Recovering Evangelicals

Do we burn them all, or can we redact the problematic parts? Or do we take the path that involves his confession, repentance and restoration? Last week, we explored our own responses, as well as those of nine anonymous listeners/friends, to the sex scandals involving Christian authors and theologians.  This began as a direct response […]

We begin with a really hot-potato topic, one that blew up the Evangelical Christian community a few weeks ago! Recovering Evangelicals are back from hiatus! When we took a break from podcasting last summer, we wondered if there even would be a 7th season … and if we did return, whether we needed to re-brand. […]

Divine dictation of fully-formed books, or a gradual evolution of texts at the hands of authors, editors, interpreters, redactors, copyists, collectors, ……? This will be the first of several episodes we’re hauling out of our Podcast Archive that are related to how we came to have this collection of books we call the Bible. This […]

A new understanding of the ancient story of Israel’s exodus out of Egypt leads to a whole new understanding of the Passover … and of the crucifixion! In this episode, Scott and Luke look back on the two recent re-releases — both challenging the traditional “Sunday school version” of the Exodus story — to address […]

Science now makes the Sunday School version of this story no longer tenable, leaving three options for believers: ignore the problem, reject the Bible, or revise one’s theology. The story of “the Exodus” has traditionally been seen to involve millions of Israelites following Moses out of Egypt: this image is derived from a literal reading […]

A retrospective on how well we achieved our goals for this season, and pondering whether we need to do some re-branding before the next!? August is a busy time of year for us: vacations … road-trips … and getting ready for the return to teaching responsibilities at the university.  And for that reason, we have typically gone […]

Although Christians may say that “Jesus was fully human and fully divine,” many of them tend to slow-pedal the first half of that fundamental tenet. A fundamental Christian belief is that Jesus was fully human and yet fully divine. But for many, including us at Recovering Evangelicals, this tenet raises all kinds of questions and […]

It’s time to revise our picture of human origins, and the theology built up around the one handed down to us by authors and church fathers who knew nothing about our hominid cousins. This is the final episode of our miniseries looking at the impact that scientific discoveries over the past couple centuries of our […]

A committed secular humanist, two Christians (and a Jewish rabbi) compare perspectives on their agreed claim that human morality has been on the upswing. A year ago, we did an episode with a Jewish rabbi and scholar — Dr. and Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson — exploring the claim that human morality has been trending upwards, […]

The questions “who was the first person to speak English?” and “who was the first human?” are equally ridiculous and unanswerable, and for the same reasons. For many Christians, the many recent discoveries of our ancient hominid ancestors have raised uncomfortable questions.  Some of them will cope with this by just trying to avoid any […]

Christianity’s response to discoveries of ancient hominids today is exactly the same as their response to previous discoveries of “non-Adamic” people in the Americas … “they’re not human!” Christianity today is not handling well the recent discoveries of ancient hominids. A lot of denial and dismissal; very little excitement or enthusiasm. One shouldn’t be surprised […]

Do we need to update our theology in light of Christian-bigotry toward our genetic cousins? During the millennia that Biblical characters were living out their lives, Biblical authors were writing their texts, the early Christian church was forming, and the medieval Church fathers were constructing a Christian theology, nobody had any idea that humans had […]

The anniversaries of two pivotal legal cases brought by evolution deniers got us talking to the National Center for Science Education about their work 2025 is the 100th anniversary of the infamous Scopes Trial (aka, the “Monkey Trial”), in which a high school teacher in Tennessee was convicted of violating a law that banned teaching human […]

Time magazine’s pick for “most influential Evangelical in 2015” tells his own story of leaving behind traditional Evangelicalism. Over the past five years, we’ve interviewed many people who are “Recovering Evangelicals” … people who were handed an Evangelical/Fundamentalist faith that they eventually found they had to reject.  As they explored their faith from different angles, […]

Are they just fun parlor tricks? Spiritual gifts and miracles like the ones we read in the Bible? Demonic manifestations? Or simply mind-over-matter? Dr. Alan Streett was on a career trajectory to be a professional baseball player when a major arm injury and a psychic healer diverted him into Seminary studies as a non-believing church […]

A Harvard-trained sociologist gives us far more than downward church attendance graphs and the “rise of the nones” that Pew and Gallup dish up None of our listeners would be surprised by news that religious faith is in decline. Pew and Gallup have been talking about “the rise of the nones” and of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” […]

