Episode 26 - Profoundly Perplexing Pomiculture with Daniel Rogers

How can we know who’s right and who’s wrong? Is there any hope for Christian Nationalists? My friend and classmate Daniel Rogers shares his experience with the cognitive dissonance he encountered as a Bible-thumping fundamentalist that ultimately led him to a whole new way of being and loving. The catalyst? Fruit. Our conversation is sometimes goofy, sometimes profound, but always comes back to Jesus’ teaching: you shall know them by their fruit.

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Transcript

Welcome to season two of Barely Christian Fully Christian.

I'm your host, Annie Ponder, and I'm so glad you've stopped by for the conversation about loving Jesus, being repulsed by the un-Christ-likeness of so much of what the world sees from Christianity, and my personal favorite, honoring the Holy Spirit

as the Divine Mother, or as I call her, Mama God. Jesus once said, When he was giving his most famous homily, the Sermon on the Mount, and he was telling his listeners how to know whom to follow.

He said, look, you're going to see people claiming to be awesome and doing great things in my name, but you'll really know them by their fruits.

In other words, you will see what happens in their lives and know whether or not they're truly walking with me.

And later on in the Bible, one of the writers, it's probably Paul, said, hey, the fruits of the spirit, just so you know, those things that you can count on to know whether or not somebody is really aligned with the spirit are things like love, joy,

peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. So today's conversation centers around fruit. So obviously I had to title our conversation Profoundly Perplexing Pomiculture. I'll let you Google what Pomiculture is.

And when you hear Daniel's story of how he went from being a Christian nationalist to somebody a whole lot more loving, I think it will all make sense. Welcome for this conversation. I'm really glad you're here.

Okay, it's always that awkward pause. Are we live? I think we're live.

Daniel, are we live?

We are live. I saw the numbers.

That's amazing.

Which is also how the other podcast started.

It is.

It was. Confusion. Yeah.

Yeah, but I love that you left that completely unedited.

Am I doing a fork?

All the raw reality.

Okay.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to I have no idea what episode this is. You know, I love how our brother Rob keeps track of his episode numbers, and they're in the almost 400s now. Maybe he's done his 400th by now.

I wasn't supposed to be live.

Yeah, it was.

I really wanted to be there for that.

Yeah, I forgot about that.

Yeah, we've already lost half of my listeners now, because we've invoked the name of Rod Bell. Great. Those of you who are still here, hi, welcome.

Thanks for being here. My brother Daniel Rogers is with us today.

Hello.

There are some things you should know about this guy. First of all, we are seminary students. Is it seminary?

Is that really what we're doing? Do you think? I mean, I don't know.

Yes, no, maybe.

We're studying theology.

I'm not sure if you can call it seminary if it doesn't end with an M.Div. Okay. We're studying theology together.

Yes.

We're doing theology.

We are becoming theologians. Okay. So I met Daniel at residency this last April.

She was scared of me. No, I was not scared. I just didn't want to like you at all.

I was trying so hard to have judgment in my heart. Okay, here's why, everyone. So if you look at the photo, if it shows up, Daniel Rogers, you can see what he looks like.

I actually, okay, this is fun. I showed this picture with no context to my 19-year-old yesterday, and I said, oh, here's my podcast guest. I want you to tell me what's your first impression.

And she looks at your picture and she goes, he's a youth pastor and he is on fire for Jesus. And I was like, pretty close actually. Yep.

Yep. So here, but here, here's why. Here's why.

Daniel Rogers is one of the most brilliantly minded people I've ever actually met. And in our theology classes, he has way more to bring to the class than the other kids in the class, most of the time.

And so I was, I was pretty sure that when I first started hearing you on Zooms, and you would have like profound and brilliant insights that would baffle the teacher and stop them in their tracks and make them like, think hard.

I was like, oh, this guy, right?

Wait, is that what was happening?

Yeah.

Wait, was that, was that seriously your impression?

Yeah. I was like, oh, this guy, he already knows all this stuff. He uses fancy Greek words.

He is so smart. I think I'm just, just going to hate him. Right.

He's like, way better than the rest of us. I was very judgy.

Yeah. Can I, can I tell you my perspective on that whole thing? Because this is insane.

Because I was literally talking to our mutual friend Jordan about this maybe like three weeks ago.

In these Zoom calls, everybody would say something and the person would say something and the teacher would respond and be like, oh, that's so insightful because of this and this and this and this and this.

And then I would respond and they would just be like, okay, and then go to the next person.

What? That is not my experience.

That I was just saying something that was like nonsensical or like not worth anything. But your impression was is that I was stumping them. My impression was I didn't say anything good enough to elicit a comment or a reaction.

Everybody just kind of moves on.

No, my friend, that is wholly false.

Not even kidding, that was my impression.

Okay. Well, I'm going to set you straight.

I appreciate your perspective.

Daniel has a spiritual gift of haikus on the fly, which are astounding, profound, and hilarious. He can just be in the middle of a conversation, be like, oh, here's a haiku, and it's brilliant and very contextually appropriate.

You'll be thinking about it for months after. So really, I just wanted to put you in the box of this guy is way smarter than the rest of us, and he's already doing the work of a pastor, and it's really hard to keep up, and all of these things.

But then I got to know you, and I was like, oh, I absolutely love you. You're wonderful. Who are you?

How can we continue having conversations? So yeah, I stand corrected. My initial impression of you was actually was not incorrect.

I am convinced that you are really brilliant and deeply wise. But now I kind of love you for it instead of trying to compete with you. So there you have it.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate. I accept and affirm your perception of me, even though I have doubts myself. Yeah.

All right. I did a high-five for you. Are you ready?

Oh, I bet you did.

Let's have it.

Now, this is one. Ready? Okay.

I love mama God. She protects my soul from shame. She'll never leave me.

What?

See, this is what we're talking about. You actually worked on that while we were having conversation. Is there a tiny little poet in your brain that is listening to the rest of the conversation and then off in his own world making haiku?

Is that how it works?

Well, you mentioned haiku and I was like, I haven't done one since residency. And so I just was like, what's five syllables? What's seven syllables?

