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

FKD Up By Faith w/ Jude Mills and Gary Alan Taylor

·50 min·3 clips

Gary says affirming Christians take the Bible so seriously they refuse to read it literally.

1. Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus centers on Gary Allen Taylor's story of religious deconstruction and recovery. 2. Gary Allen Taylor is the guest, while Jude Mills hosts Fucked Up by Faith and frames the conversation as a collaboration about hope, healing, and former faith communities. 3. The episode asks what happens when someone leaves fundamentalist Christianity but keeps seeking Jesus, community, and a freer version of faith. 4. Gary says he grew up as the son of an evangelical pastor in a "very typical white, southern, evangelical world" with "hints of racism" and "purity culture." 5. He says he worked in evangelical spaces for 25 years, including Focus on the Family and the Evangelical Ministry Axis, before losing his job after public deconstruction. 6. Gary says questions about white supremacy, homophobia, and the Black Lives Matter movement were not welcome in the organization he worked for around 2016. 7. He describes evangelicalism as a system that centers white male heterosexuals and marginalizes women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities. 8. Gary names the "unholy trinity" as patriarchy, purity culture, and power, and he links those forces to Christian nationalism. 9. He says the movement uses an "us versus them" logic that trains people to see the world as black or white, gay or straight, right or wrong. 10. Gary says deconstruction is finding out for himself what he believes and how he wants to live after receiving secondhand religion. 11. He says the word deconstruction now feels too dualistic to him, and he has been recording about "rewilding Christianity" and a more contemplative mystical form. 12. Gary says he wants to move toward "non duality" and "unitive consciousness" rather than culture-war thinking. 13. He says he was angry for a time, but he no longer wants to wage theological war against people shaped by the same system. 14. Gary and Jude discuss the difference between the evangelical expression of Christianity and other traditions, including Anglicanism, Episcopalianism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and contemplative paths. 15. Gary says many Christians outside the United States look at white evangelicalism and ask, "what the hell is wrong with white evangelicals?" 16. He argues that affirming Christians take the Bible "so seriously" that they refuse to read it literally and instead use historical criticism and personal experience. 17. Gary says the Bible is "sacramental" and human in origin, and he describes it as pointing to "the word made flesh, not the word made text." 18. Jude and Gary present the episode in a conversational interview style with theology, biography, and pastoral reflection. 19. Listeners interested in deconstruction, affirming Christianity, and Anglican or Episcopal debates would likely value this episode. 20. Listeners seeking a strict defense of evangelical literalism would probably not enjoy it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

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