Raised on the Prosperity Gospel: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right

Brad Onishi: Josiah Hesse grew up in the middle of the country in Northern Iowa in a time when there was a farm crisis, when poverty was rising around him, and desperation took hold for many in his community. His parents' reaction to the pressures of being parents living through this crisis was to put all of their hope and faith in a prosperity Gospel church. One year, they gave 100% of as much income as they took home. They didn't give 10%, they matched dollar for dollar, giving to the church. His home is also one that was filled with various forms of brokenness and dysfunction, as was his church. There was scandal and exploitation, there was pain and hurt, but amidst all of that, Josiah has gone back to his home to find the humanity in his family members, in his community, in the people that raised him.

He's written a new book called On Fire for God, and in a genre that is now crowded, his ex-evangelical memoir really is able to unpack the ways that the development of the Christian right in the 1980s, the progression of Christian nationalism in the 90s to the present, maps onto the individual lives of those Americans seeking meaning and faith, seeking support and community, and often doing so in ways that destroy them and give them over to people who would exploit them. His story is the story of Christian nationalism as it has morphed into the mutant violent movement that it is in 2026.

Our interview is wide ranging, and we not only zoom into the details of his life, but we zoom out to how the facets of faith and church of the religious right that shaped him are now coming to bear on all of us in the United States. Josiah Hesse is a journalist based in Colorado. He's been writing about ex-evangelical issues for a long time. He's also somebody who writes about running and marijuana and other things. I enjoyed our conversation immensely and found in Josiah's story a sense of unflinching analysis coupled with a beautiful, painful look at the humanity of those who he loves.

For subscribers, there's a couple of extra minutes at the end, about 10, where we talk about some things that I think are really important as it comes to Josiah's life and the way they map on to what's happening today in our public square. So if you're a subscriber, stick around for those extra few minutes that I think are really profound. And if you're not, you can check out how to be a subscriber in the show notes.

Before we get started, I just have one announcement. We are starting next week our interviews on Sundays. We're going to move our interviews to Sundays and provide a more long form avenue for our discussions. Next Sunday, you'll hear me talking with Sarah Mossener and her new book After Purity, and then in the weeks that follow, you'll hear Annika Brock Schmidt and Leah Payne jumping in to take turns interviewing authors and journalists, experts and scholars. I'm super excited to introduce new voices to this show and to expand our offerings. I'm going to be starting to live stream on Mondays on February 9, and so not only will you have the interview Sunday, but you'll have me coming unfiltered on Mondays to talk about all the news from the weekend, the headlines, the analysis and more. So next week, Sunday will be our day, and we'll move forward from there.

Also check out our new websites, straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and axismundi.us. They're brand new. They're beautiful. We worked hard on them. Go check it out. All right, y'all, without further ado, here's my conversation with Josiah.

Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. As I just said, I'm joined by somebody who I'm not sure if there's anyone who's been writing as a quote, unquote, ex-evangelical author, and in as many genres as Josiah there could be. But I don't think there is. I don't know if Josiah is gonna buck at that label. I hope you take that as a positive. So first of all, Josiah, thanks for coming by.

Josiah Hesse: Thanks for having me, Brad. Big fan of the show. Can't wait for American Caesar.

Brad: Yeah, well, we'll see. We're straight out the gate. I appreciate it. We're here to talk about this book, though, and that is On Fire for God, your new memoir that's out. And I'm not gonna lie, the subtitle is Fear, Shame, Poverty and the Making of the Christian Right. And when I first saw that subtitle, I was like, that's a lot. I mean, come on, one book cannot be doing all of that. But the book does do all of that, and it does so through the prism of your life and your childhood and your parents' lives and so much.

I want to just start with where you're from. Would you mind, you are an electric writer. You're somebody that can make the setting into a character all of its own. Would you mind telling us about the very small but fascinating place that you grew up?

Josiah: I grew up in North Iowa, about halfway between Des Moines, Iowa, Minneapolis, Minnesota. These two towns that were right next to each other: Clear Lake, which has the claim to fame of being the town that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens in that plane crash. And Mason City, which is known for the birthplace of the Music Man musical.

