Why are so many Christians deconstructing their faith? With Dr. Amanda Udis-Kessler-

In this episode of Unholier Than Thou, I sit down with Dr. Amanda Udis-Kessler- a progressive Christian pastor, sociologist, ethicist, author, and sacred music composer-for a thoughtful conversation about one of the most debated movements in Christianity today.

Together, we explore:

• What progressive Christianity actually is
• Why so many people are leaving evangelicalism
• The role politics has played in modern Christianity
• Whether Jesus and Paul emphasized the same message
• How progressive Christians approach the Bible
• Why faith and science don't have to be enemies
• What deconstruction really means - and where it can lead

Whether you're a conservative Christian, a progressive Christian, deconstructing your faith, reconstructing it, or simply curious about the conversations reshaping the Church, this episode invites you to think critically and engage with a perspective you may not have considered.

This isn't a debate. It's an honest conversation about faith, doubt, politics, Scripture, and what it means to follow Jesus in today's world.

If you enjoy conversations that challenge assumptions and encourage deeper thinking, subscribe to Unholier Than Thou, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's asking big questions about faith.

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#Jesus
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome back to the Unholier Than Thou podcast. Today's episode is probably going to challenge some people. And honestly, that's okay. I'm joined by Dr. Amanda Eudis Kessler, a progressive Christian pastor, sociologist, ethicist, anti-racism trainer, author, and sacred music composer? And today we're talking about the thing that makes a lot of Christians deeply uncomfortable. Progressivism in Christianity. Can faith evolve? Can Christianity exist outside of fear, control, nationalism, and cultural wars? Why are conversations about race, inclusion, justice, gender, and power so controversial in the church right now? And why are so many people deconstructing the version of Christianity they inherited? Whether you agree with progressive Christianity, hate it, are curious about it, or think it's destroying the church, this conversation is going to make you think. We talk about religion and politics, power structures in the church, why certainty can become dangerous, and what faith looks like when compassion is prioritized over control. This is not an echo chamber episode. It's an honest conversation. So let's get started. Amanda, what does progressive Christianity actually mean beyond politics?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

That is a great question. And um, it really has to do with how we read the Bible, what we think religion is, what we think religion has to do with the rest of society. So it's even though most progressive Christians tend to be politically liberal or progressive, it is a much larger framework that because it's Christian, it does start with the idea that Jesus is someone worthy of trying to follow because he offers a path that can be productive and life-giving for people. But for most progressive Christians, there is not necessarily only one right religion. We understand ourselves to be on a particular kind of religious path, but we don't necessarily think it is the only one. And for people who would respond to that by saying, well, in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. That is a great opportunity for me to say that most progressive Christians also do not take the Bible literally. We say we take it too seriously to take it literally because it is a human production. It is the history of the interactions that a subset of humanity has had with whatever they experience as the divine. And so anything they wrote about their history, about those interactions, reflects the context of their time, the knowledge they had access to, the assumptions they had. And therefore, just as we never see electricity in the Bible, we should not be surprised, for example, that we also don't see open, mutual, same-sex marriages in the Bible that no one knew about electricity back then. No one knew that same-sex couples could have, you know, um mutually engaged, consensual, loving relationships that just was not understood. So we read the Bible as an incredible vault of wisdom, as this marvelous set of ideas and stories and claims and um and narratives to learn from, but we don't treat it as written by a hand that dropped down from the sky. So that is kind of a progressive Christian take on the Bible. Then there's sort of what our relationship is with the culture more broadly. And one place we differ from much more conservative Christianity is the idea that we um we trust that just as other religions might have wisdom for the world and value for people, and we don't think we are the only right religion inherently, we also think that other ways of learning and knowing have wisdom and value for the world. So we tend to be well aligned with science, we tend to agree that climate change is a real thing, we tend to accept the evidence for evolution. I really don't want to say believe in evolution because that makes evolution sound like a religion, you know. Rather, we accept the uh the wisdom and insights and gains of science. Uh, so there's that. We we tend to be very supportive of what medicine has to offer. So it's not that we think everything in the modern world is a great thing. Some of us are uh of pretty um mixed feelings, for example, about AI. So it's not that we think everything new is great, but we also don't think everything new is bad. We don't think that the wisdom for humanity closed when the last book of the Bible was written and the Bible was compiled. So there's that. We we tend to really want all people to get to have good lives. And so we understand that that looks different for different people, but we also understand that there are some things absolutely all people need. Because all people, for example, are embodied, right? Whatever else is or isn't true of us, we live in and through and with our bodies. So we all need survival resources, we need clean air, we need medical care, we need all people need that, no matter who they are. So we tend to support politics and ethics and values that are aimed at giving all people the opportunity to have good lives, even though we might talk about that in different languages. Um, and we tend to think that the idea, and this does come from the Bible, that all people are made in the image of God has real implications for how we should live with one another in the world. So there's also that. The other side of the political piece that needs to be lifted up separately from the idea that politics should value all people is we inherit from the Hebrew Bible this idea of justice. Um, Jesus was a Jew who was within a prophetic tradition that he emerged from. And what the prophets are mostly famous for, the prophets were Jews of their day who said to their fellow Jews, you are not doing enough for justice. You are unjust, you are corrupt, you're letting the poor starve, and so on. I mean, there's there's a lot more detail than that. But often what it comes down to is the prophets are saying, we are supposed to be living justly and caring for people. That's part of our agreement with the God of our understanding. And we as prophets are going to remind the rest of our society that you're not doing that very well right now. And arguably one of the things Jesus did was try to remind his society that they weren't doing that very well. So when we talk about progressive politics, we could use the language of today and talk about DEI or woke or whatever. But oftentimes it comes down to this very, very old idea of justice, that it's not appropriate for some people to have way too much and other people to have nothing, and so on. So, what I would say to try to summarize all of this, because it is a pretty broad-ranging question, is we have a particular kind of relationship with scripture, uh, which is deeply respectful and humble, but also critical and conversationally engaged. Um, we listen to scripture, but we also speak back to it and argue with it. So we have that complex relationship. We have a complex relationship with society now, in that we neither want to accept everything in society uncritically, nor do we want to reject it uncritically. And finally, I like to think that we have a kind of humble relationship with the sacred, however, we understand that. Uh, one thing about progressive Christians is we probably all have slightly different understandings of who or what God is or how to talk about God. And we deeply respect that among each other, and we all learn from one another. We really think that progressive Christianity is a humbler way to be in relationship with the sacred, whatever the sacred is. And so I am gonna end this question by referring back to my favorite verse in the whole Bible. Maybe this is my favorite verse because I'm a Jew by heritage and it's from the Jewish scripture and it's from one of the prophets, but I love it. I think it gives us great guidance. It is um Micah 6.8, so that's chapter six, verse eight. And in it, the prophet reminds people that what God asks of them is to seek justice, live kindly or mercifully, and then live in humility with God. So justice, kindness, humility, basically. I think progressive Christianity cares about those three things deeply and profoundly. And um, these days, the best way to sort of lift that up is to compare it with white Christian nationalism, which doesn't care about justice, isn't particularly kind, and indeed thrives on being cruel in some contexts, and certainly to me and many other people seems full of arrogance. And so we we can't say that someone who calls themselves a white Christian nationalist or a Christian nationalist isn't Christian. That's not for me to say. Uh, but it does seem that that is a very different way of understanding what Christianity is. And so hopefully, what I've suggested in this answer is that what makes us different beyond just the politics is how we are in relationship with history and with the present and even with the future.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

