Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep. 188 – My Guncle & Me w/ Author & Journalist Jonathan Merritt
319 Plays1 year ago
This week we’re joined by award-winning author, journalist, and public speaker Jonathan Merritt! Jonathan wasn’t just a “pastor’s kid,” his father was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Steeped in conservative evangelicalism, his life took a turn during college when he decided he wanted to be a religion and spirituality writer. Jonathan lost himself in his work, publishing several books, writing articles for prominent publications, and earning two graduate degrees. From the outside looking in his life appeared to be on track, but nobody knew that this rising star in progressive Christianity was a closeted gay man. Then he was publicly outed… and his whole world turned upside down. Jonathan is a truly prolific person with a one-of-a-kind perspective, and we love his approach to faith, family, and community. He just published his first children’s book, “My Guncle & Me,” a story about a boy whose gay uncle shows him that his little differences make him special. It’s a wonderful book that we absolutely recommend to anyone with kids in their life! Follow Jonathan on Instagram (@jonathan_merritt) and X (@jonathanmerritt), check out his podcast Seekers & Speakers, for more information go to www.jonathanmerritt.com.
Recommended
Transcript
The Misunderstanding of Evangelical Stardom and Identity
00:00:00
Speaker
And I think he thought I was a person of import, which I was not. I mean, i was I was successful in this tiny little pond, but I was not like a superstar. But I think he thought, well, if I out this guy, I'll be i'll ill i'll make a name for myself. I remember he wrote an an um an essay at salon dot.com, and it was titled something like, Why I Outed an Evangelical Star. And I was like, an evangelical star? Who's he talking about? um It was so weird. so But that was both the worst and best thing that's ever happened to me. I wouldn't wish it on anyone because people die. People die because of these sorts of things. It's a horrible and unethical thing to do to someone. um But it was also incredibly liberating.
Introduction to Jonathan Merritt
00:01:10
Speaker
Hey, everybody, we are back with another episode of Growing Up Christian. I'm Sam. I'm Casey. And today we are joined by author, journalist, what I presume to be an all around wonderful human, Joel. ah Nope. Why did I say that? ah Jonathan Merritt. Listen, listen, if I got if I got a Joel McHale once today, I got a thousand times. So I know I i had a feeling I'm sorry, I had to throw it in there and make believe I had to do it. You always get that all the time. And if you think I'm an all-around good human, you ought to ask ah you ought to ask somebody in my family what they think. They'll give you the scoop. Yeah. I think that i feel like that goes for a lot of people and their families. They're our worst critics. No, ah but i that's like my first thought when I see your pictures. I go, that oh, no, that's not okay. I showed my wife your picture tonight and I was like, do you know who that is? She's like, that's the guy from community, right?
00:02:10
Speaker
So well, listen, you know, you want to know funny story. Let's play the six degrees of Joe McHale. So a very ah one very good friend of mine, she endorsed my children's book is ah ah Kate Bowler. So you might know Kate Bowler, the author. Yeah. Kate Bowler's best friend is Joe McHale. No way. So she's always joking him. um And, you know, I've always said, look, the bottom line is nobody has ever seen the two of us in the same room at the same time. So you do the math. Yeah, I think it needs to happen. I would love that. in my And then everyone has to guess who's who. That's right. ah But yeah, anyway, so
00:02:51
Speaker
got my Joel McHale joke out of the way. Sorry, you've heard a million times, but now everyone's going to Google you. Google you. so It's like jonathan's like Jonathan Merritt bingo.
The Role of Questions in Faith and Journalism
00:03:00
Speaker
you just You just laid a chip down. The Joel McHale joke always lands.
00:03:06
Speaker
ah Man, the I want to say the first time I actually
00:03:12
Speaker
learned of who you were was probably eight-ish years ago, maybe almost 10. It's hard times funny at this point. You don't remember things that good. But ah one of the things that stuck out to me, ah because your lane in journalism has been faith and culture and their impacts on each other. um And when I first heard you I want to say it was ah a bad Christian podcast. oh yeah um But I think what stuck out to me and why I've been following your work since then was that when you were talking about it,
00:03:58
Speaker
I didn't know by the end of the interview, like what you believed. And to me that made me trust you a lot more. I was like, the things you're saying are interesting and I don't feel like I'm being sold something. I feel like I'm being given good information that is impacting the way I view things in a way that's not trying to sway me towards something, but just like a better way of understanding it to more ah ah just to engage with it on a ah fairer level. So that's where- Who didn't ever guess you were a proud boy? Well, you know, and I wrote an article about this recently um at R and&S, at Religion News Service. um I think that the essence of faith, and maybe by extension, I've often thought about the essence of my work, is really less about giving people
00:04:52
Speaker
good answers and is instead about stirring within them good questions. And um if you believe, as I do, um that the Spirit is a force, capital F force in the world that guides us into all truth, capital T truth, then um the Spirit doesn't need my help. that if I can give you um a holy question, then the Spirit is competent enough to lead you to the answer that um that that you need. And so I've always kind of, I can tell you what I think, um but I always try to have really soft edges um if I can, depending on what it is, of course, but I try to have pretty pretty soft edges on on on my views because I don't want people to shut their brains off.
00:05:43
Speaker
which is a common predicament. I feel like anyone, I mean, i know what pod I know what space we're in, and I know that that's something that a lot of our viewers can resonate with. What's something that I think about though, because I think ah that there's an element there of like you yeah you have to have a little bit of faith in like the people that you're talking to, that they're capable of, having those thoughts and and arriving at decent conclusions and things. And I feel like that's missing in a lot of media right now. It's just kind of assumed that people are not going to be able to figure things out unless I tell them what the right thing to think about it is.
00:06:30
Speaker
you know, which yeah I don't know, it's just very like, kind sir you you are right, because there are some people in the world who are dense, and they're immovable. And those are that's not my audience, right? They may be listening to me. But I'm, I'm not really interested in those folks. I mean, speaking to those folks, if they come along, ah You know, I'll golf clap for that all day long. But for the most part, ah like people who have, for example, um ah they have a tie to religious institutions and those institutions pay their mortgage.
00:07:09
Speaker
um They're incentivized not to understand what I'm saying. If I'm saying something about their institution, there's actually a great quote, I believe it's by Upton Sinclair, where he says, it's impossible to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on him not understanding it. And so ah for me, I'm much more interested in the people who live in that second layer underneath the power brokers. who ah love, they they love these institutions. And so, ah you know, they're not kind of the burn it all down folks, because I'm not interested in that either.
