Within Reason - #103 Rhett McLaughlin - Why I Left Christianity

Episode Date: April 20, 2025

Rhett McLaughlin is a comedian best known for creating the internet’s most-watched daily talk show, Good Mythical Morning along side Link Neal; their award-winning weekly podcast The pair also host a weekly podcast, Ear Biscuits; and the instant #1 New York Times bestseller Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply. Rhett McLaughlin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, man. I can't believe you nearly made us change this tabletop to something cleaner. We do have something that's more professional. This is beautiful. I mean, you know, welcome to our space. Yeah, thanks for, thanks for hosting me here.

I usually open the show by saying something like, thanks for being here or welcome to the show. And I've done that on a few occasions in other people's sets and other people's houses, and they kind of look at me a little bit blankly. So I'm sure you know what I mean, but thanks for having me. You've got a lot of character on this table. This is like a who's who of. Early, yeah.

Early YouTube. Decades ago. Yeah. You were pointing out like the fine bros here and I saw like I Just Seen over there. It's like a real old school thing. Why did it stop? What happened? We kind of ran out of people to talk to.

Honestly, the guest based, we started our podcast as a guest based show. You thought that we would be like the Mark Maren for internet personalities. Sure. There's two issues. Number one, there's only so many, especially back in the day, only so many interesting internet personalities to talk to, that we're also willing to come into our studio out here. And then there's some dynamic that happens when two people are interviewing one person. Yeah. And we were like, this is not.

Yeah, I've seen that kind of thing before. Like a lot of other shows have multiple hosts, but there's like one main guy maybe. but having two people it's it's kind of tricky there are podcasts that do it link and i are always both trying to be the main guy that's our problem yeah yeah we've made a career of it but on a podcast it's the same thing interviewing two people i've done that a few times as well like when i had cliff and stewart connect leon they work quite well as a pair but it's it's quite difficult to know like where to frame you and we're on the other side of that quite a bit right i mean like i bet yeah 99% of any interviews that i'm a part of links right always right here

You know, we have to sit as red link. We're very precise. Yeah, do you feel a bit naked, sad on your own in a, in a situation? No, I enjoy it. Yeah. Well, I prefer it this way because it's, I also prefer being naked, because, especially with you, because there's something that gets lost in, if you really start getting into the weeds of a conversation with somebody and you start thinking, oh gosh, I better ask the

other guy a question. You can avoid or sort of not manage to really get into the weeds with a particular person. Now, you have one of the biggest shows on YouTube with Good Mythical Morning, and in my experience, with any kind of YouTube followership, you can't say anything without annoying somebody. We've already offended somebody in the comment section. You, with one of the biggest shows on YouTube, decided not too long ago, a few years back, to start talking about your spiritual deconstruction, if you call it, and your move away from Christianity. That must have been quite the move for you. And it's one of the reasons I'm interested in speaking to you. And hopefully, I know you've spoken a bit about it on various shows and things, but my audience is really interested in philosophy and theology. I'm sure they're fascinated by some of the intricacies of your thoughts on this kind of stuff. But when you start thinking, I want to say something about this. Like, why?

You've got a good thing going, man. Why are you going to mess it up with all this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me about it. I started talking to Link about how I started talking to Link about how I. I thought we needed to share our story, mostly because of how much we had disclosed about ourselves over the years.

We, you know, our podcast, even starting with this when we were interviewing people, we would ask all these really personal questions, ask them about their background. We would give a little bit of our background, but we would leave out this really foundational part of who we were.

And then even in all the interviews that we would do about our career, we would basically, the story would go, so when we went to engineering school, we were engineers for a while, and then we became YouTubers. It was a very simple, easy to understand story. When the reality was, well, all throughout that time,

we were involved in Christian ministry, we were very involved with campus, Crusade for Christ and in between being engineers and being professional YouTubers, we were professional Christians. We worked full time with Campus Crusade for Christ as, you know, campus missionaries for lack of a better word. And our ministry was essentially using our comedy to help Christian students figure out how to talk about their faith. So we would literally, we didn't put on like big, you know bait and switch evangelistic shows that you're supposed to invite like non-Christians to we were like hey let's do something where we kind of come into their typical weekly meeting

and we do something fun that it's got music and video and that's helping them kind of see differently the way that they approach evangelism and the only reason that I'm doing what I do today is because of my background, because of all the experience that we had coming up in that, you know, in that setting. So it just felt disingenuous to not talk about it. Yeah. It just began to, it was like, it began to kind of press on me. Like, this is such a, and also in the meantime,

I had been through this complete deconstruction and essentially a deconversion. And so it's like, I kind of have to tell the story, of the background while simultaneously tell the story of telling the story of why I no longer believe it. Yeah. And so it wasn't like a, oh, we gotta go out there and like get on this, there was by the way,

not really a deconstruction train to get on at the time. It wasn't, I mean, there were some people who had talked about it, but I wasn't paying attention to that. I wasn't interested in that. I didn't know who had deconstructed publicly. I didn't know much about the word deconstruction. So it wasn't a, I want to be a part of a movement, or I see myself as part of a movement

or a spokesperson for that. It was like, we need to be honest with our audience. Yeah. Let's just tell the story. Campus Crusade for Christ. What is that about? Well, let's see if I can remember exactly because I used to have to get up at the weekly meeting

and say this. Campus Crusade for Christ is an interdenominational Christian organization founded in 1951 by Bill and Vonette Bright. Wow. Our philosophy is threefold to win, build, and send. When students to Christ, build them up in their fate, and send them out to continue. the wind-build sin process.

How's that working out for you? Hey, it worked pretty well for a while, man. Yeah. Well, you were pretty knowledgeable, right? Like, you would be able to talk to people and convert people. I mean, presumably that doesn't go away. Like, you've still got the knowledge, right? Yeah.

You've still got it inside of you. That, the evangelical Christian part of my brain will never go away. is always there judging the deconstructed Los Angeles YouTuber, you know, I think, so I

whenever I see somebody talk about me and I try not to do that very often. Like, I know just being on your podcast and talking about it, like we get, you know, you know this game very well, you give the, you give the material, you provide the material for all the Christian reaction channels. Oh, sure.

This is what they feed off of, right? This is what they want. If we're talking about this, they want to talk about us talking about it. Yeah. And so I, a lot of times, I'm listening to myself say things, and I'm like, oh, that's what they're going to say about this.

Yeah. You know, and I try not to calculate that too much and think about it, but you can drive yourself crazy, like trying to like orchestrate all your words. Yeah, yeah, but it's something you're always aware of as a public figure. Was most of the stuff that you were,

were doing like was it was it biblical was it arguments for god's existence was it like what kind of approach were you were you taking what what's your like expertise when it comes to evangelism um so with campus crusade for christ we would share something called the four spiritual laws and it was a little booklet essentially that bill bright the founder of campus crusade had put together and it was essentially essentially a gospel tract you know god loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life all people have sinned and it's basically it's the gospel right and for laws for spiritual laws it was very like 1950s Christianity you know but it was very effective because it what it did is it had you had the ability and of course I wouldn't like always break out the booklet I would just you know

maybe do it in the context of a conversation but you know you might go out on I mean this I mean It sounds crazy when you think about it, but like we would go down to spring break at like Panama City Beach. And you got all these kids just parting on the beach. And we were like, well, we're gonna go out on the beach and we're going to start spiritual conversations with people. And we're gonna plant seeds in the least

and in the best case scenario, we're gonna get, we're gonna bring someone to a point of decision. That's what you wanna do, you know, bring them to that point of decision, right? So a great question is, you know, if you were to die tonight, how certain are you that you would go to heaven, right?

I mean, that's a great, it's heavy. It's heavy. And usually if like you're in the middle of partying in Panama City Beach and you're like drunk and you're, you're, so many students are sort of, you know, day three, day four, it's spring break and they've just been pumping themselves full of alcohol. And they're literally, some of them,

some of them are still having a boss, but some of them are like actively realizing that there's no fulfillment in the excesses, right? And they're like, it's like the perfect time to approach them. man, it's quite an existential moment, really. Yeah. Yeah, well, I've seen a lot of interviews with, like, with drunk people on the streets, and it can go one of two ways.

There are, like, the funny ones when people are vulnerable in the sense that they might say something a bit stupid or whatever, and it makes for a funny viral moment, but also, yeah, the Christian outreach. I know people were doing that at my university, too, where they used to sort of stand outside the nightclubs, and they weren't actually preaching or evangelizing. They would just hand out, like, water and biscuits and things, and I suppose it was like a, you know, it's a Christian root, but it is... I mean, all of the vices sort of come out in a nightclub, in the party atmosphere, everything, everything about your inhibitions.

And I feel like that is probably the place where Christ centers so many people. Like when people tell their stories about coming to Christianity, it's often that kind of situation but writ large across their life. It's like I was in the dumps, I had no way to turn. And at the end of the night at the club, you're sort of in a sort of microcosm of a moment like that for the day you know you're tired the lights have come on and everything is suddenly really ugly my i was in uh i was in las vegas i remember i've been there once and i was sort of i showed up at night and i thought this is the most incredible thing i've ever seen it was it was it was it was

glamorous it was glittering it was beautiful and then the morning i woke up relatively early because i was on uk time and the whole thing was like baked in sunlight and suddenly it all looked really silly. It looked silly in plastic. And my friend said it was a bit like at the end of a nightclub where the lights come on. And you realize everything's actually been ugly the whole time. And you just sort of see it. And he's like, that's kind of what Jesus does. He just like turns the light on and shows you that everything was was ugly all along. Because Vegas is one of the most demonic places I've ever been to in my life. So I was there with there's an emptiness there for sure. I was there with the guy with, um, there's a there's a show called the ice coffee hour,

which I was on, and one of the hosts of that, he was sort of driving me down in L.A. And we went past the, what's the pyramid one called? You know, the one that's like Egypt? I forget what the place is actually called. I don't know the name of it. It's got this huge pyramid that shoots this massive beam of light up into the sky, right? And he said, oh, that's really interesting, actually, because, you know, Las Vegas often gets these, like, swarms of locusts. I was like, really?

They get swarms of locust. It's like, yeah. And you know, the crazy thing is because this pyramid shoots up that massive beam of light, It's amazing. When it happens, they all, like, swarm onto it. It was like a tornado. And so, yeah, start going crazy. And I was like, so you're telling me that, that swarms of locusts descend on Egypt in Sin City. Yeah. It was all getting a little bit biblical. Yeah. And I kind of feel like that is the perfect place to walk up to somebody and be like, do you think there's something more?