I okay, there's so much to unpack in everything that you just said. So the first thing that you mentioned was that progressive Christianity does not believe the Bible literally. And so immediately, because I was raised in a very conservative Christian home, I call it a cult because it was the independent fundamental Baptist cult. And so when you're talking about how you like to look at other people's viewpoints, and not everybody, even within progressive Christianity, agrees with one another, but they appreciate one another's viewpoints. That is not the way I was raised. It was a very black and white, this is the way it is, this is the only way it is, and we don't even need to look at these other viewpoints or talk about these other viewpoints because we live in this bubble, and that's all that's real and true, and that's the only way we're going to get to heaven. And so I appreciate these kinds of conversations now because not only have I deconstructed, but I am able to and allowed, and I am excited about having conversations with other viewpoints than the way I was raised. And um to find out where people are coming from, I think it's so important because there is such a, and I don't like to get into politics on my podcast, but sometimes things bleed into each other. And unfortunately there are on both sides people that are very, you know, one side, my side's right, your side's wrong on every point. And the other side says the same thing. There are people extremes on both sides, but I think where we can come together is if we allow ourselves to have conversations with people that maybe we have opposing views with, then we can see other people's viewpoints. And I think that's where real healing starts to happen. I used to cringe at the term white Christian nationalist because I thought, are they calling me that? Because I'm white, I'm a Christian, and I love my country. And so I would get very offended by that term until I started having when I left the church, when I left the call, and I started having conversations with people that didn't believe the same way I did, weren't raised the same way I was raised, lived in different kinds of cultures than the way I was raised. I am friends with the gay man now. Everybody knows David. He's asked me before on this podcast when you were in the cult, do you think you and I would have been able to be friends? And I said, no, I would have wanted to be friends with you, but I wouldn't have been allowed to. And so it's like all these people and lifestyles and viewpoints and perspectives that I missed out on because I was in that bubble. And so I want people who are listening, because I know there's people on both sides that are listening, to listen to this with an open mind, hear some maybe opposing perspectives and viewpoints with an open mind. And maybe you come away with, I still believe the way I believe, and that's fine. But maybe you come away with some questions, and maybe you come away with some curiosity, and that's even better because we want to be able to have these conversations with each other, right? So do you think that a lot of people are leaving evangelicalism and then they're like going into more of a spiritual type of journey? Because that's kind of where I find myself just like leaving the typical Christian church or a non-denominational mega church type format for something more intentional and more personal. Do you feel like that's sort of a movement or do you feel like it's going the opposite way?

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Um, I don't think it's going the opposite way. And I think the reason I think there are roughly or broadly two types of people leaving evangelicalism and the most conservative traditions right now. Some of them are people for whom the claims and creeds and so on within those traditions just don't feel true to them anymore. So these are people who are leaving out of a sense of integrity. These are people who either have already kind of started their deconstruction or will probably eventually deconstruct. And they may wind up in a range of places. They may wind up not religious in any organized way at all. I know people like that who uh gain their sense of meaning and connection from nature or friendships or other kinds of activities. There are people who will find their way into traditions other than Christianity, and then there are also some people kind of in the deconstructing category who do find their way to progressive Christianity. I'm thinking particularly of um a married couple in the church where I'm a pastor who come from an evangelical background. And um, I think in some ways they've been deconstructing for a really long time, but one of one of their kind of classic um pain point moments was when one of their sons came out as gay, and that probably hastened their process a bit. Um, and so they are now at in my congregation, and and people in my congregation believe a range of things. There's no creedal test or anything in the United Church of Christ, which is my denomination. You know, these are people who come from exactly the kind of evangelical background you're talking about. I I'm not sure they would have been quite at your level of what you're calling cultishness. But then I think there's a new trend in people who are leaving evangelicalism. And it's really important to name this. Um, I one of the pieces of my background is that I'm a sociologist of religion, which goes way back in my life and I don't use it that much anymore, but it has been helpful for me to have that when I watch the people who are leaving evangelicalism now because of how much the evangelical church is in fact supporting the current political administration. And the reason these people who are leaving are unhappy with evangelicalism is not necessarily because they are particularly liberal about sexuality or abortion or anything like that. These are people who genuinely believe that the current administration is immoral. And that's their own language. I'm not making that up. They see corruption, they see criminality, they see these things. And again, I know your listeners may disagree on whether or not that's true, but there certainly is enough evidence that people have found of problems in the administration. And so some of these people are looking at the evangelical support of the administration and going, how can they be supporting these things that seem to go against what we think we believe? Now, I have not been able to figure out where those people are going yet. I don't think researchers really understand what they're doing. Um, I feel incredible pain for them because even though I'm sure I disagree with 99% of what they think and what they value, I think it must be just devastating to have this administration that you have wholeheartedly supported because they they claim to be aligned with your values. And so it makes sense for you to support them. And then all of a sudden you learn these troubling things about them and they don't seem to want to be held accountable. They don't seem to be repentant. And so I don't think we yet know what's happening to those people. My guess is that some of them are just backing away from religion for a little while and trying to discern what the right thing to do is. My guess is that some of them will eventually wind up in evangelical-leaning mainstream religion. So among the Methodists or the Presbyterians or the Lutherans, not the most liberal end, but also not the most conservative end. I feel I'm kind of hoping mainline religion will take those people in and make space for them and so on. My own congregation is by far too liberal for them to be interested in us. I mean, my church flies a pride flag. So we're not the right place for those people. But I hope they find some places to get some support and get to have the conversation where they are told, no, you're not crazy. Uh, these things you're concerned about are legitimate concerns. So to me, the distinction between people who are leaving just out of their own personal growth process versus people who are leaving in dismay at what's going on in our country, I think they kind of need different kinds of support. And I hope that's there for both of those groups. I think my world can be really helpful, like my congregation can be helpful to people who are deconstructing. I am perfectly delighted to have conversations with people in that space and listen to them and ask them questions and you know, and talk to them about what progressive Christianity is and isn't and all that. But I don't know how to help the folks who are just troubled with what they're seeing around them right now.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Yeah, yeah, it's hard. I know a lot of people who are, you know, it's it's almost like it goes hand in hand, I think. Because if you're raised in a very strict religious environment and you're on the more extreme side of conservatism, conservatism, I can't even say it, conservativism, there you go. I think you deconstruct Christianity at the same time you're deconstructing your political views, because I almost think it goes hand to hand. Because once you start deconstructing some of those ideologies, the politics are gonna go in line with that. Because how can you deconstruct certain things that are so black and white and then remain way far right? You can't.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