What's five syllables? And then wrote it down. Well, I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Can you read it again? I think of Mama God.

Thank you. That's the best compliment. Okay.

Can you do it again?

I love Mama God. She protects my soul from shame. That was an interesting line.

I don't know where that one came from. Oh, I do. At first I'll never leave her, but that's not exactly true.

So I put, she'll never leave me.

Yeah. Yeah. Now she really is a shame protector.

That's like a main function I have found.

I was thinking about the bear, the mama bear.

Yeah. The mama bear. Oof.

Oof.

Wow. Okay.

So I'm going to print that out. I might get that tattooed someplace. In the meantime, just so everybody can catch up, here's Daniel Rogers in a nutshell.

This is like his official bio. Okay. Daniel Rogers lives in Boaz, Alabama with his wife, Laura, not Laura, right?

Oh, you remember that.

Yes.

I heard that. Yeah. I'm a former English teacher.

I pay attention. His son, Caden and his daughter, Ellie Shea. He works as minister for the North Broad Church.

Daniel enjoys reading, writing, playing music and spending time in the outdoors. More on that in a second. Remind me to get back to playing music.

Daniel has a BS in Bible and Ministry. Why do they call it a BS? From Armridge University.

Okay. He's currently pursuing an MA in Theology and Culture at St. Stephen's University, alongside some of the coolest people in the world.

Daniel has authored three books, several e-books, and hundreds of essays and articles. His favorite topics are eschatology, the Stone Campbell movement, and his own journey from legalism to freedom.

Okay.

So I want to tell you this story. This is so funny. Daniel plays lots of different instruments.

At residency, we all like to gather around a piano or a drum or somebody begins something, and other people filter in and they're singing. Some of us are dancing. I won't say which ones.

We're all dancing inside.

Yeah, just some more on the outside than others.

And so this one afternoon, I was feeling this tune. I don't know what I was playing something at the piano. Something was coming out and Daniel's walking by.

And I was like, I need more people for this. Like, I think we can make something here. And so I'm playing these chords and I look over and I say, Daniel, grab something.

Daniel looks around, grabs a watering can that's next to a plant on the floor, looks at me and goes, now what? Do you remember that?

I do not remember that at all. When did that happen?

Like Wednesday or Thursday, we've gotten to know each other by then well enough to know. It's like, oh, this guy's funny. So I was like, no, Daniel, a musical thing.

Get over here. I want to work on this. So yeah, that was it was lightening fast.

OK, now what?

That definitely sounds something like like what I would do. I was so mentally drained and emotionally drained that whole week. Yeah, that's a lot of it is a blur.

It is for me to now.

But when I remember that part, when I fish out certain memories, I'm like, oh, wow, precious. OK, so speaking of certain memories. So so that everybody knows, I listened to the audio version of your book.

How a can you do the title is a long one.

Yeah, it's a long one. How a 25 year old learned he wasn't the only one go into heaven. Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's your autobiographical memoirish story of going from, would you go so far as to say this was Christian nationalism?

Oh, yeah, there's some of that in there for sure.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was picking up, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. So Wednesday night of our residency, we watched Dr. Safi Koskos be hooded by our university and given, what's that called?

Like the honorary doctorate?

Honorary doctorate, yeah, that's right.

Oh, see? Look at me pulling out correct terminology and it's before my second cup of coffee today, which was a holy, like just an exquisite experience, right?

And then you stand up and we've been invited to offer reflections and words of congratulations and that sort of thing. And do you remember what you shared?

Oh, yeah, I remember what I shared.

I remember. Can you do it again?

I can't do it again, no, but I can. Summarize. Summarize it, yeah.

It was a very emotional moment, right? Because Safi, he talks about what the word Muslim means. Was it like a servant of God or something like that?

That sounds right, yeah.

Oh, and everybody should know this man is a Muslim scholar of the highest caliber and has a beautiful translation of the Qur'an, which has references to the Jewish and Hebrew scriptures.

Yeah, he's a big follower of Jesus. That's like his theme, is that he coaches like Christian pastors in Middle East countries on how to interact with more violent expressions of the Muslim faith. Yeah.

That one story that he told, oh, that was just nuts about the guy who went into al-Qaeda, you know, when they were having their meeting to select a new general. Remember that?

And he was like, I'm here to tell you about basically why, how you're breaking your own rules and that kind of thing. Like that was such a crazy story.

Anyways, I stood up and said something to the effect of I was trained to think of, you know, basically that there's two kinds of Muslims. There's the kinds that wants to kill you for not being a Muslim and then bad Muslims.

Yeah, that's what I was taught. Yeah. And so to meet somebody who A, did not want to kill anybody because he believes in non-violence and to love one's enemies as Jesus teaches, you know.

But it was also a very good one, right? I just sort of, like I already knew that what I was taught wasn't accurate, but that just confirmed it on a very personal and intimate level, you know, with somebody in the room with you.

I mean, it was just incredible. Such a transformative experience, for sure.

Yeah. I don't know if you remember this, but like when you said, I want to let you know that I used to, I think you may have said I used to be a Christian nationalist, actually.

Maybe so.

Yeah, possibly so. Yeah, I think that's what my memory is offering up right now. You said, I used to hate Muslims and I used to not understand anything about who you were as people and have all of these things.

And you essentially like repented right there. You were like, I want to tell you how sorry I am that I was aligned with those ideologies and how glad I am to meet you.

And something for me and I think for many other people in the room, it felt like a holy silence came over for a moment. And we were like, okay, it actually gives so much hope for particularly what we're experiencing now in this country.

Because you were essentially saying it is possible to go from Christian nationalism to full embrace of all people. And I know because I've done it, I've lived it. And so then I was like, I need to know everything about you and read your book.

And this is fantastic. How can we, how can I learn more? So I listened to your audio book.

I listened to it all in one day, by the way.

While you were cleaning, right?

While I was cleaning my house, I was like, I don't want to stop. I'll just, oh, look, there's more pockets of dust over here. Let me keep going.

And so that's hearing it in your own voice with your own inflections and self commentary.

Yeah, it's a, it's a bridge, right? That's what it's called.

