We’re back!  Here’s a sneak peak of what we’ve been preparing for Season 3. We began with a simple question: “Why should we go back to church?”  Some people were forced out by COVID; others elected to drop out long before COVID because of a faith crisis.  And many in both camps are now wondering whether/why they should go back.  We talked to church members, our Facebook Discussion group, pastors, an internet pastor, a mega-church leader, and a best-selling author.  And what we thought would be one episode blossomed into a five-part miniseries! We also thought we needed to do another COVID update. But before doing that, we thought we should look at why certain church-folk can be so resistant to solid, data-driven science. And that also got us exploring their contrarian views on the climate crisis. Once again, a single episode turned into three. And then we’ve put together another mini-series under the title: “The origin and evolution of …” You’d be totally right that this will have us filling in the blank with predictable and scientific things like: … of the universe … of life … of species … of humans. But we’re also going to fill in that blank with unexpected, theological things like: … of the ancient Hebrew concept of YHWH … of the “Old Testament” … of the New Testament … of heaven/hell/afterlife. And so many other ideas that we’ve got baking in the oven. As always, tell us what you think. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please share with a friend and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

In this season finale, we take a look back at our journey with you. Boyd and I had planned to take it in one direction, but as all great conversations go, this one went in a direction we completely did not expect! It really took on a life of its own. A couple episodes that we had simply thought would be warm-ups as hot-button cultural or societal stories put a spotlight on some really strange things about the Evangelical movement, which then had us dissecting Evangelicalism in detail. One of the distinctive features of Evangelicalism is the claim that we have a “personal relationship” with the Divine. We found we had to ask the challenging question: “Really? What does that mean?” So the second deep-dive was a search to find out how exactly we humans experience relationships, how we can manufacture the experience in our heads, and how we can get it all so horribly wrong. Much of this was fueled by listeners writing in to us with their questions and personal perspectives, and our private Discussion Group page on Facebook. We treasure that. So, as we take some time off to enjoy the summer and prepare for teaching responsibilities, we ask for two things from you: (1) keep writing in about where we should take this in Season 3 (maybe go back back through the Archive and see where we left threads hanging); (2) help increase our listener base by simply telling a friend or two, and writing a review/rating at your favorite podcast catcher. It’s been fun! Have a great summer holiday! See you again in the Fall. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Over the last two weeks, we’ve looked at how the Gospel of Jesus was changed from being a message of love, forgiveness and liberation into one of fear, guilt, shame, and unworthiness. This distortion was reinforced in the home, the Sunday Schools, Youth groups, and from the pulpit. And in the eyes and minds of people within the church and outside of it, this version of the Gospel became Evangelical Christianity. In this episode, we’re going to explore another distortion from an entirely different angle: how the Jesus of that Gospel was replaced with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez has written a book which has taken the literary world by storm. And not just the Christian literary world: it’s a New York Times Best Seller. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Kristin takes us on a walk through recent Evangelical history, and shows how another distorted version of the Gospel was also taught from the pulpit, in the Sunday Schools, and within popular Christian literature. And this one too is seen by many American churches as entirely normative. As always, tell us what you think. If you want to find more from Kristin: https://kristindumez.com/ If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please share with a friend and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

In this second half of our look at religious trauma, we talk to Dr. Marlene Winell (PhD, Psychology), who literally wrote the book on this topic … Leaving the fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion … and is now the director of a large counseling service for those dealing with religious trauma (https://journeyfree.org/). Marlene shares her clinical experience of over 30 years dealing with this problem, one which she lived through herself. We look at many of the medical aspects … cause(s), manifestations, treatment … as well as some of the neurobiology behind it. This in turn led us to unpack our own view of the evolutionary origins of religion and religious trauma: the latter taps into our primal urges of tribalism (our need to be part of the group; our fear of “the other”), basic fears (of suffering, ostracizing, death), our need to follow the alpha male of the tribe, and how organizations use these urges against us to control us. Not just churches and religions … we also look at many completely irreligious groups and organizations that follow the exact same playbook. That having been said, we did look at how Christianity has contributed to religious trauma. And when we asked her “what should the church and Christian believers do about this”, this atheist answered: “You need to go back to the original teachings of Jesus.” As always, tell us what you think. If you want to find more from Marlene: https://journeyfree.org If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please share with a friend and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

