(Paul Enns) Paulogia:
Every once in a while, it’s good to take a fresh look at the origin story.
Welcome to Paulogia, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians.
If you’ve been watching the channel for a while, you may have seen my very first video called “Ken Ham Made Me an Atheist,” which was a quick intro into me with a clickable title. Or maybe my more recent “Why I Am NOT a Christian” video, which is more of a current position statement.
I’ve gone into more depth about my deconversion story on other channels, including Pine Creek and Neil the 604 Atheist. But I think my favorite telling has been on a Christian podcast called Recovering Evangelicals, hosted by Luke Jansen and Boyd Blundell.
The podcast describes itself as for people who were once very comfortable in their Christian faith until the 21st century intruded and made it very hard to keep on believing. The hosts remain Christians but understand potential challenges from science, philosophy, and history. They tend to have fascinating discussions there, and I highly encourage you to find the link in the description and check them out.
They had me on as part of a series on young-earth creationism and the various possible reactions from Christians when such a worldview is challenged. My segment represented the reaction of one who ultimately leaves the faith.
With Luke and Boyd’s permission, I’d like to share that chat with you today, unedited — including their Christian perspective on my journey.
While this isn’t my usual look at Christian claims, perhaps it will lend some insight into the man behind this channel. Or perhaps my struggles will resonate with you, whether you arrived at the same conclusions I did or not.
Recovering Evangelicals (Intro)
Luke Jansen:
Welcome to Recovering Evangelicals, the podcast for people who were once very comfortable in the Christian faith until the 21st century intruded and made it very hard to keep on believing it. I’m Luke Jansen.
Boyd Blundell:
And I’m Boyd Blundell.
The Second Coping Strategy
Luke:
Last week, I mentioned the three general coping strategies that young-earth creationists take when their faith comes up hard against the science that paints a picture of a world that goes back many billions of years and life evolving from one form into others.
The first coping strategy is to reject the scientific data. We talked about that strategy last week.
This week we want to look at the second strategy: reject the faith.
I know many people who ended up rejecting the Christian faith for a variety of reasons, although there are often common themes or threads. In fact, listeners will know that I myself was essentially one of those until I found a way to go for option three, which is next week’s topic.
I had no shortage of people to talk to in person about this strategy of giving up faith. But I really wanted to talk to this one person who fits into this camp — our guest today, whom I met only recently and only online so far.
The reason I wanted to talk to him is he’s not just one more face in a large crowd. He stands out because of his reach and influence in this area.
A lot of people may not know our guest by his proper name, Paul Ens, but he’s popular on social media by the name Paulogia. He’s got a YouTube channel with about 44,000 followers. The tagline reads: “A former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians wherever science is being denied in the name of ancient books.”
His reach and influence is reflected in the people he’s engaged with — both allies and opponents — including Matt Dillahunty, Viced Rhino, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, Eric Hovind of Creation Today Ministries (son of Kent Hovind), William Lane Craig of Reasonable Faith, and Sean McDowell, son of Josh McDowell.
So Paul is clearly an influential voice in this conversation.
We talked to Paul about his story.
Paul’s Background
Paul Ens:
Like many a prairie boy in Canada, I was raised in a Mennonite community and a Mennonite church — which, for those who aren’t familiar, is a very evangelical, very literal denomination of the faith that typically believes in a young earth.
I enthusiastically attended Bible camps in high school. I spent a lot of time attending youth conferences and youth events. My main passion was Bible quizzing, which was memorizing the Bible. At one point I could quote almost the entire New Testament.
I went to Bible school on full scholarship because of that and really dug into what I learned there.
After Bible school, I went on to secular careers — first in the software industry, then into the movie industry, and later into the comic industry.
Luke:
Do you want to talk about that movie industry?
Paul:
Sure. “Movie industry” is my subtle way of saying I went to work for George Lucas on the Star Wars prequels. That was a very cool part of my life.
If you can imagine a Mennonite boy from Saskatchewan who had experienced nothing outside of that being dropped into the middle of San Francisco — culturally that’s a big shock.
And weirdly, I maintained my Christianity the entire time I was there. It wasn’t until after I left San Francisco that I started doing the serious introspection.
