[SPEAKER_00]: When Darrell Dow launched a fundee's like in two thousand and seven, he described it as a silly blog dedicated to independent fundamental baptists, their standards, their beliefs, and their craziness.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for so many of us who grew up in that world, it wasn't just silly.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a lifeline.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the eight years he actively ran the site, Darrell published more than two thousand posts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sawed twelve million visitors to his website and watched as nearly one hundred and fifty thousand comments poured in.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was one of the most important and impactful platforms for those of us who were navigating a rocky journey out of the independent fundamental Baptist movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so excited to have this episode, so don't spend someone I've been wanting to talk to since I started this podcast five years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: He helped so many of us find the words to describe the experiences we're going through and to also laugh our way through it, sharing some hilarious memes and articles observing some of the biggest quirks in fundamentalism.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this conversation, we dive deep into Darrell's personal journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: From his time graph as a missionary kid to being at Pensacola Christian College to slowly deconstructing his faith in becoming what he now refers to himself as
[SPEAKER_00]: A happy, agnostic.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also talk about the value of satire, how stuff funding is like exploded into a thriving community.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how fundamentalist religion and authoritarian politics often go hand in hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also talk a little bit about the new fundamentalist resurgence among Gen Z men and so much more.
[SPEAKER_00]: But more than anything, we talk a lot about healing, about making peace with our past and ultimately about getting small and focusing on creating real change within our immediate communities.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, this conversation went half for like five years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so excited for you to hear it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to stop talking and get you right into our conversation with Darrell Dow.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody welcome back to the show Darrell Dow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for joining me here on the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's great to be here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you for so many reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: One before we hit record, you'd mentioned it's been like a decade since you've talked about this stuff in a public way.
[SPEAKER_00]: What have you been up to recently for people that are like, where is Darrell now?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does life look like for you post to stuff on these like?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a lot going on in sort of my personal and professional lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: I live with my partner and my two kids.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been teaching.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've actually hit the college circuit a little bit, you know, teaching some classes, working with the college career.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're back.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I can search for a university here in Delaware.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've also, you know, if you Google my name and in publications, you'll see that I've been a little bit of writing for sort of professional reasons, you know, some publications academically there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of with my been my life, my existence for the last a little while here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, now that we've kind of cut up where you are now, let's rip all the way back to Pensacola Christian College days.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was going on in the mind of Darrell sitting in the dorms of PCC way back when?
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot, a lot of different things, a very sort of confused and angry young man, I think, to sort of sum it up.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'd live my whole life.
[SPEAKER_01]: My dad was a PCC graduate.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of how I ended up there, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So my whole life, I had been sort of in this funnel headed towards this thing, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The playbook is laid out for how you're going to live your life.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to go through high school, I was home schooled in the Island of Grenada.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a missionary kid and sort of separate from both US culture and sort of the mainstream of funding culture to be honest.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although, we traveled back for furloughs and visited churches.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a second entire life with my friends and sort of the culture in the islands.
[SPEAKER_01]: I sort of identify as half my brain is islander still to this day.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it created this weird dichotomy where I could see fundamentalism and I believed in a lot of it, but I could also see that there were a lot of sort of gaps or flaws or places where it didn't quite account for the way the world actually worked.
[SPEAKER_01]: through that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I landed at PCC, kind of with this idea that I was going to come here, get some education, and then my goal was to go back to the islands.
[SPEAKER_01]: I figured I could just go back home and kind of live out my existence there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I got there, I wanted to be a model student.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to be like the best possible PC student I could be.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was a super rule follower.
[SPEAKER_01]: for the first, like, year or two years, you know, and eventually just got completely burned out with the hypocrisy of it, with the arbitrary nature of it, with the illogical nature of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had a lot of time on my hands, very dangerous thing, but I have a lot of time on your hands.
[SPEAKER_01]: I worked a second shift
[SPEAKER_01]: during the summers because I actually lived at PCC during the summers and worked there and didn't just go there academically.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was increasingly never left.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was there all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And once summer I had a lot of time at work to actually read because I was working in the computer room overnight and I found myself reading a lot of books from the library PCC library.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd show up every day check out two books, you know, take them to work, read them, and then come back and check out two more.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the same week, I read George Orwells in nineteen eighty four, and I'll just Huxley's Brave New World.
[SPEAKER_01]: Same week.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it blew my mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: I started to realize that the power structures that were around me were all about serving itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: It really wasn't about us students at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The organization, the institution exist to protect the institution.
[SPEAKER_01]: And no matter what else happened, we were sort of all disposable.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we learned that because every spring we'd have what we called spring cleaning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once you got far enough past the date where you couldn't get your money back, they'd start expelled people.
[SPEAKER_01]: They would start expelled them after that point, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They wanted to get paid.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we would, you know, people would just disappear.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of a sudden, somebody would be there and they'd just be gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: people that you known for a long time and that didn't just happen among the student body, you know, all of a sudden staff members would be gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, these things were just happening all the time and it put me into a state of panic.
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually started to have sort of a PTSD response to what was going on there because I knew my credits wouldn't transfer.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd spent all of this time and I was very consumed with the idea that I had to finish.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to get my degree.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to see this to the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: Didn't want to start over.
[SPEAKER_01]: If, if forty-five-year-old Darrell was talking to eighteen-year-old Darrell, I'd be like, cut and run, like it's, you know, it's just a couple years.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it feels like everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: In that context, it felt so important.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one thing and another kept happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: I ended up my senior year just so burned out that I remember walking across the stage to get my diploma and I felt absolutely nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: just burn to a crisp.
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, just scared that somebody was going to come pull me out of line as I was staying there to get my degree and expel me for what I didn't know, but I mean, just that was the level of just intimidation and fear that was existent there took a long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had dreams that I was back at PCC for years after I left for years.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was such a traumatic ending to that experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where all of this kind of started for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: We got to see the man behind the curtain a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: When these institutions get a hold of you, what happens is nothing good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I asked you about Pensacola because you've said in other interviews that without Pensacola, there would be no stuff on these like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I also, that was really interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I found a quote from you where you like in fundamentals into this childhood monster.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's somebody's terrifying.
[SPEAKER_00]: You think you're a little bit sees it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you find this website where people are posting picture of a monster and drawing mustache on it and laughing at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really healing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: When did you decide?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have this kind of traumatic college experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm expendable.
[SPEAKER_00]: At what point do you go like let's start drawing my stashes on this monster and then even beyond that like
[SPEAKER_00]: to decide to do that publicly with your name attached is such a scary decision.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: How long of a time span was that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, what made you go, like, I'm going to, like, put myself out there as the guy that talks about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the blog started around two thousand seven.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I kind of have that day in my mind because that's when my first daughter was born.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so
[SPEAKER_01]: that you know I graduated two thousand three so there's about four years between there and in that time I had left college gotten a job gotten married I was working in a church fundamentalist church I was the
[SPEAKER_01]: Music director, Sunday school teacher, Philan, preacher, like, I was, you know, I was a deacon.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was doing all janitors.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: A little bit, paint paint the walls.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it was a small church.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it was the church that my, at the time, my wife was now my ex-wife grew up in.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, it was kind of, I was in that world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was just continuing to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we left.