Yeah. And it's so interesting because I think that one of the, one of the misconceptions. about someone who like me was a person of faith, of Christian faith, and is no longer a person of Christian faith. They're, you know, I've got some faith in things, but not really religious faith, is that somehow the two alternatives are that life of excess and selfishness and like pleasure or religious faith in Jesus.

And I think it can throw people off a lot of times And I'm like, oh, I recognize the, you know, I don't see it as necessarily like, well, one is right and one is wrong. But it's just like, yeah, clearly like a human that is simply focusing on pleasures like that, that ultimately end up just being, they become empty pretty quickly.

Like that's just a universal truth. That's not, like you as a Christian don't have a universal hold on that truth. That's not just because it was mentioned in the Bible. Does it mean that that's the only place? that truth shows up. Like that's a, it's a human experience, right? So now as someone who doesn't really know

what I think about God, I still recognize like the emptiness of a place like Las Vegas. But I'm also like, you know what? Maybe every once in a while I wanna go experience some excess pleasures. Yeah, oh, it was fun. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And not judge myself or judge others for it at the same time. Yeah. Knowing that if I take the perspective into that, that, oh, I recognize the emptiness of this. You know, eating at a buffet, I mean, how many times can you eat at a buffet, right? Before you're like, okay, get me out of the buffets.

But I feel like, again, this is kind of the perspective that I think about the way that I thought about those students when I was there with the truth in my hand. You know, I was like, there's two paths here. There's the path that you're on, which is just self-sabotage or there's Jesus. Never considering that, well, maybe there's another, maybe there's a few more ways to think about these things. Do you think there's pride? in there? I mean, one of the worst sins a Christian can commit is the sin of pride. And I think they're constantly sort of battling against it, especially when you're in a position. I mean, let alone some of the people I talk to who have public platforms, constantly putting themselves

in front of a microphone and answering people's questions and being constantly praised. It must be really difficult to not get prideful when it starts working. But even in an outreach situation like this, is there an element where it's sort of like, not even, not like, I'm better than these people but like look at me doing this good thing walking into the to the to the depths of of hell and harrowing it and and getting everyone you know back to christ yes i mean i think that there is um there's an element of sort of taking pride in the work that you're doing for god even though you can easily um give god the credit be like the spirit was working through me because if you know the code you know the code of humility and you know how to talk about these things but secret

you're thinking about how you're doing in relation to other Christians and you're thinking about how they're doing in relation to you. You can't, it's human nature. You're gonna, that you're gonna do that. But I think there's another type of pride that I think back on those times,

you know, I remember a specific instance, and this is actually after I was no longer on staff with Camp of Jersey, but I was still very active in the church and I was leading a Bible study. And we had, become friends with this couple that were Catholic. And in my estimation, Catholics weren't Christians.

I mean, I was that, I was that type of evangelical. Whoa, really? I was like, well, maybe there's some that, you know, actually have a relationship with Jesus. Idolatrys, worshiping, yeah, but they believe, you know, they believe that it's works and faith. It's not just faith alone. And so they don't have the grace thing figured out.

At the very least, I need to introduce them to the real truth, right? And so I knew they were going to be there. And so I was like, well, I'm going to do a Bible study. I'm going to go from Galatians, right? Because Galatians talks about that, you know, basically how it's about faith and it's and not about works. And it was one of those things that, in retrospect, I was thinking about them. And everyone else in the Bible study, the other regulars, knew that I was kind of preaching

to them from this perspective. and I think back on that and I'm like I brought a lot of spiritual pride to that situation because I thought I had the correct perspective and just assumed they don't agree with me about this so and they're definitely wrong I'm bringing them in to give them the truth when you think that you've got the truth and it's a truth that impacts everyone it applies to everyone You it's really difficult to not take pride in that and to begin to see yourself as better. I mean, I'm not saying that all Christians think that they're better than other people. I'm just saying for me, knowing, I remember lying there when I was in college

and thinking how grateful I was, that I basically believe the right thing about everything. Yeah, well, I often parody Christian denominations with that exact thought. It's like how, what are the odds, how lucky you are? And with no irony at all, I, of course, I was, you know, a 20 year old kid, but I was lying there in bed and I was like, man, like, not only am I a Christian, but I am the right kind of Christian. Like, I believe the right stuff. I'm in the right denomination. I'm in the right ministry. Like, even amongst the ministries here on campus, I'm in the one that is the most serious about this. Yeah. And I was like, this is, I'm so God, I'm so thankful that I'm right. about everything, essentially is what I was saying. Yeah, those are my nightly affirmations.

I'm just so grateful for being right about everything. It's fascinating. There is an interesting paradox there, the so-called preface paradox, where people can be, they can think that they're right about everything whilst also thinking they're wrong about at least one thing. It's called the preface paradox, because at the beginning of a book, authors will often say, if there are any mistakes in here, like, you know, I'm sorry. But they've gone through meticulously and checked every single one.

So if I went through every single one of your beliefs individually and said, do you think this is true? Yes. Do you think this is true? Yes. Because I'm going through your beliefs. So definitionally, every one of them would say yes. But if at the end I then say, but do you think at least one of those beliefs is actually false? If you're a bit humble in any respect, you go, yeah, of course, one of them is false.

Yeah. So you've got this paradox of thinking they're all true, but at least one of them is false. It's got to do with like probabilistic. Yeah, right. Certainty probably. But yeah, there's that there's that feeling that you've got God on your side as well. And you sort of go to sleep, slightly prideful, slightly content, slightly happy, where does that certainty, like, come from? Was it, was it the result of Bible study and consideration of different groups and denominations? Was it more sociological, just sort of the way you were brought up? Did you, were you cognizant of the factors which led you to be in the correct denomination and the correct student group? Yeah. So, not at the time. I think that, I think that. that what I would have said is that I've been taught the right stuff

from my parents and I had been in the right environment growing up. I think that ultimately, there's a couple, there's a few factors that contributed to it. I think number one, there is, certainty is a really important aspect of religious faith and especially Christianity and especially evangelical Christianity. Because I think that agreeing with a set of propositional statements is actually what,

if you ask somebody to describe, they might say, well, it's about a relationship with Jesus. But if you're like, well, yeah, but what does that mean? These propositional statements come up. It's like, well, I believe this about Jesus. If any church worth it sought has a we believe place on their website, right? That's what I thought, right?

And so I think that being certain and being right about these things comes at a premium. It is really, really important. So I thought that being certain was very important. And then I just think I had the type of personality came from the type of family where we kind of thought we had it figured out, right? Like I still, this is a big problem for me now is to not settle on what I think I figured out, to be really doubtful of my particular. perception of the world. To say, well, again, I know that I'm wrong about some stuff and there's a lot of stuff that I'm not sure about. But I can struggle with wanting to latch on to certain ideas and be, well, I've got this figured out. I've got this figured out. You start trying to

build this worldview. So I think it's a combination of the environment where certainty was really important and in my personality, the way that I gravitated towards that. We'll get back to in just a moment. But first, do you trust the news? I don't. And a lot of that has got to do with the bias that inevitably seeped into media reporting. We can never get rid of media bias, but wouldn't it be great if there were a way for us as consumers of news to navigate media bias, objectively comparing the way that different sources are reporting on the same story? Well, that is exactly what today's sponsor, Ground News, allows you to do. Ground News aggregates thousands of local and international news outlets all in one place, so you can compare reporting across the political

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back to rep. And what was this particular kind of Christianity? You said you were a Protestant. Were you in a particular denomination? Were there particular beliefs that you held that most Protestants would sort of disagree with you about? What I would say is we would, we caught ourselves non-denominational. But from a theological perspective, we would have most aligned with just the Baptist Church. Sure. So we were, you know, we were probably a little bit more reformed Baptist, right? So there was a strong, not as strong as you would have in like a PCA church, a Presbyterian

church in America about predestination. But, you know, we were kind of soft Calvinists, like four point Calvinists, you know. And so we definitely believe that God had predetermined essential. essentially, essentially who was his child, which was interesting to be in the context of evangelism. Yeah, I was going to ask, like, how does that affect your, when you go onto the beach and spring break and you're talking to people, do you just have this thought like,

well, I hope I happen to bump into the people that God's already preordained to come to faith? Yeah, I think, yes, I think the analogy that I would have used is that I'm planting a bunch of seeds. Yeah. And some of them are sort of pre-determined. determined to grow and to flourish. Yeah. You know, and that's not up to me.

I'm just the one that's plant the seeds. But then if it's not up to you, is it like if you don't plant those seeds? They wouldn't get saved? They wouldn't get saved. I mean, it kind of seems to this whole predestination idea seems to undermine the motivation for going. Oh, I really, this was probably my key, like, theological conundrum in college. because we really, I was close with guys who were reformed in this way, you know, and were Calvinists and they would be like, listen, it's just very clear in the scriptures

that he, who he predestins, he predestins. It's like, you know, and so I remember sitting on the porch one time with my friends as we were talking about that. I said, okay, well, all right, if I want to believe the Bible, and again, I, of course, I bought into univocality, and I was able to reinterpret the passages that would question this perspective in light of the ones that I had gravitated towards, which is how you build, you know, a systematic theology to begin with.

But I remember sitting with them and saying, okay, I can, I can agree that God preordained a certain number of people to be his children, which definitely means that a certain number of people are not predestined to be his children. In fact, statistically speaking, the majority of people who've ever lived and live right now,

and they're going to be in hell. So I believe that because the Bible says it, but, and I like pause because I was a little bit nervous, I was like, but doesn't that kind of make God an asshole? And they were like, no, no, no. He's just like, you don't, you can't understand, first of all, we all deserve to be in hell. The fact that he would save,

He's justified and not saving anyone. Yeah, that's the line, isn't it? And so then I was like, yeah, but he decided to create a world in which these beings would exist. Like he still made that choice. Doesn't that still kind of make him an asshole? So I was having thoughts like that at like 20 years old, but was able to continue to carry like a cognitive dissonance

that allowed me to still be a very strong Christian and just be like, okay, there are things. things that I don't understand, God's got that figured out. That'll be the first question I ask him when I get to heaven. Yeah, and of course there's no Christian who doesn't have thoughts like that swimming around in their minds too. It's, for some people, those are questions that they just retain and like you say, think, I'll ask God when I see him. For others, it's like the first domino falling apart. I'm interested in what your view of hell was at the time when you said that most people are probably going to hell. What did you think hell was at the time when you're around 20?