It's a bridge.

Yeah, it's definitely a bridged. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So for everybody here, if people have not yet read your book, which how could they not like, tell us a little bit about what went into writing it.

Yeah.

So I, I've had quite the journey in my faith.

I started off in, I was raised in a fundamentalist, very conservative expression of Christianity called Church of Christ, which if you heard in the, in the bio, one of my fascinations is the Stone Campbell movement.

And that is the movement from which the Churches of Christ came. There's also several other denominations that arose out of that movement, such as the Christian Church and the Disciples of Christ.

So if you've ever heard of any of those, they all come, they all have the same religious family.

So like something as, as fundamentalist as, you know, the most extreme branches of the Churches of Christ and something as progressive as the, like, you know, the Disciples of Christ all come from the same faith tradition.

It's really, really an interesting thing.

Oh, really?

Yeah. And as I have begun to reflect more and more on my journey from legalism to freedom in Christ, I began to do writings and do research into the historical Stone Campbell movement, what was going on in there.

And I realized that my story was having an impact on a lot of people. And so I wanted to write a book that served several purposes. One, it would help someone who was going through what I went through in deconstruction or rethinking their faith.

It would allow them to experience that through my own story. So maybe they could maybe bypass some of the more, you know, horrible mistakes that I made along the way, right? And any kind of live, though, you know, experience those through my story.

Not that they wouldn't have mistakes of their own or tough times of their own, but maybe they could get some good book recommendations and not have to sift through some of the things I had to sift through to get, you know, to get to where I'm at on

the journey now, which I'm still on the journey. And I also wanted it to be a way for people to understand what someone is going through who's questioning things from my particular neck of the woods within Christianity.

Because a lot of people, they see what their child's experiencing in deconstruction and they're like, I can't identify with that at all. And I hope that reading my own story might even open them up to see, okay, this is what my child's experiencing.

This is why they're asking the questions they are. They're not just trying to rock the boat for the sake of rocking the boat. They're not being disingenuous.

They're not seeking after money, fortune, or fame or whatever. They're just genuinely asking questions.

And the other group I had in mind when I wrote the book were people who maybe were still in legalism and were maybe trying to refute people who weren't. And they just wanted to read it as like an antagonist.

And I'm open to them reading it as well, because I'm open to being critiqued and have the opinions and things that I talk about being questioned, because that's how we grow. Movement requires friction, right?

And the idea that it doesn't require friction only exists in eighth grade science problems where everything is done in a vacuum. Yeah. But once you take things out of a vacuum, there's going to be friction if you're going to move.

There's going to be resistance, and that's perfectly natural. And it's not something that we should be shocked by or surprised by or be necessarily afraid of. Right.

So the idea of a frictionless existence only happens in fake spaces where people are pretending to be something that they're not. Right. So that's why I wanted to write this book.

The other reason I wrote it is because I was in a new church, a new church home as a minister. I came to this church in the fall of 2021. I published the book in the fall of 2022, but I started writing it in like the spring of 2022.

Right. And one of the reasons I did was to kind of introduce myself to this new congregation. And I didn't want to be a surprise to anybody.

Right. Yeah.

So. What a brilliant way to be like, hey, everyone, just so you know, here's where I've come from. Here are the questions I've asked.

Here are the convictions I have now. I'm still learning, growing, exploring, but full disclosure, this is me.

Exactly. And if you can't handle any one of these pages, you know, then you probably can't handle me, right?

Maybe this isn't going to work.

Yeah, exactly.

Let's find that out now rather than, you know, half a year down the road. I like that approach.

I'm fascinated by the questions that initiate our, and this is a loaded word for some people, but I think you and I mean the same thing when we say it by deconstruction, right?

So the journey of like, oh, this is what I've always held as true, and now I see some problems, some cracks in the foundation. I'll begin to explore that.

And it usually leads to some kind of giant transformation of one sort or another when we start looking at these questions. So I am curious. You may have said this in the book.

And, you know, perhaps I was swiping a cobweb when you said it and it didn't stick. Can you point to one of the earliest questions that began this whole thing?

Do you remember, like, at the very beginning of your deconstruction journey, what was something that first made you go, hold on, wait, wait a second?

Yeah. So I'm going to be intentional in, like, naming the start of my deconstruction journey because there are two different shifts that we can experience. We can experience a lateral shift and we can experience a forward shift.

I had several lateral shifts in my time when I was rethinking my faith, but it was the first forward shift happened in October of 2016.

I had been recently released of my duties from my parents' congregation, the church that I grew up in, the church that I eventually became the full-time minister of.

And I went to go speak at a conference of people who shared some of the same ideas I had about this niche kind of prophecy way to interpret scripture sort of thing. And they asked me to go speak, so I went to go speak.

And when I was there, I met a bunch of people from different denominations. Now, the title of the book is How a 25-year-old Learned He Wasn't the Only One Going to Heaven.

That title is based off a question that most people within the Church of Christ, especially in the South, have experienced. And that is when you're talking about what church you go to and you tell somebody you're a member of the Church of Christ.

The first thing out of their mouth is either, are you all the ones who don't use any music? Or are you the ones who think you're the only one going to heaven? And so, I'm in this room having been just recently let go from a home congregation.

I'm in this room with people of all different sorts of denominations. And what blows my mind about them is that I see the fruit of the spirit within their life, love, joy, peace, etc.

And that was such a profound experience, because my question was like, how could these people have the fruit of the spirit when they don't even go to the right church? When they don't even worship in the right way?

They don't even understand baptism in the right way? They don't even blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So, that was like the first big question to me, I think.

How can they have the fruit of the spirit when they have bad theology?

Yeah, exactly.

And that took, so 2017, some stuff happened at the end of 2016 that I talk about the book. I was like formally excommunicated by my family a month after that conference. And then, so I went into fight mode for like a whole year.

And then came out of it sort of like in the summer of 2018, basically. And then that's when I started reading Rob Bell.

And everything went downhill from there.

I'll just start reading Rob.

It's over, my friends.

So yeah, that's where I started, I think.