[SPEAKER_01]: We moved actually back to Pensacola.
[SPEAKER_01]: For a job opportunity that one of my people I graduated with was like, hey, come down here, you know, I got a programming job that, you know, and I was a computer science major.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was like, right, you know, I'll go down and do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at that point in time, then I was outside of the sort of world of fundamentals.
[SPEAKER_01]: I visited a few churches, none of them really landed.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I had no connection to them, no tie to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could see too much.
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt too much about what was going on there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was just kind of like, no, I don't, I don't think I want to do this anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so at that point, I did what a lot of people do and I started referring to myself as sort of like merely Christian, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, oh, I'm still Christian, but
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm not fundamentalist anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we go through these phases.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think almost everybody does.
[SPEAKER_01]: One is which I'm going to save fundamentalism.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fundamentalism is broken, but we can do it right.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a way to do it better, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so people go through that phase and then they kind of run into, you know, they're heading against the wall a few times and they're like, oh, okay, maybe we can't do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, let's, let's try to find some sort of just Christianity, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so some people, people take different paths in that, but you know, they try to figure that out.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's what I get.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I started giving myself an education at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was driving in my little truck back and forth to work and I was downloading these courses online.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of organizations now, they start to, you know, just release their coursework for free.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was listening to courses on theology.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was listening to courses on the world's religions.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was, you know, listening to courses on Eastern philosophy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was just like out there, just trying to figure out, like, what is this?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, what is the background of all this?
[SPEAKER_01]: Where does all this come from?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started to go, you know, it's a little silly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's a little silly the way that the self-importance of fundamentals is just a little silly.
[SPEAKER_01]: They think that they're saving the world in most of the world doesn't know they exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is one of those places where it's like, well, you know, think about all the hoops we jumped through as kids, all the stuff we went without, all the things we didn't know, all of the rules that we followed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we get on the world and the right touch.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like, you're a little weird, but also whatever, you know, and it's just, it just doesn't land at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started to realize the absurdity of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I said to myself, you know, I feel like I need to just start writing about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my advice to bloggers is write about it, even if nobody would ever read it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to love it enough that you just have to write it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just write it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just started writing it and almost nobody was reading it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I did something that was probably, you know, as a bit of a no-no in the blogging world, I cross-posted one of my posts into the comment section of John A. Cove's stuff Christians like.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, he had written, I even forget what the article was, but he had written about something.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had written something about that same topic, but from a fundamentalist lens, not even jellicle, largely lens.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, here's a slightly different take on this, and I posted a link to it in that chat.
[SPEAKER_01]: And from there, it just kind of blew up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like people found it, people started sharing it, and people started reading it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And before I knew it, I was in this, I was posting, you know, several times a week.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, you know, in these huge conversations, we had these,
[SPEAKER_01]: These reply threads to a post that would go on for hundreds of replies and I was just like I don't even know what's happening here, but obviously there's a lot of people who want to talk about this and so I just kept going but I refuse to take it too seriously because that's where they get you
[SPEAKER_01]: Fundamentalist love nothing more than a serious debate right because then they can roll out ninety six reasons why and you know paragraph after paragraph I read these types of blogs, you know for and against fundamentalism work is like I'm a you know theological treatis on the reason why you know the church started during Christ ministry and how fundamentalist get that wrong or whatever and it's like
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, you know, that's great, but that's not really where people really want to think about and feel about.
[SPEAKER_01]: They need to feel their feelings about what happened to them, rather than sort of intellectualizing all of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I really started down that track, writing parody, writing, you know, satire, writing like the rules for fundamentalism.
[SPEAKER_01]: People still reference it to this day, I still get emails about that from, you know, from time to time, where people are like,
[SPEAKER_01]: I just found these rules for fundamentalism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was really kind of how the whole thing took off.
[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned like, obviously this is super early on and I love your advice about, you know, just start talking about even if nobody else is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And really my podcast came at a point where I felt like there wasn't ongoing coverage about abuse stories within this world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really created it for like, man, I wish this resource was there for me when I was in high school, figuring the stuff out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I mentioned that to say, when I was in high school, figuring this stuff out, one of the few things out there was stuff on these like, you know, like, you talked about Tim Rul on your site.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse had come to our church when I was a teenager.
[SPEAKER_00]: I googled it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how I kind of found out about all this stuff happening in that world.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you were starting your page,
[SPEAKER_00]: There was even less out there than there is now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, was there anybody, I know you're listening to college courses, you're studying theology and things?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was there anybody critiquing fundamentalism in a way that you were like consuming their content or you're like, man, they were kind of the person I looked to as my stuff, Fundy's like, you know, when I was figuring it out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not really, not per se.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I was having a lot of sort of one-on-one conversations.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was part of something called the PCC board.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't know if you ran it into that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And any of your, it's no, it's defunct now.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't even think there's like an internet archive copy of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there were a lot of people on there who were somehow associated to PCC who we kind of get into like fundamental forums.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for PCC.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, but...
[SPEAKER_01]: much more sort of anti than four.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so it was kind of a mix of things and a lot of people who sort of were like a little burned out and some some defenders, you know, would pop in from time to time.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I had a lot of sort of conversations and dialogue with people.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's some people on that.
[SPEAKER_01]: board who are still my friends, you know, but other than that, sort of those discussions back and forth, there was nobody who was sort of doing it the way I was doing it, and I wasn't even sure if I was doing it right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I had this fear, like it's still right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't even know if this is, you can do this, but I'm just, I'm just going to do it, not wait for permission and just just start.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's so funny because that's what I think about.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been doing this five years now and I'm always like it would be really helpful if there's like a book on like how to do a podcast about like your fundee trauma and how much to expand how much to contract and and with that in mind like
[SPEAKER_00]: you're doing this site, you're talking about all these topics.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I found like, you know, I remember reading through articles, but then even going back through, there was a constant kind of recentering of like, this is what I'm talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what I'm not talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I want to talk about fundamentalism, but there is so much similarity with other fundamentalist subsets.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're like, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: I talk to Mormons.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like take away the stuff around drinking coffee and like a couple of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like purity culture was the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: The messages were the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pressure was the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: What kept you ramed in to just go like independent photo map is some staying in that bubble?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's that you know that whole right what you know thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I I didn't feel comfortable launching out because I was not the subject matter expert on those.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't my lived experience and
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's important to understand as you read through that.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll see, you know, the things that I say at the very beginning of the blog may not be exactly the same things that I say at the very end of the blog.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a transformation that I'm going through at that period of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'll say very publicly now.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a happy agnostic.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't believe in any of this stuff anymore, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Cost that question off the list.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe that people get great comfort and meaning from various religions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't intend to take that away from anybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not like out here, like angry, like you should burn it all down.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that there is a framework that that provides.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that there's a lot of damage that is done along the way too.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as I've talked to people, I mean, one of my best friends was grew up seven day Adventist.
