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Ep. 78 - Watch Me Make This Quarter Disappear w/ Kevin Klein of Valleyheart
69 Plays3 years ago
Our guest this week is musician and songwriter Kevin Klein of the alternative rock trio, Valleyheart! Kevin is a former Christian school kid whose relationship to faith has changed a lot, over the years. On June 3, Valleyheart is releasing a brand new, highly-anticipated album on Tooth & Nail records entitled “Heal My Head,” and we can’t wait to hear it! You can follow Valleyheart on Twitter and Instagram (@valleyheartma), and stream their most recent single, “Miracle,” wherever you listen to music!
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Transcript
The Ritual of Gene Day
00:00:00
Speaker
But on Fridays we had what was called Gene Day, where if you brought in a dollar and paid your teacher, you could wear regular clothes. You had to pay to wear jeans?
00:00:12
Speaker
Yeah. So every kid was so excited. Like you got your dollar. Like it was this thing. It was this like Friday morning ritual to gather all the money. The teacher would come around. I remember people would leave the dollar face up on their, like, you know, those desks that we used to have that would open and those wooden desks. The teacher would just, I mean, we would leave a dollar and the teacher would come around and be like, okay, okay.
00:00:34
Speaker
But the weird part is, you know, if you sort of dressed up normally that day and then got to school and didn't have a dollar, you were- Take your clothes off in front of everybody? That's
True Lies Restaurant Experience
00:00:44
Speaker
so cool. That would be bad.
00:01:03
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Growing Up Christian. I'm Casey. And I'm Sam. And today, so we had a sales meeting at work and afterwards we're kind of hanging out. The guys are loading their vans and stuff.
00:01:19
Speaker
I looked at the one guy I'm like, you want to go to lunch real quick? He said, Yeah, I'll go to lunch, you know, something fast. So around the corner from my warehouse, there's this like, it's, it's like a honky tonk, basically. And I live in like,
00:01:34
Speaker
Is a honky tonk an actual that's a restaurant? Yeah, it's like a place that it's kind of like a bar with a dance floor. That's kind of country western themed. I don't know the technical definition of honky tonk, but I feel like Merriam Webster. I'm probably close. Yeah, I mean, I've only heard the I would say the only time I've heard the word honky tonk is in those pop country songs. And it's usually followed by Badonkadonk, right?
00:02:07
Speaker
That's a classic, yeah, that's a good one. So I get what you're saying. I'm picturing it and I'm there with you. It's like Hooters with 10 gallon hats. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. I don't feel any urge to protect this place or anything like that. So if you want to Google it, it's called True Lies, True Lies. I don't know why. Exactly, like you would expect it to be. Yeah, it's in El Dorado, Kansas.
00:02:33
Speaker
El Dorado. That's what people say. I don't know. Road to El Dorado. Do we have a so we have a Selena here that everybody says Selina. They don't say Arkansas River. They say our Kansas River.
00:02:49
Speaker
I don't know. But anyway, I argue with the local dialect. Right, right. That is what it is. So I'd never been to true lies before, but I'd heard about it. It's like it sounds like a porn shop in the middle of Pennsylvania off of I-84. That would be classier than what it actually is.
00:03:12
Speaker
But it's like, it's like a restaurant by day and it opens at like 5am. So it's like it's open crazy hours. So open from 5am to like the middle of the night. And at some point it turns into a very rowdy like country bar.
00:03:27
Speaker
And I've heard there's a lot of fights there and stuff like that. But I'd heard that the food was
Debate on Government and Staffing
00:03:33
Speaker
all right. And it's so close to where my warehouse is. I'm like, let's just go over to this place. Let's try it out. So the whole time I was there, I was thinking like, if Sam comes to visit at some point, I'm bringing him here. He would hate this place so much. We could record a podcast just from our table there.
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of those places that's like, you know, it's one thing to be like country. There's nothing wrong with that. It's kind of charming in a way and stuff. It's one thing to be conservative. These people are like, like turn it up to 11.
00:04:10
Speaker
Like I bet you whoever owns this place, the back of his truck is just loaded with bumper stickers between the rust spots. It's like an eight foot American flag. And then on the other end of the truck, it's like a thin blue line flag just blowing in the wind.
00:04:30
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Well, here, I'll give you some context here. So we're walking in and on the door, taped to the front door when you walk in, it says, true lies. Sadly, due to government handouts, no one wants to work anymore. Therefore, we are short staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did choose to come to work today and remember to tip your server. They chose to show up to serve you. Oh, that's on the front door when you walk in. And then we have a.
00:05:00
Speaker
We have a, uh, I guess I'll, I guess pizza place is vague enough, but people who know me and are around here will know it out. But they have a Facebook page that I follow for updates, comment pizza. Yeah. And it's, they post similar things, uh, not quite as heavy handed, but it's always, it's like, nobody wants to work these days, but we're hiring. It's like,
00:05:24
Speaker
And then they tell you how much they pay an hour and you're like, yeah, that's why nobody wants to work for that. They don't have to anymore. I don't, why is that a bad thing? Can we detour on that? Is it, why is it a bad thing where if you don't have to work for $12 an hour, why the fuck would you?
00:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, staffing is a problem everywhere. It's everyone's hiring. It's not because nobody wants to work. It's just the state of things right now. There's more jobs and there are people looking. It's just yeah, sucks. It sucks. But you know what might help with that is more open immigration, but I digress.
00:06:05
Speaker
Hey, they're not looking for that. Don't don't give them easy solutions to their questions. Yeah, that's it doesn't jive with the worldview. But so, OK, so we sit down and it's shocking the amount of like stimulus there is in this place. Yeah, I like not surprised to know that what I'm guessing that you can barely see the walls with all the paraphernalia on them. A ton of paraphernalia. Yeah. OK, so one whole wall, it's two flags.
00:06:34
Speaker
One says Trump 2020, we got screwed. And the other one says Trump 2024. I don't know if that one had a catchphrase underneath. I couldn't see it from where I was. I hope we get screwed. They had a big info war sign. Okay. In the thing, which is something I haven't seen at a business before. No, I've never seen that at a business. That's remarkable. They had multiple wooden
00:07:02
Speaker
What do they call that? I keep wanting to say fatigue, relief of Donald Trump on the wall, like the bar.
00:07:11
Speaker
is pictures of Donald Trump on the front of the bar. What? How old is this place? I mean, it looks old. It's a down. They recently redecorated. It's kind of like an ongoing project. God. It's like a cracker barrel for races. I'm going to say, I see the cracker barrel.
00:07:38
Speaker
Kind of old timey, it's sort of fun, you know? It's like a cracker barrel but with a modern racist twist.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah. And so there's this thing going on in the background. There's one TV over top of the dance floor and it's playing something and yeah. Okay. Like you go into a restaurant during the day and there's a TV on like it's normally sports center or something. That guy, there's that one guy that's always on ESPN every five seconds. I don't follow any of that. I don't know what it's a sport. What are sports? I can't. That's what I like about you.
00:08:17
Speaker
It's the one thing we have in common Yeah, it's like that maybe it's like a soap opera usually it's like some like milk toast news station or something like that this one I noticed like I looked over my shoulder and I saw an election map and I'm like, oh That's not good
00:08:39
Speaker
And then you saw Mike Lindell on TV. I wonder if Mike Lindell's part of it. There's some sort of documentary thing, like quote unquote documentary thing going on around right now. It's making the rounds in like the conservative circles.
Conservative Documentary on Election Fraud
00:08:54
Speaker
That's like it's laying out all the evidence for how the election was stolen and it's showing people stuffing ballot boxes and whatnot, like the mail ballots.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's I forgot the name of it. Yeah, some loser. I don't know which one, but put out a documentary compiling all the evidence. And it's basically a bunch of like weird videos of people dropping off ballots and ballot drop off points and being like, look, they're dropping off ballots. That's too many. There's a problem. It's insane.
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and like, I mean, what have we, we've been hearing like nonstop news for the last two years about like Republican gerrymandering, how they're like redistricting Florida top to bottom. It's that it's like, yeah, yeah. The, the government's corrupt. Like,
00:09:41
Speaker
Of course it is. Like, do you think this only happens on one side, whatever this is, if this is anything, this is a bipartisan strategy, I guarantee it. I don't know. But yeah, it was a lot. And it was one of those places where the waitstaff is like,
00:09:57
Speaker
I say white stiff, I only talk to one person. She was rude. She was like rude from the get go. Not very nice. It's because she's mad that she's the only one who showed up for work that day, dude. She's gonna work double time. I'll tell you what, one thing I can tell you for certain about this lady, she's on board with all of this. She's a true believer. You could work there without it. You can't imagine someone like me working there. Impossible.
00:10:25
Speaker
like could you have to be fully on board or just i don't think anyone eats there if they're not fully on board except for you for some reason you ended up there i went there once yeah i mean i'll go the only way i'm going back is if you come to visit yeah i'll go with you go ironically yeah why not
00:10:44
Speaker
I'm still like things ironically. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the only way to do this. But, you know, being in and out of repair shops and stuff all day long, every day, there's a lot of really hardcore conservatives that are business owners. This was the most blatant, over the top, ridiculous display of like, I don't know, like, you know, identity forecasting, whatever you would, you know, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, yeah.
00:11:14
Speaker
The shit's public masturbation. Pretty much. It was pretty much what it was, yeah. So, yeah. True lies. El Dorado, Kansas. Give it a Google. I'm sure you can see what I'm talking about. So you don't know what was on the TV. It wasn't Newsmax. It wasn't You Don't Know For Sure.
00:11:30
Speaker
All I know is that there's a documentary going around right now that's like showing how the election was stolen from Trump. And by showing how it was stolen, it's not showing how it was stolen. I don't know why we're I bet you I can Google this in 30 seconds. Yeah, you can. I actually I just watched a piece on it with someone explaining exactly why it's just goofy shit. It's just done poorly.
00:11:57
Speaker
like some of their slam dunks are like people dropping off multiple ballots but in areas where like you can drop off other people's ballots like you can drop off a bundle of ballots it's no issue so they'll just get like security camera footage of somebody somebody publicly just dropping off a bunch of ballots and then
00:12:14
Speaker
walking away, they're like, look, this is it, slam dunk. It just doesn't make sense. 2000 mules. Yes. That's what it's called. It's, it's, uh, our, our boy Dinesh D'Souza. That's right. How do these people just keep, okay. Like the first time I ever heard of Dinesh D'Souza was in like 2013 or something. He did a documentary called 2016 Obama's America. Do you remember this?
00:12:42
Speaker
I don't. That was like his first big hit. Glenn Beck pumped it pretty hard. That's where I heard about it because I think I was listening to that at the time. It was basically about how we were going to be like the Soviet states of America by 2016 if Obama won the 2012 election. Now that's their dream. It's so funny how things change.
00:13:06
Speaker
freedom of speech, but, you know, don't protest things I don't like. And burn all the books that we think are shitty. Yeah. Oh, man. It's so frustrating, the hypocrisy. It's blatant. It would be cool if one side, if just one side decided like, you know what, let's just let's try being consistent on anything.
00:13:31
Speaker
Wouldn't that be amazing? I don't know what that would look like. He'd probably never win an election. That's like, yeah, exactly. You know what that looks like? It looks like Bernie losing an election again and again and again. That's what it looks like. That's exactly it. Yeah. The only two people who have said the same thing for like 30 years is Bernie and Rand, or Ron, not Rand. God.
00:13:51
Speaker
Ron Paul. Both of them have been pushed to the outskirts. I guess Ron's a little more comfortable there. Anywho, big story this week. Before we change the stories, I want to point out my hypocrisy. I, for the past few nights, slept on my pillow sheets.
00:14:13
Speaker
he makes sheets he makes sheets and I slept on them all blue pinstripe no these ones are like taupe taupe and I mean they're it's like the color of his personality bland and taupe pointless but comb over comb over the new color you are human khakis I want to read that in a box of crayons like I got taupe I got beige I got comb over oh dude
00:14:41
Speaker
we have that box of crayons like we have that that box in the in the covered out there it's like all browns but we um we had just a that's too long of a story to get into but we had a situation um where we just did we we don't have we we ended up getting a king bed recently we don't have a lot of like i should say recently but
00:15:05
Speaker
We don't have a lot of spare sheets. And we had to borrow like a pair of spare sheets from my in-laws. We're like, we need a new pair of sheets, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, yeah, that's fine. We got some. We got them. It's not my in-laws that buy them. They actually
00:15:26
Speaker
as much as they are. You know, they're Newsmax watchers, but they hate Mike Lindell's product. That shows you how bad it is. They hate my pillow. They just think it's the shittiest fucking pillow of all time. They bought them because they're like, yeah, Mike Lindell seems like a reasonable guy.
00:15:43
Speaker
product is trash. And if people who watch Newsmax and are on that end of the spectrum think his product is trash, it's legitimately awful. He can't even sell it to people who are just on his side politically on everything. Well, it's not for sleeping on, it's for kneeling on to say a prayer for America.
00:16:05
Speaker
My wife's grandmother will buy his stuff because she watches, you know, whatever. She orders everything online. And if you watch like old people TV, his advertisements apparently. So she buys his stuff and gives him away his gifts. So everyone's got like my pillowship. But yeah, so they gave us, they were like, that was like the spare sheets that they had that we could borrow. And it was, I hate to say it, but they're honestly kind of comfortable.