I don't think you can. I mean, I do wonder about the other group, the people who haven't changed their minds about what religion is, but find the current government hypocritical. So what I what I don't understand in the current moment is are the people who are kind of giving up on the current government eventually going to need to shift some of their religious views, or is it simply that right now they can't support their religions supporting what the government's doing? I genuinely don't know. And if someone knows, I hope I run into it and learn it soon. I haven't really seen that out there. But I think you're right. I mean, the deconstructive process or deconstruction process, it can start with the day someone wakes up and goes, I don't believe that creed, or if God is really loving someone who never heard of Jesus. Jesus is not going to burn in hell for all eternity, or even if God is really loving someone who did one horrible thing in their life once is also not going to burn in hell for eternity because that is unbelievably disproportionate. So we could go down a long list of the kinds of topics that people deconstruct over, but I agree with you that often when someone starts changing how they understand religious reality, it will begin to seep into their social life or their political life or other places as well. I think there's one thing I forgot to say when I was talking about progressive Christianity that is really important and that's relevant to the issue of deconstruction, which is conservative Christianity is very, it's so grounded in the idea of certainty and that faith is the opposite of doubt or uncertainty. Um that's part of what makes it, as you say, black and white or rigid or or cultish. And I think for most progressive Christians, I mentioned humility before, it's hugely important to a lot of us. We don't think we know all the answers. We are willing to sort of stand by where we've gotten to. So I am willing to say I'm fairly sure that justice is better than injustice. I mean, that sounds like a crazy statement, but in fact, it is a claim that I feel pretty secure about. But do I know who or what God is? No. Am I always my best? Not even close, you know. And so there's, I think there's some willingness among progressive Christians to at least try to hold our certainty a little bit lightly, to try to be humble, to try to learn from other people and perspectives. We may not agree with them, but they may help us understand better what we do and don't think. So I am, for example, I'm super grateful that over the course of my life I've really had to struggle with a lot of religious homophobia as a queer person, because what it has given me is decades and decades of reading and thinking and praying and talking to people and coming to understand what those handful of passages in the Bible probably were really about, which is not what most people think they were about. And so my willingness to learn has helped me grow in that one area. It has helped me love myself better, it has given me compassion for my enemies. But so the notion that we have to hold what we know a little bit lightly and always be ready to learn more, and that we need to value the questions as much as the answers. I mean, everyone is familiar with the idea that Jesus said a lot of things. He taught a lot of things, he told stories, he kind of said sayings. He also asked hundreds of questions literally. If you just read through, especially the three earlier gospels. He asked a lot of questions. He asked a lot of questions. Yeah. And so we, if if we're, for those of us who try to follow his way, asking questions is not a bad thing. It's in keeping with what he did.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

You were talking earlier about justice and injustice, right? And I think the issue is that to a lot of people, that is subjective because their definition of what justice or injustice might be may be different than what you or I think. For example, I listened to a guy that I've had on here before. His name is Justin, and he has uh several times a week, actually, he debates Christians. Now he used to be, he went through seminary and he used to be a preacher, and now he is deconstructed and he is atheist. That's what he's landed on. He's landed on being an atheist. So he has these debates with Christians and he has point blank asked these people if God told you to go unalive your child, would you do it? And is that a just like basically trying to get them to say, is God just or not just? And they always say, No, God's just. He's just. Okay, well, if he asked you to go unalive your child, would you do it? Would that be a just God? And they all say yes. Now think about how dangerous that is. Very, very that that mindset is not something I want to be a part of at all. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

Sure. So so I don't know if this helps. One of one of the other kind of interesting things about my background is a couple of years ago I wrote a progressive Christian ethics book. Um, so I have thought for years about what it means to be ethical or moral in the world. And is there kind of a way of thinking about that might be new and fresh and helpful? And what I came up with actually is an approach that does not require religion at all. It works perfectly well as a secular or humanist approach. It happens also to work pretty well with progressive Christianity, but it is based on this idea of human well-being. And so if we start, if we even bracket religion for a moment and just say, you know, if all people have some kind of inherent worth and dignity, and we could think about that religiously or not, but if we start there, every single person is of sort of equal moral value. We're not talking about actions yet. Someone can certainly do harm and maybe they would need to be restrained or whatever to keep them from causing more harm. Don't mean that. But if we start with the idea that all of us have some kind of inherent value, worth, dignity, goodness, whatever, and all of us should have theoretically the opportunity to have a good life, that gives us a vantage point from which to evaluate what in religion or government or economics or anything is good or bad. And I know that that sounds wildly universalistic. And in fact, the way we do that evaluating is much more concrete. And let me give you just a really simple example. I mentioned before the fact that we are embodied and therefore we need we need survival resources. So an approach to economics that lets people starve, by my approach, is morally problematic because no one should have to starve, right? And whether you agree with that or not, that's a fairly clear way of putting it, right? So, in the same way, we can say any approach to religion that permits us to unalive people because we think God would is morally problematic. And so this is a really either deconstructed or maybe even unreconstructed way of thinking about religion. But what it says is religion can be good or evil in because people are both good and evil. We I'm trying to remember who it was who said the line between good and evil runs through um every human heart. Um it was a Russian dissident whose name I'm not remembering right at the moment. But um, if that's true, if we have the capacity to be good or evil, all of us, then any human institution, education, religion, politics, the economy, whatever, have the capacity to be good or evil because they're human institutions. So one other thing that I think progressive Christians try to do is we try to say there is there is something bigger than our egos, and we often call it God, but God isn't restricted to religion because religion's a human enterprise. And once we can make the distinction between sacredness and human religion, then we are free to ask of human religion what's good in it and what's bad in it. Where is it causing harm and where is it doing good? Um, you know, there there's there's some language in the Hebrew Bible that that invites us to bless and not to curse. Um, well, religion does both. It can bless and it can curse. So part of our job, if we want to connect to religion ourselves, is to be part of the religion that blesses, not the religion that curses.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

So, how can someone tell the difference between genuine spirituality and religious conditioning? Because growing up in the church myself, religious conditioning was, you know, it's what you're taught, what you're conditioned to believe, every little thing that you think that your paradigm is it, your ideologies are the only way. And obviously, we talked about how that seeps out into other aspects of life, politics and how people treat each other and all of those things, you know, moral values and things like that. And when I left the church and I started deconstructing, now my deconstruction has lasted two decades, maybe more. And I still feel like I'm still not exactly there. I'm still searching, I'm still exploring. I'm to the point where it's like it's exciting now, not so much scary like it was in the beginning. But there are times where my husband has to stop and say, is this really how you think, or is this what your cult mindset was, like what you were conditioned to believe? And so I had to take a step back sometimes and like evaluate. Okay. So then it's like, well, is this a genuine spirituality or is this a conditioning that I've been given?