Brad: You talk about the charm that at least when you were a kid, well, I mean, even today, when you go back and in recent visits, the place still has. But you also describe, I think, the transformations that took place. So, you know, as I was reading, I was imagining this small town that still has the bones of what was a kind of 20th century downtown that feel in some ways like a bygone in a time when strip malls are all the rage. But you and I are about a year apart in age. You grew up in the 80s, and this was a moment in Iowa of great turmoil for farmers, and I think great change for the region in which you grew up. Could you just share that with us? Because I think it's a big part of the story, and I know that everyone listening is not going to have their historical sense of what was going on in early 1980s Iowa and the Great Plains during that time.

Josiah: Yeah, in the early to mid 80s, there was something called the farm crisis in Iowa. Farming was booming throughout the 60s and 70s. The Nixon administration pushed everyone to go big or go home, according to the Agriculture Secretary, and so everyone went into debt and expanded their farms. And then all these things happened. Russia invaded Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter put an embargo on them. A lot of economic changes, droughts, all these forces kind of came together, and suddenly the cost of the goods to make the goods was far higher than the value of them, and value of the land plummeted. All these people lost their farms. All the people who were steady, you know, expanded their farms. And we get this big corporate agriculture that we have today.

But the idea, you know, we see on like, Super Bowl commercials of like the American farmer getting up early and milking the cows, that did exist in America for a time, but after the farm crisis, it all just kind of became corporate agriculture. And you know, nobody has both like crops and livestock on their farms anymore. Like all the livestock are in these giant warehouses, and it's just horrifying to get a glimpse of or a smell of what you often do when traveling through Iowa.

Brad: I bring that up because I think a lot of folks, because of recent election cycles, have sort of been introduced to the idea that the Midwest is a post-manufacturing region. Places that they imagine are Michigan and Pennsylvania, places like Wisconsin. I don't know that folks remember this part of the story as it pertains to farmers in this country. And I do think it sets the stage for a lot of what you describe, because what you describe in the early pages are a setting in which so many people around you were, because of poverty and pressure, there was a sense of looking for help, looking for relief, looking for a sense of how to make it in a situation that felt impossible.

You talk about drug use, you talk about addiction, you talk about all kinds of things, but it leads us into your family and your mother and your father, who two characters will get to, I think, in more depth in a second, who, by way of various detours, found their way to a kind of prosperity Gospel church that had a minister with designer suits and nice cars while many of the people in congregation were on food stamps. That sets the stage for the entire book. How did your parents find themselves there and in ways that will never do justice to what you describe in the book? What was the draw to that kind of gospel for them living through the farm crisis and everything else going on behind the scenes in their lives?

Josiah: Yeah, well, they came out of the Jesus movement, which, as a lot of your listeners, I'm sure, know, started in California, but like most things that start on the coast, that make their way to the Midwest several years later. So it was late 70s and early 80s when they were in that kind of idealistic but somewhat apocalyptic world. And that shifted for a lot of evangelical culture in the 80s. There wasn't quite as much of an apocalyptic fever in the 80s as there was in the decade before. And there was a lot of materialism, and there was the promise of a lot of materialism coming from people like Robert Tilton, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Oral Roberts. A lot of the leadership of my church went to Oral Roberts University, and they brought a lot of his teachings to North Iowa.

And you know, Oral Roberts' book, What is it? The Miracles of Seed Faith, uses a lot of agriculture language, you know, of planting your seed of faith, and you will reap a tenfold harvest. And we see prosperity gospel really thriving in tragic areas, like in the developing world, in the Rust Belt, where, you know, a lot of jobs have been lost, because it is very attractive to people who are in a state of desperation. And working class people are, you know, and I say this as one of them, susceptible to materialism. You know, there's often the dream of like, one day, you know, we're going to have the big house, we're going to have the vacation, the cars. And the preachers would really play on that. You know, it wouldn't be a sensible offer of like, you'll have a steady income, you'll have savings, you'll have, you know, money in the bank to buy your kids Christmas presents. You know, it was always, you know, much like Trump, the biggest and the best. And nobody's ever seen the blessings like this.

And it worked out quite well for the people on stage, and they would often brag about that. You know, Kenneth Copeland has, you know, a lot of there's YouTube moments of him talking about his private jets and the suits he gets, and, you know, all the blessings that he's received. And our pastor did that as well. He would talk about how I can buy a brand new car today with cash if I wanted to. That's how much this works. That's how much God has blessed me.