[SPEAKER_01]: But out in the woods, like learning how to do survival as well, because the end times were coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's just, it's so funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't believe in the rapture, but yet they still believe in the end times.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the market, the beast for them, was like having to go to church on Sunday or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the same stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, you know, it's just the, you just change the details a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you're absolutely right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there are, you know, church of God or there are other places where you can find this same sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: What I eventually realized was that fundamentalism is just the vessel that carries this thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not the thing itself, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just the label that people slap on it and it happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can, you can be anything and have the same fundamental ideas about, you know, you need to address a certain way and talk a certain way and have a
[SPEAKER_01]: a reputation or a testimony, you need to have great control over people, over what they consume, you know, with media, what they listen to, what they watch.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can have that sort of purity test in just about any group of people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Humans, they just do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you say it's a vessel for the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the thing control in your mind?
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing is absolutely control.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's absolutely control, and it's absolutely the profit of a few.
[SPEAKER_01]: on the backs of the many.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there are a congregation of the blessed inside of fundamentalism who profit insanely sometimes from these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are also true believers who do it because they really, I mean, I would put my father in that category and pastor missionary still a pastor to fundamentalists or an assistant pastor now because he got divorced.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can't be seeing your pastor anymore, but he's assistant pastor teaches Sunday school and so on and so forth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, I believe truly that he truly believes in what he's doing and hasn't profited at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he was a male carrier for years because he couldn't make enough money and fundamentalism yet to do some tent making on the side.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there are those people, but there are people who definitely do profit.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would put the sort of the Bob Joneses of the world with their art galleries and the thing,
[SPEAKER_01]: They found a way to create this.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and I would, I would put the fall wells, frankly, in that same category, liberty university and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like there is a money and power and status that can be add, and people will try to have it at the
[SPEAKER_01]: the universally level writ large or at the local church level where it's like the pastor is like, and you need to give your ties and offerings and I need to be able to live in this certain lifestyle that most of my congregants can't actually afford to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is, I believe that's really what it's about.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not really about the things at all because we see all the times that the rules change when it's convenient.
[SPEAKER_01]: They just too.
[SPEAKER_01]: The rules are never about the rules or the purity or the separation from the world or the this or the that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those things are always just of convenience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if we need to change, we will.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's just how it goes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, your beard would be allowed at Pensacola now.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be, I could wear jeans and my beard, and it would, you know, and so as much as we were told, you know, that these things were just like horrible and awful limits and unprofessional, all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They also have a reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got to keep students coming in to be able to perform.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where we're going to have a hard time recruiting if we don't relax a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the thing, the power, the, you know, the status, all of that, the institutional longevity, that matters more than anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it's also important because I think this conversation comes up and people go, you know, my pastor didn't make that much money or whatever, but there's also that thing of like money sex and power is a driving force for so many of these guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you've mentioned the money side, you know, I obviously cover the sex side of this a lot on this show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you look at a guy like Steven Anderson, who's in the NIFB branch, you know, off on his own.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like the guy doesn't collect a lot of money for himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not super materialistic.
[SPEAKER_00]: No sex scandals that I have aware of, but I'll, you know, make mark the date on that because he knows.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he gets off on the power that he has over his family and his congregation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm curious.
[SPEAKER_00]: as you're documenting this stuff, you know, you have the people who are the abuse of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I would say like a Jack Hiles knew what he was doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he built this thing knowing like I'm gonna amass power for myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you do have the people who are the like the true believers, the people that are like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're really good people who adopted really bad beliefs because they thought they were true.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you were writing
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you like hold a piece of grace for those people or did you go like, let's talk about how crazy the belief is regardless of how, you know, noble, the intent of this person is that's Harolding them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have found good people in every sect, denomination, belief system, gender identity.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can, you can find good people.
[SPEAKER_01]: just generally, but good is what people do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Love is a verb and do their actions match up to what they say their beliefs are.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always hold a little space for the fact that people can come to a realization.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have this conversation with my kids all the time, you know, about are there bad people?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't believe there are bad people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe people do bad things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe people give in to the worst angels of their nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they pursue these things because they're trying to heal some wound inside themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've got some obsession with something that's completely unhealthy.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are, well, it's like an addict.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're addicts.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're addicts to the power, to the sex, to the money, to whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does that mean that that reason is an excuse?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's not an excuse.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a justification.
[SPEAKER_01]: It never is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Reasons are not excuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can look at a Jack Hiles and you can say, I can see how he got here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does that an excuse for his behavior or not?
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nor is it for Jack Scott nor is it for anybody else in that, you know, in that general vein of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that, you know, it's sort of with the end of the blog.
[SPEAKER_01]: I ended the blog because I was done with my journey.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't mad anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: I need to put it bluntly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't mad anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw these folks as broken human beings, their hurt people who are hurting other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized that I didn't need, I didn't meet anything more from that discussion.
[SPEAKER_01]: I understood it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could go live my life.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was kind of done with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can move on past it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and so I am always holding space and hope that other people will do the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've heard many, many, many stories of people who have and that always makes me happy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if anything that I've written or said has had some small part in that that I'm I'm glad for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I also know it's a silly little blog and I don't expect like changing things out of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's an interesting thing because I know for myself like creating has been very therapeutic and and I had a bigger gap of time between leaving, leaving and then all the weird branches out of it that you hit on the way out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then starting the show, but I still feel like
[SPEAKER_00]: If I listen to episode one, two, three, four, five, I'm in a completely different place just in the last five years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to a point where in twenty twenty three, I was like, maybe I don't even need to do this because like I feel like I'm not feeling that like surgery feeling where I'm like ripping myself open every episode and doing, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but then I realized like for myself it was just like okay now I can't approach this and immensely healthy way like that's a weird time to stop like now I can have it be what it is and then have this life on the side of it And but I always hope people I'm like at the point that you feel like healed from this like you don't have to keep talking about it like you can step away just like I could choose at any time to go like you know what this is doing more harm to me than get it I'm gonna yeah, I'm happy I'm I'm really happy to hear that you've had so much time away from it to not
[SPEAKER_00]: just be in it every day.
[SPEAKER_00]: With that said, there is a lot that has happened in the last ten years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think twenty-eighteen is when you wrote your kind of epilogue and kind of popped your head back up for a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Has there been anything culturally or news that you've seen in headline pop-up, someone else's book or something where you go like,
[SPEAKER_00]: maybe it's time to fire up the computer and like do another stuff that he's like post because I have to imagine you're seeing some of the stuff going like man what the hell is treber up to right now you know or like whatever that is you have those moments where you get that itch you know a little bit it's not it's not the itch to get back in it and start writing again yeah it's more a sense of almost surprised that it's still happening I
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm far enough away from, but I'm like, oh my god, people are still doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, they're still, you know, and in the epilogue that I wrote, I said, you know, that I drove by the same little fundamentalist church every Sunday.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were the same few cars outside.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it's very easy to kind of be like, well, the, you know, fundamentalism is it's working towards obscurity in its own way.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's kind of, it's evolving and changing and doing what it does.
[SPEAKER_01]: Overall, the population is less and less inclined to join these kinds of groups.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the overall, you know, the zeitgeist of the country is just not really towards that at a spiritual or a church level.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what we have seen and what I am sometimes inspired to jump back and write about is the lessons that I learned from a authoritarian, you know, white male dominant systems and what those mean about our national dialogue today.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that has been the place where I've kind of been like,
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I even have anything worth saying in that space that hasn't been said a thousand times over?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a perspective coming from fundamentalism?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the general thought that I have when I see this kind of stuff is, I've seen this kind of thing before.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is all very familiar.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know exactly what this looks like.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know what the next moves will be.
