Will Deconstructing End My Marriage? A Conversation with Keri Ladouceur

This episode explores the complexities of spiritual evolution and its impact on marriages and relationships. Our friend Keri Ladouceur shares her wisdom, and we discuss stories of navigating changing faith and the strain it can place on intimate partnerships. We cover how questioning beliefs impacts relationships, emotional labor amidst change, the stigma and fear surrounding deconstruction, open communication and mutual support, and what hope there is for couples undergoing religious transitions. If this is a place you find yourself, we hope this conversation is beneficial. You are not alone.

Content note: This episode contains profanity.

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Chapters

• 0:06 Spiritual Evolution in Relationships
• 7:25 Navigating Relationships Through Spiritual Evolution
• 18:26 Unhealthy Dynamics in Evangelical Relationships
• 28:10 Reclaiming Sexuality in Evangelical Relationships
• 33:25 Deconstructing Patriarchy and Certainty in Relationships
• 42:29 Navigating Emotional Labor and Spiritual Evolution
• 47:20 Divorce and Spiritual Evolution in Relationships
• 58:23 Navigating Theological Differences in Marriage
• 1:09:23 Embracing Relationship Evolution and Diversity
• 1:16:12 Embracing Relationships Beyond Belief

Transcript

Randy: 0:06

I'm Randy, the pastor, half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology and spirituality.

Kyle: 0:16

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air, around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy: 0:24

Thanks for joining us and welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher. Walk into a Bar. Well, friends, welcome.

Randy: 0:38

Today we're talking about deconstruction or, as I prefer to refer to it, spiritual evolution.

Randy: 0:43

But we're talking about how that spiritual evolution in our lives and deconstruction that many of us have gone through or are in the middle of, how that has affected our relationships and, in particular, how that's affected our marriages, how that's affected our relationships with our partners and our significant others.

Randy: 1:00

We've heard story after story of people who had no choice but to deconstruct their faith, had no choice but to go on this journey of a spiritual evolution, and I want to say that the reason I'm referring to it as a spiritual evolution you listeners who have been around for a while know what I'm talking about.

Randy: 1:16

I believe this is just a life orientation, that all healthy spiritual journeys are a journey. Your spirituality evolves and grows and changes over time, because human beings grow and we don't know everything that there is to know and we never will and so we're always going to be on a journey where our spirituality is evolving and changing and growing and morphing and feel like it's regressing perhaps all the things. But that doesn't happen in a vacuum and it affects our relationships, and some of you guys are listening and you're in the midst of what I'm talking about exactly what I'm talking about and it's excruciating. Some of you are now single because of the stuff that we're going to be talking about. So we're talking about kind of the personal parts and what's the fallout from spiritual evolution and deconstruction.

Kyle: 2:04

Yeah, we've talked about deconstruction a lot. We've kind of beaten the theoretical side of that to death probably.

Randy: 2:09

So hard.

Kyle: 2:10

And so it's nice to—well I won't say it's nice. It's, I think, useful, beneficial up-building. Hopefully to turn towards the relational fallout or the relational consequences of that, especially for people who are doing everything right, doing everything as well as any human could be expected to do it. Often there are still very severe relational consequences, so severe that a lot of people just have no theological frameworks to even think about them until they happen and then they're left kind of floundering. And so maybe we should say who we're talking to. So we're talking to Carrie Lattiser. Again, we're very excited to have her back on the show she's uniquely positioned to, I think.

Kyle: 2:53

Speak wisely about this issue, carrie. I'll let you say more about why that is, but it's something that I think everybody who is married or who has a significant other and who is deconstructing either one or both partners deconstructing is going to have to encounter this. Think about this at some point, whatever happens, whether they come out of that healthier as a couple on the other side or whether they don't. And so we're excited to talk to you and get your wisdom on this. It's something that it's unusual for us to talk about stuff like this. It makes me a little bit uncomfortable to talk about stuff like this. If I'm completely honest, this and like parenting are places where, like I don't know, I'm just here to listen. So we'll see how much I have to contribute to this, but I am excited about it.

Randy: 3:34

Yeah, welcome, Carrie. Good to have you back.

Keri: 3:37

Thank you, thank you both of you for having me back. I had so much fun in in our last conversation and then you asked me to have this one and I'm like, wait, this isn't a podcast. You like cry on right, like this is an intense conversation and I love how you guys are, like you know, theological and philosophically framing this. But yeah, there's so many personal implications. When it comes to spiritual evolution, to deconstruction, there's layers and layers of loss, you know relational loss, familial loss and disassociation that happens here. But certainly our primary partnerships get impacted. So I can talk a little bit from a place of like.

