Deconstructing Hell: Brian Recker on Fear, Faith, and a Spirituality of Love

What happens to Christian faith when hell is no longer the centerpiece of the story? 

In this episode of Faithful Politics, Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram talk with Brian Recker—public theologian, former evangelical pastor, and author of the upcoming book Hellbent—about how a fixation on hell distorts the Christian life.

Brian shares his powerful journey from fundamentalist Baptist roots and Bob Jones University, through service as a Marine officer and years as an evangelical pastor, to becoming a voice for deconstruction, healing, and inclusive Christianity. We dig into his critique of fear-based religion, his embrace of Jesus’ love ethic over punitive theology, and why he believes rethinking hell is central to creating a more compassionate and just faith.
Along the way, Brian explains how doctrines of eternal punishment shape evangelical politics, why leaving hell behind frees us for restorative justice, and how re-centering Christianity on Jesus’ life and love could transform both the church and society.

If you’re wrestling with questions about deconstruction, hell, universalism, evangelicalism, or inclusive faith, this conversation will give you language, perspective, and courage to keep going.

Guest Bio:
Brian Recker is a Raleigh-based public theologian, former evangelical pastor, and Marine Corps officer turned author and speaker. A graduate of Bob Jones University, Brian has lived through the arc of fundamentalist Christianity, mainstream evangelicalism, and the difficult but liberating process of deconstruction. His work invites people to move from fear-driven religion to a spirituality rooted in love, justice, and inclusion.
Brian’s forthcoming book, Hellbent, makes the case that an obsession with hell has warped Christian spirituality, pushing believers toward fear and exclusion rather than love and transformation. Through his writing, videos, and public speaking, Brian seeks to help Christians reimagine their faith, embrace restorative justice, and rediscover Jesus’ radical call to love.

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching us on our YouTube channel, thank you for joining us. We're so glad to have you. And we just hit 5,000 subscribers, which is not a huge number, but it's a number big enough that will, I don't know, allow my kids to look me in the eye once again. So thank you. Thank you. If you subscribe to our channel, we're so, so thankful for you. I'm your political host, Will Wright. Join uh as ever with my work wife, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? I feel a little awkward after that statement, but otherwise doing OK. And joining us this week, have Brian Recker. He is a rally-based public theologian and former evangelical pastor whose work invites people to move from fear-driven religion to a spirituality of love. He's also a Bob Jones University alum and a former Marine officer and now writes and speaks about deconstruction, healing, and inclusive Christian faith and has a book coming out called Hellbent, which will make the case that A fixation on hell distorts Christian life and points to a, well, a different way to follow and have a love-centered uh faith. So we're just so happy to have you on the show, Brian. Yeah, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me guys. I love the concept of this show and love the conversations you guys are creating. Awesome. And I was telling you offline, would be remiss if I at least like say this and give my wife credit. Like I came across like you and your work because my wife, was a lovely lady, watches your stuff. And I was just kind of like I was sort of drawn in by a lot of the videos that you create because you're just raw, you're authentic. um And you have a bit of a backstory too. So I'd love for us to maybe to kind of start about start with that start with the arc of your journey from Bob Jones University to Marines to pastoring to videos and advocacy of inclusive net just just give us the whole thing. Like how did you how did you how did you get to where you are? I'll try to give it to you without getting too bogged down in the details. So I was raised as the son of a fundamental Baptist pastor. My dad is still a fundamentalist Baptist pastor, suit and tie every Sunday, King James only type of church where no Christian rock, only hymns. So like Chris Tomlin and Steven Curtis Chapman were seen as too progressive for the church that I grew up in. So that was my world. um And I was homeschooled, so in the bubble the whole bit. uh In my homeschooling, Rush Limbaugh was my social studies. We literally sat in the kitchen and listened. If my mom missed a day of Rush Limbaugh, she would tape it. There were cassettes piled in the kitchen of Rush Limbaugh, like daily, you know, his daily shows. So conservativism was intertwined with our faith completely. um And I was definitely raised to think that Democrats were basically demonic. ah And I really received all of that quite unquestioningly. I received what I was told. You know, my parents are engaged people, informed within their bubble of the media at least. And so I thought I had the truth, you know, we felt even a little bit superior about it. ah And so when I went to Bob Jones, I wasn't really questioning much, but I did quickly start to question when I kind of just getting the lay of the land of Bob Jones, a very interesting place, very weird place. ah And I don't know what it's like now, but when I was there, really the most unappetizing people you could possibly imagine were the like, dyed in the wool Bob Jones students. We called them the Bojas. They were the ones who really drank the Kool-Aid, who were like all in on what Bob Jones was selling. The ones who bought it. They were just, I didn't want to be like them. And so that was the first time I began to feel a little bit like, maybe I don't fit into this completely because the way you kind of were elevated in spiritual leadership at Bob Jones was by turning people in. There were all these rules and infractions. You you had to wear a tie all the way up and if it was even half-masked, you could get turned in. And so, it was like a narc culture. It was really, really dark. And so, I found myself attracted more to the people who didn't totally fit in at Bob Jones. Non-fundamentalists who were being made to go there, like the rebellious kids that were being forced to go there by their parents. Those are the people that I found more relatable, more easy to get along with. And that was when I first began to question some of the fundamentalist assumptions. By the time I graduated, I had... really migrated away from fundamentalism. um I had discovered some mainstream evangelical voices that were much more appealing to me, um like Tim Keller, for example, even John Piper. I hate to say this to my shame now, but at the time I really liked Mark Driscoll. I thought it was cool that he could drink beer and say it in occasional cuss word, but still be a pastor. So for me, was like the fundamentalism, the trappings of this where it's like you have to... um It wasn't just about what you believed, but it was how you appear, and it was all these surface-level things where I wanted to get back to the heart of it, right? And so by the time I graduated, my first deconstruction was moving away from fundamentalism and becoming a mainstream evangelical. And evangelicalism, compared to what I grew up in, felt like so progressive. Like, I thought I was so cool for going to a church just with a drum set, you know? Like, that was so progressive. a