[SPEAKER_01]: I understand how people can live in this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the reason why.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I look at the political picture specifically, and I see how easily people
[SPEAKER_01]: adopt viewpoints that are completely counter to what Christianity is supposed to be by any classical definition of Christianity, right, which is sort of helping the poor and the NAD and like, you know, like being that force for good in the world and all of those things that we're supposed to do, all that stuff Jesus said, you know, about, you know, the making herding the earth and all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what we're doing instead is we're saying the angry man and the business suit at the podium will lead us all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And isn't that familiar?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've seen that kind of thing before.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sexual abuse?
[SPEAKER_01]: Where?
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a little.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I can't and so we
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that the reason why I haven't jumped into that conversation is that one, there are lots of voices doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I started writing about fundamentalism, you're right.
[SPEAKER_01]: There weren't a lot of people sort of writing on the way I was writing about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if there's a space
[SPEAKER_01]: for me specifically, you know, to kind of jump into that or if I want to at this point to jump into that conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I definitely look at it and I shake my head and I say, you know, there are people in those fundamentalist churches who are cheering for a person who's diametrically opposed to everything they told me they stood for when I was in those churches.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that tells me that it was never
[SPEAKER_01]: It was never about the morals.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was never about, you know, it was exactly what you said.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was about the money and the sex and the power.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is exactly what it was always about.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that they can so easily pivot and go, oh, well, you know, now we're going to take away food from starving people.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when I see those types of things, the war-like language that comes out of these places, these people believe they're in some kind of holy war.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're somehow taking on the forces of darkness that are what?
[SPEAKER_01]: giving people health care and you know I'm not sure what the forces of darkness are but they you know they're there and there there's very terrified of them and the messages are the same so that that that that's kind of all I can really say about that is that it was telling to me to see those folks that I had written so much about you know with their principles and their virtues just so easily cast those to the side in the name of political profit and that is not surprising but it is disheartening
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot we could talk about there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious just to step back for a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one thing that I've been like trying to have a conversation about, but I don't know, even how to, because there's like a weird like you, I was born and raised in this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so like it's hard sometimes to go, what's my default operating system?
[SPEAKER_00]: And because the program is just there from day one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so sometimes it's hard to go like, what moral feelings do I have that come from that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what part of my identity is molded versus like, I can't go back to zero and go like, I'm really fascinated by the idea that I don't think I would be as passionately sitting here.
[SPEAKER_00]: talking about sex abuse and churches.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I hadn't grown up hearing sermons about standing up for what's right, even when it's not popular, staying in the gap, we need a few men to say this, speak out against evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're in a far, charge hell with squirt guns kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then also, too, I think, my version of Jesus that I consumed and the still resonates with me, even as someone who's also happily agnostic now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I grew up in fundamentals and like took these messages that like made me leave ultimately and it sounds like you did the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then you also have other people who grew up in it and on the extreme end become like the Josh Duggers, you know, like they took it in and like were these really odd creepy figures.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you have other people that are like, this does mean vote this way and look for what Robert Jeffries would be like is I want to mean tough SOB to lead us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do you think people just totally can sit in the same youth conferences and same services and take totally separate Jesus' out of that?
[SPEAKER_01]: I have this freeze that I've used, which is that you pick your psychology and then you pick your theology.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that
[SPEAKER_01]: people start with a pure like, let's just absorb the Bible and see what it says.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then let's like, though, either this guiding light and well, you know, because then you would think most people would end up sort of in the same place, but they don't, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even when you, like I talked to people who are like super reform, you know, and they have this sort of negative view of humanity and up themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: They believe that because they have a negative view of humanity in themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that
[SPEAKER_01]: theology fits with the thing that already exists inside of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that people who
[SPEAKER_01]: have a lot of empathy, people who have the ability to identify with the feelings and thoughts of other people, people who need community and they need justice.
[SPEAKER_01]: They need a very strongly rooted in the idea of fairness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those things lead people to pursue a Jesus who is fair and kind and you know that they look at those aspects.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that people who are
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, anti-social in some way, they see people as things to be used.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a deep set fear inside themselves about who they are and how they show up in the world there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their self-images is fraught with anxiety and all of these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: They take a Jesus like that and they say, well, my Jesus is, you know, this strong man who destroys my enemies and does all of these things that I need him to do for me because I need that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there are people who exist inside fundamentalism because that structure makes them feel safe.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gives them the psychological sort of boost that they need.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, in a very destructive way.
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a positive, but it's appealing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is why, you know, when we go into fundamentalist churches, I mean, you all, we've all been there on testimony night, you know, and I was in drugs and drinking and in the gutter for all of these years and you know, they needed something, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They, they was a genuine need for some structure, for community, for all of these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: They happened to land the fundamentalist church, unfortunately.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was serving something that was very much a deep set, and you'd inside of them, and I'm never going to chain that or belittle that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in those kinds of places, I don't get into that in the block.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't punch down at those folks.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're coming to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the people who were born with the silver spoon or the silver scripture in their mouth, so to speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: legacy people.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you really look at them, they don't believe it the same way that the rank and file believe it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They just don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't absorb that the same way.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a useful mythology for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something that, but they have their own agendas and their own ideas about how this should work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's very moldable in that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's really.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of layers to that, too, but I I think that's one piece that has certainly come up with this show is like I was at a church a large fundamentalist church and this was post doing the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: people in those very small contexts recognize me from that nobody recognize me anywhere else in my life but if I visit a church someone's gonna recognize me and someone came up to me fundamentalist woman has been in the church a long time and she said just so you know you know I was abused outside the church and I found I didn't find healing until I joined this church
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, I'm really glad that was your experience because I really am.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that is a piece that gets lost and this is like, there are people who were struggling with addiction and going to church gave them that rigid structure that helped them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were people who were abused and were abused outside the church and found people that cared for them and took them out to lunch and picked them up every Sunday.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a beautiful element to that piece there.
[SPEAKER_00]: and i think sometimes it's like this it's like this either or mentality falls in on both sides where it's like well the church was the good thing and the world is the bad thing or the world is the good thing and the church is the bad thing it's like it is so nuanced and so complicated and like
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think the issue is like when you go, okay, all of the ideas in either one are off the table for criticism because someone had those good experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, that's the part that I have a really difficult time with.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it eliminates what you hinted at, which is like, the people born with this overspin are never going to notice the issues of the rank and file.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're never going to see the person that's overworked the level that they are or struggling to feed their kids the way the pastor has an experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the piece that's really complicates things when you're having these discussions.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did you, did you ever feel a need to
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously it was for you, like something he's like ultimately was like for yourself, like before anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: You said, but did you feel like a responsibility in your tone at any point for like the people who were on the fence where you're like, I really want to help this person understand how harmful this is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to be careful with my language.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're not put off from being guided out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, how did you navigate that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to say early on the show, please don't hang out, but I used to be like, I don't want to be as stuff funny as like in the sense of, I'm not really a meme page first and foremost.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, I'm not just poking fun, because I don't want to lose the abuse victim.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is fundamentalist.
