In light of recent events we are re-releasing Dan's interview with Chrissy Stroop, who helps explain the Evangelical obsession with Israel. One of the main themes is how Evangelicals profess love for Israel based on their need for it theologically, but rarely attend to the actual lives or politics of Jewish people. They explain how this works through an examination of supersessionism and Christian Zionism. This episode provides a background for why conservative Christians are so unquestionably pro-Israel even in times of conflict and war.
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Axis Mundi You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
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And I am privileged to be joined today by Dr. Chrissy Stroop.
Chrissy Stroop holds a PhD in Russian history from Stanford and is an outspoken Former evangelical, well-known analyst, commentator, and podcaster addressing a wide range of issues related to discussions of evangelicalism in this country, Chrissy writes for Playboy, for Rewire News online,
For foreign policy and many other outlets Chrissy is also the co-editor with Lauren O'Neill of a new book titled Empty the Pews stories of leaving the church Which is due out in December, but people can get pre-orders of it now and it details 21 stories of people leaving different kinds of traditions like evangelicalism Catholicism Mormonism and so I want to begin Chrissy by saying thank you so much for joining us today Thanks very much for having me, Dan.
Yeah.
Now, on this podcast, Brad and I have talked at length about the social cost of nonconformity within evangelical circles, and our listeners will be familiar with our own stories.
We've shared those, so your upcoming book will be really relevant to that.
I want to come back to that and sort of hold that in reserve and get a chance to talk about that.
Before we jump into that, what I wanted to talk about is your recent writing on evangelical support for Israel and their belief about, I wish people could see air quotes on the radio, right?
About end times.
And we recently did an episode talking about some of these issues.
We discussed how evangelical fascination with Israel is kind of based on a kind of abstraction by which we meant a certain conception of what Israel is, who Jewish people are, But it's often far removed from any real encounter with Israel or Jewish people or the Jewish tradition and you say something similar in a piece that you wrote recently and I wanted to quote you as sort of a way of starting this discussion and throw it over to you.
But you said, you posed this question, you said, Can evangelical support for Israel really be equated to love for the Jews?
In my view, the idea is nonsensical on its face, and it's impossible, excuse me, as it's impossible for anyone to love an entire people, which is, after all, an abstraction.
For authoritarian evangelicals, however, the term love is often applied to abstract situations in which evangelicals' responses are dictated by specific theological scripts.
It's the end of the quote.
And so, let me just toss out a few questions there and have you respond as you will.
In your view, what is going on when evangelicals say they love Israel?
What is this theological script that they're running?
Why do you think it's possible for so many evangelicals to say that they love Israel, yet harbor arguably anti-Semitic theological views?
For example, that Jewish people have to become Christian to be acceptable to God.
So, I throw it over to you.
What do you think is going on with these kinds of claims, and what are those theological scripts that you think are running that you mention in your piece?
Sure.
Well, first let me start with saying that my piece, it was one of two pieces you quoted from a piece I published in Religion Dispatches, which followed on a piece I published in The Forward, an op-ed for The Forward, and it simply filled in some more details that I thought were significant and important, but I wasn't able to get to in that
Initial op-ed for The Forward, but both of them are a response to a lawyer writing under the pseudonym of Jarvis Best, and also to some other people who have been attempting to whitewash the toxic side of Christian Zionism, to pretend that, well, Christian Zionism is just fine.
This Jarvis Best literally said that we should take evangelicals, or he said we should take Christians, including evangelicals, love for Jews at face value.
And that statement just floored me, because what does it mean to say, I love the Jews, right?
And so that's where I started looking at the whole thing through this framework of the kinds of abstractions and theological scripts that evangelicals map onto the world in what I like to call a politics of providentialism.
So they're looking for, you know, signs, signs of the times when it comes to the apocalypse and all of that.
But in general, they're looking for some things that they can identify, according to their way of thinking anyway, as the implementation of God's will, God's plan in history and in current events.
And so, for most American evangelicals, the establishment of the modern state of Israel is a major fulfillment of prophecy, right?
Because the way that they view the end times, they think that According to their reading of the Bible, a modern state of Israel had to be established.
The Temple has to be rebuilt.
So, for these reasons, of course, they support a really aggressive sort of right-wing Netanyahu, Likud-type version of Israel, or, you know, even to the right of that.
I mean, they would love to see a strictly Jewish state take over all of Jerusalem and And even raise the third holiest site in Islam so they can rebuild the temple.