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Okay, so that is a complex question because it would be really easy to try to give a dualistic answer and say either it's spirituality or it's conditioning. And I I don't, I'm not going to be quite that simplistic. I think there really are three kinds of categories. There's spirituality, there is the stuff we learn that inclines us toward what's good, and then there's the stuff we learn that inclines us toward what is less good. So conditioning, unfortunately, includes both what we learn that inclines us toward the good and what we learn that inclines us toward the not good. Sociologists have a special term for this. We call it socialization, and we say all human beings are socialized. You grow up in society, you are taught what to think, you are taught what is true, what is good, what is right, what is cool or uncool, who to hang around, who to despise. We learn all this stuff. And the learning of that is not inherently bad. The fact that we learn it is not inherently bad. There's no other way for us to become adult human beings other than learning how to live in society. But some of the things we learn are morally good and good for us, and some of the things we learn are morally bad and bad for us. Um, I don't know if you are at all a fan of Broadway musicals, but way back in, gosh, I think the 40s, uh, there was a musical called South Pacific that dealt quite a bit with racism. And there's a song in it called You've Got to Be Carefully Taught. Uh, and I believe one of the verses begins: You've got to be taught to be afraid of people whose skin is a different shade and people whose eyes are oddly made. You've got to be carefully taught. So we are carefully taught all kinds of bad things. In the context of talking about religion, we are taught all sorts of um harmful things about what is true and false, what is good and bad, what God wants. But the things we taught that we are taught that are harmful aren't harmful because we're taught them, they're harmful because they either lead us to despise ourselves or to despise other people or to give up on making the world better. Like there's some really practical evaluations we can do to determine whether what we've learned is good or bad. If you have learned something that would make you unable to be friends with your best friend David, did you say? Yeah. So if David's a good guy and if his friendship is a blessing to you and your friendship is a blessing to him, anything you were taught that would interfere with your friendship is a problem. Anything you were taught that would help you be able to be friends with him is a good thing. At my church, we, and I should say my congregation, but most of the churches in my denomination, we tend to teach that same-sex loving people are as morally good as anyone else, um, that we have the same gifts and failings as anyone else has. And so, and so we are good people to know and befriend, and we can be good friends and we need the friendship of others and so on. But that is something that that our church teaches. So the teaching piece of it isn't the problem. It's it's whether what we're taught is good or bad. And then to kind of get back to the um the initial distinction with spirituality, it's quite hard to talk about what spirituality is because so often spiritual experiences don't come with words, and and people who have spiritual experiences don't always find words adequate to explain what they've experienced. So I don't love putting words on spiritual experiences, but I think they often involve a sense of peace, a sense of spaciousness, a sense of oneness or connection with uh with creation or God or the universe, a sense of one's ego and separateness kind of falling away or being subdued. And if we define spirituality in that kind of way, this experience of being part of something larger than our individual selves, than our individual egos, you can see that we do find it in worship and in kind of individual practices like prayer or meditation, but some people find it in the wilderness. Um, I often find it when engaged with music, sometimes religious music, sometimes not religious music. There are people who who actually find that in romantic relationships. Um, you know, that that that the connection in that relationship can be an occasion for that larger sense of connection. Um so if I had to boil spirituality down to kind of a handful of words, I'd say it's connection with what is greater and a falling away of our sense of separateness. And does that have to do with our indoctrination? Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no. If, for example, I had grown up religious, which I didn't, um, but if I had brought up in a religious tradition that taught me how to pray or how to meditate in a way that opened me up to that greater spaciousness, then the indoctrination would have helped with my spirituality. If I had been taught growing up that, you know, my little group was the only group of people who were right with God and everyone else was going to hell, and there was only one way to God, and you had to believe the following 12 creeds. Um, that might not help me be spiritual because all of the scarcity mindset and fear that underlies having a sort of a small God, as it were, having a very narrow view of things. To me, it would be much harder to get to that spacious, open place of oneness if you have, if so much of your energy has been invested in protecting boundaries between you and other groups of people. Now, not having grown up that way, I can't say from experience that that is true. And I'm sure that there are people who've grown up in very conservative religious traditions who have had profound spiritual experiences, but I'm not sure that they have had them as a result of those beliefs. I'm not sure that you get to that spirituality by reflecting on Jesus as the only way, but perhaps you get to that spirituality by praying to Jesus and then feeling a sense of connection with Jesus. And at that moment, you might not be thinking about Jesus as being the only way. You might not be worried about who is or is not going to hell. You might just be in that sense of grace. Yeah. It's so hard to talk about this. So I'm sorry I can't put better words to it, but it's just part of the limits of what spirituality is.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. I am just soaking it all in. I'm soaking it all in. So one of the things that you had said in your bio that you are you consider yourself non-doctrinal, non-credal Jesus follower. Can you can you speak to that? Explain that to the listeners.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

Absolutely. So one thing that most people don't know is that the word Christian means essentially little Christ. So for one thing, we are supposed to be like Jesus. It's not clear that that means we are supposed to worship Jesus. But for me and for many people on the progressive Christian side of things, if we are supposed to be like Jesus, the first demand that makes of us is to try to understand as honestly as possible what he was really like as a human being before any of the traditions about him being God emerged. Because we can make a distinction between the historical Jesus and the mystical or cosmic Christ. Um, and so all I want to talk about right now is the historical Jesus to the extent that we can get back to him. There's plenty of biblical scholarship now that suggests what of the things he is reported to have said in the Gospels that he is more likely to have said or less likely to have said, and so on. It doesn't mean there isn't tremendous wisdom in what other people said about him, there often is. But for me, the starting point is what was he probably like as a person? What did he probably actually say and do? And how on earth did he have such a fantastic relationship with the God of his understanding? Because anyone who can be basically an oppressed Jewish peasant under Roman occupation, um, at a time of economic exploitation and military oppression and all of the things that were going on in his society and his time, and someone who can be living through all that and nonetheless teach that people are to love their enemies and nonetheless choose to die rather than to kill people. I mean, he must have had unbelievable faith in the God of his understanding. So for me, the starting point is who was he? How did he get his faith? What did he believe? And that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to try to believe everything exactly the way he did. I mean, it's thousands of years later. We know stuff he didn't know. All that casting out of demons, it doesn't mean they were real demons. Those might have been people with mental health issues or physical. I mean, who knows? But what we do know is that he somehow could engage with people who were suffering, make them feel seen, make them feel heard. He could respect them in ways that his society didn't. And whether he technically cured their illnesses or not, I don't know. But he definitely seems to have given them some kind of hope and some kind of restoration to themselves. And so even if the details of life in today's United States of America are quite different from, you know, first century Judea, I want to figure out what he was about and how to apply it now. And so, for example, he he says very clearly, this is in a couple of the gospels, someone asks him what the greatest commandment is. So, for context, Jesus was an observant Jew. A lot of people actually don't know that, but he was. He had a more lenient interpretation of some of the law than some other Jews of his time did, but he was not alone in that. But he was an observant Jew. And so the Jewish people, which again I am by sort of inheritance part of, their 613 commandments in the kind of origin stories of the of Exodus and Numbers and the Torah more generally, the first five books of the Bible. So there are these 613 commandments that Jews inherited. Someone goes up to him and says, What is the greatest of this basically 613 commandments? And either it's a trick question or it's a genuine question. It's not clear what you know what was going on there. But he lifts up two commandments. They are not commandments about ritual purity, they are not commandments about what you can and cannot eat, they are not commandments about how to worship, they are not commandments about who to have sex with or not to have sex with, they are not commandments about what to do if you're fighting with someone and they accidentally kill your oxen. There are the details of those 613 commandments are wild. They are what the Jews came up with for how to live in their time and place. And he doesn't lift any of those really specific commandments up. He says, Love God with everything you've got, love your neighbor as though your neighbor were part of yourself. Now, those are not original to him, those are actually in the Torah. So he is pulling material from the Torah. But it's interesting that what he picks to lift up, first of all, he's not content with one, he's got to do two. So love God and love your neighbor. Um And then we get to ask, well, what does that look like? So it's very helpful to know that's what he thinks is important, but that doesn't necessarily tell us how to do it. In a number of other places, he suggests things we might do. For example, he says that we should love our enemy as well as the people we like. And there are concrete things we can do to do that, like praying for people who persecute us. I do not mind telling you that I pray for people who try to take my legal rights away. I do. I think I'm supposed to do that. So those are, you know, a couple of senses in which I try to follow the path of Jesus. By saying that I'm non-credal and non-doctrinal, what I mean is I think that what the church came up with about him after his life may very well not have reflected how he thought about himself. And so if I have to choose what to think about him among competing options, my preference is to try to get as close as I can to what the person living on earth was doing, was thinking, was believing, because, and this is why this is very important to me. If Jesus is a special cosmic God man who is qualitatively different from me by being God in a way that I am not God, which again, the great majority of the Christian church would say that is a basic truth about Jesus. He's God in a way that we are not God. Well, if that's true, I can worship him. But that doesn't really give me a lot of hope that I can be like him. I mean, I can't be like God if I'm just a person. So if I want to be a little Christ, if I want to be like Jesus, I have to focus on the human Jesus, because I'm a human being. Uh, and I think a fair number of progressive Christians would say something like this: whatever we do or don't think about his sacred nature, and we differ on that, our focus is on his human nature because that's what we can try to be like. And today in the world, some people see all sorts of evidence that God intervenes all the time. Some people don't see a lot of that evidence. I would rather act as though God does not intervene and God leaves it up to us to make the world better. Because then there is a call, there is a demand on me, an invitation to, as it says in the beginning of the gospel, according to Mark, repent for the kingdom of God is drawing near. And also, kind of another piece of this is the prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples, that we now know is the Lord's prayer, my congregation calls it the Jesus Prayer, has this radical thing in it. We, and those of us who say this every week may forget how radical it is to say, your kingdom come or your community come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, means we are saying whatever God is good. And so we want to do what's good, even if that conflicts with what we really want to do, like out of our smaller selves. So, do I want to hate and fear people who are trying to take my rights away? I mean, of course I do. I'm human. But when I come back to that Jesus prayer, the Lord's prayer, and I am supposed to pray God's realm be among us, God's realm of love be among us, God's will of love be done among us instead of my petty little will of self-protection and hatred and judgment and ego and all that stuff. So, with all of that, it's simply easier for me to kind of bracket the creeds and the construction of the church after Jesus' life and say, that's what other people made of him. We all make something of him. Some people don't think he existed, some people think he was just a human being, some people think he was very god of very God, to use the, you know, the formal creedal language. Some people think something in between. But in terms of how I act in the world, I'd rather act as though he were just a human being, a spiritual leader, a rabbi of sorts, since he was a Jew, who had a path, who had a school, who had a program that I want to follow. Because I his program looks good to me. Love God, love your neighbor, love your enemy, do good to people, don't judge. I mean, I I could rattle off a lot more, but that looks like a good program to me.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