Keri: 4:12

In my role I get to spend a lot of time in conversations with folks journeying through this and sort of offering pastoral care or safe listening space for that kind of stuff. But then of course I do have I talked to you just as not a resident expert in it, but as someone who is divorced, on the other side of deconstruction and trying to reimagine relationships where we landed in really different places because of our formation, you know, and the evangelical church prior to that. So I'm yielded to you guys to talk about whatever that would be helpful, and I just name. I'm not an expert in. You know I'm not a therapist, but I have some experience in trauma work and so I'll probably talk about a lot of different. I'm a real nerd when it comes to emotions and nervous system and attachment theory and how that shapes theology, so I'm not an expert in that. But I will bring my personal experience, both in work and in life, to the conversation perfect, I think.

Randy: 5:04

Fully believe when somebody tells you they're not an expert, that's when you start listening, because that means they're trustworthy.

Kyle: 5:09

But, carrie, it means they've read enough to know that they're not an expert, which already puts them.

Keri: 5:14

I'm actually learning that the more I'm learning, the more I knew nothing if I'm just really honest at 40 years old. The more I'm learning right now, the more I'm like oh my, we know absolutely nothing, like let's dive into physics sometimes.

Randy: 5:26

But yeah, I'm a learner for sure, yeah, and for those of you who haven't been journeying with us for a long period of time haven't heard the first conversation that we had with Carrie. Carrie is the executive director of an organization called the Post-Evangelical Collective and that is a really important and beautiful organization that I'm a part of, my church is a part of, is a church network in some ways. Carrie, can you just in like, in 90 seconds or less, talk about the Post-Evangelical Collective and what you do?

Keri: 5:57

Sure, I mean essentially it's a group of like pastors, artists, key stakeholders in the church that have been gathering for the last couple of years trying to reimagine, perhaps explore Some of it's a different posture.

Keri: 6:10

We've said over and over again we don't think we need, like, new belief statements or boundary lines in the church. We need a different way of being, and so it's this growing contingent of people that are trying to reimagine. I like to say a more like hope-filled, eschatological imagination for what Christ is up to in the world, what Christ came to do, the life, ministry, teachings of Christ and what that means for even our humanity today. So I think I mean it's a really exciting place. It's churches that are dreaming about this and engaging in these conversations, really trying to reimagine. Then, what are faith? Spaces of mutuality and flourishing, what are spaces not built around, you know, belief, alignment, or intellectualized theological statements, but built around belonging and celebrating our belovedness that might become redemptive presence in the world. So churches that are hoping to hold space for spiritual evolution, conversations like the ones we're having here, like what you guys are doing at your church, randy.

Randy: 7:07

Absolutely Super, super fun to partner with you and the PEC and all that's going on. There's something really, really fun moving in the church, I would say. So, carrie, let's just jump right into it In your role this is the main reason why I wanted you to be part of this conversation is in your role. I mean, you just get people reaching out to you, in some of them in just ecstatic because the post evangelical collective or something like it is out there, and some of them in like really desperate places. Right, I'm sure you run the gamut of people who connect with you and say I need this desperately or I need some help, I need some resources, or also, hey, my marriage is just like hanging on by a thread or just ended. I'm disoriented, I don't know what to do. Can you just tell us, bring us into just some of those conversations, not personally or, you know, without divulging certain things, but what are you hearing? How is deconstruction and this idea of a spiritual evolution affecting people and marriages and relationships and partnerships?

Keri: 8:09

Yeah, you know, I think part of deconstructing wherever it begins for people, and for some people it's like one thread that gets pulled and it's a slow unraveling.

Keri: 8:19

And for some people it's an experience that they have like in the church or with faith. Or, you know, for a lot of people, even in 2016, and what representations of the faith that shaped them have become in the world fell out of alignment with the ways of Jesus, and so, as they've been wrestling through that, you realize that sort of faith formation or that formative place wasn't just like what. It wasn't just what you believe, I don't know, about God or Jesus. Right, it shaped what you believe about what it means to be a human, what you believe about your worthiness, what you believe about punishment, what you believe about brokenness in yourself and in the world. Like it shapes how you look at parenting, how you look at relationships, how you read the Bible, what you believe the activity of God is in the world and how it happens, and what to fear in yourself and in other people and in the world could be, or how to leave some fear behind right.

Keri: 9:13

Yeah, precisely, precisely. So. The impact of that kind of dismantling of like an entire operating system literally within your body has massive implications on relationships. And I have served as a pastor, you know, walking with individuals who have gone through spiritual deconstruction, and then most of my work is sort of, you know, eyeball to eyeball with pastors and artists and stakeholders in the church, elders in the church that are wrestling through this kind of stuff.

