The Pastor Skeptic

Jeremy Steele When a kid comes out, it's a 15% chance that they'll try to kill themselves. Mm. If they're rejected on religious grounds by their family, that doubles. Why don't we set the bar at only sharing beliefs that don't make them want to kill themselves? Right? It's a low bar, but I-

Dan Beecher It seems so great.

Jeremy Steele I feel like we can clear it. Yeah. Right?

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. And you may not be able to hear it, but those of you watching this on YouTube will see that we're in a slightly different setting.

Dan Beecher Yeah. This is a whole new configuration for us. Yeah. We are all in the same room. We are here. You and I, Dan, are here together, and we have a special guest. Would you like to introduce our guest?

Dan McClellan Our guest is Jeremy, and I suppose I should have asked you at some point about your last name, but-

Jeremy Steele Steele. Steele.

Dan McClellan No, I knew that. Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm the worst with names, but Jeremy is on social media, on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram as well, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The thing that sticks in my head about your introduction of yourself in each video is that you are a deep skeptic.

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan McClellan And a pastor.

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan McClellan And I would like to hear more about what deep skeptic means to you. Yeah. And then introduce yourself- Yeah ... a little more thoroughly for the kids.

Jeremy Steele Yeah, for sure. Deep skeptic. So, there's some people that are, like,

Dan Beecher skeptical and just kind of,

Jeremy Steele "I don't know about that." Right? For me, what it means when I say I'm a deep skeptic is that I just am not going to accept something until I have some solid data. And if I don't have solid data, we'll leave it open, right? And I think when I say deep skeptic, I also mean that I'm never going to close down really anything I believe-

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm

Dan Beecher ...

Jeremy Steele and say, "That's it. It's 100%. It's the law," whatever. I'm always open to new data. And the more data I amass about something, the less likely it is that I'm going to let go of that.

Dan Beecher But- And specifically, we're talking about skeptical even of things like the question of whether or not there's a God- Yeah, for sure ... or any of those sort, which is, eh, not the most traditional position for a pastor to take.

Jeremy Steele You're not wrong. And people regularly remind me of that online.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I'm sure they do.

Jeremy Steele Because I think the question about the existence of God, it's a hard thing to... Any data, anything you get is just completely subjective.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Jeremy Steele Very circumstance. And so there are days when I'm like, "Yeah, I think God exists," but it's all experiential. It's like you experience a sense of transcendence or whatever it is that people want to tag to God or the universe or whatever they call it. But it always boils down to experience, right? Yeah. You can't measure that. Yeah. Yet. Yet. So I go back and forth. So, and that's, I think, for me, there's this really great book by a researcher named Dr. Lisa Miller. She's Columbia, and I think she worked with Yale or Princeton. All the Ivy League schools are the same in my head. But- She's fancy,

Dan McClellan that's for sure

Jeremy Steele Yeah, she's real fancy and super smart. And basically, they were studying religious beliefs, religious practices, and religious experience. And at the end of the day, it didn't really matter which religion that they were studying. They all had an overall positive effect on people's mental health wellbeing, and all sorts of metrics for a good life.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Jeremy Steele So, they had an easier ability to cope with stress, a more sense of connection. And the other thing that was really interesting is statistically, deep religious experiences, and not the ones that people are traumatized and ruined by, but deep religious experiences represented a statistically significant protective effect against recurring of major depressive disorder. Hmm. And when they were doing the fMRI scans, and people were talking about reliving the religious belief moments, the same part of the brain that is stimulated by an SSRI was the one that was lighting up on the fMRI. So I say all that to say, because, of course,

Dan Beecher I'm a deep skeptic.

Jeremy Steele Being a pastor, I consider that role, at least for me, to be helping people find spiritual beliefs and practices that work for them, that help them become the best version of themselves, find a purpose greater than themselves, and maybe experience transcendence. And I- Without necessarily

Dan McClellan tying it to a specific tradition.

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan McClellan But making it more about the experience without the boundaries of a given community or faith tradition.

Jeremy Steele Right. And that's partially because of the population I work with, too.

Dan Beecher Talk a little about that.

Jeremy Steele Yeah. But I should say, at the end of the day, if I die, God doesn't exist. I feel like I've spent my life on something that has actually helped people, even if it turned out the whole enterprise of religion was a lie. So that's how I make peace with the, who knows about God, but the religious stuff might help people.

