to a lot of people, that's very an important part of their belief that, but why can't that be metaphorical and people, and most Christians would be like, well, no, but that, that.

I believe in the metaphor of the Bible, but I believe that in the bodily resurrection of Christ that his corpse floated up to be with his dad, like literally his father, like, as if the heavenly family works in the exact same way that there's, there's a man who has sperm that gets injected and then has like an offspring that shares a DNA. Why isn't he the metaphorical son? And why isn't it a metaphorical resurrection? How does this shit work? Because as a Baha'i, we're red letter Bible readers.

Like, what did Jesus say? Because that's what I care about. I don't care what Paul said, you know, 40 years after the death of Jesus as much. I mean, he think he's certainly a brilliant and wise man. I bet he didn't even meet the guy. I don't really care what happened 100, 200 years later or at the convocation of worms, what they decided how the Trinity worked or anything like that.

Like, I care about what Jesus said and what he did. And he keeps talking about how he teaches in parables. Yes. So I'm all about like, okay, let's look for the parables. And then I just don't get it. Can you please explain for this very lost and curious behind? Well, what you're saying is that Christians can't seem to get their act together and how to interpret the Bible, including Jesus. Yeah, I'd say you've nailed it.

Yeah. And maybe the problem is that they assume they're only going to get the one right interpretation. And that probably has a lot more to do with power than it does with actual understanding. So how is that? I remember I was on a long bus ride once with a rabbi, and she said to me, I don't get what you Christians arguing about the Bible, like somebody's going to get the right interpretation. She said, for us Jews, she said, the Bible is a bottomless well of meaning. I just love that phrase.

And she said, what we think it's about is to stir up conversation because it's not important that somebody else had an idea. It's important how we think. And if it stirs up our own thinking, that helps us become more thoughtful people and we're in a better or a better place for that. And in a way, I think that's part of what could happen as a result of a lot of folks dropping out of organized religion. I think they're dropping out of an organized religion that has abused its own texts, that has in a sense been its own worst enemy. And maybe when people almost throw the Bible out like it's worthless, a few people will. sneak back and say, hey, did you see what's going on in that story? The religious leaders never

told us this, but man, there's really cool stuff going on. That's been my experience. Yeah. But it involves giving ourselves permission first to understand that ancient people were not stupid and they took all this stuff literally and we're smart and we don't. I think ancient people store, look, they didn't have TV reception wasn't good. Internet speed was not good. storytelling was their way to do science. It was their way to do psychology. It was their way to do political science. They worked with the world through stories.

You feel it in ancient stories. You feel it, especially when you read indigenous stories. One of the things I did some years ago, I taught a course on origin stories. And so a lot of people don't know, but there are like two origin stories in the first two chapters of Genesis in the Bible. Took those two stories. And then we took stories from... It was Adam and Eve and God created the earth? What's the other one?

Yeah, the first one is God creates the earth and then creates humanity last. And then the second one, God creates a garden and then makes Adam and Eve and brings all the animals to Adam, or to Adam to name and that sort of thing. And those two different stories in Genesis 1 and 2 use different names for God. And so now scholars believe that they came from melded from two different traditions. came in two different lines. But that's interesting, the book of Genesis as an indigenous origin story, the same as like a Navajo or Navajo, you know, origin story or a, yeah.

And when I did that, we would read them out loud. And then I'd invite the students to just say, what did you notice? Well, after you've done two or three or four, you start to notice certain patterns and certain differences. And it was just an electric, you know, educational experience for me as the teacher, at least. And so if we allow that ancient people were grappling with the tool that they had, they didn't have laboratories, they didn't have micrometers, they had stories. And I think that's how we should read any sacred text. You know, you realize there aren't that many places where people can talk about spirituality where somebody isn't trying to sell them.

I saw online like you're not very popular with the evangelicals. like they'll literally rail against you from the pulpit. So what happened there? I think because I challenged especially the idea of the Bible as a liter that you have to read it literally and that it's inerrant and that sort of thing. I just think that's disrespectful to the Bible. I think the Bible's way more interesting than that. And I think history shows that that way of reading the Bible has caused a super big amount

of harm and still does and its worst harm. I hate to say it may be out in the future still. So I was outspoken about that. One of the litmus tests in the last 20 years or so in the evangelical world is whether you treat LGBTQ people as equals or not. And I think for many people, that was the last straw for me. I've heard so much about you and getting to know you and your work over this last week as I was researching.

It's been an honor. It's a tough and a difficult and challenging and wonderful book. I urge people to check it out. Thanks for coming by. And you're signed up for the Soul Boom Spiritual Revolution. Oh, man. You're a card-carrying member. I'm in.

I'm in. I'm in. Wonderful. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.