And my parents were running two small businesses in North Iowa, very California businesses. It was a tanning salon and a water bed retailer. And those were doing well for a time, but there was this emphasis on growth, on becoming wealthy. My dad did still have it in the back of his head that around 1988 or so, the, you know, world may come to an end, as Hal Lindsey had predicted in The Late Great Planet Earth. And so he had it in the back of his mind, like I got to become rich if we have to survive the tribulation. We, you know, need all the resources we can get. And so those businesses suffered from too much growth, and at the same time, they were giving loads of money to the church.

My dad estimates it's around $250,000 and meanwhile, we were earning, or like, bringing home like $10,000 a year for a family of five. So we were living a pretty scant life while funneling loads of cash into this church while also giving them free labor. You know, we'd eat corn in the fields as fundraisers. I helped rebuild the roof of my church. My mom worked in the daycare. My dad volunteered for the suicide hotline. So it was just giving, giving, giving to the church, and looking back 40 years later, those resources really could have been better applied to more fruitful endeavors.

Brad: There's a moment when you're in the mid to late 80s when your parents realized they've not tithed 10% for the year, that they've actually tithed 100%, as much as they took home. They actually gave that exact amount, or similar to the church for that year. And you know, I remember underlining that and just thinking about how many folks are in that same boat these days.

I want to get to your dad and the suicide hotline, because there's a kind of key there about his trajectory. But you just touched on something that I think might be confusing to certain people at home, which is this: how can I preach you a gospel that says the world is going to end soon? And I know that the end of the world and fear of that had a large and long effect on you personally, into your adult life. So it was a pillar of the gospel that you were hearing as a kid. Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, 1988, the world's gonna end. There's all of that. I lived that too. I used to think, do I have enough time to convert my dad before Jesus returns, or will he go to hell forever?

How do I square that with not only should you be getting ready for the world to end, but you should be getting as rich as you can? Like, how do those two go together? I mean, I think I know the answer, but I think it'd be good to flesh it out for everybody listening at home.

Josiah: Yeah, and I definitely can, but I just add that there's often this kind of Orwellian contradiction in the world of evangelical Christianity. Like, we hate Hollywood, but we're going to create Pure Flix and, you know, make all these movies that are exactly like Hollywood. We think that the music industry is full of sinners and degradation, but we're going to create this whole industry of contemporary Christian music that really just mimics everything that they do. And then, yeah, fashion, diet, culture, like there's so much like a criticism of these institutions and then mimicking them at the same time.

But I think for a lot of people, there was with the fear of the world ending, of rapture, of tribulation, a sense of urgency to live your life before that time. You know, some people were post-trib, pre-trib. You know, in either way, like you wanted, in my dad's case, a family. Like he had a very rough childhood. And it's not uncommon that people with childhood trauma have this urgency to have kids and do it right. You know, I'm going to be everything my parents weren't. I'm going to be everything that I needed as a kid. And you know, that has a lot of problems unto itself, but that was kind of the push behind this is, let's live a good life like God wants us to before it all burns down.

And I'll just add one more thing that, you know, when Hal Lindsey was going around telling the world that everything's going to end in a decade or so, he was using all of his money to buy real estate. And so that doesn't really suggest someone who believes that the world is about to burn in 1988. And well, and we all know like he kept putting out books decade after decade, sort of quietly, the other books would go out of print, and then it'd be like the 1980s. No, the 1990s. Oh, Y2K. Like, he's just updating his doomsday clock again and again.

Brad: Let's come to your dad, who, as you mentioned, had a really rough upbringing. Grew up in a house that, you know, was marked by abuse and marked by poverty. He gets to this place where, you know, he and your mom own these businesses, and there's a modicum of success, there's a modicum of some money in his pocket, or at least the ability to buy things on credit. But there's pressure there. There's a sense of needing to keep up with the Joneses, to be the biggest, the most successful, not only because of capitalism, but because that would be a sign of faith. The only thing holding me back from that would be my lack of trust and devotion to God and his holiness.

That seemed to lead your dad into kind of a spiral of addiction and other outlets that are supposed to be prohibited by the church and by the brand of Christianity all practiced, but I think are probably widespread, not only in your region, but in churches throughout the country. Would you mind giving us just a little bit of the trail of your dad's arc and how he goes from being somebody who's taking his family to church four and five times a week to somebody has his mistress in the church sanctuary where they meet to do adultery? How does one land in that kind of place?