Keri: 9:42

So in some ways it feels like for those folks, I think they perceive the stakes are higher and there's a lot that goes into that, even the ways that we have held pastors, you know, on pedestals and had unrealistic expectations. I would even say that one of the spiritual prosperity gospels of that faith that I came from, the faith tradition that I came from, was a certain sort of like look and projection of what a happy family like in some ways that's what the pastor had to project because that's what they were selling to the congregation was this like particular life? You know, you think about brand ambassador kind of language. So I think pastors, whether it's perceived or whether it's real, feel the weight of the implications of these types of shifts when it comes to their relationships even more. And I guess I could say, as someone who is divorced, I'm aware of like stigma and and the real, actual practical loss that comes with making a decision like that.

Randy: 10:35

Let's come back to that stigma idea in just a moment. But how regular is it for you to hear people saying I don't know what's going to happen to my marriage, or it's over, or or how do I know I? Haven't even told my partner or my spouse yet about what I think you know what I mean. Like how often is that that you hear that narrative?

Keri: 10:55

I mean I have these conversations weekly, like multiple a week, with people that are working through this type of stuff and that's, like you know, in my little corner of the world. For a while in my work, I had been saying well, let's just say it's significant With the number of people who've walked away from the evangelical church since 2016,. That's the number of people who are working through some sort of deconstruction right now, and it's massive. And again, when you step back, wherever it starts, all of these things feel very connected from sex to relationships, to parenting, to familial relationships, to control and order and who makes decisions, and you know, all of these types of things begin to unravel. So it's a significant number of people and many of them aren't coming to people like me or to the church to help them find answers to this unraveling, because the church is the one that inflicted this type of pain or these wounds, right? So I think the church is operating at a deficit, if I'm really honest, as the church being the ones to help people pick up the pieces on the other side or reimagine a different way to look at relationships or marriage or partnership, and another sort of component to this, I guess and then I'll move on is.

Keri: 12:05

I've talked to a lot of folks who, after they walked away from the evangelical church, are working through sexual identity stuff too, and so that there's massive implications on that.

Keri: 12:14

Relationships when for the first time after 30 years, a woman can actually identify, as you know, lgbtq, like and and own that part of their identity. And then if they're in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage, there's implications to that for the spouse. I talk to couples or right now it's not even I talk to couples in this situation. Now it's also I'm talking to pastors who are talking to couples in their church in this. You know, like that's how frequent it is, and so massive implications to the outcomes of these types of things, and I actually can't think of a place that probably requires more tender care and sacred presence. So it feels important for us in the work in the PEC to figure out how do we get this better, at least in the church, how do we outsource to professionals as often as possible in some of these situations too, and how do we have a bigger imagination to equip people for how relationships might evolve over time as well. I think that's probably my hope in all of that.

Kyle: 13:13

That's so useful because I know so many people so, like lots of really good friends of mine, who have been struggling for literally in some cases decades, with cleaning up the baggage of the kind of fundamentalist, cult-like church culture that a lot of us were in for a long time, and it affects all of their relationships, including their marriages, and they don't have anywhere to go To your point about. They're not going to go back to the church because that's where it happened. They don't know of a good alternative. It's hard to find a therapist who is skilled in that, who is like specializes in that kind of thing, because to most of the secular world what goes on in those cult-like church spaces is really foreign and odd. And it's not to say you couldn't go to like a credentialed psychologist and get excellent advice Of course you could, but like it's hard to find somebody and then afford to pay them like really knows what's going on.

Kyle: 14:02

So they're stuck, and they've been stuck for a long time.

Keri: 14:05

Yes, it's very tricky to find good resources. I mean, since COVID it's really tricky to even find find a good therapist. Right now I'm learning like cause therapists are hard to even they're loaded on the calendar with yeah, they're so busy.

Keri: 14:18

Um, it's also there's ways that those types of resources were demonized and fundamentalist. So even opening yourself up to like so this is really interesting. When I was walking through divorce, most couples, by the time they say they need to go to therapy, the average is 18 months before they actually do it. It was 10 years for me of finally saying yes to marriage therapy, and then it was really intense marriage therapy for a while and then when it was like okay, these things are actually marriage therapy is exacerbating these things and sort of validating what some of these issues are and they're actually growing. We're not moving towards one another. I don't think that this marriage is going to be tenable for a variety of reasons.

Keri: 15:00

I worked at a church at the time and I went to the leadership of the church and wanted help in like making this decision, like would you guys enter into this with me and journey with me through it? Which felt super vulnerable. But for some reason I have just found, as I've grown in my own story, the more sort of inner validation that I live with, the more I long for external collaboration and I felt like I wanted people to enter into this massive decision. I wanted people to tell me if I had not tried enough or if I had not done enough. Anyways, so they say, at this church, we will help you guys, will you do like one last ditch, will you do a marriage intensive or marriage retreat? And I was like, oh God, yes, if he'll do it, like totally, you know.