pastor could wear jeans. Oh, we're reading out of the NIV. man, we are edgy, you know? Totally. So sometimes people ask me, did you get all your tattoos post deconstruction? No, I was one of those cool pastors that had tattoos, right? So I dove headfirst into evangelicalism. And I will say, um in some ways I'm very thankful for my fundamentalist upbringing because it gave me a muscle for deconstruction, which is I think something that everybody really needs to do, we have to be able to examine the ways that we were shaped by the structures that shaped us. All of us get a context that we're born into and we don't get to choose that. But we do have to have a moment where we become introspective about it and to begin to just not say, hey, just because I was force fed all of this as a youth, maybe some of it was wrong. Maybe some of it was harmful. And because what I was raised in was so extreme, I was kind of forced to do that just to be even kind of normal in society. And so I had to deconstruct some of that fundamentalism. Unfortunately, because evangelicalism was so refreshing and appealing to me, I quickly became in leadership and became a pastor at the age of 25, um which I think locked me in from further deconstruction at that moment because then I had this institutional pressure on me where I had a salary, I was networked in these relationships, which kind of put some things on pause. So that's the first leg of my journey. I'll pause here for questions before I continue. I mean, I think that's so amazing to hear that there's a lot of overlap that I feel, you know, between your story and probably my story, you know, I ended up actually dropping credentials with a fairly large, one of the largest evangelical denominations, you know, in the world or in a certainly in America. And it's and I did that for theological reasons, for cultural reasons, yet I maintained kind of my identity and yet obviously you know there are certain times where you have these deeply held beliefs and depending on how deep the beliefs go, like how deep they go within our web, of beliefs that we have going on inside, how fundamental they are, how many things that they're attached to. It can be really hard to question those kinds of beliefs. I imagine it can be very scary to do so. Well, I know that because I've done that. And there's a fear that's invoked and it's like, how am I going to leave behind something that's been so fundamental to me in my life? And then on the other side of that, it's like, I want to get rid of all these beliefs that are toxic, uh wrong, untrue, harmful, you know, et cetera, going on and on down the list. And I'm wondering, like, how did you work through that process? You know, I mean, I know I'm sure that's coming in part two of the story more, but it's like you had this... you had like these big transformations that were going on already moving from this really fundamentalist uh environment to like a kind of fundamentalist environment or evangelical, whatever you want to call it. And yet, of course, it seems like you've moved beyond that. And so what what's been the mechanism of that? Do feel like in your life, how have you worked through that? I said, I think that first, so I disappointed my parents by becoming an evangelical. Like even when I was an evangelical pastor, that was hard for my dad. Me being the kind of pastor that had tattoos, that had like rock music in my church, that sort of thing. Even though I still believed in relatively conservative theology, I lost some level of their respect and like that sense of, we're all on the same page. So that... initial break as hard as that was, I think that was kind of important for me because there was more of that coming when I would ultimately leave evangelicalism. The thing that keeps most people in is belonging. To change your beliefs about something like LGBT inclusion or even politics is often to risk your belonging within evangelicalism. And so I like to point out that when it comes to particular doctrinal issues, like again, for example, LGBT inclusion, although pastors might have more formal theological training than regular people, They are in some ways way less able to be objective about those theological positions because they have so much at stake in changing their minds. Not only would they lose belonging, but also obviously career, salary, their networks. And it's not just like, you can just move over and become a more progressive pastor because you don't know anybody in that world. All of your networks and relationships are in this world. And so... It can be very difficult. When I read books as an evangelical pastor, for instance, about that issue in particular, I would often read the books that reinforce the position that our church held so that I could better articulate it, so that I could have better defend it, and so that I could also sound more compassionate in my articulation of it. Even though intuitively I was beginning to feel like I was putting lipstick on a pig, like, was like, intuitively I was like, I actually feel like we should just affirm these people, but the... I can't because of my theological grid and it was too costly to question the whole grid. um So just to kind of rewind a little bit, um coming out of college, I actually joined the Marine Corps as an officer and part of that was because I did feel quite sheltered as a homeschooler in this bubble. I wanted some exposure to the world before I just dove into ministry and that was wise. But while I was a Marine, I started leading community groups and kind of elevated in lay leadership positions in my evangelical church. to the point where I got out and I helped launch a new site of my evangelical church, really the same month that I exited the Marine Corps. So I was like set up basically in this sort of leadership classic pipeline. And the first few years were really rosy. I loved being a pastor. I loved preaching. I loved, yeah, digging into the stories of Jesus and, you know, shepherding people in that community. And so that was 2012 when I started pastoring. And I would say those first three years, I felt very... Yeah, just at ease. And it was really 2015 with the rise of Donald Trump that the first sort of break happened. When I saw him be elevated, my first impulse was like to make fun of it and to think that this was something that was just going to be a flash in the pan moment. I even used it as a sermon illustration that Sunday, I think. I was like, we're all on the same page about this, right? This is a ridiculous thing. This is a buffoon. Like we can all laugh about this. And then within weeks I realized, oh no, like he's the front runner and oh no, like my parents. Excuse me, my parents are totally on board and many people in my church are totally on board. Like this is becoming their guy. The Access Hollywood tape dropped. My dad uses that defense of, it's just locker room talk. And I was like, this is the same, excuse me. This is the same guy who sat me down in my kitchen and told me that character counts during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton. And like all of that was like inverted. I felt like I was in Bizarro world. And... Then I watched figures like up until that point, I listened to Al Mohler's podcast, The Briefing, like every day for those back around 2012, 2013 era. And he was at first anti-Trump. And then once he was the front runner, he flip flopped and all of a sudden he was pro-Trump. And watching all of evangelicalism line up behind this guy, it felt like a mask off moment. It felt like I was seeing evangelicalism clearly for the first time. And I had this