So, you know, to actually act on the geopolitical stage like Donald Trump has done by moving our embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is extremely destabilizing.
So yeah, when we talk about theological scripts arguably being anti-Semitic, of course all of Orthodox Christianity, little-o Orthodox, throughout the history of Christianity, has a theology of supersessionism, which I think is anti-Semitic.
Some scholars, including Jewish scholars like Daniel Byron, would be a little kinder on that, and say that at least when it comes to Paul himself, Byron wrote a really interesting book about Paul.
He calls it theological anti-Judaism, and makes a distinction, and absolves Paul of anti-semitism, which is a very interesting argument to make, but in any case, you know, the idea is that there's an old covenant and a new covenant, and, you know, God has moved on to the new covenant, and today's Jews have refused to do the same, so they're living in rebellion to God's plan, and the whole rabbinic tradition since the time of Christ is just erased.
It's not important to evangelicals.
I mean, the Jews in their head are, for the most part, Yeah, I think you made a really interesting point.
I think there are a few points there worth sort of playing on.
One is, you're right when people talk about the history of Christianity, and we all know that what emerges as Christianity emerges out of Judaism and so forth.
And so those discussions about sort of these these kind of founding figures like Paul or Jesus of Nazareth himself or those early disciples are of interest but certainly after a period of time when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and there is no Jewish temple anymore and Second Temple Judaism comes to an end and Christianity becomes the Roman religion and very you know very predominantly Gentile and
I think from that time forward, there's very little debate, right, about what you're describing as a supersessionism, which, for those who may not be familiar with that term, it's just that notion that those who practice Judaism and don't recognize Jesus as the Messiah are fulfilling God's kind of old covenant.
They're not understanding the sort of fullness of the full plan of God and so far sort of outside of God's will.
I think you're right.
Once you make that shift in like the third, fourth century, there's not much argument to be made that that's not a part of, as you say, small Orthodox Christianity.
I think you also make an interesting point that I would like to sort of just touch on, right, that you'll often hear evangelicals talk about support for Israel But one of the ways I think this is an abstraction, or as you describe it as kind of imaginary, is it often ignores all of the messy, real-life, day-to-day politics of the state of Israel, right?
That you have multiple political parties in Israel, right?
Jewish-majority political parties, some of which are really secular, some of which are much more religious and favor that kind of right-wing religious view, some of which
favor annexation and expansion in the occupied territories as you're describing right the Likud party and Netanyahu and so forth in this this vision of reclaiming you know the sort of Israel of Davidic times the landmass of that but of course you have other Israeli parties that oppose that you have minority parties in Israel and you have Arab political parties and you know
So, I think part of what you're highlighting, and I'm glad that you highlight it, right, is that that's part of what makes this such an imaginary appeal, is there's this image of a kind of Israel of the Bible that's just sort of transported into the 21st century now and applied to this state, right, a geopolitical state.
As if there's a one-to-one correspondence.
For me, that's one of the things that makes it that kind of imaginary, abstract notion, is it ignores all of those complexities, that there are plenty of Jewish people in Israel, and Jewish people outside of Israel, right, who oppose those, and yet that evangelical discourse sort of smooths right over that.
Yeah, of course, according to Trump, they're just loyal Jews, and I'm sure that evangelicals are perfectly happy to I agree with that comment for the most part, but yeah, I mean, the thing about this politics of providentialism is that it imagines that there can be callings not just for individual people, but also for nations.
It's, you know, for some Christian intellectuals of the 20th century, it's sort of a Christianization of Hegelianism, but I think it's also older than that, and, you know, maybe Hegelianism itself is a sort of inflection of Christian eschatology.
But there's this whole idea that certainly post-Hegel was very much influenced by Hegel, that nations act in history like persons, sort of.
I mean, you could also trace it back to Hobbes, so obviously it's a kind of old idea.
But this idea that a nation can have a divine calling, it's an idea that naturally elides complexity, and authoritarian thinkers Of course, are averse to complexity.
So they like these these kinds of frameworks.
And, you know, I've also seen this kind of rhetoric in relation to the mission field.
And I tell my own story about doing two short term mission trips to Russia in 1999 and 2000.
In the Empty the Pews anthology, it's coming out December 1, and how Observing missionary activity and being a part of it contributed to my deconstruction, because that's a whole other messy can of worms.
But, you know, one of the things I noticed about missionaries is they like to say things like, well, I just love the Russian people.
And, you know, already 19, 20 year old me is like, what does that mean?