Keri: 15:47

So it turned into this, though they recommended this organization that does this for couples that are in ministry, but it's really complementarian and it's like theology, and so I said that feels really dangerous for me to go there, and then for them to tell me like well, you work outside of the home and you're out of headship, and like that feels really harmful, I don't think I can go there. What about this other alternative? And and I mentioned this place called Onsite that does like trauma work and it's psychology and neuroscience, informed trauma, like these people with doctorates, you know, and they were like saying no to this organization because it wasn't quote unquote biblical counseling. And so I was like, but what is biblical counseling Like? Help me understand. And this was legitimately.

Keri: 16:21

I was so naive in this conversation, but that fundamentalist view about these resources and what I've learned is like biblical counseling is like a certification that John MacArthur and his whatever ministry organization certifies people without counseling degree. Like it's dangerous actually, but this was a stretch even in my marriage to talk about, like the higher value would be science and psychology and like the people that are experts in these fields, even if the church had demonized them. So, kyle, I just want to like confirm how entrenched that even is fear of what these resources could be, not to mention how do you find so? Even if I talk about an imagination or or things that informed my dream for what I wanted marriage and partnership to be, most of those are informed by outside of the church resources for whatever, and I'm happy to list those or share those, if that is oh, please do, or at least tell us, so that we can put them in the show notes.

Keri: 17:18

Yeah.

Kyle: 17:19

A little bit ago you referred to, like religion in general, as an operating system, and that's going to stick in my brain because I had not thought of it that way before. But it makes so much sense and I just want to call our listeners intention to that, because if the operating system you've been running for so long has disposed you against evidence-based help, you're not going to see it as a good, you're not going to understand it as something that you ought to seek out and you're going to resort to some kind of pop psychology, self-therapy thing that's going to end up maybe hurting you more, and so I'm laughing uncomfortably because there's not a good alternative that I know of. But if you have better things geared towards people who have been running that operating system for so long, please tell us and we'll put them in the notes.

Randy: 18:02

Yeah, yeah, and I mean, as we're talking, it's just laying kind of laying heavy of just like imagine being in that place where we're taught within the church and evangelicalism that like marriage is everything. That's part of the problem in many ways, right, we're told that from when you can remember on through that like marriage is your destiny, especially if you're a woman in the church. And then to have some questions and like I don't know if I believe this anymore, I don't know if this sits with me anymore. Just normal human feelings, you know normal things. But then you're already feeling super, super insecure about I don't think my spouse is going to welcome this. As a matter of fact, I think this is going to introduce a huge amount of tension into our relationship or our marriage.

Randy: 18:49

And then you do take that leap and then your spouse maybe says okay, let's talk to our pastor.

Randy: 18:54

And then your pastor gives you advice to say I've got the perfect thing for you.

Randy: 18:57

You know whether it's that retreat or whether it's that Christian counselor. And not to say that all evangelical retreats and counselors or Christian counselors are bad, because I know they're not, but by and large it's kind of like another cog in the wheel that's going to tell you the exact same thing and make you feel like you're trapped and locked in this thing and you can't ask any of these questions. None of this is safe. You need to turn it off within you if you actually care about your marriage, care about your kids, care about your fill in the blank. All of this sounds super manipulative to me in some some ways, and I don't think it's even intentional on many people's behalf, right, but it's just. I think it's this, like you said, operating system that can really easily trap a person inside to feel like I have no alternatives, I have nowhere to go, and we just want to tell you that's not the truth, like I have no alternatives, I have nowhere to go, and we just want to tell you that's not the truth.

Keri: 19:49

So, unless you got anything to say to that. Carrie, we can keep moving. I actually do want to just stop for a second and say like it is incredibly healing to hear you, like as my dear friend and as my brother, like name, and say that. And what comes up for me is, oh my gosh. So many times in that I thought why am I having to advocate for myself so fucking much? Like I I literally came to submit myself to you and ask your permission, I'll do anything you want here. Literally. I went to a second one-on-one with that guy and he said I know you said no to go into this retreat, but I went ahead and called and got you dates anyways and I was like I am, I'm so grateful that you wouldn't help me. I am not participating with that and if you can't see how harmful that would be for me, like you, you don't. You don't see, and he I can. I promise you, and I really respect this guy. He does not see the dynamics of the outflow of the systems and structures that you're referencing. And this is like you know.

Keri: 20:49

Kyle mentioned lots of people that he knows in the church that are navigating this kind of stuff. I think even people that have varying levels of formation on relationships and marriage and in the church everybody who grows up and then finds themselves in their own relationship is formed by what they were formed by, right. So this is like family of origin stuff and stuff in the church that shapes what you think marriage is and all of that shit is going to get dealt with in your marriage. So, whether you cognitively know it or whether it's in your bones because it's what your grandpa was like and it's what your dad was like and it's all this unhealed, all untended to shit that's just been passed down generation to generation, it's going to come up and you're going to decide am I going to choose the same adaptive patterns that everybody before me or am I going to awaken to this pain and deal with it and reorient and actually live what I believe right? Because we act out what we believe whether we want to own up to it or not.