Dan McClellan Yeah,

Jeremy Steele but the community that I work with, it sort of grows out of my TikTok, and other social media platforms. It's people that have been deeply hurt and traumatized by religion. Mm. But are wanting to be a spiritual person, have spiritual beliefs and practices, and so almost all of them, the religion, the religious stream that traumatized them was Christianity. And so I like to say I'm a practitioner of Christianity. That's what I'm trained in. I don't like to call myself a Christian.

Dan Beecher And so- Can you-- Wait, can you sort of- ... can we dig into that a little bit? Yeah. The distinction that you're making there?

Jeremy Steele Yeah. I live in DC, okay? And- Enough said ... I'm I'm a- I'm not sure that that is enough.

Dan Beecher Right.

Jeremy Steele I'm also part of the queer community, and when you say Christian, it means something- Yeah ... in both of those spaces.

Dan Beecher Something more than just like, "I'm a believer in Jesus," or- Right ... like, I follow a certain set of tenets. Exactly. It has a greater sort of sociological meaning.

Jeremy Steele Yeah. And what it means does not describe me. Right. Right?

Dan Beecher It almost rejects you.

Jeremy Steele It is-- I am, in many ways, the opposite of the kind of contemporary cultural definition that comes up in people's mind when you say Christian, especially when it's somebody that's not involved in Christianity. And so that's not me. Mm. But as far as a religious tradition in my experience, that's what I know the most. That's what I went to graduate school to study. And so I practice that. But man, I don't want you to think of me as part of the community with all of those people.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You don't feel in community with Mike Johnson and- No. And

Jeremy Steele Definitely not. Yeah. In fact, oh my God, when he talked about having a biblical worldview and if you want to know what he thinks, read the Bible, I'm like, "Have you read the Bible?" No.

Dan Beecher Nobody has not.

Jeremy Steele So you're really good with just enough beating of a slave. Right. Right? Just the right amount.

Dan Beecher The correct amount of beating. You don't want to go past.

Jeremy Steele Right. Yeah. So yeah. I wish I had something that didn't use the word Christian, really. Mm. But all the stuff-- I grew up in the evangelical deep South in the '80s and '90s, and follower of Christ or Christ, all of it seems cheesy and not it. That's the best thing I've come up with. I've asked people on TikTok to help me out, and nobody's got a better-- nobody's got something that feels like it resonates more with me.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You put the ish in Chrishtian. Almost got him an honest spit-take on that one. Yeah. Almost got the spit-take.

Jeremy Steele It's like the, who is the politician? George Santos, that he said his parents were Jewish and somebody confronted him, and he's like, "They're not Jewish." And he's like, "I meant Jewish." Uh-huh. Yeah. Classic.

Dan McClellan Oh my gosh.

Dan Beecher Oh. So talk to us about, because you are an ordained pastor-

Jeremy Steele Yeah

Dan Beecher ... talk to us about your path from presumably very conservative-

Jeremy Steele Yeah

Dan Beecher ... Christianity in the South to a queer positive pastor-

Jeremy Steele Yeah

Dan Beecher ... in DC.

Jeremy Steele What did that road look like? Man. It's interesting because when I say I'm a deep skeptic, I've always been that, but I'm also old. And so when I grew up in that sort of evangelical, deep South conservative religious culture, you only have access to the information that is around you or in the

Dan Beecher lib-- It was a smaller town. It was this tiny

Jeremy Steele library

Dan Beecher that is the books that are selected by the people in that town. And so, when I asked about evolution and science, the people who had graduate degrees that were in my life were creation scientists. Like that- Oh, wow ...

Jeremy Steele bullshit. Are we allowed to cuss on this podcast?

Dan Beecher You are.

Jeremy Steele Okay, cool. And so the pseudoscience stuff, and so I would receive this stuff, and I would read it, and I would believe it until I got a little bit further along, and there were some people that would push back against it. Right? And so that, it took a long time really to start to unwind a lot of that because I had all of this data that I'd been given from what I was told was reputable sources. Mm-hmm. And it wasn't. Right? And the other thing, growing up as somebody who's not straight in that culture is that It really wasn't an option to claim an identity other than straight, cisgender, all of that. Right. Anything outside of that norm was a temptation, was something you were struggling with. And that gets deep. Mm-hmm. Right? I'll never forget. This is when I was in high school, there was this woman, we'll call her Pam.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Jeremy Steele Okay. That sounds right. Mm-hmm. And Ms. Pam had a prayer gathering at her house for high school students, but it was very charismatic, right? It was probably the gayest thing I have ever been a part of. Because we would come in, she would put on Vineyard music, and we would have tambourines and streamers. We would dance around. And people would fall out and speak in tongues. And there was this guy there who was there every week like me, every time. And then all of a sudden, he wasn't there for a couple of weeks. And I asked Ms. Pam, I said, "Ms. Pam, what happened to John?" And she looked around like, "Did anybody hear him ask that?" Pulls me into the kitchen, and she's like, "Well, a couple of weeks ago, John confessed to me that he was struggling with homosexuality, so..." And then she left.