I had talked myself into, mostly as a result of that struggle I was having, that it was probably some sort of, I basically became, without really reading too much about it and annihilationist. Yeah. And so just the idea that people who don't know God, who are not his children, will probably go through some sort of torment, but it won't be forever and then they will cease to exist. Yeah, and that hell is, I mean, annihilationism is the view that people will be annihilated if they don't go to heaven, they sort of cease to exist, maybe after a period of suffering of some sort. I've always been quite attracted to that idea because of the, like, classical, tomistic arguments for the existence of God, which have God as like the ground of being, if God is the foundation of being itself and everything that is participates in him. then if hell is something like separation from God, and if God is the ground of all being, then what does it mean to not be with God? It means to not be. It means to not exist. So I've always thought philosophically there's good grounding for considering separation with God to be the same thing

as not existing, because to exist is to participate in God's existence, as some of the classical philosophers would put it. But that's not as motivational as the fire and brimstone imagery. And presumably in your outreach, you wouldn't push too heavy on the hell. stuff, especially considering that you thought most people were going there anyway, and there's nothing to be about it. Yeah, right. And I think that it's interesting to see. I'm still a fan of Christian apologetics. It's fascinating to me to see the way that, and especially now, there wasn't nearly as much just apologetics media as there is now when I was deconstructing, because this mostly happened to me in the late aughts in, you know, 2010, 2011. And nobody was making,

there were people writing books, but nobody was making internet content about this. stuff. But I kind of dip in and dip out and to see the way the conversation around hell is evolving is fascinating because it is a really, you know, it's like if you've got, if you're selling a product, it's like the one thing where we get all the bad reviews about this. It's like, oh shit, people keep talking about this one thing and it's the hell thing. So how do we rebrand hell? And the way that hell is being rebranded is smart. You know, a lot of people are moving into this. you know, annihilationism, but also there are people who just frame it as separation from God. It's just simply like you chose, you rejected God's love. Like that's not hateful for him to, to say, well, now you just are going to be on your own and whatever that is to deal with your own stuff. And it sounds kind of, it sounds a lot nicer. It just sounds like you're just rejecting something. And I think that's become a big, it's become a pretty big talking point. Yeah. What, I mean, maybe this was one of them, but when do the domino start to fall over for you?

How old are you and what starts to happen? Because right now, you're speaking past tense. So at some point, you go from not just Christian, but really involved, professional Christian, as you put it, to now where you are. Where does this start? So in my early 20s, you know, the first couple years out of school, I'm an engineer, civil engineer. I'm still very involved in Campus Crusade at the time. I'm not having that many, you know, existential questions about it. If anything, I'm thinking about how I'm moving towards being a professional Christian

because my wife was still in college at the time. And so Link and I had kind of, you know, we've been best friends since first grade in 1984. So we kind of knew what we were working towards. and the idea that we were going to develop this ministry where we got to be funny and make our comedy videos and we were really trying to find a way to do the thing that we loved for the cause that we loved.

So it sort of started as with God in the periphery here of like all the video stuff and it's all sort of directed towards at least sussly to some degree evangelism? Yeah, definitely. And I think it was a way to have my cake and eat it too because I really wanted, like we, we are entertainers at heart. We wanted to be filmmakers.

We wanted to make things that, you know, had significance culturally. We wanted to do that from the very beginning. So we always had our minds of like on this idea that maybe we'll kind of, you know, we can have, we can use this ministry or we can have a ministry where we're doing these things that we love. And then maybe something that we make will be impactful enough so that we could one day, maybe we'll move to Hollywood and maybe we'll have a ministry there just through the things that we create. That was sort of the thought in the early days. So shortly after the engineering stint, going staff with Campus Crusade, at that point, you know, you're going to the staff training

and you're taking the seminary classes and your initial, and I was always a, you know, I was a, not like a super deep student of theology, but I would say moderately. deep and there were certain ideas that I would gravitate towards and things that I kind of I like to think about and talk about at that same time I was given a book and I never really thought about the intersection of science and faith I think the way that I would have described it is yeah I think that most scientists are not Christians most scientists are atheists and they've come up with some pretty wacky ideas to try to explain the world and why people are the way that they are

why the world is the way that it is, and they're mostly just desperate attempts to explain the world without God's involvement. So that whole thing about evolution and how long the world has been here, that's probably all BS, but I didn't think about it any more deeply than that. I wasn't like a staunch young Earth creationist.

I didn't think about that issue in particular, but I picked up a book from an astronomer, Hugh Ross, and I'm sure, you know, I've mentioned this before, and he's like a, he has a Christian ministry that is like very anti-evolution, but very pro-old universe.

Huh. From the standpoint of astronomy, which, you know, obviously when you look at all the astronomical evidence and the speed of light and the size of the universe and all this stuff, okay, the universe has been around for probably as long as the scientists are saying.

And, but then he went on to essentially say that, you know, but all God's truth, All truth is God's truth, and this is totally compatible with the Bible, but just so you know, evolution didn't happen. He was a proponent of something called progressive creationism, which essentially was, yes, the world has been around for as long as the scientists say. Right. And these fossils we find are legitimate fossils that are approximately the date that they're saying they are. But God was creating new batches of creatures, special creations at different stages throughout the history of the world.

Whoa. And then ultimately, resulting in the creation of people. So why? Great question. Great question. So I remember thinking, as I'm reading this, I'm like, it's the first time I ever thought about there being some reconciliation. between what we observe in science and my belief about the world. And I just remember thinking, this doesn't, this doesn't feel like a good explanation.

I've never heard if somebody, I mean, I'm sure I've met someone who probably, like, believes that the Earth is old and the universe is old, but maybe is suspicious of evolution. But specifically, like, well, I'm a scientist and I'm an astronomer. And there's just no way I can look at the redshifting of the galaxies and deny that the universe is 13.8 billion. as well but that evolution stuff from that other field of biology that i probably never really seriously studied yeah no that's all that's all bs and instead i mean god is just creating animals willy-nilly and and there's animals that are getting more and more like a person before the people yeah it's like it's like god is just sort of doing little trial runs right i mean what does

that say about god is what i was thinking yeah it gets there eventually that that is a little bit a little bit strange. I suppose it's kind of biblical in the sense of like stretching out the story of Genesis over however long you needed and animals sort of popping in on on different days and stuff like this. But yeah, I mean, the biggest problem for me that evolution poses to the Christian. And a lot of Christians today just accept evolution. They're like, yeah, sure. Humans all have a common ancestor with other animals. The biggest problem that I think it poses is the seeming like arbitrariness with which you have to say that presuming that our apish ancestors don't get to inherit eternal life at some point a mother gives birth to a child and the

child is morally condemnable to hell but also potentially has the ability to inherit eternal life but his mother doesn't right and what the difference is there and maybe it's just a brute fact Maybe God just breathed life into that particular organism, but it just seems a bit arbitrary and unfair. That that person's suffering will now be redeemed and it now means something. But they're mothers who is the same organism, same suffering, same lifestyle, same everything, dies like an animal. It just doesn't seem right to me. Unless you want to say that personhood is something which develops as well, but that gets you into a whole lot of trouble. And so that's where I ended up going, right?

Because when I was, I didn't really buy into the progressive creationism thing, but I was. so sure the evolution didn't happen. I was like, when you're raised in the Christian faith and the only exposure to the idea of evolution you've ever had has come through the filter of a Christian scientist telling you why it's not legitimate. You know, somebody comes into your church and they're like the evolution expert

and they're like, they make it seem so impossible that you walk out of that with the full affirmation of the idea that evolution definitely didn't happen. and it's a horrible explanation. It will be debunked by the scientists themselves within our lifetime. Like, that's the kind of stuff that we told ourselves, right?

Right. And we firmly believed it. But because of this proposal, this progressive creationist idea, because the age of the universe and the age of the earth, from a geological, I'm always been interested in geology, but from a geological standpoint,

I was like, oh, well, this isn't escapable. Like, this isn't, like, the way that answers in Genesis has framed this issue is, I mean, I'm not gonna say it's definitely disingenuous. I think they really just believe that. It has to, it has to, you know, be consistent with the Bible, and so they're just willing to just completely reshape everything that they're seeing in light of that.

But I essentially was like, well, this doesn't make any sense. So then the idea of considering evolution, which just felt, I was like, am I actually about to do this? And I was like, well, I think C.S. Lewis believed in evolution. You know, you start saying these things like, yeah, but there's people, there's a lot of Christians who are, like, theistic evolutionists, and, okay, so maybe there's something to this. So I read Francis Collins' book, The Language of God.

The Language of God. And the thing that I took away from that book was that, well, evolution happened as well. And, you know, he touches on it a little bit. He talks about in that book, I think he talks about the, second chromosome, the fusing of the second chromosome. I think he talks a little bit about retroviruses and essentially, you know, we've got the marks of the same retroviruses on our DNA that chimpanzees do. Right. There are just these, again, there's no other way to see it. Just like inexplicable data. Right. It's like if we're not related to every other animal on

earth, well, God certainly try to make it seem like we are. Yeah. And, uh, So then that was a huge moment for me. I remember coming home, still living in North Carolina. Again, a lot of people think that the story that is often told is that Lincoln, I were Christians, we came to Los Angeles, we were corrupted by this sinful city, and we threw away our faith. And the reality, and I've told it many times, but, you know, it's passed over, is that all this happened when I was in North Carolina. Right. This happened when I was completely buckled into the Bible belt as tightly as you can be, surrounded by people who agree with me about all these things,

with no social pressure to deviate from that at all. In fact, a lot of social pressure to stay in the fold. So I was struggling a lot because no one, I didn't have anybody to talk to about this. Yeah. I remember talking to Link, I mean, I talked to Link about it a little bit, And he would just kind of be like, oh, shit. Like it felt like you're learning a lot of things that seem problematic, but I'm not going to think of,

I don't want to think about this. Yeah, yeah. Jesse, my wife, who did come from like a young earth creationist background. Like that's, you know, that's what she was taught growing up. When I came home and I was like, we need to talk about something. And I said, I am thoroughly convinced that evolution is true. and that we are related to every other animal. I believe in common ancestry,

and I just think that it is not just, I sort of think it's true. It's just like my reading has led me to think that if this isn't true, then I actually can't determine anything that's true. It's so overwhelming, because I had read in additionally to that.