sinking feeling like, Are we the bad guys? uh Like, are we actually maybe on the wrong side of some major things? Because listen, at the time I was politically somewhat naive and uninvolved. I had really accepted a lot of things without questioning them. But I felt like there was one thing I was sure about. That Donald Trump guy was a bad character. And if you couldn't see through that, I felt like I couldn't trust your moral discernment. And so if as a movement evangelicalism was lining up behind this guy, I started to think, what else? Did I just swallow that they gave me that I really should have been questioning? Because if you are so morally blind that you couldn't see through Donald Trump, then I should really start questioning a lot of these assumptions. And so that was my sort of come to Jesus moment that happened in 2015, 2016. That's a really amazing story and I will tell you, um it's a story that I feel echoes amongst a ton of people. I'm sure in your communications and talking with people. ah folks will probably tell you a similar story, you know, of some capacity, grew up fundamentalist and then it got really wacky. And then, you know, now I'm like, I'm still a Christian, but everybody calls me a progressive because I love people now, you know, like I know that that's that's Josh is sort of like mini story. He gets he gets cast as a progressive all the time because, you know, guilty by association, I guess. But uh I am curious, though, because I I asked him, I asked. April of Joy when she was on our show ah about her kind of deconstruction because she's still a believer. And I said, you know, like you've had a uh wild life. I like everything you you have told me makes sense. ah You know what I'm looking at with the person is in front of me. But but like, why did you keep Jesus? Like what what is what is the one thing that you like you cut off all the chaff? of everything you're like okay fundamentalism bad you know uh patriarchy bad but like Jesus like you're still a Jesus follower so like like in your in your situation like why why did you keep Jesus? I have never had a reason not to. I don't think most people deconstructing do it because of Jesus. I've never actually heard anybody say, man, I started deconstruct because I really looked into it and that Jesus guy, like, I don't know, man, like, he's just got a lot of, a lot of bag, a lot of problematic stuff. No, it's usually the church, it's Christianity. I am not a defender of Christianity. I love Jesus. The history of Christianity is very problematic. This is not the first time. that Christianity has been used by the forces of empire to maintain hierarchies of domination. This is not the first time that's happened. That's been a repeated pattern throughout history. I think Jesus was exactly opposed to that. And so in many ways for me, what it means to really follow Jesus is to right now oppose much of mainstream Christianity. And that to me is actually being more aligned with who Jesus was because Jesus was, he never once, called the prostitutes that they were going to Gehenna. It was always the religious elites and those that were in bed with power structures that were dominating others. That was who Jesus called out as going to hell, which I believe is a metaphor. But the point is, it wasn't, so I've never felt like I couldn't align with Jesus. I will say that in my process of deconstruction, I realized I had never given myself the opportunity to be intellectually honest about some of the major premises of the Christian faith. um And so I put everything on the table once I was out of the church and so To jump back into my story just real quick 2015-2016 was when I saw myself really majorly breaking with evangelicalism in the sense that I saw myself Now all of a sudden as in a different place than most evangelicals, but I didn't leave immediately instead I really positioned myself in that place of speaking into it from within and challenging it and I was like man This is cool. I'm not just preaching to the choir I'm talking to people who are watching Fox News almost every night and I'm able to challenge them to love their neighbors on Sunday morning. And this is really important. It wasn't until 2020 that I really had my major sense of, I can't do that anymore because I felt and I and nothing wrong with people who are doing that change from the inside thing. I think that some people do need to do that for a season and maybe that's their calling. But for me, where I was at, integrity demanded that I step out for a few reasons. One, I realized I was still I was censoring myself in some major ways. because I knew that, okay, I could push on the edges of racial injustice or, you know, being welcoming towards immigrants, but actually, queer inclusion, if I actually go where my gut is telling me to go on that, I would lose my job, and as a result, I'm playing it safe by not going full force on where I feel uh integrity would lead me. So that was part of it, in order to fully embrace where I felt like I was being called to go, I had to leave. But then also, I felt like my... existence within it was giving a stamp of approval to that system and structure, which I ultimately was realizing that it was doing more harm than good. And so I needed, I realized I needed to get out of it. So that was 2020, I put in my resignation and it was amazing. Once I left in early 2021 and I did the whole like Bon Voyage thing, they prayed me out. I didn't leave in some big like, you guys suck and you did an evil thing. Like I, I was gracious. It was just like, Hey, there's a new chapter for me. You know, I didn't want to rock the boat. So they literally like prayed me out and I left on good graces. But when I left, within weeks, once I felt this sense of freedom that, I'm not required, I don't have a statement of faith that my job requires me to sign off on, I don't have to defend this stuff anymore, I can really just be intellectually honest for the first time, it was incredible how quickly I changed on some other issues. For instance, the queer affirmation. so, and over the next year, it became more of a burden where it wasn't just like, you know, I think maybe... I think maybe God's cool with gay people. It became more of a sense of, like we have done grievous harm to this community and we need to be repentant. And actually those of us who have been a part of that harm, I need to speak out as an act of reparation towards that community. That was the burning desire that began to rise up in me. So about a year after I left is when I started speaking out in a more public way and posting about it. I did a series of videos about why I believed Christians should affirm queer people. And when I did that, my church removed all of my sermons, eight and a half years of sermons from their website, sent out an email about me, about like me being a prayer request essentially. And when that happened also, that was hurtful, but it was kind of expected. And it again, just gave me the freedom to say, okay, I'm not living for institutional approval anymore. I forget what your question was last actually. What did you ask me before? is great. because keep going. Well, my question was... I know, me too. The question was about why Jesus, and I think that you explained it well, but I'm still captivated by your story. So please continue. then as I left, did put everything in that process of deconstruction. really, a lot of people even pushed me and said, why are you, you're just like, this is a sunk cost fallacy that you remain a Christian. Just be intellectually honest. You're an atheist. But to be honest, during that time, I