Dan Beecher So...

Jeremy Steele And I was like, so the evangelical CIA came and got him. What was clear, though, is that that was something that was so bad that it meant that you couldn't be part of the community anymore. Right. And either you had to be that-

Dan McClellan There was no pastor-client confidentiality either.

Jeremy Steele Right?

Dan McClellan You're just sharing this with-

Dan Beecher Come on, Pam

Dan McClellan ... whoever else in the class.

Jeremy Steele I know.

Dan Beecher Just go

Jeremy Steele sharing that. And either you should be so ashamed that you should never show your face again, or that you were not welcome. And I've been in the church world enough to know that both of those things.

Dan McClellan But he didn't say, "I am a practicing homosexual." He said, "I'm struggling with this." Right. And that, in and of itself- Yeah ... she considered to be sinful, or she considered-

Jeremy Steele Yeah. Well, I don't know, because she said, "So..." Like I was supposed to know.

Dan McClellan She just trailed off and-

Jeremy Steele And as a high schooler, I made up all of this stuff.

Dan Beecher So we murdered him.

Jeremy Steele Right. "So you will never see him again." And I actually, I didn't ever see him again. We went to different schools.

Dan McClellan Oh, wow. Okay.

Jeremy Steele But that kind of messaging, and it's not just the actual homophobic rhetoric, it's the way it's enforced, the way you internalize that. Yeah. This internalized homophobia. And you go years and decades with this idea that, like, "Oh, wow, this is a problem." That, "Oh, if I stare at somebody of the same gender, I've got to stop, and I've got to stare at somebody of a different gender the same amount of time." Because then

Dan Beecher I'm fine.

Dan McClellan In case

Jeremy Steele somebody caught

Dan McClellan you, and then they can be like, "Oh, okay. It turns out that I-" "Oh,

Dan Beecher okay. No, no, no."

Dan McClellan "I'm straight."

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan Beecher Exactly. Cancel each other out.

Jeremy Steele Yeah. And so even years after I had sort of made this transition, and what really helped me make theological transition was going to a seminary that was really a kind of Wesleyan evangelical seminary. They gave me the real tools to study stuff, and I was like, "Oh. Oh, everything you've been saying so far is bullshit? Cool." But even after I had made that transition in my theology and all of that, I still had this internalized...

Dan Beecher And it took therapy and all kinds of things for me to come to grips with who I was and go through that sort of internal process. And that was probably the final piece, right? Was to be able to say to myself the things that I've been saying to other people for years and years. I guess part of my question is, when you've been part of a community that has associated itself so strongly with, "This is the Christian position"-

Jeremy Steele Right

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher and you've been rejected, or at least a part of you that's sort of integral to who you are- Mm-hmm ... has been so roundly rejected by that in the name of this Christianity-

Jeremy Steele Right

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher what did it feel like to then pursue pastorhood or to go to seminary- Right ... with that hanging over

Jeremy Steele everything? And see, this is the interesting thing, that internalized homophobia and evangelical dogmatism, until you do, you just feel like, "I don't know. My friend has the sin of gossip, and they're dealing with that." Mm-hmm. "I have this other sin, and I'm dealing with that." And it's not like your identity is being rejected.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Jeremy Steele Right? It's that like, "Oh, I have this thing, this problem." And now when it starts to break open- Then you are feeling that. But for me, that was after seminary. Okay. And I went to some camp in the Deep South when I was a teenager. Lots of manipulation, lots of altar call stuff, and decided when I was in the sixth grade I was going to be a pastor. Mm. And never let go of that. Interesting. And so it was a foregone conclusion at some point that I was going to go to seminary and do the thing.

Dan Beecher Well, and I'm sure that you got a lot of positive feedback.

Dan McClellan Oh

Jeremy Steele yeah. For sure.

Dan Beecher You say, "I'm going to be a pastor," and everybody's like, "Oh, yay." Right. "Jeremy's going to turn out great."

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan Beecher "We're going to be so proud."

Jeremy Steele And now they all think I'm going to hell.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and I think your story raises something interesting. I don't compute for a lot of folks. Right. Yeah. Particularly people who have grown up Christian. And you pointed to something that is central to the perseverance of Christian traditions- Mm-hmm ... is that when someone is raised within that framework, and that is the foundation of their identity- Mm-hmm ... and that is the lens through which they know and experience and see the world throughout their entire childhood, and it's all they know, that's not something that you can just flip a switch- Right ... and it goes away. Even if you decide, "Okay, this is me. I'm not changing. I'm not going to feel bad about this anymore." Right. Your worldview is still built, structured upon that. Yeah. And so it influences you for the rest of your life. And I think that is what leads a lot of people to look at me and be like, "Well, he's just lying about something." "Because there's no way on Earth that this all computes." But I came into religion as an adult, as a 20-year-old. Mm-hmm. And brought my rather secular upbringing. Yeah. Because I grew up in Gaithersburg. Oh, wow. Yeah, I went to Travilah Elementary School. Mm-hmm. We took field trips over to Antietam, down to- ... the mall, and to all the museums and everything, and to the Potomac River that I thought was the Potomac for the longest time. That

Jeremy Steele was definitely a Southern pronunciation of that word, the

Dan McClellan Potomac. Well, I think the first time I saw it was in elementary school, and there was a worksheet, and we were learning about indigenous peoples. Uh-huh. And it was like, "The Potomac Tribe." I was like, "Oh, okay." Sounds about right. "That makes sense." I didn't recognize this as the name of the river that was down the street.

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan McClellan I was like, "The Potomac Tribe, that sounds very indigenous." Yes. Yeah. But I was raised to believe in evolution and raised to believe in all this stuff, and my education was very different. And I brought all that with me into the church. And what I've told people is no one ever tried to disabuse me of any of that. Yeah. As an adult who could present as fairly well-informed and fairly intelligent. I guess, I don't know, they just didn't think it was worth it. Right. Or maybe they were intimidated by the prospect of trying to get me to return cognitively to primary school- Right ... so that I could be indoctrinated and conditioned to believe all these things. And so I think that for a lot of people who are raised like that, once you have those primary answers, is what we say within the LDS tradition, kind of installed in your cognitive foundations and the foundation of your worldview, it's hard to let them go. Yeah. And so usually the perspectives in adulthood are not very far from those foundations that were built, which is why I think a lot of apologists who go to seminary or something like that- Mm-hmm ... because they want to defend the faith, they end up still the apple does not roll far away from the tree. Right. And they end up defending a lot of very simplistic-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... very juvenile perspectives about what faith can be, what a religious identity is- Yeah ... and what sin and all that kind of stuff is as well.

Jeremy Steele Yeah. And I think that's, for me, really the core piece of me was always questioning, right? And finding things that didn't seem right, and then asking the questions, getting answers, and eventually those answers... The more developed my brain became, the less satisfying those answers were. Yeah. And then the further I got in school, the more I was like, "Mm. No, science, I really believe this. This is testable. This is repeatable." Right? And there was this limbo phase with figuring out what does that mean about the Bible and all that kind of stuff. But for me, and this is for good or for bad, when I don't have an answer, I'm just like, "It'll come at some point." Yeah. "I'll just leave that, and- Yeah ... I'll just watch some Dan McClellan videos at some point,

Dan McClellan and I'll answer it." I've found a phrase that I started using in graduate school that I love is "suspend judgment."

Jeremy Steele Yes. Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's like, well, we can't really know for sure. I'm just going to suspend judgment- Right ... and move along with my life. I don't have to resolve this right now- Yeah ... particularly when it's something that no one has ever been able to resolve.

Dan Beecher Well, it's such an important thing that we don't always get in society. We don't always get taught that- Yeah ... saying, "I don't know"-

Jeremy Steele Yes

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher is such a positive, strong position to take. Yeah. I think there's this sense that there's a weakness in- Yeah ... "I don't know," or that there's somehow a shame in "I don't know."

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Well, I think a lot of the Christian worldview is that the answers are all out there, and that they're all- Right ... there for the taking, and that everything does have an answer. If you're proclaiming objective absolute truth, and people are like, "Well, tell me about this moral quandary." Yeah. And they're like, "Well, now I've committed to having an answer to this." Right. "Now I need to have one."

Jeremy Steele Yeah. Towards the end of December, near the solstice, I did a couple of darkest night moments on TikTok Live, where I just said, "Just name what's hard. The holidays are not always happy, and in fact, the pressure to feel and act happy can make the sadness worse." And so it was intense, I'll be honest. It was thousands of people, and it was scrolling by faster than I could answer them. But there was a couple of times where somebody would say, "I lost both my kids in a car wreck earlier this year, and how could God do that to me?" And all this kind of stuff. And, "How could God be loving?" and all of that. And I remember saying, "I have no idea, but that is horrible. It shouldn't happen. And the feeling that you have that there's something fundamentally flawed about the universe because that kind of stuff can happen, I think that's right, and I can just be there with you and hold space for it." And it was interesting because I literally had-- There's no answer to that. Yeah. And the couple of times that that happened, the I don't know answer, people were like, "Oh, shit. That's what I was looking for."

Dan Beecher I mean, that's the thing.

Jeremy Steele I wasn't looking for an answer,

Dan Beecher right? Yeah. I think it becomes almost problematic.

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan Beecher I've been to funerals where, because of the religious construct of the funeral, people weren't allowed to mourn.

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan Beecher It was seen as a failure of faith- Mm-hmm ... to mourn the passing of a person who was supposedly now in a better place. Right. So why would you mourn that? And it doesn't acknowledge the human moment that's happening.

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think it's something that-- How many couples, how many wives have had to try to help their husbands understand that they don't need to be fixed, they just need somebody- Yeah ... to cry with them or to be there for them? Yeah. And so that's why-

Jeremy Steele To commit the sin of empathy. Yes. One of the

Dan McClellan eighth deadly sins. That scene was cut out of Seven. Yeah. And they had to change the title of the film, which cost them a lot of money with the sequel. It's a

Dan Beecher lot, yeah. But anyway, and

Dan McClellan there's an explanation for this, because an awful lot of Christianity is built on having right belief. That's what orthodoxy is. And so there's also this presupposition that turns out to be entirely wrong. We can test it and show that behavior does not flow directly downstream from belief. Yeah. But that is a very, very common connection that is made. And this actually has evolutionary pretty deep roots. Mm-hmm. That if you're a part of a community, communities have certain standards, certain beliefs, certain mores. Mm-hmm. And these exist so that you can put on display your fidelity to the group's standards to others. Right. So we live in communities that are large enough that pretty much everybody can expect to run into people on a fairly regular basis that they don't know. Right. And have to even rely on them for whatever they need to get done. And you need mechanisms to be able to know, I can trust this person, or I can't trust this person. I need to have a duel with this person, whatever. And religion, what we label religion, is a very efficient and effective means of doing that with a lot of the rituals and things that we do. But this results in a lot of beliefs becoming costly signaling. So

Dan Beecher if you- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan to go to a funeral and say, "I'm not sad, I'm happy because they're in a better place," that is a way... And deep down, that's an inevitable human reaction. Yeah. You can't avoid that. But that you hide it- Mm-hmm ... you incur that cost by performing that faith because that shows everybody else- Yeah ... "No, I get it. I believe it. I believe what we're supposed to believe. And because if we believe what we're supposed to believe, we will behave a certain way- Yeah ... I'm willing to behave that way." And they're hard to fake signals of sincere belief in the group's standards. And that kind of stuff's been tested for decades

Dan Beecher and-

Jeremy Steele Yeah. I had this conversation with a rabbi, and you're going to tell me it's wrong probably, and it's going to ruin everything. But he told me about the point in the Exodus story where Moses comes down, regathers everybody, reads the law, and then they respond. And he said that there's this construction there of the response that says, in Hebrew, it says, in an English translation of, "We will do what God has commanded us," or whatever. But in the Hebrew it says, and this is where you're going to tell me I'm wrong, but it's fine, that they say, "All that the Lord has said we will do and we will hear," or, "We will do and we will understand." It's like do and hear, right? Okay.

Dan Beecher And- You're safe because- ... you're reaching for- ... Dan doesn't have any way of looking this up. I reached for my phone. Yeah, you're reaching for your phone.

Dan McClellan In the Hebrew, because normally it's hear and do. It's the other way around.

Jeremy Steele Right. But in the order of the words, and this is what he said, and so we'll see. Okay. So he said that it's actually revealing something about how we experience belief. That we don't understand and then do, but it's in the doing that we form our beliefs- Mm ... in community, and that there's obviously an interplay between what we learn and what we do. But like, and that ... even if you tell me it's a lie. That has really formed a lot of the way I process things. And also I'm a Wesleyan. I'm from this Wesleyan tradition where we have experience as part of this sort of belief formation process- Yeah ... that they say was Wesley, but it was just totally made up by a scholar, which is fine. But yeah, that whole idea of it's in the doing that we believe- Mm ... yeah. That feels right to me with my experience of the world.

Dan McClellan And even in the LES tradition, you have something very similar, that a testimony is developed in the bearing of it. Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I think there are two sides to this, because on one, the kind of cynical side of me would say this is just a rationalization of people not being able to deny that- Right ... you actually are performing this.

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan McClellan And they're saying, "Okay, well, yeah, we'll say that you're performing it, but that's how you develop." Like the cynical side of me- Right. For sure. Yeah ... would be like, that's just a rationalization. But at the same time, I think there is truth to that because the performance is what develops the community. And so while there is a degree of performativeness, I think- Right. Yeah ... to that kind of thing, if that is generating community, and if that is generating connections and meaning and value and all that kind of thing- Right ... then I think there is truth to the fact that the community has developed and their faith is increased and there's this collective effervescence, to quote an outdated scholar, that makes it all meaningful and makes it all worth it. And so from an experiential point of view, I think there's value to that, absolutely. So yeah. I think I disagree.

Jeremy Steele After we stop recording, I've got to know. I need you to look up- Look up

Dan McClellan the passage and see what it is?

Jeremy Steele Look up the

Dan McClellan passage and see. Yeah,

Jeremy Steele because normally it is hear

Dan McClellan and do, not- Right.

Jeremy Steele No, for sure

Dan McClellan ... when we

Dan Beecher do

Dan McClellan and hear. Yeah.

Dan Beecher After party.

Jeremy Steele Oh, patrons only, definitely.

Dan McClellan Well,

Dan Beecher so. We'll give our patrons something to look forward to

Dan McClellan there. Yeah. And usually also shama is the verb for hear- Uh-huh ... but it's not used to just mean passively hear. Right. It means hearken, something like hearken. Yeah. It's more like we will- Rock ... absorb this and we will agree with it, and that kind of stuff.

Jeremy Steele Interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I wanted to get to just talking about whom you're ministering to.

Jeremy Steele Okay.

Dan Beecher Because you've mentioned that it is not a standard flock that you are a shepherd of. Yeah. Talk about how it has come about, and who they tend to be, and why they've come to you. Why they've

Jeremy Steele come to me, who the hell knows?

Dan McClellan But- This is beyond all content creators with large audiences, when people come and say, "What is the secret?" Nobody knows.

Jeremy Steele I don't know. I put shit out there and people watch it, and at some point I feel like they'll stop, but they haven't. So I was writing a marketing article and trying to tell nonprofits how to use TikTok. I was researching how to use TikTok, and I decided I was going to put out some content that was authentic to who I am, which is a pastor who is not sure if God exists. Which is funny because I've said that in all the places I've ever worked, and they didn't ever fire me. Actually, I just got set up on blind date with atheist nephews- ... to talk to them. So I did that, and I exposed corruption in the church, which is I think an important piece because to have a pastor name these things as wrong and this shouldn't have happened, and where I was part of it earlier, to confess that, "Yeah, I did that and I can't believe it, and I suck as a Christian." So that's an important piece for people to, I don't know, see a person in this role say that.

Dan Beecher Well, sadly it's not what we're used to,

Jeremy Steele right?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher What we're used to is hearing about corruption or some sort of sexual misconduct or whatever. Right. And how the church and the people surrounding it, and the higher-ups covered it up- Yeah ... and how they shuffled it away. Yeah. So to hear someone who is in the clergy willing to actually call it out as the horrible thing that it is, and to decry it-

Jeremy Steele Right

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher is unfortunately a little bit rare.

Jeremy Steele Yeah. And it's a thing that my experience is that people who have been harmed in that way respond to it in a, "Thank you. What's the other option?" Right? So the idea that the Bible says you should give 10% of your income, not really there, but it's used to manipulate people into giving you money and giving you 10% of their Social Security check when they can't even pay for what they've got. And to name that as corrupt, then people are like, "Okay, this is interesting. Now what?" Or they'll send you a DM and say, "Okay, yeah, I feel like I can trust that you won't bullshit me. Here's the next question." So I did that, and then I did progressive takes on the

Dan McClellan Bible, I call it an ancient spiritual text instead of the Bible, just because people bump on the Bible word. But not just to-

Dan Beecher parrot Dan McClellan and Pete Enns, but in a way that says, okay, so we don't have to deal with the Bible's sexual ethic and map an ancient culture's understanding of sexuality one for one onto our modern culture. Probably shouldn't.

Dan McClellan Right. It's not that we have to. Wait,

Dan Beecher what? Right? But it was written right there.

Jeremy Steele Right. But what that does is it lets you look at something deeper in those passages. Yeah. Find something, and then say, "Okay, now that thing is something that I can say, how does that help me be the best version of myself?" So the idea is that I try to take scholars and convey their content in a way that pushes people towards being able to form their own spiritual beliefs. And then I actually talk about how you choose beliefs instead of inheriting them. Mm-hmm. And so I did that, and there was all of these people that they were like, "Actually, this is really healing for me."