Josiah: Yeah, my dad was a teenager. He was kind of the typical working class stoner in North Iowa. Loved his Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper records. Smoked weed all day, every day, a lot of drugs. And then, you know, it's a very familiar story. He meets someone who's part of the Jesus movement. He gets saved, and he goes full on into this world as much as I did when I was a young evangelical zealot and burns all his records. Never gonna smoke cigarette, weed, anything. I'm getting married. Marries my mom after really just a couple of months of knowing each other. They had three kids before they were 21 and he works round the clock, first the Winnebago factory, where I worked years later, and then, you know, builds up these businesses.

And it's just a lot of pressure. Like looking back on it, you can feel like a kind of pressure cooker effect with him just assuming that being born again was going to take care of all of his emotional problems, all of his addictions, it's going to make him rich, and everything is going to be wonderful now that he has the Holy Spirit living inside of him. And that just didn't work out, predictably. You know, I'm 43 and I couldn't imagine having like, three kids at the age of 21 and working round the clock and volunteering for the church and not really dealing with my own emotional problems. And he just kind of cracked at some point. Like both him and my mom sort of became emotionally distant from each other. They fought a lot. They would break up and get back together, move out, move back in, and he started volunteering for the night shift at the suicide hotline.

You know, just to take us back to the farming crisis, the suicide rate in Iowa spiked to 400% of what it was years previous. And so a lot of people were really in need of these kinds of services. But as you could imagine, there wasn't a whole lot of training for these counselors on suicide helpline. It was really like, get them saved, and that'll do it. You know, get them to say Billy Graham's sinners prayer and problem solved. And my dad started counseling a woman who had a lot of problems, and she was doing the right thing by reaching out to someone, by, you know, admitting like I am feeling suicidal, I am having these problems, I'm searching for help.

And my dad, you know, I love him to this day. We're very close, and I have compassion for him, but it is a very insidious thing to do what he did, which was develop a sexual relationship with this woman he was supposed to be counseling out of suicide. And she sort of reintroduced him to drugs. He, you know, started smoking weed and then meth and acid, and they kind of start having a little bacchanal inside of the sanctuary. And this is his escape from the pressures and the disappointments of domestic life and working around the clock at these businesses. And he, my mom, eventually split up and he never returned to any church.

Brad: I think one of the things that strikes me about your dad's arc, your mom's arc, everybody that you cover in your book, in terms of your family, in terms of your region, in terms of your community. This is going to sound cliche, and it's not, and I think folks who've listened to the show know we've done 1000 episodes of this show. I have read so many memoirs and stories and evangelical journeys. This is one in which the humanity of everyone involved comes to the fore on every page. And I think that you really accomplish something that a lot of people claim to want to do, but don't know how to or don't want to do the hard work that it requires, which is every page I read about your dad, I thought those are not good decisions, nor do I condone a lot of what's going on here. And at the same time, I was always able to understand the kinds of pressures you just talked about, the abuse that he'd endured, and the like shortcut approach that he'd been given from the church. Of like, if you just do this, everything will be great. If you have enough faith, you will be rich.

And he's a 28 year old guy at this moment, a 31 year old guy. And as you've already mentioned, I can only sort of try to think myself into the pressure of living up to this cosmic story, this family story, this reparative story, of like, creating a family that he didn't have all the while the farm crisis is going on in the community. When one reads these stories, they both are appalled at the culture of the church and the ways that it trickles down to the people involved, but the humanity of everyone comes to the fore beautifully. And I hope that you feel very proud of that, because it's rare in this kind of writing.

I also just want to touch on something quickly before we move on to your story. In one of the very first pages of the book, you talk about how you love your dad so much, and when you first see him after being away from home, it's a sense of like, I love this man, and it's touching. And then there's like, he says something, and like, a minute later, you're just like, I want to get the hell out. Why did I come home? I want to get the hell out of here. What am I doing? I should have never come back. And I think a lot of people who come from high control religion might relate to that of like, wanting to be close to their parents, and then having their parents say, like, one thing at Christmas and being like, I'm getting the fuck out of here. I'm done. No more. It's over. I mean, is that something that you've reckoned with over time? And you know, what is the insight there for people who've had a similar experience?

