Episode Summary: (CW): Mental Illness, Suicidal Ideation, Depression, and Anxiety) Anna Gazmarian’s new book Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, investigates the overlapping complexities of religious faith, mental illness, and doubt. If you grew up in religiously conservative spaces, odds are you either never talked about mental illness or you were made to believe only people with a demonic spirit could suffer from mental and behavioral disorders. According to research by the National Institutes of...

Episode Summary: Interviewing Jonathan Merritt felt like having a conversation with myself. His journey out of white evangelical subculture is an almost mirror-image of my journey. My guess is, you’ll find a lot of correlation as well. Jonathan was a card-carrying evangelical who left his Southern roots and evangelical home to find faith, family, and freedom outside the confines and cult-like community of evangelical Christianity. His journey led him from certainty to contemplation, from...

Episode Summary: Do you feel spiritually and physically domesticated? Are you struggling to free yourself from the long-term impacts of spiritual colonization? Do you feel disconnected from the natural world? Are you longing for something more than merely reconstruction? If so, spiritual rewilding might be the next step in your faith seeking journey. Though an environmental term—meaning letting nature take care of itself and referring to conservation strategies that reintroduce species to...

Episode Summary: Author Liz Cooledge Jenkins joins us on the show to discuss the harmful effects of patriarchy on men, women, families, LGBTQIA persons, culture, nations, and spiritual communities. With its ties to domination, violence, aggression, militarism, and white supremacy, patriarchy centers white, heterosexual men at the expense of everyone else. Patriarchal communities often tolerate or even condone violence against women, including domestic violence, sexual assault, and honor...

Episode Summary Have you ever wanted someone to sit with you by the fire and watch your old religious beliefs go up in flames? Maybe you’ve longed for a guide or a coach to help you navigate all this wandering in the spiritual wilderness. If so, then this week’s episode is what you need right now! Faith deconstruction coach Angela J. Herrington joins me to talk about life after evangelicalism, and in particular this tender time in your spiritual journey when you feel alone, bewildered, angry,...

Episode Summary Have you ever paused long enough to consider why you continue pursuing the spiritual path? After all the scandals, abuse, religious trauma, and oppressive theology, why are you still here? This same question hit me last week during church and I didn’t have a profound answer. For whatever reason, I just can’t quit my search for the Sacred. I bet you’ve asked a similar question, or at least had the honesty to wonder just what the hell you are still doing in a movement that has...

Episode Summary: Living in the United States is a daily dose of trauma. Our nation is philosophically and pragmatically built on injustice, coercion, lies, oppression, exploitation, violence, dehumanization, and planetary destruction. Do we ever stop to think about how messed up the world is? The answer, of course, is an overwhelming no. We are living in what theologian John Dominic Crossan called a domination system—shorthand for a way of organizing society in a hierarchical, patriarchal,...

Episode Summary Have you ever paused long enough to consider that maybe, just maybe you are living a lie? Is it possible that your outer shell, or your outer identity isn’t really you after all? What if all your coping mechanisms that have come to shape your identity isn’t the real you? Maybe you’ve spent your life operating out of your false self based purely on survival, but is that who you were born to become? I hope not. At some point, if you don’t examine your false self, the real you...

Episode Summary One of the paths available to you post-evangelicalism is mysticism, a spirituality that in many ways is almost the direct antithesis of evangelical Christianity. If evangelicalism was all about certainty, apologetics, Biblicism, and defending your faith at all costs, Christian mysticism can be defined by unknowing, mystery, paradox, and direct experience with the Sacred. Mystics know something the rest of us don’t know. God is right here with us, right here inside us, right...

Episode Summary Authoritarianism is on the rise all across the world. Here in America, the leading proponents of anti-democratic ideology are evangelical Christians who have been swept up in the cult of Donald Trump. Driven by a dominator theology and good old-fashioned white supremacy, conservative Christians can be counted on as the leading supporters of dictatorial politics. As Dr. David Gushee writes in his book Defending Democracy From It’s Christian Enemies, “Our current democratic...

OK, I'll admit it right up front, this is a heavy episode. This one feels like a therapy session processing through the anger, the rage, the bitterness, and all your past complicity in white evangelical Christianity. If you haven't noticed yet, one of the pit stops on the deconstruction road is animosity. You finally wake up to all the harmful ways evangelical Christianity has impacted your life and the lives of others and sometimes all you can feel is resentment. It's easy to get stuck here,...

Episode Summary In the second-part of our conversation about the Divine Feminine, we look at the ramifications of believing God is a guy. Institutional Christianity has given us God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, a triune male God with “He/Him” pronouns. And this male dominated theology has created a male dominator culture that manifests itself politically, socially, sexually, religiously, and economically in pragmatism, patriotism, persecution, capitalism, greed,...