00:16:33
Speaker
And that makes me feel like a traitor to this country. Everyone can do it with Mike Liddell is is that we don't have like somebody to counterbalance him. Like what we need is like a Billy Mays. That's just like a hardcore AOC progressive, you know, just a balanced Mike out. And then we probably stomach him. We just need somebody to counterbalance him. He's pretty un-stomachable. I don't want to I don't want to counterbalance because whoever the counter is,
00:17:03
Speaker
would be
00:17:03
Speaker
equally as un-stomachable. And I don't want to deal with two of those kinds of people. One's enough. We'll just let him, I'm glad he's like tucked away at the corners in Newsmax. I don't have to see it. We'll just sell his pillows over there and I'll get his sheets from my wife's grandmother. Check out true lies. Enjoy the onion rings. But I was morally conflicted, dude. I was like, we're putting these on our bed. And I was like, these are gonna, I hope they suck. I hope they're trash. I was like, you just wet the bed on purpose.
00:17:33
Speaker
yeah i was like these are actually yeah pretty good that's the issue we've been having my son has wet the bed the past couple nights it's like so we needed like a spare just in case you like it's insane dude i mean he's five hasn't had an accident in forever he's been out of diapers forever
00:17:50
Speaker
And the last night he was good, but for two nights in a row, he woke up at like five in the morning because he completely soaked his what twice in a row. Do Saturday and Sunday. Have your having your entire weekend ruined because your five year old piece of bed twice at five o'clock in the morning is the worst. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds it sounds bad. My dog's been peeing in the cat room lately.
Casey's Dog and Instincts Story
00:18:15
Speaker
Your dogs like I feel like your dogs are always going through some shit with their
00:18:19
Speaker
whether pee and poop and barfing, it's just a thing. We're never truly safe. It's because your dog is out in the wild. You live in an area where your dogs can just roam and they just eat carcasses and shit and they come into your house and barf it up and shit it out. Yeah, it's true. The amount of times that my dog will come running up with something like, what do you got there? Oh, it's a severed leg. Yeah.
00:18:49
Speaker
I'll never forget when my dog, my dog, who's no longer with us, but she's a Westie. So not a big dog came running up to us like, you know, when dogs do that, that happy wag where like their whole body's just like, they're like shimmy up to you. They're like, yeah, comes up with like a dead bunny in, but it's like a, it's a, it's a baby. It's like a baby baby. I'm talking like,
00:19:16
Speaker
six inches, like just small, like fresh, super fresh. And the top of the head is off completely. So it's just like the lower jaw and a tongue. It's like.
00:19:27
Speaker
And she's got an all white dog. So she's like her snout and muzzle is just completely soaked in blood. And she's just like wriggles up so fucking happy. It's the best time of her life. And my wife and my mother in law, like we were out by their my mother in law's pool and they just kind of freak out. And she just looked so defeated. She like drops it. She's like, what? This is the worst day of my life. I thought you guys would be so happy.
00:19:56
Speaker
He's like, Smeagol, just presenting you at the present. Yeah, I was like, good girl. They're like, don't say that. I'm like, what are you? I mean, that's her job. That's what it's like. It's bred into this dog to kill rabbits. I don't know. She was so happy. It was one of the best days of her life. So we celebrated and we ate it together raw. It was we shared it. We let her lick in my mouth afterwards. It was really cute. I think that's pretty sweet. Yeah. Anyway, on to more important business. I don't even know how we got here, but
00:20:25
Speaker
It was a fun trip. It's about to be less fun.
SBC Sexual Misconduct Cover-Up
00:20:29
Speaker
Depending on who you are in the scenario. Yeah, so some real bad news came out this week for the Southern Baptist Convention. Shout out to some people in the Discord. We were talking about this earlier today, but what was it a couple of years ago? How long ago was it that the initial accusations were made public?
00:20:51
Speaker
The initial accusations, I think, were a couple years ago. I forget exactly, but it was at last year's Southern Baptist Convention that they voted to hire an independent third-party organization to investigate the allegations. And now we're about three... Allegations of broad, widespread sexual abuse and misconduct, Catholic Church-level stuff.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, and now we're about three weeks away from this year's Southern Baptist Convention. So jury's still out on how they're going to respond to it. But basically the report is that things are shit. Things are really, really shitty. A couple of things about it that are particularly notable is one is that like it was 10 years ago, dude, that that's right. It just came back 10 years ago was like when the first person really spoke up the shit and it was like, but
00:21:43
Speaker
It wasn't publicly yeah yeah and it wasn't like they were like they weren't crying for the whole thing to be torn down and completely demoed they were just like we need accountability like there should be a database.
00:21:58
Speaker
for people who have offended sexually or whatever. I'm not sure exactly what the language was around it. Allegations, maybe not necessarily, but allegations are... Look, I'm at the point where if someone comes forward with allegations, it's probably fucking true with this.
00:22:18
Speaker
No one's just like, hey, someone touched my dick and I didn't want them to and makes the thing up. No one's doing that. Like women aren't just like, uh, that pastor sexually assaulted me just because what they want to tear him down. Like this is getting fucking ridiculous that we still have to play these fucking games where they just like can pretend like someone would make this up to tarnish their reputation of all places.
00:22:43
Speaker
of all places. Like the church, if someone comes out and says, somebody did something to them, it probably happened. I don't... Why? Okay, let's frame this real quick here. Sure. Because I think we're getting into the weeds a little bit. So basically, people have been speaking up for a long time. Yeah. Okay. But it's just like you see in so many of these organizations. We talked about this
00:23:11
Speaker
a lot. These church groups and these giant denominations and stuff like that.
00:23:16
Speaker
are a lot like a corporation, meaning that it's a big bureaucracy. And at some point- President, CEOs, executives, it's just like a hierarchy. And when you have an organization that big, with goals as big as theirs are, whether you agree with them or not, at some point, people start to look at the organization as a lot more important than individuals. Individual people
00:23:42
Speaker
have brought allegations against pastors and leaders within the church within the Southern Baptist Convention for decades, probably since its inception. I'm sure that allegations have been coming in for a long time.
00:23:58
Speaker
The convention continually push these people off. They were the cries were like we they want the database like well we can't we can't really keep track of all that that's not really doable and then it turns out that they actually do have a list of all the people that.
00:24:16
Speaker
Allegations that we made against that they just said about this thing with so like of all the people that have brought forward allegations against different pastures and stuff There's a lot of them that have been dismissed out of hand have been treated as liars or fakers or as people who didn't know really what happened or as a you know, there was some people on in the article cited on NPR that like we're told to keep quiet about what had happened there were some people that
00:24:45
Speaker
Out of all this group, there's some people where there's nowhere for the organization to run. This is clearly something that happened or probably happened and there's really no denying it or pushing these people away. And for those people, what they said is like, hey, individual churches are autonomous and we can't get involved in discipline or anything like that here. The best we can do is pray.
00:25:10
Speaker
of that small group of people that they treated their allegations as if they were credible, which is a fraction of the whole. Those people have said, hey, can we have a list or a database? Can you guys do something to track these leaders and pastors and stuff like that that have abused
00:25:36
Speaker
members of their congregation or whatever. One of the pastors, the guy that was a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, so this is leadership at the highest level, was forced to resign over sexually assaulting another pastor's wife on a beach house vacation.
00:25:56
Speaker
for years and years and years these people the small fraction of the whole that were actually recognized as having legitimate you know accusations and stuff like that those people were continually told that like hey we can't get involved we can't create a list we can't create a database we can't track these people
00:26:15
Speaker
Meanwhile we'll come to find out by this and you know external investigation They do have a list they have a very long list with hundreds and hundreds of people's names on it that they keep internally people that were Accused of all sorts of heinous things against all sorts of type of people minors. There's one pastor That's accused well
00:26:39
Speaker
There's a guy that said that he was abused from age 12 to 15 by this youth pastor. And not only did the church not do anything, as they sat idly by while these leaders were continually shuffled to other churches in other parts of the country, very reminiscent of the Catholic Church. It's the same exact thing.
00:26:59
Speaker
And now here's the flip side of it and here's where I think you gotta you know It's easy to just like stay light of match and burn this whole thing down during this last convention Like sam was talking about the group, you know the larger group of all these different member pastors and
SBC's Movement for Transparency
00:27:16
Speaker
stuff like that voted Overwhelmingly to have an external group come in and investigate these claims. So there is a huge internal push
00:27:26
Speaker
for accountability and for transparency, you know, when it comes to sexual abuse and stuff like that. And it was ignored for years and years and years. And now it's, it's all coming to light thanks to this investigation. I don't think anybody assumed that this was going to be a legitimate investigation that was going to turn up actual actionable items, but it is, and it was, and
00:27:52
Speaker
Man, they're bringing to light some really awful things. Yeah, I agree. I didn't think that it would be a real investigation. I think a lot of people felt similarly. I don't think people believe that they would do their due diligence. Again, it was an independent company, but generally when you go in that direction, there's the assumption that you're going to hire somebody that might soft-small you.
00:28:17
Speaker
And that really doesn't seem to be the case here. I think what's going to end up being important is whether or not the SBC follows through on any of their actionable items because they did provide a lengthy list of ways that they can do better, that they can prevent this in the future. And I don't know, man, I guess I'm skeptical that they'll like really put in the work to make sure any of them get done.
00:28:45
Speaker
You know, obviously a database is one of them, but I think going back to quickly the irony of them saying, well, there's not much we can do because all of these organizations are autonomous is they have never said that when it comes to literally anything else. If you ordain, if you said, I want to ordain a woman as a pastor.
00:29:06
Speaker
Nope, there goes your SBC funding. You don't get to be in the club anymore. If you're an SBC pastor, you can't drink. You have to sign something saying you won't drink. And if you do, you can be knocked out. They control every fucking thing. Now, of course, they're not going to find out about a lot. If you want to drink in the privacy of your own home,
00:29:25
Speaker
that's not obviously going to come back to get you but you sign something that's pretty lengthy that says specifically what you can and can't do when it comes to the way you conduct yourself publicly and i guess the difference is drinking's on there but sexual assault just isn't mentioned so it's probably not as big of a deal but
00:29:46
Speaker
No, but I do have to imagine that it talks about sexual conduct and things like that. Like, you know, if a pastor cheated on their wife, I'm sure they'd have more to say about it than if a pastor molested a 12 year old. And then they then they can't do anything about it. And that's what's so fucking sick about this is like, it's very obvious that like, they could, they could have done something from the start. And that playing this whole like, the autonomy card, it's like states rights bullshit is what that made me think of.
00:30:17
Speaker
It's like, yeah, it's like protect the organization at all costs. Like this is going to hurt the organization. And we've talked about that so much because there's the idea that like the mission outweighs the bad things that could derail it. Well, you're going to hurt the gospel.
00:30:33
Speaker
No this hurts the guys you hurt the guy this hurts the gospel you thinking you can run from this stuff forever and then having it explode in your face that's what hurts your testimony not pastor terry having a margarita in key west on vacation you know posting a picture on facebook and that's that's what's so frustrating about so much of this stuff is just like the amount of of
00:30:58
Speaker
of emphasis that is put on things that are so meaningless and insignificant while while this is i mean it is the quintessential example of remove the plank from your own eye before you you know try to take a sliver out of your your neighbors yeah i did it's just it's just gross i think the only thing like the only part of this story that like that softens it at all is the fact that like
00:31:26
Speaker
The overwhelming majority of the members voted for this independent investigation, which I mean, that is that's a thing that I think is worth giving them some credit for. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, there's something I think is Russell Moore was the previous president who who left.
00:31:46
Speaker
uh, because of some of the, like all the bullshit that was going on. He actually had a really, not to necessarily, like he was the president of the SPC for a while. So to, for him to be able to like, this is the guy that left because of the sexual assault, like this, this literal topic is why he left. He, he was the head of their public policy. So he wasn't the president of the organization, but he was the head of their public policy division or something like that.
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah yeah his his you know his blurb in the NPR article i think is it really paints a picture okay here's the quote he says.
00:32:23
Speaker
So this is Russell Moore who formerly headed the SBC's public policy wing, but left the denomination. So he left the denomination as a whole after accusing top executive committee leaders of stalling efforts to address the sex abuse crisis. So this is something that's been going on for a while. And it's not something that like all of a sudden the lids been blown off it. Like this has been an internal struggle for a long time. And there's a lot of people within that group that have just turned a blind eye to it.
00:32:53
Speaker
or have chosen to let it keep going on by not doing anything about it. But he says, Moore says, crisis is too small a word. It's an apocalypse. He says, as dark a view as I had of the SPC executive committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systematic than I imagined. Yeah. I mean, he ends up, he had a couple other really good quotes regarding it and the way that they
00:33:20
Speaker
Well, similarly, just the irony of like, oh, we can't do anything about this, but, you know, we'll go ahead and make a big deal about what women wear on television or what women wear to church in a way. Oh, that hurts your witness. But then they won't.