Keri: 21:39

So I think my vision for relationship invites like a level of ruthless honesty that also was not available and that will be old paradigm, the old system where you have to kind of live in cognitive dissonance and do what you're told and it's high control, right and authority and you have to like let go of all agency and authority and give that to somebody else, because there's always somebody else that's going to tell you what's right and what's wrong, and there's ultimate punishment if you don't do it. So you know for a nine-year-old. Think about what kind of trauma that is first of all, but for all of us to then go wait if I get divorced, is that what's waiting for me? God hates divorce. Like there's just a lot of layers.

Kyle: 22:19

I know this is going to come up more later, but this is something I learned from my wife based on her past church experience. If you're the woman in that situation in a patriarchal culture like the one you were describing with the complementarian retreat, once you're out of it you got nothing, because your identity was just defined by his identity and so you're like a non-person at this point almost because you've severed the thing that gave you personhood in the eyes of God and in the eyes of God's representatives on the earth, which is that church.

Kyle: 22:48

So, like, my wife was literally kicked out of her church because her partner at the time had not followed the advice that was given and so, from their perspective, she was persona non grata.

Randy: 23:00

Nobody reached out to her separately it was just closed nobody reached out to her separately, it was just closed. Yeah, and I mean this idea of telling a person who's come to you and said our marriage is in trouble, don't know what to do. First of all, pastors, just a little compassion and the audacity and I trust you, carrie, to say this is a good person, that you like this person, but the audacity to be able to say I know you said you're not interested in that retreat. I went ahead and booked it for you anyway because I know it's good for you. Better than you do Holy moly like get out of a toxic system right there.

Keri: 23:34

And I want to say he knew for three years that we were doing really intensive marriage work and he was supportive, like he, you know, he was a caring boss that was compassionate and checked in. But then, yes, when that moment came, what you're talking about and just the sheer gaslighting of it, and actually this is a dynamic that's playing out in my marriage because of the ways the man I was married to was formed by those things, at the end of the day, that paternalistic I know what's best for you, you don't know what's best for you, or these kids, like the way that this dynamic was just so prevalent in my own life in so many different ways. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of self-advocacy that, thank God, I've just had to learn how to do over the years I'm a real pain in the ass I guess I'll say it that way and and and, and I often think about that.

Keri: 24:24

That man had to be married to somebody like me and when I became post-evangelical and he was an evangelical pastor, that was really difficult for him and I was publicly calling out these systems and structures and harm that they were doing and publicly being drug through the mud for doing that. And he had to be married to me and I think about that was that's really difficult and I've tried to own and apologize to him. I can't imagine how challenging that was actually.

Randy: 24:56

So it's quite complex, yeah, yeah, to say the least.

Randy: 24:57

For some people who might be listening and saying I don't know what the big deal is here, like, how could evangelicalism mess a bunch of marriages up?

Randy: 25:01

How could fundamental you know, how could the church, the organization maybe in the world that is the biggest advocate for healthy marriages you know, written countless books and given countless sermons be responsible for some of this ugly stuff and trauma in marriages? Let's just go, I'm just going to say a few little bits and I want to just have you, carrie, kind of guide us through what might be unhealthy and how evangelicalism contributed to really unhealthy dynamics in some marriages, really unhealthy dynamics in many relationships, and just even the way we see relationships, the way we see marriages, the way we see what it means to be a wife, what it means to be a husband, all of those things. So everyone talks a lot about purity culture. Purity culture is something that's a reality within that many of us grew up in, in the evangelical church or in a fundamentalist expression of the church. What about purity culture is kind of like a toxin that eats away at a healthy relationship and marriage, carrie, oh gosh, we could have a whole episode, yeah yeah, yeah, good luck, good luck.

Keri: 26:09

Certainly within evangelicalism. So again, if you're listening, you're like what the hell's really the big deal? So that paradigm would have like deeply entrenched men and women and lots of different conversations related to sex, related to bodily autonomy, related to agency, related to you talked about the prioritization of marriage. There's a spiritual prosperity gospel that gets sold there, like if you wait until marriage and you cut off desire, there's varying degrees of what's talked about with masturbation. When it comes to this right, like and I'm learning what's told to men is really different than what's told to women, but all of these are.

Keri: 26:43

I think the operating system is fear and shame.

