Slow Train to Heck

Join TJ and I as we sit down and talk through his own deconstruction of the concepts of church community, cliques, and church politics - and how difficult it can be in church environments to create truly deep connections. 

Content warning: depression

This week it's our first couple interview! I chat with Courtney & Ben about their stories - Courtney is an ex-fundamentalist Christian who has deconstructed her faith and along with that, the monogamous relationship model that is often ingrained into that culture. Ben immigrated to Canada from China and is himself deconstructing his experience of traditional Chinese culture, and we discuss the interesting parallels between that and Courtney's own deconstruction.

On top of that, we also talk a lot about sexuality, homeschooling, purity culture and the affects of purity culture on marriages, pornography, and dismantling dichotomous thinking.

Lots of content warnings on this one: discussion of sex and sex acts, purity culture, pornography, and marital abuse.

The podcast Courtney mentioned was "Good Girls Talk About Sex" - episode title "My Vagina Was As Dry As A Bone".

This week, Ray shares her story of exiting fundamentalist Christianity and learning to accept herself as a human. We talk about the constant striving for perfection that evangelicalism encourages, the importance of learning to have compassion for our younger, fundamentalist selves, and moving beyond our past rejection of our own "flesh" and embracing our whole selves through deconstruction.

Ray's Book Recommendations: 
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter - Sue Monk Kidd
10 Lies The Church Tells Women: J. Lee Grady

Content warnings: misogyny, divorce, depression

This week I sit down with Deb Walters, a spiritual director and Enneagram facilitator, and chat about her path out of a narrow and isolating Christianity and into a more loving and open Christianity. Among other things, we discuss the pull of Christian supremacy, the dangers of certainty, parenting through deconstruction and giving kids space to follow their own path, the importance of safe spaces for questions, and we even get a bit meta about the "why" of the podcast. 

Books Deb references:
"The Holy Thursday Revolution" by Beatrice Bruteau
"The Universal Christ" by Richard Rohr

We're back for 2022, and we're kicking it off with a really great story from Kelsey Garcia, an advanced care paramedic. She shares her journey from a conservative evangelical Christian working at Christian camps, to her work on the front lines of health care witnessing the reality of death and discovering how often, reality doesn't exactly line up with the picture the church paints of the way the world is. 

Content warnings for this episode: homophobia, addiction, fatal medical situations, death, residential schools

Check out the song Kelsey mentioned - The Fence (Matthew Shepard's Song), by Peter Katz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1ANBqzDFNo 

Join Taylor and I as she details her experiences as a Christian missionary and unpacks the ethical issues that are rampant in that arena. We dig into the inherent Western white Christian supremacist side of missions, the inherent attitude of colonization that's wrapped up in it, the manipulative and abusive side of it, and how when women raise red flags about what's going on, they simply are not believed.

Content Warnings: child trafficking, poverty, power abuse, sexual abuse, church abuse, misogyny

The book Taylor mentioned is "Well: Healing our Beautiful, Broken World from a Hospital in West Africa" by Sarah Thebarge.

Lemuel Ministries: https://www.lemuelministries.org/
Lumos: https://www.wearelumos.org/

On this episode, Laura Drapeau shares her story of growing up in Western Canada as an evangelical Christian, and having her worldview altered as she encountered other cultures, started asking questions, and discovered her own sexuality as she met her wife in Bible College. She tells such an impactful story of how her view of the LGTBQ2S+ community was shaped by what she heard from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, and how through lived experience, came to realize that what she had been taught couldn't be further from the truth.

Just a content warning ahead of time: We do discuss examples of homophobia and transphobia in this episode.

Helpful books Laura references in this episode:

God and the Gay Christian - Matthew Vines
Torn - Justin Lee

This week my wife Hannah steps up to the mic and shares her own story of doubt and deconstruction, how my own deconstruction impacted her, and how we make a marriage work in the middle of huge changes in beliefs. We also share some advice (for whatever our advice is worth) to couples experiencing similar belief changes. 

This week I sit down with my friend Kevin Wilcox, a lawyer and evangelical Christian. Instead of the usual deconstruction conversation, we discuss concerns with the direction evangelicalism is headed in Canada, including comparing and contrasting Canadian evangelicalism with its counterpart in the United States. We also talk about the increasing link between evangelicalism and political conservatism, the lack of self-examination in the church, and what we as individuals can do when we see the evangelical church causing harm. 

I also talk a bit about my own experiences, including how I feel Christianity taught me to hate, where I get my sense of meaning and morality outside of Christianity, and give a few hot takes, including my thoughts on how evangelicalism breaks people's ability to accurately assess whether things are true. If you stick around to the end I have a hot take on the podcast The Rise And Fall of Mars Hill as well!

Kevin's blog: https://withallyourmind.ca/
Since Kevin mentioned it as well, this is my blog (note, most of the content on here is old, and an artifact of where I was right when I left Christianity... please keep that in mind if you look at it!): https://schrodingerschristian.wordpress.com/

Join Kristin Bennett and I as we chat about her upbringing in an evangelical doomsday cult, and her path out. It's a jam-packed episode - we talk about the process of recognizing that what you grew up in was a cult, rapture anxiety, how Christian supremacy is taught to children, sexual repression, purity culture and rape culture, marriage and divorce, and more!