The Recovering Evangelical Podcast

Welcome to the brand new podcast, The Recovering Evangelical. This is a quick intro explaining my heart behind the podcast - healing & faith beyond the church.

Christian Nationalism driving you away from the church? We feel you. Guest April Reuning joins me as we discuss the evangelical church's obsession with Trump and how that ultimately led to her departure.

It's Holy Week. Everyone goes to church on Easter Sunday - but what if you don't want to? What if it's painful? This week, we're discussing what Resurrection Sunday really looked like. Spoiler alert: it was nothing like Easter Sunday at church.

Your mental health matters. Your emotional and spiritual health matters. Not everyone you love needs to come along on your journey of recovering from the church. On this episode, we look to Christ's example of healthy boundaries & how to protect your deconstruction experience.

Join me as I chat with my friend Wayne about life after ministry and the intersection of race & the church. When it comes to race in America, the evangelical church often chooses neutrality. We discuss why, where Christians miss when it comes to generational racism, and how to keep check yourself when it comes to white saviorism.

In this episode, I tackle what deconstructing your faith really is & how I got there myself - how leading worship went from my favorite thing to a painful thing & how it jumpstarted my deconstruction journey.

If you can get past us talking about cicadas, the Real Housewives, Cincinnati Chili, and more, about halfway through the episode, the wonderful Pastor Abbey Smith and I talk about being women in ministry - how Jesus affirmed them, how Tiktok hates them, and how we might misunderstand the Apostle Paul on this subject.

Jesus told us his greatest commandments. Talk about those and the church will call you "woke", "watered down", "soft". But his example and teachings are clear and the church ignores them every chance they get. As we deconstruct and get back to a Jesus-centered faith, this episode looks at his life and how we can look to it as a model for our own lives.

The church argues semantics. The church gaslights and refuses to apologize or take accountability. The church says you align completely or you're out. The church doesn't forgive. This 'deconstruction community' has to unlearn all of those church behaviors in addition to unlearning harmful doctrine or we're no better than the church. And if we're not better than the church, what the hell are we doing?

My friend, Lindsay, is a blue dot in a red state. She got fed up with the politics and power in the evangelical church and now is navigating all the things she's ever been taught. She doesn't claim to have the answers but she willingly asks the questions.

The first part of the 2nd season will be dedicated to how the Evangelical church used purity culture to control us. We'll hear from married women, women of color, and men about their experiences and the harm caused. Part 1 - what is purity culture and what's it mean for the unmarried.  Quotes and purity culture info from Pure by Linda Kay Klein.

On this episode, my friend Kenza (@iamkenzaashley) joins me to continue the conversation about purity culture. She shares her experience with it as a black woman growing up in the church and we examine why the church easily sees redemption after a fall for men but not so much for women.

Purity culture teaches a woman to suddenly turn her sex drive on when she gets married after years of forbidding even the thought. April Reuning (@aprilajoy on Tiktok) joins me to discuss the general impact purity culture had on her but more specifically, the impact it had on her marriage.  TW: sexual assault.

My friend Blair (@talkpuritytome) joins me to talk about dealing with purity culture after leaving the faith altogether, how the church might just be a sex cult, and how women never truly have bodily autonomy. I also share some feedback on the latest episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and the absence of consent in evangelical purity culture.

On today's episode, we hear a male perspective on purity culture and how, while women and girls have been disproportionately harmed by purity culture, the church still left men with baggage to unpack, behavior to unlearn, and things to apologize for.

Purity culture in the evangelical church ignores everything but heterosexuality but when it comes to damaging, is an equal opportunity abuser. My friend Whitley joins me this week to discuss healing from purity culture and how that affected her journey of coming out and her faith now.

This episode features 2 interviews with a man and a woman, both raised in purity culture and now both married, who have found themselves on the asexual spectrum (or figuring out if that's what best describes them). They talk about the shame around that, how it has affected their marriages and identity, and how they are recovering from purity culture and figuring out how to celebrate their sexuality. Note: Candid talk about sex.

It's our very first episode of The HERetics! Come find out who we are, what we're all about, and why we're doing this. Content warning: we will potentially be discussing Pray Away - the Netflix documentary. We understand that conversion therapy may be a difficult topic for some to hear. We will do our best to give a heads up on this episode before we discuss it.

@Puritytopolyamory joins me on today's episode to discuss ethical non-monogamy and how she went from purity culture and getting married at 19 to finding her peace in polyamory. Unpacking and healing from purity culture is hard for all of us. No matter where we fall, there's an unlearning of shame for wanting what we were told was wrong. Listen along with an open mind as she shares her story.

Note: Some sound issues - echoes, etc. Sorry in advance!  The church creates a vicious cycle of victim turned victimizer. We've unpacked a lot of our trauma at the hands of purity culture. But how do we unpack the hurt we inflicted on others because of purity culture?  My guest, Abbey Smith, talks about going from abstinence educator to sex positive pastor. It's a journey of undoing we're all on, but isn't it worth it?