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

My Life and Faith After Evangelicalism W/Jonathan Merritt

·49 min·3 clips

Jonathan Merritt calls the next wave of Christians spiritually stubborn.

1. Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus centers on Jonathan Merritt's move from evangelical Christianity into a post-evangelical faith life. 2. Host Gary Allen speaks with Jonathan Merritt, an Atlantic contributor, The Week editor, and former Liberty University and Emory Divinity student whose background shapes the discussion. 3. The episode asks what faith can look like after evangelicalism without abandoning Jesus, family, or spiritual practice. 4. Merritt says he grew up in a Christian school, church several times a week, and a church school while his father led as a televangelist, megachurch pastor, and former Southern Baptist Convention president. 5. He says he packed a minivan and moved to New York City with enough money for about eight months of rent after realizing he was gay. 6. Merritt describes New York as the place where he could explore who he is both as a gay person and as a person of faith. 7. He says mainline Protestant spaces such as the Episcopal Church, PCUSA churches, liturgy, and sacramentalism gave him life and renewal. 8. Merritt says contemplation, spiritual listening, and being alone became the most surprising places of spiritual vibrancy for him. 9. He argues that evangelicalism trains people to think it is Christianity itself, while other traditions are treated as outside the faith. 10. Merritt says the majority of Christians worldwide are not evangelical and that evangelicalism did not exist as a Christian form in the 11th or 13th centuries. 11. He compares evangelicalism's depth of thinking to a 14-year-old discussing existential reality and contrasts that with older traditions that have sat with hard questions for centuries. 12. Merritt says evangelicalism is interested in 'winning' and 'growth' more than wisdom, and links that impulse to a modern capitalistic expression of Christianity. 13. He says the Christian tradition's older branches, including Jesuit Ignatian spirituality, offer practices that have been tested and handed down over centuries. 14. Merritt explains that his chosen family in New York expanded his imagination for kinship and gave him a seat at their table. 15. He describes My Gunkle and Me as a children's book about Henry Higgleston, a child who feels different, and a gunkle who visits with his dog Jimmy Choo. 16. The book's core message is that difference can be the very thing that makes a child special and able to give something unique to the world. 17. Merritt says children need models of diversity, inclusion, and acceptance because 'a child cannot be what they do not see.' 18. He gives concrete examples of widening family life by integrating biracial couples, queer relatives, disabled relatives, and neighbors into everyday relationships. 19. The conversation is warm, direct, and interview-based, with Gary Allen moving between personal testimony, theology, family questions, and light get-to-know-you prompts about Broadway and biscuits. 20. People navigating deconstruction, raising children, or considering mainline Christianity will likely connect with this episode. 21. Listeners wanting a defense of evangelical certainty or a purely doctrinal debate may skip it.

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