[SPEAKER_00]: You had a different approach that I think is also helpful and help me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, what was your mentality navigating that stuff?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I, I wrote a post at one point on the blog that was entitled, Why don't they just leave?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was, you know, why don't they just because that's easy for people from outside to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did you stay in that for so I mean, how did you put up a PCC for four years?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why didn't you just leave, you know, and in that I said, you know, basically, yeah, why don't you just leave?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you just leave all your friends and family?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you just leave the church that's probably all so you're lively?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you just leave everything that you've known?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you just leave the comforts of the theological system that it kind of gives your life meaning?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you just leave?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you just, like it's just this thing that you can just do?
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely was very aware that there were people who were on the fence, and they're reading this, and that sometimes the worst thing that we can do
[SPEAKER_01]: is to lovingly scream at those people, how can you be so stupid?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because then the defensiveness just sets in.
[SPEAKER_01]: What I learned through my own journey was that people don't change their minds because it somebody has better facts.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't change their minds because you've created the perfect system of argument or logic to convince them that things are different.
[SPEAKER_01]: They change their minds because they have personal experiences that means something to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: That they go through and it broadens their world and it opens their mind and it makes them see things differently.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gives them space.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you are telling somebody
[SPEAKER_01]: I am right and you are wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's an immediate barrier set between the two of you.
[SPEAKER_01]: What I try to do is say, I am right.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are also right from where you're standing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me try to get you around to where I'm standing to try to let you see that, you know, there's another way to look at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that I think is a lot more helpful, personal example for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I started working in Georgia right after my first daughter was born,
[SPEAKER_01]: My boss at that time was a gay man, married to another man.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't gay marriage wasn't legal then, but they called themselves married.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it was the first real experience that I had with somebody from the LGBTQ community.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, that was just something that I hadn't really, I didn't have any friends or people who were in that community at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't sure what to think.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I worked with Nick for some years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And all of a sudden I realized Nick's just a person.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's in the big of place about his spouse.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same thing that everybody else complains about their spouse.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's, you know, his big gay agenda is going home and watching TV with his dog.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's really nothing here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when my second daughter was born premature, it wasn't people from the local churches who showed up with like baby formula.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was Nick and his partner who was a pediatric nurse who showed up.
[SPEAKER_01]: to like, you know, help out and give us encouragement and to tell me that, you know, if I needed time off, I could take it and all of those types of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized something about that, that, you know, that shifted from a growing up fundamentalist, not really understanding sort of like anything to do with the LGBTQ community.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that shifted to me going, oh, I have a very different perspective on who people are now.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just people, you know, and I feel very comfortable around that community.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like there's a lot of positive great stuff happening there that I would love to be a part of, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, and that changed my whole perspective through what?
[SPEAKER_01]: Through him sitting me down and showing me ten reasons why, you know, gay people are also people?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: by him showing up with some baby formula and being a human being and just being like hey yeah I'm a gay guy and I'm also like very human and we can relate to each other and consider him to be one of you know my dear friends and so that that that changes the way that you see the world that's how change works and that's the only way that I found the meaningful change works for people and so I'm not going to sit and cast judgment on people who haven't had those experience yet
[SPEAKER_01]: What I'm going to try to do is invite them into spaces where they can maybe just get a taste of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and I realized now, you know, I didn't realize how absurd so winning was until
[SPEAKER_00]: leaving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I would say my leaving experience was almost a decade of like just, you know, I, I, I, I, I's opened in two thousand eleven that some things off, bubble burst moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: In two thousand seventeen.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess two thousand seventeen is when I officially left ministry and then, you know, I basically accepted.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was agnostic by like twenty twenty
[SPEAKER_00]: One, or something, Twitter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's a long journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's what you said.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like leave your community, leave your political affiliation, leave your friends, leave your mentors, which was a huge piece for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then we would knock doors every Saturday and think people were crazy for not doing the reverse of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where it's like leave all your family come to church, do this, leave all your beliefs to check them at the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like now it's crazy me that anybody ever did that.
[SPEAKER_00]: like that people were like, yeah, I'll pray on the doorstep and I'll be there Sunday and I'll do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's such an interesting thing when you start reversing it and go like, yeah, we were expecting everyone else to do that for our belief system along the way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Pretty wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it honestly really didn't work all that well for every person you might pray on the doorstep.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we got ninety nine doors slam the interfaces, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just not very highly effective.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a traumatic thing for me was I did a door door sales for two months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, this feels way worse, but it feels exactly the same as going door to door, inviting people to church, which is always a fun experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, to this day, I am kind to the people who show up at my doorstep with religion.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I had a couple of young ladies who are Mormon show up at my house the other day.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I'm like, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to convert to your religion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I, you know, I've kind of been on the doorstep of people before, but I'm like, you know, I can offer you a moment of humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Would you like it's hot out here?
[SPEAKER_01]: Would you like a bottle of water?
[SPEAKER_01]: like can I can I can I do something kind for you and if they didn't they declined but it was just you know that's the kind of thing that I try to do now because I have been there and you know I know there are people are like oh those people shop on my house I'm gonna give people it's like they're not the people who are doing this they're not
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the lowest ranking people on the totem pole who are out there on a Saturday, knocking on doors.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's not, showing them kindness is probably worth more than anything else you could do to change their minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm curious.
[SPEAKER_00]: You hinted at the current political system and just like all of that rhetoric.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you mentioned before we hit record, deliciously beautiful sound bites, where you said we're living in a fundamentalist wet dream right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm, what do you mean by that for first and foremost?
[SPEAKER_00]: And is there anybody right now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because because like I'm seeing Christian nationalism in scare quotes all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been guilty of saying in scare quotes myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think there's something to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm really curious like what you're seeing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And are you seeing anybody in particular right now like tackle this topic in a way that you think is very helpful?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I'm kind of seeing some people talk about a way where I'm like,
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know who your audience is with this and how you're saying it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that, you know, and this is so ironic because, I mean, the reason why JD Vance is where he is now in the vice presidency was because he wrote a book that alleged to help us understand why this happened in the first go around, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why Trump was elected the first time?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know that anyone has written the book that explains why evangelicals and Christians and fundamentalists specifically are so
[SPEAKER_01]: eager.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not just, they're not voting with one hand while they hold their noses.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're eager.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're sold out.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're excited about the prospects of things that have been kind of offered to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that
[SPEAKER_01]: The current political engineers, and these are not, I mean, this is not Trump.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not, you know, JD Vance.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the people, maybe like more of a Stephen Miller or somebody who's working a little bit behind the scenes.
[SPEAKER_01]: The people who are in the think tanks, they have tapped into something that
[SPEAKER_01]: allows these folks to get on board with an agenda that otherwise they should be by every measure directly opposed to right because they're getting
[SPEAKER_01]: The things that they campaigned on are the things that they've been like saying they wanted forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, our entire lives growing up, we've been hearing about the repeal of Roveaway.
[SPEAKER_01]: A abortion rights, I mean, I was born in a nineteen eighty and I was hearing about it from a time I was old enough to like remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were talking about abortion rights and Roveaway.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've talked about it up until it was repeal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, just recently.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they can take that and they can kind of put that up on the wall and see, like, see, God uses imperfect tools, because the levers have been pulled just right to make them believe that they are somehow, this is the culmination
[SPEAKER_01]: of all of these political things that have happened, the moral majority, and all of this stuff has happened in the past, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Starting with Reagan, starting with, you know, whoever in that line of succession, they've started to believe that now this is actually the way that we're going to like, you know, usher in the kingdom, I guess, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the part that is still a bit of a mystery to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, okay, you've done that and then what?