All that time, both in Canada and the States, I was heavily involved with youth ministry — particularly the Bible quizzing ministry. I was head of that for Saskatchewan for a while and California for a while, and involved with international competitions, coaching hundreds of kids.
I was also involved in music ministry, including Promise Keepers events — big Christian gatherings.
Even despite my secular careers, ministry was my thing. I was at church five times a week.
Authority and Science
Luke:
Before you came to the point of rejecting your faith, how did you deal with things like the Big Bang and dinosaurs?
Paul:
Generally, I was raised — or maybe raised myself — to defer to authority. My pastors and Bible school teachers were so sure that young-earth creationism was correct and brushed aside other scientific ideas so readily that I just said: they’ve looked into it; I don’t need to.
They assured me we had great answers to all these things. So I just moved on with my day. I was passionate about the New Testament, youth work, music. Whether the science lined up, people were assuring me it was fine. So I took their word. I was very much a slave to authority.
The Dinosaur Trigger
Between projects, I was writing a graphic novel involving dinosaurs. It wasn’t a Christian project — it was meant for a wide secular audience. I knew what I thought about dinosaurs, but I wanted to sprinkle in some factual nods to what scientists say.
For the first time, I started paying attention to the dates — 165 million years, 115 million years. In a young-earth mindset, they were all created on Day Six. Same time.
But my book needed to know what these “evil secular scientists” thought the order of progression was. So at least I could get the order right.
Some of what they were presenting made a lot of sense.
That created cognitive dissonance. An itch in my brain.
So I thought: my pastors are sure the evidence is great. I’ll read it myself and get rid of the itch.
I ordered Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis books.
Even though I believed what Ken Ham believed, the answers seemed terrible. Flimsy.
The one that broke me was: How did kangaroos get to Australia?
The explanation was basically that after the Flood there would have been logs floating around, and the kangaroos somehow hopped from Mount Ararat to India, then jumped onto logs and floated to Australia — and nowhere else.
I literally dropped the book.
That cannot be the best possible answer.
And that was the beginning.
Luke:
Where were you in all this — were you in San Francisco at this point?
Paul Ens:
Calgary at that point.
Luke:
So post–San Francisco.
Paul:
Yeah.
And up until reading the Answers in Genesis books, I was fully committed to my faith — working in ministry, involved in ministry, doing ministry.
It was this weird thing where I started having other people pray because I was feeling really guilty that I was having doubts. I felt like I couldn’t pray in front of people anymore when some of this “doubt-y” stuff was happening.
Luke:
That’s a common experience. I’ve had a similar conversation with a worship leader, and he said: “When I was younger, I felt like I couldn’t lead the music if I’m doubting.” This gets back to a theme: evangelicals and doubt.
Boyd:
One of the dangers in a social-control mode like this is that traveling—changing location, changing context—is a real danger.
Because just having multiple perspectives on anything changes things. You go from Saskatchewan to San Francisco—how to live life, how to organize your day. You meet your first openly gay people. They don’t have horns. They’re not monstrous. They’ve been nicer than some of the people back home.
Those dissonant moments add up.
So I was curious: when did it happen?
Paul:
It wasn’t San Francisco. I was already back in Calgary — back into Canada’s Bible Belt.
The other weird thing for me: I’d always been taught the Bible is either 100% true or you can’t trust it.
Luke:
And as soon as you get to 99%—
Paul:
Nope. Right.
Boyd:
You see this all across the evangelical world — and not just evangelicals, across ideological spectrums — this black-or-white structure. Even in sexual morality: the “virginity problem.” The idea that if something happens once, there’s no point managing it, because there’s no middle ground.
So this must have been a “straw that broke the camel’s back” moment.
Paul:
It was one of those moments where I didn’t know what was right, but I now knew what was wrong — and I was in the camp of wrong.
Boyd:
I’ve never read the Ken Ham stuff. But I think about the stuff I did see — Promise Keepers and that world — and you look back and go: wow.
But in the moment, it’s like: if you asked me to make up a story, I could do better than this.
Paul:
Exactly. If I had to make up a story, I’d do much better than what I was reading.
So now I had this sense these people weren’t my intellectual superiors at all — and there was no reason I should trust them.