Critique of Religious Institutions
00:07:44
Speaker
Like the reflexive, reactive, the
00:07:47
Speaker
Okay. You know, you, you gave me a purity ring and so I'm going to, I'm going to devote my entire social media presence to talking about how bad you are for the next 17 years. I'm not interested in those folks. We're going to get along good, but there there are a lot of other people who say, I think that there's a lot of good in Christianity, in the Christian faith historically. in what happens when people get together and they and they begin to circle these kinds of timeless sacred questions. But I also wanna be really honest about what happens when bad actors get involved and when um when religion becomes, which is the truth, religion is not really about theology. Religion is not driven by theology. It pretends it's driven by theology. Religion is driven by money and power.
00:08:39
Speaker
And it uses theology um as a kind of virtue signal to make itself feel good about the money and power. But if you look at, you of course, you can look at the history of Roman Catholicism and see that. You can look at the history of evangelicalism and see that. If you don't believe me, rewind the tape. I mean, you guys are old enough to know you remember the so-called worship wars. um you know It was like, rock and roll is bad until it's not, until it's lucrative. Until it brings people into your churches and until it puts money into your pocket. and Then we create loopholes and workarounds and we sweep it under the rug. In the same way in the 1960s,
00:09:17
Speaker
if you were divorced, you couldn't do anything in the church. You were basically like gay people today in in in evangelical churches. yeah And then all of a sudden, everybody started getting divorced. And these were people who had very deep pockets, by the way. ah Their names were on on the front of the fellowship hall. And so suddenly we said, you know what? ah Let's just start a bunch of divorce recovery classes and quit trying to interrogate people about whether or not their divorce was quote unquote biblical. So this is, there's a real history here, I think, in the way that religion works. And someone like me- As long as it was a wife's fault. Well, true. But someone like me who doesn't take a paycheck from the institution, who can stand up, point the finger and say, the emperor has no clothes. Everyone else who's been standing there thinking that they're a fool, but still loves the king.
00:10:07
Speaker
is able to say, yeah, me too. And those are my people. Dude, I remember actually you mentioned the divorcing is funny because when I was I'm 36, when I was a kid um at my church, I was probably 12. And there was a guy who had had gotten divorced and he he had preached one Sunday. And I guess that was it. And my I only know this because, you know, my mom was telling me about it. um I wasn't privy to the hot goss, but it was a problem. like people It was like a 50-50 split and they had to do a lot of negotiating.
00:10:43
Speaker
with the Bible to their parishioners on why like it's okay. And and um you just saying that made me think a lot about that scenario because it was a that's why I made the joke about it as long as it's the wife's fault. right Because this whole the whole setup was that his wife was like mentally ill and that you know he tried his best to make it work. And I question that narrative you know now, I don't know, but that seems to be the way that those conversations kind of tilted. And in regard to your comment on the the structuring of power, um do you know do you know the name Tony Jones? Sure, yeah, I know Tony well. Oh, okay, cool. um i just like I'll say, look small plug for Tony.
00:11:35
Speaker
um He wrote a book recently. I don't think a lot of people know this, The God of Wild wild play god of wild Places, I believe it's called. yeah And
Growing Up in a Southern Baptist Household
00:11:43
Speaker
I just read it. And it's absolutely brilliant. It's one of the best books I've read all year. So small small plug for Tony Jones, The God of Wild Places. It's like Barbara Brown Taylor meets you know, Wendell Berry, it's fantastic. Yeah, i've I've heard really great things about it. And there's something that I i heard him say at one point where he was, I guess he at one point was connected to the John Piper church um in his ministry. And a conversation came up about atonement theories and there being several. um And he was like, and I'm gonna paraphrase poorly,
00:12:24
Speaker
what ah Tony Jones said, but it was basically like Piper was saying, yeah, we don't want people don't want that. they want an and That's not what they're coming to you for. It doesn't matter that there's this many atonement theories. they need they want They don't want questions from people up here. They want answers from people up here, and that's not helpful. um so that what you had said previously made me think of that too. And like the way that there's always that organization around just trying to push ah an agenda. And that probably comes more from
00:12:57
Speaker
again, keeping your, your paychecks in line and and making sure people don't leave. Cause as soon as there's too many questions being thrown, it is more, it would be more likely that people would, would find someone cause that is, he's not wrong. Piper's not wrong about that by any means. so He would, people would start going a place where they just tell you the thing that they want to hear. And some would stay, but plenty wouldn't. Um, I want to get into some of like your story and your shift into the faith and culture stuff um and just kind of get a synopsis of your of your background. um ah You grew up in the South, pastor's kid. I don't specifically know where or what type of church and things like that. So maybe just give us a ah snapshot of the world you grew up in.
00:13:46
Speaker
Yeah, so this is a this is a long journey from ah from growing up in the setting that I grew up in to writing a ah ah book about inclusion. It's it's been, I think, ah a journey that's lasted my whole life, but started um it started ah growing up in the in the home of a TV preacher. My dad was president of the Southern Baptist Convention when I was growing up, so I grew up sort of in the white-hot center oh wow of the of the religious right.
00:14:22
Speaker
And Jerry Falwell was one of our family friends, you know? Shout out to Liberty University. Shout out. That's where we went. um um and I'm an alum. um Oh, you are. How did I not? I feel like I shouldn't have known that. I guess I didn't do ah my own research. My undergrad is from Liberty, and Dr. Falwell paid for my education. we that was My dad was on the board of trustees at the time, and that's the world that I grew up in, you know, in the in a megachurch pastor's home, in a fundamentalist home. Um, and, uh, you know, that word has meaning and, and, and the meaning of that word actually does apply to the way I was raised. You know, you get a lot of people who like went to Willow Creek or something and it's like, bro, you were not a fundamentalist. Um, I, however, was a card carrying member and, um, that's, that's all I knew.
00:15:12
Speaker
I actually thought that that that's what Christianity was. you know there's There's a temptation sometimes when you're raised in ah in an iteration of a thing to assume that your iteration is is the thing itself. And um that's what I thought. I thought this is this is what Christians are, this is what they believe, this is what they do. um And it wasn't until much later in life, actually, until probably until I was getting my second graduate degree that the cracks in the walls started to run. And I began to ask questions. You know, this is one of the reasons why that the John Piper's in the world. I don't give people questions because questions are so dangerous. ah you When you ask questions, you have no idea where they will lead you. And and so ah once people start asking questions and you know there was a generation of people
00:16:10
Speaker
who didn't think they could ask questions. And then, you know, um you know Anne Lamott walks into the room and Donald Miller's right on her heels. And you start having these people who come in, and today they they those books feel very passe. But back then, just simply asking hard questions of the faith, even even things like doubt. You know, doubt feels so commonplace now. I mean, there are churches that have, you know, entire curriculums encouraging people to doubt.