Josiah: Well, it is very heartening and validating to hear you say that, because that is something that I really wanted to achieve. And I love reading fiction, and I think the best novels like show characters doing reprehensible things, but you know enough about them to understand why and have some compassion. You know, it doesn't excuse their behavior, but it does explain their behavior. And yeah, I think it is a very common thing, especially in this age, for people to, you know, feel that sense of home from their family. And sometimes, you know, my case, my literal childhood at home or your hometown. And then at the same time, you hear them say like, you know, trans people are mentally ill, or, you know, immigrants are bringing drugs to America. We need to get them out, or they're costing American jobs. And you're like, who are you? How do you believe this stuff? Where are you coming from?

And it's something that I continue to struggle with. You know, I was just home for Christmas last December, and, you know, as soon as I got there, one of my family members was talking about, you know, how boys are raised to be warriors, and we need to let boys be aggressive. And, you know, and I kind of added in like, yeah, there are healthy forms of aggression. You want to beat up a, you know, a boxing punching bag. You want to go, you know, for a long run, or something like, there are healthy ways to get that energy out. But this was a very myopic, like, you know, we need to really train boys for war kind of mentality. And I'm like, all right, take a deep breath. This isn't, you know, I'm not going to change anyone's mind with being really aggressive, and I'm really going to hurt myself by getting angry. You know, when your body floods with cortisol and you get so stressed out, and you know you want to control the situation, you want to have all the ammunition of like, you know, this research paper says this about, you know what you're saying.

And I find that curiosity is a nice antidote to that. You don't have to agree with someone to be curious about their perspective. And when you engage with people with curiosity who are different than you, you end up learning a lot about yourself. You end up being forced to articulate what you believe, or sometimes take a little bit of what they believe and add that to the mix. Like, okay, I agree with you on this point over here, but like, you know, this larger thing you're saying is, you know, doesn't jive with me. But it helps keep me relaxed and keep me in a good place. But then I also come out of it with a more sophisticated, nuanced understanding of my relatives and of America.

Brad: It's hard. I have been the person with the research papers at the ready and done that many times, and it does not help. As you say, I think this leads us to your arc, and there's way more than we can get to today. But I've heard you say in past interviews that you were kind of a junkie for God and your parents' marriage and everything we just talked about with your dad. None of that dissuaded you, even as a teenager, from devoting yourself to God and to the church. Would you talk to us about your spiritual life when you're a pre-teen, when you're a young teenager? Give us an insight here into how you were a spiritual junkie?

Josiah: Yeah. Well, I went to a lot of different churches. You know, we had the main church Agape, but I was also going to an Open Bible Church and an Evangelical Free Church and Assemblies of God church. And I'd go to the camps and conventions and Christian rock concerts, and we'd put on hell houses and passion plays and, you know, Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames. I estimated that on average, I was going to about nine church events a week, and had nothing in my life outside of this world. I didn't, you know, play sports. I wasn't in band or drama. I was flunking school, really, because I was preparing for the world to end.

So I really had it in my mind that eternal torture awaited those who didn't do it right, and I never quite figured out what doing it right meant. Sin was a very confusing concept to me, because so many things did seem to be sins. But then people would debate whether they were or not. Is drinking a sin? Is cursing a sin? You know, the part in Mark about blaspheming the Holy Spirit being an unforgivable sin. And I'm like, well, what does that even mean? Can I do that with my thoughts? Could I think myself into eternal damnation without knowing it? And you know, I've heard this story so many times from former evangelicals, that when you hear someone on stage say that familiar line, if you were to die tonight, would you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you would go to heaven, and if you don't come up to the stage, and we'll pray with you, I would do it at the passion plays that I was participating in, because I never felt that sense of like I'm okay, I'm going to be okay.

And if eternal torture is at stake, what is a higher priority than that? I mean, if you know there were like, rabid buffaloes coming to town that were going to tear you to pieces, yeah, you'd be warning everyone, and you'd be getting the hell out of there, because, like, that sounds pretty damn horrifying. And after doing hell houses and watching Carmen videos, like I had a very visceral imagination of what eternal torture encapsulated. I thought about it every single day. So I was reading my Bible, I was having conversations with church leaders. I was doing everything I could to try and get to that place where I'm like, okay, I don't, maybe don't understand all of this, but I know I'm okay. I know I'm going to heaven, like that Supertones song says. And I never quite landed there. And it was something that just tormented me night and day.