That doesn't mean anything.
Right.
It makes you feel good about yourself, but you can't speak a lick of Russian.
You don't understand the culture at all, or its many complexities, and you read some essentializing stuff and you think you understand the Russian soul.
Yeah, so you've kind of talked, you just introduced a couple things I want to come back to, and you've kind of talked about this, mentioned, you know, eschatology and so forth, and I want to talk about this.
So just to sort of remind people, right, if I can give my, like, thumbnail sketch of kind of majority evangelical end-time beliefs.
It's this view that at some point in the future, usually presented as kind of the imminent future, could happen at any moment, Jesus of Nazareth is going to physically return to earth.
There's going to be this cosmic, climactic battle in which God is going to destroy God's enemies, redeem the Christian faithful who have remained faithful to him, and set up sort of a new kingdom and so forth, right?
And so that's part of what we're talking about.
So here's why... Well, yeah, except that you kind of skipped over the rapture, which I think most American evangelicals I would still believe in, although I also think some indications that belief in the rapture may be waning.
But that's the idea that Christ appears in the sky and takes believers up to heaven first.
Right, so they get to miss—I was actually going to strategically come back around to it, but you're too sharp.
No, it's all right.
You're too sharp to let me.
Yeah.
There'll be this awful period on earth in this conflict called the Tribulation.
And the sort of dominant evangelical view has been, as you say, it's a bit murky what the status is, that those faithful Christians, by which evangelicals mean evangelicals, will be taken up and kind of rescued from that before that happens.
They won't have to go through any of that nasty stuff.
Yeah, possibly.
Or maybe they have to go through half of it, or maybe they even have to go through all of it, but they still are taken up before Armageddon.
Right.
Pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, all those fun things.
Yeah, with pre-trib being the most popular, at least it used to be, and I don't know the latest data.
Right, right.
But it probably still is, according to people who actually believe in the Rapture.
Yeah.
It's just that post-millennialism has become a lot more popular, and weirdly combined with charismatic Christianity.
So there's a lot of, like, frothing and ferment right now, and we'll have to see where the dust settles on it.
But still, there's a toxic apocalypticism there, you know, whether it involves this Rapture belief or not.
Yeah, and so what I wanted to do is, as I say, you've sort of introduced this, but I would argue, I think I'm going to ask you to argue in a minute, right, that there are some contradictions, right, between that theology, that theology of the return of God and what that return is going to look like and what it's going to entail.
And this kind of professed love for Israel, right?
So maybe you can talk about that.
What are the contradictions there?
Or another way to say this is, sort of, what happens to Israel, maybe we could say, in that apocalyptic vision, and how does that sort of cut against this easy notion that we love Israel, we love the Jewish people, etc.?
Sure.
Well, as I already mentioned, you know, the policies that evangelicals will support, the kind of Israel that they will support, ...are policies that will inevitably lead to destabilization and violence.
You know, and it's not going to be just Palestinians who suffer that violence, though they will, they do suffer, and they will suffer disproportionately.
But, you know, evangelicals, many of them who believe in the rapture, or even without the rapture, believe in a particular end-time scheme around Israel, certainly believe that Armageddon will be centered there, and that it will be massively destructive, and that You know, a lot of Jews will die in the Battle of Armageddon, and most evangelicals believe that those who didn't convert to Christianity will go to hell.
There are some exceptions where, you know, they take Paul's statement, all Israel will be saved, to mean every Jewish person, as well as every Gentile Christian, grafted onto the vine.
But, you know, for the most part, they think that Jews that don't accept Christ go to hell.
So, what they're really doing and arguing for Is not going to be good for Israel.
I mean, if they got their way and there was a push to destroy the Al-Aqsa complex and rebuild the temple, I mean, that would be all out nuclear war.
Right.
Yeah, and all of that, I mean, once upon a time for my PhD, in my comprehensive exams, I did one on the Book of Revelation, which is the final book.
I'm sorry.
It's a fool's errand, right?
I'm going to tackle that, right?
The last book in the Christian New Testament from which a lot of this theology is drawn out And it's impossible to just read that and not capture just the violent imagery, right?
The one that I always remember is this one, it's this image of the divine returning and like putting all the enemies of God in this giant wine press, like the kind that, you know, people would walk around in barefoot and squeeze the grapes.
Putting all the enemies in there and marching around until their blood overflows.