She just starts crying. Because this represented, she knew what this represented, right? this was the seismic shift. And I think a lot of people that I tell this story to are like, what do you mean? But there's all these Christians that believe in evolution.

Like, I can't believe that this was so significant for you. But I think the reason it was is because at that point, I realized how wrong I could be about something so fundamental. Yeah. And I never, ever considered that I might be wrong about something so fundamental. And then not only was I wrong, but all of these Christian apologists

who were so sure about their critiques of evolution, they had missed the boat so significantly on this that suddenly I was like, can I trust anything else they've got to say about this? So that was the first big domino. Yeah, it's significant, like you say, I mean, you might think, Well, there are Christians who believe in evolution, but it depends which way you come at it.

I mean, if you're somebody who's like a scientifically minded person who comes to faith in Jesus, you're not going to abandon evolution, but you might think, okay, I can make this all work. But if you've come from the background you've come from, it's like, it's like going up to your wife and saying, you know, I just think maybe we should, I just think maybe we should like live in separate houses or anything. And your wife starts bawling and someone says, hey, I don't really know. Some people do that. Some married couples, they sort of, they live apart. It's like, yeah, but what it represents to move from where we are now and the way we were living to having this kind of question or this kind of desire indicates a direction of thought. Yeah. Which you don't really want to, want to entertain. Your wife, if I'm not mistaken, was a student of Bart Ehrman at Chapel Hill. She was. Right? And was this around this kind of time? Was she already being fed? The atheist lies through her. professor so when she this was undergrad you know at unc and um she at that point this was before we even went on staff with campus crusade i mean right there was no questioning of anything like we

we both saw bart as the enemy right this guy is coming and he's just decimating the faith of christian students and with it with a laugh you know yeah he comes in with that with that chuckle that So disarming. And it's funny, I haven't met Bart. I want to, because I want to be able to tell him this story. Well, the first thing that would happen is Jesse, you know, my wife is, she's very passionate and she's very smart. And so she was a great defender of the faith when she was in it. And she would challenge him, right?

And she would like go up to him after class and be like, what about this? or what about that? And then she would like come and report back or like, this is what he said. And I'm sure that there are many students who have continued to attempt this strategy with him over the years. At the same time,

there was somebody who was working with Campus Crusade at UNC who approached a couple years later when Link and I were already beginning to do our ministry work, who approached me and Link and said, we actually want to create some resources to counter what Bart is doing on campus because we feel like we need to equip students better

because they're going into these classes of his and having these quite being confronted with these questions and what can we do like in terms of a multimedia project to address that so we were actually beginning to have those conversations never became anything I mean how ironic would it be if you I could dig up a video of me like criticizing Bart from 20 years ago I kind of wish we had done it just to I'd have it now

That would be awesome. But yeah, so there was never, I think that there was, especially in those days, in the college days, there was zero curiosity about whether or not I might be wrong. Yeah. You know, that wasn't even up for debate. There was no, there was full confidence and no curiosity. And I am in a very, a very different place. I think those two things have reversed at this point in my life. Right, right.

Very low confidence in my perspective and high curiosity for all of this stuff. Yeah, I feel like that's been happening to me over the past few years as well. And I think it's for the better. It's less entertaining and it's less fulfilling on a superficial level because it's nice to be able to, even when you're just talking to somebody, it's nice to be able to at dinner when somebody asks you anything, right, here it is. I'll lay it out. Here's my beliefs. And here's why I think this.

and let's have a discussion about it. It's less fulfilling to sort of go, you know what, man, I've got kind of no idea, but here are some thoughts. But I think it protects yourself against the kind of spiritual crisis, which you inevitably run up against, when that first domino starts to fall. And for you, it was evolution. You have, you've said before that you used to kind of evangelize against evolution

without having known very much about evolution. I mean, it sounds like the moment you started like reading into evolution, of its own accord you became convinced by it how do you navigate arguing against evolution if you haven't already engaged with that primary literature

like I'm really intrigued when I heard you say that on some other show or something it's like well you know I hadn't really learned about evolution but I used to go out and argue against it what arguments are you using like how do you do that?

Great question first of all it was a different time anyone who's interested in these issues now can get I mean, you could just ask chat GPT to give you a primer on evolution. But all I had was, I mean, there was a few books, but one I remember, there was this, I can't remember the author's name, but the title was icons of evolution. And it kind of talks about the quote unquote, best arguments for evolution, and he talks about

why they're all corrupt. And so what I found is that, first of all, 99% of the people, that I engage with about this where I was from and at the time knew nothing about evolution. Even if they were like, yeah, I agree with that because that's what the scientists say. Yeah. But then you're like describe the mechanism of evolution.

It's like we come from monkeys, right? Well, I had read enough to say things like, okay, so you're saying that the primary raw material of evolution and through natural selection are genetic mutations. So give me an example of a beneficial mutation. Mm. And at best, your beneficial mutation just causes a change in color.

But give me an example of a new species. Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't happen. That stare is quite, yeah, right? It's quite intimidating. Suddenly, I'm like, I'm thinking, is evolution true? Right. Man, I don't know, man.

And so I just had those back pocket, and then I would say things like, Take, for instance, if we took all in, you know, you have this concept that you put organisms into different environments and they suddenly become, you know, they adapt to different environments. But what if we were to take all of the dogs in the world and put them out into the wild? What would happen? We would have a convergence to a type of canine that could survive in the wild. And it wouldn't be my little poodle and it wouldn't be the Great Dane. It wouldn't be these extravagant dogs that we have created through artificial selection.

It would be the one that adapts to the environment and that would probably look like a wolf. End of story. Evolution doesn't happen. You know, and most people who don't know anything about are like, oh, okay, I guess it doesn't happen. It's easy enough to do when somebody really, really just doesn't know. Because I think most people are at that position where they kind of know that evolution is this thing and it's got something to do with genetics and environment selection. But all you need is like one good counter example or question that can't be answered, along

with that confidence. Yeah. And those eyebrows. Yeah, the eyebrows are key. The eyebrows and the confidence. And there's something about the fact that you're doing this kind of professionally as well. Like if they know, oh, this is a guy who's part of this organization and whatnot, they're probably thinking, even if I had an answer, he'll have heard it because he does this every day.

And so, like, there's just something. about that confidence, which is going to be quite off-putting for people. But presumably those questions start to get answered for you by the reading that you're doing. And was it, I mean, you said it was Francis Collins book. Is there a moment where you're reading it and like your mind goes to those apologetical arguments that you make? And you're like, oh, that doesn't work. Yeah, I'm like this, you know, there's not an explanation for this. And of course, you can do that You can, every single one of these things, you can, there's a page on the Answers

and Genesis website for everything that we could talk about related to evolution. So they've got their perspective on the second chromosome and the fusing of that chromosome. They've got their perspective on these retroviruses. And I think I was getting to a place where I no longer, I would essentially, I just, read their responses and I was just like,

this isn't, this can't be right. Like they have to be wrong about this. Like this is not a good faith argument. This is not a good faith answer, you know? And that's when it started dawning on me. Okay, I began to notice a pattern. And I think maybe I didn't even realize I was noticing a pattern yet.

But this is the pattern that started then and then propagated itself throughout my entire deconstruction. And that is, there's a type of answer that someone gives when their allegiance is to the truth that they need to be true. And there's a type of answer that people who are actually interested in the truth give. And what I kept finding is that Christian apologetics really consists of people who are like, well, the truth cannot be questioned. The truth we've predetermined that this is true. And now we've got to find a way to buttress that truth.

And there's a tenor to those arguments that they don't hold up very well under scrutiny. When you get the answer to the answer, to the answer to the answer, you just keep finding it like, it just seems like these people seem to be interested in what actually happened and these people seem to be interested

in the truth that they hope that happened. And that was a huge, huge flip for me because what, again, as a Christian, what I thought is we have the truth, they have the desperate attempt to be anti-God, right? You know, we were taught that these evolutionists, these professors who are teaching this kind of stuff, like they're sinful, they're deceived, they don't want,

they desperately don't want God to exist, so therefore they gotta come up with these ideas in order to explain them away. But when you're like, actually, First of all, most of these ideas came from Christians, you know, the age of the earth, these geologists back in the day, these were just, most people were Christians

just de facto the matter. And they were like, oh, this is, God must have done it in this way. And then when they find evolution, oh, God must have done it in this way. And so the scientific stuff, there were plenty of people who taught me like, it's okay, you can believe, you can, yeah,

you can believe that. You can be a theistic evolutionist, You probably still need to believe in a literal Adam and Eve because the atonement still needs to make sense. You know, original sin's got to make sense. And I was like, okay, yeah, those arguments seem like were just trying to marry two disparate ideas. Yeah.

But I was like, okay. But I just think that that mentality of finding that the people, because it got into biblical scholarship after that. It got into, okay, well, the primeval history. Okay, so this is, I guess, this. this is allegory, like this didn't happen. These were, these are religious myths that were adapted from other myths that were around at the same time.

Mm-hmm. The flood didn't happen. Yeah. The Tower of Babel is a weird explanation for language. And I started seeing all that. And so I was like, okay, now my entire view of the beginning of the Bible is different. And again, I would go to the apologetics answer. And I would be like, one person seems to be, like the critical scholars actually seem to be like interested in what happened.

