Episode Details

Getting to know one of our listeners, and his very unique and thought-provoking path into and out of Evangelicalism.

We talked to Doug, one of our listeners, to learn a bit about his very unique story through Evangelicalism: from Fundamentalism, through progressively more liberal churches, eventually going back to Bible Seminary as an atheist to become the minister for a Unitarian Universalist church, and currently studying Zen Buddhism while also attending Sunday School at a Disciples of Christ church in small-town USA.

Our casual conversation meandered through a variety of touchpoints:

• his favorite podcasts, including a skeptic’s interest in the paranormal and UAPs (the new acronym for UFOs)
• born into a spiritually liberal home, but became a Fundamentalist Evangelical as a teen in order to escape hell
• inerrancy/infallibility of scripture was deeply engrained into his formation
• eternal conscious torment in hell
• Young Earth Creationism
• his career goal as a teen was to become a missionary, preaching the Gospel, so he went to Bible College
• Bible College was a Bob Jones wannabe institution
• all other faith traditions (esp. Catholicism) were seen to be heretical … “and even Southern Baptists barely made it”
• how the Evangelical movement at that time strayed into national politics
• his spirituality has always been much more intellectual than experiential/emotional
• joined the Air Force; trained in Logistics and Acquisitions
• attended an Orthodox Presbyterian Church
• began noticing more and more problems in his daily readings of the Bible; eventually, this pillar holding up his faith (inerrancy/infallibility) broke completely
• went through a progression of increasingly liberal churches; eventually stopped going at all [for a while]
• stopped believing in any of it, despite two “atheist-in-a-foxhole” experiences; learned to accept that he could die at any moment, and never felt a need to reach out to God