Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus · The Sophia Society

A Call For Bravery, Peace, and Self Love w/Regina Cates

·54 min·3 clips

Regina Cates says Christian nationalism has made her unwilling to call herself Christian.

Gary Allen opens the conversation by welcoming Regina and framing Holy Heretics around post-evangelical faith. He lays out the hard questions that keep coming up after religious harm. Regina talks about being connected to a source and a wisdom that she experiences as real. She ties that conviction to her first book and to moments she says helped save her life. The conversation turns to humility as something learned, not performed. Regina describes experiences such as a sweat lodge and sobbing in a homeless man's arms as formative encounters with love. Gary presses on the question of why she keeps going after trauma, domination, and the challenge of reconciling sexuality with her spiritual journey. Regina answers that Jesus would want her to keep naming what is not correct. She says Jesus would want listeners to do the same. The episode then moves into her belief in Christ consciousness as an ongoing presence rather than a distant rescue from the sky. Regina rejects the idea that Jesus will descend in a miraculous end-time intervention. The exchange briefly turns to a dark joke about what humanity would do if he appeared now. The conversation keeps coming back to self-reflection, quiet work, and the discipline of asking difficult questions. Regina says that kind of inner work is a major reason she wrote the book. She wants readers to feel free to ask their hardest questions in private. She also wants them to take those questions to church or community if they choose. Gary gives her room to develop the argument instead of squeezing it into sound bites. That pacing lets the episode move from personal story to theology to a direct challenge about what faith is for. The close lands on a plain invitation to keep thinking and keep reconstructing with honesty. The result is a conversation that feels warm, direct, and unafraid of the language of Jesus, power, and self-truth.

As heard by us

A patient post-evangelical conversation about healing, humility, and hard questions in faith.

Regina Cates and Gary Allen Taylor keep Holy Heretics close to Regina's own story: trauma, sexuality, humility, and the slow work of asking hard questions.

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Why you'd press play

A candid, Jesus-forward conversation about post-evangelical faith, sexuality, and asking hard questions without rushing the answers.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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