And that’s the right word: trust.
Because then you start thinking: wait—people have been lying to me about this. Or at least: they’ve been overstating how confident I should be.
What else have I been lied to about?
And suddenly the wedge is in. Now I need to investigate the Bible. I need to investigate everything. Start from scratch.
And because there’s only “100 or 0,” the drop from 100 to 99 was too much.
“How Long Did It Take?”
Luke:
How long did it take you to come to the decision you came to?
Paul:
Immediately after that, I went into the same process — because I knew nothing about evolution. I knew nothing about science. That hadn’t been my purview.
So I asked: what should I read?
I started reading Dawkins. I started reading Bill Nye books. I had to start from the ground up. I couldn’t jump into science papers.
My understanding was basically: “Nothing exploded, monkeys came out of the water, and we were a couple generations after a monkey.”
So I started digging into science books. I’d look at the things I thought I knew, find the best counter, then find the counter to that — which eventually leads you online, blogs, YouTube.
Over about five months, I went from not understanding evolution at all to being able to talk about the fusion of human chromosome 2, endogenous retroviruses — and why these were too strong for evolution not to be true.
Now, I think many people will attest: knowing those things is completely irrelevant to the question of “Did Jesus die for my sins?” Or “Does God exist?” Those aren’t directly related questions.
I kind of “cheated” in one of my first videos by saying “Ken Ham made me an atheist.” Not really.
I understand how people can hold these together:
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evolution true
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earth old true
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God true
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Jesus true
I read people like Peter Enns and others who’ve worked out reconciliations.
But for me, the question became: if I’ve been lied to about this, should I take a step further back?
So then I started going after the Bible — what I thought I knew about the Bible.
That was probably another six months:
Can I trust who wrote these books?
Can I trust the content?
Did you know some passages weren’t originally there?
Textual criticism — things I’d never dug into.
I’d taught kids to memorize the New Testament for decades, but I hadn’t asked: Did Paul write Hebrews? Maybe, maybe not. That used to be “good enough.” Now I needed to know what we actually know.
And again: that all-or-nothing structure mattered. I knew people reconcile things, but for me: Jesus said Noah was a person. Jesus said Adam and Eve were people. Paul said Adam was a person.
So those reconciling stories didn’t work for me.
Cost-Benefit
Luke:
This is a major worldview change. Usually decisions like this come with some cost-benefit analysis. What were the costs and benefits?
Paul:
I didn’t know what the cost would be. You can’t know that upfront.
The benefit was intellectual honesty.
I’ve said to this day: I’m not recruiting to atheism because we have better cookies. The reward is intellectual honesty — and nothing else.
Some benefits came later depending on interpretation: my Christianity was guilt-based, so I felt less guilt. But fundamentally: I wanted to know what’s true.
Luke:
So in a way, this was about stopping the itch.
Paul:
Yes.
And the cost was: all my family, all my business partners — everyone. I didn’t know someone who wasn’t a Christian. There was no one I spoke to more than once a year who wasn’t Christian.
So the idea that I was “itching to leave” wasn’t there. It was all downside.
The cost later became:
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my marriage
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relationships with everyone in the church once it became known
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and I didn’t tell everyone — I was outed before I was ready
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most people quickly cut me off
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I lost most of my friends
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I lost my entire social group
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my marriage fell apart
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for a while it was touch-and-go whether I’d even maintain a relationship with my kids
To this day my kids are young-earth-creationist-type Christians.
Everything.
There were a handful of people who kept loving me — I can count them on one hand — versus the hundreds I lost across North America.
I had to find new jobs. I had to do everything.
Luke:
And you could have carried on if you kept your mouth shut and pretended.
Paul:
That was actually my plan.
I couldn’t be in the family I was in and not go to church every week. So I would sit in the pew and try not to yell at the pastor because he was saying things I knew were wrong.
Luke:
That’s important for listeners to hear: huge cost, very little benefit except integrity.
Cancer, “The Vultures,” and Legacy
Paul:
To compound it: shortly after all this, I learned I had quite an aggressive cancer.
And after I avoided the parade of “God has given you this to judge you” —
Luke:
I was going to ask. It feels insensitive, but it’s such an obvious play.