Education and Evolving Beliefs
00:16:42
Speaker
It's a sermon series on dow doubt. was a Doubt was a big no-no for a lot of us ah growing up in evangelicalism and I think in conservative Roman Catholicism. So that was, though that is the furnace from which I was forged.
00:16:58
Speaker
And what were you getting your master's degrees in? And was it still Liberty that you were at? No, I actually, I went to Liberty. I got a degree in biology and chemistry. That's an interesting place to get a degree from that. Oh, yeah. So I could tell you- Given the creation class I took, I feel like I had some bad takes, but- I could tell you all the reasons why modern science was problematic. That's what a degree in science will give you. it's it's a very It's a very strange ah place to get a degree in science. So ah i I did that. I graduated. I was preparing for medical school and um really burned out on it and was just like, I don't want to do this. So I came home and I told my parents, I said, hey, I think I'm going to withdraw my applications in medical school and I want to be a religion writer.
00:17:47
Speaker
And they're like, that's not a thing. And i said i I think it's a thing. And they're like, it's not a thing. And I'm like, I think it is. So I, you know, growing up in a pastor's home, if you want to study religion, where do you go? You go to seminary. And if you're Southern Baptist, where do you go? A Southern Baptist seminary. And so that's what I did. I i moved to Wake Forest, North Carolina, and I went to a seminary and I got my Master of Divinity. And that was really the first place where I started to question some things. And um and while I wasn't, i wasn't
00:18:25
Speaker
I wasn't even considering unorthodox, quote, unquote answers, but there were just basic things like, um, Hey, you know, we claim to be conservatives, but, um, shouldn't we like not want to destroy God's earth? You know, just like pretty, pretty simple, basic things. And then you look around and you began to see all of the ways in which. um Evangelical beliefs were contradictory, and the the level of cognitive dissonance, not to mention hypocrisy, was really alarming. And when I graduated from Southeastern Seminary, I became immediately aware of just how poorly educated I was in in theology.
00:19:10
Speaker
um I had never read Karl Barth, you know, one of the foremost theologians of of the last century. I didn't know some of the major figures um in Christianity. I had been, you know, reading um a lot of these kind of thinkers and ah basically all white, ah Western, evangelical, modern thinkers. Yeah, less than 100 years old, probably. Yeah. Well, and you know then you look at them and it's like, okay, they teach at this seminary, which is where they got all three degrees. yeah know like Everything was very incestuous. And so I was like, i I think I need an education. So I ended up going to Emory University in Atlanta.
00:19:56
Speaker
had a lovely time at Canler School of Theology and got a research master's there, um worked under a great scholar named Ian McFarland, studying kind of the intersection of Christology and Earth ethics, and did a little additional study at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York in ascetical theology ah many, many years later after I moved here. And, you know, you can kind of you can kind of track the trajectory there, I suppose.
00:20:25
Speaker
Did any of that draw a wedge ah between your family and you, just like that trajectory or is everything? Yeah, I think i think it was in increase you know it was sort of troubling. Like um my brothers, my older brother is an attorney and my younger brother is a pilot. And I think my dad would give his savings account if he could create a time machine and have me go back and be either one of those things. because it's easy to swallow a thing that is not you, not like you at all, right? Because it's just another thing. But when you are a version of the same thing and it's a version that you happen not to like, um it becomes really difficult. And I think additionally, you know, evangelicals, and this is not a statement on my dad. I don't i don't i don't say negative things about him in public. i
00:21:23
Speaker
no I have no need to, but I'm saying this generally. Evangelicals, are um they are bullies with the Bible. It is Bible as weapon. And that is that can be a way in families and in churches and in closed systems, that can be a way for people who have really done a good job learning all their Bible flashcards to dominate and control and coerce people. Shadow wanna what do you do? When somebody goes and they become, you know, they graduate from Padawan to Jedi master themselves,
Theological Tensions in Relationships
00:22:05
Speaker
right? And suddenly now you go, well, you know, it's like Romans, whatever says, and I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, they're actually like, like six modern interpretations of that. And yours is the minority view.
00:22:17
Speaker
And somebody's like, oh crap. um Right? Like it doesn't they just say no it's not and that's the end of it not ah it doesn't mean you don't know what you're talking about. It just means that nobody actually invented that until about 176 years ago. That's just the truth of the matter, right? So when you begin to learn these things, it can create a lot of tension. So I'm not just speaking of my family or my dad or whomever, but right I think a lot of my relationships with the evangelicals, the more educated I got, And the more that that education actually led me away from their way of seeing the world and thinking about the world rather than toward it, ah it created a lot of tension between us. I think that's, it is interesting. Like when I was growing up, you know, I feel like there was a, there was a lane in like evangelicalism that was really big on like, you know, kids need to study apologetics.
00:23:16
Speaker
and apologetics is just like learning how to be right and to be more right than the person you know that you're talking to and like memorizing all the verses and the pre-programmed like thoughts on those verses and like learning how to explain away the verses that seem that seem like they contradict the core ones but they don't actually if you think about them this way and if we go back to the original Greek of this one word and I don't know. I, I, I was kind of like you were saying, like the protectivist, like, uh, view of, of the Bible and stuff. Like I, I didn't realize it's not until we started doing this podcast that I realized that there was people who didn't, who were Christians and Bible believing whatever that don't believe in hell. Like I had no clue that that was a thing. You know, Sam studied all that kind of stuff, but.
00:24:11
Speaker
Yeah, and what's really, really shocking, I think, for a lot of people is when you tell them, not only have christians had there been Christians who've not believed in hell for a long time, but the people who believe those things are older than Protestantism, right? like You get evangelicals, it's like, guys, you've been around, I mean, depending on how you trace the line, since maybe the set late 1700s, And so the arrogance for someone to like assert things as if there's no debate when, um you know, the view that's on the other side has been around since like the fourth century. ah It's a little silly. It doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means you're very, very new to the game. yeah ah dude That was one of the huge like mind boggling, like explosive moments for me was when I realized most of what I believed was
00:25:07
Speaker
you know, from the 17, around the 1700s. As soon as I learned the name John Nelson Darby, my life changed. Oh yeah. Yeah, I say all the time to people, I go, look, I understand, I understand that you believe this is true. I just want to say that if you were born in the 12th century, you and every other Christian would never have heard of this. It doesn't mean that it's not true, right? It just means that there are... they're bad i had i heard ah I heard an evangelical pastor the other day who made a statement where he said, you cannot be a faithful Christian if you don't read your Bible every day.