In the past few episodes, we’ve learned about the important role that other people play in one’s spiritual experience: we see, feel, and hear from God in part through our encounters with other people. This makes sense if the church is “the body of Christ.” Unfortunately, there’s a dark side to this fact: many people are traumatized by their encounters with other believers and with the church. From childhood, they are raised to see themselves as evil, wicked, and worthless; to always be fearful of an eternal, fiery hell, especially if they think they might have committed “the unpardonable sin” (which is never fully defined); to feel always surrounded by demons hell-bent on a mission to attack us at every step. Women are taught that they are second-class citizens in the kingdom (“After all, it was ‘the woman’ who deceived Adam”), and are responsible for tempting men in the way that they act and dress (“you don’t want to cause the brothers to stumble, do you?”). Indigenous people are taught that their heritage is evil; their children can be taken away in order to “give them a better life.” And when believers struggle in their faith, and begin to ask questions, or find that they can’t walk the walk anymore, they’re shunned by their family and their community. They become a pariah. Ghosted. “The Christian army is the only army on earth that kills its wounded and leaves them on the battlefield, rather than trying to bring them back.” This is all religious trauma. And the problem is, these things go on all around us all the time, and yet we don’t recognize it as evil. Or we don’t admit it: “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.” In this episode, we talk to Janice Selbie, an ex-Fundamentalist believer who experienced religious trauma on a national level (her family were part of the Canadian version of the indigenous people story), on a personal level (her own religious deconstruction story), and a clinical level (she is now a certified counselor specializing in religious trauma). Boyd and I found we had much to learn from her. As always, tell us what you think. If you want to find more from Janice Selbie: https://www.divorcing-religion.com/ If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please share with a friend and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

The neurobiology of the spiritual relationship is such a big topic, we thought it would be good to hear from a second scholar who comes at this from a completely different angle. Dr. Sarah Lane Ritchie obtained her graduate degree in Theology and Science studying consciousness, neuroplasticity and religious belief … we couldn’t have found a better candidate for this topic! Once again, we first talked about how humans relate to other humans (or our pets) before applying those ideas to our relating to God. Once again, the answer came back: the brain takes in external information through our senses, combines that with information already stored in our brains, does the math, and from that creates a model of reality (including our relationship with whomever is “out there”). But that still raises the same problem for me that I raised last week when we talked to Erin: that very same neuronal pathway can be high-jacked by psychedelic drugs, by extreme mental/cognitive states (sleep deprivation; complete exhaustion; shamanic ritual; tantric sex). In fact, more to the point, we can even learn how to activate this pathway by “doing church” … developing a practiced routine that involves certain behaviors and patterns of thought. Could this in any way be behind the claims some people make about “feeling God’s presence”? Would that explain why some people get those experiences, and the rest of us don’t? This got us sharing a few personal stories of being in church settings that shamelessly manipulated emotions and cognitive states in search of a spiritual experience. As always, tell us what you think. If you want to find more from Dr. Ritchie: https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-sarah-lane-ritchie If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please share with a friend and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Having described the neurobiological mechanisms behind our relationships with other people, Dr. Smith then addressed our original question: “how do we humans relate to God?” Her answer: “in exactly the same way.” Some might be surprised that I even had to ask. They might shrug their shoulders or flip their hands and say: “Of course we interact with God through our brains … how else do you think that happens?” But accepting that explanation raises more than one problem. First, many of those people are the same ones who talk about some day leaving the body behind and flying off to the blue yonder. For them, heaven is a celestial, spiritual place: they completely separate the body from the full experience of God. Can they have it both ways!? Second, if activating those neurochemical pathways is part of the spiritual experience, then how do we distinguish that experience from “artificial” ones provoked by psychoactive drugs or extreme physiological states (mental and physical exhaustion; tantric sex; shamanic rituals), which also use the exact same neurobiological pathways? Third, when one learns how to stimulate those same pathways in church by developing a practiced routine of hyperventilating, rocking and swiveling rhythmically, alternately tensing/relaxing, shaking, repeating phrases (my Pentecostal/charismatic experience) … or by finding a private, quiet, peaceful corner in which one meditates, reflects, reads, and prays (the more traditional approach) … is that a spiritual experience or a trained reflex leading to a cognitive state that they interpret as a religious experience? What about claims of God speaking to people through dreams, which sleep physiologists describe as a very chaotic mental state not unlike that caused by psychedelic drugs? I don’t think we’re finished trying to understand the spiritual experience. As always, tell us what you think. Leave a comment here (below) or at our new Recovering Evangelicals Podcast Facebook Group page (you’ll need to join the group first). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals wherever you get your music and podcast episodes. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