Yeah, I agree with you. I the thing that that really started to, well, one of the many things that really started to kind of crack my foundation, if you will, was seeing the contradictions of what Jesus was teaching and then what Paul was teaching. And so I'd love to talk about this because this is a hot topic. Let's get into that because yeah, Paul is quite the character.

SPEAKER_01 49:09

Okay. So yes. Um, and and before I jump into Paul, I want to point out that there's another parallel worth bearing in mind that we don't really have to spend any time on, which is the Gospel according to John, Jesus probably said just about nothing attributed to him in the Gospel of John, which is a very late gospel. It was a very different kind of community. And so with the Gospel of John, we have to be really careful. There's a lot of anti-Judaism in it, there's a lot of exclusivism in it, and there's a lot of incredible mystical beauty in it. So why am I starting with John when you ask me about Paul? Because I actually think about the strategies of approaching John and approaching Paul similarly. If we want to know what Jesus was like as a person, we basically have to look at what are called the synoptic gospels. Uh in and in chronological order of writing, these are Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Uh, in in most of our Bibles, Matthew is printed first, then Mark, then Luke. But that is where we are going to get as close as we're going to get to what Jesus was like as a person. We know that Paul never met Jesus, and Paul himself is really upfront about that. This is a guy who had a mystical experience, who had been a righteous uh Jew of a particular tradition, who before his mystical experience claims to have persecuted the early Jesus movement and then had this mystical experience and became the greatest evangelist for this movement, who is substantially responsible for taking the movement beyond Judaism to the Gentile world. And there is, there's a lot of wisdom in Paul, there's a lot of harm in Paul. So there's a few things to say about Paul. One thing just to get off the list immediately is Paul did not write all of the letters in the gossip in the New Testament that are attributed to him. He he wrote about half of them, but half of them, good biblical scholars now think, were written by other people calling themselves Paul to get more traction. Um and I'm I'm not gonna pull up the list of which is which. But when we look at the undisputed or authentic letters of Paul, we see a mix of absolutely horror show, bizarre things, and some incredible rich spiritual beauty. So the trick is to be really clear that Paul and Jesus have just about nothing to do with each other. Once we know that, then we can ask what is good in each of them, what is less good in each of them, and how do we figure out what it means to try to hew to what is good in them? So Jesus did not believe in divorce. That seems pretty clear. I am divorced, I am legally divorced. So am I. So obviously, I don't follow Jesus to the letter. Jesus didn't know about electricity. I mean, I know I've mentioned that before, but but again, it's worth remembering, times do change. And what we're looking for in any spiritual guidance, in any spiritual leader, we are looking for the spiritual wisdom that stands the test of time that can be applied across circumstances. Ironically, Paul himself says something about this in Philippians, and I'm not going to remember the words exactly, but there's this passage about, you know, whatever is good, whatever is pure, whatever is righteous. Think on these things, right? I preached on this actually a few weeks ago, and that that's part of authentic Paul. And when I think of that idea, that what we need to do is identify what is good and whole to it, what we will find is there's good stuff in Jesus to hold to, there's less than good stuff in Jesus to Jettison, there's good stuff in Paul to hold to, there's plenty less good in Paul to Jettison, there's good stuff in Buddhism to hold to, there's less good stuff in Buddhism to Jettison. You know, so the idea that Paul and Jesus have essentially different religions in a sense. Now they were both Jews. Paul was still a Jew, but Jesus preached the kingdom and Paul preached Jesus. There is very little in what biblical scholars find authentic to Jesus in the earlier gospels to suggest that he thought he was God. Now, in the Gospel of John, he clearly thinks he's God, gospel according to John, I should say. But again, that's a different community. It's 60 years later. They are working out of the same kind of mystical experience that Paul is working out of. Mystical experiences are great, but the first thing they do is they give you permission to mess around with the earlier teachings, because the second you have a mystical tradition, you have some kind of new insight into the materials that are already out there. And so what we know about Paul is that he had a mystical experience and came up with this very different understanding of Jesus that may have been shared by some other early Christians, but that does not, as far as most good biblical scholars can tell, it does not seem to reflect what Jesus thought about himself. There is even a passage in Mark, the earliest gospel, where someone comes up to him trying to curry favor and says, Good teacher, help me understand whatever. And Jesus reputedly says, Why are you calling me good? No one is good but God, which is wild. So yet if that is authentic to Jesus, if that little passage is authentic to Jesus, it suggests to us, A, that Jesus had a pretty mixed view of human goodness, but B that Jesus didn't think he was God. Okay. That's yo, we skip over that passage, but that's profound. Paul definitely thought Jesus was God, and that's because he had a mystical experience of Jesus. I I can't argue with someone else's mystical experience, and I wouldn't. Um, what I care about is what fruits someone's mystical experience eventually bear. So someone has a mystical experience, congratulations. Do they come out of it being kinder, humbler, gentler, more patient, more tolerant, more committed to love? Or do they come out of it more uptight, more rigid, more scared, you know, whatever. And I mean, I'm making that sound really dualistic. It's more complicated than that. But so for me, we cannot think about Paul and Jesus as preaching the same gospel. They literally were not preaching, and gospel means good news. That's through the Greek translation. The good news Jesus preached was the coming of the kingdom and God's intervention to make a bad world better. What Paul preached, Paul's good news was that Jesus' death and resurrection were saving people and giving them a new life. I can't speak to how right or wrong either of them were. They are wildly different messages. And so something that a lot of progressive Christians really love to point out is that if you read the Sermon on the Mount, this is um gospel according to Matthew, chapters five through seven. Jesus says pretty much nothing about what you have to believe. There isn't really a creed in it, but there's a lot of directions about what to do, how to live. Do this, don't do this, judge not, um, ask, seek, not, love your enemy, and so on. Tons and tons of that. It is from Paul and the tradition after Paul that starts lifting up creeds and beliefs and theological claims. From there, we get to the literal creeds, you know, the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, all of these collections of assertions about what is religiously true or true of the spiritual universe. To me, those things post-state Jesus, they were the product of, in many cases, a very different mindset. I'll give you one last example of where I think that the whole tradition of creeds goes wildly awry. Jesus as a Jew would have been an absolute monotheist. There is one God. There is no three gods, this or that. There is God, I mean, whatever, however God shows up, there is one God. Once we get to the debates about whether Jesus is of one substance with the Father or not, and how can there be three gods in one, we are no longer talking about peasant Jews in Galilee. We are now talking about Greco-Roman or Hellenistic philosophical traditions, you know, that the Neoplatonic traditions, the traditions that come to us from a similar part of the world geographically, but from a completely different set of assumptions about how reality works. And therefore, that's fine. But if I want to again try to follow Jesus, I'm better off looking at what did he say, what did he seem to think, how can I interpret his perspective from my day, and mostly, because I'm using a lot of words here, but at the end of the day, what can I do to build my own trust and faith so that I have the stamina, the resilience, the bandwidth to go, be a loving presence in the world, be compassionate, to be self-sacrificing, to be of service, and indeed to be a servant. I don't get that from Paul. I don't get that from the creeds. Those tell me what to believe. I want to know what to do.