00:25:47
Speaker
Nice. And I think, well, we all we all took that church history class where we learned about the invention of the printing press. So was like, nobody a Christian until the 16th century? but Not a good one. Not a faithful one. You start to learn like, these These things are, they're pretty they're pretty thin. And what I wish evangelicals could do more often than they do is not change their minds and become like me, because I have no stake in that, except when their views are hurting people, and some of them do. But I just wish that that they could admit the things that we all know are true. And that and I think that that would breed in evangelicals
00:26:32
Speaker
kind of theological humility that would make them a lot easier to get along with. We we talked a lot about, over the years, about um the fact that, you know, if you talk to most evangelicals and you ask them, like, what's their priorities, right? It's like, well, it's God first, and then it's my wife, and then it's my kids, and then it's my F-150 or whatever. but like i I know that like for for me, there wasn't a lot of like discussion about spiritual matters at home.
00:27:12
Speaker
and especially like once i started to drift away from the core principles of things like there's almost sort of an apprehension to talk about any of it. yeah I mean, what was that like were for
Being Outed and Family Tensions
00:27:26
Speaker
you? I mean, were you and your dad to like, did you converse about it a lot or was it like an avoided subject? Well, you know, I mean, such a huge part of my story is being gay. So that's a, that sort of is like the, the giant rainbow elephant in the room. And, um, when I was outed, I was actually a teaching pastor at his church. So, you know, surprise, surprise, things got complicated. And, um, what, what we chose to do is what I think a lot of people, uh, choose to do in similar situations is we adopted a very Clintonian don't ask, don't tell policy.
00:28:06
Speaker
And we never talked about it. And a year after I was outed, I moved to New York City. And we still didn't talk about it. And a few years went by. And um you know I knew that there were assumptions on their side about, you know I don't know, commitment to celibacy or something. Yep. And these were not these were not commitments that I had made at all. um And I figured, well, what does it really matter? I mean, they live you know however many hundreds of miles away. I have a great life here. I've got great friends. I'm i'm living my dream.
00:28:50
Speaker
um But inauthenticity is a heavy weight. and And it is also a thief. It steals relationship. and depth and um it makes you live out of alignment. And I think alignment is so key to being a healthy human. And so over time, I realized that um if i wanted to if I wanted to be healthy for my sake,
00:29:23
Speaker
Then I had to be in alignment, which means that that that we had to break that sort of unspoken rule and we had to cross the boundaries of uncomfortability and we had to have some really hard conversations. And those conversations were not always easy. In fact, my dad always jokes, you know sometimes our conversations could peel paint off the walls. that they there They can be very heated. um ah They're very personal. um And they're very emotional. and um But the net result is that I don't have to carry that weight. you know when when When you've got this kind of don't ask, don't tell in a situation like this, with like ah
00:30:06
Speaker
a gay son, the gay son carries most of that weight. um It's actually, it's ah it can be, initially it's liberating for both parties, because it gives me time to figure out who am I? Who is Jonathan Merritt really? And it gives him space to go, you know, maybe I didn't do something wrong, which is sort of the way that a lot of conservative Christians think, Christian parents think with gay children. Over time, however, It's just me having to carry a lot of secrets. And the other person is liberated by their own convenient assumptions. And it becomes really imbalanced. And those are not my weights to carry. I've carried enough weights. I did it my whole life. And here I am doing it again. And so it feels natural to me because that that's a that is a habit that I have developed honestly.
00:31:01
Speaker
But there comes a point where you say, this is no way to live. And actually the pain of saying those things out loud is is actually less than at some point the pain of holding them in. And that's when you have no choice but to start moving your mouth. I have ah kind of a two-part question to follow that up. ah You had come to terms with your Sexuality while you're working in your dad's church and just kind of keeping that you haven't you hadn't come out yet I'm curious is what that was like for you knowing that it wasn't an affirming environment knowing that you were You it sounds like you alluded to being comfortable with who you are. You hadn't taken any vow of celibacy of any sorts um you were so ah ah like, you know kind of expand on that a bit and then
00:31:59
Speaker
The situation in which someone outed you, was it someone who had an issue or did they dig up dirt on you? Was there, did you have close people that it just slipped and then it, you know, that's not like wildfire. Yeah. You know, um, I, I, everybody, everybody who is living with that kind of trauma, um, like being in the closet has ways of medicating themselves. Right. Some people drink a lot. Some people have a crazy amount of like monkey sex with strangers and stuff. like You know what I'm saying? yeah They just go nuts. They just go nuts. um And they medicate with sex. um ah Some people, like me, medicate with work.
00:32:49
Speaker
And I just disappeared into my work. I became incredibly successful. I wrote not hundreds, but thousands of articles and in in the heat of my career. um I was publishing books by the time I was 27. I'd earned two graduate degrees and I started publishing books. I was publishing a book every two years. I started ghostwriting books for, you know, Grammy winning rappers and, uh, you know, presidential candidates and reality TV stars. And I was writing sometimes two or three books a year. um my god And so I didn't have a lot of time for sex with other people. um But you're welcome for that joke. But but I got some stuffed animals yet to get rid of. But yeah, right. Right. listen don'
00:33:43
Speaker
no Sorry, you weren't 12. You were an adult at that point. I was an adult. Thank you very much. Apologies to my Woody Woodpecker. Yeah. Oh my God. ah so so i But I was traveling through Chicago, actually. I was speaking at the Q Conference. It was a conference you used to be called the Q Conference. It's called something I don't know is a disadvantage now. Um, and I was speaking at the Q conference in, in, uh, there was a guy who I had connected with who was gay and a Christian and he, he really liked an article that I had written in USA today about this issue. And it was like calling on Christians to be more loving to LGBTQ folks. And he said, Oh, I'm just up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. You're in Chicago. I'd love to take you to dinner. Okay.