never felt like I stopped following Jesus. I felt like I was becoming more passionate about the things that Jesus seems to care about in his actual life and ministry. In evangelicalism, I don't think the life and ministry of Jesus is the priority. Most of even the Christian creeds throughout Christian history, they skip from the virgin birth to the atoning death. What was Jesus on about? Because that's what I want to be on about. And so for me, it has become much less about the religion about Jesus and more about living out the spirituality of Jesus. And that's really what my Christianity is. And so I remain, I have become quite agnostic about many of the finer points of Christian dogma. I don't care that much about dogma. I don't think Jesus cared that much about dogma. Jesus did not teach his followers dogmatic beliefs. He did not ask people to convert to dogmatic beliefs. He taught them the greatest commandment, the love ethic, and then he sided with the vulnerable until they crucified him for it. And so that to me is really what it means to live out a Christianity that looks like the way of Jesus. And so throughout this process, I've just, yeah, I've never felt like I needed to break from that. Yeah, I really appreciate hearing your perspective on that. And again, I resonate with a lot of things that you said. Our journeys are similar, but they're not the same. And it's interesting to me when I meet someone who has had similar experiences, even down to Albert Mueller. I listen to him every day for years and years and years. The briefing. And then I would listen to the um Speaking in Public or whatever it was. It was like another one of his big podcasts. And so even that, I absolutely... like deeply resonate with that part. then like imagining, like what was it that led me down my path versus what led you down like your path and why my views have remained what they are versus why your views have shifted. And it's like, it's so fascinating for me to think about that and to wonder about that. And I know part of what you've tried to do, right, is you're there, you're trying to speak for the vulnerable, which I think is amazing. Trying to speak for the marginalized, which I think is what Jesus did and would do. Trying to shed light on ways in which the church has taken individuals and an entire category of people and systematically either abused them or hated them or any number of different, you know, things that really, be honest, they're horrific to treat anyone with the image of God in that way, you know, and I think that those kinds of things like have to be understood and have to be acknowledged and we need to not whitewash history, but we need to be honest about it. But I want to think about I want to give you chance to speak on anything I just said that came out, but I do have a question about now moving into your book. And so maybe I'll just pause there and see if you had any thoughts on anything that I said. Well, yeah, I'd love to learn more of your story. sounds like, uh I mean, for some people, they would write me off completely, you're just an absolute heretic. I appreciate that you seem to just be able to engage with people that maybe have moved further in ways that you haven't. And I try to remain open. I'm not saying like I've got it all figured out. I will say that in my deconstruction, having like uh certainty has really been less important to me. So when it comes to things like the exact nature of the atonement. the exact nature of what does it mean that Jesus is God, like the nature of his divinity and that sort of thing. I think speculating about that stuff is really fun, but for me what I realized, and this will dovetail into my book, is that that need for certainty, a lot of that was rooted in the belief that if I was wrong I might go to hell. And once I realized that this whole thing wasn't about getting all the answers right on the God test when you die or else you're eternally punished. Right, right, right, right, right. of Jesus. Then it kind of released me from the need to know for sure all of those things, you know? uh And so that's been a big part of it. Hey, give me one second. You might have to just trim this part out. I had a kid ask me a question. I've got all my kids home from summer and I just need to like shut this door and like, there's like noise. One moment. I marked it. No worries, mate. Been there, done that. Yeah, I actually like it when I hear like stuff in the background when I listen to podcasts and like, and there's like siren. Well, I don't like the sirens because I always if I'm listening to the vehicle, I always think it's like, you know, around me, but hearing dogs or kids or something. uh It makes it seem like it's like a little environment, you know, it's wild around here, man. It's really hard to get anything done, to be honest. I hear that brother. I hear it. I loved your story and I just resonate with it and I appreciate it. And even the idea of like taking on the spirituality of Jesus. I will say things to people like, if it weren't for Jesus, I wouldn't be a Christian. And I kind of am saying that a little tongue in cheek, but it's it's completely true. And I do I do ascribe to the classic canons, right? Of or the creeds, I guess I should say, you know, I would probably be in your evangelical in terms of theology. Most of it, you know, kind of probably down the line is my sense, although I'm kind of systematically in my own little process of deconstruction of. looking through and actually asking the question, why do I believe this? And then evaluating the answer I have to that question. And often it's not very good. And so I'm going to start to dig deeper into what that means. Go ahead. Well, no, I, sorry, I was just resonating with what you were saying because that's what I did. em I look forward to, I hope you do read my book. I think you'll find it interesting. You might disagree with a lot of it that's totally fine, but I think it'll give you some stuff to really wrestle with. And one of the things that was, so I started deconstructing hell while I was a pastor. eh And part of that is as a fundamentalist growing up, hell was, wasn't like evangelical churches, hell is in the statement of faith, but they're not talking about that much on Sunday morning. You know, it's kind of like, we don't want to be hitting people over the head with it, we're being seeker sensitive, but at the end of the day, they still believe all the same things that fundamentalists really believe. Maybe there's more leeway extended to Catholics can go to heaven, okay, we'll let the Catholics in, but like, because for me growing up, they were definitely out, and my best friend was Catholic, and I was just here. Not the liberals, yeah, right, not Episcopals. Right? And so there was this sense that... um When I went to evangelicalism, I was at first very relieved that, it's not fire and brimstone anymore. But then I was unsettled because it's like, we're not talking about this, but like, isn't that a bad thing? Because if this is true, shouldn't we be talking about this? Because like, if we actually believe this and our statement of faith on the website says that unbelievers will suffer eternally in hell, just feels like we should be talking about it more if we really believe that. of feels like it's the only thing we should be talking about. If the stakes are that high. it's like he might seem socially awkward, but he's living in integrity. Whereas I almost felt like I wasn't. um And so I began to do a deep dive and I read Erasing Hell was the evangelical industrial complexes answer to Love Wins. I don't know if you remember that. Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle wrote a book, because Rob Bell wrote Love Wins. And evangelicalism wrote off Rob Bell after that. John Piper tweeted, farewell, Rob Bell. In other words, like, you are not of us anymore because you questioned hell. You crossed a line in the sand. And then there was this book, Erasing Hell. But what was really interesting to me, and that book, excuse me, Erasing Hell is really about reaffirming eternal conscious torment. eh But Preston Sprinkle, who was the evangelical scholar who helped with that book, I listened to his podcast, Theology in the Raw. And after writing that book, which again, affirms eternal conscious torment, he kept reading and researching and he was kind of unsettled that the answers weren't as clear as he thought they were. And he went on to change his mind and become an annihilationist, which is the belief that uh unbelievers will simply be put out of existence and destroyed rather than suffer forever. And watching his evolution was somewhat permission-giving because again, this is like the scholar that was tapped to write the book to shut down Rob Bell's, know, creeping, uh changing on hell. And he himself was like, actually the evangelical answer on hell isn't as airtight as I thought it was, even after writing his book. And so I began to really just consume everything I could. I read a bunch of books and I was shocked at how bad the biblical support was for hell. At how apocalyptic hyperbole, which when we see it in the Old Testament, Isaiah and Jeremiah use all kinds of apocalyptic hyperbolic images and we don't believe that they're talking about hell. We know that they're talking about the destruction that's gonna come in the form of Babylon or Assyria, that this is real world historical judgment, which is often given apocalyptic metaphorical imagery to accompany it. And that's basically what's happening in the book of Revelation as well. Really the only verse in the Bible that says that people are going to be burning forever in Revelation 14, where it says that the smoke of their torment rises up forever those who have the number of the beast. That is a very specific indictment of the empire of Rome. That, you know, I wasn't told this growing up, but that number of 666, almost all scholars believe that's talking about Nero Caesar, Hebrew sort of numerology. 666 spells out Nero Caesar. This is an indictment of Rome and using this apocalyptic imagery, similar to what you see in the Old Testament. And when you take that image and you sort of read it back into the rest of the Bible, you can draw out these sort of hellish images. but they're much more uh developed in medieval Christianity and Dante's Inferno than they are in scripture. And so I began to really wrestle with this and my first, while I was a pastor, I initially went down that same path as Preston Sprinkle and became an annihilationist, which was a big step at the time. And it involved, it was quite scary because I wasn't sure how it would be received by my pastoral team. And I remember when I talked to my lead pastor about this because I was like, hey, out of integrity, I have to tell you, I've begun to shift on this. uh But don't worry, I'm an annihilationist, not a universalist, because that would have been like a bridge too far. uh And so he was like, I remember, I'll never forget his question to me. He was like, okay, so you don't believe that people are going to suffer in hell forever? I was like, no. He's like, so you believe they'll be destroyed? I was like, yeah, I actually think that you can find that in the Bible even more easily. And he's like, okay, so just to be clear, you still think something bad is gonna happen to them, right? And I knew that that was going to be the issue. In other words, there has to be a punishment, right? Otherwise, if there's no punishment for not being a Christian, what's the point of being a Christian? Punishment, I realized, holds the whole thing together for many people. um And that helped me kind of start to see in my own self that so much of my spirituality was based in wanting to be on the right side of a punishing God. I better not get this wrong. because otherwise something bad might happen to me. I would be punished in hell or I'd be eternally destroyed. One of these bad things would happen to me. And so my spu- You can say till you're blue in the face, the kingdom of God is about now and this life. But if you believe in hell, if you believe that if you get some of this stuff wrong then you could go to hell, I don't think it's possible for that not to take center stage. And the belief in eternal punishment I think sucks the air out of the room. for the possibility of a spirituality that's about growing in love in this life for the sake of the world and what leads to flourishing in this world, especially for the most vulnerable of this world. And that's what my spirituality is about now. But in evangelicalism, when hell is a part of the story, good works and social justice, even if it... Curing child hunger. None of that can pale in comparison to just saving people from hell. You could even say, oh, we're gonna start this whole ministry and cure... cure disease and save children from hunger. And they'll say, well, are you going to give them the gospel? Because you might feed a hungry child, but if that full bellied child dies and goes to hell, then what good is it? And I found out that really hell was a trump card. All loving actions really were judged by whether or not they led to conversions. And this creates, I think, a very malformed spirituality. So the first part of my book is really about how having hell in your theology actually twists your spirituality to make it, I think, unloving. It creates an unloving picture of God, an unloving posture towards others. I don't think it helps you relate to people the way that Jesus related to them. Jesus was not trying to change and convert people. He entered into people's And ultimately, um yeah, I think that I rejected hell not just because I realized that the biblical support wasn't there, but because it's a really, really bad spirituality that it hands us. And so I'm hopeful that I can... not only deconstruct that spirituality, then help people understand that I think. I love that and it really resonates with me. um So I didn't grow up in the church. ah So a lot of the deconstruction that I hear about ah is all pretty foreign to me. I spent most of my life as an atheist. I came to the faith in 2008. So, you know, lot of the things that people talk about, you know, growing up in church is pretty foreign and even like... the concept of hell and, you know, being against LGBTQ and stuff like that. So, like, the first church I attended when I came to Christ was an Assemblies of God church. And I came to the faith because of my wife. um And it's like, I remember it was a small church, so they were really, they really needed people to do worship and like to do, like, they needed a youth pastor, you know, and... And just to give you a sense, like they had asked my wife to be the worship leader, but I play guitar and drums and stuff. like I'm suggesting songs to her and I'm like, yeah, maybe we should play that Hallelujah song, you know, that's on the radio. I forgot who's it by. It's the one in Shrek, you know, but she's like, that's not a worship song, Will. And I'm like, but they say Hallelujah. think that might be a cover. I think Jeff Buckley covers it. yeah, yeah, I think you're right. So anyways, it's like this institution is just so um dead set on getting you to behave, look, think a certain