Paul:
Oh, 100%. “When you repent, you’ll be healed.” People came out of the woodwork to give me that message.
Boyd:
The vultures always know.
Paul:
During that time my life was legitimately in jeopardy. The relationship with my kids hadn’t fully recovered.
When you get close to not being around, you think about legacy, whether you believe in an afterlife or not.
And I’d learned so much so fast that I wanted to put it out somehow.
I knew how to make video content. So I wanted to create videos my kids could potentially watch if I wasn’t around — to extend the relationship, to let them understand where I was coming from.
Also: breaking from young-earth creationism is less controversial than “God isn’t real” or “Jesus didn’t rise,” so I started with YEC.
And specifically, Ken Ham and Eric Hovind were the two I focused on, because I thought: these ministries are lying to the most people.
And I wanted to address them.
Also, most people doing this content were speaking to people already on the other side — and they’d swear and make jokes and that’s fine, but if you’re the kind of Christian I was, once you hear the F-word, nothing after that sinks in. It’s the stopper.
So I wanted to make content that a Christian would at least watch.
That’s the style I was going for.
“Did You Ever Believe the Vultures?”
Luke:
During that moment — leaving faith, cancer, vultures — did you ever believe them? Was there a part of you like, “Maybe…”
Paul:
Not so much that.
But verses would come to me — like: “It’s impossible for those who have once been enlightened and then turned away to be restored.”
Verses like that would pop into my head:
I turned away—now it’s impossible for me.
One thing I hear a lot from people who leave their faith: fear of hell can last months or years. If you believe literal hell, that’s the thing that wakes you up at night: Are you sure?
“Anything You Kept?”
Luke:
Did you find parts of Christianity you could still hang on to? Like: “I can embrace this part, just not the whole thing I grew up with”?
Paul:
No.
I ended up deciding none of these books were inspired by a god in any way.
So if there is a God, he was not involved with the 66-book Bible I was familiar with.
Anything wise in there is wisdom you can get anywhere. “Love your neighbor as yourself” wasn’t invented when Jesus was walking around. Humans had empathy long before that.
So sure—there are things in the Bible I’d love if people practiced more.
But the idea of sin, and a God I owe a debt to, and someone had to come pay that debt — once that’s gone, holding on to “love your neighbor” is fine, but it’s not derived from anything I’d recognize as Christianity.
Boyd:
Like the Jefferson Bible — Thomas Jefferson literally cut out the ethical stuff and pasted it together.
Paul:
Right. And “slaves obey your masters” wouldn’t be in there.
Divine Hiddenness
Luke:
In one of your videos you talk about divine hiddenness. That was another issue for you.
Paul:
Divine hiddenness, for me — and I don’t think it applies to everyone — is the one bit of evidence you can point to against God.
I’ll go over what I mean (it’s modeled after Schellenberg’s famous syllogism):
If there exists an all-loving God, he would want all people to come into relationship with him.
If anyone is honest and wants to come to God, God will find them.
So if there exist people who honestly want to know God and to whom God has not revealed himself, that’s evidence there is not an all-loving God.
There might be a creator god, a deist god, whatever.
But an all-loving God who deals with heaven and hell can’t be.
I search myself. I continue to search myself. If I found the evidence I was looking for, would I become a Christian? If I’m honest: yes. Why wouldn’t I? If I believed it was true, I’d come back right away.
People can brush me off: “You’re suppressing truth,” or “God has a story for you,” or “This will be part of a testimony later.” Timing versus evidence.
But for me, it’s like Ivan Karamazov — “My integrity demands that I return my ticket.”
I would prefer that God existed. I would prefer to have the evidence. I would prefer to be convinced.
But I don’t believe anyone can choose what they’re convinced of. God has not provided me with enough to convince me.
So that’s a big problem for me.
The “Kids Evangelize Your Parents” Video
Luke:
I go down rabbit holes, so when I hear you say these things I think: interesting. One thing I wanted to ask you—your video about when your child rejects your beliefs. It’s almost like counseling someone you used to be.
Paul:
I don’t really care if people who agree with me watch my videos. That’s fine.
But I want to talk to who I used to be.