00:34:33
Speaker
So he comes down, um takes me to dinner. We like have a little make out sesh after, you know, having a few drinks and in the backseat of his car. And um we did not have sex. And I said, I was like, I need to go. i My head is like, my head is rotating. and I need to go. So I went back to my room by myself and I went home and um I went to see a therapist who was not helpful, so I didn't go back to that therapist. So the Christian therapist? Yeah, I like looked somebody up in the, youth you know, and it was not good. The guy was, I knew there was something, there was like that red blinking light in your heart that goes off that says like danger. um So I didn't go back. And at the same time, this guy,
00:35:24
Speaker
was saying, I want to come down and visit you. I'm going to get a hotel room. Let's hang out. I want to be with you, blah, blah, blah. And I had no interest in being with this person at all. And you know as as in any situation like that, I think there was an experience of rejection and frustration. And I finally cut the guy off. I said, I can't talk to you anymore. So we stopped talking we stopped talking completely. two I think two or three years later, Chick-fil-A has their big fiasco and I wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, In Defense of Eating Chick-fil-A. And I said in the piece that this, I said this has nothing to do with my my views on gay marriage. it's an It was an argument about the the tethering of one's consumerism and one's politics and the way in which that makes life in a capitalistic society virtually impossible.
00:36:18
Speaker
I love that. I still have those conversations with friends today.
Public Outing and Its Impact
00:36:25
Speaker
Amazon, Chick-fil-A, anything, every corporation you can find your problems with. I'm going to pull that article up. It's like, okay, you can eat chips ahoy, but you can eat Oreos and you can go to Walmart, but you can't go to Target. It's like, it's mind numbing. My argument was, look, if there's nothing inherent in the product that is unethical, then um you're you're you're free. Unless you personally feel that way, right? if you If you feel bad doing it, don't do it. But to expect everybody else to do what you're doing is sort of insane. um So that was my argument. That piece went mega viral. And um he then wrote a blog post essentially outing me. this guy And that was it.
00:37:14
Speaker
So not, not the, not the therapist, but the the the guy that you had to cut off. That's right. Yeah. He came, he came back and you know, it's like, yeah I always wondered if one day this person would, because, you know, in some ways, This guy was kind of like, he had been like a, he had had like a a show on religious television and then he came out and got fired. And so he had like, he'd never really become a person of import, but he wanted to be so badly. And I think he thought I was a person of import, which I was not. I mean, I was, I was successful in this tiny little pond, but I was not like a superstar. But I think he thought, well, if I out this guy, I'll be,
00:38:00
Speaker
I'll, I'll, I'll make a name for myself. I remember he wrote an, an um, an essay at salon dot.com and it was titled something like why I outed an evangelical star. And I was like an evangelical star. Who's he talking about? Um, it was so weird. So, uh, but that was both the worst and best thing that's ever happened to me. I wouldn't wish it on anyone because people die. People die because of these sorts of things. It's a horrible and unethical thing to do to someone, um but it was also incredibly liberating. Yeah, I imagine it has like to rip someone's own story out of their hands like that can have tremendous effects on the way they tell their story and the way that they process it.
00:38:55
Speaker
i especially knowing that culture. I mean, I even just, I harbored still, I still harbor guilt to a degree of, you know, the being at liberty, working where I worked, ah assuming, having reasons to assume that some of my friends or colleagues were gay, but not like, But recognizing now what, like as an adult, why I was never a safe person to come out to, like you just, that culture is, it's a steamroller. Uh, and if you're not in the right place at the right time to protect yourself, uh, when you, when you make that choice, I imagine it can be incredibly damaging. Yeah. Yeah. How how is that essay received?
00:39:50
Speaker
because I feel like that's a pretty divisive thing. I could see like the reactionary crowd being like, yeah, get them. Well, the argument that was being made, which was which was um ridiculous, but nobody you know nobody does their homework these days. you know Only journalists do their homework and we're few and far between. so He had said in there you know that I was a guy who was out here essentially um
00:40:20
Speaker
peddling anti-gay something. When the reality is, um I was incredibly progressive. Everything I was writing was, I mean, the the the article that this guy first read was in USA Today, and it was called, An Evangelical's Plea. Love the center. And it was a dismantling of that trope that you should love the sinner but hate the sin. And what I said is is that actually what that does is it just frees people to be really hateful about what they perceive to be sin. And therere you never see people who say those kinds of things trying to nurture in their lives outward expressions of love for people that they consider to be sinners. And so it's it's a problematic phrase.
00:41:08
Speaker
That's the kind of stuff that I've been writing, but you know, when you, when you, when you, when you say that someone is harming the community, there is a small fraction of people out there who will say, Oh, well then it's justified. It's justified. Um, you know, that's a very small number of people, but I think he was sort of maybe playing to that crowd. But they all comment on Instagram. Yeah, everyone. It is very interesting, the idea of a gay man outing another gay man in that like, like to me, I feel like if I heard that, even in a time where I, even at a time in my life where I wasn't like an affirming person, it would just, it would
00:41:57
Speaker
it would stick out to me as bizarre. like ah did Do you know if this person received significant pushback at all from that? ah Some, yeah, some. And you know today, I think they have a podcast with a D-level celebrity or something. I can't remember. I stumbled on it. Somebody pointed me to something the other day and I just kind of went and looked at it. and I was like, oh, that's that's borders on the interesting. But there's still... trying to do their thing. um But I think it was ah actually had the opposite effect. you know They thought it was gonna be kind of a career explosion and it was ah it was the opposite of that. It just and just was was a bad look. i i know i just I had to let it go. I couldn't be, I couldn't, you know I was angry for a good six months
00:42:55
Speaker
And then I had to let it go. It was not it was no way to live. you know And it was not
Evangelical Leaders and Private Struggles
00:43:02
Speaker
it was not something that I wanted to live with. And so I had to shed it for for my sake rather than his. I mean, i have no I don't need to be friends with this person. I don't want i don't need to reconnect with them on you know Dateline or something. But um but you know I wish them well. I wish them no ill will. And ah and like I said, In, in, in many ways, it was a, it was a gift. Thank God. I'm not, I don't know how long it would have taken me. I don't know how long it would have taken me because I was exactly what I was saying. You remember that Upton Sinclair quote. It is impossible to get a man to understand the thing when, when his salary is dependent upon him, not understanding it. And that includes self understanding.
00:43:48
Speaker
And that's why a lot of people are in these evangelical masculinity cults. And next thing you know, it's like they have an inappropriate relationship with some kid in their college ministry um because of that exact same thing. you know They're paid to not deal with that what's really going on in their lives. And so I i think of it as a terrible, wonderful gift. Even even prior to that, um you know hearing about what you were writing about, but the church space that you're in, you must have been living in some in a baseline level of stress, right? Were the things you were writing and the ideology you were positing accepted, um or was it too progressive for a lot of the people in your world at that time?