way, including the topic of hell. So I think that the natural question is, if hell isn't the uh focus, then how do you define salvation? And then what does a person have to do to... to go to the good place. So I don't think that salvation is about what happens after we die. I do think that it's about being on the side of Jesus in this life. Every time somebody asks Jesus, like, what's it all about? What's religion all about? What's the Bible all about? What's spirituality all about? This question came up kind of a lot for Jesus. He was actually asked... several different times across the gospels, how do you just, like, give me the bare bones, like, give me the basics, like, what do we really need to worry about? And he never made it about hell, about believing the right thing, about even really being forgiven for your sins, certainly not about receiving some sort of atonement. um He said it was about loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. He said that over and over again. And then the other time that he summarized it, and when he said that, he said, this is what the law and the prophets are about. In other words, the whole Bible is about this. It's about love. ah And then he also summarized it in the Golden Rule, saying, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is the law and the prophets. So Jesus anchored it in loving behaviors rather than perfect dogmatic beliefs. Now I do think what you believe matters, because what you believe about God, not because you're gonna be punished for wrong-think, what you believe matters because what you believe about God shapes who you become. ah And if you believe that God is a punisher, then you can be a punisher. If you believe that God is the one who eternally excludes and damns people for being wrong and being other, then you will have a worldview where you exclude people for being other. And by the way, we're seeing that happening right now in our country, and it's Christians who are often driving the bus on the othering, the dehumanization, and the exclusion. However, if you have a God who is love, who is defined by compassion, the Father that Jesus described was never the one keeping people out of the party. That was the older brother who kept himself out, right? Jesus only ever excluded exclusion itself. The Father says, on in. And the older brother didn't want to come into the party because of who else was in there. And so to me, heaven is a feast that we can all get in on. And it is about, I do believe that primarily these are the kingdom of God, and this is not actually a progressive belief. Even evangelicals like N.T. Wright would say that the kingdom of God is a metaphor that's about this world, not the next world. The kingdom of God is God's dream for the world. It's what the world would look like if God truly had God's way, if love was in charge instead of Caesar and domination systems in this world. And Jesus showed us that that's what the parables are about, is reimagining a world where love gets the final say. And does that have implications for the next life? Possibly. I think that most of what we receive in terms of the next life are metaphors. Even things like, so in the book of Revelation, it is interesting how this is a book filled with apocalyptic imagery, dragons, you know, covered in eyeballs, etc., etc. But then when it comes to the New Jerusalem and the Lake of Fire, all of sudden people are like, well, those two things, those are real, like for sure. Those, are they're to take absolutely literally. Everything else is a metaphor. um The Bible has a lot of universalist statements. God will be all in all. God will reconcile all things to himself. um I do ultimately believe that all things will be reconciled to God. I don't know exactly what that looks like. I don't, I am quite an agnostic on what I think heaven is actually like, but I'd still call myself a universalist. ah And I ultimately believe that the images that we receive about hell are primarily about natural consequences in this life. The metaphor of Gehenna that Jesus used, people say Jesus talked about hell more than anybody. Jesus actually talked about Gehenna more than anybody. Gehenna, was the word translated hell that Jesus used. Gehenna was a real valley outside of Jerusalem. And Jesus wasn't the first person to use the metaphor of Gehenna for judgment. The prophet Jeremiah talked about Gehenna. He said that when Babylon was going to come and destroy Jerusalem and the temple, that Gehenna would become a valley of slaughter because Jerusalem wouldn't have room for all the dead bodies, that the valley of Gehenna would be filled with dead bodies. And so it was a metaphor for the fact that because the people of God were not living in line with the love of God, they were not caring for the vulnerable, they weren't caring about the widows and orphans, they were giving themselves over to violence and war and nationalism that actually there would be a judgment, not in the next life, but in this life. And Jeremiah used apocalyptic imagery, he said it's gonna be a valley of slaughter, but he didn't mean an eternal hell, he meant a literal, like there would be war and destruction. And Jesus used that exact same metaphor and said that unless you change, you're going to be thrown into Gehenna. And I think a lot of people forget when they read these warnings from Jesus what actually happened in history within decades of Jesus' life was that for the second time in history, Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed, not by Babylon, but this time by Rome. And the warning was fulfilled that actually the historian Josephus tells us that again the valley of Gehenna was filled with bodies. from the destruction of Rome. And so I think that actually when Matthew is writing the gospel stories and putting these warnings in Jesus' mouth that unless you repent, you're gonna go to Gehenna. When Matthew was writing that, Gehenna had literally just happened. Rome had just destroyed Jerusalem years before that. Matthew was written as a wartime gospel. And so I do believe he had these real world consequences in mind. that end of the world language makes sense because the world is always ending somewhere. Apocalyptic language makes sense when you're fucking going through it. Sorry, you can edit that part out. The world is always ending. Right now, apocalyptic language makes sense for the families in Gaza whose homes are bombed out. They are living through hell on earth, through Gehenna. And I think that the kind of language that we see in the Bible, doesn't have to be like... an actual end of the world. It's like we don't have capacity to understand metaphors. And we make everything about this end time scenario rather than realize this is about the flesh and blood realities that we are living through. It's the kind of worlds that we're creating. It's about the kind of society we are leaving for our children. That's what Gehenna means. So these warnings still matter a lot to me. When I think about hell now, and what Jesus has to say, unless you repent, you're gonna go to hell. I think about the fact that climate scientists tell us that unless we change our ways within 20 years, this world might be unrecognizable. And so this matters for real bodies in the here and now, not just for when we die. And so I think that we have the opportunity, are we gonna build the kingdom of God where everybody matters and everybody belongs, or are we gonna allow Gehenna to be our future, where we decide that we're going to focus on me and mine and allow hell on earth to exist for many people, for the global majority. I definitely