Like, why do these people write this? Why is it like this? Where did this idea come from? And then the Christian apologist seemed to be like, well, we know it's God's word. So how do we prove it? And it just kept creeping closer and closer to Jesus. And I had this like, this happened. This was years, right?

because I was like, well, I'm not going to stop believing in Jesus. You know, you can have these weird ideas about the Old Testament, but like, Jesus is different. I mean, I have a personal relationship with him and, you know, and that stuff's true, right? You know, the stuff about the resurrection, my arguments for why the resurrection had happened and it being the best explanation for the beginning of the church and all this. I had those arguments in my back pocket. but long story short eventually those arguments fell victim to the same type of critique they're a little bit different because I do think that there is a more interesting conversation around the resurrection because you can kind of know a little bit less about what happened and you can be somebody who believes all this stuff about that I might agree with related to evolution but then be like I have a faith position that Jesus actually rose from the dead I recognize that I can't it's not a scientific thing I can't prove it it is a little bit different category. But it opened me up to questioning these sacred ideas. And it's just the most sacred

idea of all that Jesus was the son of God, who raised from the dead, eventually was the last domino to fall. Wow. And how does that finally fall? I mean, because the evolution thing confronts. And I think the reason why it was so scandalous in the 19th century is kind of just a vibe shift, right? Because when you speak to philosophically minded Christians, they will quite correctly say, there is no argumentative syllogism you can construct, which shows that because animals have a common ancestor, therefore God doesn't exist. That doesn't follow. There's no, there's no argument you can make from that. But it's hard to put into words just like the feeling. Again, it's like we were saying before about indicating a direction of thought. When a society

is based upon the idea that human beings are special and unique. This idea, if you're smart, it doesn't need to undermine the idea that God exists, but it shows this direction of thought, like, oh gosh, we're not as special as we thought we were, and where's that going to lead? I'm pretty sure that in the first edition of the origin of species in 1859, that beautiful ending, you know, there is grandeur in this view of life from, many different species, whatever it is, having been breathed into many lives or into one, have been and are being evolved. And there's that phrase, like having been breathed

into one or to many, you know, primordial forms of life. And presumably because of the backlash that this idea receives in the second edition of the origin of species, having been breathed by the creator into one life or to many, Darwin defaced the ending, his moving to the origin of species. And I think by edition three, it was back out again. So you can, if you, I've seen one in person, an actual second edition, like a rare bookshop. If you happen to be in like a fancy rare bookshop and see if they've got a second edition, it will say, buy the creator.

Wow. Because there's just something so confronting about it that you need to, you need to respond to. But okay, there's that. And then there's the resurrection. That's not just like a vibe shift. That is, this is the historical claim upon which Christianity is based. And like you say, it's less accessible to the scientific method because it's a singular event. Yeah.

It's not like a process that's still going on today that we can biologically observe. And you can't scientifically or historically prove the resurrection, but you can prove like surrounding facts. You can say that Jesus was crucified, that his disciples claimed to see him, all of this kind of stuff. All of those arguments are still there and still sat in your mind. Presumably you're pretty familiar with them as someone specializes in outreach. Why would that change? Like what shifts the dial on those kinds of arguments for you? And this is where I, you know, I don't remember specifically like, okay, well, it was this book, it was it.

But, you know, it could be something as simple. It was one aspect of that argument, of that case, you know, probably the most famous one is, well, why would the disciples die for a lie? And then when I really looked into that and then I found that, well, I don't think I can actually historically defend that anyone died for something that they knew to be a lie. Like I think that this can be explained by them being deceived, right? They could just be wrong about what they saw or their perspective. But I think the bigger picture was, as I started looking at different perspectives on historical Jesus, I remember there's one book

that was called The Historical Jesus, Five Views. And I read that book and I think every one of them was some kind of Christian. Yeah, sure. Just different gradations of liberal or progressive Christian. And Everyone laid out their case with a lot of confidence

and a lot more scholarship and knowledge than I have about the subject. But it was so gray. And I just started, this feeling began to creep in, which was like, okay, well, maybe he did rise from the dead, but what I've learned about are the process of historical investigation and also just the nature of human psychology

and the nature of religious movements and the nature of people's willingness to believe things. Like, it began to dawn on me that I don't know exactly what happened with Jesus. I don't know the nature of his, specifically the nature of his death. Like, was he left on the cross? Was he thrown into a large, you know, like mass grave? Was he put into a rich man's grave by Joseph Arimathea? Was that invented?

I don't know, but what seems to be pretty clear to me is that it's almost certain that there's some explanation for how it all started that isn't that he actually raised from the dead. In my compulsion to believe that he raised from the dead, it is a religious position. It is a faith position. It's not an historically defensible position to the degree that these Christian apologists make it out to be. We were talking last night about Dale Allison how I just think I love his book. He's great.

And this was all like, you know, this was, I read that like two years ago. So this is all the way after my deconstruction, but I'm still interested in the subject. But, you know, he's a Christian. He believes that it happened. But I think he's got one of the best books on the resurrection. The thing is so refreshing about it

is he's not coming at this from like a, Gary Habermass standpoint where he's like, this is the most reasonable thing. And if you don't agree with that, you're just, you're being unreasonable. It's like, well, no, it's, I mean, we're talking about the pinnacle of an unreasonable idea, an unreasonable event. This is not, if this happened, this is something I have to accept on faith. And I am completely fine with people who do that. But my intuition is that it didn't happen. And I have sort of lost my ability to have faith in things that are just conjecture in things that I, something that foundational.

I mean, I still have what I would call some level of religious faith. We can talk about what that might look like, but I think that my ability to have faith in the idea of the resurrection, it just was like, why would you be, why would you choose for that to be the thing that you believed in when all these other things have sort of fallen apart

to this process? Came across an interesting idea, a friend told me, I wish I could remember exactly how this goes, but I'm pretty sure that there is a development as the Gospels go on about the description of the tomb. So, like, in Mark's Gospel, presumably, I think it just says that Jesus is put in a tomb. And in Matthew's Gospel, it becomes a new tomb. And then I think by Luke, it's a new tomb in which no one had been laid. Or maybe that's John. I can't remember the details.

But there's things that you wouldn't notice that I'd never come across this idea before. If the empty tomb is an important apologetic to Jesus's resurrection, when we know that the tomb was empty, in order to know that the tomb was empty, you need to ensure that Jesus was probably the only person laid in it, because otherwise it could have been mixed up with someone else or something like this. And so there is this hint at evidence of an early apologetical motive to make the tomb a new tomb, which means there's no other bodies in there, and then specifically a new tomb in which no one, one had been laid. Right. So that when they say there's an empty tomb, nobody can come along and say, well, are you sure it wasn't somebody else or someone saw the body or it got lost or

something? No, it has to be an empty tomb. And so you're right that when you, those little questions, are we sure that he was taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb in the way that it's described? And if you start to notice apologetical motivations, potentially, in those very stories, starts to undermine the historicity a little bit. Like how Matthew's Gospel is the only one that mentions the guards at the tomb right and we're told why the guards like we're told by matthew essentially why he's included the story of the guards because they are like jesus has gone and the jews pay him pay the guards and say you're going to spread the rumor that the body got stolen that's what you're going to do and the guards like sure thing you know we'll do that we'll

take that money and this is a rumor that still persists to this day says matthew's got what's the best explanation for that is it like there were actually guards and matthew is the only person who happened to or has Matthew invented the guards as an apologetical tool admitting that there is this rumor that the body was stolen and thereby having to invent the guards at the tomb to protect against that maybe there were guards like we can't prove that there weren't but when you start to see how much potential apologetical motivation is underlying these these claims in these gospels which although broadly seeming to be attempts at historical biography are also just just full with full of what is probably best thought of as mythical, mythical storytelling becomes really difficult.

Dale Allison talks at length about the raising of the graves in Matthew's Gospel at the time of Jesus. Which is bonkers. Absolutely bonkers. But it's really strange how it's worded as well because it says that when Jesus dies, it says at that moment when he dies, there's a great earthquake and all the graves open. And the holy ones of Jerusalem appear to people after the resurrection. And it's a really weird, clunky wording because it says that the graves opened. when Jesus died. But then it said that the people appeared to many after the resurrection,

as if they were just laying dead in the open tomb for three days or something. Like it's weirdly worded, and Matthew's the only one who reports it, and you've got this undertone of Jesus being the first born of the dead. And it's like, okay, like Dale Allison is pretty convinced this didn't actually happen. It's another question whether Matthew thought it happened. But the problem is that if Matthew didn't, okay, well, this is just a bit of myths that Matthew is obviously telling some kind of of allegorical story. What does that mean? It means that Matthew is willing to make up stories about

resurrecting people from the dead in order to serve a theological point. If it happened once. And then the floodgates are open, especially because Matthew's gospel is the earliest gospel that has any post-resurrection appearance that's recorded in it. Boom, the doors are, the doors are open. Yeah. Well, the thing that's so fascinating to me about this is, you know, famously evangelical Christians, especially when I was coming up in campus ministry, like, we had our anti-Mormon arguments. Oh, yeah. Right? There was this, there was this one summer that some Mormon missionaries, like I was out of the country doing some missionary work, and Link was still in Raleigh, and there were Mormon missionaries that came to talk to him. They ended up coming back like four or five times,

because Link, especially at the time wasn't controversial, wasn't confrontational. He was just like, yeah, you guys, so he like, they went through the whole spiel or whatever. And then when I got back, I was like, you let them come like five times, you didn't never challenge them. He was like, well, I was just kind of waiting. I ended up writing this like pamphlet.

I would do this all the time, I would write like little papers or pamphlets or whatever. And there was one that was like, this is what you need to say the next time the Mormons come to your door, right? Because you can take apart their theology and their history in a much, it's so recent, right? So that was my perspective.

And I find it so interesting that the average Christian apologists, the level of scrutiny they apply to criticizing Mormonism, if they would just for a moment turn that level of scrutiny on their own story, you'd be like, guys, come on. Do you see what you're doing? Or like, and if you had been born in a Muslim country and you were of the Muslim faith and you didn't believe that Jesus actually raised from the dead, what would your Muslim apologetic about the resurrection be? Like, do you really think these arguments are as strong? Or is it just you need them to be true? Yeah. It's so foundational to who you are, you need this to be true. But the second aspect of it is, it's like, we're sitting here having this conversation

in the context of 2025, where we have access to all this scholarship. And all this scholarship and all these discussions about these issues are such a recent phenomenon that first of all, the tiny minority of people who live today who call themselves Christians, care about this stuff and actually take time to think about it, right?

You believe that Jesus rose from the dead if you're a Christian, probably because your parents told you. Like 90% because your parents told you. And then you got into a movement where it's continually confirmed by people who come in and they say some smart stuff about it and this is why you can trust it. So even if it did happen,

it doesn't feel like a really penetrating investigation and to the historical circumstances is what's going to like, oh, make it click and be like, oh, it did happen. I looked under the last rock of history and I found the resurrection. Like, it doesn't seem like God intended for that to be the way if- That's right.

This is clearly some sort of, this is a revelation. This is a, this is like, you know, this is a secret. This is like God's secret information that you can choose to believe and then this, your life has transformed. Like, I'm okay with people who frame it in that way. I'm like, well, I still think that you're, I think this is a psychological phenomenon.