Okay. So for you as an observation, wait, I see real genuine fruit of the Spirit, which you were a disciple of Jesus, right? You were following him.

You heard his words. You'll know them by their fruits. And you're like, okay, teacher, I'm listening.

Why do I see fruits in people who have the wrong theology?

Exactly.

Yeah. Ooh.

Which is why I can hang out with you, because even though your theology is all messed up, I see fruit in it.

Oh, wow. Hey, thank you. Yeah, let's get it.

But guess what?

My theology is also really messed up, but you see fruit in my life. Because the thing about it is, is any expression, any theological expression or statement or claim that we make is always going to pale in comparison to the real thing.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So even when we call God good, like God is laughing at our definition of good because it is so much better than anything that we can imagine.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's all about fruit, right?

It is all about fruit. Jesus does not say, look for the teachers with sound doctrine and follow them. Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. It is interesting.

In fact, that's how you know somebody's theology is good, is fruit because a good tree cannot produce good fruit, right?

Bad fruit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit.

Yeah. I got you.

That's okay. It's, you know, I don't know how much coffee you've had today yet, but mine's not nearly done.

So I had a white chocolate mocha to try to wake up for this thing, but I'm still struggling, but we're doing good.

Okay. Yeah. You have littles at home who haven't been gracious with their sleeping hours lately.

No, not at all.

Yeah.

That is okay.

Yeah.

That's the joys of parenting. So speaking of parenting, I wanted to hear, you were excused from your family of origin.

Yeah.

Because, well, I mean, and Jesus literally said, like, you're going to experience this when you start following me. You're going to lose people, and you have. Can you tell us a little bit about how that was for you?

Yeah.

So I was taught that truth mattered more than anything else.

And I was specifically told, like, literally told, if you ever read something in the Bible that contradicts what we have taught you, you have, like, a moral obligation to follow what it says, even if it means that we're wrong. Right.

OK. So you were taught that scripture was your ultimate standard, not the church's doctrine.

Yes.

OK.

OK. Every Sunday, I mean, almost every Sunday of my life, you would hear someone say something to the effect of.

If you see or hear anything that we do or say today in this worship service that disapproves or that can be disproven by scripture, we need to know because that is our only standard.

Wow.

Like every single. And they would say things like, if you study the Bible with an open heart and open mind, then you can find truth. And so anything that you find that's credible, we need to know it.

Like that's what I was taught.

OK.

I didn't realize the assumption was, and by the way, we've already got it figured out. So anything that you come up with that's different than what we believe, you're actually the one who's wrong. And this is doing it wrong.

You're reading this wrong.

This is baiting you into transparency so that we can swiftly correct you.

OK.

So it's a great sentiment, but it might not actually be as benign. Because when I hear that, so my faith tradition actually has embedded in the doctrine of the 28 fundamental beliefs. Yeah, there are 28.

There's too many.

In one of them, it says kind of the opposite of what you were raised hearing.

It says, here's our lifestyle issues, right? We don't drink, we don't dance, we don't wear jewelry, we don't swear, we don't all these things.

And then it says, if anyone feels convicted by the Holy Spirit to do differently than these things, you should find a different place to be. So like, if God Almighty inspires something else from you, there's the door.

Wow. See, ours was way more of a sterile laboratory kind of approach to faith. Literally, yeah.

It's way more about syllogisms and charts and facts and passages that you've memorized and exegesis and all this sort of thing. It's very much a facts don't care about your feelings kind of world, right?

And I don't think, you know, we talked about, I talked about a second ago how it was like basically baiting people into transparencies so they could be swiftly tried. I don't think anybody there thinks that way.

Like that that's what they, I don't think anybody there thinks that that's what they're doing. That's just practically how it works out. Yeah.

Yeah.

Like I think they're sincere in their beliefs.

Like I was having a conversation with my mom yesterday, actually.

And she's like, I'm studying this really interesting thing here lately about how trauma can be passed down through generations and that if a mother has a high level of cortisone when she's pregnant, that it will actually impact the development of the

baby's brain like during the pregnancy. And I'm thinking like, who am I talking to, first of all, because you didn't even believe in ADHD when I was a kid, right? You thought that ADHD meant not enough spankings.

And it was very much of a nurture versus nature kind of thing. And now she's switching and she's like, wait a minute, it's way more nature than it is nurture.

And she's like, and we have this list of 10 things that are classified as traumas in early childhood development. She's like, I disagree with one of them, corporal punishment, because that's endorsed by the Bible.

So I think they got it almost right, but not all the way. And I'm like, so close. You're so close, right?

But she's like, have you ever heard of this before? I'm like, oh, you mean like the whole brain child or whole brain discipline, or, you know, whatever? She's like, oh, yeah, that's one of the books that we've actually had to read.

So you've read that? I'm like, yeah. When before we, you know, when we were starting to have kids and thinking about how we would discipline our children, now we did a bunch of research into this kind of thing, you know?

And then I was like, so you think that maybe the circumstances of my birth and like the stress you went through impacted how I view the world and all this kind of thing? She's like, yeah. I'm like, wow, she's actually making some pretty big changes.

You know, that's really cool. But there was still that, but there was still that I'm willing to accept any information so long as it doesn't contradict my interpretation of the Bible.

What I know of the scripture.

Yeah, exactly what I think I know about the scripture. Yeah.

I don't want to hijack your story because I want to hear more. I have more questions. But this is giving me so much hope to hear that your very own mother is experiencing this kind of expansion in her thinking right now.

Because as you and I have discussed and many other people are, it seems like the way things are happening right now in the political scene in our country and around the world, the authoritarianism is on the rise at an alarming rate.

But I have a little hope because of what you're describing, that your mother is experiencing, that you have experienced, that's what your whole book is about.

Like going from a very authoritarian legalistic mindset to a much more expansive sort of love-based theology, right? It is possible. Are you familiar with the work of Sheila Rae Greigweire?

I don't think so.

OK.

So I could say lots about her. She is a, I think she's a sociologist, but that could be wrong. She is an evangelical sex researcher.

Oh, that's nice. So she writes in collaboration with her daughter and another team member and then also with her husband, who is a retired pediatrician, I believe.