And I also, you know, I'll add just real quickly, this is a hallmark of religious trauma syndrome that people have impaired cognitive abilities and don't achieve academically the same as others. And I went to Christian schools, but I also went to a public school for several years, and there were times of learning about other faiths, other cultures, that would put like little questions in my head, like, oh, the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the story of Noah by 1000 years. How does that work, you know? And then all of these other stories in the Bible that you know have their antecedents, and I would just have to shut down my thinking, like you're going to blaspheme the Holy Spirit with these questions. And you know, your belief is your salvation, so you got to protect that belief. And so I just didn't allow myself to have the kind of blossoming of rationality and logic that a lot of young minds do, and it impaired me quite a bit. It led to me flunking out of high school.

Brad: I want to extend that story, and the question that I get every time I tell my story is, well, how did you get out? How did you, you know, how did you find a way to the outside world, in essence? Before we do that, you, so you've touched on, you and I are very similar in age. You've touched on a bunch of cultural touchstones that I'm glad I, we should have played bingo or done a drinking game here. So you mentioned Carmen, that was great, the Supertones, okay, a bunch of others. But in the book, you talk about My So-Called Life, which, for an elder millennial, come on, it does not get any more iconic than My So-Called Life and Jared Leto. And this is a part of the story of like you watching Jared Leto and feeling certain feelings. And I think that's a big part of not only the story, but this matrix of battles that was happening in your mind all the time when it came to sin and sexuality. So how does Jared lead us into that whole part?

Josiah: Well, I was attracted to both girls and boys as a young man. And you know, like a lot of us, I was taught supernatural warfare, spiritual warfare, the idea that angels and demons surround us at all times. I read This Present Darkness, another bingo card for you. And so I would interpret these normal, pubescent changes in my body through a supernatural lens, and believe that when I was attracted to men, that was demons, you know, trying to get into my head and into my body. And you know, being attracted to women was the more righteous path. And you know that made me terrified of my body, terrified of my mind, and it was something that put me through a great deal of agony that is really still with me to this day.

I mean, you know, the literal fear of hell and demons can go away, but the, you know, nervous system reaction that is put in you at a young age, when you are so susceptible and all of the architecture of your brain and body are forming, it stays with you. And I remember there's a Chick tract. I mean, there are probably a lot of them on this topic, but like, of a young boy who's like, what, playing with dolls, and you see Satan, like, you know, influencing him, like, you know, you're not really a boy, you're a girl. And then, you know, Satan getting the dad angry, and then telling the boy to, like, look at pornography magazines. And so there was a framework for what is a very common childhood experience. I mean, almost universal, asexual people aside, of your body blossoming, your imagination, your desires, noticing things in the world. I like that. And suddenly it's portrayed inside this culture as the devil being in your brain. Like that, you can't even trust your own thoughts. Yeah, it was agony.

Brad: There's an iconic scene in the book of when your family hosts a fundraiser, and you know, you're not sure where you belong. The girls are doing one thing, the boys are doing another. You go out on the porch and it leads to high jinks involving high heels and a broken window, and people just have to read the book to find it. But to me, that's the scene that just will stick with me for a long time along this whole trajectory. Let's fast forward a little bit. You're somebody who's going to nine events, I should say, per week. You eventually end up being somebody who writes novels, has written a memoir, has been a journalist all over the world. Where does the beginning of you leaving this culture and this community start?

Josiah: Yeah, so I don't know if this is universal, but for a lot of millennial evangelicals, Y2K was a big scare. I think in the days leading up to it, it wasn't so much, but like in the months leading up to it, and there were a lot of evangelical institutions, books, Jerry Falwell did a whole sermon about it. And when that transpired, and nothing happened, it put like a little crack in my faith, in my understanding of this world, and kind of led to me just experimenting with little things.

I actually went to Evangel College. My sister was enrolled there, and I was a junior in high school, and Bible college kids party. Like that was where I started smoking cigarettes, had alcohol for the first time. Was around people smoking marijuana for the first time. And then I, you know, met people who turned me on to secular music. You know, it was a revelation for me that, like punk rock, wasn't an evangelical institution that, you know, there were these bands like The Clash, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols. And then I got really excited about Radiohead, REM, Bjork. And so I just started gravitating toward the secular world, and still had one foot in my faith. And I found people like Johnny Cash or Bono or Moby who identified as Christians but were part of the secular world. I started reading more C.S. Lewis, but was just kind of edging my way toward or outside of the bubble of evangelicalism.