I don't, I don't believe it. I'm a skeptic in that, in that regard. But I just find it so interesting the way that some of these apologists go so hard on trying to prove it. So do you really think that that's going to be the, that's going to be the thing that changes somebody's mind? Yeah, I mean, it's not like it's what Jesus was doing. No, barely I say unto you, premise one. Yeah, he wasn't doing apologetics. It doesn't work like that.

It's clearly like not what it's all about. Right. And apologetics can only take you so far. I mean, there is this idea online in particular that to be a Christian or to be religious is to essentially do natural theology is what they call it, which is like arguing for the existence of God. Like the whole religion discussion has become consumed with God's existence, biblical scholarship. And we forget that it's actually an assumption and a concept. controversial assumption that that is the approach to have to this conversation. For many people, like natural theology is just a waste of time and an improper approach to the question of God's existence.

And most people who have a religious experience will report that. Thomas Aquinas famously didn't finish the summer theologica, the greatest Christian metaphysician of all time. And he doesn't finish it because he's performing mass, he's performing the Eucharist, and he has a religious experience. and his friend or colleague or whatever is like writing to him begging him you have to finish this Thomas like this is you've got to finish and he says I can write no more it's all straw compared to what I've seen and you're right about the double standard as well I just had a Mormon on my show Jacob Hansen who one of the key things that he likes to emphasize he doesn't usually speak to atheists this is quite funny I saw him recently and he says he doesn't usually speak to atheists

because there are so many like metaphysical assumptions you have to make if you want to talk about Mormonism, you already sound absolutely menthol. If you're talking someone who doesn't even already believe in like angels and God and stuff, you're not going to move an inch. But he's like, I always talk to Christians because they do believe in angels and revelation and prophets and all this kind of stuff. And he can kind of like hold up a mirror to these Christians because they look at him and be like, oh yeah. So like, you know, God spoke to some dude in upstate New York through some like golden plates that like no one's ever seen. And he's like, yeah, well, how many witnesses do you have to the resurrection that left any accounts.

Right. We've got more eyewitness testimony to the golden plates than you've got to the resurrection, you know? And it's, it's this like, obviously, I can look at this and think both of them are, you know, not quite hitting the mark. Right. But his big gripe is like, I don't mind people saying that we don't have enough evidence or you're not convinced or whatever.

But as a Christian, you can't switch that off when it comes to analyzing your own faith. And it does sound absurd to be like, oh, there was a prophet. in New York was there. But we've only just got used to the idea that religion comes from, you know, that comes from the Middle East. The whole reason why Jesus is born of Nazareth is like a lowly origin. They even say in the Gospels, you know, is he the guy from Nazareth? You know, what good comes from Nazareth? We're just used to it now. But at the time, that would have sounded about his crackpot as saying, you know, this guy in upstate New York? Yeah, he's found some golden plates and they're buried under the ground. And so I do find, like, I've talked about Mormonism a lot

recently because i do find it holds up this interesting mirror to christian apologetics it's like this is kind of how you sound guys a lot of the time yeah i it's i certainly agree i it is this it's and to have been on that side of it and to i mean i specifically i don't still have that document that i wrote the guide to talking to your that is a shame i was going to ask um i mean it might be in some you know box somewhere but i can go i can tell you that it was incredibly dismissive. And I think that I, you know, I was trying to be cute and funny at the same time.

And so I'm sure I was like essentially saying, can you believe that people believe this? Like if you only knew how crazy this set of beliefs was, you would basically deny it on that, the fact of how crazy it was. But it's like, it's not, hey, it's not any crazier. It's just less familiar. you know it's just less familiar than these things that we believe so wholeheartedly um yeah but at the time

you you just you can't see it when you're in it you can't see it yeah of course you said at the time you you said you started believing in natural selection and your wife's in tears does that like put you off do you think oh gosh maybe i shouldn't dig any further is it already an unstoppable force like how does that go because presumably she's kind of okay with the evolution thing now so yeah she's more than okay with it yeah like how does that like begin to develop do you just kind of keep going and say like sorry darling but this is this is what i think and there's nothing i can do about it yeah i it moved very slow because again i didn't have all these YouTubers talking about this stuff.

I had to make the decision to be like, I'm going to buy this book and take the time to read it. And I'm still like living my life. I'm not, I'm not like a voracious reader. I mean, I read quite a bit, but it's, you know, it's pretty slow. And Link and I are trying to build a career and we're trying to like make ends meet.

And this is early days of YouTube. So I was a bit, scared of where this might lead and I think I just had this idea because again you know where we come from everyone else in our families are not just Christians but they're strong committed Christians this is the most important thing in their life you know we grew up looking down on cultural Christians we we could spot them now that person just goes to church because it's the thing to do but we go to church because this is the most important thing that we could do is having communion with other believers. And so I think that

it moved very slowly because of that. I was getting into the historical Jesus stuff in like 2010. I like look at back at some of my journal entries and that was when it was beginning to kind of fall apart, like the Jesus part was falling apart. But we moved to L.A. in 2011. So one of the things that happened, Link and I had a series where we were making these local commercials. Several of them had gone viral in like the late odds. And we ended up getting a TV show on IFC. That's why we moved out here. So we moved out here with our wives and kids all together in 2011. And I kind of thought to myself, this is maybe an opportunity to start over a little bit. You know, I went to, we went to a church that we had some friends at that we knew from out

here and it was in Hollywood and it was like the music was awesome and everyone was so cool and they wore like the cool hats it was like it was like hipster church and it was so much different than what I came from and the way they talked about these issues was it was just more nuanced and gray and I found myself thinking like I think I could I think I could do this I think I could do this because you know I guess ultimately if you backed this person into a corner you probably believe, the pastor would probably believe all the stuff that I believe, but he's holding it a little bit more loosely and maybe I can kind of have this thing like, I love Jesus and I remember writing in my

journal, you know, when Peter talks about, you know, when Jesus is asking him if he's going to leave and he's like, where else would I go? Yeah. I thought the same thing. I was like, what am I, what am I going to do, become an atheist, become non-religious, become a different religion. It's just like, even if I'm not sure about this, I'm sure that Jesus is good for me. I'm sure that these ideas are good for me and this idea of believing in resurrection

and like this, I can kind of just maintain this. That's where I was when I moved out here. That lasted such a short period of time because when I would stop and I would just think about it, I'd be like, yeah, but it's probably not true. And I started finding people who had been through similar things. I could talk to about these things. And you start just finding there's people who have.

And also I started finding people, I can't remember exactly that they weren't really talking about on YouTube, but there were people writing about it, blogs and that kind of thing. And you just start finding, oh, these people don't believe this anymore, but they're still good people who want the same thing out of life. Because we thought, my wife and I thought our marriage would end. We thought we wouldn't have anything useful to share with our children.

You know, when you believe this, this idea that you've got the truth and that this is the most essential truth, and it isn't just about your salvation, it's about your life. Like your marriage is based on this commitment to Christ first. Yeah. Your kids, in every decision that you make about them, is based on this biblical understanding and this framework. You're going to throw that out.

What are you going to do? What's going to happen to your marriage? What's going to happen to your marriage? to happen to your kids. But then you start finding all these people who don't know what they think about it anymore and they still have solid marriages and their kids are still good kids

who are just trying the best that they can. And so I think that about one or two years into being out here when I was kind of like, okay, I don't. I just don't believe this at all. I'm not going to call myself a Christian. But maybe we'll keep going to church for a while. Well, I'll try to figure out what we're going to do about the kids.

Yeah. Did that have anything to do with, like, L.A. and the demons of the city? Or do you think it was just, like, already, if you'd have stayed in North Carolina, the same thing would have happened? I think that L.A. gave me the permission to basically be like, because if I was back home, and my decision to not go to church back home, would have involved several discussions with family. Yeah.

Whereas my decision to not go to church in LA was just my decision. It's not going to church. Yeah. So there is no doubt. So that's what I'll give the Christian critics is that the role that LA played is it did give me the freedom. Sure. Because we're not in a culturally Christian environment out here in the same way. It's like people believe all kinds of stuff.

Yeah. And so my decision to be like, okay, well, I'm just, we're just not going to be a part of this. more was made it was made easier yeah and by that time is your wife still in tears about it like how does that progression by that time i think the thing with her we're in basically exactly the same place now in terms of like what she would you know she believes essentially the same thing and it took her own path to that and has her own perspective and the things that are important or interesting to me are not necessarily important it's like a reverse lee strobel isn't it you know yeah the case against christ right movie yeah and so she's basically in the same place doesn't

consider herself a Christian but I think for her as a mom who is homeschooling you know I think there was this well what do we do what do we do about our kids I feel like I need to continue to teach some of these ideas to them and there needs to be some kind of framework and this is something that a lot of people who are deconstructing deal with because you know religion works we

I definitely believe that we created it but we created it because we needed it to some degree for the ritual the community the sense of all these things that are essential to the human experience that I do think you can experience outside of a religious

community but for most of history religious communities have done that best and when you have kids and you're raising a family and you're looking for purpose and meaning and structure you can choose to like hodgepodge create that on your own or you can plug into a community that has a set of shared myths and that's a really difficult thing to to navigate but it's been a long process but we found people who are also navigating it found our own community and I think that that was a big part of

of our sort of moving out of it. Yeah. So now, what's your relationship to Christianity like? I mean, you said you read Dale Allison's book like two years ago. That's no, like, you know, easy bedtime reading. You've got to still have some kind of interest in the resurrection to do that. Like, are you still reading about it? Are you still intrigued?

I mean, what do you see as your relationship with Christianity now? There's a fascination with it that I do. just think is just a natural inclination. I think that part of it, an analogy I've used before is, you know, if I had been raised in a religion that was based on the Lord of the Rings books. Yeah. I think that I would have been shaped significantly

by those books, that worldview, that even if I left it, I think there's this like, it's such a part of who I am. I think going back and reading them and experiencing them would be something that was a little bit comfortable. It also helps to kind of like, it helps me understand the way that I am.

I am the way that I am. I see the world, the way that I see the world because of my background. I may not completely agree with all of it anymore and disagree with most of it. But I would be lying if I didn't say it was an essential part of who I am. So I think that there's always gonna be this fascination

with Jesus. And I almost feel this compulsion to defend the person of Jesus from the way he is used, especially in America. Yeah. In American politics, especially.

That's been a fascinating, the rise of Christian nationalism has been a fascinating thing for me to watch. Yeah. Because you know, I don't know exactly what I would have done if I would have stayed in the faith. but I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't have gotten

on the Trump train just from a Christian standpoint. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. And I think that to see the way that the name of Jesus is used and the ideas that he is being used to support, it's super fascinating, but I also find this need to be like, yeah, but what was he? what was he about?

Like I don't know what the man who lived, that I do believe lived. I don't know what he actually said. I don't know like what, like what's the percentage of the record that we have. But whatever, we have this movement that was started and they wrote these things and like, some of these ideas are really beautiful,

you know, like from a moral standpoint, like the things that Jesus asked you to do, being selfless, being service-oriented, you know, caring about the poor and the needy, not just being about your own accumulation of your possessions, recognizing the emptiness in the accumulation of possessions. Like, these are beautiful ideas that I subscribe to today. So I think that part of my interest is this like,

I want to, I want to rescue Jesus from the hands of the people are using him for evil. Yeah, because they're pretty out of line. I mean, Jesus says this, hasn't he? You know, there'll be people who are, who come to me saying, Lord, Lord, and I'll say, depart from me, I never knew you. And there is an idea that the path is narrow. And it does just seem at times flatly contradictory, the attitudes that people have. And yet, I don't know if it's like a biblical literacy thing or what, but when you see like prosperity preachers, for example, flying around in private jets and things, and you think,

I just, I don't know how you can read the Gospels and not have this. yeah just jump off the page at you have you seen the clip of donald trump asked what his favorite bible verses i think this is 2016 i'd rather not get into this specific it's sort of very personal and they're like really anything jump out she's like no i think it's i think it's too personal and they say are you more of a old testament guy or a new testament guy and he goes i would say probably equal yeah and by the way i think by the next time he's asked you know what your favorite by a versus. He's like, oh, it's, you know, Second Corinthians one, seven. Right, right, right. Right, yeah. This is the interesting thing about that.

I, I, I, because I want to give, like, first of all, there are many Christians who are just, like, buying this idea that, like, he's actually a, like, Trump's actually a Christian, right? That is happening. But I will give, there's a lot of Christians, I'll give them credit. They don't for a second. They, they don't for a second by that he's a Christian. They know that he's using the Christians for his ends. But, and I know many people like this,

but they believe that the things that he's a crude tool to basically accomplish things that are more consistent with the Christian worldview. Yes. And so it's a little more nuanced. And so I understand that that's what they think, but then I'm like, yeah, but okay, let's talk about, let's talk about the things that,

that platform wants to establish that are still very inconsistent with the things the bulk of the things that Jesus talked about. Then one wonders how much that is Christian nationalism as a whole, how much of it is really Christian outside of just being nominally Christian in the way that Trump might be nominally Christian. I mean, the one thing that gives me pause for thought is like when he was nearly assassinated, he did sort of quite convincingly portray a feeling of, of sort of spiritual awakening after that. I mean, he put it in quite uncomfortable terms about like, you know, well, if you, if you look at that, if you look at how close it was, I saw the graphic of how it went just past my head. If you look at that and you're an atheist, you know, you've got to start rethinking it.

And there is this forgetting of Corey Kemportori, who's the firefighter that the bullet eventually went into and killed. Right. But I did think, if you were nearly assassinated, especially if you've already got this sort of egomania around you, president of the United States, thing. To have your head turn at the right moment and avoid assassination, I do wonder if maybe that did make him at the very least, like seriously consider the possibility of divine watch. Right. But I don't know, even then, although I want to grant him that possible space for spiritual growth. I don't know if that develops into like, you know, it's easier for a rich man to for a camel to pass through the Ivan evil and all of that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, it's like a,

It's a crude tool, as you put it. And if you just look at the way that, one does wonder, I always thought of doing like skits where you sort of put Jesus in the modern day and see how he would actually react, like this sort of this strange juxtaposition of the Christian attitude you're supposed to have and what Jesus was actually all about. Because some of his teachings I do think are difficult and maybe inapplicable.

I had this idea of him like walking through central London or something. and somebody like comes up to him says sorry have you got any change and the disciples will go sorry mate we haven't got any change and he goes yeah brethren when one is in need you know if you do this to the least of these you do it to me so it's like you know Matthew grab your grab the person right anyway as I was saying and then another person comes up have you got any change mate and they're like oh we just go it and he's like because one person is in need because you've helped one does that lessen the need to help another no no Peter grab your grab your tunic we're going to give it to him, you know, and then people just keep sort of coming up. And at the end,

someone comes up, you've got any change. And Jesus is like, sorry, mate, you know, I haven't got any change. Because I do wonder how directly applicable some of these teachings are to the modern world. And so it's kind of easy to say, you know, Christian nationalism isn't Christian. You know, Jesus would never abide by Trump. But it's difficult to imagine what Jesus would say about the presidency of a transcontinental republic in general anyway. So I always find it very difficult to make this kinds of claim. Well, and I think that's one of the reasons that I think this is, you know, back to the idea of like, why is it so fascinating? Because when you start, when you really appreciate the context for what this person was operating in, you know, and you think about that for every scripture, the idea that like, oh, this makes so much more sense, not as.

some prophecy for current times, but for it was a rhetorical exercise for what they were dealing with. And it's just, it's, to me, it becomes, the Bible actually becomes more meaningful in one sense. Maybe not in like an ultimate, ultimate meaning way, but in a, the way that we actually find and build meaning as humans based on how we interact with our circumstances and how our values interact with our circumstances, like that's what these biblical writers were doing all along. And suddenly it just, it kind of comes alive to me. Like I always thought, I don't understand

these biblical scholars who aren't Christians. Like, it was fascinating, you study this for a living and you don't believe it, but now I get it. Yeah. I get it, you know, not only because it was so personal to me and foundational to who I am, but because it really is this story of the human struggle to figure out what the hell is going on.

Yeah. Context is always key with any kind of art. And in a way the Gospels can be considered, like a, they're not art per se, but the sort of artistic elements, the beauty, the truth, the poetry, the meaning that jumps out. A lot of that has got to do with contextualizing a piece of art. But so much of it has got to do with that. That's something I clocked when I, you know, the book Ways of Seeing by John Berger, or is it Berger? I don't know how to do. I haven't read it. But he's got this TV show as well that he did. And one of the things he does is he shows this picture. He says, just look at this picture and see what you think about it, and then turn the page. And you turn over the page and it's the same picture, but it's got a caption now. It says, this is the last painting Van Gogh made before he killed himself. It's like, how has that changed the way that you interact with this painting? And some people want to say it kind of shouldn't.

No, the art should stand for itself, but it clearly does. Context plays a massive, massive part. And when you consider the first century Jewish context in which Jesus is working, so many of his claims are transformed. And this is something Christians always want to do when it comes to things like his claims to divinity and stuff. It's like, no, you have to understand to a Jew at the time, this would have been a really significant thing to say. You know, claiming to be the Lord of the Sabbath would have been huge, invoking the I am statement would have been absolutely massive. But I think we do need to do that sort of writ large and maybe some of the good stuff. needs to be contextualized as well as the bad stuff.

Yeah, they're willing to jump on it. Like, if you say, what about what about what about when Paul's talking about women or slavery in the Old Testament? It's like, oh, there's context, context, context, like, that doesn't apply today. It's like totally different. You've got to understand there's the cult of Artemis and women were getting power that they shouldn't have and they were bond service. Okay. But with a lot of the rest of this stuff, it's just quite flatly like, yeah, the Bible gives us the guide us how to live today. It's eternal truth.

Like, what do you mean? You need to reinterpret it. What are you talking about? I just kind of think we should look for a bit more consistency on that front, maybe. Yeah, well, I just, it's, it's that starting point, right? You know, I think, you know, you talk about the, and I know you've debated people on this, just the idea of slavery in general in the Old Testament, right? And like, just like the, or the conquest.

And it's so easy when you're like, well, my starting point is that this is true. And so any answer that helps me explain. this. I mean, I remember my son, the first time you ever heard about Joshua's conquest, essentially coming home from church and being very upset, like, I got people to destroy these other communities. And of course, I had the, I didn't have the answer that I've heard in most recent apologetics that it was hyperbole, which I don't know if my son would have understood that. But I essentially was like, this is, you know, God, basically, God is God makes this decision and he can use his people to carry it out.

But also you need to know that these people that were killed were so sinful. And even the kids that were born into that, the level of sinfulness was so high that it was ultimately an act of mercy. Like there's ways that you can talk about that. I think about that now. I'm like, what did I tell my very impressionable son? I basically said there is a time in which genocide is justified. Right. That's essentially what I said.

And you're saying it to your son as well. It's like, well, you have to understand that, like, those little children, you know, were just sort of so, so corrupt. Oh, and by the way, remember last week when we were talking about how all human beings are sort of necessarily corrupt and we all deserve hell, it's just for God's grace that we're, what's that going to think? Yeah. So if you're sinful enough, then we should be genocided. Okay. And then next week you're telling me that we're all born in sin and I don't know. It's quite funny, though, if you had that, I mean, the idea of like hyperbole, you know, oh, it's okay, Sunday.

It was just exaggerating. They were exaggerating. What? The teachers were exaggerating. It doesn't say that in the Bible. No, no, no, it does. God was exaggerating. That's what I mean.

He just sort of, you know, he just realized that we'd work that out all these years later. Yeah. Right. But then when you, like, what was the context? What actually was happening? It's like, okay, well, this is probably some sort of retroactive history to kind of explain, how did we get here? Like, we were probably just some tribe that sort of broke off of the Canaanites or whatever.

And now, you know, now we have. have to explain why we're not them, and like, let's create this story. And, but I just think that if your starting point is this has to be true, this is God's word, and that is of utmost importance, you know. We were talking about this last night to this, the analogy that I use of the magic show.

This is how I kind of explain my faith at this point, right? So if we're at a magic show and the magician is what they're doing all this amazing stuff, that to me a non-magician is just, I'm like, this is crazy, how does he do that? But I've got a professional magician next to me that after every trick, he explains what happened. He takes the magic out of it.

