This week on Snarky Faith, Stuart talks with Chris Jones, host of the Spiritual Hot Sauce podcast, about a question a lot of people are quietly asking right now: what if Jesus and the religion built around him aren’t the same thing?

Chris approaches faith from the other side of deconstruction — not trying to rebuild the same structure, but trying to strip it down. He makes a distinction between worship and discipleship, arguing that it’s possible to admire Jesus without actually living the way he taught. For Chris, the real work isn’t about belief as much as it is about embodiment.

The conversation moves through the ways religious systems can shape — and sometimes distort — how people read scripture, and what happens when someone approaches those texts without the usual filters. They also get into suffering, not as something to avoid or explain away, but as something that can reshape a person depending on how it’s navigated.

Chris shares parts of his own background, including growing up in a pastor’s family and eventually stepping outside that expected path. That shift becomes part of a larger theme in the episode: how people rebuild identity after stepping away from inherited beliefs, and what it looks like to pursue something more personal, and less controlled, on the other side.

This isn’t a conversation about abandoning faith. It’s about what remains when the structure cracks — and whether something more honest can take its place.

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