SPEAKER_00 58:51

Yeah. And I think the difference, a big difference between Jesus and Paul is Jesus was saying the kingdom of God is within you. And Paul was saying that the kingdom is going to be set up here on earth. We're waiting for the second coming and all of that. And so I just don't understand why so much of Christianity focuses so much on Paul and not enough on Jesus. It's like the whole basis of Christianity should be Jesus, and it's Paul mostly.

SPEAKER_01 59:23

Well, so once we get to the more conservative traditions, Paul is much more useful for the more conservative traditions because Paul tells us much more about what to believe than Jesus does. And the conservative traditions are much more grounded in what to believe. Paul also is speaking to the early Jesus movement. So, in a way, he's speaking to the beginnings of the church, whereas Jesus is just this itinerant Jewish teacher telling most of the time other Jews how he thinks we should be Jews. So I kind of get why, especially conservative Christianity is really cautious about engaging too much with what Jesus himself may have said. Now, Jesus did think that the kingdom was in the process of arriving on earth. As far as we can tell, the kingdom for Jesus was this mystical phenomenon, God at work, and it was within us. That's certainly part of it, but it was also kind of between us and among us. We could see the kingdom and how people treated one another. So I do want to be a little careful not to think that for Jesus the kingdom was only mystical and not political. I think it was also social. So I think it was both mystical or internal and social or external. But Jesus, as far as we can tell, did not believe anything about his own kind of later return to earth and kind of what that would look like. The other thing to bear in mind is that Paul and the other New Testament authors who are focusing on Jesus' return are generally writing in a time of persecution of this new movement. So not only were they yearning for Jesus to come back and make things good because that would be lovely, these are also people who are being martyred, who are being exiled. You know, the book of Revelation is a fascinating and horrifying acid trip by a mystic who had been exiled by Rome, and it is about Rome. It is about the evils of Rome. And it is, I'm sure some of your listeners will not like this, but the book of Revelation is kind of like revenge porn of someone who has been harmed by this empire, and it seems so unjust. This empire has so much power, it can kill people with impunity, it can exile people with impunity and strip them of everything they know and love. And so this book, for example, is someone fantasizing about what it would or will be like when Jesus comes back and uh and gets his revenge. Totally understandable impulse. Who among us has not wanted revenge? We're all human. Sure, yeah. That's not what Jesus says. Jesus says, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, you know, bless those who curse you. Is that hard to do? Yeah, really. It's the exact opposite of the book of Revelation. So when we think about the coming kingdom, as Paul might imagine that, or as the other uh New Testament writers think about it, a lot of them are being persecuted. Most of them ended up martyred at one time or another. So what they are aching for and yearning for, and I can sympathize with this. I'm I'm I have not been persecuted like that, but I'm familiar with my country trying to take my rights away or whatever. I'm familiar with the yearning for them to get theirs, but it doesn't help us understand this idea that we are actually supposed to be part of making this kingdom or this beloved community. Because, and this is what is so radical, I think, about a more progressive Christian read of the authentic, I shouldn't say authentic gospels, but the three earlier gospels, the ones that actually have Jesus' real teachings in them. When he says, do this, don't do that, do this, don't do that, what he is proposing is, and this this is a pretty Jewish thing at the time, there was a long tradition. I mean, and this predates Jesus, by the way, by centuries, okay. The idea that God had not come back and rescued the Jews from this oppressor, that oppressor, oppressor, this conqueror, I mean, if you look at the string of conquerors, you know, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans, there's a ton of them throughout Jewish history. And so the Jews kept asking, if we are God's chosen people, why are we always being conquered and oppressed and killed and harmed? And in their day, it was not possible to say that God, God is not able to stop our latest set of oppressors from oppressing us. And I mean, that's a whole other conversation. Why is there evil in the world? We could have that talk maybe another day. But so, what what a lot of Jews wound up saying before Jesus' time was we are not living well enough, we are not keeping the commandments, we are not being just enough, we are not being pure enough, we are not being righteous enough. And until we do better at those things, God is not going to rescue us from our oppressors. Okay. This strand goes all the way through Judaism well before Jesus. Jesus takes that strand up and says, We do need to be part of a solution, we Jews, we people. So he does see a role for humanity in God's work. But what he says it is is a little bit different than what some of the prior prophets had said. The prior prophets largely said we need to be more just, but they also said we need to keep all the commandments better. That there's this sense in Judaism that when Jews actually keep all 613 commandments, you know, God will rectify the situation. And again, I'm not talking about today, I'm talking about thousands of years ago. Jesus comes along and says, Here are the ways I think you should behave in the world. My my read of my tradition, as I'm sharing it with you who share my tradition, because again, most of his followers were Jews. He says, We need to do these things. The kingdom is on its way to us. I read that, and what I see in that is we are part of making the kingdom, we are part of making the beloved. Community. This is not just that God is going to come down from the sky and fix things. We are part of a solution. There is no solution without us. Now, maybe there's also no solution without God. That's a whole other conversation. That'd be a great conversation to have. But we have a role to play in this. And I think Jesus' perspective is that having this insight that God is at work, but that we have to kind of be at work with God. Again, we will differ in what we understand God to be, but that we have a role to play, that we are part of the solution. And he has plenty of ideas about what we should and should not do. We should love our enemies, we should not hate them. That's one example. But um so with all of that, then it it becomes important to say that the later church has plenty of things to say about how people should behave, but it's all out of a completely different reasoning. Because once you have the blood atonement Jesus who died to save us from our sins and to make sure we get into heaven, then task one is believing all these things, which as which you grew up with, the this belief piece is the core of it. And then there are all these things that you're supposed to behave in this way or that way. Do this, don't do that. You do get some of that from the Bible, but more of it is from Paul and less of it is from Jesus. And I think that's because from Paul's perspective, we are not actually co-creating the kingdom of God. We are supposed to behave well, not to make things better, but because we have been saved. It's it's a different rationale for action. And which is, by the way, why so many people who have some kind of mystical born-again experience and eventually sort of fall away from it, you know, one of the things we know about why people fall away from it is they think that experience is going to radically change them. They have been born again, they are a new creation in Christ, all of that language. We get it from Paul and from the non-authentic Pauline letters. And the reality is those things alone don't change us. Having a mystical experience alone doesn't change us. It's what do we do day to day? Do we cultivate a prayer life? Do we try to treat people kindly? Do we do psychological healing work so that we uh grow past our prior wounds and traumas? I mean, there's many ways to do that. But so for me, when you talk about the difference between Jesus and Paul, one of the less often discussed but really important distinctions is why you do things. And as I see it, for Jesus, you do things to help God or to work with God, whatever God is, to make this beautiful world of justice and joy and generosity and goodness. And for Paul and the later church, you do things because that's what a good Christian does. And I know it's not that simple, but it's very tempting to see those things as quite different.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:08