And I often say that I never rebelled from evangelicalism. It wasn't like there wasn't this moment of like, screw these guys. I'm out of here. This is toxic. It kind of slipped through my fingers and was somewhat of a traumatic experience. It was the biblical historian, I suppose his title would be, Bart Ehrman, that really put the final nail in the coffin for me when I learned how the Bible was composed, assembled, edited, translated. You know, it's a long story. You could do like seven podcast episodes on this. I'm sure a lot of people have. And when I started seeing just how haphazard and political and eclectic it was, and how many books were left out of the Bible, and how much influence had been put into shaping it in all these different directions, and then at an earlier time, when I learned, you know, that there were 40,000 different types of Christianity in the world, and I'm like, oh, but I landed on the right one, on the north end of Clear Lake, at the right time, with the right pastor, that one true church and all those others just in my hometown were wrong, but I had the right one that I put no effort into and learning about other faiths.

And then meeting people with no faith who were good people started getting into, you know, the queer punk rock scene of Denver and San Francisco. Once I left Iowa, there was a certain point where I was like, I'm just gonna say it. I don't think God exists. You know, I was actively going against that prescription in Romans, he who believes in his heart and confesses with his mouth that Jesus, Lord God, raised us from the dead, shall not own no death, but have everlasting life, which was translated for us, interpreted to us as salvation from hell into heaven. I was like, okay, I'm going to do the exact inverse of that with my mouth, damning myself to hell, which I no longer believe in, and am going to live my life with the years that I have left knowing that there likely isn't going to be any kind of eternity behind all of this. This life isn't a test that, you know, we have to pass in order to earn our way into heaven.

And yeah, like I said, I didn't want that, but that seemed to be the reality of life. I couldn't just block it out anymore. And I'll just add one more thing. What I've noticed, and I think there is some research behind this, neurodivergent people tend to, when they're younger, be the most aggressive evangelical zealots, the ones that are reading the Bible and digging deep into the word and like, oh, I've got to understand this. And then at some point are like, I've drilled down so far into this I haven't found what I'm looking for, and I'm going to explore the world at large, and that's going to satisfy this intellectual hunger that I have inside of me.

Brad: I love that last part because, I mean, I am neurodivergent, and I had that exact, exact experience to a T. I want to encourage people to read this book because of the journey you take in terms of your life and the way that you discover the world. And I think one of the things that I really admire about you is, you know, here you are somebody who grows up in a chaotic home marked by poverty in a forgotten region of the country, and you make your way, as you say, from Denver and San Francisco and back again, and you've now lived a life that is filled with wonder and curiosity. It's filled with a hunger to learn. So you know, like I said, you're a journalist, you've written novels, you've written this memoir that's a life full of intellectual fulfillment, and to me, a life of richness, but it's the exact opposite kind of riches that were promised right to the people in your congregation when you were young.

It's the exact opposite kind of wealth that your dad was hoping to find after his chaotic and difficult upbringing. And there's something truly beautiful about crafting a life like that after coming from a place that that really didn't seem to offer any hints that this would be your trajectory. And so, you know, I think people should read to for a lot of reasons, but one of them is to follow you on that path. Do you mind if I ask you one more question? I know you need to run.

Josiah: No, go ahead.

Brad: All right, y'all. If you're a subscriber, stick around. And if not, I'm gonna be with Josiah for about two more minutes talking about the ways that we can talk to our family members about difficult things, family members who've gone down the MAGA road, the QAnon road, the conspiracy road. So if you're not a subscriber, you can sign up for $3.65 a month. You get access to this bonus content, to bonus episodes, our 1000 episode archive, an invite to our Discord and ad-free listening, plus office hours starting soon. Check it out.

As always friends. Thanks for being here. Thanks for your support. We'll be back Wednesday with This in the Code. Friday with the weekly roundup. Be on the lookout for new episodes of Reign of Error with Sarah Posner, which is airing each week over the course of this first part of 2026. Check out our new website. We're so proud of it. Took a ton of time, and if you're not a subscriber, think about doing that today. Dan and I are doing office hours this year, so we're checking in with folks on a regular basis to kind of hang out throughout the month. We do bonus episodes, bonus content, access to our Discord, ad-free listening and all that. You can find that all in the show notes or on the website, but that is what helps keep this show going and keep our flag up. Other than that, we appreciate you all. Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next time.