Keri: 26:46

So it's a lot of really harmful messages about if you are not righteous or pure in these ways and also then, once you get married, all of those things are going to magically go away and then you're going to have a really healthy, amazing sex and actually your sex life is going to be so good because you followed these rules and waited. And so I mean we could just talk about the harm, of how untrue that is on so many different levels. We could talk about the consequences of those messages that are really different for men and women and I don't want to pretend to be the expert on either of those, but purity culture has that alone significant implications for what is taught, even what's taught. That's not true about agency and bodily autonomy, both before and after marriage. I mean, I could talk about what this was like to be in pastor's wives groups and talk about like sexual expectations and agency and like there's so many layers. It's really gross and maybe was not intended to be as harmful as it turns out it was, for both men and women.

Kyle: 27:48

Maybe it wasn't a malicious intention.

Keri: 27:50

Maybe there was some intention at some point related to righteousness or purity or a particular understanding. Maybe it began with a faithful pursuit. I don't want to say it was nefarious, but whatever the motivation was, the implication and the consequence of it is not good in the lives of men and women and marriages.

Randy: 28:10

Yep, yep, kyle, I'm assuming you're just going to jump in whenever you get something.

Kyle: 28:14

I don't want to start talking about purity culture, because I will not stop. So you say something that resonate with you. I, like I can't be the one.

Keri: 28:22

And I grew up during purity cultures years. I was 16 and got emancipated and was watching sex in the city, so, like my formation was, and I was married to somebody who had a very different orientation around these. So I have you know, and then some of those things I said come from conversations that I've had in this space. But what would you guys add as men?

Randy: 28:41

I mean, I would just say, from the experience of being married in, you know, just saturated by evangelical culture, my wife and I had to go through 10 years of figuring out what sexuality looks like for us as individuals, but also as a couple, and working that together and the damage that was brought about. It felt like it actually was like a chastity belt that it was promised that everything's going to be perfect Once you get married and if you follow these rules and you wear the ring and you stay virgin and you do all the things, it's going to be golden the whole time. And, man, we struggled over our sex life, I want to say for a long, long time, I think, because of the baggage that we pulled into our marriage, because of what we were told and discipled into. Some of it is overt, some of it is actually like I can't believe the shit they tell girls, and teenage girls in particular, about purity, culture and all this stuff, and they do the opposite with guys.

Randy: 29:37

It's just like bros, hold your, hold your. I want I could get real vulgar right here, right, know what I mean, but hold yourselves off. And, man, it's going to be a free-for-all once you get married. I promise You're never going to think about porn again, you're going to never masturbate again. It's just you're going to be living a porn episode. I don't know how to talk about this shit.

Kyle: 29:59

But you get the gist which makes you wonder no one believes that right. Because no one believes that right?

Randy: 30:04

Because no one's living. That I kind of did. I feel like I kind of did.

Keri: 30:14

Yeah, the hearer believes it, but the speaker can't believe it, unless the speaker is somehow deceived, which means the speaker can't be a man in that situation. I see these things, though, in. I mean, I have been in conversations because they teach the same version of that to women. Because they teach the same version of that to women I have been in conversations with pastor's wives. If you're not having sex at least every three days, if you're not wearing certain things, if you're not, you're not allowed to say no, you're not like.

Keri: 30:38

So the agency that's removed. And I mean anytime we do anything hollow anything in our life. It's not necessary. You know, like you've, you've sensed that we cut men off from their emotions, so they're supposed to come into this disembodied. We shame the shit out of their desire and porn usage, and so they all still do it. They just hold shame around it because they're way too afraid to be vulnerable and like ask their wife for what they want because they don't feel like they can give their wife.

Keri: 31:04

And we cut women off from pleasure and from agency in every fucking area of life. So women like Hillary McBride has brand new stuff coming out about this that the consequences of like disempowering pleasure and desire and agency, like in every area of your life, and we don't let women dream about their careers and that model. You don't let women dream about like anything other than being a mom or a wife. You don't like women or you don't take up too much. So all of this, though, gets tied into, like what was taught there and how harmful it is for men and women, what's taught emotionally and what's taught about purity culture. I also I have a friend who's writing about eucontamination and disgust theology and what happens when we have this sort of in or out purity code model, what that does, how we show up to ourselves and to other people. So I think it's bigger than even just the ways that we've talked about purity culture, but like what purity does to our understanding of what's good and what's bad, old faith paradigm, and I think that's really fascinating too, yeah.

Randy: 32:11

I mean my wife and I have been married for this year will be 20 years, and our first probably almost 10 years of our marriage trying to figure out our sex life and our sexuality with one another was rooted basically in what we were taught, which is basically like the dude needs to have sex once every 72 hours, so do that, figure out how you're going to do that. It's all rooted around the man.

Keri: 32:32

Basically it's all rooted around Because women don't have any desire.