A theologian and professor at an Evangelical Theological Seminary describes a very unique, but instructive, “slippery slope” experience. As promised, here’s our second conversation with someone who walked that “slippery slope” out of Evangelicalism, but did so while leading and teaching a large group of Evangelicals who were still quite comfortable with their own Christian […]

One of our listeners tells his story of chipping away at Christian ideas, only to find a faith that feels more Christian. This week and next, we’re going to hear the life stories of two more people who grew up in a Fundamentalist / Evangelical world, but embarked on a journey with which our listeners […]

An exploration of belief, unbelief, delusion, and critical thinking, and some (coping) strategies in dealing with this peculiarity of being human. Humans can believe some pretty crazy things. Pew Research has at times found that 1% of Americans believe the earth is flat. And that 6% aren’t quite sure whether it is or not! In […]

Many people think that the church burned scientists and their books during the Dark Ages; they would be wrong …. and here’s why We’re still discussing the book Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and how the Conflict Thesis fooled the world.   Last week, we spoke to one of the authors of that book […]

Almost everyone in the 21st century Western world have bought into this unfounded myth (very possibly YOU too!?) A few days ago, it was the 1st of April …. April Fool’s Day!  Instead of playing some kind of prank on our listeners, we thought we’d look at a great book about a hoax — on […]

Scott unpacks the journey he’s been on, and the very un-Evangelical and very unorthodox faith he now holds. Three weeks ago, Luke sketched out what his faith looks like now, after completely deconstructing and reconstructing the one he grew up with.  This week it was Scott’s turn! We first traced out the common path we’ve […]

This is the conversation that motivated me to start Season Six: the book that got me questioning whether “my [liberal] faith was in vain” Folks, this interview is the one that rebooted the podcast!  The previous three episodes that started Season Six were all a lead-up to this conversation.  It was an article written by […]

Using the modified Wesleyan quadrilateral to summarize my current understanding of the Bible, God, Jesus and the human condition. In this episode, I explain how my Christian understanding on several key theological ideas has changed. I came from a very Fundamentalist Evangelical upbringing, and all our listeners know that I’ve completely left behind the Young […]

Before describing our new Christian worldview, we thought we should talk about the tools and strategies we used to get there. Our goal, over the next few weeks, is to have two world renowned Christian theologians — one very conservative and the other very liberal — give us feedback on our now very liberal Christian […]

A retrospective that spotlights a provocative thread with huge theological and existential implications: the primordial cosmic ‘egg’ was fine-tuned, preprogrammed, and front-end loaded! In this Season Finale, we look back at an incredible series of episodes — most of them in the past few months, but many others from as far back as four years […]

After life got a foothold on Earth, it immediately set about to filling the various emerging ecosystems with new organisms. If you compressed the 3.7 billion year march of life on this planet down to 24 hours: earth comes into existence at midnight, the first fossils of life appear in the wee hours of the […]

Getting twenty five fundamental constants and physical laws just right to produce a universe full of electrons, neutrons, and protons … all the way up to planets and stars Last week, we learned that “Fine Tuning” can mean three very different things.  Today, we’re going to explore the first of those three: the exquisite precision […]

Human evolution is hard to take for some Christians, especially when we claim that humans have been climbing up the evolutionary ladder in the moral sense. It was only a few years ago that Pew Research found roughly one third of Americans believe that “humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of […]

The scientist poster-boy for atheism and an ex-Muslim, ex-atheist Christian have a conversation (not a debate) about worldviews (not God). One of our long-time listeners asked for our opinion on a ”debate” between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: the conversation between the two of them raised many questions and points that resonated deeply with […]

Sparks fly when a Greek Orthodox evolution-accepting professor comes up against an Evangelical school headmaster bent on bringing in a Young Earth Creationist curriculum Why are we doing yet another episode on Young Earth Creationism?  The biggest reason is because it’s still a very potent ideology in Christianity, especially within Evangelicalism.  YECist parents and YECist […]

An experimental psychologist and a theologian with a PhD in psychology give us their perspectives on the emotion of awe and its role in the spiritual/religious experience. Last week, we explained why we decided to look more closely at the emotion of awe and its role in the spiritual / religious experience, as well as […]

After a quick primer on this uniquely human phenomenon, we’ll hear from someone who had a profound, life-changing experience during a solar eclipse, and then relate all of this to religious/spiritual experiences. Humans seem to be unique among all other species on Earth when it comes to the emotion of awe.  Whether it’s experienced while […]