Yeah, and you mentioned John in the book of Revelation and how he was on the island and all of that. And and I remember thinking that the rapture was scarier than if I died and went to hell. And but one thing that was always preached, and I even hear a lot of people say it today, we don't have to worry because I've read the back of the book and I know that God wins. And they all say that. And that's like, oh, we don't essentially saying we don't really have to do anything because God's gonna obliterate all the bad people out of here anyway. We're gonna be just fine and we can just sit back and let God do his thing. Yeah. And also, I did think too, when you said John on his acid trip, I thought he must have been on something because some of the stuff that he wrote on was like, okay, I don't know. That sounds like a bad trip to me.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:13

Well, I think, you know, to be fair to John of Patmos, who um who wrote Revelation and who is different from the John who wrote the gospel according to John, to be fair to him, persecution makes some people crazy. I don't think we know a lot of details about his exile to Patmos, but if it messed with his mind, he might not have been on an actual acid trip. I mean, he might not have been doing mushrooms, he might have been traumatized. There's a lot of material in different pieces of the Bible that we can look at through a kind of trauma theory lens and better understand. In um, I forget which psalm it is, but there's a line in one there in one of the psalms has this beautiful language. If you're familiar with God's spell, it's it's picked up in the song on the willows toward the end, and and it's this beautiful, painful, sad sense of loss about exile, and it's very moving. And later on, I believe in the exact same psalm, it basically says, Happy are those who take the children of your enemies and dash their brains out against a rock. Yes. So I look at that last sentence, and I mean it makes me really. I think the young people today would say cringe or sus or whatever. Right. I'm I look at that and I see trauma. No one wants anyone's brains dashed out against a rock unless they have been either traumatized or taught some really violent stuff, which to me is a different form of traumatizing. So I look at the cruel moments in the Bible, I look at the idea that you know, in the Argent story of Abraham that he was to unalive his son. I look at that as written by someone in deep pain. Hmm. Interesting pain and therefore do I want to value that as useful wisdom? No. Do I want to try to have some degree of compassion for whoever wrote that? Because what on earth had they experienced to make them think that often your own offspring could ever be good? That's that's pain. I think that's pain. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:35

Yeah, it's interesting when you put it that way. I never even thought to look at it with um that kind of lens. So I appreciate that perspective. So I'm interested in the fact that you had said that you you really never deconstructed, right? Because in your bio, you said you never had to deconstruct, but you had to construct this idea.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:01

So I started out as a secular Jew. I found the Unitarian Universalists in college, I stuck with them for 30 years.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:08

Now, what exactly is that?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:09

Like what exactly Okay, that is a liberal offshoot of Christianity that is not in that is not Christian anymore in the sense that it believes that pretty much all of the world's religious traditions have something to offer. And its focus is more on people who want to learn and grow together, no matter how different what they believe might be. It tends to draw politically liberal and progressive people, it tends to draw upper middle class white people and well-educated people. Its worship style is very, very like Christianity, but only in some congregations would you ever hear a Bible passage. There's because different Unitarian Universalist congregations have different kinds of theological perspectives. Um, some are more Christian, some are more Buddhist, some are more humanist, some are more 12-steppy. Actually, I went to one of those for a while as a young person. So because they there is no creed at all, and because Jesus is mostly understood to be a wise teacher, but nothing more than that, um becomes a religious tradition where people come together to kind of look for universal truths that can be found anywhere and figure out how to learn them and apply them and grow together as a community. It's absolutely a beautiful vision for anyone who has not attached themselves to a particular tradition or story. It worked really well for me for decades. Again, I don't wish that tradition any ill at all. It stopped working for me at one point. I needed to be part of something that was gonna have more of a story and demand more of me. And it's it's hard to explain a little bit quickly because I'm trying to be mindful of time. But because of all of that, the only thing I really ever had to deconstruct was sort of the Christian homophobia that was just in the air I breathed in our society when I was growing up. So even growing up in New York City, when I saw Christianity as a young person, it was pretty much always really homophobic. Uh, you know, I would go to pride marches, and the only Christians I knew at the time were protesters on the corner with really hostile signs. And so that I did have to kind of deconstruct. I did have to, you know, it took me decades to recognize that I could have an engagement with Christianity myself, myself, and, you know, be the sexuality I am. And now actually they are they are great gifts to one another within me. Like I, it turns out being in conservative Colorado Springs as an openly queer pastor, I can be really useful to a lot of people who need not necessarily doctrine, but who need to hear that religion loves and welcomes them. You know, I can be a model of that, which is a good thing. But I, because I didn't grow up the way you did with the kind of beliefs and expectations and assumptions that you did, I didn't have to unlearn those things. So when I started learning about the Bible, it was no stretch at all for me to see it as a human production. Now, there is deep wisdom in it. There's also horrific cruelty and violence in it. Um, so it's a mix of things, but because I never had to let go of the idea that it was, you know, inerrant or written by God in some sense, that meant that I could approach it with a kind of curiosity that probably has made my relationship to it easier than what it's like for people who have left conservative Christianity for liberal or progressive Christianity because they're still trying to release those messages about the Bible being special in certain ways. And it is true that every single week I preach on Bible passages. Obviously, I think the Bible has some value to it. Um, but honestly, the poetry of Mary Oliver has some value to it. You know, the insights of the Buddha have value to them, you know, the the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have value to them. It's possible to center my attention on the value of the Bible without either taking it literally or rejecting all the other wisdom in the world. And so in that sense, I had a much easier path to where I am today because I simply I didn't have to unlearn so much of the stuff that you had to unlearn. And the thing about unlearning things is if we learn things when we're kids, just psychologically, the process of unlearning is it can be slow, it can be imperfect, it can be complicated. We can worry that, you know, what if I was right when I was a kid and I'm wrong now? I mean, I can't tell you how many people I know who grew up believing in certain ideas of hell and they've let them go intellectually, but they still occasionally get haunted. So it's wonderful to be among the relatively few people who opt into Christianity without having had that stuff. But it does mean I have to be very humble and careful when I'm talking to people. Uh, and I don't mean talking like on a podcast, but like when I'm doing pastoral counseling with someone from a background like yours, because I don't know the pain of having to deconstruct and the confusion of it. It seems I I've read as much about it as I can. It seems very hard.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:53