I mean, it's just incredibly violent imagery that is usually tied in with this notion that, again, speaking for a majority, it is not universal, there are exceptions, but this kind of dominant image that the Jewish people who will be saved by God in this conflict are those who basically renounce Judaism as having been a mistake and recognize that they should have been Christians all along, that Jesus was in fact the Messiah and so on.
Part of my movement out of evangelicalism, I think, was also a little bit of that, of just not being comfortable with that.
Something about that just struck me as fundamentally unjust, or not right, or not very holy, right?
If I was still going to hold on to any form of faith, it wasn't that, right?
Yeah, I mean, this whole idea of eternal conscious torment Or even Annihilation of the Soul, which is something that I started considering as a teenager, which is, you know, I would guess a little more benevolent, of everyone who just doesn't believe the right things, was also a major part of my deconstruction.
I mean, I finally... I went to Christian school.
I was in this very sheltered environment, but after my sophomore year of high school and my junior year of high school, I went to... I attended the Summer Honors Program at Indiana State University.
And I met a lot of public schools, and I met people who weren't Christians, and, you know, it was kind of shocking and destabilizing to me, but I made some good friends, and that, I think, really got me thinking in a less abstract way, more personalized way than before, that, you know, I really am uncomfortable imagining people going to hell for believing the wrong things.
It still took me a long time to reject belief in hell from there, but I didn't like it, you know?
You're getting into this now, and you mentioned this short-term mission trip to Russia that you took.
But I was going to say, in your experience, when you were in that evangelical world, when you were living there, how central was this end-times theology or ideology, these conceptions of Israel, Because when I was within evangelicalism, it was a really, really central component, right?
There were some pastors who, it didn't matter what text it was, it could be like the Mother's Day sermon, and we're going to find a way to make it about end times, right?
It could be like anything happening in the news, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comes out and somehow that's a sign of the impending apocalypse, right?
For some, it was really central.
Was that your experience?
Oh, it was pretty central.
I wouldn't say that it came up in every sermon, but I also would definitely not say, like, Jarvis Best claims that when he grew up Southern Baptist, it hardly came up at all.
I mean, I find that very hard to believe, and I don't want to doubt his own experience, but that would be a highly unusual experience to have in a Southern Baptist church.
So, you know, and maybe he's a bit younger, and maybe The emphasis has shifted some, but, you know, certainly in the 80s and 90s, and I was in this, you know, though very tenuously through the beginning of the 21st century, a few years in there before I really kind of came to grips with the fact that I couldn't consider myself evangelical anymore, and then finally, eventually stopped calling myself Christian really only a few years ago.
Yeah, I mean, end times ideas and beliefs were very central at our school.
In our churches, not to say they were mentioned in every sermon, but yeah, they absolutely came up, and people were watching for signs of the times.
I mean, I had a high school chemistry and AP biology teacher who was this sort of, like, weird apocalyptic evangelical mystic type who was always, like, you know, feeling like the Holy Spirit was telling him to do this or that, and he would start His classes, with what he called a thought, which would be this rambling devotional, could go on for like half the class time.
Sometimes, even in AP Biology, which is two periods, because you have one for the lab, he would take up almost the entire first period with these rambling thoughts.
And he would say things like, So I had this dream, and I was before the wide throne of judgment, and it was judgment day, and Christ was separating the sheep from the goats, and I was walking around and looking around, and I was so nervous, because I was so afraid that some of my students might be among the goats, but then they weren't, and I was really happy about that.
And he would go on and on like this, and, you know, he would talk about the genetic engineering of red heifers, and, you know, how sin is increasing in the world, and it must be the year of Noah, because look how nice we are to gay people, and in conclusion, Christ is probably coming back this fall around Yom Kippur.
He literally said that two years in a row, and probably more than that.
And this is definitely your, you know, John Hagee kind of stuff.
Yeah, so first of all, I just want to point out here that I really feel like that impression you just did might have been worth the price of admission.
That was awesome.
I mean, related to that, because it does show that it was this kind of ubiquitous discourse all the time, and you've touched on this, right?
You're sort of interlocutor or the person you're responding to in these articles.
But there are those who argue and say, look, all of you mean anti-evangelical or ex-evangelical or critical of evangelical people.
This isn't really what evangelicals are about.
You're painting with too broad a brush.
This is kind of really a fringe movement.
Would I be right to say that, yeah, while evangelical views may be changing, and it may not be the same as it was, I don't know, 20 or 30 years ago, or maybe even 10, that this is still a central part of the evangelical mythos, and the ethos, the way of living as evangelicals, the way of thinking of evangelicals.