Randy: 32:35

Right, correct. It's all rooted around the man's need, the man's desire. We talked to Sheila Gregoire several times, once about terrible things Josh Howerton said about. This is what a woman's supposed to do on her wedding night. Go listen to that stuff. If this is affecting your, you know, if you're in the midst of this stuff, go listen to Sheila talk about it, both on her podcast but on ours as well. But it's amazing what happens when you actually start having a mutual dialogue about what are your desires, what are my desires, what works for you, what doesn't work for you. Once you start actually incorporating both people as humans into the conversation, which is not how we're discipled and taught in much of the church. If we're honest, it's amazing how your sex life just all of a sudden blossoms and comes alive in ways that you would never guess, if you're just not gearing everything around the dude's orgasm. That's it. Let's move on.

Randy: 33:28

On that note how about you know great Patriarchy? Let's just hit the big ones right off the bat. Patriarchy has drowned many, many marriages. How do you see this playing out? Tell us a little bit about that, carrie.

Keri: 33:43

Yeah, you know, I think for some people even listening maybe that's a triggery word to hear. I know some men even feel like indicted when the word patriarchy comes up and I perceive whenever you say that you're naming like the general system and structure of male sort of headship and leadership and this is like the air we breathe and the water we swim in, both within the church and outside of the church, right, and so within the evangelical church that I was like, formed in and grew up in, this was prescribed and ordained by God, so it wasn't just like things we say at play out in Hollywood or you know, the the male, the wage gap between men and women are like patriarchy has all of these implications. But within the male, the wage gap between men and women, right, like patriarchy has all of these implications. But within the church, when you are talking about male leadership and authority and decision making and you tie gender roles to this and you tie marriage dynamics to this and you tie parenting dynamics to this, there's some massive implications to say this is God ordained and like I want to be generous and say I understand where people, how people read the text in a particular way and prescribe that it's just, if I'm honest, it's very, very, very different than how I read the text. It's very, very different than how I understand the work and activity of Jesus in the world.

Keri: 35:00

And so my dream is like I don't want to just dismantle patriarchy, I want to imagine, like what's better than that, what does it look like for men and women to flourish together and to have mutuality in all sorts of different ways and in marriage? And I think that gives us a different sort of picture of the embodiment of the way of Christ than the control hierarchical, shame-based, fear-oriented you know Bell Hooks talks about. Like the first act of violence of patriarchy is not men towards women, it's men towards themselves, because we cut men off from their hearts and their emotion. And you know there's lots of consequences for men and women and for relationships when it comes to deconstructing the implications of patriarchy and what's formed in the evangelical world.

Randy: 35:50

Mm-hmm. Yeah, let's just talk about one more little dynamic that kind of evangelicalism or just fundamentalist religion gives us. That is kind of a kryptonite to many marriages and that's this idea of certainty. It's something that we've talked about on our podcast a ton, but as I think about the pitfalls and I talk to people pastorally about the pitfalls of, you know, the church worlds that we grew up in and what they've done to our relationships and marriages, certainty is not one that would rise to the like the top, but I think it's kind of at the root of a lot of what we're talking about.

Randy: 36:24

Because when you're told you can't, like, you can't ask questions because all of this doctrine is airtight and unquestionable, when you do start to have questions and your husband is the person who you're supposed to go to, or you, as the husband, are supposed to have all the answers, and now you're asking these questions but all of a sudden you go to your spouse or you go to your partner, you go to that person and start to bring up some of these questions or doubts, or fears or you know whatever, rage, shame um, rejection. I think certainty is something that like really really makes marriages and relationships fall apart. I don't know if this had anything to do with any of your story. If you encounter people who are like I can't talk about this to my spouse because they don't have the understanding for it, and then now I feel helpless and I feel alone and I feel like I'm in a I'm not in a marriage anymore or whatever is any of what'm saying do you hear this and have experienced it.

Keri: 37:20

Oh, yeah, yeah, and I, I mean I've experienced it where, like, the husband has walked through some of those changes and transitions and been really afraid of what the wife's response was going to be, um, and some vice versa, where the wife has walked through that first and then the husband got, you know, was employment was threatened or had fear, or really powered up in the old system and said, which one of us has a master's degree, like surely I know and you don't know, or, yeah, had like oh, that's cute that you want to think, but was like dismissive of these things, or like I mean I can think of one where a spouse, you know, kind of came from a ministry family and she was like I cannot go down this road with you and risk losing all of these family members that had, you know, like cousins and grandparents, and like I just will not go there because of these, the risk of relational loss.

Keri: 38:10

So, yeah, that definitely the need for certainty, and I think, um, well, the need for it in those decisions and in that paradigm is really different than what you're saying, which, yeah, I find lots of people have varying levels of fear and even engaging in those conversations.