At this point in our mini-series looking at spiritual/religious experiences, we thought it would be good to understand how we perceive the rest of the world around us, including our relationships with other people, or our pets. This is still one of the biggest questions in science: one that is still entirely unresolved. And it gets even harder to understand when claims are made that we can have a relationship with God. Think about it: how do we finite, physical, biological beings interact with an infinite, non-physical, non-biological Being? We do know a little bit about what’s involved when we relate to other people. For example, everyone knows that it includes taking in sensory information from our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin; they may not realize that we also have all kinds of sense organs in our ears, muscles, and bones which encode information about the relative positions of limbs and body in space. In addition to this external information, we’ve got all kinds of information already present inside our brains: our emotional state; memories; personal values and beliefs; societal norms and laws; data re. our loved ones (facial features; the way they walk and talk; personality profiles), and so much more. But somehow, something in some place(s) of our brain and through some process puts all this information together into a detailed moment-by-moment experience of our reality. Is it being projected onto a movie screen in our head so that a little being can watch? (I know … infinite regress). We’ve already explored this in detail in Season 1, episode #10 (“a possible scientific explanation for the human soul”). So, we talked to Dr. Erin Smith (PhD in Psychology, and a Christian) about how our brains process information inside and outside of our heads in order to create a model of reality. Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we could apply what we talked about to the question at hand: the neurobiology behind spiritual experiences and the human-Divine relationship. We’ve saved that for next week’s episode. But first, you need this foundation. As always, tell us what you think. Leave a comment here (below) or at our new Recovering Evangelicals Podcast Facebook Group page (you’ll need to join the group first). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals wherever you get your music and podcast episodes. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Many Christians insist that this is the main thing that distinguishes Christianity from all other religions: “we have a personal relationship with the Divine”. I certainly heard this many times during the first few decades of my spiritual journey. The problem for me was, I just didn’t seem to ever experience what they claimed. The frustration and confusion this generated was one of the reasons I found I had to give up my Christian faith. And one of the things I had to leave on the ground for years as I began to pick up the pieces and re-build a credible Christian faith. It’s only been in the past year or so that I’ve actually dusted this particular fragment off again. In this episode, we unpack how this relationship looks nothing like any other relationship we have. How can it? I mean, is God a person? Most believers will accept that God is far, far out of our league. Timeless. Dimensionless. Limitless. To say that we are like bacteria to God even stretches the comparison. And yet how can a bacterium have a personal relationship with a human? Just the same, many fellow believers will claim that they do indeed have a personal relationship with God/Jesus. So why don’t I? am I the problem? am I not doing it right? is it because of sin in my life? Answering “yes” to any of these questions doesn’t square with other Evangelical claims like: “There’s nothing you can do to merit God’s favor …. God loves you just as you are.” is God the problem here? Why does God cloak himself in hiddenness and then expect us limited physical humans to find him? is the problem related to our understanding of “personal relationship”? God is so immense, that we can only ever understand him through metaphors. To put God in a “person-box” reduces him. Putting gender terms around that box further reduces … “him.” Many in the Bible reduced God to impersonal metaphors: a fire, a wind, a sound. Many today reduce him to mere sensory feelings: a warmth … quivering … ecstatic joy. Or they’ll say they experience God in a sunset … a poem … a randomly chosen Bible verse. And yet, none of these push-backs seem to dampen their adamant claim that they do indeed experience God personally: they feel his presence … they see him all around them … they talk to him, and hear from him … he answers their prayers. I had to ask if perhaps they might be “generating the warm fuzzies”: manipulating their context, and creating the emotions and sensory perceptions which they then interpret as a spiritual experience with a “person”. That question sets the stage for the next three episodes in which Boyd and I will explore how it is that humans experience the world around us … how we relate to other people, or to our pets … and even to God himself. As always, tell us what you think. Leave a comment here (below) or at our new Recovering Evangelicals Podcast Facebook Group page (you’ll need to join the group first). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals wherever you get your music and podcast episodes. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

It’s a common phenomenon: people who say they’ve left the faith, but they just keep coming back to pick at it. It left a nasty wound, which has since scabbed over, but they keep lifting the edges We looked at the demographics behind this … not just in America, but also in Canada, the UK, and Australia (these make up a large proportion of our listening audience). And we can relate to it on a personal level. So we thought we’d look more closely at it. We came up with four driving forces that might explain this phenomenon: it’s wrapped up in other things that one can’t let go of (family, friends, community) thinking/talking about religion is in their mental wiring, their DNA, or has become an engrained habit uncertainty and fear: “what if I was wrong? Am I gonna’ go to hell?” the stages of life: having kids, a life-threatening illness, or approaching old age tend to force this subject back to the surface of one’s consciousness We also noticed that people who give up their faith can often tend to embark down two paths. They either become “reconstructors” (they find a substitute, even an entirely different kind of religion) because they see themselves as “spiritual but not religious. Or they become “crusaders” … they actively and loudly oppose the religion which had previously been such a central and vital part of their life. As always, tell us what you think. Leave a comment here (below) or at our new Recovering Evangelicals Podcast Facebook Group page (you’ll need to join the group first). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals wherever you get your music and podcast episodes. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page