And she does a whole lot about evidence-based findings related to the messaging that evangelicalism has put out for the last, I don't know, how many years, about all of these things that we see causing real harm.

You know, male headship, female submission, men need sex and women have to give it to them. Like all of these ideas, what purity culture has actually done. So she researches all of these things.

Fascinating work. I highly recommend The Great Sex Rescue and also The Marriage You Want. I think that's the title.

Getting the marriage want? Anyway. Okay.

So she recently put out a podcast where she had read a book by someone whose name I won't be able to remember, who in 2006 published this book after 40 years of being a university professor where he had designed a test that would rate how much

authoritarianism is in a person's thinking. And so he makes this authoritarian scale, right?

And you take the test and it shows, oh, you have like this much, I can't recall the markers, but basically how much authoritarianism influences your thinking.

And the thing that gives me so much hope is in his findings, in Sheila Ray's, Greg Weier's work, in your own life, in my experience, it is not a static number. It can change, it can lower.

And what usually is the catalyst for people coming down the authoritarian scale is proximity to other people who provide the cognitive dissonance, like what you experienced. Hey, I don't believe the same things, but there is fruit here in my life.

And that gets under their skin. And if they're paying attention, we'll make them start to think and question and wonder. And then like your mom, go, wait a minute, maybe I haven't been right about everything all along.

So it's giving me hope to hear these stories is my long-winded point.

Yeah, I think one of the things that helped my mom out a lot was one of the children that she adopted, it's really severe ADHD. And all the discipline techniques that they tried on him like failed to work like it did for the other children.

But when you receive that diagnosis and they agreed that it was real, having had the experience of trying to discipline a kid with ADHD and it not working, right?

So it wasn't just not enough spankings or not enough groundings or something else, like there's actually something psychologically off, you know? And he started getting the medication and there's a switch.

I think that's what opened her up to, oh, well, maybe I'm missing something here in this world of mental health, maybe there's more to it than what we once thought. And so it gives me a lot of hope too.

And that's so much of my story is thinking that it was one way, being so confident in this up here, but then my heart and my soul and my experience something that was totally different than like the nice, neat framework I had up here.

And it forced me to rethink and to question myself and question the underlying assumptions I had about everything. Right.

Once you start pulling that thread, the whole sweater might unravel.

The whole sweater.

PSA. The whole sweater is coming off. But you can have, you know, like you can weave that yarn into something else.

So it's going to be all right.

Yeah, you can. And that's isn't you mentioned a while ago how some people have an issue with the term deconstruction. And I think there's a difference between deconstruction and demolition.

Right. Oh, yeah. Sometimes sometimes demolition is necessary.

Right. Yeah. But deconstruction is way more methodical.

It's way more intentional. And it typically it typically comes with the purpose of of reconstruction.

Now, there might be a couple of years there where you're sitting on the foundation of the house with all the planks and stones and things laid out in piles around you. Right. As you sort them.

But the idea is eventually to start laying those down again. Right.

Yeah.

To start building on the foundation. Yeah.

My favorite metaphor for this is more plant life. Plant like it's a tree getting pruned where certain limbs, branches, et cetera, are not bearing fruit. And so they're pruned off.

And sometimes it's very, very painful to see, you know, like you walk by a tree and you're like, oh, my goodness, they just like, is that thing going to come back? It's just bare. There's nothing left.

But it still is rooted where, you know, and that's how I view like my deconstruction, reconstruction. I actually just don't connect to building metaphor because my brain doesn't work that way. So that's why I needed like a botanical illustration.

But I have remained rooted in the things that I have always been firmly convicted of, which are God is good. Jesus is God's son. Like I'm fully buying that narrative.

And I bear God's image. When I know those three things in my roots, then I can handle any of my branches coming down because I'm still here in the soil of God's goodness.

Yeah, rooted in that Trinitarian flow.

Yeah, yeah, right.

It's like what, I mean, the Apostle Paul uses the building metaphor. He talks about, there is this foundation. And then he says specifically, like be careful what materials you use to build this up.

Like be careful if you're going to use straw, if you're going to use wood, if you're going to use stone. You like pay attention to that.

And so much of it is going back and examining those building blocks, like, oh, wow, maybe we shouldn't have used this. But I love your sort of the botanical imagery as well. That's good.

Yeah, I like that a lot.

Yeah, it's been useful.

It has.

Yeah.

So, oh, gosh, I'm about to interview you. Let me stop.

Okay, go for it. What do you got?

I was like, because this is the chair that I sit in to interview people. So tell me about one of those branches. Which one of those was hard for you to pluck off?

Which one really was tough to get?

Well, I would love to tell you, I have a memoir. It's not published yet, because it's in second draft form right now, and I am currently living some of the chapters that I knew were coming for draft three.

Oh my goodness.

So I will put a pin in your beautiful offering to wonder about that, and I'll send you my manuscript. I'll ask you to be a beta reader when I'm ready to put it out.

That's funny. I just went into the interviewer posture.

I love it. That's what I said in the welcoming meal. This is a conversation.

You can ask me questions. This is not interrogation.

That's right.

But I do have a question that's going to maybe take us in a totally different direction. But I've been thinking about this for a minute. So I love your story.

I love the tender, oh, the words are hard right now, the very beautiful, soft, tender way that your story comes through to me.

Because I don't hear, like you're trying to burn down the town, I hear this deep love for everyone in the story, even the people who disowned you. Turn that back, right? I hear this, it really is, here's my reflection back to you.

I hear Jesus so strongly in your story. I hear this Christ-like love for everyone you speak of, and a gentle grace toward even the people who caused you the greatest hurt.

And so that makes me want to hear, can you please tell me, I'm going to really put you on the spot with this question. Okay, you ready?

Oh man, yeah. Okay.

Can you tell me about your experience with love for and love from Jesus? What's that like for you?

Oh yeah. Well, there's this line from this podcaster that I would like to listen to. And the line is, well, look at him go.

And so anytime you think back on like stupid things that you did or, you know, things that you tried out or whatever, the thought that should come to your head at first is, I'll just look at him go. You know, he's just doing his best.

