Recovering Evangelicals

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

We did not anticipate two seemingly unrelated episodes would be so fertile, producing a mini-series of six episodes and a massive volume of listener feedback. In hindsight now, though, we can see the two are causally-related … each episode unleashed more feedback which gave us more material for yet another provocative episode, and the cycle continued. Now we want to digest what you the listeners had to say about it all. We combed through the comments and identified several complementary threads and many probing questions: were we being destructive toward the Christian community in general? were we being too hard on Evangelicals in particular (even persecuting them)? were we confusing Evangelicals with Fundamentalists? what are the problems with Evangelicalism? are we allowed to protect Evangelicalism’s reputation by unilaterally re-labeling the embarrassing elements in our community as Fundamentalists (aka, scapegoating)? have Evangelicals and Fundamentalists lost their distinctiveness? can we find a litmus test to distinguish Fundamentalists from Evangelicals? if we can’t revoke the “Evangelical” label from those embarrassing elements, can we come up with a new label for ourselves? what does it really mean to be an “Evangelical”? do Boyd and I need to re-name our podcast? Our listeners (you!) gave us their thoughts on these questions (and we had a few rebuttals). 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

Our previous four episodes, and the tremendous listener feedback they generated, referred often to Evangelicals and Evangelicalism. Some listeners suggested that those terms were applied incorrectly, and that we should instead be using labels like Fundamentalists, Christian Nationals, Moderates, Modernists, or Liberals. Do those who self-identify as “Evangelicals” … in their daily conversations, or when talking to Pew … know what they’re saying? Are they allowed to self-identify, and can other people deny them that right (for example, by declaring: “those people that Pew call Evangelicals are really Fundamentalists”)? Do we need a “shibboleth” before one can self-identify or be identified as an Evangelical? [the 12th chapter of the book of Judges describes a civil war between two sub-groups of Israelites who were in almost all respects indistinguishable, except that one side recognized that the other pronounced the word “Shibboleth” differently: they decided that everyone should be challenged to say this word and those who said it differently were immediately seized and killed.] When Pew Research describe the values and actions of Evangelicals, are they painting Christianity with too broad a brush? How has modern Evangelicalism gotten so far off course from her original mission given to them by Jesus? How did it morph into Christian Nationalism and Dominion Theology? In this episode, Boyd and Luke talk to a Professor of Church History about questions like these and several others which have come up in the last few episodes as we explore “who are Evangelicals?” Spoiler alert: “Evangelical” comes from the Greek word for Gospel (euangelion): the Good News. It’s the word that Jesus used when he sent his disciples to “go out and take control of the world“. “… and take control of the country“. “… and set up a theocratic nation.” “… and tell people they’re all going to hell“. “… and stand opposed to the sexual norms of your society“, “… and preach the Good News of liberation, forgiveness, and love for all people.” We talked about this in great detail last year in episode #14. 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

The previous three episodes had us unpacking statistics, quotes, and teachings pertaining to Evangelicalism which … really didn’t make Evangelicals look very good at all. It made us wonder if we might be seen as being too hard on Evangelicals. Even “persecuting” them. And then, the Internet being what it is … delivered up to me in my morning news feed an article in Christianity Today which claimed Evangelicals feel like they’re the most discriminated group, as well as another one that explored stories of persecution of Christians overseas. In this episode, we look at a Pew Research report which dug into this perception held by people who self-identify as Evangelicals. And we talk about why they might face discrimination: whether it is indeed discrimination against their religious beliefs, or against the way in which those beliefs are foisted on society. And the sense of privilege which seems to motivate them. We also look at the horrific stories from far off countries … bombings, killings, beheadings … and whether this is bona fide persecution of Christian belief, or rejection of Western/foreign influences and simple tribalism under the banner of religious belief. Is it a fight over theology, or over control of the country? And isn’t this precisely what’s also going on in America: a fight for control of the country, under the guise of a defense of Christian values? As always, tell us what you think. Leave a comment here (below) or at our new Recovering Evangelicals 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 podcasts and music. 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 me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Months ago, we planned to kick off Season 2 with two episodes that … we thought … were quite unrelated: the Insurrection at Capitol Hill, and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. And yet our research revealed a common thread running through both: QAnon and Evangelicals walking hand-in-hand in revolt. While interviewing people to gauge their awareness and interest in these two topics, we learned that the thread led to something called “the Great Reset.” Our bet is that you don’t remember ever hearing about anything called the Great Reset.  We certainly hadn’t. When we did the homework to see what was going on here, weren’t we surprised to learn that it has to do with a global cabal trying to take over the world, using COVID-19 to bring the world to its knees, and only Donald Trump was standing in their way to prevent this “secret” plot. In fact, some Evangelicals see this cabal being led by Satan himself. We kid you not. If you think these ideas are completely removed from your own reality, think again. We’ve all heard of conspiracy theories of world takeover … world governments colluding … government control of the populace … banks and billionaires exerting influence.  It’s the stuff of many Hollywood movies. And maybe you’ve sometimes even wondered if “there might be some kernel of truth here”. This is precisely the fringe of the world of reality known as QAnon. And many of us who have moved in Christian circles have often heard of spiritual warfare … children of light against children of darkness … Christians needing to stand up against a growing evil … Dominion theology. We may also have heard that we now live in the End Times: apocalyptic images featuring Armageddon, the Beast, the Anti-Christ. Fringe ideas of Christendom perhaps, but this is precisely the world of Evangelicalism in America. And those two fringe worlds resonate with each other. The Great Reset indeed! We hope this episode gives you something to talk about. But you might want to sit down before you hit <Play>. 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, and leave a review at your podcast provider. 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 been almost a year and a half since we’ve had COVID-19, and over half a year since we’ve talked about it. It’s time for an update. Global deaths have now exceeded 3 million, despite our having several vaccines with high efficacy. At the heart of this paradox: people refusing to wear masks, to socially distance, or to take a vaccine. Who are these people? Pew Research have asked … and found an uncomfortable and embarrassingly high proportion of them are Evangelicals. In fact, Pew Research found that white Evangelicals (in the USA) are the demographic most likely to decline the vaccine!? And worse, the most likely to declare that it should not matter what impact their decision has on the community!? “Evangelicals”? Boyd has an interesting word for this kind of people. In this episode, we give a ground-level primer on what a virus is, and the two new vaccine strategies that have been developed to fight them. Instead of the old approach of injecting actual viruses which have been inactivated (by chemicals or radiation), the new approaches are to artificially synthesize a signature protein from the COVID virus (the “spike protein”) and then float that into our cells using lipid bubbles (Moderna; Pfizer-BioNTech) or a hollowed out shell of a different harmless adenovirus (Oxford-AstraZeneca; Johnson&Johnson). We also look at the reasons why people are declining the vaccine: relatively minor side effects which might mean a few days of discomfort or even lost income a misinformed belief in becoming a genetic mutant an uninformed understanding of the increased risk of blood clots or anaphylactic shock use of stem cells from aborted fetuses concern about how quickly these were developed, and lack of data on how well they work the feeling that they’re strong and therefore don’t need the protection they can quote Bible verses to ward off the threat As always, tell us what you think. Leave a comment here (below) or at our new Recovering Evangelicals 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 podcasts and music. 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 me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page