Episode Summary Have you ever paused to wonder why it was always God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—a trio of divine beings known only as “He” and “Him?” This should cause us to ask a basic question. Why is God so overwhelmingly referred to as a He in institutional Christianity, as well as in Judaism? Did you know that from ancient times God was first known as our Mother, and sustainer? Over the next two episodes we’re going to discuss what I believe is one of the most...

Episode Summary We continue our march toward the marginalized this week with another conversation with Dr. Miguel De La Torre about the future of American political identity. As a Lantinx scholar, Miguel sees a future in which American society is run by white Christian nationalist elites at the expense of everyone who is 'the other.' Much like South African Apartheid, America could become a nation controlled by a very powerful and violent minority all supported by white evangelicals. After...

Contrary to what many assume, peace isn’t meekness in the face of evil it is the courageous and oftentimes creative task of disarmament. Active peacemaking is a way to fight against injustice without using violence. It is using the transformative force of love to resist oppression. It says that the means are the ends, that the way to peace is peace itself. “Love of enemies does not necessarily ease tensions; rather it challenges the whole system and becomes a subversive formula for true...

Episode Summary In the second installment of our conversation with Natalie Drew, we move deeper into her gender transition and how it impacted her marriage, career, and spiritual journey. If you haven’t checked out Part One, go back and listen now before moving forward into this episode! We answer several questions including, can you be Christian and transgender and what might it look like to transcend the false gender binary that pervades our social and spiritual spaces? I know you will...

CW: We discuss trauma, addiction, suicidal ideation, abuse, and other topics that may be triggering. Please listen at your own discretion. A lot of times on our show, we discuss theological matters that mostly reside in your head, but this episode is altogether very different. This conversation is personal, it’s raw, it’s painful, it’s the deeply transformative work of an individual who fought to save her own life by becoming who she always knew she was. It’s not only an episode about gender...

CW: Adult Language. Christians were never meant to be normal, we've always been "holy troublemakers" who do not accept the world as it is but who insist on the world becoming the way God wants it to be. In the words of our friends at The Center for Prophetic Imagination, “A world where all walls of alienation are torn down as we live justly with one another.” From the very beginning, Jesus called us to be a beloved community of resistance to the brutal normalcy of a world dominated by the...

Episode Summary Barbara Brown Taylor is who you want to be when you grow up. Her life is a legacy of wisdom and wonder, walking the long road toward becoming fully human. In this intimate conversation that is more memoir than interview, she looks back on a long pilgrimage of faith while sharing some of the secrets she’s found along the way. As she reminds us, “This is not the life I planned or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mind, and the central...

One of the great ironies of the Christian religion is that the person Christians worship isn’t a Christian. Jesus was born, raised, and died a Jew. He might even find it odd that an entire new religion grew up out of his short life and painful death. He is without question, the most popular person to have ever walked the earth. But what do we really know about this first century Galilean? If we are honest, not much. He was born to humble parents under sketchy circumstances, he grew to become...

Episode Summary "In the Beginning, God created male and female." Evangelicals have used this one verse as a weapon in their war on transgender individuals. But a closer look offers a far more inclusive interpretation. It is true that God made both male and female. God also made light and dark, the land and sea, skies and earth, and guess what? God also made EVERYTHING in between like rivers, lakes, valleys, hills, and mountains. The diversity of life that lies in these in-between spaces is...

“The Spirit of God, She has made me, and the breath of the nursing God, She gives me life.” - Job 33:4 When you close your eyes and envision God, who do you see? Like me, you probably envision God as an old, white male sitting on a throne looking down from on high with an air of judgment and anger toward the world. This is the god of authoritarianism, patriarchy, domination, and purity culture and he’s been entrenched in our hearts and minds for years. But what if we’ve gotten God...

We're excited to drop the first episode of Season Three of Holy Heretics with host Gary Alan Taylor! We are dedicating this year to marginalized voices who have either been muzzled by conventional Christianity or who have been pushed to the periphery of faith. People whose voices, bodies, race, gender, or sexuality make them dangerous to the status quo.  In this introductory episode, we invite you to go on an adventure into the borderlands of faith, where we seek the real meaning of the...

At some point in your deconstruction journey, you are probably going to be faced with the question, "Do I stay Christian or do I walk away from this movement altogether?" If that is where you are today, this episode is for you. It's been a minute since Western Christianity has looked anything like Jesus. For the last 1,700 years Christianity has been known more its violence, patriarchy, domination, nationalism, and racism, instead of love and compassion. Christianity jumped the religious...