00:44:40
Speaker
Well, you know, people saw me as as a kind of safe, that the thing I used to hear from everyone was, um I don't agree with what you with everything you write, but i always I always read it. It always makes me think. And so I had a huge, I was like a gateway drug for evangelicals, because I would come out and just sort of ask a question that, They couldn't ask because you were kind of hitting for their team a little bit. Yeah. So that was, I think that was a big draw for me as here I was in this cocoon, this protected cocoon with my evangelical, you know, credentials, but as going just far enough, just to the inside of the edge.
00:45:32
Speaker
And without ever without ever walking to the outside of that of that rim. and And so, you know, there were a a lot of people who kind of at the same time were doing similar work. You know, Rachel Hald Evans was one of those. And Rachel sat on the outside of the edge, and I sat on the inside of the edge. And I would sort of, people kind of passed through me to her. um And so you know I think there were a lot of us who sat at different places in this moment before deconstruction was even a thing.
00:46:09
Speaker
uh, where we were, we were asking, we were asking these kinds of questions that led people on journeys, sometimes out of the church, sometimes out of the faith, uh, you know, sometimes just to, uh, I think a more, a greater level of awareness wherever they were about the true nature of the thing that they were practicing.
00:46:33
Speaker
I think sometimes like that kind of thing, it gives you permission to, to consider an idea that otherwise would be off limits, you know, when it's like a trusted figure that's not going so far outside of the boundaries of what, you know, you're willing to even look at like. It lets you tiptoe to the line and at least consider like those you know viewpoints that are on the outskirts of what you you're willing to accept at all. and that's yeah I feel like that's how people make meaningful shifts because you know there is a there is definitely a strain of like ah
00:47:10
Speaker
Exvangelicalism where you know sam always talks about it it was like you go from one form of extremism to the other like, you know militant Conservative christian, you know apologists to militant atheists, you know in the course of like three months yeah, and you know, they're they're pretty noisy a lot of the time, but I feel like that that The meaningful, like considerate, you know like thoughtful shifts that people make are um they're slow and they take some time. And you need like you need those people ah that allow you to to explore the outer rim of like what what even seems acceptable at all. Yeah, that's right.
Evolving Biblical Arguments
00:47:59
Speaker
That's right. i feel like And and i I think for me,
00:48:02
Speaker
um I was making arguments that were, um you know, you can make an argument using the tools of ah of the the left or the right. And my, my argument you know, the left will often make make arguments based on these kind of big big, broad principles like justice. And, you know, the right will often say, well, this is what the Bible actually teaches and they in kind of a literal literalistic way. And that's what I was doing, right? So I'd write an article about immigration and I would and i would just brik drag out this litany of verses about welcoming the stranger. And it was a very evangelical way to make a very not evangelical argument. And I think that's something that made me very effective among evangelicals. Now over time, obviously that changed because I began to read the Bible differently. And I began to realize that those arguments were
00:49:02
Speaker
were not not they they they they worked well when they worked well and then you couldn't apply them to other things and they were really problematic when you tried to think through other issues yeah like when you try it's like it worked well especially for the people that it worked well for who still need There are a lot of people in that world that need a handful of Bible verses to move them on any topic and instead of just insinuations, logic, ideas, concepts, motifs, whatever. And I feel like as you move out of fundamentalism, you do drift more into metaphor and allowing that to work for your life ah and more for the fundamentalist crowd. You built your house on sand.
00:49:48
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. ah But i um I think of what you were saying in, you know, what your work was doing, what people like Rachel Held Evans was doing. It's like, to me, that stuff was like tantamount to like a spiritual halfway house, where you're like,
00:50:08
Speaker
i like i was I'm part of well what's left of it, I guess, a church still. It's hard to call it a church. We disincorporated and all that during COVID. um But it's still just a group of people that I love to spend my time with. um But we went through this moment of like ah huge like a lot of people coming. and It was tons of people who came from the evangelical borderline fundamentalist world, mostly just traditionally evangelical. and
00:50:40
Speaker
Almost all of them, it was their stopping point on their way out. They just needed a place to be released from this shit ah that they had grown up with. And I know for some people involved, that was hard ah because that wasn't their intent. ah They were they were hoping that they would find a place to find a home and find comfort. That was never a priority for me. It was just if you did great, if you don't. Just that the freedom ah for people to to move on to me was a special thing to be a part of. um
00:51:16
Speaker
But yeah, I think those spaces are incredibly necessary. And I think at that time too, Jonathan, I think the work you were doing, I feel like there's been a big shift in a lot of ways. I'm sure there's, and you could probably name several of them, ah but I feel like there's been a big shift in the way that
00:51:38
Speaker
we're managing that middle ground now where 10 years ago ish, you you know, you're finding people just asking these questions that you go, holy shit. That's like snaps you out of some things. And then I feel like now there's just a lot of people with a bone to pick. And we're just, I, maybe it's just a space I'm in, but I feel like I see that more than anything now. um Yeah, because because you know you you you they're there're the the middle ground is eroded. you know The kind of ah kind of thing that I was doing doesn't exist anymore.
The Erosion of Middle Ground in Beliefs
00:52:17
Speaker
um there isn't There isn't like 10 voices between the left fringe and the right fringe, because you can get canceled for that.
00:52:26
Speaker
So unfortunately, what we've had what we have is is you used to have like um used to have like cults, fundamentalism, evangelicalism, soft evangelicalism or liberal evangelicalism, call it you Jim Wallace evangelicalism or Ron Cider evangelicalism. And then you had like like um middle ground ah mainline ah Protestantism, so what the UMC used to be, for example, where it kind of like straddled those things.
00:53:00
Speaker
And then you went all the way down, you know, until you got to like the, the, the UCC and the Episcopal church. And, you know, then you fell off the cliff into like, you know, unitarians. That was the spectrum. Now. Um, and that, and that was sort of denominationalism kind of did that for you, but even denominations now have continued to pull. Yeah. a lot of split liness Right. Like Southern Baptists have gotten more conservative Presbyterians have gotten more conservative. The, the Anglican church in America, which was the kind of conservative break off group of the Episcopal church. There's a move in that organization to overturn women's ordination. I was just reading an article about this, you know,
00:53:46
Speaker
ah yeah Meanwhile, you go into a lot of Episcopal churches and it's like, you know what is this Wiccan? You get this kind of spectrum where everything is has moved move to these fringes and then the the public expression of those things. um Has become really just fundamentalism on the left and the right some of that has been driven I think by the mass exodus from evangelicalism into the mainline and these other liberal groups because fundamentalism is a hell of a drug and A lot of people never actually left fundamentalism Yeah, and they just traded conservative fundamentalism for liberal fundamentalism
00:54:33
Speaker
And all all of the same machinery is still in place. All the litmus testing, all of the yeah us versus theming, all of the Puritanism, all of the cancel, I mean, cancel culture. It's like the same people burning JK Rowling books today burned them 20 years ago for a different reason. Yeah. So, you know, it's like, it's like we get it. We get it right. Uh, that those, those things are still very much alive. And if you have eyes to see, if you've studied this stuff for long enough, you engage, you engage the hard left and it feels oddly familiar to you.