And I think that's how Jesus looks at us.

And so when I think back on all the different things that I tried out, you know, whether it was Christian nationalism, whether it was fundamentalism, whether it was the beginnings of agnosticism, whether it was, you know, the preterism, eschatology

stuff, whether, I mean, whatever it was, you know, I just think that Jesus is looking at like, wow, he's just going forward, isn't he? You know, and that just gives me so much comfort and peace, and so much grace for myself, because I think that,

like, there's this line from Paul where he says that all things are summed up in Christ. Like, you take out a spreadsheet and you put in all the formulas about your life, every little thing that you did.

And then at the very bottom, when you hit enter, and it goes, and Phil figures it out to like, that's Jesus. And so when I think about my life that way, like everything, when you hit enter, everything ends up being, you know, J-E-S-U-S at the bottom.

Like, that gives me so much comfort to know that he's using my story to weave together this beautiful, this beautiful quilt that is totally worth it, totally worth every misstep, every mistake, every pain, every hurt that I brought upon myself,

whatever. Like, it's all part of it and it's all good, you know. Even if some of it is bad, it's separate and apart from the rest of the tapestry, right? Because of how it fits in, it all works out for the good.

Yeah.

I hear very strongly there the thread, the theme of Christ the Redeemer, not necessarily meaning like redeeming us from our sin in this sense so much as, because that's a whole other atonement theory question, but redeeming every part of our story.

Yeah. That's what I see a lot in Paul's writings. I mean, as hateful and as awful as he could have been in his self-righteous, like even God looked at that and was like, yeah, that's something.

I can work with that.

Yeah, I can work with that.

Which is nuts, you know, which is really nuts. Yeah. Did that answer your question?

Hmm.

Well, let's see. Yes, and I still would love to hear more if you're in a space where you can really kind of go there.

So like, if I had landed here from outer space and I didn't know anything about who Jesus is, and I was like, well, I keep hearing this guy's name, can you tell me who he is to you?

Okay.

Yeah. What would you say?

Yeah. I would say, Oh, that's what it was. Like apologetics to an alien.

That's crazy.

I would say that Jesus is the embodiment of infinite love that communicates to us that we are not alone, that we are not stranded, that we are not abandoned, and that even in the darkest, most awful moments of our life, when we cry out, you know, my

God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The answer comes back with a resounding, I have never left you, and there's nothing that can separate you from my love. And so Jesus is an embodiment of all of that.

And to me, that is just the most beautiful, profound truth that there is, that we know that God is love because Jesus is love.

And he is the incarnation of everything that is good, that is actually holy, that is just, that is righteous, that is beautiful.

And the only reason I have any hope at all in my life is because of that love that's been demonstrated through Jesus' self-giving, pouring out towards us from every hour of his life.

I don't know if you'll recall this, but at one point in residency, this topic was being discussed, and you said, oh, here's a haiku. Let's see, I have it. Let me pull it up.

What you have the haiku?

It's in my mind.

You said, Jesus is like God, but the real mystery is God is like Jesus.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, I have it here. I've got it.

Oh, you have it? You wrote it down?

Yeah. Wait, I'm pretty sure I did. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Discovering a new 2025 haikus.

Yeah. God is like Jesus. The real mystery is Jesus is like God, but the real mystery is God is like Jesus.

Yeah.

Right. Loving.

Yes, exactly. And now the mystery, it is all about Jesus, even the bad stuff. I can't believe you kept that.

It seared into my memory.

First of all, I was like, who are you? You just haiku spontaneously? What is that?

I've never met a person who does that. And also that struck me as there's the entirety of the gospel right there in a tiny little haiku.

I was in a haiku mood. I don't normally do haikus.

Okay. Okay. This is just a mode that you have.

I like to get hyperfixated on stuff, you know?

Yeah.

And so I switch hobbies real easily.

Okay.

Okay. No. Yeah, that makes sense.

I love that what you would say to my alien query is quite similar to what I would say to yours, which it sounds like there's a lot of points of connection in our journeys.

And the thing that I come back to in every time of despair or distress is, yeah, wait a minute. I've never been alone. I have never been alone.

I have been fully accompanied.

The whole time, there's a beautiful line that is in Ephesians four, I think it's verse six. Paul says that God is above all and through all, which both of those were okay with. But then he says, and in all and in all.

Oh, that's so hard.

That causes, wait a minute, are you saying God is in my strawberry plant? Okay.

Yeah. Hold on, hold on.

It's gonna be okay, deep breath.

But God is in you at your worst, and God is in your neighbor, and God is in your enemy, and God is in your children.

Yeah.

Yeah. And somebody says, well, how can that be? These people aren't in a covenant relationship with God because they don't believe.

Okay, well, is God omnipresent? So, you know. Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Isn't that like one of the definitions of God, according to some folks? So.

Yes.

I love it. Yeah.

It's so beautiful to consider the never aloneness that we, we kind of come to this awareness, you know, maybe some of us earlier on than, than others. But every sincere follower of Jesus I've ever spoken with has said essentially the same thing.

Oh, I've never been alone.

Never. And that's what Paul says. He's like, he's never far from each, each one of us.

And sometimes we think we're far off, but no, he's. Yeah. God, she is not.

He's not that.

I noticed that. Thank you.

Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah. The, the psalmist also talks about that. You know, if I go to the heights of heaven, behold, thou art there.

If I descend into the depths of the sea, behold, thou art there. If I lie in my bed, if I rise up.

If I go to Hades, like the land of the dead.

If I go to Hades. Behold. There you are.

Wow. Wow. That's really good news.

That is such good news.

Because I was always taught, like seriously, I was always taught that Hades was a place of separation from God and that we needed Hades because sin can't be in the presence of God.

And so until we're resurrected and made right, then we can go into God's presence. Yeah. But that's not what the Psalm says.

That's not.

And that's not what Jesus teaches.

Fun fact, my upbringing includes a fun little belief that if you go into a movie theater, which are places of sin and devilry, that your guardian angel or angels will stand outside the door and weep while you go in and wait for you, but they can't

protect you while you're in there. So don't go.