[SPEAKER_01]: What comes next?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, do we start tearing apart the Constitution and mandating Christianity?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it seems like, yeah, we've kind of started to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're putting mandatory prayer back into some schools.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're like, you know, we're kind of doing these types of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're saying that women should die rather than getting like saving healthcare.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, these are the places that we've decided to land.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now we're saying, you know, we should strip
[SPEAKER_01]: health care away from you know people on Medicaid that we should like do all of these types of things and it it doesn't line up with the Christianity that we're supposed to have but somehow it's congruent in their minds right yeah the idea of freedom means freedom for me to practice my religion publicly in your face in public spaces and to force you to do the same
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like that's not a definition of freedom for anybody, but that's kind of where we're going with this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that the web dream of fundamentalism is an authoritarian state where you are the people who are in charge of the country.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look and sound a lot like the people who have been in charge of fundamental structures.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said that rather tongue and cheat that it's in it, it's old white man and a suit of podium, but it's not far off.
[SPEAKER_01]: The rhetoric, if you listen to sort of like the jack scops or the jack hiles and the way they demean and attack their enemies, the way they use cutting language, the way they, you know, they're their masters of the insult and the dig.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's exactly what's happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's all that like, hey, I feel really good because you're attacking the people that I don't like.
[SPEAKER_01]: you're punishing the right people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of those folks are going to be sorely, they're sorely mistaken if they think that ultimately it's not going to come home to root stone them as well, that these changes to the country are not going to affect them, their personal liberties, their freedoms, their ability to live in a lives and so on and so forth.
[SPEAKER_01]: But right now, the message that's being sold is
[SPEAKER_01]: The people who you don't like are going to be punished, and people who look and sound like you are going to get their due, finally.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are going to be pulled, and that for fundamentalists who have labored an obscurity for all these years, being told that someday we're going to, you know, basically we're going to run the country in the world, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to send our missionaries out, and we're going to convert people, and we're going to, you know, we're going to have this huge revival.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what we prayed for, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Revival.
[SPEAKER_01]: What does revival mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it means a lot of people are going to start sounding and looking like us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now we have the big stick in the bully pulpit to be able to say a lot more people should sound and look like us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they really believe that that is going to usher in this sort of nineteen fiftyish dream of you know the predominance of white men basically.
[SPEAKER_01]: and a god of their understanding and the way that they believe that morality should be enforced and that he are going to, you know, be able to put other folks, if not out of the country, at least back into obscurity, make them too scared to speak out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that we're somehow going to manage to bring that in and that's going to be heaven on earth in some way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you look at any religious system that runs a country,
[SPEAKER_01]: It never ends up like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it always ends up very authoritarian, you know, and yet I jokingly said that, you know, like that on the blog at one point that, you know, fundamentalist state, they don't really, they don't really agree with the theology of say, like Islam, but they do like how they keep their women in life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that that's not far off the beam.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in terms of what the plans for this country are what they'd like to see happen in terms of you know the the national dialogue around
[SPEAKER_01]: repealing marriage equality or, you know, trying to push people back into basically indenture servitude as far as their jobs go, you know, like giving a lot of control to organizations.
[SPEAKER_01]: That all fits very, very nicely with and has been since the beginning of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I researched a little bit about Billy Sunday one time and found out the Billy Sunday was funded a lot by
[SPEAKER_01]: a factory owners who wanted alcohol repealed Beekard to be illegal because they were having a hard time keeping their workforce sober enough to work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they would pay him to come speak because why?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because they needed that money, they needed the labor force to show up sober on that day morning to work.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's been the marriage of politics and commerce with Christianity has always been there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that it's useful right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's my question.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sorry for way off the beaten path.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm enjoying the conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So as long as it's interesting to do as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious, just as someone who's thought about this a lot, like one piece, I've former Congressman Adam Kinzenger on the show a while back and we were talking and I said, do you think that Trump strategized leveraging evangelical talking points to gain power?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you think he accidentally stumbled into this crowd that was willing to give power when he accidentally touched on some of those talking points?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like chicken or the egg kind of thing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think where we're out politically right now and I would say not even just politically, but I would say just the the swell of like conservatism, fundamentalism, whatever you want to call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gen Z men attending church at higher rates and women for the first time in history is a stat that like I keep screaming about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you think the church.
[SPEAKER_00]: is the chicken in this situation, or do you think that this conservative movement has been like, hey, you know what we haven't really tapped into?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the evangelicals, like, like, what do you think is feeding the other?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know it's like a sixteen hour conversation at a bite.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Buddhism, there's a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that, it's a bit of kismet there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a bit of the right people found the right people at the wrong time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's, is Trump an opportunist who will say whatever it is that he needs to say, yes, of course he is.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he's outside holding up a Bible, you know, he's like digging all these boats, you know, being a big A flag at this rally to see that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: He will say and do whatever it is that gets him, you know, what he needs.
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk about your psychology, determining the theology.
[SPEAKER_01]: Trump's psychology is very obviously somebody who is incredibly needy when it comes to, you know, having his ego stroke and, you know, wanting people to say he's the best and the greatest and everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if he can, you know, get these folks on his side by saying those things, of course, he'll say those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that Trump's appeal to evangelicalism was as targeted.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was a bit of an happy accident for him specifically.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was less of an accident for the people around him, the Steve Bannon's and the, you know, all of those folks, they are very, very aware of this group.
[SPEAKER_01]: They understand the history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mike Huckabes, Mike Huckabes, being a part of this world.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, just like you go down the line, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And they understand very well the levers that you have to pull.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's almost like just a whisper in the ear.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, people really, they're really digging it when you say whatever in terms of like, oh, that's great.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll say more of that then.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I just say, oh, the wall, they go crazy.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, like he said things like that, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So he knows that if he like throws a little god language in there, talks about being like, you know, God's ordained person to bring back this air or whatever, people are going to eat that up because that's what they want to hear.
[SPEAKER_01]: They want to hear that.
[SPEAKER_01]: As I said, they've labored in obscurity for years and years and felt, you know, even though Christians are the majority in this country, they've always acted like them in order to increase fundamentalism, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's more Christians than anybody else in this country have been since the beginning, and yet they're always acting as if we're one step away from being wiped out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, you and I probably both, we were spent our childhoods like preparing for concentration camps.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I read so many books about prisoners of war.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, if they got on the bus with guns and they said, are you gonna die for your family?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, all of those stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've been preparing for that our entire lives about and this is the idea of like we're finally going to be free of the shackles of like the liberal, you know, media and the liberal government and then we're going to be able to live our true Christianity out loud.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like you always could.