That video was in response to a very bad piece of advice that I thought would cause strife in relationships where it didn’t need to.
I don’t think it’s a child’s job to evangelize their parent. There’s a power dynamic problem there that isn’t compatible with evangelism.
So I was giving what I thought was the best advice for how a Christian kid should handle that scenario.
My own kids have adopted a great model: they love me; they don’t agree with me. There are topics we can’t talk about. That hurts. But we value the relationship more.
If I’m going to “get out of hell,” it won’t be because of one more argument — it will be through love and the Holy Spirit, not argument.
So when I saw Eric Hovind basically saying kids should school themselves so they can win an argument against their parent — I don’t think that’s a good evangelical strategy.
That video wasn’t about whether the stuff is true. It was about the believer/non-believer relationship dynamic.
Boyd’s Push: “Are You Still Buying Their Categories?”
Boyd:
Now that I’ve come back into this topic — I went off, did graduate work in philosophy and theology, and I’m interested in this — and now I’m back around evangelicals… I’ve been trying to figure out why I object to some things but not others.
It strikes me that one criterion is: does believing this force you to be cruel?
That’s what I associate with evangelical theology — the in-group/out-group pattern. People rejected you, even did a kind of “touchdown dance” on your illness.
Some of them are “nice people,” but the ideology has this cruelty built in — because it can’t accept ambiguity and complexity. That’s the enemy.
Answers in Genesis — it’s about keeping the walls high.
So here’s what I want to push you on — not “bring Paul back to Christianity,” not that — but my spidey sense is tingling:
Are you still buying into their categories?
One category is the all-or-nothing.
So when I hear your divine hiddenness argument, it tweaks me: are you demanding more explanation than should be demanded?
Not an attack — just putting it out there.
Luke:
Luke hates when I do this.
“I Can’t Choose What I’m Convinced Of”
Paul:
One of the linchpins for me is: I cannot choose what I’m convinced of.
I can’t convince myself the room I’m in is painted pink just by believing it. There’s a certain amount of evidence I need.
And I did a video on “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I think that’s true for everyone, because whatever you don’t believe you consider extraordinary. Whatever is close to what you already believe is ordinary, so it takes less evidence.
So I’m in a position where I might need more evidence for the resurrection than someone who already believes in God and interventions. For them, eyewitness testimony might be enough. For me, the evidential burden is higher.
But I didn’t choose that.
Boyd:
That’s precisely it.
And one of the ways you’re interesting is: you’ve chosen to be open, for the right motivations, and you’ve had to acquire skills. You trace your thinking. You define your words. You refuse to let it become personal.
And honestly, I didn’t realize William Lane Craig was such a jerk. I didn’t know him well. He’s in a sealed subculture.
I admire your bravery: you walked into a world where you’re admittedly an amateur, and you did what you could with openness.
So now I want to ask: you had a civil interaction with Eric Hovind. How is that playing in your head now?
For listeners: explain what happened — going into his class.
Eric Hovind’s Class
Paul:
Eric Hovind was someone I built my channel around at the start — partly because he’s a layperson, but he also got experts on. That model appealed to me.
Because I focused on him so much, we were internet enemies — polar opposites.
He teaches a Bible school class. Because of COVID, he opened it up so anyone could take it. You pay a little money.
I decided: let me take the class and see what Eric is teaching.
On the last day, they normally go speak to atheists — literally a field trip to find atheists — but they couldn’t do that.
So I decided: I’ve sat here quietly; I’m going to put up my hand.
Long story short: Eric and I had an hour-long conversation in front of his class.
The “me from three years ago” would have wanted to own him on scientific details. I’d dreamt of nailing him to the wall.
But three years later, I thought: what’s more important is demonstrating what a civil conversation should look like between people who don’t agree on anything.
There were 180 people in the class. I would rather model civil discourse than embarrass him in front of his students over whether the moon recedes and what that means for a 6,000-year-old earth.
We were civil. Afterward I reached out to Eric: should more people see this? I put the conversation up on my channel.
It was a risk because I didn’t nail him to the wall, which is what my channel is often about — facts and presentation.
I’ve had a weird split reaction: maybe 80% of people love it; 20% of people — both Christians and atheists — think it should never have happened and are mocking us for not “having won the day.”