That's not traumatizing at all.

Yeah. I tell you what, I don't know about you, but I continue to find, as I travel down the layers of the soil in my heart, it's a very botanical, I have a lot of botanical metaphors for who I am.

So I'm going from layer to layer deeper and deeper in my heart. I keep finding, like, oh, I forgot about this belief that I used to hold. Oh, that's got to come out.

Like, there's another weed that I need to pull out. Like, I'm not done.

No. And you're going to learn new things that you think are where it's at. And then you realize that even they need to be tweaked and print.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's that's I think. I think it was Brian McLaren. Maybe it could have been Rob.

Maybe it could have even been Richard Rohr. Is it like parenting? The goal of parenting is to is for your kids to have to unlearn as little as possible.

Well, I can tell you what I've messed that up already royally.

Same.

I'm already working. I'm already working on fixing the mistakes I made early on.

Most recently, I told my children, I've told them this several times. I am so sorry that I resorted to physical violence to insure compliance. I'm so sorry and please don't spank my grandchildren.

There are other ways you can parent. I actually had to read, well, I didn't have to. I read Dobson with my youngest child because she is a firecracker.

I have been repenting of that lately.

Yeah, I mean, we made a commitment to not spank when we were kids.

That's brilliant.

I wish I had. Yeah, but look at her go. She's doing the best of what she got.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right. And all shall be redeemed. And as our friend Julian of Norwich says, is all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

We had to read that for Dr.

Fitch's class this last or this this upcoming. Well, sorry, we had to read that. We have to read that for this fall.

Did you read all your books in advance already, Daniel?

Yeah, I'm already done with it.

Okay.

NERD!

Listen, I'm going to be completely honest. This is why I have to do that. If I don't read all those books, like now, they're not going to get read during the semester.

Oh.

Why is that?

Seriously, because I can't do it. I cannot do sustained reading, like, over time.

Oh, you have to do it all in short bursts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if I'm on, if I'm on, I better get as much done as I can because I'm not going to work for another three weeks. Yeah.

So you have... Okay, so I have a personal question. Do you have ADHD?

I do.

Okay.

Because you've learned to make it work for you, then you've been like, this is how my brain works. I will work along with it instead of trying to fight it and fit it into the mold that doesn't fit.

Yep. That's why I do the things I do is because I have ADHD, and I've learned not to try to be whatever normal is. I just do what works.

And so I work in bursts. If I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea in my head, I go to Waffle House and I sit in my corner booth and I write it out because there's no other way for me to sleep if I don't, right?

Yeah.

Oh. Bradley, he sends out in his syllabus, he sends out all the lectures for the year, except for the ones through Zoom.

So I've already watched all those and made comments on them, like in my brain, so that I can write those comments out on my videos and get credit for it. And if Dr. Fitch did it, I would do the same, but he doesn't.

He makes you watch him week by week.

And I start off the semester like last semester, I started off watching the video as soon as it was released, leaving a comment, then responding to as many comments as I could, to halfway through and to the end of the semester, watching it on, you

know, basically Saturday at 1159 p.m. on 2 times speed.

Okay. Okay. Just to refresh one more time.

No, because, because I went from watching it as soon as it was released.

Oh, you went from, oh, oh, got it, got it.

To watching it at the very last second to make a comment before the week was up, just to ensure full credit.

Because I cannot do it.

Yeah.

Yeah. I break halfway through and I just can't, can't keep up. Yeah.

Well, I don't know if you know this about me.

So my first career, I was a teacher.

And so I am really excited to hear when people learn how their brain works and then, and then follow it rather than trying to fit it into, like you said, a normal way of it, which I mean, normal is like a setting on my washing machine, but that's

all. So yeah, that's true.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, like if, if I took, okay. So Dr. Fitch, he gives us like nine books, right?

If I took those nine books and said, oh, I'm in class for 13 weeks, as long as I read at a rate of 1.3 books or whatever it is a week, I'll be good to go. I would not get, I would not get them read. I would read them all at once.

Yeah.

And then I would read the last eight in the last week.

So I read it at the start. Yeah.

Brilliant. I love it. Yeah, I love it.

Daniel, I'm so glad you exist.

You know, maybe that'll help somebody who's listening. They're like, oh, my goodness, I can. I know what to do now, you know.

Well, that's that's really my comment.

I'm so glad you exist.

I'm so glad that you are just out here being transparent about who you are, your process, because it illuminates the path for other people, either who are stuck in legalism going, is there another way to think about things or trying to be some way

that their physiology, their brain, their wiring isn't work. It's not working. Yes, here this my friend Daniel just lets his brain tell him when to wake up and do the things.

Here's one for you. This has nothing related to God or legalism or whatever. I guess it does because everything is spiritual, but hear me out for a second.

Okay, hear me out for a second. So it's hard for me to read a book that doesn't have a lot of headings because I can't say, oh, this chapter is only 30 pages long. I have to say, oh, the section is only a page and a half.

And if I do that, then I can read the whole thing. I think that's one reason why I read Rob's books so quickly is because they move fast.

Yeah, he uses the bold and the italics and the, yeah.

Yeah, so if you have issues with doing laundry, yeah, you might, this might be how you're doing laundry. You take a piece of clothing out and you fold it and you put it in a pile or whatever, and then that's how you do it.

And you're like, this is how you do laundry. This is the normal way of doing laundry. It does not work for me.

It would take me all day long to get that done. Here's what I do. I take the whole pile out, I throw it on the bed, I separate it out into everybody's piles.

Okay, socks over here, t-shirts over here.

Oh, no, a lot of stuff here, Kaden's stuff here.

You're doing the whole family.

And then I sort out my pile into specific things and then I fold them or hang them up.

Because my brain is like at every stage, I can congratulate myself for a job well done and then move to the next stage. And it's like a totally different project and I don't get bored. You see?

I do. That's what I do, like literally everything. I break it down into these like smallest possible sections so that when I finish the one section, I can be like, I did it.

Yeah, like throw a party in my brain and then go to the next one. Yeah.

I love it. This is brilliant. Yes.