Dan Beecher This is an interesting question for me because the concept of choosing beliefs, at very least on some level, beliefs kind of aren't a choice, right? I can't choose to believe something. If you just say, "Hey, I'll give you 100 bucks if you just believe that there's a giant pickle in space." For sure. I can't. If I'm being honest, I can't just choose that. My guess is

Jeremy Steele you choose beliefs based on the data that you've received.

Dan Beecher I guess my perspective would be that I receive a bunch of data, and then my brain shuffles it around as best it can. Okay. And then whatever comes out of that shuffle is what I believe. Right. But I don't know that I chose that. It just feels like- Sure ... that's just my summation of everything that I've been able to take in.

Jeremy Steele Right. Yeah, no, I totally get that, and I don't think you're wrong. What I'm talking about is that people often have given someone else authority, chosen to give Brother Johnny- Right ... the role of telling them what is true and what to believe, and they have just adopted that belief system. And so really, they've chosen beliefs either way, but ultimately, the choice to have it outsourced and just inherit beliefs from some sort of external source is the thing that causes people-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ...

Jeremy Steele to unravel.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and there's a lot of research on this as well.

Dan Beecher Yeah, for sure.

Dan McClellan Because there's a big difference between closely held beliefs about the way the world works and what cognitive scientists of religion might label religious credences.

Jeremy Steele Yeah, right.

Dan McClellan Because when you say, "Oh, I believe that." Do you believe that Jesus did that, or the other to this or that, or the other person, or whatever? Whether or not that is actually a deeply held belief is kind of irrelevant. Mm-hmm. What is important is are you willing to sign off on this?

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan McClellan And so are you willing to give your public assent, which is that turns that thing not so much into a belief, as into a credence. Yeah. It is a creed. Yeah. Are you willing to sign off on the creed? Mm-hmm. Because you've got a telescope over here. We can look into space. We can see things. We can observe things, and our intuitions and the more critical thinking that we use, and the more analytical thinking that we use, the more convinced we might be of actual truth claims. Right. That's a different kind of cognition- Right ... than saying, "I believe Jesus rose from the dead." Yeah. That's for sure. You're really just saying, "This identity is so important to me that I'm willing to sign off on this credence." They function in different ways. They change in different ways because when you have seen a ball drop, you don't just one day wake up and be like, "Ah, gravity's not for me anymore."

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan McClellan Those things, they're not revisable. Yeah. But within religions, or quasi-religious communities- Mm-hmm ... one day you might say, "We cannot elect a president who cheats on his wife because then he'll cheat on the country." And a few short decades later, you wake up and be like, "Suddenly, I believe- Right ... that we're not electing a pastor, we're electing a leader, and so I no longer believe that it is wrong- Right. Right ... to have a president who cheats on his wife." So those kinds- Yeah ... of credences are revisable, and they are revised constantly.

Jeremy Steele Yeah. And so I think

Dan McClellan they're also operating on different wavelengths there.

Dan Beecher Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I think

Jeremy Steele rewinding to this original path that we were on, out of all of that came this community of people that was looking for a spiritual community, like a church. Most of them had experienced church and in some way there was an element of that that was positive for them. They were looking for that, but they could never go to a church. Right. Right? Could never go back. That was not a thing. And- Because

Dan McClellan Sister Pam is there.

Dan Beecher God, because Sister Pam is there.

Jeremy Steele And the place where the trauma happened is a trigger. And not just the one place, but all these places. Yeah. And so they started asking for a place to gather, and we started Discord, and eventually It was sort of dubbed Not Church because it was like the stuff you wanted from church, where people were having spiritual conversations, talking about God or whatever, and being there for each other in difficult times without somebody telling you you're going to hell because there was a tarot deck next to your bed.

Dan Beecher Just because I know that my 90-year-old mom is listening. Okay. Discord is an online- Okay, boy. Is an internet sort of meeting app.

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan McClellan Sort of thing.