Something about my personality loves both of those things. I love to be wowed and to believe that something is magic and then I love to have this guy explain why it wasn't magic. And I think that at this point in my life, the explaining why this action, how this actually happened, how the Bible ended up the way that it was. It was like, well, I believe that it was magic,

and now I've got the guy sitting next to me, like a Dan McClellan explaining why this is what it is. And I'm sort of equally into those two ideas. But to contextualize my personal religious faith, I just can't help but hope that at least one of those tricks is magic, is real magic. And that the tricks that this guy can't explain, yet like why we're here at all whatever you know some of these foundational things yeah

really well these things can't you know no one's giving any great explanations for those things and maybe they never will and you know I think it was I believe it was a member of the band ACDC you talked about God is the the blanket we throw over the mystery I think was his line and so I just think that there's this magic and this mystery that I sort of want to That's my faith. There's some magic and mystery in the universe that I don't want to explain away and that I'm willing to throw the blanket over that and call that God. But I understand that there's no dogma in that that we can organize a movement around.

Yeah. We don't go to some house of worship and say, okay, today we are going to worship the blanket over the mystery. Yeah. And so that's something I'm trying to figure out. Like what is it? And it's compatible with evolution. Yeah. And it's like, okay, is that like, is that universal, you know, Unitarianism or, you know, is that, is there some tradition that I can find a home in that, like, acknowledges the mystery? And so far, yeah, I'm kind of like, I don't think so. I don't, I'm not super motivated to figure that out. But yeah, very, very L.A. sort of, I don't know, man. Let's not put a label on it, man.

And this is a, I think it's, you know, Britt Hartley, who I'm a fan of, who wrote No Nonsense Spirituality, she's quick to point out that this is a, this is certainly a position of privilege, right? I am a successful entertainer who lives in Los Angeles and has all my basic needs taking care of, and I can approach these things

with just a passive intellectual curiosity. Right. I'm not fighting for my life, I'm not at risk, because of the things that I believe, these statements may cause people to not like me, but I'm not, you know, I'm not being persecuted in any way. And also, I'm not living the kind of life where I need desperately to have hope

that there is some sort of ultimate resurrection, that there is some sorts, everything will be made right in the end because my life is so bad. My life is great, you know, comparatively. And so I recognize that, just dabbling in this, I'm like, well, what if I would go to this church? or I could go to this church or I could join this community.

Yeah. There's an incredible privilege that comes with that. But it's my circumstance. It's like I, you know, I'm doing the best I can. Yeah. Given the circumstances. Yeah, well, I appreciate it. And I appreciate you taking the time to spell out some of your beliefs.

I mean, like I say, it's perhaps that uncomfortable thing five years ago whenever it was that you decide you want to do this because it's not. It's not the most user-friendly topic in the world for a lot of people, but at the same time, you want to be open with people. And it feels a bit weird to, if you're going to let people into any degree, this is such a big, important part of your life. You kind of have to have to let it be known. And hopefully in those five years, you felt like that was worth, worth doing. Yeah, I think so. I think the real struggle at this point, I have no regrets about having told the story and being honest about it. I think that the struggle. is, you know, what good, what's the net good of me talking about these things? Yeah, right. Because I think that, and this is only, this is something I've been thinking about

more recently because I do, there are some people, I think that I just don't, I don't wanna disrupt. If their faith is working for them, I'm not interested in disrupting that just because, I might believe that it's not true and that there's some sort of delusion. Because I think there's a certain personality that can kind of go through this process

and actually come out on the other side and still feel like they're living a really meaningful life. And for me, I don't regret the deconstruction one bit and I don't regret the, you know, being public about it one bit. But I do ask, you know, myself sometimes I'm like, and I think this is what keeps me from talking about it more. It's just, okay, well, if I'm just taking something apart, but I'm not giving any tools, like what is my role in this?

And also, it's just entering into the fray, which actually is a question I had for you, right? Because you are in the fray in talking about this stuff on a regular basis. And like 95% of the time, what I do is like, like the silliest, most un-serious content on the internet, right? Right. And that you couldn't offend somebody with it if you tried.

Yeah. But when I choose to, in a small minority of time that I choose to talk about this, I make enemies. You know, people are like, what are you doing? You're this is a bad example. You're bringing people away from the faith. And, you know, even though I'm like, well, actually, I think I'm just causing people to question things

that should be questioned, still like I don't I don't like getting that kind of negative attention sure yeah I just I don't like I don't want to debate I don't want to get into it with somebody online really right I'm like I'd rather just make you laugh be a distraction from all the stuff that's going on in the world but you obviously yeah you step right you step right into it yeah it's it's my it's my breakfast so like how do you uh you know how do you approach that knowing that this is like I know you You know, we're just talking about being at this conference where you're basically the only atheist at this conference. Yeah, that's right.

It's great fun, actually. And I've got quite a good working relationship with the people I debate with and the communities that I sort of step into as a bit of an outsider. And so it feels all right. Like, I don't have any serious trouble in that regard. But also, it's always been the way it's been for me. It's not like I've got this show and I'm about to, like, potentially nuke it with all of this talk. about religion and stuff. Like, that's what it's been from the start.

Like, in fact, when I sort of move in the opposite direction, like, you know, when I've spoken to you today, you've been sort of telling your story, I've been asking questions, it's been interesting. I've done the same thing with Christians, where it's been a similar vibe of like, you're just telling me a story. And I'm not going to sit there and go, well, I think you're wrong about this and start debating. And people in the comments kind of get annoyed about that sometimes.

Or maybe annoyed's the wrong word, but they sort of say, like, oh, you know, I wish you to push back more and I'm like this person's just like telling me their story you know I'm not here to do that today and so if anything I kind of had the opposite problem which is that I need to be like opinionated fiery if I'm if I'm on the fence too much then people start to lose interest in what they've signed up for which is somebody to look to for a viewpoint for an opinion and be interesting to hear what that guy's got to say and it's all context dependent and honestly I say that but then as I've been a bit more willing to have those exploratory conversations and non-committal discussions, the channel has grown exponentially.

And so I think that is resonating with people more. But it means that when I do decide to come out and do the debate and remind people that actually I am still somebody who enjoys debating and defending an opinion and all of this kind of stuff, it's not like jarring for anybody, you know. And so, yeah, I mean, I get a lot of that kind of commentary, but it depends how you feel about. it, right? Because if you, after this conversation goes live, if somebody says, that thing that he said about the empty tomb, that's just like wrong, man, look at this verse or look at this thing. You're going to look at that and you might go like, that's kind of annoying. Oh, man, like, maybe I shouldn't have said that. Whereas I'm going to be like, if it's significant enough, it's like, I'll just make a video about it. I'll just respond. I'll be like, okay, here's five arguments against the empty tomb, you know, because that's like my thing. So there's a sense to which also, when those comments or or when that attitude is coming towards me, I think, well, if it really comes to it, I'll just respond, whereas you're not going to want to sit there making video. Yeah, do I want to go back, do I want to get to it back and forth? Because that's a, you know, I don't speak, uh, super precisely about these things and I know a fair amount, but I'm not, I'm not an expert on any of this

stuff. And I'm not necessarily in the deep end. I'm usually just sort of like talking to people who are in. Yeah, sure. Right. And so you know, like I know I've said things. today that'll be like, oh, I put that that way and this guy is talking about it in this way, and I kind of regret that I said that, even though I've gotten much better about just not watching that stuff or caring too much. I know that's, you know, that's the business that those guys are in. But yeah, that's interesting because you started with this in mind versus this being some. For a lot of people, for me, it was a big, like, what?

we thought you guys were Christians. We feel betrayed because we would actually let our youth group watch your videos. Yeah. Because we kind of knew that you were Christians, right? And it's like, well, yeah, we weren't. We're not anymore. So it felt like the ultimate betrayal for a lot of people. Yeah.

I mean, I do sometimes get, like, you know, teachers often say that they use my videos in class, for example. And a lot of school children watch. And I do then think, you know, man, I really, I do need to be careful because, Debating is a sport. I talked about this last night as well, and I've always been quite open about the fact that I think that debates are a bit sort of silly if you think that they're a way to get to the truth. I mean, they bring up interesting arguments and stuff, but everybody knows that they're not the most productive way to have a conversation. It's a jousting match. There's nothing wrong with that. It's fun. It is sport. But as I often say to people, it's like a boxing match. You will find out who's the better boxer, that you won't find out who's the better fighter. Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to be a good boxer. You know, debating is fun. And And so I'll do that, but people do watch it thinking that this is like, I don't know, that might be the only conversation they ever see on that topic, at least some of those viewers. Yeah.

And it is a bit of a consideration. I mean, like, I look back to some of my older videos and a lot of them, I was just, I just had no idea what I was talking about. In particular, there's this whole video of me talking about the ontological argument for when I was like, I don't know, 17 or something. And I watch it back today and I'm just cringing with embarrassment. I won't take it down because I like seeing the progression. Right, it's a part of the historical record at this point.

But I remember, like, you know, my friends were making fun of me for it and I'm looking at the comments on this video and somebody says, you know, Alex, thanks so much. I'm studying for my like A level exams at the moment and this video's been really helpful. And I thought, this poor kid has just failed his exams because he's been watching my videos. Yeah. And so there is a level of responsibility that comes along with it too. But that's why I'm also sort of trying to embody this, this spirit. spirit of conversational approach. Even like in a debate, I'll debate people, but then we're like,

we're cool afterwards, you know? Yeah. We'll hang out. And I really appreciate that about your about your approach too, because I, yeah, I don't think there's ever really a reason to yell about this stuff. No. You know? Debates can bring that out of you. And it's a shame when that when that happens, but it also, like, it's better just because it protects yourself as well, even if you're just self-interested. Like, forget the sort of, I want to, you know, foster positive community and all the kind of stuff, even if you're just fully self-interested, if you walk in with this bravado and confidence and somebody, like, proves you wrong, it's embarrassing. You're on stage and you're flustered and you're, and people are clipping it up and it's terrible.

Whereas if you've gone in from the outset, like, I'm doing this debate, I'm here, but I'm here to explore this. I'm here to have a conversation. Then when somebody says, what about this? And you go, ha, good point. It's not the end of the world. Because your pride isn't on the line in the same way. I always thought that if I did convert to Christianity, the way that I would announce it would be, I would accept a debate about Christianity. And I would let the opening speaker give their 20 minute opening statement. And then they'd call on me and I'd stand up and I'd go, you know what? Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, good point. All right. Yeah, you win. Well, done and that would be how I would do it yeah you yeah yeah you can make a moment out of that

like the many many people are praying for that conversion yeah and when I finally become a Mormon it's gonna yeah rug pool man really really really shake them up yeah hey rat thanks so much for taking the time yeah thanks for having me