00:33:37
Speaker
Just completely pretend like there's no issues going on. It just shows like the rot and the soul of B.C. Now some of the things that the report recommends to form like as solutions, I mean, we should probably wrap this up, but as form an independent commission and later establish a permanent administrative
00:33:57
Speaker
entity to oversee comprehensive long-term reforms concerning sexual abuse and related misconduct within the SBC, create and maintain an offender information system to alert the community to known offenders, provide a comprehensive resource toolbox, including protocols, training, education, practical information. Here's a big one that's such a fucking duh that it makes me sick that someone even has to write it down in an independent report.
00:34:24
Speaker
restrict the use of non-disclosure agreements and civil settlements, which bind survivors to confidentiality and sexual abuse matters unless requested by the survivor. It's like, come on, like a church handing out NDAs like that is really fucking egregious.
00:34:40
Speaker
That's one of the big ones. I mean, that's what everyone defaults to. Mars Hill did that shit like obviously corporations do it all the time. And the fact that we like NDA is a thing is kind of mind boggling. Like we can we can legally force you into silence is so strange. But a church especially defaulting to an NDA to not have to deal with the legal repercussions of a fallout for the
00:35:03
Speaker
Pretty gross. So look, juries out on whether or not they're going to implement any of this shit. I'm interested to see how they react to this. It was like a 300 page report. I'm interested to see how they react to it at this year's Southern Baptist Convention. We'll see if any one of them or the majority, at least when it comes to voting has, I don't know, any integrity at all. And we'll actually follow through with any of the recommendations here.
00:35:29
Speaker
My hopes aren't super high. The entire executive committee should be gone. Not a single person who's been on that board throughout this crisis should be there when this is all done. It's the same as when we talked about liberty after all the scandals and stuff like that.
00:35:46
Speaker
Yeah you know that if there's anyone left right on that leadership committee at the end all this. Then they're not taking this seriously enough to i mean especially there remain attacks exempt organization you know i know that's what i think that's what people find.
00:36:02
Speaker
really upsetting too is that they can continue to maintain that despite their failures to report such awful things. I want to say the report, it's weird because the way that the vote in favor of the independent investigation worked was like, I want to say there was a couple of executives that the majority of this falls on.
00:36:24
Speaker
that handled these kind of cover ups and stuff like that. I feel like there's kind of like this desire for people to try to like get out from underneath it though. Like if you could, even if you could hang it on a couple and the rest were like, things seem weird. We should vote about this. Like you're implicated. You've been at the top for too long. Everyone know like it's just the trust is completely eroded.
00:36:46
Speaker
It's been a road, but now it's especially a road. And you're right. I mean, the only way the only path forward, even if even if there are people on the executive board who are completely blameless and guilt free from all of it, who gives a fuck like you got a clean house. If they haven't been an outspoken voice throughout the process here, then they need to go.
00:37:08
Speaker
If you care anything about your quote unquote testimony, reestablishing trust with your, you know, your denominational members and things like that, stop protecting those people and get rid of them. And if they, you know, if they willfully ignored
00:37:26
Speaker
you know that the request of people who have like you know level accusations that leaders and stuff like if they were part of the group that shuffled around these different pastors who were accused of molestation and abuse they need to face criminal charges regardless of what it makes the sbc look like take these people out and hit them with the full extent of the law
00:37:50
Speaker
Or else, you know, you're just going to be another corrupt organization that has no credibility with the outside world. Yeah. I mean, the fact that, I mean, they have to understand, like I just read earlier today that 3 million Southern Baptists have left the denomination in the past 15 years and more than 1 million of those have been in the last year.
00:38:11
Speaker
So you're having three percent. You're fucking hemorrhaging people because of the way you're running your shit. So get the fuck out of your own way. If you if you actually care like that's the irony. We care about the gospel. Therefore, we can't deal with this. Otherwise, people will be like, well, then it's bad. Yeah, it's fucking bad. Own it because everyone knows it's rotten anyway. That's why you've lost so many people.
00:38:36
Speaker
If you want to clean it up, I'll never consider it to be a viable option for me. I'll probably never consider it to really be important at all. I think most people would be better off leaving it. I don't think the Southern Baptist Convention carries a lot of weight and I think their theology is backwards.
00:38:55
Speaker
But you could do that in a way that doesn't fucking hurt people so bad, including the people who are leaving it in droves. Those people are hurt too for different reasons. I don't know. It's getting mind boggling that the way they dig their heels in and say, we can't handle our problems because it'll make more people leave, just the numbers don't check out on that.
00:39:18
Speaker
Their responses to everything for the past 15 years has been constant leaving. So, anyway. Tidy up your house, scumbags.
Introducing Kevin Kline of Valley Heart
00:39:28
Speaker
We should introduce our guest. Our guest this week is Kevin Kline. Kevin is a frontman for an awesome band called Valley Heart. I speak very highly of them in this conversation we have, so we don't need to get too much into it here.
00:39:43
Speaker
Uh, they're a tooth and nail band. They have a new record coming out on June 3rd. Uh, they also, if you, I don't know, I don't think a lot of our listeners live in Massachusetts, uh, but they are a Massachusetts band. And if you are in the area, I think they have, they're still selling tickets to an album release party on June 3rd in sale Massachusetts. So, uh, that sounds interesting to you. I want to be there very badly. I would be there, but
00:40:11
Speaker
Uh, my foster son's high school graduation is that night. So I suppose I'll go to that instead of the Valley heart album release show, but I really should say release. I think it's a listening party, not a show. Um, but they'll also be hitting the road soon to promote and tour the new album. So keep an eye out for him. Like definitely check him out on Spotify.
00:40:32
Speaker
It's really good shit. I think our listeners, especially, he just hits on a lot of shit that we've all gone through when it comes to losing, shifting, changing your faith, whatever that looks like. I think you'll find something that resonates with you all to the sound of some really fantastic music. So without further ado, our conversation with Kevin Kline.
00:40:57
Speaker
Hey, everybody. We're back with our guest, Kevin. Kevin, what's up, man? Hey, how's it going? Good. Good. Kevin, I want to start us off with a little bit of an icebreaker because we have a mutual friend, as we've talked about, and he's actually been on this podcast before. So for the listeners, Jesse O'Neill, my childhood friend,
00:41:18
Speaker
You guys used to play, you guys' bands, you were in a metal band for a while. I don't know for how long, but you guys used to play shows together and he's brought up this show that he played a couple of times that was really an interesting experience and I only just found out that I guess your band was a part of that. So you guys played a homeschool graduation. Do you remember that?
00:41:44
Speaker
Did he tell you the state? He didn't. I was going to say... Do you play a lot of homeschool graduations? Yes, at least three a year, so this is kind of hard to track. No, no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I think I remember... I think it was in Connecticut. I think it was in Bristol, Connecticut, if I'm not mistaken.
00:42:07
Speaker
Did he give you any more context or information? I mean the context was that like there was nobody there and the people who... Well that we did, that we did, that happened a lot.
00:42:18
Speaker
There was a lot of that, so that's not really narrowing anything down. Maybe it was parents and kids who didn't belong there. Kids who would not necessarily find themselves gravitating towards the metal scene. I think it was for this family that, yeah, they were big fans of the heavy stuff and the Christian heavy stuff.
00:42:37
Speaker
I think I got it down. Yeah, that's so funny that he remembered that. I'll need to reach out to him and ask him more about it because that's too far. Oh, man. Yeah, that was a time in life. Yeah, he's talked a good bit about playing.
00:42:56
Speaker
just every band. I swear if you're just in the heavy music scene and it's like playing a show for other bands and a couple other people. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Homeschoolers are a different breed. I was homeschooled. I had gone to homeschool graduations and I know what those are like and I know that metal bands don't usually belong.
00:43:14
Speaker
No, no. I mean, there was a lot of, I mean, like you're saying, a lot of shows like that. A lot, not lots of people, but just weird shows because we were sort of that, you know, Christian metal band. We would play churches sometimes and youth events that had just no business of having a heavier band on there. Played at Deli once. At Deli?
00:43:37
Speaker
Yeah Deli played a bunch of just interesting youth groups. Yeah, lots of variety in that time of life It's so funny thinking back on I'm sure Jesse has all these stories too, but there's that funny video I'm sure you guys have seen but it's like the the band playing at Denny's the hardcore band and
00:43:58
Speaker
I don't think I have seen that. Oh wow, that's like iconic. It's just this band, this like local hardcore band. It's like, what the fuck is up, Denny's? And it's just like they're in the Denny's and they're playing a show and there's like people around them. It's like a real show that someone just took on like their iPhone or something.
00:44:16
Speaker
And it's one of the most amazing videos because it really captures a time in life for me. It's like, I know that feeling. I know the feeling of pulling up to a place and being like, OK, we're playing at Denny's tonight or like some weird place in the middle of nowhere. All right, let's give it our all. Yeah. It's like you pull up and you never know. It's also funny because when you never know what to expect, you don't really know what you're looking for. You're just like, yeah, did we pass it or this is this is it. We're here now. Yeah.
00:44:43
Speaker
This can't be it because there's no cars here. There's been lots of that in my life, my friend. All right, Perkins, this song's called, Moods Over My Hammy. There you go. There you go. So, Kevin, why don't you, I want to hear a little bit about your life and how you grew up. I know you grew up in my area, I think, Massachusetts. Did you grow up in Massachusetts?
00:45:06
Speaker
So I was born in New York and it was in Massachusetts when I was around nine years old. So most of my life in Massachusetts.
Kevin's Musical Journey
00:45:14
Speaker
Cool. I feel like there's not, obviously there's plenty of people who grow up in Massachusetts, but I feel like we haven't talked. Tons of people have grown up near you, Casey, people from your area. I feel like that happens. I feel like exactly the opposite. What? Our guests? I feel like at least five people are from there. I feel like people from Massachusetts.
00:45:31
Speaker
never like stop jabbering about it. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. All right. Like everybody in our dorm was from Massachusetts. Yeah, that's right. See you too much to school together. So how you met? Yeah, we met at Liberty Liberty University. Oh, big LU.
00:45:51
Speaker
Yeah, but yeah, we did have a lot of mass kids on our dorm and I didn't actually know so a good man. I knew a couple of them ahead of time, but I was like, just kept meeting people from Massachusetts. I'm like, how are all of you guys showing up Liberty University? Well, I'm sure Liberty is a big school, but what year did you two graduate or college? I graduated in 09. 09. Yeah, I was like, I took me a little bit of time to get through it. I think I was 2011, I think.
00:46:19
Speaker
okay okay so yeah you guys are a little older than my group because there are some people i know down at liberty too but a little later oh yeah yeah so if you're no people who went exactly it's it's a it's a definite rule but yeah so you grew up uh yeah so what was your kind of background your church background
00:46:39
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So I grew up in New York as a young child and then moved to Massachusetts. Church background. Well, my mom was slash is Christian and sort of tied to her faith very strongly. My dad was sort of not so much that was the secular one at the time, you know, the one we had to say, as they say. So my mom
00:47:08
Speaker
This group raised me going to church pretty young, and she's Brazilian, so it's a Brazilian church actually. It was my first church experience. I was like a very young child. I remember running around in Queens, New York actually, running around and singing at the church. There were like solos you would do as a four-year-old, and I would sing at the church and run around at the church.
00:47:33
Speaker
And then got involved in like kids church and then eventually youth group in high school which were definitely some of the most formative years. And made a lot of friends through that. Made some of probably what is now my core friend group through that. And it's morphed and melded but met a lot of people.
00:47:53
Speaker
Met the band that I was in that played with Jesse's band and the Christian Metalcore band. Met those guys in high school at youth group and started touring when I was 14 and a half. Wow. Yeah, it was freshman or sophomore, 14 or 15, it was like sophomore year of high school and we hit the road in summer and then we kind of just did a lot of those sort of
00:48:18
Speaker
regional tours and you know that was sort of our church in a while too for talking church history just like doing that.
00:48:28
Speaker
Am I going too far? Did you just walk? No, no, you're fine. I'm actually going to cut in though because the whole touring at 15 thing is kind of wild to me. I feel like that's what 15 year olds talk about wanting to guessing someone in your group had a driver's license that was able to make that. Yeah, I was always the younger one. I was always the younger one. So I sort of hitched on and then eventually got my license and started driving too.
00:48:51
Speaker
I was in, I had a brief stint in a band, but I wasn't, I'm not, there's no reason that should have lasted longer than it did. Probably shouldn't have lasted, but I had a van. So that was like, that might've been part of the reason that kept me around. People would go far in that world. It's currency, man. So did your dad ever get into church or did he always kind of hold it at arm's length?
00:49:20
Speaker
I held it pretty much at arm's length. It's funny, we still talk. I have a great relationship with both my parents today and talk to them about faith and church stuff all the time. My mom, who is still a Christian but not going to church anymore, which has been a very interesting thing. It's something I never thought I'd see. But my dad always kind of held it at arm's length.
00:49:41
Speaker
I mean, we were pretty hardcore, sort of the church that I'd grown up in, sort of evangelical church, AG, some days of God, it was pretty charismatic, pretty intense, pretty identity driven from the youth group phase up in, you know, even before that with kids church and all that
Impact of Evangelical Upbringing
00:50:00
Speaker
stuff. And I was not
00:50:02
Speaker
uh indoctrinated but i was heavily you know i mean yeah indoctrinated but this sort of heavy sense of this is my faith it wasn't just like oh i go to church on on easter and christmas it was like i was reading the bible when i was in middle school and praying and sort of leading worship at chapel and all this stuff so um my dad always just kind of was like hey like i it's fine but it's just not for not my thing like
00:50:25
Speaker
I'm my family's Catholic, like one of those guys just like, yeah, I'm chill. Like, I don't really want to go to church. So, you know, we talk now about some crazy stories and like sort of the tensions that brought within my dad and I sort of like being this judgmental little kid who like, you know, at the time thought if you listen to UnChristian, go to hell, you know, and all this crazy stuff that gets into your brain. And my dad just being like, all right, Kev,
00:50:50
Speaker
All right, and him just not knowing how to deal with that, right? And it's crazy. Even my mom and I talking about that stuff, about how crazy some of the things we believed, and we did, and pastors we listened to, and how whether you fall on the Christian side or not, now both of my parents were like, that shit was crazy.
00:51:09
Speaker
Assemblies of God comes up a lot on this show. I feel like I didn't really know anything about them two years ago. And now like a significant portion of people that we've talked to have been assemblies of God and it seems like it tends to lean charismatic fundamentalist like pretty much 100% of the time.
00:51:28
Speaker
Yeah, I would say so, yeah. I mean, I can't speak for the whole branch there, but I know specifically for our group it was... I mean, it wasn't like crazy stuff, but it was just, you know, the little subtle things. It's the modesty stuff, it's the culture around purity and...
00:51:46
Speaker
And, you know, all that subtle stuff that you're not like hit on the face with, but through the years you're like, huh, you know, you just start sort of reminiscing and thinking. And I often wonder, I mean, I'm not, not to just bash on the AG. I mean, I think that every institution has a level of that. Like even thinking about my school, like where I went to school, it was like, there's just some weird stuff that happened. And I'm like, as an adult, now you're just like, wait a minute, that probably wasn't the best thing.
00:52:14
Speaker
Yeah. Were you at a Christian school? I was. Yeah, I was. But it wasn't like Christian related. It was just like we had a uniform. I just was having a conversation with a friend about this and just thinking about how wild this was. We had uniform Monday through Thursday at my school and we would
00:52:31
Speaker
wear gym clothes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Monday and Wednesdays would be regular sort of button-up collar with dress pants, clothes. This is elementary school and middle school. But on Fridays, we had what was called gene day, where if you brought in a dollar and paid your teacher, you could wear regular clothes. You had to pay to wear jeans?
00:52:51
Speaker
Yeah. So every kid was so excited. Like you got your dollar. Like it was this thing. It was this like Friday morning ritual to gather all the money. The teacher would come around. I remember people would leave the dollar face up on their like, you know, those desks that we used to have that would open and those wooden desks. The teacher would just, I mean, we would leave a dollar and the teacher would come around and be like, okay, okay. And
00:53:13
Speaker
But the weird part is if you sort of dressed up normally that day and then got to school and didn't have a dollar, you were- They took your clothes off in front of everybody? That's so cool. That would be bad. You had to call your parents and they had to come bring your uniform. I remember that happened to a girl once.
00:53:30
Speaker
and that was just thinking of like the humiliation and just the logistics of that is just yeah it's annoying when I pick up my kids because they got sick at school never mind yeah I know a dollar it's like come on so looking back on that it's like that's some sort of mind shirt going on there that's like we control you we allow you to sort of break out of the mold it's like under it's a controlled chaos theory I've gone into like
00:53:58
Speaker
deep Freudian theory with my friends about the situation. It's pretty weird. They don't take IOUs there, I guess. Yeah, I guess not. We've talked a lot about like, because I went to Christian school pretty much my whole undergrad, whatever.
00:54:14
Speaker
It's so weird like the dynamics that form in those in those environments Because you know, we always say that like when when nobody's really doing anything bad like very small things Get amplified big time to the point where like, you know, nobody's drinking nobody's even really swearing or something but someone just like Continually doesn't tuck in their shirt like they're supposed to and all of a sudden like their mom's in the principal's office and they're having Oh, yeah
00:54:42
Speaker
oh yeah that's that's exactly right it was exactly that it's now looking back you're like this is nominal levels of offenses and what are we doing here you know. What's what's like one of the dumbest things that you remember like getting in trouble for yourself or somebody else.
00:55:00
Speaker
Well, I have a specific memory, but it's not about me, but it's about one of my good, good friends in middle school, and it's a really funny story, actually. So, every Friday, gene day, you wear normal clothes, and there's this kid, his name is Jordan, I don't think he'll mind me saying his name, but if he does, I'll say it.
00:55:17
Speaker
There was this other person, my friend, he, every Friday he would wear, we all wear normal clothes, but he was super into goth and metal and like, you know, these bands like Metallica and Megadeth.
00:55:32
Speaker
was super into metal stuff. And he was always sort of the rebel of the school. And every Friday, we weren't allowed to wear shirts that had any graphics, let alone names or words or bands or anything like that. It was supposed to be sort of a plain shirt. That was another thing. No graphics could be on it. But he would come in every Friday with a Metallica t-shirt or a slipknot. It was like that level of stuff.
00:55:57
Speaker
Yeah, and I remember he would get called to the principal's office every Friday and he just didn't care. His mom didn't care too. His mom was so cool. I remember she was just one of those teachers that like fight with the principal like, what is wrong with you? This is messed up.
00:56:13
Speaker
And she had her son in there for different reasons, but she was like, this is crazy. And he would just defy the rules every time. And then one time I remember he got called in and he was wearing a Lamb of God t-shirt. And I was like, uh-oh, like, Jordan, this is it, man. You're done. This is the end for you. And he went in, went to the principal's office, and I remember coming back and he had this big smile on his face. So what happened? Did you get expelled, suspended? He's like, no, dude.
00:56:41
Speaker
She looked at my shirt and she said, Lamb of God, Jordan, that's beautiful. I'm really glad that you're taking this path in life. And she was completely fooled by the band name. It was sort of a mild shirt, so it could have gone both ways. It was sort of, you know, ambiguous. And she totally thought it was a Christian band or Christian t-shirt. And we just laughed about it for the whole period. I'll never forget that story.
00:57:05
Speaker
That's so good. I feel like we were recently talking about band names that could pass for Christian names. I remember Lame of God the first time I heard it thinking... Because most of my introduction to heavy music was through Christian music.
00:57:24
Speaker
I was like, okay, but then the people I heard it from weren't Christians and then they weren't in that scene at all. So I just remember feeling uncommon. I don't want to be the guy who asks. I don't want to be like, oh, is this a Christian band? Because then you look like the guy who only, I don't know. It was like, I don't want to be that person. And that one sat in the back of my mind for like three or four weeks before I finally got confirmation. It's like a
00:57:50
Speaker
Children of Bodum. Do you guys know that band? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, Bodum sounds like something that could come out of Leviticus, you know, there's like children of Bodum. Like, yeah, I missed that chapter, but it's in there. Okay. How big was your school?
00:58:07
Speaker
When I first entered the school in second grade, there were, I think, 41 kids in my class. By the time I had graduated eighth grade, because I say they're from second grade to eighth grade, the school had deteriorated into, my class was not four kids, and actually my last year was the collapse, was the last year of the school.
00:58:26
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. Now, it was a school and a church. Now it's just the church and the church is still there. The school is long gone because they realized they didn't make money and just shut it down. There's a whole situation in weirdness with that. But yeah, it deteriorated pretty quickly throughout those years, but small, I would say. That's very similar to mine. That's impressive. Yeah, there's real resilience or stubbornness there. I don't know what it is, but there's something there.
00:58:52
Speaker
No, is it like a traditional type of curriculum where you went to classes and stuff or did you do some sort of like homeschooling as a group sort of thing? It was pretty traditional class stuff. There was no homeschooling aspect but we had, I remember as an elementary school and I don't even know if this is normal across all schools because I only have my experience but we would have one teacher for all subjects.
00:59:16
Speaker
Um, that's, that's pretty standard, right? Yeah. Well, I only was in it until through second grade, but that was always the case for me. Okay. Yeah. Well, nothing too out of the ordinary there, but I will say when it got to eighth grade stuff started getting weird because
00:59:33
Speaker
Our computer teacher, who didn't really have a degree in anything else, I think, suddenly, because teachers started leaving in protest, because the school was closing all of a sudden, our computer teacher suddenly became our math and science teacher, and really had no, one of those things looking back, had no idea what the guy was doing. I'd be like, hey, Mr. McNeil, if X is equal to seven, or, you know, whatever, but what's the log of 10? I don't think so sense, but, and you'd be like, huh, great question.
01:00:01
Speaker
Let's look at it together. That was the answer to every question was let's look at the textbook. I felt now I feel bad for that guy because he was just probably thrown into a shitty situation and just like, all right, I guess I have to do this. But it got a little weird there for sure. Well, look, kids, it's either a sine, a cosine or hypotenuse. Patenuse. Patenuse.
01:00:25
Speaker
Here's a here's a great way to transition into a tangent here. I always think it's weird thinking of how like because like when you're a kid, you feel like your teachers are kind of old. And now that we're I'm presuming you're in your 30s or around that, it's like 27. Really? Yeah, I don't think you necessarily look older than 27 didn't mean to be offensive. But yeah, I do. Making guesses here. But it is weird to like think back and be like like knowing that our teachers were around our age.
01:00:56
Speaker
And it's like, or some of them. And you're like, you were normal people, but you didn't, they didn't seen it. And thinking back on how they would have felt or what their experiences would have been. I had this teacher who was a nightmare. I don't think I've told her. She was terrifying and kids were afraid to do anything. Like if you yawn too loud, she would just yell at you and berate you in front of the rest of the class.
01:01:17
Speaker
and one kid he was the one who would typically act up his name was Gary and he would he was he did have a fear of her but then he was also a brat so it was like one of those kids that couldn't help it but then ended up just he was miserable and I because he would always get yelled at but one day he really had to go to the bathroom and he was too afraid to
01:01:36
Speaker
to raise his hand to ask the teacher if he could use the bathroom. And he just sat at his desk and peed his, and sat in it for a while before the teacher, like, the teacher saw him crying, fucking crying in his chair with his head down. And she's, that's what she realized, he peed his pants, and she had to pee his pants. And it was just because- How did she react to it?
01:01:56
Speaker
Oh, like she was mad at him for doing it. Oh my goodness. Oh, yeah, she was truly an awful person. Wow. Yeah, there's there's some weird. Yeah, it's it's definitely trippy to think about the age thing. That stuff chirps me up all the time. I think about it way too often, just sort of comparatively. Oh, my mom was the same. She was my age when this happens. Yeah, it's wild. It's wild.
01:02:18
Speaker
I know you're like oh they were my age like my parents were younger than me when they had me like I like my when my kids are uh six and five and when I was around five my parents were around my age and it's just like oh that is weird to think about because
01:02:34
Speaker
I feel so much different than how I perceive my parents, definitely. You never really know. Like there was probably so much shit going on in their heads and their lives and their minds that you just like, you'll never understand it. It's so true. And I think I have had more and more grace for my parents as I've gotten older.
01:02:53
Speaker
because i'm like wait a minute i'm nearing in on the age that they would have had me or something like this and you're thinking i have so much stuff going on in my head and i'm still a mess and like learning and growing and like doing all this stuff it's like they're just people like of course that's obvious but you know there's always this sense of sort of them having it figured out and down and
01:03:12
Speaker
I don't know. I think as you get older, you're like, there's a lot more. Just you guys did your best. Yeah. Yeah. So did your best thing. Right. Like who is in charge of your school? Was it a pastor or was it like an actual like qualified like person for running a school or? Well, all right. I'm going to go with the bureaucracy of it all.
01:03:33
Speaker
So it was a church and there was a pastor who had his wife and family, but the church side was pretty separate. The school side was funded by the church side. So the pastor was sort of this elusive figure that would like stop in every once in a while.
01:03:48
Speaker
he wasn't around like you know there was a whole sort of system of there was a principal there was a vice principal there was a i don't even know you know your there was the office with your secretary and all this stuff so there was a pretty intricate system there um but it was all again looking back my mom and i were just talking about this it was all shady in the sense of i don't know it wasn't like
01:04:11
Speaker
I feel like it was people that didn't have the right credentials to be the positions they were in just because it was like a really small private school. Not a lot of eyes on it. No, like government eyes on it at least. Yeah, interesting stuff. But there was a sort of a... That stuff's always interesting to me because like...
01:04:27
Speaker
I mean, there was one qualified teacher at my school and he was great, but the rest of them were just like volunteer parents. And then they had a lady with some education background and stuff. And I think she was a pretty competent lady.
01:04:43
Speaker
there just wasn't a lot of infrastructure there or like clear designation of power and stuff. And so like dress code was just a problem all the time at our school because it was kind of, it wasn't clearly defined. So it was kind of at the whims of whoever wanted to make a big deal out of something or didn't out of this. And it wasn't as bad for the guys, but like for the girls, it was bad.
01:05:11
Speaker
It was like if you Irritated the person in charge they tend to pick apart your dress and your your shirt length and your how tight your pants are and stuff and I remember like we had one big event a year that was like the senior banquet where everybody dressed formal and stuff and the girls would all have to bring their dresses in and try them on for the the
01:05:39
Speaker
the leadership person at the time. Exactly. And like they would decide if the dress was like appropriate or not. And I remember like all of the girls like basically any of the girls that tended to be in her crosshairs, they would all have to wear like a big shawl over top of their dress.
01:06:00
Speaker
and then all the rest of them could kind of wear whatever they wanted to. It was just always a weird point of contention within that environment, because there wasn't very clear set out rules on like, look, you guys wear khaki pants, you wear blue or red polo shirt, blah, blah, blah.
01:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, no, there was a lot of that. My friend went to Christian College, one of my best friends, and they had the quarter trick for guys. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. The quarter trick? The quarter trick. Yeah, it was for guys and girls, I think. Maybe not for girls. Maybe. I don't know.
01:06:34
Speaker
It was the era of skinny jeans. It was the scene, heavy music era for all the guys. We were just tight jeans as we could. The trick was, if you can get a quarter down your pants and it hits the ground, you're in good shape. This is a real thing at a really qualified seminary in Boba College. Wait, did the person conducting the survey, did they sniff the quarter afterwards? That would be freaky. I don't know.
01:07:03
Speaker
I never went to the school, but there were people who were vouching that this is true and you would get a fine if it got stuck in there. You'd get like a $50 fine.
01:07:15
Speaker
Not only did they get fined, that person who put it down there had to fish it out, and that was the bomb. Right. In reality, they owe $49.95, if you ask me. Or I should say $75. You got to pay for a full month of OnlyFans subscription for mail. There you go. There you go.
01:07:34
Speaker
I wanted big while we're talking about wearing jeans and a polo and skinny jeans and a polo at Christian College. I just want to give a huge shout out to August Burns Red for making that cool at that time, making it not so terrible. Yeah, definitely. Definitely used to love that band. That was their deal. They all wore polos. They were like the American Eagle scene kids.
01:07:59
Speaker
Oh yeah, oh yeah, there was, oh my goodness, I have pictures on the end of it. That was, yeah, that was the world we were in at that time, everything. So dude, growing up with your dad not going, you mentioned there being like a tension there, not going to church, and you kind of, you kind of saying stuff to him. Was that like a normal thing where you trying to get your, like, did you feel that pressure to like get your dad into church? Did you talk to your mom about it? Like, how did that, how do you think that affected you when you were a kid?
01:08:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah, immensely. Actually, last Father's Day, my dad and I had a three hour talk about this. I think everyone's going to take away from this conversation, dude, for everyone listening is going to be that it's pretty fucking cool that you can just talk to your parents about this shit. Yeah.
01:08:42
Speaker
And I'll say it's I know it's a privilege I like I am so grateful for it because I know that not everyone has that opportunity and not everyone Everyone's parents or themselves are in a place where they can sort of have conversations that move forward that don't just hit a wall of like well We just disagree or I don't love you right up until I don't accept you like people You know with different sexual preferences. There's there's a lot of
01:09:07
Speaker
stuff that you can't talk about with your parents. I feel really grateful that when it comes to faith stuff, I'm still able to. But yeah, talking to my dad about it, it was interesting because it was intense. It was really intense. I mean, I was pretty, I was your little evangelist, you know? I wanted to convert every and anyone that, I was, you know,
01:09:32
Speaker
Inductimated in that sense of the world is black and white like you're either saved or not like you're either on God's side or you're not like you need to be safe and I specifically remember having anxiety as a little kid because I you know walks left behind right a movie that moved her camera in and I
01:09:50
Speaker
And those scenes would impact me so strongly because in my mind, I was like, well, my mom and I are going to be okay. Like we're the ones that the clothes are left behind. If people are listening, they don't know what we're referencing. This is a movie that essentially plays out in a narrative, the rapture, right? Where it's like people get taken back into heaven and the people who aren't Christian or weren't true Christians get left behind and sort of deal with the havoc of the Antichrist and of the world. It's pretty crazy shit. You definitely can pass the quarter test.
01:10:19
Speaker
Yes, exactly. So I had this heavy burden. I mean, like a burden that no one should hold yet alone a kid of you need to save your dad for an eternal damnation, you know, like your dad's gonna burn and I would have dreams of my dad burning and being in hell and just like,
01:10:37
Speaker
Such crazy stuff, and thinking I'm okay, I'm saved, and sort of putting that burden on my dad, he loves me, he loves me, he loves me, but it was a lot for him, and I think we talked about it now, and there's no hard feelings, he was just like, he's like, I understand you were brainwashed, you were in that headspace, and I was like, yeah, I was, I mean, my dad wanted to get a tattoo for the lungs, and I specifically remember telling him as a kid, dad, if you get a tattoo, you're gonna burn it.
01:11:05
Speaker
Wow. And now, you know, I have so many tattoos and I know, so he, I remember him saying, Kev, listen, I just want a tattoo that has your, he wanted like my name on, like something about me. It was like the sweetest thing. And I was like, Nope, like you can't mark your body. And he's like, one day you're going to grow up and you're going to get tattoos of your own and it's going to be too late for you to get tattoos. And I'll say, I said, dad, that's never going to happen.
01:11:30
Speaker
So, on my 18th birthday, when I got a tattoo, he was pretty upset slash, you know, sort of happy. He should have just gotten one with you. Well, that's what I said. I said, dad, it's not too late. And now he's all, no, I'm too old. It's past the time.
01:11:46
Speaker
I think he's just scared. I think it's just his excuse. But even until this day, I'm like, dad, it's Father's Day. It's your birthday. Let's go get a tattoo. Let's go. Every occasion, I'm like, it's time to get a tattoo together to make up for it. I'll pay for it. He's like, no, I'm too old. I can't do it now. So it's this ongoing joke we have. But if you look behind the curtain, it's of a joke. It's a pretty intense thing there that you sort of see the world in that way.
01:12:11
Speaker
Yeah, dude, it sounds like your dad was in an interesting spot. Like he wasn't trying to blow up you or your mom's spot and trying to let you guys do you, but also do him. And I think that sounds really, I mean, it sounds cool for him to have that patience with it, but that must have been so complicated and difficult for him.
01:12:33
Speaker
Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. And now that, you know, I don't go to church or even consider myself Christian anymore in a traditional way or whatever, um, we have such interesting talks about it. And like, I don't know if this is legal to say on a federal podcast, but can I talk about, can I talk about smoking weed or is that, is that weird? Yeah. Okay. Okay. We talk about drugs. I'll just pretend not to hear any of this. Okay. Cool.
01:13:00
Speaker
There was a few years back where we smoked weed together on his birthday and watched a movie and kicked it and talked about this stuff. And it was just such a surreal experience of like, wow.
01:13:12
Speaker
If you would have told me younger him that this situation would happen, there was no living soul that would believe you. But it's like the irony of it all. It's like here we are like laughing about these things. It's very serious sort of traumatic things like smoking. It's funny. And again, I'm grateful to have that sort of light hearted flexibility around my dad. Yeah. Or maybe the devil one.
01:13:35
Speaker
Or maybe the devil won't, and you know, that's a joke, right? But I think after leaving the church and sort of whatever, that idea of like two paths, right? One is God's path for your life and one is the devil's path and the wrong path.
01:13:52
Speaker
that has sort of haunted me even after removing the theology and like whatever and the culture and not going to church and all that stuff. There's still this like thing I struggle with a lot and I've talked to a lot of people that sort of grew up in the church and curious what you guys have to say too of this like dual path like right and wrong back and forth thing that happens in my head when certain situations arise or when I'm finding myself in a certain place and
01:14:19
Speaker
even as it's like when I actually when I get too high and I get all paranoid stuff as sometimes you do which why I don't really smoke anymore at all but when I did the reoccurring paranoid thought I would have is like you're on like sort of that joke you just made like you're on the wrong path and that's that's weird you know
01:14:37
Speaker
What particular things when you're, like you're in that headspace, what are the particular things that you look at as like, if this is a right versus wrong thing, this is the stuff in my life that's definitely a problem. Like, is there specific things that you're like, this could be an issue if it is the way that I was taught it was.
01:14:57
Speaker
No, it's not a specific thing. It's sort of like, almost like your butterfly effect situation where it's like one deviation in the road has sort of exponentially led to a different life. Which is ridiculous because life itself is this sort of beaming, beautiful, uncontrollable thing that just happens, right? There's no, I mean, whether you believe in sort of things being mapped out or not, I guess will defer your answer,
Faith, Upbringing, and Personal Will
01:15:20
Speaker
but
01:15:20
Speaker
um that's where your answer but there's just this sense of like oh this is not the right path which i don't believe in my right mind but it's this sort of in my body thing that happens that it sort of that thought tempts me sometimes and like gets me in a really weird headspace and i've only recently figured out that that definitely has to do with my upbringing in the church in like a very weird way of like dualistic paths god's will your will and sort of constantly putting into different baskets like which is which right um
01:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, there is definitely some things that like even if the implications of it are far from true there there are aspects of that that did turn out to be the way that we were taught they were in some ways like for instance, you know, you're kind of taught that like
01:16:07
Speaker
You need to be in church and you need to be around other Christians and surround yourself with your brothers and sisters in Christ and stuff like that. And if you're not constantly being nourished spiritually in a church setting or in spiritual ways that you'll drift from the Lord,
01:16:26
Speaker
And that is absolutely true. I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I think it was good for me. But it really was like my proximity to other Christians directly influenced how concerned I was about keeping my mind in check on what I thought.
01:16:48
Speaker
It was only after I had some distance between myself and church people and church places and all of that where I really started to be honest with myself about how much I actually believed and what actually mattered to me as opposed to what I continually paid lip service to and hoped was something that mattered to me.
01:17:11
Speaker
So you're saying that community helped you or sort of harmed you in knowing what you really believed? I think it just, it, I think regardless of whether you're talking about church, like if you, if you hang around nothing but like right wing people all the time, like there are people who are going to be completely repulsed by that and they'll just kind of withdraw into their own thing, you know, but a lot of people like are going to see like, Oh, well, you know, these people, I don't agree with them on this and that, but I,
01:17:40
Speaker
you know, they're good people and I do like them and I enjoy their company and slowly kind of like, they'll find themselves drifting more in that direction than they would if they had no proximity to those people whatsoever. And I think within the church, it's like that, but turned up pretty heavily because there's a lot of pressure to adopt principles and ideas and core beliefs, you know, that sort of fade away when you're not there all the time.
01:18:06
Speaker
Yeah. So what you're saying is you think that in the context of church has been a good thing in your life or sort of a thing that you've been fighting against? I think for me, it was both. But like the kind of stuff that that comes to mind with it is like it was only after I had kind of like removed myself from that community that I was able to go, okay, do
01:18:32
Speaker
Do I really think that God flooded the entire planet and all the animals got on a boat? That's the actual history of the world as we know it today. Do I actually think that? Because there was a lot of pressure to, like within my church, there was a lot of pressure to like, you read the Bible, you interpret it literally, and that is literally what God means. The earth's 6,000 years old, the whole earth flooded, two of every animal fit on a tiny boat.
01:19:00
Speaker
And that's what's the actual history of the of the planet is. And I wanted to think that was true. And I felt pressure to to believe that and to profess that. But after I wasn't like there all the time and feeling that pressure directly, it gave me more room to be like, I don't think I really believe this at all. You know, that's not an important thing, really. But like there's a lot of other things that kind of
01:19:28
Speaker
that have a lot more weight and, um, you know, they're a lot more pertinent to like your daily life and the way that you look at the people around you that I think faded away to, you know, when things like homophobia, you know, was, was definitely one of those things.
01:19:44
Speaker
Like I had to get out of there and meet other people and be away from like this consistent message for me to go. It's not right. The way that I think about, you know, these people who are just people and they're, they're good people, you know, I don't know.
01:19:59
Speaker
There's there's a lot of things like
Questioning Beliefs at Liberty University
01:20:01
Speaker
that. They're not all bad But I don't know it's it's like the the once the community aspect is severed I feel like a lot of people probably that's that's the test of your faith, right? Because it's just you it's you out in the wilderness and like there's nobody there for you to like Protect yourself from the outside world with yeah. Yeah, you have to do some digging. Yeah, absolutely
01:20:25
Speaker
I think what's interesting, I feel like almost my experience is a good bit different. The irony being that my mind shift and my thinking about things differently happened within the full context of church, being part of it, being active in it, being involved, and then just hearing things and being like, I'm not there anymore. I don't think that anymore.
01:20:49
Speaker
Or just having questions that I didn't feel like were being answered and reading about them, finding a new perspective or finding a different perspective, authors with different perspectives to get an idea of maybe the way other people look at this. And actually what's funny is that Liberty University was kind of where things did start shifting for me when I took a Daniel revelation class.
01:21:14
Speaker
joked on that a little bit here be quite silly but that was where I was they tried to set it up in a way that's just like there are these other ideas about what about you know end time stuff right and to me that was low stakes right you're not talking about the deity of Christ or the resurrection you're talking about
01:21:33
Speaker
heavy-ass speculation on whether or not how the world is going to be destroyed. So you're like, whatever, more like low stakes where you're like, I can think maybe differently than the mainstream without this being a problem. Mainstream evangelical Christianity, without this being a problem.
01:21:49
Speaker
So, you know, you read these books, it's like four views on this and then you get these different perspectives. And then I read a couple of things on like the dating of Revelation and when it was authored and the evangelical narrative. I'm like, this sounds so forced. Like it was like that became like an Occam's razor kind of thing. Maybe the simplest answer is the right one here. Like if you can, if it's very simple, that it was probably like if you can simply explain why it was probably written in this time period or this decade.
01:22:17
Speaker
um versus you know jumping through mad hoops and writing 15 chapters on why it wasn't it felt like really a lot easier to be like well maybe i just can think differently about this so that was ironically the catalyst for me was being like that got me interested in thinking about things differently that i made me feel like oh i i can take a different person uh and that
01:22:39
Speaker
I ended up feeling slightly more and more bold in the different types of perspectives I can take within within whatever scenario I was in. But was it John that wrote Revelation?
01:22:50
Speaker
Hey, John, someone who went by the name of John. Getting your feet boiled in oil scrambles your eggs a little bit. Maybe that's where revelation came from.
Departure from Church Community
01:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's quite the story. I mean, what was that like for you? What led you, because you said you don't identify as a Christian anymore. How did that come about? Oh man, that is a big question.
01:23:19
Speaker
Well, I think I had a similar journey to what you guys just explained of sort of having these bigger questions more and more in my late teens, early 20s.
01:23:32
Speaker
A lot around social issues, right? About certain groups and all that stuff and a lot of it around just the idea of eternity and hell and stuff like that. And just kind of that same feeling of like, huh, I'm not there anymore. I don't think I believe that. But like still being at church and sort of singing songs on stage. But like in the back of your mind, you're just like, I don't know.
01:23:57
Speaker
something goes off here. Not just culturally, but sort of existentially. So yeah, I started having, I think, those questions. I graduated high school and I didn't go to college, but I started leading worship at a church, like a church plant, and that was what I thought I needed to be doing in life. I was like 18 or 19, I was so young.
01:24:22
Speaker
and it ended up not being so great like sort of the whole situation it was just like a struggling church plant just not emotionally supportive for like a kid who just like trying to figure out what to do in life you know not to blame the church but it was just learning a lot of just like things out of that and
01:24:39
Speaker
and started traveling more and started just thinking more about critically about what I believed and sort of being out of that church context definitely helped that too. So I think I agree with or resonate with both of your stories. But it wasn't this like sever that like something happened like pastor betrayed
01:24:55
Speaker
this person or I saw this happen and my family got excommunicated it was none of that it was this sort of slow burn of like okay like I'm not sure I'm there anymore and then hearing other people go through that but in very sort of secret ways or through music like hearing you know page of the lion and hearing all these these guys that are singing about it and sort of connecting and being like wow like I really feel this stuff like I really feel myself in this
01:25:21
Speaker
and and getting more into that stuff and you know this is early twenties sort of having that moment where i'm like i'm not gonna go to church anymore i'm gonna just take some time and figure out what i believe and get away and and sort of the the identity crushing thing that happens when you decide to sort of take that big of
Reconciling Past Faith with Identity
01:25:42
Speaker
a
01:25:42
Speaker
it doesn't sound like that crazy for a lot of people like oh you left church like whatever but as if someone who's like led worship or like been into church when you get out of it it's it could be like there's like a withdrawal from that whole community or just sense of self that is like pretty jarring it feels a little funky um so spent some years in that sort of fog and headspace and and i think i'm still in some version of that but a lot healthier and a lot better thankfully due to like
01:26:07
Speaker
therapy and friends and conversations like this and with people talking about their past and talking about how the weird stuff was weird but also how like some of the good stuff was good and that's been the hardest part for me. It's like it's figuring out like whoa like there's some stuff in here that like is part of who I am and part of the way I see
01:26:27
Speaker
Love and life and patience and all these things that I consider good things about myself Were were acquired through my faith or my relationship with my mom and that sort of faith relationship And how do I make sense of this where it's not even throwing the baby out with the bathwater? It's like I can't throw myself out like there are parts of myself that are ingrained in this But a lot of it I most of that I don't I don't mess with him. I don't I don't believe in I don't I don't resonate with
01:26:56
Speaker
So, but some of it I still do and those little parts are very poor. So it's just about how do you navigate that and how do you not feel like you're broken when that is the case or you're not feeling like half of yourself is in one door, half of yourself is in the other end.
01:27:10
Speaker
I think for a while I saw myself as lost. I was like, well, I'm just lost. I don't know. But I'm definitely not in that place now, thankfully, due to good conversations, relationship therapy, supporting life, and so many things. But yeah, it's been a journey to get here. And I still feel like I'm trucking on and figuring out what that means and what that looks like to feel whole in that sense.
01:27:33
Speaker
But I think it's a journey worth going on, rather than being like, well, I need to sort of scurry back into a corner. Because we all know that feels great. It's great to have that security net of like, all right, here are my sets of beliefs. It's here. It's black and white. It's what it's written on the wall. It's what all these 10,000 people are doing must be good, right? Where it's like, no, I don't want to fall back into that. So yeah.
01:28:00
Speaker
Yeah, dude, I think what you're saying, especially about, you know, you mentioned not wanting to, it's not about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but how much of like, how much of who you are is because of what we
01:28:10
Speaker
raised and I think this is what I'm kind of extrapolating from some of what you're saying is that like and this is some maybe I'm projecting it maybe you can tell me but like there's so much of so much of Christianity is tied up in just believing the right things right you need to believe x y and z and that's what's going to send you to heaven that's what's going to save you in the end times that's what's going to get you sucked up into heaven to heaven's gates of the rapture like
01:28:35
Speaker
It's that rightness of belief. And we make this assumption that because of our rightness of belief, we're going to do the things that God wants us to do. We're going to take care of the people who need to be taken care of. We're going to have those virtuous things that end up becoming part of us, looking at things in a way like, well,
01:28:55
Speaker
maybe loving the unlovable or trying to be patient or whatever. Those types of things get instilled, but we are taught that we're only going to successfully accomplish these things if we believe the right things about who God is or who Christ is. I think what becomes so weird is when you realize that you start losing those beliefs, but some of those values maintain despite them and you start to feel like,
01:29:25
Speaker
You know, I guess I kind of connect this back to what you're talking about is that that struggle of feeling like even when you're beyond believing some of these things that struggle when you you you sink back into those times of you're on the right path or the wrong path or whatever. And I want to maybe a little bit get into maybe some of what I feel like that comes through in
01:29:47
Speaker
in your music uh your that oh my god i keep forgetting i we talked about it before we started recording uh the name of your album uh the last the most recent one
01:29:56
Speaker
Everyone I've ever loved. Yes, I feel like that struggle comes through in it of like beat which that path or like I feel like I'm on this the wrong one, but I definitely don't feel like I that but maybe I'm okay with that and I'll just be okay with being wrong that but then that so I feel like maybe I want to hear about that journey for you because I feel like maybe you were transitioning to where you're at now when maybe you wrote some of that, but I it just feels like
01:30:25
Speaker
like you can keep some of that good stuff you can keep a lot i have i kept a lot of it despite i'm still more i i i still kind of plant myself in christianity i guess but that that comes with a lot of baggage and asterisks but either way i but for me it's like we're it's all regardless of belief it's like my my belief at this point has become like in these good things in this way of life and that like
01:30:51
Speaker
It kind of inversed, right? Like, so growing up Christianity, you'll only do the right things because of Jesus. But now it's like, I just want to do, I feel like if there's anything in this world, anything that matters, anything that has meaning,
01:31:07
Speaker
I'll prescribe this meaning to it, if that's how I give it that meaning. But that's the way that I want to live. I'll live that way. And it's a big middle finger to Paul. You know, faith that that works is dead. No, it's not, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. Paul James was no.
Exploring Spirituality Beyond Christianity
01:31:25
Speaker
Was that was that was that Paul or was that James? I might have been. I might have been James. You've been out for a while, man. I've been out for too long. Wow. I feel like I got to Google it now. That is James. Right. But the irony of that is like you have see.
01:31:37
Speaker
You had people who wanted to get rid of, who wanted to get rid of that book. Was it Martin Luther? I mean, Jesus Christ. One of the reformers or something, wanted to get rid of that, didn't think that book should have been in the Bible because the idea that your beliefs are, it's kind of like, who gives a fuck what you believe? Show me what you do and then I'll know what you believe.
01:32:04
Speaker
I know it goes both ways. I was more making a joke to like sort of turn it on its head, but I completely agree with what you're saying. But anyway, yeah, so the whole like struggle of right and wrong and wondering if like, for the longest time, I was like, I'm believing the wrong things. Therefore, I might go to hell, even though my life didn't change at all. And I was still actively involved in the world I was involved in.
01:32:28
Speaker
Am I really? Is it all about this like ascent to some theological proposition? That's it? That's how we've boiled this down to. But then when I would really feel like I connected with my faith, it never had anything to do with it.
01:32:43
Speaker
trying to make those two compete old for me. Yeah, no, for sure. They can get tiring. Yeah. So if you're unmoored from Christianity, do spirituality play any role in your life? Did you find another belief system that worked better for you? Or do you kind of just take it as it comes and not really think it's
01:33:10
Speaker
as closely about some of the good configure principles of it. Oh, no, I think more closely, I think than I've ever had before. That sounded really condescending. No, no, no, no, no. No, you're fine. I understand the question, but it's no, no, but it's a good question, right? Where it's like, well, if you don't resonate with this. But no, I think deeply still very spiritual, deeply
01:33:35
Speaker
I think just more open and more humble to the fact that maybe we're all wrong, maybe someone is right. I don't know. I don't have the authority or I have the right to have the faith and everyone has the right to have the faith. I think this is it, you know? But a lot more open to just how different people found faith, find faith, and even within Christianity, you know? Because I think I grew up in such a way of, all right, you're assemblies of God, Christian,
01:34:04
Speaker
you know, even Catholics, even they're on the edge, dude. I don't know about those guys. Like, you know, it was even this like outside of my own culture, not sure, you know, and I think that played a big role and like really started turning me off. It was just like us, them. So now I try to make, I'm still, again, still learning how to build those values of what I loved and learned as a child.
01:34:27
Speaker
you know, teenager and through my life still of sort of God reaching out. But I don't see it in like the traditional church Christian sense that I grew up in. But I think that it's beautiful that there are churches all over the world that celebrate God differently, that don't have maybe fog machines and flashing lights like
01:34:48
Speaker
sort of the contemporary version of Christianity is in America. There's just different ways to see it. That's where I'm at and I think I'm still tuning in to find what that means for me personally. But I think we all are in some way and I think
01:35:05
Speaker
once you think you've landed i don't know that that's where i think i'm having i have a hard time like okay cool like i'll never truly land but there are ways that i think building values are important so there's a sort of balance of like yes build your values but there isn't as like yep i'm i'm this now and and uh i don't know i kind of try to have that openness about most things in life and get tripped up most of the time but
01:35:25
Speaker
Does the larger institution of, you know, organized religion like does it do you just kind of do you feel like like repulsed by it or do you really not have that sort of angst against it or where did that not anymore? Not anymore. Not anymore. I think.
01:35:43
Speaker
Well, I should say for certain institutions, I do. And those are the ones that take advantage of vulnerable people and marginalized communities. And that's actually something very close to my heart where, you know, my mom and I grew up, my parents were divorced, and my mom and I, I grew up together. And I've seen my dad a whole bunch, but, you know, there was, um, the televangelist, your, you know, your preferably dollars. Yeah.
01:36:08
Speaker
Kenneth Copeland's and you know I grew up on that stuff and saw my mom fooled into that pretty heavily and so there is a fire in my heart reserved for institutions like that that has not gone out to this day and I still have a lot of sort of anger and angst build up towards that of course just because I can't see people get like that sort of level of scamming like really bothers and hurts me just because of the personal connection but in general I think anyone with the right mind would feel that way
01:36:38
Speaker
So yes, in that sense, but no in the sense of, you know, church, as people would go to church, there's no sort of judgment. And I think there might have been for a while, like, nah, dude, like, I'm out, like, I got out. And there was this, you know, almost, I sort of needed to distance it and like, not associate at all or like, think it was bad to feel good about myself. But I feel like I've realized you can only be in that place of anger, which is an important place to be.
01:37:05
Speaker
but it's not a good place to be forever. I do believe you have to walk through that part of the puzzle, right? But to stay there, it's not a great thing. So I still find myself again at times seeing stuff and feeling angry, but I try to be very careful of managing that because it's almost sadness now. That anger is a lot of it is transferred to like, wow,
01:37:28
Speaker
Those people are so in it that they really don't see a lot of this stuff. And not that I know or that I see outside, but when people are obviously getting manipulated, there is something to be said of like, wow, that's a weird situation. I'm not saying I'm better, but I'm saying that we need help.
01:37:46
Speaker
So there is, I think it's a mixed answer, but in terms of just like people who go to church or like the F to church, like I don't, I try not to feel that way or hold on to that. I still do have a healthy amount of calling out bullshit I see in the church just because so many years I sort of was like, eh, or felt, you know, part of it. So I think it's important to still call that out where I see it, but I don't try to spend my time thinking about it or ruminating on pastors being fake or this or that, because it's like, well,
01:38:13
Speaker
I'm going to just do my part to like to be the counter to that, not to just be a critic to that. Like what am I doing to sort of offset that? Like how am I offering people sort of a good story or good hope? So I try not to focus too much on that, but, but definitely have been in places like that and still find myself. It's like, you got to walk through that desert, but it's not a good place to pitch a tent. Something like that. Yeah.
01:38:37
Speaker
Tell that to the Israelites who were in that desert for 40 years. Tell that to the Israelites who were in that desert for 40 years. That's messed up, man. I think I know a few of those on Instagram. They didn't.
Church Growth and Challenges
01:38:49
Speaker
The Airbnbs, they had, right? They didn't have tests.
01:38:53
Speaker
uh if it's uh if it's not a subject that you want to talk about totally understand but we we get a we talked to a lot of people who like one of their final experiences with christianity and and and church in any sort of formal setting was a church plant
01:39:13
Speaker
And it seems like it seems like that's a common thread. And, you know, we recently had a discussion with a couple that are also musicians. And, you know, they talked a lot about their experience helping to start this church in Boston. And it seems like church plant stuff is like just these
01:39:37
Speaker
cataclysmic like up and downs. It's like the peaks of meaning and ecstasy and stuff like that in building it, followed by the pits of despair in the demands of what's required for people who are trying to get something like that off the ground and the
01:39:57
Speaker
the difficulty in working that closely with people who may or may not have the experience necessary to wrangle an organization like that that they're trying to put together. What was that experience like for you? Oh, man. Yeah. I think there's a lot to that. It's funny. You said church plan in Boston. That isn't because the one I was in was that was a
01:40:18
Speaker
oh well exchange details yes after hours blast necessarily here but i'm growing up christian after hours um yeah no i think there's an element to there's a connection to what we talked about with the school teachers about
01:40:36
Speaker
these people with maybe good hearts who are just showing up to serve, right? But there being a level of, there might be a disqualification for certain roles there and a lack of maybe education or experience, but because it's in a church setting, it like sort of nullifies that and it's like, oh, your heart's there. So like, let's get you involved and like, let's put all this responsibility and pressure and all this stuff on.
01:40:59
Speaker
And I definitely felt that as like a 19 year old kid that was like so under qualified to be a worship pastor at a church plant. And, uh, you know, at the time I was doing it with a girl, I was dating or doing it together. It was a mess. And it was not their, it's not their fault. No one put a gun to my head to do it. But I think there was this, there was this delusion of like, I'm here to change the world, which could have happened if I didn't do it. Like there was a sense of this is my, this is God's platform.
01:41:26
Speaker
this is the plan, this is it. And there was this responsibility I felt to do that. And I think that, I don't know if that completely answers the question, but I think there's a relationship to that and sort of burning out and realizing feeling like I didn't have what it takes or what is wrong with me or this or that, where it's just like, you're just trying to build a church.
01:41:47
Speaker
with little money and the fundraising culture is a whole other thing and like it's intense it's like it's crazy stuff and it's stuff that I don't miss and don't recommend and I don't know it's it can get really funky I think the conflicting feelings that situations like that bring upon people is like when you get into a church plant you're doing it because you're like we gotta bring the gospel to this area and God obviously wants his gospel brought areas and
01:42:15
Speaker
You're met with this like, of course it's hard work and it's not great and it's difficult, but there's this feeling that like it should take off differently or feel differently. Like if God wants this to happen, shouldn't this be going maybe a little bit smoother? Shouldn't maybe less people be leaving? So then when you want to leave, you're met with like, I'm giving up on God, but like,
01:42:39
Speaker
You're also feeling like, shouldn't God be doing some of this too? Shouldn't this be doing better? Or bringing in more people if this is what God actually wants? I don't know. Maybe that hits you a little bit more when you're stuck in that mode of like,
01:42:57
Speaker
whether or not everything's predetermined where your works make a difference. But I just remember feeling like I used to go around areas of Boston just hoping to be able to meet people and somehow, maybe,
01:43:11
Speaker
end up bringing him into church or even if it wasn't church like getting in a conversation with a stranger about and leading him to the Lord. It's so weird to think about. I feel like I might have never even brought that up but I just feel it feels so strange to think about because I think in some sense that was always about me but in a church setting I'm like I always want like it felt like maybe it shouldn't be so grueling to get this to where it should be if this is what God
01:43:40
Speaker
wants, but then giving up is like going against God's plan. It makes everything so convoluted and confusing and it created a lot of fog at that point. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm going to throw a wrench in that because I'm curious to hear what you think about this theory, but I also think the inverse is true where a lot of times people are able to justify unhealthy systems and behaviors by pointing to the fact that, oh, our church is growing.
01:44:08
Speaker
Absolutely. It's an interesting paradox. I also agree with what you're saying, but it is funny to see other churches that are obviously manipulating people or hurting people. I mean, there's the whole Marcel stuff. I don't know how much you guys followed up with that, but there was a lot there of like, oh, let's point to the numbers and say, okay, we're on track. God's working. God's working. People are growing. The church is growing.
01:44:36
Speaker
Until it implodes on itself or explodes on itself right maybe one is imploding what is exploding where you realize that you're just riding the wave of sort of success and recruitment right and i think yeah in that in the idea of recruitment has really been on my mind and heart like this past.
01:44:53
Speaker
couple months, I've been talking to friends about it, just that sense of, as a kid, like you said, walking around, looking at people, passed by, and having this nature, and I am a recruiter, like, I am here to save them, I'm here to bring
01:45:08
Speaker
And in your head, it's like to bring them to know Christ, to know freedom, to know the gospel so that their chains are broken. And I'm not saying that that's not true, that you didn't believe that earnestly, but there's a sense of that is a crazy thing to just think that you were trying to recruit people. Or I can speak for myself, like I was always seeing the world through a lens of it's my people and like the world and it's time. And I think that creates, for me, created a really unhealthy perspective on the world and one that I
01:45:36
Speaker
definitely do not hold anymore by any means and actively work to like never fall into that headspace because I feel like that's where you get into trouble with understanding people because I think everyone has the opportunity right to say oh I'm on the right side of the lens here you know.
01:45:52
Speaker
whether it's Mohammed that was born in Morocco, or Frank in Germany, or Paolo in Brazil, or Kevin in Boston. We all have our worldview and our way to say, well, the way I grew up is there. So the humility and just the openness to be like, well, let me not put, you know, this isn't a me-centric world. It was like when people didn't want to accept that, you know, the sun wasn't the center of the universe. They thought the earth was the center of the universe. Years of scientific battle for people to think, no guys, like, we're literally the third planet in.
01:46:21
Speaker
We're not the center. It's kind of the same thing. You're like, wait, no, but it makes sense that like my, my, my, my story, my movie in my head, like I'm the main character. But then you realize like everyone else is the main character too. So I'll be kind of gentle to other people and understand their, their perspective. Yeah, dude, absolutely. It's funny. I'll be like, even, I'll be really self-deprecating here, I guess, because where we were in like, you know, when I talk about going around trying to
01:46:47
Speaker
hopefully find myself in conversations where I could lead so to Lord or invite him to church or whatever. Of course, the only places I was walking around were like, you know, low income areas, right? Low income housing.
01:47:00
Speaker
what you might
01:47:19
Speaker
in this area with these people and it it's so shitty like I hate that so much about like that also like a sense of because like I'm I'm in sales and like when you're making cold calls the perceived importance of a person or like how well they have themselves in their organization together directly correlates with like how much anxiety you have about going to talk to them.
01:47:44
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. So like walking more anxiety, the more anxiety, the higher rank the person talking you're talking to. Yeah. Like I work with car dealerships and like going to talk to the owner of the car dealership produces a different level of anxiety than like going to talk to the technicians in the back shop or the service manager or whatever.
01:48:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're spot on. I think that has a lot to do with it. And I think probably some of that's just like the justification for it is, I'm going to the least of these, forgetting entirely that Jesus just shit on the rich. Well, that's where you got to give your boy Carl Lentz props, because he went to the most of these. Justin Bieber, he went to the Kardashians. He swung for the fence, that guy. He swung for something. Yeah.
01:48:36
Speaker
Yeah, well, yeah you go big or go home and he eventually had to go you went you went big all right Couple bangs I heard what's the what's his next grift has he announced yet? I mean we have an idea of where he's going is he selling? like gold bouillon on Rudy Giuliani's radio station or what's what's his next huxed and
01:49:03
Speaker
You know, man, I think they should just have one big uncantled tour where it's everyone who was canceled just getting together. This is a great idea. Dude, it's just the worst idea. No, it's like Carl Lynch, Carl Lynch, Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones like dance in a can can. No, no, no. But it ends with them with their tour bus just driving off of a cliff. And then, you know, they go out with a
01:49:33
Speaker
there last year. I think that's fine. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll figure that one out. Yeah, you got to her book and people, you know, people. Yeah. Let's make this happen. Yeah. But I want to talk about what I do want to talk about your music and I know you got some stuff coming out. I know I was telling you at the top year before we started recording, everyone I ever loved. I was driving home from North Carolina on my vacation a few weeks ago and I listened to it like
01:50:00
Speaker
I guess I'd like four times back to back and just really like kind of soaking it in because I loved it. I like, you know, the first time I'm listening to it, my kids are. I also probably had to listen a bunch of times because I'm driving a 12, 13 hour drive with my kids in the backseat. Yeah, it's not a whole lot. It's hard to pay attention to anything. But it's like I feel like a lot of the stuff that we talk about that we have talked about comes through in that. And that came out that album came out in 2018.
01:50:29
Speaker
A lot of what you were writing was leading up to that. Was that when you were kind of struggling through a lot of this and kind of on your way out of what you would have considered like a traditional Christian world?
Faith and Personal Growth Reflected in Music
01:50:45
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, that album specifically was a big part of processing all these topics. And it was written, yeah, I mean, came out in 2018, but it was recorded in 2018, but written, you know, sort of three, four, five years before that, all the songs were gathering up and, and
01:51:03
Speaker
Yeah, it was sort of just everything we're talking about here and more, just all those concepts of just discovering your identity and your relationship to faith and to family and to community and to friendships that have grown up through faith. I mean, that's another thing. Going to youth group, like I said, a lot of my core friends were from church and seeing their faith change and that dynamic.
01:51:28
Speaker
it's still trippy to me like there's some friends I have that are you know they're still in the church or pastoring churches and I'm just so far away from that world it's just it's crazy how things can change so navigating that through the lens of friendships and what that means for your friendships and grieving and losing friendships.
01:51:44
Speaker
There was just a lot on that album that was just written about regarding sort of re-understanding faith and leaving the church, obviously. But what's funny, like now the big thing is a deconstruction writer, everyone's talking about it and that's cool. But it wasn't even like, oh, I'm deconstructing, like time to write a deconstruction album.
01:52:04
Speaker
It wasn't anything like that and I think it was just what I was going through at the time and very, really the stuff that was deep, deep in my heart and sort of things that I was processing the most and you know it seemed to now be like a record that really helps people in that space to sort of understand to talk about things which is so great but it's always interesting to look back on it to be like I didn't intend it to be this like banner or anything like that for like
01:52:32
Speaker
the people who like leave the church it was just what I was going through and it's just always interesting to see how people sort of perceive that art and put it to their own story and their own but it seems like it's helped a lot of people which is really cool and like makes me really fun yeah dude absolutely I think I think when I you mentioning that it was written over obviously a period of time I think I want you can almost see that like there it's almost like a conversation like when you look at someone the back and forth and it's like you seem like you're more over here maybe in one song and more over here and
01:53:01
Speaker
I don't know, man, I really piece together well. And I just that's what made me want to re listen to it so many times in a row. That's so cool. That's cool. I love that. And here and like, you know, questions around, you know, like I said earlier, like you, some of it definitely comes down to that whole, like, two paths. Am I on the right path? Am I on the wrong path? And I think
01:53:22
Speaker
And one of the songs, you said something about, you know, maybe I'll just be content existing outside of your lovers. And it's like, I think, to me, like, I thought what resonated with me about that concept is I feel like that, that
01:53:37
Speaker
kind of encapsulates something that people who are having a shift in faith whether or not they stay Christian or not but having a shift from the faith that they were born into is something that they go through where it's like the dissonance is like I understand you're so the idea that what you were born into is correct is so
01:53:57
Speaker
wrapped up in your psychology and who you are, that the idea of doing anything different can't be anything but wrong. But you're so much outside of what you came up in that you have to just be okay with being wrong. And I feel like that's the first step that people take in a lot of ways. And I think that you a lot of what you
01:54:17
Speaker
what that album, what you say on it hits to that. Yeah, that is a great point. What always gets me though, and I'm always confused by this because it's what you said. It's the main character syndrome, right? It's like, well, how is the thing that I was born into not the thing? It has to be like, this is my life, this is my perspective. But it always gets me people who find God at 29 or 30.
01:54:49
Speaker
Yeah, okay, interesting. I don't have the answer, and I have thoughts, I have opinions, and I'm just like, well, how do I, is it a trick of the light? Is it emotional response? Is it someone just super vulnerable? Is it God? What is that? Because that person, sometimes I've seen people living a life
01:55:10
Speaker
alcoholic, like down a certain path and like overnight for life has changed and their complete worldview and sense of self and reliance on everything is just completely shifted and that is funky and definitely still very interesting and like see that play out in some people's life when I when I was younger in the church I saw it and I was like what is that?
