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

Reconstruct Faith Your Way w/Angela J. Herrington

·51 min·3 clips

“If anyone is sitting there saying, ‘oh, dear, what’s next?’ … you’re on the right path.”

Angela joins the show for a wide-ranging talk about faith after rupture. The conversation starts with what it means to be called a heretic, and with the effort it takes to make space for hard questions. From there, it follows the long arc of deconstruction and how that process changes over time. At first, the questioning feels sharper and more defensive. Later, it softens into curiosity and less fear. Angela says her deconstruction began around 2016 while she was still working inside an evangelical organization. Questions about LGBT rights, Christian nationalism, and misogyny were already pressing against the limits of what that environment could hold. The conflict grew over time. By 2020, she says she had lost her job basically for deconstructing, and the show treats that loss as part of the cost of speaking honestly. The conversation does not stay with damage alone. It also returns to the season when the instinct was to burn everything to the ground. That anger is named plainly. So is the healing that had to come after it. The tone shifts from survival into inquiry. Instead of only asking what was wrong, the episode starts asking what else might be out there. That shift matters. Angela describes moving into a research mode and then a wonder mode. In that space, she begins looking beyond the faith categories she inherited. Buddhism appears as one example of something useful and life-giving. Alexandrian Christianity is another. The Gospel of Thomas also comes into the conversation as part of a wider, less fearful search. The episode keeps coming back to the cost of all this. Pain, wounds, and trauma are not treated like side notes. They sit at the center. The host presses on the idea that deconstruction may not be one clean stage, but a continuum. It can begin with a gut sense that something is off. It can move into the need to get out. It can pass through rage and then into the harder work of recognizing trauma. That framing gives the episode its shape. It is less interested in tidy closure than in honest movement. Angela speaks like someone who has lived through the collapse of certainty and is still making sense of what remains. The conversation leaves room for complexity. It also leaves room for repair. Near the end, the tone softens without getting sentimental. The language turns toward healing and toward giving people permission to take whatever space they need. That care is not abstract. It comes through as something earned through pain. The episode closes by pointing listeners to resources and to a community around the show. The result is a conversation that feels both personal and expansive. It holds critique, grief, curiosity, and hope in the same frame. It treats faith as something that can be unlearned, rebuilt, and widened without pretending the damage never happened.

As heard by us

A post-evangelical conversation that moves from anger toward wonder without losing sight of the hurt.

This post-evangelical conversation moves from deconstruction into a steadier, more spiritually curious register. It names evangelical harm, Christian nationalism, and misogyny without flinching, then asks what else might still be true, useful, or healing once faith has split…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a faith conversation that moves from hurt toward wonder.

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