[SPEAKER_01]: what you're trying to do now is use your power to make other people do something that you know you think they should do and they don't it doesn't compute at all it doesn't it doesn't compute so is it the chicken or the egg I think it's both frankly I think it's a perfect storm of timing
[SPEAKER_01]: When things were, you had the right group of people who were angry enough with the way things were going, uncomfortable enough with the pace of change in the country culturally, and the perfect person showed up to say, hey, I can fix that for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they said, you can have all the power you want.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: As long as you do what we want you to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's interesting looking at this for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was born in a ninety five.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like I didn't get to see like I have a fuzzy memory of nine eleven, you know, so like my perspective on politics is so different and this is something again that came up with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm considered as I was like
[SPEAKER_00]: When I started understanding politics, it was around the time everyone was realizing like, oh, we kind of got lied to around nine eleven.
[SPEAKER_00]: His introduction to that was like a swallow patriotism, let's go fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so like that's two very different reads on a situation with time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious just to get your perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think this that we're experiencing right now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like does it echo what you saw around the George W. Bush period or is this uncharted territory?
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the back, on the back of that, do you think it gets worse from here?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you think we're gonna cycle back and the pendulum's gonna swing another way?
[SPEAKER_00]: Too very small, easy question.
[SPEAKER_00]: So quick, put the answer, Jenna.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the sentiment has always been there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember singing, I was literally in what year would that have been?
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it ninety-two that Clinton was elected?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I was sitting in an answers in Genesis seminar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: In nineteen ninety-two and they announced that the votes were in and it looked like Clinton was going to win the presidency.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was just this whole fellow on the crowd, like, oh, no, like what is going to happen?
[SPEAKER_01]: And somebody I think even made out some comment, like, you know, we may not be allowed to have meetings like this, you know, going forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's there's always been this sort of sense that that persecution and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that we have not up to this point had someone who was as willing to identify with the fringes as we have in Donald Trump.
[SPEAKER_01]: George W. Bush, especially, was certainly a right winner, although he wasn't right wing enough for, I mean, the people that I was around were like, he's not right wing enough, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: They thought, brush, brush, and then ball wasn't right wing enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I mean, you know, we kind of like we're in that space, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: He was not, Joshua B. Bush was not for all of his flaws willing to embrace and identify with white nationalism to like really kind of pull in like religious fundamentalism and kind of embrace it in kind of the same way that we're seeing now.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that we go one of two ways from here on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that history kind of, you know, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so either we have a groundswell of people who say enough is enough and we're going to get back to, you know, honoring the social contract that we have to let people live their lives in peace and do what they feel is right outside of harming someone else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or we continue this trip down in a authoritarian road where we just start to see more and more of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my fear is that Trump has written a playbook, which is going to be used for the next fifty years.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is my fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: We may continue to see this flip flop back and forth of the White House, you know, a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: We may see Congress go back and forth, but ultimately the playbook of the strongman, authoritarian figure, the person who kind of stands up, and there are many, many, many.
[SPEAKER_01]: make no mistake who we're sitting in the veins ready to take his place.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are people who are salivating at the thought of being that person.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that we were going to see a lot more of that going forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: What does it mean for the country overall?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if I knew, I'd make my investments now, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: I worry.
[SPEAKER_01]: I worry, you know, as the parent of two neurodivergent kids, when somebody says we're going to start a registry for neurodivergent kids, I worry.
[SPEAKER_01]: When, you know, as somebody who has many, many friends and relatives in the LGBTQ community, when I start to see like, you know, the way that some of these trends are going, it frightens me to death.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what happens from here.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think if there's ever a time to be bold,
[SPEAKER_01]: and to stand up and say something, now is the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because not to echo those people sitting in the answers in Genesis, but I don't know how much longer we get to do that if we don't do it now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think this is a great segue back in the fundamentals.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the big glaring question mark that we leave off on in that question is, okay, when Trump dies, or leaves off in what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: who takes this place what's next and I think that's where the hope is obviously that you know the culture personality goes with him and and we see some guys grasping for power but it doesn't happen nobody knows what we convened when that happens but it does lead back to there's a similar thing happening in fundamentals right now jack troopers not getting any younger
[SPEAKER_00]: John Wilkerson, you know, at First Baptist Church of Hammond is, is there currently?
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly doesn't have the, I don't think the, the strength and personality as, as a scop and a, and a hiles, which for better or for worse in some of these ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's some danger there with how innocent me he is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, Paul Chappel is obviously still there in Lancaster, but you have all these figures where you're like, they had been the guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have been the Mount Rushmore of Fundamentalism for so long.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think happens next?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because like, these guys are so much their own personality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, do you think that's going to be a death blow to each of those, I dominoes one by one as they leave?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think they just slowly shrink, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what do you see happening over the next twenty years in the IFB movement and how much of a finger on the pulse of you had on it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Very little, you know, I follow occasionally, and I have, you know, much as someone sent me, you know, a link to your show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, hey, you're being talked about people saying blinks to things, you know, or like, hey, this news is happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: That news is happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's, there's kind of two ways that I've observed that this can go.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you add in somebody who declares an error pair, so Jack Hiles to Jack Scott, that was sort of like the direct obvious passing of the torch.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: He may have worked it out really well.
[SPEAKER_01]: All the things, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So so you can have that happen to some degree, maybe for a generation or two.
[SPEAKER_01]: But outside of that, one of two things happens, either somebody shows up with a new cult of personality and shapes the thing to be more around how they, you know, they want to see it work.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a new strong man.
[SPEAKER_01]: It kind of comes in, fills the void or
[SPEAKER_01]: what you end up with is fragmentation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where you end up and fundamentalists are great for this, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to split.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to start another church down the road.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to stay in our second Baptist church.
[SPEAKER_01]: Third Baptist church.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you got, you know, PCC starting from some Bob Jones grads, and then the big split there, all of that sort of thing happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I tend to think that
[SPEAKER_01]: how that works out has so much more to do with the overall influence of what's going on in the country and what's going on economically and what's going on politically than it does about any specific person.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that a lot of these places tend to reflect the needs that people have for stability, for meeting, for whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in times of great turmoil, some of the words, if we end up with a very authoritarian government going forward, and it's very Christian-based and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I expect to see the ranks of these places swell.
[SPEAKER_01]: I expect it's that to be much more culturally acceptable, that to be, you know, more, it's like, you know, sort of, you can't run for dog catcher in a Southern town unless you teach Sunday School of the First Baptist Church, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that will be very much the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody's going to need to be aligned with something.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that will naturally happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the the wind goes out of the sales a little bit and there's not as much energy politically and there's not as much call for that to happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think what you end up getting is a lot more fragmented and slightly linear versions of fundamentalism happen like the NIFB.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the MVP, that's exactly what I had in mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you start to see these splinter groups coming out and, you know, with more and more radical styles of theology, further and further, a field from whatever, but relatively small.
[SPEAKER_01]: There may be a million of them, but they're all five people big, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, because you can't build an empire on the NF and IFB, you can't do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it'll collapse over its own way.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's on the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because nobody's extreme enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they always fragment off into the next.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they're fighting.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to be defined by your separation.
[SPEAKER_01]: And fundamentalism has defined itself by separation for a long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: They kind of almost run out of things to separate from.
[SPEAKER_01]: So now they just separate from each other at various points.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that'll make that the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And meanwhile.
[SPEAKER_01]: It really depends on what the overall, what society thinks of those groups and how valuable they are to someone's other goals as to how they're going to thrive.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really think that that's where we end up at.
[SPEAKER_01]: And much like, you know, if you read Margaret Appwood,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know and you can read sort of about what happens in those in those very like sort of fundamentalist run you know it's a fictional story but I don't think too far off the beam what you end up with is a theology that just gets molded into whatever's very convenient for the leaders to use in order to keep the control what they need.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's the piece I mentioned earlier.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the piece that's interesting to me where we're in uncharted territory is I'm seeing I'm reading all of these reports about Gen Z men and their leanings and you're seeing I think
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the lie that was said to them in the wake of the me to era.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the lies that I've been told to them about, you know, now the equality means a threat to your masculinity and all the powers of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're seeing now this uptick.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's forty.
[SPEAKER_00]: I forget those stats.
[SPEAKER_00]: I won't say it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Men, Gen Z men are attending church at higher numbers than Gen Z women.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're attending at higher numbers than previous generations.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're starting to swing back in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's purely because of their political conservatism, their socially conservative beliefs are pushed to them into the pews.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what do you get?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the fundamentals on two point out is what do you get the person who is binging Andrew Tate?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that has led them into a lifestyle that's now pushing them into a pew.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the starting point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like to me, we're going to see some really interesting podcasts coming out in about two years from that demographic, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you're right, but I think that Andrew Tate and his misogyny and all of the things that go along with that, that's he's just saying the silent part out loud.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that he's, you know, if he wrote it down, Jack Hiles would assign it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe not all of it, you know, obviously, that the hedonistic sort of approach to that is not was not never his thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: At least not publicly.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yet, I think that the general ideas about women's society, how would you be structure in the place of men in it?
[SPEAKER_01]: But I kind of know, there's parallels there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that your observation is correct.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it kind of goes back to what I was saying.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I society kind of dictates kind of what populations are looking for, what need are they trying to fill?
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a bunch of young men who are trying to find meaning.
[SPEAKER_01]: trying to find connection, you know, that the so-called male loneliness epidemic, which is, you know, questionable, but, you know, it's being talked about out there, perhaps self-inflicted, one might say, but I saw some might and I would, but, you know, that being the case now, they have a need.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so their psychology dictates sort of the theology that they are attracted to.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will be interested to see what the longevity of that is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because, you know, it's one thing for Gen Z to say, you know, I feel excluded.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel a little down on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to go join this group.
[SPEAKER_01]: That group is also going to marginalize you and expect certain things from you and have controls over you in ways that you might not appreciate there either.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so again, does fundamentalism morph and change and try to find a way to kind of keep that group.
[SPEAKER_01]: involved or is there disillusionment and now we find people swinging to the other side.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in twenty years, we find a lot of those gents of your puesitters sitting where you and I are.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was a crazy ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: All the guys finding these male mentors that kicked them to the curb and are then going, well, there goes that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that it's it's unwritten, but
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like this is not the end of the story never ends, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Just keeps going.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like this is not the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like we're in a really weird middle chapter right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: And something else is going to happen, you know, towards the end of our book, our lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to look a little bit different.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope we can do it without a lot of bloodshed.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope we can do it without a lot of pain and suffering from people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if we can in this country.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not really our fact.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fun the DNA.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I hope we can.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I really appreciate this conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so glad someone who ever sent this email, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I sent you like maybe a LinkedIn message.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was trying to find you way back in the show and and and and knew you had kind of unplugged.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't pursue it very hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just like, if you're just at, okay, maybe not by, but I'm so glad's happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I hope it's not the last.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am curious and closing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've hinted at this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you were forced at gunpoint to fire up the computer, write an article on stuff and he's like, if you had to, you know, take these last couple of years and you were to say to readers of the site and say, like, hey, consider this, ponder this, like think about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: What would be your message that you would want to put out there to go like, here's an epilogue part two from Darledal.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I do try to come up with a theme for the year, something that resonates with me, something that I can measure myself through the year against.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the two words that keep occurring to me this year are the words get small.
[SPEAKER_01]: The words problems are so big.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you turn on the news, I consume the news in like ten-minute increments right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: I turn on NPR long enough to hear that the world is still terrible and I turn it back off again.
[SPEAKER_01]: That also, I mean, I acknowledge a lot of privilege.
[SPEAKER_01]: It comes along with that to sort of be able to tune out and it's a white male.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't affect me the way it affects a lot of other populations.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also understand I have to worry about my own mental health.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the idea of get small is simply this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone is an environmentalist in their own backyard.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody wants raw sewage dumped on their street.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody wants clean water, clean air.
[SPEAKER_01]: people want good education for their kids and their local school system.
[SPEAKER_01]: People want to know that their neighbors are not dying because they can't afford their medication.
[SPEAKER_01]: I encourage people to think about the problems writ large that we have in this country, the things that we're trying to solve for.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I could sit down and I could write blog posts about it and I could be very intellectual about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I could make people laugh a little bit about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think what's more valuable than that is going over and checking on my neighbor and making sure, you know, that he's okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Checking on the people down the street, sitting in a local school board meeting, writing my local, you know, my state representatives about local things that are going on, writing my Congress person, very, very proud of Sarah Bride, first transgender, representative, super, super proud that she's from my state.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, focusing on those things that are right around us, because I think the great lie is this belief that there's nothing we can do.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all happening and there's nothing we can do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're right, there's nothing we can do to change the Supreme Court's Rolex on things.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is nothing we can do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, other than voting, there's nothing we can do to really like change the outcome of these big things that are happening around us.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can certainly go down to your local library and volunteer to teach a kid to learn how to read better.
[SPEAKER_01]: and have a moment of humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I think that that getting small is the only way, a physician friend of mine said that you change healthcare in three to five patient increments.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the only way.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the only way you can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that you change the world, you change this country in three to five people increments.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who are the people who are around you, who you have the most influence with, or the people write around you all the time?
[SPEAKER_01]: Focus on that.
[SPEAKER_01]: What can you do?
[SPEAKER_01]: What can you do in your own neighborhood and let the rest of it kind of be what it is because you can't control it and the controls and illusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is we can we can we can don't so much virtual ink on these things that I have and I will again, I'm sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what you know, did I bring fundamentalism down with my blog?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I didn't.
[SPEAKER_01]: But did I help a few people like individuals who I still know?
[SPEAKER_01]: I still call my friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I think I did a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a win.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's moving at three to five people at a time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I'm going to keep trying to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I would leave people with as an encouragement to say, you know, it doesn't have to be inside of a church or it doesn't have to be inside of anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: It can literally just be you out picking up garbage in your neighborhood and saying I just made it a little better.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that can be enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I would leave you with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as somebody who was made to feel a little bit less alone through an extremely dark period, navigating time out of the, I have to be, your blog was very much up for me and it's, it is meaningful to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, I don't want to do the awkward.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me chat about and wax your car for the next twenty minutes.
[SPEAKER_00]: it really was like being able to have a resource that was out there and you know and it influences what I do now trying to also be a resource that's out there and I'm sure there'll be somebody after me that's doing the same thing and now there's so many just writing about evangelicalism at large but I really do appreciate your work so much and it had a major impact on me halfway through its life which I think is pretty cool so thank you so much for doing this I really appreciate it and I hope it's not the last time we chat
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope so too.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll talk to you again.