00:55:16
Speaker
And so I think that that there used to be kind of classical liberalism and classical evangelicalism, and there was all these kind of places in between, and you could find space. And and that middle ground is has largely eroded. It doesn't mean nobody's there. It's just been depopulated. Yeah. Do you feel, okay. Do you feel that the, the, I don't even know how to like encapsulate it time wise, but like the last 25 years, like the the preoccupation with like, um,
00:56:02
Speaker
political tribalism and stuff, and and how that's that sort of co-opted religion to the point where like that's that's really kind of people's religion in a lot of ways. like The things that they say about their faith being their priority and stuff, it's like, yeah, but you really only ever talk about. you know ah conservative politics or or you know this and that and the other. Is is that like an aberration or is that does it just feel that way like the cable news cycle and stuff like that? I mean, is that always how it's been? Well, for a very long time.
00:56:37
Speaker
um circa Constantine, ah you know these these these institutions have been um very enmeshed. But they're enmeshed in a way now that is um really surprising. you know nobody The kind of theological debates that are happening now, you can you really can't find one that doesn't have some political correlate.
Intersections of Religion and Politics
00:57:07
Speaker
Nobody's fighting about infant baptism.
00:57:09
Speaker
yeah You know what I'm saying? Like that used to be the stuff that really got people rankled. Now we're fighting, you know, it was like the Southern Baptist convention this week. They were like fighting about IVF and is IVF moral. And somebody said, why are they fighting about IVF? And I said, I bet I can tell you in 30 seconds, I go on to Google and I went, oh yeah, the Senate is debating IVF. yeah Oh, okay, I got it. And also IVF is very closely tied to abortion logic, right? So there were people talking this week about embryonic orphans, um that that that that every, it if you wanna know what it looks like to be conformed to the image of this world.
00:57:56
Speaker
Look at the kind of fights that are happening in these theological circles. Every single one is a political fight with Jesus wallpaper.
00:58:08
Speaker
That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. I don't even respond to it. That's pretty much how it is. That sums it up. I have one more question for you. OK.
00:58:25
Speaker
in the immediate aftermath of being outed. Did you have any weirdo NPCs that like came forward in your life because God had told them that they were gonna shepherd you through your time of trial? Oh gosh, I still have weirdos, let me tell you. I yeah i get, yes, ah but at the time, i'll tell you I'll tell you what was the real burden, was the number of conservative evangelical pastors. who would like DM me on social media and then send me like a picture of their penis the next day. No way. Oh my God. I want names. I'm telling you. I'm telling you. I'm not. I'm not. It would be like. Blink twice if it was Greg Locke. This is so and so the pastor of Pigs Knuckle Baptist Church in central Arkansas. He's being so nice. He's telling me he's really whatever. And next thing you know, he's kind he's married with children.
00:59:24
Speaker
and confessing, and I had a guy who was running a huge evangelical organization, actually, and he flew to New York right when I moved to New York. He flew to New York to meet with me. I'm having lunch and he just blurts out. he's like He was 58 years old at the time. Just blurts out that he's gay. Guy's married with three kids, runs a huge prominent evangelical organization, and I'm like, I thought we were having lunch. I mean, I, and you know, I think, I think then what he's hoping is I end up in his hotel room, you know, which by the way did not happen. Um, so that's what I think I didn't expect is that when you become that like soft target, the the number of closeted evangelical leaders is stunning. That's and incredible. and
01:00:17
Speaker
And I know a lot, I actually know a lot of them today who who who have said, look, I've had my kids, I've done my thing and I'm never coming out. And I go, Do what you do, man. it's That's your business. But the number of confessions that I've had to hold on to. So now, you know i i get I get numerous to this day, numerous DMs every single week. It goes in the request folder. If I happen to check the request folder, I would just delete them out. I can't even allow them in. Even if somebody comes and says, hey, will you give me your recommendation for books to help me on my journey? It's like, I know where this is headed.
01:00:58
Speaker
And maybe it's not. Maybe it's not, but I know where it heads a lot of times. You know, to some disappearing photo at 1130 Eastern Standard Time. No, thank you. Not here for that.
Promoting Inclusivity Through Children's Literature
01:01:10
Speaker
That's incredible, man. Wow. ah Before we let you go, man, obviously we want to talk about your first children's book, right? Yeah. Yeah. My Gunkle and Me. I was privileged enough to get a copy of it, read it to my kids. And ah what's funny for me is I
01:01:37
Speaker
I realized that I hadn't had any real, my kids are eight and five. ah Sorry, eight and seven. I don't know why I said five. I'm just living in the past, I guess. I don't want my son to grow up is what it is. um No, eight and seven. And it dawned on me that I hadn't had a real conversation with them.
01:02:01
Speaker
outside of like marginal touch and go things about the fact that some men love men, some women love women, some people love both. And I think what also hit me is their uncle, one of their uncles, two of their uncles, ah ones, he's out, but it's a very quiet thing because of it's challenging for him. um He's much older. uh but uh my wife's cousin who they my kids call uncle is gay and he's very out it's not a hidden thing it's not even an embarrassing thing or quiet thing for him to talk about if anything he'll make fun of our evangelical family members for the way they've treated him uh being gay over the years he's made it his own thing to to have over them in some way so i'm like
01:02:57
Speaker
and and him and his his boyfriend, his ex-boyfriend had stayed with us before.
