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

Finding God in an Errant Bible w/Liz Charlotte Grant

·54 min·3 clips

“People leave Christianity because they weren’t actually allowed to ask questions.”

Liz Charlotte Grant joins Holy Heretics to talk about leaving evangelicalism. She describes how moving into a more mainline and liberatory theology made one plain thing hard to ignore inside a closed religious culture: people read the Bible in very different ways, and that changes everything. That matters. Grant names the harm that follows when people are not allowed to ask questions, especially questions about God, politics, sexuality, spiritual formation, how we got here, and how to move forward post-evangelicalism. The conversation then narrows to Genesis. Rather than treating the book as something that must produce one clear meaning, Grant argues for a broader, more generous way of reading that leaves room for multiple voices and multiple interpretations. Midrash becomes her guide. She traces the path through a book called The Beginning of Desire, Readings on Genesis, which drew her into the Jewish world of interpretive practice and gave her a model she could use for her own book. The model feels more rhetorical than methodical. Grant says its aim is not to domesticate an ancient text but to notice what can be said about it and what has still been missed. She is drawn to interpretation as discovery, not control, and she treats strangeness as something to keep rather than smooth away. The text can stay difficult. She emphasizes that making a sacred book strange again is not a betrayal of truth but a way of resisting the pressure to flatten it. Readings multiply. Grant says that even the ancients seemed to understand scripture in this multivocal way, so reading for more than one meaning is not a modern cop-out. It is permission. The episode keeps circling back to the freedom she found in asking what she really thinks about the text instead of repeating the bounds evangelicalism placed around it. By the end, the conversation becomes a case for reading Genesis with humility, curiosity, and fewer inherited fences.

As heard by us

A patient case for reading scripture with more freedom and less fear.

Liz Charlotte Grant and Gary Allen Taylor use this conversation to revisit how evangelicalism can narrow honest Bible reading. Grant maps her move from certainty into a more mainline, liberatory theology, then into Midrash as a way of approaching Genesis without forcing it…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want Genesis after evangelical certainty, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus