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Ep. 102 – Let’s Just Pray That She Repents and Immediately Croaks... w/ Casey Parks of The Washington Post
78 Plays2 years ago
This week we’re joined by author and journalist Casey Parks! Casey is a Washington Post reporter who covers gender and family issues. She spent a decade at The Oregonian, where she wrote about race and LGBTQ+ issues and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Oxford American, ESPN, USA Today, and The Nation. In this episode, Casey recounts her childhood as a charismatic youth, winning a trip to Alabama for leading so many people to the Lord (that’s right, soul-winning champion!), coming to grips with her sexuality, and all the ways that her family, friends, and fellow church-goers coped with that reality. Casey also has a new book out called “Diary of a Misfit,” which is about her long, difficult quest to learn about a man named Roy from her grandmother’s town that was supposedly kidnapped as a little girl but grew up live as a man. At its core, the book is a family saga about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us. Find out more about Casey and her work on her website (www.caseyparks.com), follow her on Twitter (@caseyparks) and Instagram (@caseyparksauthor), and buy “Diary of a Misfit” wherever books are sold!
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Transcript
Trana's Exorcism and Other Church Stories
00:00:00
Speaker
The woman who got exorcised at my church, her name was Trana, which just seems like a perfect host for a demon. Like, that name, doesn't that just sound like a demonic name? It sounds New Age, which I know means demon. Oh, yeah, New Age, yeah. My mother read around at the same time, my mom read some book that was called He Came to Set the Captives Free.
00:00:22
Speaker
and she would keep that book in the freezer tucked behind the hamburger meat because she thought it was so powerful.
00:00:38
Speaker
that demons had a hard time with. Demons can't permeate the freezer and the hamburger meat, I guess. I don't know. I'm not sure where she got in her mind that that was the cure for it. But she said if she had it in the house, weird stuff happened related to demons. Because the demons did not want us to have that book because we didn't have too much information.
00:01:18
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Growing Up Christian. I'm Sam. I'm Casey. And I'm going to start us off with a story, Casey. It happened about 30 minutes ago. So I have a bearded dragon. This is a more recent purchase. I don't know if I've mentioned that here, but
00:01:38
Speaker
Just in case I haven't, the gist of it is that over the summer, towards the end of the summer, my wife took our kids to the Fair, the yearly town fair, and they had like a petting zoo area or whatever, a reptile exhibit.
00:01:59
Speaker
My kids fell in love with the beer dragon there. They held it for like an hour and then they cried when they left. And then they want to go back and see it again the next day. Pretty much determines how it's going to go. Yeah. So then my wife was like, well, I'm just taking, I'm just going to check it out. I'll take it to the pet store and like, you know, basically the place that was there, the place at the fair that was doing the exhibit is they sell all sorts of
00:02:24
Speaker
I guess they're not technically exotic animals because there's laws against those, but like snakes, lizards, it's not like a fucking puppy mill is all I'm trying to say. So right. So yes, she's like, well, just go check it out. And of course, that meant they came home with a bearded dragon and.
00:02:42
Speaker
everything you need for a bearded dragon. Uh, I guess they're cheaper when they're older, but you have to keep like these light bulbs plugged in constantly. Like, I don't know. It's probably, it's like on paper when you buy it, it's like the lizard is like 50 bucks and then it's just like, and then your electric bill goes up a hundred bucks a month and you have to buy crickets all the time. It eats live crickets. Uh, that's like, I guess they eat less crickets with more like fruits converted to hot dogs.
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, chop a bunch of hot dogs. It's mostly insect diet and then they become more vegetarian when they're older. So they're a little bit
00:03:21
Speaker
It's a little bit more cost effective, but we're like, we finally found a place to like buy crickets online or whatever. That's worth it. And anyway, this is way too much information to lead up to, but so we have a cricket pen.
Roommate's Rat and Snake Chaos
00:03:34
Speaker
You also, we now have pet crickets, I guess you could call them that. And this thing holds like a hundred, under 50 crickets. Uh, I also happen to have a cat named cricket.
00:03:44
Speaker
And this is the only cat that gives a fuck about the crickets at all. Relentlessly just tries to see them. He'll stare at them for like hours at a time. He'll just stare at the cricket cage. And today I had taken the cricket cage out of the room that I normally keep it in. I put it on my counter and then I just forgot to put it back. So my cat cricket,
00:04:09
Speaker
Knocked the cricket cage off the counter and the thing exploded. Fuck you. I knew where this was going right away. I lost my shit. I started screaming at the cat and my kids were like, what happened? I'm like, look at the floor. It's like crickets are just like shooting everywhere. So I'm like, I've like tossed the cover back on real quick and we're just like gathering around. All my cats are like with their paws, like trying to capture them, trying to like save them so I can feed them, so I can kill them later, of course. It's like,
00:04:38
Speaker
God, it was- Just turned your living room into that hallway from Temple of Doom. Yeah, it was like a scene from Jumanji.
00:04:50
Speaker
And you love picking up grasshoppers and crickets. Yeah, you specifically mentioned frequently how much I fucking hate the feeling of those things like hopping against you. You cut them in your hands. Oh, my God, I'm shuddering right now. So, yeah, that was really aggravating. So that's that what, again, happened like about 30 minutes before we jumped on here. So.
00:05:12
Speaker
Oh, boy. Yeah, that's that's exciting. Yeah, that's the problem with reptiles as pets is like you also have to keep their food as pets. Mm hmm. I feel like I probably told this story before, but my roommate had snakes in college and he he he was on like a snake buying spree for a minute. So he ended up with like three or four of them. He had Burmese pythons and ball pythons.
00:05:40
Speaker
And then he released him into the wild when he got sick of him, right? Probably. I know one got lost in his car and I don't know that it ever was recovered. No way. Yeah. He like tied it in a sack, you know, when he was transporting it back home or something like that. But he...
00:05:59
Speaker
He decided at one point because of the cost of food that it would be, you know, prudent to breed his own rats. Cool. To feed to him.
00:06:11
Speaker
And so for a minute, we had like a rat mill in his closet, in our apartment, in his closet. Yeah. In like rubber made containers, not even like legit cages for him. Did he at least poke holes in the top? Yeah, I think so. And then the snakes didn't all have like official cages either. Like he had some of them in like rubber made containers with like the heat lamp on top and they would escape.
00:06:37
Speaker
because they're snakes. Yeah. Those are pretty tricky, dude. Snakes don't fuck around. They get out. Yeah. We had multiple times we had ball pythons like missing in our apartment, which is kind of whatever. They're basically like scaly worms. Yeah. They're not going to bite you or anything, but. Were you allowed to have those? Probably not. Probably not. We also had a cat, which we had, I don't think we were allowed to have. And then one of my bandmates, girlfriends kind of dropped her cat off on us for quite a while.
00:07:07
Speaker
So it was it was wild over there for a minute. And there I remember just like the rats, if you didn't clean their cages like every day, they because they just like, they're continually peeing all over the time. They're like, like little miniature hippos, just like flinging diarrhea all over your stuff. If you can clean that thing every day,
00:07:31
Speaker
immediately the, like his whole room would stink like ammonia. It was just awful. It was like mustard. Yeah. Yeah. So it was, uh, it was disgusting. And I think he ended up getting one litter of rat pups out of it, those little pinkies, you know, like they call them.
00:07:52
Speaker
And I feel like something else awful happened. I don't remember. The whole thing was terrible, though. It was like, yeah, this was a this was a mediocre idea on paper. And in actuality, it's the worst, dude. Terrible execution. God, I don't there's certain things or it's like, yeah, I mean, people have rats as pets when you once you get into the breeding game. It's like it's funny because if you do that with dogs, if you breed dogs, people don't look at you the same way. They're like, that's your pet, but you breed it.
00:08:22
Speaker
But with rats, it's like you either have a pet rat or you breed rats. You don't mix the two. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're a snake breeder, you're probably not an eyebrow ring. Yeah. Obviously, you're not well acclimated to normal society. You're probably one of those people, one of those dudes that wears like long denim shorts, no matter the weather conditions. A cowboy hat with a ring of snake teeth around the top of it. Yeah.
00:08:52
Speaker
You have a lot of mysterious scars that don't look like they came from surgery, that's for sure. But somehow they don't look like snake bites either. Okay, so that's a lane on TikTok I started following is like people who fuck with snakes.
Blood Moons and Prophecies
00:09:08
Speaker
God damn dude, I get so scared watching those because you never know if those are going to end with someone getting bit.
00:09:14
Speaker
Like poison snakes? Oh, yeah, dude. Like I'm talking like 15 foot like cobras and shit. The cobras are terrifying. Yeah. Yeah, dude. It's like I get like I watch them and I'm like, I could barely finish them. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'm like, I can't. I cannot see how this ends. It scares me.
00:09:31
Speaker
There's one that I got on a kick like that for a little bit and there's one of a dude and he's covered in tattoos and he wears like, I guess her contacts, but like his eyes are black. Like he's kind of darkened like the whites of his eyes and he's like one of those guys that handles extremely dangerous snakes. Oh yeah, I've seen this guy.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, oh, I probably showed you this guy when you were here. It's not for educational purposes. It's like, it's the same as having a crotch rocket that's strictly for doing wheelies on the highway.
00:10:07
Speaker
But, uh, yeah, there's a video of this guy and he's like messing around with this giant King Cobra, which why are they so big? They're so big. It's unbelievable. Like I, I knew they were big. Uh, but I think I thought that occasionally they would be unusually big and that they're usually like not, but no, those things, they just live in areas where people do and they're like 10 to 15 feet long.
00:10:36
Speaker
Yeah. And they're fast as fuck, dude. And they make that just like that spine tingling hissing noise.
00:10:44
Speaker
Yeah, very awful. So like he's messing around with this one and apparently it was shedding its skin and so its eyes are like all milky. I guess they can't see as well. Okay. And he's, I don't know why that matters. Only if you're trying to like provoke it into almost striking you or actually striking you. Yeah, so he's like messing with this snake to get it all hooded up and stuff. And finally like this thing just, he picks up the tail end of it and it turns around and it just latches onto his hand.
00:11:13
Speaker
Come on. He shakes his hand like this and the snake doesn't come off. It takes a good two seconds for him to wiggle his snake off of his hand. The clock is ticking at that point. I don't know what kind of recovery time the guy had. I forget if I watched that part. He was not somebody that I wanted to hear talk. Mostly just wanted to see him bit by snakes. He's the kind of guy you want to get bit. I don't think you have a lot of time to make it to a hospital.
00:11:43
Speaker
After you get bit by them. No, and he, I think if I remember correctly, he was somewhere near Miami, which like, if you are going to find a hospital with some sort of rare anti-venom, Miami's probably a good bet. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of drug kingpins that have, you know. He's in my, those aren't in Vigidors or Miami. So he just has these things and fucks with them. No, I'm thinking like- They didn't used to be anyways. Yeah. He knows what lives there now. So he'd let a few out.
00:12:15
Speaker
That's good. What is it in Florida? You can hunt pythons or whatever. Yeah, Burmese pythons. Yeah, because because someone like it doesn't have to do with people bringing them there and letting them out. And then they like I took over the the popular. I don't know. I think that's some of it. I think that's some of it. And then some of it was like that. I know there was like a breeding facility. It might have been like Hurricane Andrew in the 90s that like wiped out this facility.
00:12:44
Speaker
you know, for pet trade and a bunch of different stuff got loose in there. Yeah, exactly. Lab week actuality. I did look it up just to make sure I wasn't talking out of my ass because sometimes when you
00:13:03
Speaker
when you see things in comparison to people that, I mean, you're just not used to seeing things that big and you overestimate the size, but their average is 10 to 12 feet, but they reach up to 18. Terrifying. Kill me. Another died and just look, if I saw one, I'd be like,
00:13:19
Speaker
That's it like I'm not gonna live through this. I think I would be scared. I think I would be paralyzed I think they're that's something that if I saw it I would be like I can't move I wouldn't I wouldn't know what to do. I Think Miami by that tattooed motherfucker. I should be good Yeah, infinitely safer. No matter how far away you are from Miami. I think I
00:13:42
Speaker
And so I got a switch into amphibians now. So we posted a shirt on our Instagram. It said, had a picture of a frog on a skateboard on it. And it was like, it said frog above it. It is like F dot R dot O dot G dot. And below it, it says,
00:14:04
Speaker
fully rely on God's indifference to my suffering. I thought it was so funny. I found where to buy the shirt. Ben Soy, who was on the podcast previously, he saw the art and was like, I think this is so-and-so's art, tag the artist. Turns out he was the artist and he sold that.
00:14:26
Speaker
art, whatever you call it, I don't know, he sold the rights to it. Good shirts or something. Yeah, it was good shirts. And so I went there and I bought it and
00:14:35
Speaker
It's weird where I mean, so it's fun. I think it's a hilarious shirt. Uh, given the, some of our family dynamics, there's a lot of places where in my, I won't wear it. I'd be like, Oh, this is just going to be weird if I wear this and I don't want to have a conversation about it. But yeah, my daughter's pretty getting, getting pretty good at reading and she just kept asking, she was like, what's your shirt say? And I'm just like this now. Okay. I realize how uncomfortable I am explaining this to my daughter now because I don't want to deal with this.
00:15:06
Speaker
I'm like, how do I explain God's indifference to our suffering? She's not going to get the joke. She's I haven't really talked to her. We haven't talked to her a whole lot about. If I told her what it was, she'd probably just be like, huh, I don't get it. And then move on. But I was just like, it's just a joke. It's just funny to me. She's like, yeah, but what's it say? I'm like, don't worry about it. It says frogs are cool. Yeah. Well, she can read that it doesn't say that. Draw some crayons or something. God, it's so annoying when kids learn how to read. It's like when you like my wife and I would be like,
00:15:36
Speaker
should we take the maybe to the par K and then it's like now that she can read well enough she's like you can't do that anymore like your you can't communicate in the open about stuff you don't want them to know about you just have to get more comfortable with disappointing them
00:15:54
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah. You get used to children's tears pretty quickly as an adult. Should we go to the PR? Okay. No, I don't think so. Water works. All right. So it's a, it's an important week. Okay. Um, do you know what's coming up on Tuesday? I mean, midterms. Yeah. But do you know what's important that's coming up on Tuesday?
00:16:25
Speaker
Oh, that's a bad answer. Okay. Let me tell you. Okay. Don't know where this is going. An event of eternal significance is coming up on Tuesday and it's kind of sad and you know, it's not all totally unexpected that you know nothing about it. Luckily I'm going to tell you about it, but Tuesday we are going to be having a blood moon.
00:16:54
Speaker
And it is a consequential event, not just in the US, but also for our, you know, the promised land in Israel. And so I spent today learning a little bit about, you know, some of the prophecies and whatnot. So I got a couple of clips. I feel like
00:17:17
Speaker
Maybe about six, six or seven years ago was the first time that I heard about all that blood moon stuff. I guess they're more common than maybe we would expect or depending on where you.
00:17:33
Speaker
are located geographically, you will see them more or less frequently. Yeah, it kind of seems like every four months, there's a bunch of articles that get forwarded by everybody's aunt. Okay, that's way more frequent than I thought. But for some reason, it captured the zeitgeist like six, seven years ago. Well, at least that's the first time that I, I mean, I would, I feel like, you know, I was pretty well immersed in evangelical culture.
00:18:01
Speaker
still at that time. Well, I mean, despite me not being an evangelical anymore, that was still so much of my sphere. And that was the first time that I was just like, it was everywhere. Blood Moon everywhere. A bunch of like the prominent evangelical pastors started talking about it. And I thought it had fizzled out. I didn't know this was still going strong. So
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of blood moons. So I don't know why certain ones are more significant than others. They like to assign a special name to them. Like they'll be like, oh, this is a dying flower blood moon. It only happens once every two millennia. And this one just so happens to fall on Newt Gingrich's birthday.
00:18:47
Speaker
Yeah, but of course they hate astrology or whatever. I know. Dude, there's it's like my God, I it's so much fun looking at some of this stuff. It's it's insane. So so I just pulled a couple of random clips that I found on TikTok. There's a lot. There's a lot of people, you know, speaking, using their voices to amplify the word here. So.
00:19:17
Speaker
Let's start with this one. Donald Trump was born on a blood moon. 700 days later, Israel was reborn as a nation. Trump becomes president on the 20th of January, 2016, at the age of 70 years, seven months and seven days. Trump then recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on the 70th birthday of the nation.
00:19:42
Speaker
It's a lot of sevens. Yeah. I mean, that's par for biblical prophecy. Seven is the number of completion, Casey. Do you not remember that from your studies? I yeah. Well, I always knew that it's seven was like significant and six was bad, but I feel like I never really understood what the reasoning was behind either one. Other than isn't there a there's like a verse in Revelation that's like talks about the number of the beast being six, six, six.
00:20:11
Speaker
uh yeah i guess i was that judas priest yeah iron maiden actually uh right i think i don't remember if it like i feel like that's a weird way i think it's a goofy way to translate it i'm not sure if it says but i don't remember if it says specifically 666 in revelation or not i should i actually think it says 666 if i remember right but okay you know
00:20:38
Speaker
Don't don't take my word for it take King James. Yeah. Well, we can look that up. I think the only takeaway from that clip that Trump would have would be that he doesn't like how old it makes him sound.
00:20:57
Speaker
yeah he's been around for a lot of sevens i mean reminding everyone that he was born 700 days before the reinstating of israel is a nation hopefully we are coming to the end times
00:21:15
Speaker
Hopefully the great tribulation is almost behind us and he like chokes on that third bun in the Big Mac. The tray of Big Macs that he puts out when he has a bunch of NFL players and college football players just come and hang out with him for
00:21:36
Speaker
at the Oval Office. Yeah. You know, I never thought about it before, but a Big Mac is basically just a trashy club sandwich. Yes, it is. I've only had a Big Mac once. I don't, I don't care about it. It's weird. I'm being snarky about them, but I do, I do like them. Yeah. To each their own. I stick with the McDouble, man. I fuck with McDoubles. McDoubles. I have a job, so I don't eat McDoubles.
00:22:05
Speaker
Okay. You just said- I'm a big Mac Max. Come on. Oh, I get it. You're a big dad. I'm into the combo season of my life. I actually get, I order a full meal when I go to McDonald's, you peasant.
00:22:24
Speaker
I mean, I get a McDouble, I get a McChicken, and then my wife and I usually split a large fry. That's the move. And we use the McDonald's app to get like $18 off of a $12 meal. They pay you to eat McDonald's with the McDonald's app at this point. Yeah. Okay, so you got to split a fry at McDonald's.
00:22:46
Speaker
You got to split one at Popeyes. Popeyes has great, those Cajun fries are super good. I've never been to a Popeyes. But you have three minutes to eat them. Because the minute they dip below like, I don't know, 25 and a half degrees Celsius or whatever the equation quirks out to, they're disgusting. Like they're really only good for like, I don't know, you could probably stuff like a throw pillow with them. Oh, yeah.
00:23:16
Speaker
They're potato-y. They got a nice cushion to them. I did find an article on CBN, Christian Broadcasting Network, where they talk a little bit about blood moons and their significance. And it says, all of the scriptures refer to the moon turning blood red as a heavenly sign.
00:23:37
Speaker
the end times are approaching, are fast approaching. While no one knows for sure which event those scripture references are referring to, the imagery created by solar and lunar eclipses often leads to questions about their potential biblical significance. I mean, could you say less in a longer paragraph? If it has significance for the end times, that means when, I mean, sure.
00:24:06
Speaker
I'm positive that whoever was writing this, whoever wrote about the apocalyptic nature of blood moons, probably saw them and were like, as a superstitious person, was like, this must mean something. Everyone thought everything meant something. That's why when
00:24:28
Speaker
It's why they had gods for literally everything imaginable that is like, well, we'll pray to this God and hope this goes well. And it's obvious that that would seem significant at that time when the explanatory power behind what they were. It's like, oh, this bad thing happened and there was a blood moon last night. I bet there's a correlation. Yeah, sure.
00:24:52
Speaker
uh but we've been doing that now for like they've been happening for 2000 years and this i'm imagining 50 plus white dude is like they're very significant still in regard to the end times and we don't know exactly when that's going to be but it's coming up
00:25:09
Speaker
Just like it's been coming up for two thousand years when they have ramifications for all sorts of things according to this stuff so says this upcoming blood moon is no different meaning it's significant some church leaders and pastors which is you know that counts as a source right.
00:25:27
Speaker
Some church leaders and pastors, you can put that in footnotes, are saying the timing of this year's lunar eclipse has prophetic significance because of its connection to elections in both Israel and the US. John Graves, CEO of the Church Association called a million voices, which no one's ever heard of.
00:25:46
Speaker
spoke on the Flashpoint program saying, there's going to be a much bigger swing than people think. It's not going to be 10 or 20 in the House. It's going to be 30, 40, 50. It's going to be at least 54 in the Senate. And he thinks it's because he says that
00:26:06
Speaker
It's Latinos and conservative women are the two demographics that are going to chase. So, so God is sending us, you know, signals through the movements of heavenly bodies, indicating that like a different group of Stooges is going to be in the, uh, you know, in Congress. I, I guess what I don't get is why it's again, that like choose your own adventure mentality where they're like,
00:26:35
Speaker
There's a blood moon on an election cycle. Therefore, that must be a sign that what I want to happen is going to happen. Like what's the relate, what, what's the relatability between a blood moon and election? Like, why does, why do they think the blood moon has anything to do with who is going to win the election by a landslide?
00:27:00
Speaker
Well, I mean, to answer your question, while the Lunar Eclipse phenomenon does periodically happen, Hank Cuniman, pastor of the Lord of Host Church in Nebraska, says this particular occurrence- Is this something that's about to bust, Guy? Oh man, is it? Is it? I think so. I think you might be right. I'm looking at him up right now.
00:27:24
Speaker
Well, Hank says that this particular occurrence lines up with, quote, events on God's calendar. He said. Oh, I didn't realize God shared his outlook as Google calendar with him. Well, God works divinely inspired lyrics through him. So I guess, you know, he's probably privy to all sorts of things. I cannot believe that that's the same guy. Yeah. He's being quoted as a source here.
00:27:53
Speaker
Well, something's about to bust, I guess. Finally, Hank, something is about to bust. OK, so that's kind of like the significance of, you know, the blood moon in the US. Basically, it means Republicans are going to win and God's going to turn this country around finally. I suppose if that doesn't happen, then that means that God has found us to be not repentant enough and he's going to punish us for longer.
00:28:20
Speaker
Well, I accept that punishment, Daddy. Expect gas prices to go up. God. They're going up right before the election. That's a worldwide conspiracy. Oh, it could be, though. We don't have time to get into the whole Saudi conspiracy, Saudi Trump conspiracy. Oh, yeah. But that's a juicy one. And I think I buy it. Maybe we'll talk about that next time.
00:28:46
Speaker
I'm generally skeptical of conspiracy theories, especially when they involve blood moons. But this one's convincing me. Hank Cuneman definitely sold me a little bit. He did say something is about to bust and now we see that that's going to happen. So I don't know. I think it's all coming together. So I'm here for it. But
00:29:07
Speaker
Well that's sort of the US significance. Now this particular guy, I've run through this last clip here, but he was a lot more concerned with how this relates to Israel.
00:29:19
Speaker
All right, now, can they see it? Who can see this blood? Because I'm under the impression that when someone can see a blood moon, there's a lot of people who can't. I think so, because I think it has to do with the moon's position in regards to like, it's like your angle, your line of sight on the moon is what gives it that significance. Or because it's not actually red. Do these people know that? Do they know? Have they taken any classes on how light refracts and works? Because it's not actually red. It's the perception of red.
00:29:48
Speaker
So I don't want to throw rocks or anything, but I'm guessing that this guy didn't take any classes on it.
00:29:55
Speaker
No. History has shown us that's exactly the case. So family, here we have the blood moon lunar eclipse on election day. Now family, the odds of that happening are slim to none. This isn't a coincidence at all. This is the most high God said. I see what the US political system is trying to do with the land I gave to Abraham and his descendants. Don't mess with the land of Israel.
00:30:19
Speaker
So not only is the blood moon lunar eclipse on the 8th of November, a warning to Israel that the time of Jacob's trouble is soon to start. It's also a warning to the US political system concerning its policies towards the land of Israel. Guys, we're living in very prophetic times. Family, the most high gives these warnings out of love. So I feel like you cut him off right before he really, really sold it.
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah, but the whole video kind of goes that way. It's like, you feel like he's ramping up to the crescendo and then it just never happens. I think you're just trying to censor him. I think you are violating his free speech. I might be. That might be a valid point, I guess, but he, this guy, he throughout his video asserts that like, for one, Biden's evil because he supports a two state solution.
00:31:16
Speaker
too, many of our US congressional, you know, people support a two state solution and God is going to judge them accordingly. And, uh, basically like any time anyone has ever said the term two state solution, which we may be causing one right now, there was a major storm in the US, what you, what some people describe as a once in a thousand years storm.
00:31:43
Speaker
Oh, well, I think the US needs a two state solution. That's what I'm getting from this. We will definitely not live in the same state if that's the case. I don't see us like being part of the same coalition just because of geographic location, you know? Oh, yeah. It's a very clear divide. We know what we're getting.
00:32:10
Speaker
You'll just, we'll just have to move closer to the border. Yeah. We could shake hands across the border. You ever hear that? It'll be a nice fence and we can put our fingers through it and we can. Yeah. Twiddle these guys fingers together. I start walking your way. You start walking mine. We meet in the middle.
00:32:29
Speaker
on that old Georgia line. I think I'm freestyling some lyrics, but you get the point. I don't know. I feel like if you pull any country song out of your eyes, I won't probably know it. Is that Florida Georgia line? No, I think that predates then. Thank God.
00:32:51
Speaker
So yeah, um, you know, either, I think either what we'll see, I mean, one of the know it one way or another, we'll see a blood moon, which is very significant. And it either means that God's talking to us or there's like a station wagon on fire in the expressway, like to the west of us, but, uh, either God is going to turn this country around by letting a bunch of Republican, you know, hedge fund managers or, uh,
00:33:21
Speaker
you know, former lawyers or whatever else pedophiles, you name it, uh, get elected or we're going to see a bunch of Democrats get elected. And that means that, you know, we're what Jacob's troubles. Is that what he called it? I think that's in regards to Israel, but we're in trouble. Let's just say that we're in trouble. If the liberals take office, I just liked the general, the whole like,
00:33:48
Speaker
If this happens, it's God's will and was totally orchestrated by him. But then if this happens, well, we're all in trouble. It's like, bitch, aren't we all in trouble? That's not your whole premise that we're all in trouble. We're end times shit.
00:34:02
Speaker
It's like none of their theorizing makes any sense. It's like we need to do this in order to save this great nation in order to make things better because the liberals are a bunch of pedophile blood drinking psychos and we need to get this country back to God and through people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and shit like that and then
00:34:25
Speaker
On the other hand, it's like but also Everything is going to be destroyed and Jesus is gonna come back and slaughter everybody. So Like what what's the message? Like what's the real I? If they're expect it's like I think they just shows that they don't really think That that's going to happen
00:34:47
Speaker
At least in their lifetime. You gotta leave yourself an outlaws. Yeah. Don't box yourself in. Little asterisk at the bottom of the let's all kill ourselves on the top of this hill together. Exactly. Yeah.
00:35:01
Speaker
Well, anyway, I guess we'll see how things go. I'm expecting a red wave on Tuesday. How about you? It's looking like that. Yeah, it's not looking great. It's definitely not looking great for- Democrats, you don't have to pick a platform. Yeah. It will help, trust us.
00:35:25
Speaker
There's a lot that could be said on that, but we won't shift. We will introduce our guest, Casey Parks. Casey wrote a book called Diary of a Misfit, a memoir and a mystery. She's also a Washington Post journalist and
Casey Parks' Religious Upbringing
00:35:44
Speaker
I only started listening to the book on, I got the audio book after our conversation. I didn't have a chance to get to it beforehand. Also didn't know it was audio book until our conversation because at the end of it, she drops that it is on audio book. So that was really helpful.
00:36:04
Speaker
I'm about halfway through it. And it's fantastic. The writing style is very captivating. It sucks you in. And it kind of just tells the story of her coming to terms with her sexuality while also investigating this. Like she hears this story from her grandmother about a person named Roy, who was a woman but dressed as a man and
00:36:32
Speaker
when her grandmother was a kid and it was very mysterious character and there's a lot of different ways that people as she starts talking to them in the town would recollect this person whose name is Roy, how they recollect the experience or their belief or thoughts or feelings about Roy.
00:36:57
Speaker
It kind of just weaves that story, the investigation of that story in with her personal life and her relationships to her father, her mother, her grandfather. And it's really fucking fantastic. I'm enjoying it thoroughly. Cannot wait to finish it. It really does pull you in. So if you're so inclined, especially after listening to this, she does get some of the stories that she talks about in this
00:37:21
Speaker
conversation. I have come across in the book, she does discuss them there as well in greater detail. If you enjoy this conversation with Casey, you need to pick up her book. Again, audiobook is definitely a good way to go for all of you who spend some time in the car like I do and who don't have a lot of time to read
00:37:43
Speaker
books for pleasure. So anyway, yeah. I don't know if you have anything to add, Casey, other than your typical leave us a review and don't do it like, who's did I share this week? Did you see the story?
00:37:58
Speaker
really personal yeah okay I mean I look the reviews I don't really care like you don't have to like it I think it's just funny when people leave reviews that are like I guess if I'm I'll never leave a threest if there's a podcast that I don't like I'm not or think is just okay I'm not going out of my way to like leave it a review like
00:38:19
Speaker
We all know I think we can all unanimously agree that the purpose of reviews is for people who like the podcast to help like boost it Like a bad review here or there doesn't do anything. It's just funny Reviews just bump you up in like the algorithms and shit like it's not
00:38:36
Speaker
No one's reading it and taking strangers opinions seriously. Like it's not like someone bought a leaf blower on Amazon. We're like, it doesn't start good. Like I take that to heart because well, if you bought it and it didn't work good for you, that matters. But this is like you're listening to two assholes talk about shit that no, that's just doesn't matter most of the time. So it's like, I don't know. I just think those kind of like, it's just so funny to me when people are like, I need, I need to give this a three star review. So
00:39:05
Speaker
People know what they're in for before they start listening.
00:39:09
Speaker
I mean, I guess it wasn't it wasn't a one star review. It wasn't cool. But the review was I just got to read it because it kills me. It's meh. That's the subject meh. They are simultaneously able to acknowledge nuance without really considering it in their own opinions. If you want straight white guy thoughts on ex-vangelicalism, then this is for you. OK, I I'm sure that's true. I just wish I knew what it was in reference to.
00:39:39
Speaker
Yeah, well acknowledge nuance and I won't I refuse. Yeah. Well, I think it's funny if we can recognize nuance But don't acknowledge it in our if we're recognizing it and then forming opinions and saying those opinions Are we supposed to then add caveats to every one of our opinions and just qualify it to death?
00:40:03
Speaker
And then like, we do that too much as I know that's why I do that too much. I, before I say anything, I'm like, let me try not to step on toes and then just really specify what I mean and spend. We actually had a review once. I was like, one of them qualifies things that he says too much. I was like, guys, right. I'm not that. I accepted that. I, that was specific and directed towards me.
00:40:26
Speaker
And I think I'd like to think I learned from it. I don't know if I did, but I feel like I've toned that down a little bit. One of them breathes heavy and should have his blood pressure checked. I'm also their doctor. Oh, man. All right. Yeah. You know, leave us a review if you like the show. If you don't like the show, send us a message instead. Why are you still listening?
00:40:56
Speaker
All right, everybody, enjoy our conversation with Casey Parks. Hey, everybody, we are back with our guest, Casey. Casey, thanks so much for joining us.
00:41:08
Speaker
Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm super excited to talk to you. I guess I said it to a lot of people, but I really am because I listened. So I heard about you and your book through an NPR podcast. And I was so incredibly fascinated by so many aspects of your story. But some of the things that I was very interested in that
00:41:32
Speaker
I don't know, maybe it's just not as accessible for a broad audience, but you did grow up very Christian. And that is coincidentally what we named our podcast after. So that's the stuff that interests us. So I think maybe just to get us started, maybe let's get into a little bit of just where you grew up and how you grew up.
00:41:58
Speaker
Well, I largely grew up in North Louisiana, but I did live for a little bit during my adolescence in, um, on an army base near Savannah, Georgia. So mostly in the South. And we went to kind of like offshoots of Pentecostalism. We went to church of God and assemblies of God.
00:42:19
Speaker
We always called ourselves non-denominational, which I don't get at all because it definitely is a denomination with like a certain kind of music and a certain kind of teaching and everything. But I actually think we like really prided ourselves on that. Like we're better than Baptist or something because we're non-denominational.
00:42:37
Speaker
That was my upbringing too, non-denominational. But again, say, I mean, there was zero distinction between Southern Baptists and the type of churches that I was part of minus Southern accents. I think that was the only distinction. I live in- With a church equivalent of scabs, you know? It's like, we're the same, we just don't pay dues. Oh, yeah. Well, we were different than Baptists because we had better music.
00:43:04
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, you, you accreted to Pentecostal church of God, uh, even though it was non-denominational. So, well, it was church of God. We just considered that non-denominational. Oh, really? And, and I did not understand that church of God was an offshoot of Pentecostalism as a kid. And I thought of Pentecostals as like a certain kind of extremist because they didn't cut their hair or wear makeup and we could cut our hair and wear makeup, but we,
00:43:31
Speaker
spoken tongues and got slain in the spirit, that kind of thing. It's so interesting to me how many people grew up in, in that. Cause even so my non-denominational, like I said, a quid to Southern Baptist, but I never like my entire life. I was convinced that that was like the devil's trick on Christians that you could do stuff like that.
00:43:52
Speaker
I was like, oh, that's wrong. You shouldn't do it. So I never actually encountered that in real life until college at Liberty University. And it was like, oh my God, I'm around people like this. And then that's when I chilled out a bit because I realized that some of them were really great people. And I was like, oh, OK, maybe it gets a pass. But I was skeptical for a while, even after meeting people like that.
00:44:17
Speaker
Well, I thought it was real when I was a kid and I, it happened to me a couple of times, but now that I'm older, I have my doubts. Yeah. I think the experience, that experience is always.
00:44:33
Speaker
Cause I didn't, I didn't do that, but I did have other experiences that seemed a particular way at the time. And then you do get farther removed from that world. And it is, it's, it's strange to look back on them and reconcile what you thought it was with what you think now.
00:44:51
Speaker
despite how young you if you like regarded that because I always wanted because that was always what was missing with me was like, I just never felt like a real emotional connection to it or like a spiritual connection, I guess would be a better word. But like how would young you describe like being slain in the spirit and what that experience was like? Oh, I thought it was like the highest
00:45:17
Speaker
gift from God and I really believed in it. I mean it happened every Sunday in church to someone and usually what would happen for the speaking in tongues part at least someone would stand up and speak in tongues and someone else would stand up and interpret it and they would do so immediately and in a full verse so it seemed really believable like they could not have worked this out ahead of time like this person
00:45:44
Speaker
The second person, the interpreter was never mumbling or stuttering. Like they really did seem to be speaking as if God were speaking through them. So I really believed in it. And then, uh, during the altar call is usually when people would get slain in the spirit. And it just seemed like such a deliverance to me, like such proof of your godliness, like I've wanted it to happen for me. And that's why I say I'm a little bit suspicious of it now because I don't know.
00:46:14
Speaker
if I just wanted it so badly that I induced it in myself or maybe I even faked it or, you know, we, there were people that I really respected that hadn't happened to them that made them believe it. I remember one time this guy, his pastor prayed over a microphone, then he handed it to a guy that I really liked. And the guy got slain in spirit, just from touching the microphone. And that to me was like a huge miracle.
00:46:42
Speaker
But I wasn't really suspicious of it or anything. And I did feel like the emotional connection. Some of that, I think, is the music that we listen to, like the chord progressions are so emotional. And it's hard not to feel emotional when you're listening to those songs. And then everyone around you is crying. And it's just a really emotional atmosphere, absent of God. Like I think anyone might feel moved. If you're going in,
00:47:12
Speaker
unskeptically, it's easy to feel moved by that. How big of a church are we talking about? Oh, I went to really big churches. The first one, I mean, I would say several hundred up to probably up to 500 people. Um, second one, probably 300 people.
00:47:33
Speaker
Maybe more than that, but they were really quite large auditoriums with full bands, light shows. We had a very professional Christmas play that they'd put on every Christmas. The musicians were very skilled at it. They put out CDs of their music. It was big and yet manageable in the way that I felt like I knew everybody there.
00:48:00
Speaker
I feel like the modern praise musician, like when I went to, cause when I went to Liberty was the first time I was ever in one of those services with the big light show and stuff. And like the biggest thing to me that separates like my style of praise music with like the Liberty style of praise music is that everybody on stage at the Liberty one stood with their feet really close together. Oh.
00:48:22
Speaker
Interesting with their heels touching and like if they get really if like if the guitar player gets really into it He kicks one feet one foot back and kind of does like a head bang sort of thing for a minute Oh, wow. I think ours were a bit more spirited they would come forth like the soloists would walk forward and I don't think they really danced exactly, but I think they like moved around I mean we were southern, you know, so we like moved
00:48:48
Speaker
Yeah, that always seemed more fun. Like what was the rule on secular music for you guys? Did you listen to it or was it strictly like no Christian music only? Well, I largely listened to Christian music, but not out of edict, out of desire. Like I thought Christian music was really good. I mean, the nineties had such great contemporary Christian music. We had DC talk.
00:49:15
Speaker
which was like rap, you know, and then we had audio adrenaline that was alternative. DC Talk was alternative as well. There was a singer I really liked who actually herself later came out as gay as well, Jennifer Knapp. Yeah. Just, you know, like, I really thought
00:49:36
Speaker
the Jesus Freak album was genius and cool. And actually sometimes I'll still listen to it. When I was writing my book, I put a couple of the DC songs on the Spotify playlist and I was still vibing with them. Like, you know, they were talented musicians. And so we did listen to country music quite a bit as a kid. Um, and then later when I was in high school or actually when I was in middle school, I was still mostly listening to Christian music and I went on a field trip once and
00:50:05
Speaker
somebody started singing Alanis Morissette's ironic and everyone on the school bus except for me knew every word to it. And I came home and I was like crying. I was like, I have to, you have to get me whatever that is because like, I'm not going to survive middle school if I don't know the words to this song. And so my parents like reluctantly got me jagged little pill, but it wasn't really necessarily banned or anything, but I just really did
00:50:32
Speaker
love Christian music. I mean, I went to so many Christian concerts. I actually had a collection of water bottles from the musicians. Like I was really big into this group for him and I was trying to collect all of their water bottles. So I had a shelf just for four hymns, water bottles, and then other shelves for, um, I was really into this group called the news boys. I had one for them. Oh yeah. They don't serve breakfast in hell. Oh yeah.
00:51:01
Speaker
I really liked why we go to Christian ska concerts. I actually loved all of it. I didn't feel forced into it or anything. I really believed it. Actually, when I was in high school once, the church threw a contest for whoever saved the most people in a summer. You and everyone you save got a free trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama to the beach and I won.
00:51:30
Speaker
And I mean, it's kind of easy to save people if you're promising them a free trip to the beach. I just genuinely believed it was fun. And I was like going out in the streets, you know, like we're going to have fun at church. Like that's amazing. You said this was middle school. That was the high school. I think I was a freshman or sophomore year of high school. So 90, 96, 97. Where, uh, what area were you living in, in high school?
00:51:59
Speaker
I was living in West Monroe, Louisiana, so it's up in the northern part of the state. I think that's hilarious because... Wait, first of all, how many people did you save? I think it was like 12, which doesn't sound... That's a heavy body count. Okay, I was going to say, it doesn't sound that impressive now, but it's actually pretty hard to save 12 people in one summer. That's unbelievable.
00:52:24
Speaker
our tan only had 13,000 people. So, you know, I wasn't working with like a huge population, but I mean, I think I had one under my belt until he defected and then Casey didn't has never saved anybody. So where, but I bought a lot of skillet albums. So you can trip. He contributed to ministry is what he's trying to say. Yeah. That's, that's so funny. 12. I mean, so you would just talk to people all the time about it. Like in high school, you're just like,
00:52:54
Speaker
I found a notebook that I had in high school where I would write letters to people and they would respond to me in the notebook and we would just pass the entire notebook back and forth. And so the notebook actually has my letters and everyone else's letters in there. And I signed every letter in his grip. That's so sick. I love it.
00:53:22
Speaker
I got like she's got like all of her journals from, you know, junior high and high school and stuff like that. Occasionally she'll like bust them out and read me a pass because she grew up super conservative, religious, too. And it's it's always funny to see like the traditional like every sort of teen drama, but with like this tinge of like, got to tie Jesus into it somehow here. Yeah, I mean, it.
00:53:51
Speaker
You know, I didn't grow up in a culture that believes in therapy. And so it was kind of like free therapy in a way. Like I remember my best friend at church and I liked the same boy at one point and he liked her, not me. And I would go down to the altar and cry about that with the pastor. And you know, that was always the worst feeling. Oh yeah. The problems I brought to Jesus were not large.
00:54:19
Speaker
I remember one of the girls that I liked, I believe she liked my brother and made my brother got along really well. So it didn't cause a rift, but there was, I harbored a lot of resentment in my heart that I had to bring before the heart issue for sure. But that was tough. Very tough. You know, um,
00:54:42
Speaker
This is kind of jumping around a bit, but when I was much younger, most of my views of God were more punitive. And so I, I did talk to God a lot more as a kid, but more in like a confessing way, because, um, again, it's kind of tied to music. Actually, there was this musician who was really big then called Carmen and he had these like souped up videos where he had songs like Satan bites the dust.
00:55:11
Speaker
revival in the land and all of these videos, um, had demons in them. And, and actually around the same time, there was a demon exorcism at my church where they cast a demon out of this woman. And whoa, I asked my mom later about it. I remember in my mind, the demon hissing into the microphone and I asked my mom many years later, like, well, what did the demon say when he got cast out? And she said, Oh, you know, typical demon stuff.
00:55:40
Speaker
And I was like, typical demon stuff. And she said, Oh, you know, he said, you can't cast me out. I dwell here. You cast me out last week. I came back with seven others. And so anyway, that's, but I remember when they're, Oh yeah. You know, I love thinking like I dwell here. So funny to me, but, um, as part of that demon out, they told us.
00:56:08
Speaker
Um, a demon can't just disperse. Like if a demon gets exercise, it has to go into another host and, and a demon can, the host has to be someone who's sinned recently. Like that's the only way the demon can take a hold of you. And so if you've sinned recently, like you're a prime dwelling for a demon.
00:56:30
Speaker
So that shit out of everybody. Oh yeah. When I was writing my book, I was trying to like backtrack and be like, Oh, okay. Let me recap this week. Get next to the guy who really did some fucked up stuff. And then like that couple with these Carmen videos where I knew exactly what a demon looked like and they were, you know,
00:56:51
Speaker
They had warts and they were all green and like big ears and stuff. I was extremely scared of one of them things getting up in me. So I spent a lot of my childhood, just like every 10 seconds or so being like, please forgive me for all my sins. Please forgive me for all my sins. Um, I think I just thought something bad about my little brother, like, please forgive me for all my sins that, you know, um, it's
00:57:16
Speaker
As I was writing my book and returning to that time and thinking, I did feel really sorry for my younger self that I just spent so much of my young life in fear. At that point when I was younger, it wasn't like, oh, this is so much fun. It was like, I have to do this, or I'm going to burn forever and ever, and there will never be any relief from that burning.
00:57:40
Speaker
Yeah, it creates like a spiritual OCD of sorts. And it's funny, you mentioned, when you mentioned a lot of your, when you were younger, a lot of your prayers just being confessions. I haven't thought about this in so long, but you mentioning that made me think of being taught that you have to start your prayers off with confessing your sins, because if you don't, God's not even gonna listen to you.
00:58:08
Speaker
Did you, is that something you got too? I don't think I ever heard that. Um, but I just, I just did spend a lot of my prayers doing that. And I think I would sometimes feel guilty about that. Like I would be like, Oh no, I gotta, I gotta pray and like praise God. Like he's going to get kind of tired of me if I don't just come to him and say like, I'm praying because you're awesome. And now that I'm older too, I'm like, wow. Like.
00:58:36
Speaker
this dude, because in my mind, he was a dude, just has to be worshiped nonstop. And that's what heaven is supposed to be. You just worship this man all of the time. I might send my son out to be killed too if it meant I got to be worshiped for all time. What an odd view of perfection. I don't really, I don't know. I'm scared to say this because I don't want to be blasphemous even now, but that vision of heaven does not appeal to me.
00:59:05
Speaker
at this stage of my life. Have you dove into the world of TikTok exorcists yet? Oh my God, no. Dude, it's one of my favorite things. Oh, it's a whole lane and there's a bunch of them.
00:59:23
Speaker
men, there's women, there's like a whole crew of TikTok exorcists out there. And I love like, the best part is the demon act outs because they get on there and they hiss and they scream and stuff. What they never do is swear. I find funny. I'm gonna have to watch this in therapy or else I like relapse, you know, like, I don't know if I can take it.
00:59:48
Speaker
You're up till three in the morning, just scrolling through each one. You're like, I can't stop. The woman who got exorcised at my church, her name was Trana, which just seems like a perfect host for a demon. Like, that name, doesn't that just sound like a demonic name? It sounds New Age, which I know means demon. Oh, yeah, New Age, yeah. My mother read around at the same time, my mom read some book that was called He Came to Set the Captives Free.
01:00:14
Speaker
and she would keep that book in the freezer tucked behind the hamburger meat because she thought it was so powerful.
01:00:30
Speaker
that demons had a hard time with? Demons can't permeate the freezer and the hamburger meat, I guess. I don't know. I'm not sure where she got in her mind that that was the cure for it. But she said if she had it in the house, weird stuff happened related to demons. Because the demons did not want us to have that book because we didn't have too much information. I don't know what the book is about.
01:00:56
Speaker
I remember a funny subject with church people like because that was it was it's funny because like everybody loves that thrill that you get from a roller coaster or from being a little bit scared like from a horror movie when when all of those avenues are close to you like you're really not allowed to watch anything like that or read a scary like goosebumps I remember was kind of awesome. Oh, yeah, my mom. My mom burned a whole load of goosebumps in a trash can outside of the school and invited other parents to go outside of the pool.
01:01:27
Speaker
One of those metal trash cans and she invited all the parents to bring theirs. Did other parents go up? Yeah. A couple of people bought Christopher Pike books too, which was like even worse than Goosebumps. That was pre-Facebook, so you get to congratulate that level of organizing. Oh yeah, they were working the prayer tree, you know, they had everybody's number. Did you ever read Christian Goosebumps, the Frank Peretti books?
01:01:56
Speaker
I did not read Christian Goosebumps, but I read Christian Nancy Drew, which is called the Mandy series. Y'all are boys, so you probably didn't read this, but... Oh, I don't remember that one. I've never heard of it. We had our own Nancy Drew. Her name was Mandy, and she was awesome. I love those books.
01:02:15
Speaker
Nancy Drew is just a little too worldly for Christian gals. What was Christian about it? How were the mysteries made more Christian than just regular old benign Nancy Drew? It's like who stole the communion bread? I think she was in boarding school and maybe God helped her solve the mysteries.
01:02:35
Speaker
I actually just read a Nancy Drew for the first time this summer because I wasn't allowed to. And it's funny as if we could listen to secular music because we could, but we couldn't read secular books. But, um, I just read a Nancy Drew for the first time and there's nothing demonic that happens in there, but Nancy Drew is kind of batshit. Like every other page, something crazy happens to her. Like the one, the one I was trying to read, I think was about a,
01:03:05
Speaker
clock or something and every other page someone is about to kill her. I guess that could be demonic. People wanting to kill a teenage girl. I need to go read Mandy and see how she compares, like how her foibles compare. I want to go read Mandy. I got to order a Mandy book. My mom has tons of Christian romance novels. I mean, if there is something that exists in the secular world, the Christians have their version of it.
01:03:31
Speaker
Oh yeah. We love talking parallel institutions here. It's the idea of Christian romance novels kills me because it can't get too spicy. So you got to be able to cut that tension with a knife. Oh yeah. We had 30 pages of them, like feeling the breeze of their pinky pinkies wiggling by each other.
01:03:52
Speaker
Oh yeah. My grandma, Jenny had satellite TV, which meant that she got the Christian music TV channel, which is like the Christian version of MTV. And we did not get it. And I would save up all of my allowance to buy VHS tapes to mail to her. And I would just ask her to tape that channel all day long so that I could watch it like when, you know, after she was done with the tape and like,
01:04:20
Speaker
I mean I did turn out gay but a lot of my early interest in those videos was in the cute boys who were the singers of it and like I said I collected all these water bottles mostly because I thought the guys were cute but
01:04:33
Speaker
Was it water bottles like they used on stage or what? Yeah, it's kind of sick, actually. Now pose it to me. So their germs are still there. Would you occasionally take small sips out of them, like six months later? Oh, I didn't, I didn't dare. Michael Sade ate onions for lunch. And like, they were all grown men too, you know, it's like really weird. So I don't know why I got that in my mind, that that was like a good hobby, but
01:05:03
Speaker
You say they're all grown men, but what's so funny is that they were probably in their like early twenties at the time. And that seems like they were saying, maybe late teens or like, they could have been like 19. It was like, they were, they looked so old. I remember thinking everyone looked so much older and then, and now everyone looks so much younger. Oh yeah. I mean, it's, it's wild to me growing older, like thinking back about my parents and how old they were.
01:05:28
Speaker
I mean, my parents had me when they were 18. And so they were 36 years old when I graduated high school. Like I'm older than that now. And I just think like, Oh my gosh. Like when I was writing my book and I was writing about myself as a young kid and my parents, and I was trying to think about like the way my mom acted when I was in kindergarten, for instance. And I was looking at it and I was like,
01:05:54
Speaker
Oh my gosh, she was 22. Like she was a kid. Like, you know, how much can you hold her accountable for things that she did at 22? If, if I were held accountable for things I did at 22. Yeah. Half of this podcast is us trying to, uh, publicly apologize for things we said and thought at 22. I have two kids, uh, five and seven and I'm 34 and I'm like,
01:06:22
Speaker
I, I occasionally feel like one of the younger parents because everyone's having kids later now. So like at drop off, it's a, it's, it is a mix, but I, I think I'm constantly thinking about age and how I feel like I'm every parent that drops off and you're like, parent or grandparent or like aunt. I don't know. It's like, it could literally go any direction now, but I can't not think about, about it. Cause I still, I mean, I feel young, like I don't feel.
01:06:53
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know what it means to feel old, I guess, but I don't feel much different than I did when I was younger. But I think about my parents too, being definitely older than me when I was seven.
01:07:05
Speaker
But it's just thinking back on like how they interacted and maybe some of the rules or even some of the beliefs that they had is just like in their 20s. Yeah. It's it is. It's so strange to think about because it's such a young is young. It's a young mentality. It feels like some of the things that I thought then are like from ages ago. And it really wasn't as long ago as it feels like. But yeah, plus the way you feel like an adult. Yeah.
01:07:36
Speaker
Plus the peer pressure within those communities has to be, because I always think about some of the crazier things that happened. I went to Christian school all the way through high school and stuff and some of the weird policies and strange things that became a whole big ordeal. My parents weren't really signed on for that. What kind of policies?
01:08:03
Speaker
you know when nobody's really doing anything wrong or getting into actual trouble like everything gets amplified to match that that frequency so like you know one time
01:08:17
Speaker
At our school, we were bored on a break, and so we threw chess pieces at each other. It resulted in parent-teacher meetings and detentions, and we had to buy a new chess set for the school and all this stuff. This wasn't a big deal. It felt like a big deal at the time, but now you look back on it and you're like, why was this such a thing? Oh, it's because nobody was really doing anything that was actually a problem.
01:08:46
Speaker
And I feel like my parents kept that in perspective, but other people didn't. I think we did, um, for all of our piousness, we did do bad things sometimes, you know, when I was in high school, like we all did the true love weights, um, pledge where you're, where you don't have sex before marriage. But like, I lost my virginity at 16 and I felt like I was late.
01:09:11
Speaker
everyone I knew had had sex at that point, including everyone at church. Really? That's such a different experience. I was in Louisiana at a time when we were leading the teen pregnancy stats. It was complicated too because I don't think any of us used any kind of protection because protection would have suggested you were stopping to think about it.
01:09:38
Speaker
And because we had the abstinence only education, I didn't even know anything about birth control. I knew that condoms existed, but I wouldn't have dared go to buy one because I wouldn't have wanted to be seen doing that. And it wasn't like I thought,
01:10:00
Speaker
Oh, I'm going to go lose my virginity. It just, it was more of like, I love this guy. And if I don't have sex with him, he's going to break up with me. Or actually, I think he'd already broken up with me. Um, that was your desperate attempt to get him back. Yeah. And I think, you know, he had already had sex with nine people. And so I just felt like, Oh, I'm really square. But like, thank God, I didn't get pregnant because my whole life would have been really different. And that was the only guy like, graciously, I figured out I was gay really soon after. And then, you know,
01:10:30
Speaker
Didn't end up with an out of wedlock child, but it was fairly common. And I just think people didn't know what to do with their normal teen sexual energy, you know? No.
01:10:45
Speaker
I mean, what's even like you mentioning that uncomfortable, like, oh, we're uncomfortable buying condoms, even if we could get past the premeditated aspect of it. And I was, I mean, I got married young. Uh, I got married like three days after I turned 21 and Liberty, Liberty university. Uh, and, uh,
01:11:06
Speaker
But I mean, years, years into being married, there's like, like, I still felt weird going in to buy condoms. I've been married for five years. And that's like just something married people do. I mean, that's something everybody does. And I'm in my 20s still feeling weird about it. Like, oh, being judged. Like, I'm like, get the hot sweats.
01:11:29
Speaker
I don't know, they're gonna, what are they gonna think about me? Like they're gonna think your wedding ring prominently to make sure they knew that you weren't having premarital sex. Like come hold the box up just like this. Yeah. Hey, this is okay. Do these come in smaller sizes though? Did you and your wife meet at Liberty?
01:11:49
Speaker
No, we met at church in high school. I was a homeschooled boy. So I was didn't meet a lot of people for outside of church. But yet I met her when I was like 16, I guess, probably started dating when I was 17 and then ended up going to Liberty.
01:12:09
Speaker
followed her there. I mean, she went there. I was like planning on going there, but I was going to go there anyway because my youth pastor went there and he basically took everyone there for like the college for a weekend stuff. You, everyone visits and likes it. So it's like you, where else was I going to go? I wasn't going to, I wanted to get a Bible degree and I only knew of one Christian college and I thought Liberty was the best one because that's what my youth pastor said. So a lot of people from my church went to one called Lee university. I think it's
01:12:39
Speaker
I think it's in Tennessee maybe, but similarly in my church had that cache of like, this is where cool people go. Yeah. My church had a lot of kids go to a decent amount of kids go to Liberty. A lot of them dropped out after their freshman year and went elsewhere or just never went back to college. But yeah, our youth pastor, I mean, I wonder if he ever got a kickback after sending so many kids there.
01:13:04
Speaker
He's working on commission. Liberty is fascinating to me. I've seen in the last couple of years, like with the school paper and in the time of Trump, like some of the kids there have gotten
01:13:17
Speaker
really brave and like standing up for their own beliefs or not wanting the school to be used as like a free political place. And yeah, there are some and they stand out and then they are gone very quickly. It's weird. It's like, they're just like, uh, we don't really have a space here for you at the newspaper anymore. You're not fired. We're just, uh, you know, it's not working out. So I mean, a lot, any, a lot of the editors have been told like you, we don't want you to publish this or that you can't say anything about
01:13:47
Speaker
X, Y, and Z. Yeah, it's such a weird. So that's a strange place. We could go on for hours about that place. And then, of course, I did meet my wife at Liberty. Yeah. I don't think I probably would have met a wife there. I don't know. Turns out you never know. I'm friends with from Liberty ended up being gay. So there was. Oh, well, you know, I do think there's sometimes you go for the extreme thing to try to silence something in yourself. I mean,
01:14:17
Speaker
I've seen like, for instance, I cover trans issues. I'm a journalist. I work at the Washington Post. My beat is gender. So I write a lot about trans people and just an inordinate number of trans women went into the military when they were young. She tried to be masculine. Yeah. And I think it's a similar thing sometimes with gay people where you think if only I get deeper in my faith, if only I go to this place, like I will get healed and
01:14:44
Speaker
You know, I mean, when I figured out I was gay, I did not want that at all.
Casey's Journey of Self-Acceptance
01:14:49
Speaker
And I begged God. I mean, I prayed out loud every single night. Please take this away. Like if you hold for you, then 17 to 18. Okay. Um.
01:15:01
Speaker
And then once I realized it wasn't going away, I kind of started obsessing about this idea of like, well, what if I could just take God out for coffee? Like what if I could say, do I really have to go to hell just for loving somebody? Like I'm, I'm trying to be a good person. I'm not murdering anybody. I'm not, you know, the only lying I'm doing about is about who I actually am. Um, of course God did not reveal himself for a coffee date with me, but, um,
01:15:29
Speaker
I wish he had, because I could have made some good miracle money. It was very painful at first. It was especially painful when I didn't even have a girlfriend and I just knew it in myself. I'm like, I'm going to lose everything because church was everything to me at that point. For what? My imagined crush on Angelina Jolie.
01:15:59
Speaker
I don't know what I'm going to get. Um, and then once I met a girl that I really liked and, and after we kissed, I was like, all right, hell's worth this. I get to kiss you again. Was that the first girl you kissed? Did you figure out you were gay before you kissed a girl or is it around the same time? Yeah, I figured out before, um, I had always had.
01:16:23
Speaker
these feelings about girls where I thought they were really cool and I like wanted to be near them, but I didn't think of it in any kind of sexual term. And even after like I kissed a girl for the first time, I didn't think about it in any kind of sexual way because I didn't know what sex with a woman would even entail. So I mostly thought of it as like, I really want to be near this person. And I thought that was an innocuous feeling.
01:16:52
Speaker
until I went to summer camp at this thing that's called girl state. There's a boy state as well. And it's like a camp where you basically run a mock society and it's separated out by gender. And there were a couple of girls at that camp that I just felt very drawn to. And again, I was thinking like, oh, this is just because they're cool. Like this isn't any kind of any romantic, anything.
01:17:21
Speaker
But then one of those girls was just an obvious lesbian. And I was fascinated by her. And I remember there's a dance at the end where the boys' state and girls' state come together. And one of the other campers loaned me a rainbow belt to wear to the dance. I had no idea a rainbow was gay. And I wore the belt.
01:17:44
Speaker
And that girl, her name was Amy. Divine Providence, if you ask me. Yeah. Amy came up to me at the dance and said, I like your rainbow belt. And I was like, oh, it's not even mine. But I'm buying one. So nervous when she was talking to me. And then I remember she danced by herself. And she was an amazing dancer. And I actually had a boyfriend who was at Boystate. He kept coming to want to dance with me. And I was like, no, no, no, no. I just want to watch her dance.
01:18:14
Speaker
After that, I was like, uh-oh, I think this might be a gay situation. And then it was just kind of theoretical for probably a year. And I would take the bus up to the Barnes and Noble and I would try to secretly read this lesbian magazine called Curve. And I would just stick it in Newsweek or something and pretend like I was reading Newsweek.
01:18:43
Speaker
There was a, there were like a couple of girls that I thought were gay that I kind of had crushes on, but they didn't turn out to be gay. And so again, it was like 2000, 2001. There was this website called planet out and they had gay dating. It was like an early gay dating app, but just on our website, so expensive. It was like 40 bucks.
01:19:07
Speaker
And if you didn't pay the money all, they would show you how many people would come up in your quote unquote area. And, but they would show blurred pictures. And because it was the South, my area was like the entire South and it was like six women and they were all blurred. And I couldn't see any of them, but there's only six, you know, who these people are.
01:19:30
Speaker
Yeah, by the time I left Mississippi, I had turned a couple others but at the time, you know, I just had this feeling and no outlet for it. And even like when I did finally kiss a girl, we never even talked about being gay. And I don't, she actually like had a guy she was dating at the time and I never quite even really knew like, is
01:19:53
Speaker
is what we're doing romance or romance or not. And we talk about, we're still friends and we'll talk about it sometime. She was in speech and debate and she took me with her to a speech and debate contest. And she was still in high school. She was two years younger than me. So she was in high school and I was in college. And at the time I was like, well, I can't tell if she likes me. And now that we're older, she was like, I took you to my speech and debate tournament. That was supposed to tell you that I liked you.
01:20:21
Speaker
You know, it was just no way of talking about it. And no, it was just so scary, both for the political climate, but also just the the existential religious warnings. Yeah. Did you pray for a lot of deliverance? Oh, yeah. I mean, I wanted to I wanted it to be taken away. And I eventually came to think that
01:20:49
Speaker
my understanding of the Bible was not complete. Like I didn't actually understand all of the context of it. And I came to see that you can't just like pick a random verse out of the Bible and be like, this is the word of God speaking. And this is an actual rule. Um, but at the time, like I remember my freshman year of college, I actually sat down and read all of Leviticus 19 and there's all kinds of stuff you can't do.
01:21:18
Speaker
And I had no idea, you know, like, I was like, wait a second, why are we eating shrimp? And why are these guys having rounded beards or, you know, like all kind of crazy stuff. And also if men can't sleep with men, does that mean I can't sleep with women? Like, you know, the Bible doesn't have anything to say about lesbians. It's just, yeah, it's remarkably silent on women in a lot of places. Oh yeah. And that's what we're supposed to do as well as be silent in the world.
LGBTQ Perspectives in Christianity
01:21:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's that I think that's such an interesting point because everything like, I mean, for, for biblical literate literalists, right? Like that should be the perfect loophole. It's like name one passage of the Bible where it says women can't have sex with women. There isn't. So you win. I'm actually writing about work right now. I'm writing about a transgender teen who is very Christian and
01:22:13
Speaker
He actually gives me a lot of hope like talking to him because his view of Christianity is so optimistic and so just from a place of love like he really has this idea like
01:22:24
Speaker
Jesus loves and welcomes everyone. And that is my role as a Christian is to go out and love and welcome everyone. And it's just so pure and sweet. And like, I wish I'd had that in my life. Um, and he actually like writes letters to other kids who might be struggling or who might've been kicked out of their churches to just be like, no, God is not people. God is God. And he still accepts you. And, um, he, he actually got kicked out of his church or at least kind of driven out, maybe not directly kicked out.
01:22:54
Speaker
But we were talking a lot while I was there of like, okay, well, like Christians are increasingly anti-trans people. I mean, Pew just came out with a survey this summer that showed evangelicals went from like 50% against trans people to like 90%. And Holy cow. That word did not exist in the era that the Bible was being written. Um, and, and they,
01:23:20
Speaker
The Christians who are leading many of the charges against trans people and legislatures and such, I haven't seen them come out with a lot of Bible verses. There's not the really convenient one the way there was with Leviticus or Corinthians. I guess there's maybe one that says something about a man should not don a woman's garment or something like that. Yeah, and it's where they all wore dresses. Yes, go ahead.
01:23:51
Speaker
I'm interested to see how that plays out and how people begin to biblically rationalize that. The main thing I've heard is that God doesn't make mistakes. Well, if God doesn't make mistakes and he made you feel trans, is that a mistake then?
01:24:08
Speaker
Yeah. And it's so much of it goes back to usually, I think, at least in my experience, it goes back to, well, God made Adam and Eve. So you, it still just goes back to that like literalism of like Adam and Eve were these real people and God specifically made them. And that's how it's supposed to be. So I think, I honestly think almost all of it is just based on that. Like if God wanted it to be another way, he would have made it with the irony being like,
01:24:37
Speaker
You have to start somewhere like so. I mean, you start with two people, I guess, but it doesn't really have anything to do with how they feel or how they perceive gender or their sexuality or whatever. So all the LGBTQ issues that come up in the Christian church, I do still feel like from that mentality, like even from that perspective, it's an argument that nuance is lost on. But I find that to be the case for
01:25:06
Speaker
lot of arguments coming from a literalist perspective because you have to you have to push nuance out especially when there's so many passages that like they don't work if you put them together so it's just like you said I mean you just said the same thing of like there's a lot of things that Leviticus says you can't do and it's like
01:25:26
Speaker
well, everyone's kind of hung up on the men laying with men, but misses out on a lot of the other ones. And it is just, that's it. It's hard to, once you're out of that perspective, regardless of whether or not you're still within Christianity in any way, when you're out of that perspective, you can't unsee that stuff and you can't help but just feel frustrated that like,
01:25:52
Speaker
Where is there a conversation to even be had here if when it comes down to picking and choosing in such an egregious way and that the only defense on the other side is that everybody else is just picking and choosing? I remember my freshman year of college, my religious studies professor was going through the gospels and talking about each time they contradict each other.
01:26:17
Speaker
One where Jesus is riding on a donkey, one where he's riding a donkey and a colt, one where like three women come to his tombstone.
Exclusion and Loss of Church Community
01:26:27
Speaker
In other words, just Mary Magdalene. And initially when he was doing this, it just filled me with dread because I was like, wait a second. Like, I thought every word in here was true and divine by God, but if it contradicts each other, which one is the real version? And let's say it's Mark.
01:26:46
Speaker
Well, then does that make the entire book of John a lie? And like, if all of John is a lie, could Leviticus be a lie? And I guess it just made me start to realize like, I have no idea who wrote these or when or why and, or in what language, you know, I mean, I'm just taking my little, uh, NIV version that's been dumbed down for my reading pleasure and.
01:27:11
Speaker
I don't know what happened in the meantime, you know, I got this same, the story I was talking about with the trans kid, his dad while I was there was like, Oh, well I looked up the Greek and they just put these two words together. And like, this isn't even actually a word. And I, you know, I've never done that. I, and I don't speak Greek, so I don't know, but, um, there's just so much I didn't understand. And I just took whatever my pastor read out loud to be like, this is literally God speaking to me.
01:27:43
Speaker
Yeah. So you had, it sounds like then a lot of, I feel like we could hang out here for a while and I know we only have you for a certain amount of time. So I'm going to make it probably an obvious shift. I was trying to like soften it, but now I'm just like, I don't know how to, apparently I'm not good at these hard transitions. But, uh, so when you started coming, when you realized you were gay, you,
01:28:08
Speaker
Yeah. Like when you said that was like 17, 18, when did you get into, when did you feel comfortable coming out to the people around you? I felt comfortable. I just felt, um, compelled. I felt compelled. I mean, that kiss was that good. Like I was like, so that's what did it. That's what did it for you. Yes. Like that's amazing. It was an amazing kiss and it transformed my life and I just knew.
01:28:38
Speaker
that it was what I wanted kissing to feel like. And, you know, a lot of this has to do with my mom because before that kiss, I had told my mom about every kiss with a boy and we would make a huge deal of it. Like we'd go to Waffle House or we'd go get dessert at Outback Steakhouse and like, you know, just do like mom daughter talk. And I was so happy from kissing this girl
01:29:04
Speaker
that I wanted to tell her that I didn't, I didn't see how I could keep it a secret from her. And I didn't exactly have a plan to tell her, but then I went home for Easter Sunday, 2002. And my favorite song at the time was this Christian worship song called shout to the Lord.
01:29:21
Speaker
And our church had a great singer that she was just amazing soloist. Um, she actually recorded a CD for our church and I had the CD and I would listen to it all the time. Like she was really, really talented. And my mom knew how much I love that song. And so, because I was in town for the weekend, she requested that they sing it. And I don't know if anyone listening knows that song, but it's again, one of those songs where the chord progression is just like,
01:29:51
Speaker
It's going to make you cry. If I listened to it right now, I would cry and shout to the Lord, all the. As soon as you said it, and then he held back and I almost called it out. Oh my God. Just steep. Praise to the king. Where the soloist sings over the choir and she's like, yeah, like really emotional and moving.
01:30:18
Speaker
And I was so moved by it. I just started sobbing. And I don't part of it was I knew if I told my mom that I would never hear that song again in that way. I just knew like once I say this, I'm never coming back here again. And that's a big move. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean,
01:30:41
Speaker
I, it took me so long to reckon with the grief of losing church. And I could talk about that a little bit, but, um, I also just felt so moved and so, I guess convicted would be the word we would even have used in church that I have to tell the truth about myself. And I have to, you know, shout to the Lord, like who I am. And, um, you know, I started crying and my mom said, do you want to go down to the altar?
01:31:10
Speaker
And I shook my head and I said, I've already tried, like the altar can't fix me. And she's like, well, let's go to the bathroom, Ben, you know, second best of the altar of the bathroom. And so I told her there and initially she was okay with it, but then she, later that afternoon just totally changed her mind. And I was going to college about two hours away from my hometown.
01:31:35
Speaker
And by the time I got back to college, she had sent me an email saying that thinking of me made her want to throw up. And I remember the last, the last sentence of her email was now even shout to the Lord is ruined. And, you know, and I did not listen to that song again for 15, 16 years until I, I was in a book writing class at Columbia university. And this is before I wrote my book and I did not
01:32:05
Speaker
want to write about myself. I thought I was doing a different kind of book that was just about this person and my professor kept urging me to put myself in the book and I was resistant to that because I was like no I'm a journalist like we don't write about ourselves and he was like look just try just try writing one essay with yourself in it and see how it goes. So I decided to write one about that and about coming out that day and everything and I went and listened to the song at the Columbia
01:32:34
Speaker
journalism school. It was a Saturday and nobody else was there. And I just like played it on my little laptop and just like broke
Church Scandal and Community Impact
01:32:42
Speaker
down. Like I could not stop crying. And it occurred to me then just like how much I had lost, like after I got kicked out of church. Well, so basically the week after I came out, I was back in Jackson and my parents went up to the altar and they told the pastor and he,
01:33:02
Speaker
He went in front of the entire church and he said, Satan's got to hold a Casey. Oh my God. We need to pray, save her and take her. And the idea was like, I would ask forgiveness and then die immediately so I could go to heaven. And my dad was like.
01:33:23
Speaker
Did you just pray that my child dies? And the pastor was like, well on earth, but she'll live forever in heaven. And my dad was like, I'm out of here. This is too creepy for me. And my mom actually prayed with him. She was like, yeah, you're right. Like savor and taker. Um, it took a long time for my mom and I had to get back on the same page with this, but, um, I knew I couldn't go back and.
01:33:51
Speaker
It had been such an integral part of my life. Like I told you, I saved the most people. I actually lived my entire sophomore year with one of the youth pastors from church. All of my best friends went to that school. I love those people. It was my Sunday night, my Wednesday night. It filled all my thoughts in between.
01:34:15
Speaker
Initially, and for many years after, I just refused to even think about it. I was just like, I'm walling myself off. I'm not going to think about this. Like they can't touch me. And I just never actually grieved the loss of it. And until I started to write my book and I remember like a really key thing for me, um,
01:34:38
Speaker
Well, actually during the pandemic, that pastor announced to the church that he'd been having like a 10 to 15 year affair with his daughter-in-law. And I was trying to see, my cousin told me- No, that's next level, Mark. My cousin told me that he announced it at church. So I like went online to see if they broadcast the church service online. Cause I was like, Oh, I want to see this. They can immediately cut that part out of the service. So I did not pay to hear it.
01:35:08
Speaker
Uh, and I've been trying to find out information about it and I haven't been able to, but, um, a few people since my book have come out have messaged me on Lincoln, LinkedIn to tell me that they know about it. So I know it did happen, but, um, when I looked at the secretary, she was also the secretary. There were some other details. I don't want to spread misinformation. I'm a journalist, you know, so I do believe in fact, but.
01:35:37
Speaker
There was some, I heard that like there was maybe someone else involved somehow in the fair. But anyway, when I went to the name of the church, so it's fine. You can say whatever you want. Well, the name of the church is in my book, so people could figure it out. But when I went to go look it up to see, I could see that in the service.
01:36:01
Speaker
The people in the choir were still the same people I remembered, or they were the kids of the people that were in the choir when I was a kid. The pastor was one of the new pastor, not the one who did the affair, was someone that I knew really well as a youth pastor. When I was a kid in the congregation, I could see all of these people that I grew up with. And it just dawned on me like they all got to keep this community and they all got to keep the people that they loved. And I lost it all.
01:36:30
Speaker
Now, I probably don't have anything in common with those people anymore. They probably would not like my quote unquote lifestyle. But they were crazy. Okay, I just want to let you know my lifestyle involves going to bed at 9pm, mostly spending time with my cat. I'm making a frozen lasagna right now. Like
01:36:54
Speaker
I mean, we are doing it up gay here. My lifestyle is so boring. Like I was just listening before y'all called to this New York Times podcast about Christian nationalism and they were interviewing the head of the Southern Baptist Convention and he was saying that
01:37:14
Speaker
Same-sex marriage is a threat to our democracy and our nation will not survive it and I was like We won't stop on that. How many pedophiles did you cover for today? Like is the threat to democracy like, you know what we did we made dinner we played Nintendo we played cribbage the card game Yeah
01:37:42
Speaker
We're doing very little to upturn democracy, you know, I mean. Well, you also were one of the mules in the 20,000 mules, Dinesh D'Souza movie, too, right? I heard gays are the only ones that pass fraudulent ballots. Well, I live in Oregon where we do mail-in voting, so we are the problem of democracy. Yes, that is OK.
01:38:05
Speaker
that we are the epicenter. There's never been any fraud detected in our mail-in voting system. Just want to say it's awesome. You don't have to leave your house. Postage is free. Um, well, if you do a drop-off, the drop-off is right at McDonald's in the library. You're going there anyway. It's great. But, um, the library, where they have all those books on CRT, you mean, I don't trust this process. They've got my book too, which I'm surprised has not been banned yet, but, um,
01:38:33
Speaker
But I still felt like a huge grief and just seeing like, there's a black hole in my history where everyone who mattered to me suddenly disappeared. And, and that's painful, even if I don't still agree with what they believe in, or they don't agree with what I believe in. Um, it's painful to lose that many people at once. And I do think I might've been better served in my life if I had actually processed that, but, um,
01:39:00
Speaker
Now I have processed it on Knopf's dime in a book. So, you know, it's not horrible, but, um, I never have actually been able to replicate the feeling of church where you have a community that you, you're with multiple times a week. You're vulnerable with each other. You've come to each other supposedly out of the spirit of love. You like have potlucks together. Um, they've come to you when you're sick, like,
01:39:29
Speaker
I just don't have that. And I, and I think I will probably always miss that. Yeah. I think that's what's fascinating about.
01:39:39
Speaker
about this, especially like, you know, you get into this mindset of thinking like, you know, you, you read ex-vangelical accounts and stuff like that. And it's, it's easy to find all the common threads and stuff, but like, what's, what's amazing to me is how different like your church experience was from like mine and my friends. And, you know, just the fact in like,
01:40:04
Speaker
Just simple things like in how, you know, you coming forward was handled, you know, is so different in your area than it was in mine where like mine, we would have covered it up. It would have been really hush hush. Nobody would have talked about it. They would have been passive aggressive and it would have been awkward. And they kind of just make it awkward until you didn't want to go there anymore. But like.
01:40:27
Speaker
you know, the public handling of that information and then also just like the good aspects of it, the community aspects of it. I think my church experience felt really sterile and there wasn't like a warmth to it. It was very much like a shake hands, make small talks, sing songs together and then leave.
01:40:47
Speaker
And we're done with each other until next Sunday. And we give a lot of money to missions because missions doesn't require our time and our efforts and our investment in any other way than like signing a check. You know, it's so different from what you're describing and it also makes.
01:41:04
Speaker
It also is just crazy to think about how, for me, losing faith was about coming to grips with how little it actually meant to me. Whereas for you, it was almost taken from you in a way where you were pushed out of a community of people who were warm and cared about you.
01:41:28
Speaker
I don't know. It's such a, it's such a strange, uh, you know, contrast between the two that, uh, I can't, you know, I can't imagine how, how rough that had to have been.
Journey to Post-Christian Identity
01:41:39
Speaker
It's interesting. First of all, I've never heard the term expangelical. I love it. Thank you. Um, that means you've been out for too long. So it's been a while, but we did not actually do money for missions. Our.
01:41:54
Speaker
I guess that probably makes us less technically evangelical in some way, but we had like this. contained community like my church had a really nice gym, for instance, and we did all of our exercise at that gym.
01:42:11
Speaker
So it wasn't even just a Sunday, Wednesday thing. Like I would go there on Thursday night with my dad so he could play racquetball or basketball. Um, that's cool. I mean, yeah, I mean, it was like, it was the center of my social world. It was not just, uh, wrote, like, we're going to go sing some boring hymns and sleep through the service and go home. Like it was every, I mean, they had a school, I didn't go to the school cause it costs a lot of money, but they had a school.
01:42:38
Speaker
Um, we would do hay rides from there. We would have like harvest festivals at Halloween. Um, yeah, I was just, it was my whole world. Lefties can't replicate that. That's the problem. Lefties can't figure out a way to replicate that in any way that gets people to show up. We need too much space. Yeah. But I do miss the aspect of people showing up for you when you're sick and, um, and just that intense vulnerability of like.
01:43:08
Speaker
I have quite a few friends who are in AA and it feels like that kind of replicates it almost a little bit, you know, where they can call, they have phone banks and they can turn to each other when they're struggling. And unfortunately, I don't have an alcohol problem, so I don't think I can join. But I'm still kind of envious a little bit of like, oh, like, I want people to turn to that way. And there's just like some built in mentorship with church and stuff.
01:43:36
Speaker
I mean, I definitely understand how people get into it. It's, I don't really, I've been asked kind of a lot in interviews for my book of like, where my faith stands now. And it's kind of forced me to admit to myself that I don't have any, and I don't know when that happened. And, you know, even writing about this kid, I was telling you all about, um, I thought his, his vision of Christianity was so beautiful and sweet. And I could just feel myself feeling like I don't believe in this.
01:44:06
Speaker
Yeah. When you shit, like, so I've been, I generally would use the term post Christian to describe myself. That could mean a million different things, but I, there, there's aspects of it that still are meaningful to me that I, I try to use as like somewhat of like cornerstones grounding like posts for myself. Um,
01:44:33
Speaker
but it's so often that I don't look, I've lost a lot of feeling to it. Like it used to feel something. I used to, there was a feeling of connection that was hard to explain. Um, so when you like, it's hard to, you don't just get to like conjure that back up and there's kind of a disappoint. I, I've been, I feel like I've been dealing with like a level of disappointment with that. Like,
01:45:00
Speaker
It still functions as a signpost in a lot of ways, in the ways that I've kept it. But it's like, I find myself at times missing that feeling of
01:45:14
Speaker
even I remember feeling compelled to pray and feeling better about like oh that was nice like I remember the feelings that came with that and it's like you then you just realized one day you're like I don't I don't have that anymore and now it's been years but it's like I still at times feel like I have like this feeling of like I wanted I want it's like almost like I said
01:45:36
Speaker
it's like the opposite of a gag reflex in some ways you're just I want to and then your body's just you're like I don't know how I've lost it I don't have that bone in my body anymore and there is a level of mourning I think that does come with that and that
01:45:54
Speaker
that feeling that you know you used to be able to feel that and that you can't just make it happen. It kind of does. I mean, honestly, it just kind of like sucks, I think. And then you just get used to that. I can sometimes still feel it if I listen to those old songs.
01:46:12
Speaker
But it's not a feeling that's directed to God, though. It's just like an emotional feeling. I feel that with Jennifer Knapp songs, but I've recently read her memoir and she
01:46:31
Speaker
only became a Christian like right before she became a Christian musician. And then it doesn't seem like she believed in it for very long. And so that was kind of a shock to me. I was like, wait a second. I thought you believed in this to the same degree I did. But you know, those songs are just I think she does have like legitimately good songs. And hilariously, I think those songs led me to like the Indigo Girls and Ani DeFranco. Like I was like, I like this folk music. Like what else out there is folk? Just like all lesbians.
01:47:02
Speaker
But, you know, it's not any different actually than what I would feel listening to an Indigo Girl song which is not directed to God.
01:47:12
Speaker
I have a question for you because I know we're getting close to our time limit here, but one of the things that Sam and I talked about, and sometimes a frustration point for us with the community of people who have left that circle is they're seeming like contempt for that old community and the people who live there.
01:47:36
Speaker
you know, your typical Midwestern American conservative, and it's so tempting to write them off as just like Cretans that are hateful to the core that are awful people. And, you know, I live in Kansas, I'm surrounded by these people, and they're good people. And like, how do you how do you balance
01:48:00
Speaker
your feelings of, you know, cause you've gone through so much from that community of people, yet you know who they are. And I don't know how to, how does that balanced out for you? Well, first of all, I'm a journalist, so I'm just inclined to hate anybody. Uh, I kind of operate just from like, um, a place of empathy for everyone and.
01:48:23
Speaker
I kind of approach all types of people as just understanding that they have been shaped by where they're from or who their parents were. And because I've spent roughly at this point, I've still spent more of my life in the South than I have elsewhere. I left the South when I was 22 and I'm 39 now. So close to half and half in Louisiana and Mississippi and Georgia. And then the other half in Oregon or New York and
01:48:52
Speaker
I really do think that for the most part, people are not evil, no matter where they're from, or what they believe. And I think a lot of times it comes down to a lack of education about the other people. And this is hate on both sides, really. I mean, I do think there's just such a divide and it comes from a lack of interacting with each other.
01:49:18
Speaker
And that's kind of why, why I wanted to do the book in part is to show my book is largely about this trans guy who lived across the street from my grandma in the 1950s.
Using Journalism to Bridge Communities
01:49:28
Speaker
And he certainly faced adversity and he also got kicked out of churches, but there were also a lot of people in town who really accepted him. And if he existed in this time before the geopolitical threat of transgender people, he was not, he didn't represent a bigger group. You know, there was no Alliance defending freedom.
01:49:48
Speaker
out there to like take him down. And I do still think that world could be possible if there was like a way to cut through the noise and like just get back to the like human to human interaction of things. Um, so I, you know, I aspire in my journalism to do the kind of stories that like really introduce you to one person very intimately so that you can
01:50:14
Speaker
come to understand that one person and maybe your worldview is like broadened a little bit. Um, and I think that can be for any type of person, you know, like I said, I tend to write about trans people, but even like a couple of years ago at my old paper, I wrote about conversion therapy and you know, that certainly harmed a lot of gay people over the years, but I do believe there are gay people who for whatever reason just adamantly don't want to be gay and maybe
01:50:45
Speaker
those places might exist for them for a reason. Um, I don't think you should force children into conversion therapy, which is what I think happens a lot, but like maybe there are adults who want to go to it. I don't know. I actually am just literally open-minded and not liberal way. You know, like I actually am just open to meeting people where they are and hearing how they feel and seeing what shaped them and just trying to come at,
01:51:12
Speaker
everything, I guess, from a view of science and facts and just like a humility to admit that I don't know. I mean, I really can't tell you the final word on the Bible because I don't speak Greek or Hebrew. I can't go back to those original texts. I haven't done all the deep digging to know. So I just kind of like have to go with my own gut for my beliefs and understand that other people have to do the same. Yeah. I mean,
01:51:39
Speaker
I think that's a refreshing take, especially given the... 100%. I thank your commitment to...
01:51:47
Speaker
following to just knowing people, learning about people and being able to tell stories. I think that must be obvious when people know about how this book was written. Because I think one of the most mind-blowing things to me was hearing that you spent, was it 10 years writing it and all of your vacation time?
Writing a Book on Personal and Societal Themes
01:52:13
Speaker
Yeah, I technically started reporting it in 2009, and it just came out a month ago. But I even actually was just looking at my old journals from 2003 and 2004, 2005, the other day, and there's tons in there about this guy. My grandma told me about him in 2002, so I really spent 20 years, in a sense, trying to make this happen.
01:52:42
Speaker
My relationship to the story changed over the years, I think. But I think I was able to stick with it in part because it just does encompass so much of religion and community and home and identity and things that I'm still reckoning with and likely will be reckoning with for my entire life. I imagine if you came back to me in 10 years and wanted to interview me on a Christian podcast,
01:53:10
Speaker
I probably have, you know, still evolving thoughts about what it did to me or what I lost or what I gained. Yeah. I don't know if we've said the name of the book at all this whole time. It is Diary of a Misfit. I think people should buy it. I want to. I can't wait to read it. Unfortunately, I wish I could have before we talked. I wish we could talk more about the process. Oh, that's fine. There's a couple of chapters about Pentecostalism and how it got started.
01:53:41
Speaker
which were things that were shocking to me to learn. Basically, it was invented in 1900. But there are some scenes of me getting kicked out of church, somebody else getting kicked out of church. So there's lots of Christian stuff in there.
01:53:58
Speaker
If if your listeners are into that, but yeah, it's kind of not even miss perfect for our audience That was one of the you're more of an audio listener. I recorded the audio book. So oh sick You can if you're liking my voice right now, there's 14 hours more where that came from
01:54:15
Speaker
Well, that's awesome. I actually, I didn't even realize it was an audio book. I have very little time to read books these days. I'm in grad school. I have two kids, two foster kids, and I work. So I'm like, and then we try to do this when I, when I have time. So I'm like, now that I know there's an audio book version of it, I am, I'm going to absolutely listen to this on my commute to and from work.
01:54:37
Speaker
I had never been in the audio books and then I got a concussion this year and I couldn't read. So I had to listen to audio books and it's awesome because you can read while you're doing anything. You could read like a brush in your teeth. You could read while you're making your coffee and it's great. I'm listening to anxious people right now, which the chapters are only six minutes long, which is just perfect. You know, I'm like, I listened to an entire chapter while I was making my coffee. So.
01:55:06
Speaker
That's so cool. Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, this was a lot of fun, Casey. Thanks so much for joining us. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next time.