01:03:04
Speaker
And we're like, Oh, you know, your uncle and his boyfriend's going to stay in your room and you guys are going to sleep in this room. And we, so we have these conversations and it still was, I guess what dawned on me was that even with that, not having an explicit conversation with my kids about it was that when I was reading them this book. Uh, and it sparked those conversations. They had really no idea what I was talking about, which made me feel bad. um And I also felt some ah strange, unexpected discomforts come up, if I'm going to be completely honest. It's hard to tell them how wrong that is. yeah Because I had never thought about, I hadn't thought enough about it ahead of time. Like I've been, you know, I moved out of evangelicalism quite some time ago. I've been an affirming person for quite some time. and
01:03:54
Speaker
I just didn't, it's like talking about it. I found myself getting like jumbled with my words. And I'm like, I guess I didn't think about it enough how to communicate it to children. i It was just very impactful for me to read your book to my kids and then talk about it. Because my son goes, what's a gunkle? I go, maybe we'll find out afterwards. And I read it. And there's nothing explicit in there. um It's not giving kids a lesson on what it means to have a gay uncle. it's and So then afterwards, I go, do kids have any questions? And my son goes, yeah, I still have no idea what a gunkle is. And I was like, all right, let's get into it. So um when I wrote my gunkle on me, you know it's not like a lot of queer children's books out there. And i can I can say that now. I didn't know that until I wrote this book. And I started to be being asked to go to like queer story time hours at bookstores.
01:04:52
Speaker
And you know, um before I was always in these Christian circles and people were looking at me weird because I'm gay. And now I'm in all these queer circles and people are looking at me weird because I'm Christian. And so I like, I'll go to these these story time hours and they're like, they're like, um you know, dissertations on pronouns. And they're all trying to educate children on a way of seeing the world. That's not the book I wrote. um i'm not I'm not bashing those books. It's just not the one that came out of me. The one that came out of me is a story about a boy named Henry. And Henry's like a lot of kids these days. He's different. And you know, for a lot of kids, um being different is a liability. It's a risk. It's a risk to your sanity. It's a risk to your safety. It's a risk to your social life.
01:05:51
Speaker
And he gets a visit from his gunkle and they have a fabulous time there with, with his dog, Jimmy Choo in tow. And the gunkle really models for him some, in some ways that are explicit and some you have to kind of read between the lines to pick up on it. He models what it means um to embrace your differences as your gifts to the world, because that's what makes you you. And at the end of the book, Henry gets it. And he turns back toward the little readers and he says, you can be what God made you, whatever you are. And I think the brilliance of the book is, is exactly what you said. I i intentionally never define what a gunkle is because what i I wanted to do was one, to simply tell a story about a world where gay relatives exist, yes which is the world that so many kids live in.
01:06:48
Speaker
And two, I wanted to create an empowerment tool for parents like you that would force them to say, how would I have this conversation? Now you've got an opportunity. you have I've cracked the door for you and you can do the rest. And that's what I hope I do um for parents. i don't want I don't want their kids to think about these things the way that some children's author they've never met thinks about these things. I wanted to give them a beautiful story that helps them to love themselves just as they are and not as somebody else wants them to be and in that space to allow parents to do the work that only parents can do.
01:07:32
Speaker
it And you knocked out of the park. i could I honestly, I had to take long pauses throughout. My kids kept looking at me while I was reading it because I would get too choked up to keep reading. like I think it had more of an impact on me than it did on them. I i loved it. I appreciated it. I think it's doing something different. Like you said, it just it's creating a world where gay people exist and they're part of your family. And that's the case for my children and that's something that
01:08:03
Speaker
like we don't want to we don't want to have to make it a conversation. ah you You have to because the world we live in, but we want it to be is less of a as much as a conversation as just anybody having relationships, you know, make it incredibly normal. I know that'll be challenging because we have evangelical family that might tell them otherwise, or they'll receive that through osmosis, potentially through some of those family members. but I thought it was such a ah wonderful book and my daughter is someone who's had a challenging time this year in school and I think that also thinking about those things she in the way that she's been different in the way that other children have made her feel alone and and then thinking of the uncle her her gay uncle who she adores
01:08:56
Speaker
and that seeing that connection between the boy and the story and his uncle is just like, oh, it really hit me, man. I i probably loved it. You know, like my kids, it was like another story almost, and I'm like barely getting through it because it was so emotionally salient for me. I think, um,
01:09:25
Speaker
I think kids can actually, I think kids actually really thrive in households like yours with um with evangelical family members alongside gay family members. Because you know what? That's what the world is. Yeah. And um and kids need to know what the world is like. You know, yeah um I dedicated this book to Mr. Rogers. And Mr. Rogers, you know, he got into television to be kind of a surrogate father because he saw people coming um back from World War II who were emotionally stoic. And he said, who's going to raise these kids to know that feelings have to be mentionable and manageable.
01:10:23
Speaker
And so he would enter in their homes ah to be fathers to kids who who had fathers who were sort of disconnected from themselves and he would always sign off. And I remember watching this growing up, I encountered him decades after his show had first aired. And um you know he'd look into the the the screen and he would say, you you know you make this day a special day by just your being you. There's no one in the world like you and I like you just the way you are. And for someone like me, that was like so deeply meaningful because that was just the only thing in the world I needed to hear. But the other thing I really respected about him is that um he always had difficult conversations. When the goldfish died, he had a conversation about death. When the challenger crashed, he didn't pretend it didn't happen. And there are people in the world who are not like us.
01:11:22
Speaker
And a lot of those people in the world wish that people like us, like me, didn't exist. um And we have to learn to live alongside them too. And so I think it can be really wonderful for kids to have um both kinds of people in their lives so long as they have parents like you who can help them to find their way through in the midst of a family that looks a lot like the world they're going to have to get through as grownups. Man, I love that. And now you're part of this Mr. Rogerian ethos. It's a fantastic book. I've already said it a million times. um You can get it ah through your website, Amazon. Where else can you get it? Where can you get it? Anywhere? Anyway, Barnes and Noble. Target, Target, Barnes and Noble. Okay.
01:12:14
Speaker
If you have kids, just get it. Don't think about it. If you have kids, get this fucking book. It's fantastic. It'll spark great conversations. um You know, you know, there another thing I'll say, too, and I'm not just saying this because I wrote the book and, ah you know, most people never earn royalties from their books. So you go buy a book at Target. It doesn't go money doesn't go into my pocket. But if you if you believe in a world that's kind and inclusive, and you want that world to exist.
01:12:48
Speaker
then the way that you the way that you do that is you have to tell kids stories about kindness and inclusivity. That the world we're gonna create is largely a function of the types of stories we choose to tell our kids. And if that's the world you believe in, then go out and buy books just like this and don't buy one by 10. Buy them for your neighbors and your friends because because when you tell a kid a story, you change the type of adult that kid will be when they grow up. And I think that matters I think that matters a lot. God, absolutely. Man, Jonathan, this is amazing. Thank you so much for joining us. I've really appreciated the conversation. As I've already overstated, I really appreciate your new book. um So thank you. My gosh, the pleasure is mine. Thank you, guys. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for listening, and we will see you next time.