I'm gathering from your right that you would reject that notion that we're painting with too broad a brush, and that this really isn't a part of the evangelical subculture.
Yeah, I mean, that's ridiculous.
What evangelical subculture is, for the most part, authoritarian, and still very much seeps in these kinds of what I've called hashtag Christian alt-facts, or Christian alternative facts.
Right.
I mean, we have plenty of data on this, and the people who are trying to argue that we don't are making up these ridiculous statistical constructs like global evangelical community, and no one knows what that means.
And it's all to distract from the fact that white evangelicals are overwhelmingly Hardline, right-wing, apocalyptically obsessed Trump supporters.
You know, or you look at certain respectable, quote-unquote, evangelical outfits like LifeWay Research at Wheaton.
Now, there's a disinterested party.
And, you know, they design their statistical studies to focus on so-called evangelicals by belief, which ignores the whole sociological context, which makes it absurd.
And what this does, ...through a kind of statistical sleight of hand, bumps white evangelicals, some of them, maybe not even all of them, in with so-called evangelicals of color.
Now, evangelicals of color do exist, but they are not the black church in America.
Yes.
And the vast majority of African American Christians do not call themselves evangelicals.
But they lump these things in together, and then they say, poof, look, evangelicals aren't so bad.
It's easy to lie with statistics, and we need to push back hard against that.
So whether you do it by evangelicals by belief, quote-unquote, or the global evangelical community, quote-unquote, you know, you're not focusing on the serious problem of conservative, mostly white, evangelical authoritarianism in the United States.
And if you look at that data in a sociological context, I mean, the notion that this is a benign group of people who are just perfectly compatible with democracy and Have perfectly principled reasons to support Israel that have nothing to do with radical beliefs?
It's absurd!
Yeah.
I like that you brought that up, and it's a big issue we can't completely dive into, but one of the themes we've been talking a lot on this season about is moving away from the popular conception lots of people have about religion as primarily being about beliefs, right, to looking at what do religious people do, or what does the statement of certain beliefs do for them?
And that's where I think you're right.
I would really encourage people, if they're interested in these things, to not just look at stated beliefs or, you know, data about stated beliefs, but look at, you know, ethnographic studies that spend time in evangelical churches hearing what people talk about, right?
Or the kinds of interview methodologies that actually talk to people and get beyond the, you know, a questionnaire that somebody can tick about things.
And I think you're right.
If you start looking at demographic factors and political views and so forth, I agree.
I think this is very much a part of that kind of evangelical mindset.
Sure, and you know, with that being said, there are certain beliefs that are markers of identity, and they might not match up exactly to other people's understanding of Christian theological belief, you know, but the belief that any kind of queer identity is a sin is an evangelical identity marker.
The belief that nobody who doesn't accept Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, which cannot be found in that formulation in the Bible, is an evangelical identity marker.
It's anti-pluralist.
So, for them, the politics is part of the religion.
You can't draw a bright line there and say, well, they're just being politicized and it's not really Christianity.
Their whole Christianity is about political power, and it has been really since about 1980.
Yep.
Yeah.
So I often wind up saying this in my interviews, because it's always true, but I could sit here and talk with you about this for hours, if either of us had the time, but neither of us do.
So what I want to do, if we can shift before we close out, is I wanted to come back around to your book that we mentioned at the outset.
It's called Empty the Pews.
And I wonder if you would just tell us a little bit about it.
What is it and what inspired it?
What inspired collecting these accounts that you've collected in this book?
Sure.
Well, so Lauren and I have been working on this.
It's really been a labor of love for I don't know, five, six years?
It's been a long time coming.
And so, you know, we had the idea a good while back, and we wanted to highlight the experiences of people who grew up in hardline authoritarian Christianity, and having them kind of look back on that through the lens of time with personal reflections in a way that would emotionally resonate with people, because we thought it could be a sort of healing thing.
And a lot of my experience in building ex-evangelical community and broader ex-fundamentalist community online, largely through Twitter over the last few years, I would say does confirm that.
I've also learned that, you know, survivors' communities are fraught, and, you know, sometimes people will act in bad faith and there will be unfortunate splits and that sort of thing.
But still, I think to tell these stories is important, and the book makes a unique contribution And as much as we do highlight mostly people who left religion entirely, because we were frustrated with books and commentary on the nuns that tended to focus on those who are still spiritual or still religious in some way.
Right.
And we didn't really think that was fair or comprehensive.