Jeremy Steele It's like somewhere between a forum and chat. Yeah. Yeah. And then, as part of that, we started this podcast called "Unbelief," where once a week I do something like a Bible study where I do a longer form lecture that I pause and say, like, when Moses goes in hot to the Pharaoh and is like, right after everything is perfect, when he goes to the people and they're like, "All right, yeah, great. God told you." Then he goes in hot with the Pharaoh, and Pharaoh's like, "Who the hell are you?" Yeah. Like, "Why are you talking to me like that?" And to be able to extrapolate just human experience out of that and like, I've definitely done that. Right? And that's not always the best. So that kind of looking at trying to understand the original meaning and the original context, and then find points in that it can help me become a better version of myself. So that happens once a week, and then we interview somebody, like a scholar or somebody like that, author, or just have somebody tell their story of everything unraveling and what works for them right now. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know. It's this really weird but beautiful community, right? You have no idea the wide-ranging discussions amongst this group. Like somebody talking about tarot and astrology in this one channel, while talking about, in another channel, the takeover of the Republican Party by the religious right. Mm-hmm. While in another channel, really trying to understand this Greek thing that Dan McClellan said in his video that they linked in there, right? And then a place where somebody at 11:30 at night says, "I'm going to the hospital. I think I'm having a heart attack." Oh, wow. Right? And nobody's yelling at each other. And when anybody says, "I've had this spiritual experience," everybody's like, "That's amazing. Tell me how you did..." They want to know more. Some of them want to try that. And honestly, being there,

Dan Beecher which I was like-

Dan McClellan Ayahuasca is usually the answer.

Dan Beecher Psychedelics are helpful. Right.

Jeremy Steele Yeah. I actually was talking at this church about my book this last Sunday, and for whatever reason, I said, "Moses went up on this mountain, took ayahuasca, and had this like..." Yeah. I won't be invited back.

Dan McClellan "I just stumbled on a bush. It was already on fire." "And I was just trying to figure out what was going on, and this dude started talking to me from out of the fire. Are you the singing bush?"

Jeremy Steele he said. Right. Something like that.

Dan McClellan Well, and that's a question I get all the time about psychedelics and other kinds of drug use in ancient Israel. But we have discovered on one of the incense altars that was discovered in a Judahite temple that dates to the First Temple period. Mm-hmm. They had three different types of cannabis- Oh, interesting ... had been burned on the incense altar. So there was cannabis in ancient Israelite and Judahite temple ritual.

Jeremy Steele Yeah. Just don't say that on my TikTok Live because it'll immediately get taken down.

Dan Beecher Right.

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's hard to have grown-up conversations on TikTok. Yeah.

Dan McClellan There's a knock at the door and just...

Dan Beecher Like,

Jeremy Steele "What happened? Oh, yeah. Somebody said marijuana."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So how has this experience been for you? As you say, it can get very intense in these forums, and it can be a lot. People are coming to you first when they're on their way to the hospital.

Jeremy Steele Right. Yeah. Well, first off, the scale of it, especially on TikTok DMs and that kind of stuff, the scale there is sort of off the charts. Mm-hmm. It's something that I'm still trying to grapple with, showing up as a pastor in that space, with the scale of all of that. But in the Discord community, which is really sort of the size of a church-

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm

Dan Beecher ...

Jeremy Steele it's not that far off from what I would've experienced as a pastor, except in a megachurch in the Deep South, there was a lot less conversation about tarot and astrology. Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, and in the Discord context, they're able to offload a lot of the responsibility and a lot of the guidance. It's not all on you.

Jeremy Steele Right.

Dan McClellan They take care of a lot of that themselves.

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan McClellan Which is what you mentioned earlier. We were talking about how a community develops, and suddenly there are people who are jumping into the comments and being like- Yeah ... "Well, Jeremy would say this,"

Jeremy Steele and... And it was funny, when that first started happening, I was like, "They're right, but this is weird."

Dan McClellan Yeah. Like... How dare you? But then you're like, "Can you take care of this?" Actually,

Jeremy Steele can I hire you?

Dan Beecher It's probably not great for you to speak for me, but if you're going to, that was actually a really good way to do it. Right.

Dan McClellan Well, I had somebody recommend to me recently- Because I don't even see all the DMs I get-

Dan Beecher No. For sure

Dan McClellan ... much less read, much less respond to them. Yeah. And somebody was like, "Well, you can train a language model with your own stuff-

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan McClellan ... and then create an app where they can- Right ... come and ask for advice, and it will- Yeah ... pretty reliably respond in with your voice and everything to say what it thinks you might say." And I was like, "Ugh." Yeah. I imagine there are certain-

Dan Beecher It gives you the ick

Dan McClellan ... kind of industries and professions-

Jeremy Steele Oh, sure

Dan McClellan ... where that changes the game.

Jeremy Steele Yeah.

Dan McClellan But yeah. You're not ready for McClellan app? With as much trouble as we have found just with ChatGPT and- DanGPT.

Dan Beecher There we go