But it’s my most commented video in a long time. I have to stay out of the comments because some people hate it so much.
But yes — it’s a weird evolution of my channel. I’d rather have good conversation with people.
Boyd’s Take: Ambiguity as a “Virus”
Boyd:
There’s a danger: do you dignify their position by debating?
But in the spirit of what you were saying: creating ambiguity and complexity is the enemy of that rigid structure.
So Eric may not realize it, but modeling civilized discourse where both sides are listened to — seeing each other as reasonable — that introduces complexity.
I don’t think you did it strategically — you’re very Canadian — but had you been coldly strategic, it’s the long game: 180 kids saw an atheist who wasn’t the monster they’d been told.
That complexity is like a virus.
Paul:
Absolutely.
Sometimes evangelicals are hardline on homosexuality until they know someone. Then it changes. I want it to be like that: “Oh—this is the first atheist I’m meeting who isn’t terrible.”
Wrap-Up
Luke:
Personally, I think you demonstrated something important. I think listeners can learn a lot from you.
Where can listeners find your material?
Paul:
My YouTube channel is Paulogia — spelled P-A-U-L-… it’s a play on the Greek word apologia (from 1 Peter), meaning “defense,” like “apology/defense of the faith.” I combined that with my name. Weird spelling.
I’m also on Twitter and Facebook.
Luke:
And I suspect Boyd and I will contact you again for upcoming episodes.
Paul:
I appreciate it. I had fun. This was great.
Luke:
Thanks so much.
Paul:
Pleasure, guys.
Post-Interview Discussion (Luke & Boyd)
Luke:
That was a fascinating interview. His story is compelling.
One thing to emphasize: he didn’t take this lightly. It took a long time, at great cost. It affected relationships with everyone in his community — people he relied on.
And really the only thing compelling him is that “brain itch” — integrity in searching for truth.
I can relate completely. I went through very similar emotions.
We listened recently to Rhett and Link — Rhett talking about the emotional roller coaster. And again: the only reason is not fame or fortune — it’s wanting to be honest.
Paul said something else that I want to unpack: “You can’t choose what you’re convinced of.”
In his search, he didn’t find enough to convince him. He searched with heart, mind, and soul. He came up empty-handed.
You can’t fault him for that. It’s not that he found it and willfully rejected it.
None of us knows motives beyond what he’s said.
I resonate with that personally — searching and coming up short.
I wrote a blog post about this (August 7, 2016) describing searching “with all my heart” and coming up empty-handed.
The only difference between Paul and me is how we resolved that cognitive dissonance — which I talked about in Episode 3 (reconstruction of my faith). Next week we’ll explore it with a different guest.
One difference is community: Paul’s community outed him and rejected him. He had no place to work it out.
That’s different than my experience.
Boyd:
Totally. I asked the same kinds of questions, went through the same thought process — but I had a group around me that tolerated my questions. They let me vocalize and process. They gave me food for thought rather than telling me to be quiet.
I’ve mentioned a group in my blogs — my “evangelicalism therapy group”: Paul, Ken, Sarah, John, Jett, Keith, and others. They helped me with my toxic religious upbringing.
I also had colleagues and fellow students from div college. They gave me perspectives I didn’t have before and helped me find a Christianity that worked.
That connects to Paul’s video about kids and belief differences — managing relationships.
So what would you say to listeners about managing this moment?
Luke:
Be patient and supportive — not judgmental. Don’t cut them off. Don’t be exclusive.
Realize it’s a process. They need to embrace a religion that works for them, not necessarily the faith they inherited.
I’ve heard the phrase: “God has no grandchildren.”
Boyd:
If you never go through the dialectic — the zig-zag — you never go deeper.
If you never have a “Marcionite phase” — that early Christian who wanted to toss the Old Testament as a bad God and keep Jesus as the good God — if you never even have that moment of “wait, that doesn’t add up,” you’re not thinking deeply.
If you never toy with atheism, you haven’t chosen what you’re doing — you’re living your parents’ faith.
I resonate with Paul because he asked real questions. I’m not with him on his answers, but the questions are important.
Hell as a Motivator
Luke:
Another question Paul referenced: the fear of hell.