01:55:28
Speaker
you know at the time it's like oh it's the power of god and not not that i'm saying it's not i'm just saying i'm open to yeah what is the psychology behind that right like what is happening that's your logic i'm really curious yeah dude i i mean my my grandfather and so my uncle it's funny so
01:55:45
Speaker
one of my uncles I talked to a good bit just like messaging right and his he's my uncle's age is like in between me and my dad likes he was born like my dad was like eighteen or nineteen when he moved out of the house and then
01:56:01
Speaker
I mean, he's 18 or 19. I think he's like 18 or 19 years older than my uncle. So like my uncle was basically a kid with my dad. And so he's kind of like bridges it, right? There's like, he's like the middle ground. And my grandfather was an alcoholic and he was a really shitty dad in a lot of ways too.
01:56:18
Speaker
the older kids. But he had his conversion experience. He got saved and he quit drinking. Anyone who knew him after that would be like kindest, gentlest, most loving. He just saw you. I remember being in high school talking about being in a metal band. He didn't know anything about it. But he would just look at you with these eyes of like, this is the most important thing in the world to me.
01:56:48
Speaker
And my uncle messaged me recently talking about how like that's how people knew him is like
01:56:54
Speaker
He just loved you and cared about you heard and saw you and it made me think of that experience again. And I'm like that it's for my grandfather that it that being that was directly tied to his. So I'm with you, man. Like I don't I don't know what to make of that stuff, especially when you see some people have a conversion experience and become really shitty. I've definitely seen that before. But right. I think a lot of that comes down to just like
01:57:21
Speaker
some people need structure so badly like and not in a bad way like oh you're just too dumb to make it on your own you know but like some people I feel like they're they're not happy with where they are and they know they need to make a change and like
01:57:38
Speaker
This community offers a structure that seems to really work for some people. You know, if you're, if you depending on what your goals are, but it does seem to work really well for certain people and like, I dunno, you know, have you guys ever had somebody close to you that like sold Amway?
01:57:57
Speaker
No, it's not a good compare. It's like a condescending comparison for sure. But like part of like jumping into something like Amway or something is like, you know, it's not the sort of thing that you're like, well, I guess I'll try it and see if I can sell some stuff or whatever.
01:58:12
Speaker
Like you have to buy into the system, you know, and the system has to become like, I have a job, but this is how I'm going to get ahead. Like this is how I'm going to establish myself and get ahead in life. And it's more than just like a side business. Like this is going to be how I get to the next level. And I think that's kind of how people approach a lot of things. And, you know, with Christianity, especially I was just having a conversation about a guy
01:58:39
Speaker
like this today who you know was kind of a partier and stuff like that in his younger days you know long before I knew him and now he's very devout and very kind of annoying about it to the point where like he gets angry that like co-workers are drinking at a
01:59:00
Speaker
at a dinner or a company outing or something like that. But he needs that structure so bad. And when that structure did work for him, he became so loyal to it that the structure is now kind of more important than reaching the people on the other side of it. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think that is the case for plenty of people. I think that's tried and true, really. I think the outliers are where
01:59:28
Speaker
I find myself being fascinated. I think I honestly believe my grandfather was enough because I don't know. I mean, I think he found a church and, you know, all that kind of stuff. But AA definitely was a catalyst for
Faith as a Structure for Life
01:59:40
Speaker
it. So I mean, shout out to AA, right? Like that is one of those things. That's that is a structure that does work. And that that having that really is is beneficial. But
01:59:50
Speaker
Yeah, that wasn't something my grandfather even stuck with like he didn't stay in a he didn't like I there's like it was just something something flipped in him from my understanding and the person that I knew was different than like the person that my
02:00:05
Speaker
My dad or siblings grew up with like there was an actual I feel like there was an actual Change as much as I could understand it outside of like boxing into these structures or then wanting everyone else to or feeling Uncomfortable if other people didn't like it was just like yeah
02:00:21
Speaker
You do you, you know, yeah, I'm gonna do this is me who I am now like it feels like there was a change there and I think I think that's what's that those are the ones that do boggle my mind and they are Certainly, but it's interesting. So to that point of structure I'm thinking about this and I think we're thinking about in terms of a meetings or church or community group or Sunday mornings But I think if you zoom that out and look at the macro the subset subscribing to faith
02:00:49
Speaker
is sort of cosmic structure, right? It's someone who's felt lost otherwise and saying all of a sudden like not in like even your community but in your existence you have a place like you have a like a place in the jar like there is now an identity and there's someone above you and there's in some ways maybe even unhealthy people below you there's like a sense of structure in your sense of self.
02:01:12
Speaker
which I think explains a lot of people who feel lost or broken or vulnerable, like the psychology behind giving them faith. For better or for worse, I think we all need that. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's just faith is one of those things, religion is one of those things, for better or for worse, that gives you that cosmic structure of your self-interest, right?
02:01:35
Speaker
And I think that's why there's a lot of magic or just like radical change that happened because you're just looking at someone who's just been completely unhinged, alcoholic sometimes. And all of a sudden they're there tonight night and day, like their lives have changed. And I think a lot of that has to do with structure. I think that's a great point. But even if you zoom it out, like to the sense of self, not just to like, oh, I have people to like see every Sunday now or like sort of a weak structure, but like a life structure. Yeah. Like reframes.
02:02:02
Speaker
your existence in a lot of ways. And I don't think that that need cheapens it in any sort of way or makes it, I don't think that it's a bad thing. Like, and if we're being honest, all of us benefit from structure, regardless of what part of your life you're talking about. Like just, you know, just look at your job. Like if you're miserable at your job,
02:02:23
Speaker
And we all go through points where we feel that way, you know, like, okay, well, what time are you going to bed at night? And what time are you getting up in the morning? And like, you're going to work, but are you, are you getting some exercise or are you getting outside? You know, all of a sudden you go from like, just being in disarray to like, I'm in bed at 11, I'm up at five, I do a, you know, 30 minutes on the treadmill, and then I go to work.
02:02:47
Speaker
i'm getting sleep you know like all of that stuff even though that's like a you know a more concrete version of what we're talking like all of that not only helps you do better at your job and not hate it so much but like it just makes your life better in a lot of ways and i think like
02:03:06
Speaker
There's something to be said for, okay, you've decided that evangelicalism or Christianity or whatever it is that you grew up in is not the structure for you. I don't think you want to spend too much time totally adrift. You need to find some foundational principles that you can plant your flag in. And you hear a lot of that from people who are into Buddhism.
02:03:30
Speaker
like buddhism is a really good framework with which to look at your life you know like secular buddhism or whatever you want to you know whichever version of it you want to talk talk about that seems to work well for a lot of people who want some degree of spirituality in their life but like christianity just doesn't work for them anymore
02:03:50
Speaker
Hmm. That's interesting. I don't know if I fully agree with that. And I'm going to think on that one because I almost am in the place that I think the universe is structureless. But I still believe that structures are important. So there's this pair is almost paradoxical and your
02:04:08
Speaker
your your point makes more sense than mine will probably make sense but i feel like we're living in a paradox that things are so crazy that we need that structure to distract us from the unstructured chaos that is probably true it could be a distraction but i also think but i don't but i don't know i that's that's the thing too where it's i don't
02:04:29
Speaker
That's what I think. But I still see the benefits of everything you're saying. I completely agree. When I feel the worst in my life, it's when things are a mess. I don't feel like I'm sleeping well. Things are unstructured. There's no rhythm. That is completely true. But I think that's why we're so quick to say, like, oh, we gotta land somewhere. We gotta figure it out. We gotta figure out this faith thing. Because in every other sphere, that structure is important. But I just don't think faith is something we can quantify down to that level of consistency ever.
02:04:58
Speaker
values, yes, that's where I think I'm still struggling. I know, but it's not even a point of me making an argument. It's just a good one. Yeah. Well, and I say all that not really having a structure myself. I just kind of drift back and forth dependent on what we're what we're arguing about. Yeah, I think an interesting caveat to all that kind of I guess it somewhat bridges the gap a bit. Not that I like to be middle road fucking guy. That guy gets annoying after a while, but
02:05:27
Speaker
Rob Bell, I remember hearing him say at one point that when it comes to a sort of spiritual growth, there's this spiritual, not religious sense. And that's, of course, fine. But there are, when you look at, when you can set something up as kind of a guidepost, you're going to have almost become a more, I don't necessarily like the terminology I'm about to use, but a more spiritually mature person.
02:05:57
Speaker
Like, if you're just adrift, you're like, I don't know that I necessarily believe in anything, but everything's great. Love is love and blah, blah, blah. Those people kind of just are flaky often. But when you look at the people who provide real value in their teaching, with their guidance, they're coming from a perspective. What they're not doing is making their perspective monolith.
02:06:21
Speaker
They're not saying this is the only way, but they're extrapolating something that's useful for everyone and themselves from a particular person. So you could pick Jesus, right? You can pick Jesus and you can use that as your post, your signpost, your whatever. And you could also pick something else. So Buddhists, it has the tradition that it's
02:06:44
Speaker
that it's wrapped up in. And it can extrapolate from thousands of years of other people's thinking within that. And I like that idea. And I think that even when you're talking about structure, Casey, that's why I'm not resistant to that. I don't think the idea of structure or a framework or a scaffolding makes people weak. I think everybody picks it. And people who don't are flaky and floaty, and they're kind of adrift.
02:07:10
Speaker
in a lot of ways. So for me, I'm not going to make any real truth claims. I'm not going to say, this is the way. But for me, it makes sense to stick within something. So my framework has always been Christian. And while my beliefs have changed in a lot of ways that pull me far outside any sort of traditional Christian faith, and that definitely
02:07:36
Speaker
puts me as an adversary to some of those in those traditions. I find that that works for me and having that structure and that scaffolding allows me to, in the circumstances that I'm in personally, be like
02:07:50
Speaker
Look, this is the kind of person I want to be based on the way they understand Jesus. I don't know if there's anything out there outside of this universe, inside of this universe, anything that provides meaning or not. But I know that when I feel things are meaningful and I find meaning in this crazy fucked up place, it's through that lens. And outside of that lens, I lose that. And it doesn't mean it's right, wrong, true or false. It just means that I'm on this. That's how I'm going to get through this and how I'm going to get through it in a way that I think
02:08:17
Speaker
When I live this way, or when I act this way, it makes the world a better place based on a collective agreement, right, we can collectively agree societally, globally, universally that like, there are ways to live that make the world a better place and ways to live that makes it in order to live into that in a way that I think is important.
02:08:35
Speaker
or helpful or provides meaning it's through that lens and through that and then so that's that's why it works for me but so i think that structure i'll never find that to be an offensive thing like i'll pick it i'll pick this one this is my structure and you can pick that structure and be really fucking shitty we're seeing it constantly and that's why people are leaving it in droves the the christian one but like
02:08:59
Speaker
It doesn't mean you can't make it work for you. It doesn't mean you have to make it work for you. And it certainly doesn't make it ultimate reality. Yeah. It's almost like a language, right? It's just communication. Yeah. You could know a language and have a great vocabulary or a shitty vocabulary. You can know a language and say, wow, there are hundreds of other languages that can communicate the same thing just in different ways. But
02:09:24
Speaker
to not ever learn any specific language sort of inhibits your expression maybe? I'm just trying to understand it through that lens. That's really interesting. I like the way you just boil it. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. To not learn a language simply because it's all just metaphor for things and concepts would be insane.
02:09:44
Speaker
Yeah, there's a practicality. The more you know, the better in some ways, but yeah, it's true. It's true. Yeah. That's, that's it. That's really, I love, I love that challenge. That's a really interesting point. Yeah. I have to wrap up in a little bit here. No, it's been great. I'm just giving you a heads up. Um, but it's, we could probably go on forever.
02:10:02
Speaker
We could. No, this is about our time. It's funny because I was like, it's close us out. Let's talk about some music and we've been doing this for 20 minutes. No, I love it. I love all the conversations. Well, let's really close us out and you guys have two new singles out. Do you have a release date for your new album?
02:10:19
Speaker
We do. June 3rd. It's coming up. Oh, nice. June 3rd. So just in a bit, we're going to put out the full record. It's called Heal My Head. And yeah, two singles are out right now. There'll be a third probably by the time this airs or the full album will be out. So we're really excited.
02:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's a continuation to the story. Nice. I can't wait to hear it. The two singles that are out now are fantastic. I've already said enough nice things about your previous album.
Upcoming Music Release
02:10:46
Speaker
Everyone really go listen to it. I think our listeners especially listen to everyone I've ever loved. I got to write this. If people want updates on touring and all of that stuff, new music, all that work, what's the best place for them to follow you guys and keep up with that?
02:11:03
Speaker
uh instagram probably yeah instagram or twitter yeah which is uh valley heart m a uh for twitter and same for instagram valley heart m a valley heart m a yeah even though you're not massachusetts anymore
02:11:19
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I can't do, you know, QC or Quebec or wherever I'm at right now. That username was taken. Well, everybody, thanks for listening. Uh, go follow Valleyheart MA on Twitter and Instagram and we will catch you next time.