How old are you now? May I ask that?

Okay.

So, okay. Because, you know, so you seven years ago, you realized you weren't the only one going to heaven. At this point, you've realized how to do everything in small chunks, including laundry and having small celebrations.

I just wonder what you're going to do with the rest of your life. Like by the time you're in your 80s, what are we going to be hearing from you? I'm here for the whole story.

Oh, by the time I'm in my 80s.

See, that's called the end of history illusion. So it's impossible for me to tell you that. So you can look at the last 10 years and go, oh, look how much I've grown.

And you can name it and you can measure it. But we always think that we've arrived. Or we're always under the illusion that we have arrived.

Like now I know, okay.

For us to imagine.

Yeah, it's impossible for us to imagine what we would be like in another 10 years. And usually what we try to think of is way less than what we actually will be. So we end up limiting ourself by trying to put our future into a box.

So I try not to make goals that are more than not that far out. I have long-term goals like everybody else does, like get a PhD and pay off the house, and write a book that's actually published by a real company and not Amazon.

Like that kind of stuff.

Hashtag goals.

Yeah. But I also understand that whatever I think about how that will work, it's going to be way cooler than anything I can imagine. So I try not to think about it too much.

Well, I do agree if I go back in my mind to when I was pre, the first question that cracked open my deconstruction, my pruning, if I could have said, hey, by this point, here's where we'll be.

I would have been like, what? I don't even. What?

What?

And almost knowing about it would make it harder to get to it. You know?

Or it would have freaked me out.

Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

You couldn't have handled it. Yeah, you have. Oh, yeah.

You can only be half a step ahead at a time. That's one step is way too much. That's where I'll build it.

There's there's a book, Stephen King, November something, 1963 or something like that. You know, I'm talking about I hear the book about this guy traveling and I'm trying to stop the JFK assassination.

OK, but it was almost like knowing about it made it harder to stop. You know what I mean? There's like something about knowing what your future is going to be that makes it harder to get there.

Yeah, yeah, I kind of like Abraham and Sarah. You know, God told them they're going to have a baby and they're like, huh, yeah, right. So they go about trying to do it themselves a different way.

And it ended up making things hard for all kinds of people.

Yes, it did.

Yeah.

So that's why we embrace that we're still on the journey that we haven't arrived, but we remain blissfully ignorant about what we're going to be and try to keep that like with as few assumptions as possible, because we'll either be, you know,

disappointed or we will lose out on the mystery of it all, or we end up being underwhelmed by what we bring about on our own, instead of just turning that over to mom and god and knowing she's going to take us to where we need to go. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. She'll take us there.

Yeah.

For what it's worth, I'm here for the whole ride. And when we're in our 80s, we're gonna have another podcast where we're gonna listen to this one and then talk about how our...

Hello, my friends.

How our middle lives and older years have blown our midlife brains wide open. So, I look forward to that.

Amen.

Amen. Hallelujah.

Hallelujah. And our guardian angels will not be standing at the door. They'll be in there with us, partying with us, right?

Oh, God bless all those people.

Yeah. Oh, oh.

I can't wait to see what you title this because I have no idea what I would do. This has been. Oh, I know.

We've been.

We've been a lot of different places.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that'll be a fun thing to surprise you with. It'll be good.

Yeah.

And this is why we don't write down questions before.

Because then we wouldn't have gotten to this spot. That's exactly right. Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I'll just I'll just shut up. Never mind.

No, no. You go.

Well, I was going to say like this isn't going to make any sense.

I love questions that are prefaced by this will make no sense.

Do you remember what everybody was worried about about the beach back in Canada?

The beach.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were worried about they're like, when you go to the beach, you need to watch out for blank. It was a certain a certain creature, a certain critter that plagues the beaches.

And New Brunswick.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what they called them in the grass?

What were they? Yeah. Oh, no.

Oh, well, I don't remember that. They called them red ants.

Red ants.

Yeah. Red ants. And like I kept hearing this over and over again.

I was like, red ants. This is spooky. What could this be?

And then I was talking to Matthew, I think. I was like, red ants. Man, what are we going to do about these red ants?

Like, what are they even? He's like, oh, this is what they call fire ants. I was like, oh, wait, that's all it is.

You know?

I have this whole other creature.

Yeah. And so this is where all this comes from. And so sometimes we get worried about something because we haven't named it.

Yeah.

So, but when I realized that red ants was just fire ants, I was like, oh, that like demystifies it.

Like, who cares about fire ants? I just watch my stuff, you know? And so I imagine that naming this thing will just bring it all together in a way that brings safety and security and clarity, you know?

So I can't wait to see what you do.

Well, I have one final question for you.

Okay.

Okay. Let's pretend for a moment that someone happens to be listening to this who is where you were before you had your deconstruction epiphany.

They're entrenched in legalism, authoritarianism, but they have an inkling that they need to hear this all the way to the end.

They're like here, but they have all the same reservations, questions, problems with your theology, my theology, our language, everything. Everything about it, they're like opposed to, but they have listened all the way.

You have an opportunity to address this person. What do you say?

If you see the fruit of the spirit in my life, love, joy, peace, patience, all the way to the end, yet you're unwilling to accept me as a Jesus follower because of my theology, then is it because you don't actually see the fruit of the spirit in my

life, or is it because you trust your own theology more than what you see the spirit producing within me? And that's the dilemma that I had to wrestle with. Because Paul says, against such things, there is no law.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, if you're not willing to have fellowship with me in Christian unity, if it's because I lack the fruit of the spirit, gosh, please tell me if I'm not loving, if I don't have joy, if I don't exhibit patience.

But if you see that, but it's because of my theology, ask yourself, are you depending more on your own intellect than you are depending on the witness of the Holy Spirit that you allegedly see in my life? Yeah.

All right, wrestle with that, folks. Wrestle with that, have some fruit salad if you like. We'll see you next time.

Thank you so much for listening. Let's connect. I'm always happy to hear from my listeners and readers.

You can find me at barelychristianfullychristian.com. And now for more of my favorite song by Wynn Doran and Paul Craig. Please enjoy Banks of Massachusetts.