I hear this all the time — “What if I die now? Am I going to hell because I rejected it?”
I felt that myself.
We’ll need an episode on hell. But I want to say: there’s something very unchristian and unloving about claiming God says: “Love me or I’ll kill you and roast you in hell.”
That can’t be the way God wants us to make disciples — scaring them into the kingdom.
Boyd:
That would be Tom Wright’s: “God so hated the world…” — the inversion of the point.
And even as I’m saying this, I remember: back in my days, we had the “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames” show — a stage play. The bottom line was: “turn or burn.” Make a decision tonight.
We used to say with glee: “We want to scare the hell out of people.”
Luke:
I remember that exact thing being performed at Bethel. One of the first times as an adult I saw it, I thought it was laughable and kind of offensive.
Boyd:
I can’t see how that doesn’t corrupt Christianity. It becomes self-absorbed: you’re doing it so you don’t go to hell. There’s no love in it.
Luke:
We did it at my church too — and at a summer camp weekly. Same basic approach: scare people into the kingdom.
Looking back now — wow.
The Bible Lens: Inerrancy as the Trap
Boyd:
This connects to a larger point: you’ve been doing the work to go through this. Paul recounts the work. But I think you’ve put more time into it, and that’s where I tried to push him:
Is the problem a misplaced view of the Bible?
He was taught it’s a fully divine document — 100% accurate in everything — God’s own word. And if it’s only 99%, you can’t trust any of it.
That inerrancy/fallibility thing.
I want to emphasize this because I see it so often: people give up their faith because of the problems they have with the Bible.
I lived it. That’s part of what unhinged my faith.
I was answering comments on Facebook recently. Someone said: “What’s the point of Christianity if the Bible isn’t true some of the time and isn’t true at all?”
People equate Christianity with this collection of documents written by humans.
But the way I came out the other side was realizing: the Bible is a human document too — colored and biased by Bronze Age, pre-scientific Middle Eastern males.
Even the Bible itself doesn’t claim what fundamentalists claim about it.
The Bible defenders jump to “All Scripture is inspired…” (from 2 Timothy). We talked about that in our third episode, so we won’t repeat it — except to say: “inspired” does not mean dictated. It does not mean divinely written.
A lot of people — believers and non-believers — have a misplaced idea: “inspired” becomes “dictated” in their heads.
It might shock them to hear me say: those who give up faith because their view of the Bible is shattered by science can still be operating with a fundamentalist lens — biblical inerrancy, biblical literalism.
Sometimes the conflict isn’t “in the Bible itself” — it’s the lens.
People accuse fundamentalists of bibliolatry: worshiping the book rather than God — defending the book more than God.
And the Word of God is Christ himself, not the words.
The fundamentalism is those hard right angles in the lens.
And what I tried to push Paul on is: if you look away from the Bible and become an atheist, you can still carry those hard-edged thinking patterns.
And I find a lot of “evangelical atheists” — Dawkins, Dennett, Harris types — they have the hallmarks of evangelical hardlines and the same pattern.
That’s why it becomes all-or-nothing thinking.
But I want to be sensitive: sometimes the only way out of hardcore Christianity is a complete break, and then it takes a long time to sort out what you can keep.
I admire what Paul is doing: he’s being authentic. He’s sensitive to the people he came from. He’s honoring his tradition by addressing them in language they can understand.
Luke:
I am too.
And to go back: some people call it “deconstruction and reconstruction” and think it’s overused, but I find it important.
You have to deconstruct previous ways of thinking and reconstruct a new Christianity. It doesn’t work putting patches on a broken foundation. You have to start over.
And I want to echo: it was great to have Paul on. I hope he hears this and responds. We plan to bring him on again.
So listeners: send us comments, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Bye for now.
Paulogia (Outro)
Thanks for listening. You’ve been listening to Recovering Evangelicals with Luke Jansen and Boyd Blundell.
Thanks for watching. I hope you found that useful or enlightening.
Are you facing now — or have you faced in the past — some of those same challenges to your faith? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.
If you’re itching for my new theology or science content, you’re in luck: tap on the thumbnail on your screen now.
I’ll see you there. Until next time — later.