appreciate your words, man. Like, no, I love the passion. I'm locked in. Dude, you can't help it, man. Once a preacher, always a preacher, brother. It doesn't go away. You just got to find other avenues. You know what I'm saying? Like, I had all these dreams. I was going to be preaching in front of all these thousands of people. And now I share the biggest platform I have with one of my best friends, Will. and he's a big liberal and he's not a preacher. So you never know how things are gonna, you know, but he is a preacher actually. He has his own way of preaching. So I shouldn't, I repent of saying that. Well, you are a preacher, my friend. ah There's no doubt. You know, um I really love the work that you've done. It's given me all sorts of questions. And you know, when I was thinking about how I approach this topic, You know, it's one where it's like, I do think we need to start to ask questions about what we mean by hell when we're saying it. And what, and like for Christians, I'm speaking as an evangelical, it's what I've been my whole life. I haven't consciously left, you know, any evangelical, anything, you know? I I am in that world, I understand it. And I think the question, I think we're either one being dishonest about what we really care about because we're normally focusing on the here and now, on how to live life correctly, on how to have the best marriage, whatever it is, and that's all good, but we're not really focusing on hell, which again, if you're gonna go and spend the rest of your cautious existence, which is not just like the rest, there is no end to it. and you're going to be tortured in the most sadistic ways possible. I mean, what are we saying, I guess, is my question about that. What are we actually saying about that? Because I don't know if we're actually defining that. I don't know if we're actually thinking about that. And are we saying that? And then where are we getting that imagery from? And then going back and being honest and saying, OK, so how would the original audience have heard this imagery? And when they have come to the same conclusion as we are coming to, when it comes to this imagery. If yes, okay, great. Why? If no, again, okay, great. Why not? And so we try to understand what's going on. I think the place where I get stuck with hell right now is I don't like the idea. You know, I don't prefer it. I would love for universalism to be true at some level. Right. Well, I guess at a lot of levels, like I don't really have a lot of ill will towards someone like that. I would want that kind of, you know, punishment, eternal conscious torment. You know, who do I know in my life where that's what I would wish upon them? Nobody. So, I mean, it's like I don't want that. I don't. But at the same time, I what I want doesn't seem very relevant. to the conversation in terms of what's real and what isn't. like maybe it's relevant to the extent that I could say, a normal person would want these things and if a normal person would want these things, what does it say about morality and stuff like that? But not like, it doesn't have any kind of like significance to convey any kind of reality to anything. For sure. especially if we're raised in uh a... I was raised in oh a thing that said, my heart is deceitfully wicked to the point where I can't listen to even my intuition. So even if my gut tells me, like, this feels wrong, this feels off, that didn't matter at all. I wasn't supposed to listen to that. I'm broken and messed up. So my gut is going to lead me astray. I just have to really receive what I'm being told is true. um by my religious authorities and their particular interpretation of the Bible. And so for me, it was quite shocking though to realize that even the Bible wasn't backing up quite what was being said. And I think that they were getting the Bible wrong in many ways and not hearing the metaphors. Cause like if you're, somebody tells you a metaphor. I think hell is real in the sense that a metaphor is real when it's describing a true spiritual reality, but it might be a psychological reality. It's a way of describing the spiritual stakes of this world. I think this world matters. But you actually miss the point if somebody gives you a metaphor and you receive that as woodenly literal, you're gonna actually completely miss the point and actually it's actually more false. And so if Jesus meant natural consequences experienced in this life, and what we interpreted was God's gonna punish people eternally in the afterlife, then I would say that we've missed the point. So I think it is worth wrestling with that. um That's my take and I know people will disagree with me, but I think what I would say as well, one of the pushbacks I get often is on like, well, I don't want most people to go to hell, but what about like the worst people, right? Like what about Hitler? What about the worst perpetrators and that sort of thing? And I think there's a lot of ways to approach that. think first of all, I would say that even the worst possible person who committed the most atrocious sins within a at most 100 year lifespan does not deserve 3 billion, 5 billion, 10 trillion years of eternal suffering that even after that 10 trillion, you're just getting started, baby. We're just getting cooking. Like it's got 10 more trillion to go and then 10 more trillion on top of that. Like that doesn't, that's not just according to anybody's standards of justice. em But more than that, I do think that We have, I think, a very punitive idea of justice in America. And I think more and more conversations in even our penal system are turning towards the reality that punishment and punitive means of justice don't work, don't really lead to true justice. That actually restorative justice is both more just and more effective. em And one of the reasons that we have in our country one of the higher recidicism rates, in other words, people go to prison again and again and again because we don't have restoration as the goal. We have punishment as the goal, which doesn't lead to the true justice, which is, think, restoration. And when we look at the heart of God throughout the Bible, we see that God always moves from judgment to restoration. It's never punishment for punishment's sake. It's always to move God's people back into belonging and belovedness. And so I think that any justice that only is purely punitive without a focus on ultimate restoration is certainly not God's justice, and I would say it's not justice at all. Wow. um Brian, I swear I can keep on talking to you, but just kind of in the interest of time, um I have one more question for you and then we can um talk about where folks can buy the book. so if three different people were to pick up your book um and we'll just, I'll just pick a person, an atheist, know, or a skeptic, um a deconstructing Christian and a um committed evangelical Christian, you know, it could be Richard Dawkins, April LaJoy and Tony Perkins. I don't know. um with that group. That would be awesome. What a dream. So if each of those folks picked up your book, what would you hope each one of them took away from reading it? I think that for an atheist, um and I have great friends who are atheists, I don't believe that God is going to punish them for being atheists. In fact, many of my atheist friends are closer to what I would consider the heart of Jesus than many of my evangelical friends, unfortunately, in the sense that I believe that they're fighting for the flourishing of real human beings and the justice of God in this world, although they wouldn't call it that. um I think I would hope that an atheist would