Yeah, it's definitely not easy. I do tell people though, it's a long process, it's not an overnight thing. And it was once the cracks in the foundation started, it just shattered eventually. And I do tell people that when you're on this side of it, the grass is greener. I have a different view of God than what was handed to me. It's like you said, it's not contained within religion. It's much bigger, it's more exciting, it's more freeing, it's more accepting, it's more loving. It's all the things that it should have been, but wasn't. And so I also have a different view of Jesus and what he taught. It's just given me a different lens, if you will. Okay, before I had contacts, as I get older, I'm 47 now. The last few years, I've I've seen a major shift in my eyesight. I've never been, you know, a person to have to wear contacts or glasses. And the last couple of years, things have changed. So went to the eye doctor and finally was able to get into contact lenses. For so long, I was seeing through my eyeballs very blurry vision. But I thought, okay, well, this isn't so bad. I mean, I'm living day in and day out like this. I can, I can put my readers on if I need them. But once I got into a prescription and I put those lenses on my eyes, I was like, I can't believe I lived that long the way I was seen. And so that's it. If I could describe deconstruction that way, it would that would be my illustration. Once I put the lens on and I'm able to see God from this other lens, it's so much more clearer, brighter, vivid, exciting, all those things. And so I always tell people just give yourself grace because you will have, as you say, those haunting moments where you're like, what if I'm wrong? I think eventually you come out of that. I'm at that point now where I'm not having those moments at night in bed in the middle of the night, freaking out. Um, but you just have a different view of things. And I think it's exciting. But I do want to, before we wrap up, I do want to talk about your music because, and I want to talk about your book too, because you're an author, you're a composer. I I definitely want to plug those. But I think music is one thing that I hear time and time again from people who leave Christianity. They say, Oh, I miss the music. I miss singing the songs in church. And good news is you're a composer and you have spiritual music that we can point people to. So let's talk about that for a second. And then also, where can people find that?

SPEAKER_01 1:21:56

Sure. A lot of people find the traditional tunes of their religious childhood really meaningful, even after they can no longer assent to some of the theological language in the traditional hymns themselves. So even though I do write worship songs that have both original lyrics and original music, these days I seem to most usefully be creating new hymn texts to traditional tunes. So people know the tunes, they don't have to struggle with the music, but they also don't have to sing the words that no longer have integrity for then. All of my music uh is freely available on a website that anyone can go to. Uh, there are scores on it, recordings on it, YouTube videos on it. I also have a YouTube page, uh, or rather, account that has, gosh, I don't know, 300 something videos on it. So that stuff's all out there and freely available. The URL for the music website is queersacredmusic.com. It's one long word, but I don't want anyone to think that the music on it is primarily about sexuality. It primarily is not. I called it queersacredmusic.com because the kind of people who would be willing to go to a website call that are probably the kind of people who will like the social justice values that most of the music has. So again, it's not largely focused on sexuality, but it is for people who are kind of open-minded enough to click on a website called queersacredmusic.com. And if they go to that, they will find a ton of subpages, you know, a page of church season music, a page of videos, a page of scores, various pages of different kinds of other worship music that's not church seasonal, you know, some social justice stuff. So there's a wide range of stuff there. People can go there. Um, someone could go to YouTube and simply type my name, Amanda Udis Kessler, with a dash between Udis and Kessler, into YouTube and find my channel, which again has over three, I think over 300 pieces on it, mostly music, but also some talks, podcasts, speeches, you know, workshops, a range of things. So all of that's available that way. I do have a couple of other websites. Um, I have an author website, which is simply AmandaudisKessler.com with no hyphen in the URL. I even have a church consulting website because I also do that. And that is equipping the propheticchurch.com with one long word.com. So there's that. While I'm busy as a pastor and still trying to write books and still trying to write music, um, I love trying to help people who who want their church to think a little bit about how to be more creative or more inclusive or how to do justice work. Like I I consult on a range of things. So all of it, the music, the consulting, the writing books, these podcasts, all of it is in service to making the world a little more joyous and a little more generous and a little more just because honest to God, I think that whatever or whoever God is, that's what God wants. And so that's how I'm trying to serve that vision.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:11

Yeah, I love that. That's so awesome. Thank you for giving us that information. So I have one final question. What gives you hope right now?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:22

I think that there are plenty of people doing tremendously good work in the world, and we are mostly not going to see their good work on the mainstream news channels anymore, but we are going to see some of that on social media and through our, you know, friendship circles and in the ways that people who share values of hope share information with one another. Uh, the courage of people resisting some of the more inhumane things going on in the world, the courage of anyone who is willing to try to sit down and not just pray for their enemy in the abstract, but actually sit down and have a conversation with them, you know. I don't get asked to do that very often. I think I would try to do it if I were. But as you yourself said, there's real value in trying to talk across differences because at a minimum we can rehumanize each other. You know, if I it it is there's a real parallel between understanding that the I, as I called it before, the revenge porn of John of Patmos in the book of Revelation, right? I don't believe any of that, but if I understand this to be someone who was traumatized by their exile, I can be compassionate toward this author. In the same way, I can be compassionate toward those people who are trying to take my rights away because they are so afraid and they are so angry and they are acting out of a scarcity mindset. It's a zero-sum game for them. They can't possibly be happy if I'm happy. And I am trying really hard to learn how to see the world in such a way that we can all somehow be happy and we don't have to take things from one another. And I am way not the only person doing that kind of thing. And so anyone who is trying to move us from fear to love, from scarcity to abundance, from resentment to gratitude, in any way, in any walk of life, and there are many of them, all of those people give me hope. And I try very imperfectly to live that way myself so that I can give other people hope too. That was lovely.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:25

Thank you so much for coming on today. My pleasure. Thank you again to Dr. Amanda for joining me for such an honest and thought-provoking conversation. Whether this episode affirmed your beliefs, challenged them, frustrated you, inspired you, or made you ask new questions, I think conversations like this matter, especially right now. My goal with this podcast has never been to create an echo chamber. It's to create space for nuance, curiosity, healing, and conversations we've been told we're not allowed to have. If this episode resonated with you or gave you a new perspective, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with somebody who needs to hear it, even if they might disagree. You can find Dr. Amanda's work linked in the show notes below. And as always, thank you for being here. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode. Before we close out, I just want to share a quick reminder. The stories told on this podcast are personal experiences and perspectives. They're shared to create awareness and connection, not as medical, legal, or mental health advice. Some of the conversations here focus on abuse, trauma, and other heavy topics. So please take care of yourself while listening. It's always okay to pause, skip an episode, or step away if you need to. And if anything we talked about brings something up to you, we encourage you to reach out to a trusted professional or support resource. You don't have to carry any of this alone. Thank you for listening.