Many Christians can fully accept the idea of human evolution, but they use a language which betrays Young Earth Creationism. If we don’t update our language, we may lose a whole generation of Christians. Many Christians are perfectly fine with human evolution: descent over millions of years down a family tree we share in common with […]

A week after Easter 2024, and in response to questions from our listeners, we discuss a whole new perspective on who Jesus was, and what he gave the Jews, and the world, when he died on the cross. Several members of our private Facebook Discussion Group asked us to explain how we’ve been able to […]

Brian takes an entirely new and unexpected direction in this latest book: it’s not enough to talk about bringing heaven down to earth, we have to stop creating hell on earth. Brian MacLaren is widely recognized in the Evangelical community. In fact, in 2015, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals […]

A social anthropologist, with decades of scholarship on people striving to connect to another dimension, gives us her perspective on the Evangelical version of this phenomenon. “It’s not a religion … it’s a relationship!”  Many Christians claim this is what separates their faith from all others.  There was a time when I myself made this […]

A brief retrospective on Season 4, and a longer one on the journey that the podcast has taken us on through Christian belief. Well, we kept it going for over a year, and added 54 more episodes to our archive. But all good things must come to an end. And so this will be the […]

Biology is unique among the sciences in its apparently absolute dependence on language that implies a goal, direction, or intention. Does this mean that biology IS goal-oriented, or directed? If so, that has huge philosophical and theological implications!? Our deep-dive into Intelligent Design got us wondering why so many people embrace that worldview. Not just […]

The details behind the story of how bacteria mutated in order to grow bigger and better by eating oranges, instead of sugar. Last week, we talked to a member of the Long-Term Evolution Experiment, Dr. Zachary Blount. He and his colleagues followed 75,000 generations of bacteria competing for a limited food resource — sugar — […]

Two very different interpretations of the same set of data: one from Creationists and ID proponents, and the other from the scientists actually doing the work. Here, we talk to one of the latter. A frequent talking point for creationists and Intelligent Design proponents in their anti-evolution rhetoric is a ground-breaking scientific project referred to […]

Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray, a deeply Evangelical believer and state college professor, has long been speaking to and educating Evangelicals about their science denial Unfortunately, science denial and pseudoscience run rampant in Evangelical circles. In our previous episodes, we’ve learned about the exceptionally strong correlations between being Evangelical and: … being against COVID protection measures […]

After a seven-episode deep-dive into Intelligent Design, we finally arrive at our better informed opinion of our position on this worldview. We started this 7-part mini-series introducing the Intelligent Design proposal that many creationists hold, and also shared our position at the outset on it: at that time, we were not convinced, feeling like we […]

After last week’s scientific experts cleared up much ID-rhetoric, we ask a rising star in the ID movement — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie — to respond to our reinvigorated questions, concern, and critiques of Intelligent Design After starting this mini-series with an interview with one leading ID proponent, and then hearing from a number of scientific […]

Three internationally-recognized, world experts on the bacterial flagellum connect the dots regarding the evolutionary origin of the flagellum, and draw some compelling comparisons to the evolutionary emergence of the Bible! Three episodes ago, Dr. Michael Behe used the bacterial flagellum as Exhibit A in his defense of the Intelligent Design proposal. Last week, we heard […]

A scientist who specifically studies the bacterial flagellum using some of the most cutting-edge research tools clears up a few myths and misconceptions. Much of Dr. Michael Behe’s defense of Intelligent Design rests on claims made about the bacterial flagellum. It certainly has become his signature, and one could even say it’s become the symbol […]

Most people don’t know: the genome is a formatted database with read/write memory systems which can reorganize itself to produce new species. This is a re-release of an episode we put out almost two years ago. In the episode that preceded this re-release, and which set the stage for this interview, we had given a […]

Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist and Intelligent Design proponent, gives us his perspective of ID, and responses to several counterarguments against ID. To start off our deep-dive into Intelligent Design, we wanted to talk to a knowledgeable representative of that movement. Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist who has been waving that flag for three decades […]

Before hearing from Intelligent Design advocates, we thought we’d give our listeners some useful background information about how cells work …. it turns out it’s all about making shapes out of string. Before we present our interviews with Drs. Michael Behe and Jonathan McLatchie (both leading proponents of Intelligent Design), we feel we should give […]

A short introduction to start a mini-series on this Christian apologetic idea, and some of the reasons why we have such difficulty with it. Intelligent Design” has attracted much criticism — certainly from the secular, scientific community, but even from Christians of all stripes … including ourselves. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to […]