realize like, oh, the God that I've rejected was not the God of Jesus. um I think that the God that most atheists reject is a big punishing guy, like a sky daddy, who is, yeah, oh, you don't believe the right thing? You go to hell. Like, there is a God that is this big punishing guy on a throne, definitely a guy, by the way, very male, it's a white male God that they've rejected, a punishing white male sky daddy. I don't believe in that God. I believe God is a universal spirit of love that beckons us into love, that there's no punishment in God. And so I would want the atheist to be like, okay, maybe I've rejected a God that I don't have to reject the entire concept of the divine to reject that God. And certainly I think Jesus was describing a different kind of God than that. So that's what I want the atheists to receive. The deconstructed Christian, I want them to feel seen, to fall even deeper in love with Jesus and to... feel like, okay, a freedom, because I think that, you know, I like to say that it's one thing to get out of fear-based religion, it's another thing to get fear-based religion out of you. And so you might change your mind about some of this stuff, but I think hell can haunt the edges of our spirituality. And so I think that to step into greater levels of freedom and knowing that like, okay, this isn't about getting everything right, I don't have to be certain about everything, I can just focus on being loving, loving the people in front of me. um And that's what Jesus did. I think that's what I want them take it from it. And for an evangelical, think at large, I would hope that if my, if I could wave a magic wand and my book would do one thing for the world, I would love it to be a part of the conversation of making hell and punishment less central to the Christian story at large. I think that most evangelicals, hell is so central to their spirituality and they don't even realize it. But if they took hell out, if they said, okay, there's no hell. I think they would realize pretty quickly that, that's like pulling a thread and it unraveled the entire sweater of their faith. Like there's nothing left. Once you take punishment out of the equation, do you have a reason? This is the question I get more than any other question when I say I don't believe there's a hell. The question I get more than any other question is, if there's no hell, what is Jesus even for? Why did Jesus even come? Why did Jesus even die? Why does it even matter to be a Christian? In other words, once you take that punishment avoidance piece out, a lot of their spirituality goes away. And that is, uh that's, think, unfortunate. I think that's a deficient form of faith. And so I think I would hope for evangelicals to recognize that punishment might be in the foundation a little bit. And I think to build the spirituality of love as opposed to that, wherever you land on some of the specifics, I would hope that that would be the future of Christianity, that it wouldn't be so punitive. That's really, really amazing. I really wish we had more time. know Josh is texting me offline that. Yeah, so speaking of that, so your book releases on September 30th, which is a Tuesday, which we know this because we talked a lot of um authors and books always release on Tuesdays. I have no idea why. don't know either. So yeah, tell us where would you like people to pick up your books and are you doing tours? What's sort of the conversation you plan on doing when it releases? this space on my Instagram. I'll be announcing some book tour dates. I'll be in a few cities this fall and then hopefully next year get to some more cities. But it comes out September 30th. Anywhere books are sold, really. I send people the Amazon link for ease, but I know that a lot of people don't like shopping on Amazon. You can just find out your favorite retailer. The coolest thing you could do, and actually what I would beg you to do if you wanted to really like bless me and bless the world, is to call your favorite local bookstore and ask them to stock it and get it from them. Pre-order it directly from a local bookstore that stocks it after being contacted by you would be amazing. Or if you don't want to spend any money, contact your local library and you can ask them to also order it and have it on hand. And then you can just rent it from the library, but you'd probably have to request it. But it's available on hardcover. audiobook and Kindle on Amazon. That's why I sent the Amazon link. And I did record the audiobook myself, which I'm really excited about, because I got a little fired up a few times. So if you like listening to books, I think it'll be a good audio experience. em know, hardcover is cool too. They did a good job with the design. And so I'm excited to get these into people's hands. That is really cool. uh in your videos, do you release them on a schedule or is it just like, hey, there's something on my heart and I really kind of need to get off my chest? How can people follow what you're doing? for fun and I was just doing it out of like a sense of, yeah, just wanting to put good into the world. And so there was no agenda. ah Once I got the book rolling and now I'm trying to sell a book. So now I unfortunately feel like a pressure to post because really that's books don't sell themselves. So I'm out there posting, trying to build my following, trying to sell my book because ultimately, yes, I would love it to sell really well because it would be awesome if I could. make a living doing this sort of thing. I don't know if that's gonna happen or not. But more than that, I really do believe in the message of this book. I grew up in hell-based, fear-based Christianity. And I think that that's not only is that a harmful spiritual message, but it also overshadows what is so beautiful about Christianity. That the reason I'm passionate about this is I actually do think that the message of Jesus is beautiful and can actually change the world. And actually if they were, you know, ah What are they? think three billion Christians. And if those three billion Christians focused more on imitating the life and spirituality of Jesus rather than just believing all the right things to not go to hell when they died, I think the world would be transformed. And so um that's why I think this book can matter for people. That's really awesome. Well, we will make sure we put all the links to everything that you mentioned in our show notes. So check those out and go out and buy the book. We'll also add your book to our we have a author's list on bookshop.org ah of all the books from authors we've talked to. there too. You can pre-order it on Bookshop. you know, feel free to argue with it. Like if you're evangelical and you're like, I don't really buy all this, that's awesome. Like I was there too. And you know, feel free to just wrestle with it and feel free to hate it, hate read it. But I think that it's worth wrestling with. I do think that this is something that the evangelical church really needs to wrestle with, especially if you're one of those churches that has hell in the statement of faith on your website, but you're not talking about on Sunday morning. I really think you need to look at yourself in the mirror, guys. That's right. Yeah, so thanks again Brian for spending some time with us. This has been really really great great conversation I absolutely love everything you're doing and yeah, good luck on your book and To our audience. Hey, thanks for stopping by and hanging out with us again And as always make sure you keep your conversations not right or left but up and we'll see you next time. Take care