But you know, there are also older books that collect essays by atheists that mostly just rehash the same old intellectual arguments that really only speak to a certain kind of person, and maybe only at a certain stage in their life.
So we wanted to do a literary project To capture these stories in a poignant and beautiful way.
And at the end of the day, we've got it divided into a number of sections with several essays in each section.
Section 1 is Purity, Culture, Sexuality, and Queerness.
Section 2 is called Focus on the Family.
Section 3 is called Trauma and Abuse in Christian Context.
Section 4 is called American Christianity, Diasporas, and Missions.
So we look at the global aspects of this.
And Section 5 is called Intellectual Odyssey.
We had some discussions initially about, you know, how broad did we want to make this book?
Should we include ex-Ultra-Orthodox Jews?
Should we include ex-Muslims?
And we eventually decided that it could just get too unwieldy, so we settled on, you know, looking at former right-wing Christians, including ex-Mormons, ex-Evangelicals, and ex-Catholics, and putting their stories in the context of all these sociological things that we've been discussing, like The rise of the nuns and what that means for America's future, and like this right-wing Christian backlash that we're facing under Trump.
So that's the general concept of the book.
That's really great.
It sounds like a really cool organization to me, because you're right.
There are a lot of books that might sound similar, and finding a way to sort of cut through that noise, so to speak, and do something different, I think is really great.
And I think you touched on a thing that has come up in some of the interviews we've had with people.
It comes up in discussions of evangelicals who might not feel like they completely fit within their communities, but they remain there, and that is If there's something that evangelicalism does provide, especially for those who do sort of share all those core commitments and stuff, it is a robust sense of community.
And I think that's a real challenge for people in the kind of world we live in, for lots of reasons, good, bad, or otherwise, for people who envision being confronted with leaving those communities or being forced out of those communities.
It sounds like that's something that really sort of clicked with you, and I know it has clicked with you personally, right?
That need to recreate a sense of community.
Yeah, leaving what sociologists call high-demand religions always comes with a very high psychological and social cost, and you have to deal with the issue of identity loss, because when your whole identity has been defined by this authoritarian religious group, and you deconstruct that, you're then left with the question of, who am I?
What do I want?
And you don't know, and it takes decades, often, to put those pieces back together and figure out who you really are.
Yeah, I think that's right.
If I could ask, I don't want you to give up more than you want to, but I really encourage people to take a look at this book.
Is there a particular story or account in there that really sticks with you that you'd be willing to share?
Or if you want to save that for people to go out and buy it, I understand that as well.
Well, I mean, it's just, it would be very hard to pick just one, because I, well, we had a number of submissions, and we chose the best ones.
We also asked certain people if they would contribute something, and it's a great mix of new authors and established authors, and so it really depends on what angle you want to look at it from, because I find them all moving in different ways, to be honest.
You know, we have Matthew Clark Davison's look back at, you know, his upbringing as a Catholic and his family history and tying that together with him being gay and the AIDS crisis and all.
It's a beautiful, beautifully written literary kind of historical exploration of him and his family's past.
For example, we have a really fascinating essay By Ruby Theogaranjan from Singapore, writing about growing up in an evangelical megachurch there, but with American sermons on tape and American prosperity gospel books and that sort of thing, and I'm really, you know, interested in the global reach of this sort of thing.
A really powerful essay by Juliana Delgado Lopera called Gentrify My Heart, about moving to a diaspora community In Florida, and switching from, her family switching from Catholicism to Evangelicalism, and then her dealing with her queerness in that environment.
There are so many, you know, really moving stories here.
I couldn't pick just one, and, you know, I'm just scratching the surface.
Sure.
Well, let me then steer people, just as a reminder, as we prepare to end our time here.
The book is Empty the Pews, Stories of Leaving the Church.
It's due out, did you say December 10th, I think?
December 1st.
Oh, December 1st.
I got the one in my head, I guess.
And it's available for pre-order now, so I really encourage people to take a look at that.
Also, if they're following the podcast or interested at it, please, if you like what we're doing, give us a review on Apple Podcasts.
You can find Straight White American Jesus on Facebook.
If you want to support us, we're now on Patreon as well.
If you want to track down Brad, he can be found on Twitter at Bradley Onishi.
I am still not there, and so I'm an email guy, but I'm easy enough to find, too.
If you just Google Daniel Miller Landmark College, you can find me.
And I want to thank everybody for listening, and again, Dr. Chrissy Stroop, thank you so much for your time.