Randy: 38:28

Good Kyle.

Kyle: 38:29

Yeah, I was gonna say something really condescending. Maybe I'll just hold it in.

Randy: 38:35

Or you could say it and we can edit it out, if it's not, if it's a little bit too much.

Kyle: 38:39

You're such a bad influence, Randy. I was just going to say, maybe that's one of the dangers of stopping at a master's degree. Sometimes you need a PhD to realize you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Randy: 38:50

Definitely leave that in Good good, we could go on and on, listen, on listeners. I'm sorry if there's one of these issues that kind of is becoming a pothole in your marriage or in your relationship and we didn't hit it. I know there's a million of them, we just don't have time to go into all of them, but I we just want to give a little smattering of like this is this is a little bit of the, the water that we swam and that kind of contributes to what we're talking about here.

Kyle: 39:18

And let me say one more thing. It's like it doesn't take a lot of education or even a lot of this kind of experience to have the realization at least I don't think it should that your life does not need to be like other people's lives or their life does not need to be like yours. So recently some of my old church friends have been having long Facebook thread discussions, kind of unpacking this very abusive and cult-like group that many of us were in together and every now and then somebody he's not talking about my church, I'm pretty sure no, no, no the previous cult that I was in.

Randy: 39:57

Your cult is much better. Yeah, yeah, thank you Good.

Kyle: 40:00

Yeah, you guys have much better lighting and whatnot, no, and so, like every now and in these conversations, somebody will pop in and complain about the overreaction. You know what? My experience there was great. I learned a lot of great theology. I made a lot of great friendships that lasted to this day. I met my spouse there and we're still super happy. And the very obvious reaction to that I would think it would be obvious would be and this is the reaction that the people who start these conversations usually have to their credit I'm sincerely happy that that was your experience. It was not ours. We're going to continue having this conversation, thank you, that's like how? Why is it so difficult to make that connection? Like we don't do that in other areas of our life do we?

Kyle: 40:47

I mean, isn't that, isn't that the? Sort of thing that you would if you would notice it, if your child did it, and you would try to train them out of it. Like your experience is not normative for the rest of the world, and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll become a mature, functioning person who is able to cope with differences that you encounter.

Keri: 41:03

And I ask you a question, Kyle. That's totally unfair, Please yeah. Maybe I need to hear how often in your marriage, especially in conflict, do you have the internal capacity to hold your experience of the situation and to understand your spouses?

Kyle: 41:19

Yeah, okay. So I'm not going to pretend that's an easy thing to do. I don't know that I there are very definitely examples that I could think of that. I won't mention where I fail at that. Some of them are concentrated around certain kinds of experience where, for whatever reason, it's harder for me to do it in that context.

Kyle: 41:41

But it is a practice that you can develop and I think the kind of training that I have had to do it in other contexts has helped within my marriage I would need to confirm that with my wife but like being trained over a period of years to to try to think about things from the perspective of other people, including people who take assumptions that I find abhorrent, who start in a place where I think one ought never to end up Um and to, and to try to see that, with a measure of dignity and understanding, um does help. I mean it does trickle into your relationships, but that's like a very difficult thing to learn and I understand that. I mean it does trickle into your relationships, but that's like a very difficult thing to learn and I understand that. But it's something that should be part of, like normal moral and psychological formation.

Keri: 42:27

Wouldn't that be beautiful? Like exactly what you're saying. It's very, very difficult to in our close relationships and in people groups and obviously those people feel like their good experience needs to invalidate the bad experience that you have there. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, it does, but this gets back to that certainty thing, randy was talking about right, Like I may not feel certain.

Kyle: 42:48

I might not think that I am certain. It may never have occurred to me to ask whether I'm certain, but when I hear somebody complaining about a thing that I really valued, an experience that I also had and that was good for me, and my immediate reaction is that can't possibly be true because it wasn't my experience. It just requires maybe I'm downplaying it, but it requires a little bit of empathy, a little bit of golden rule to try to think about it the other way around and see a little bit of like internal capacity too.

Keri: 43:17

Right to say you can see this differently than me and we can still hold this space together and and probably some maturity on their end of, like, your negative experience doesn't have to diminish the positive experience that they have either. Right, like there's some what I can't even fathom. What is it that motivated them to comment on there? Let me set you straight. Right, but this is like I think you know this is part of that work in relationships. It's like if you have one partner that's working through spiritual evolution my perception within the evangelical marriage world I think this threads through several of kind of the conversations that I have and this is not all men, but this is some threads and themes the ways that we castrate men emotionally then requires women in those marriages to do a lot of emotional labor for men.

Keri: 44:03

So then, when women have an experience that is, I don't know, evolving or expansive or different, when that paternalistic high control, I'm an authority and I have very little emotional capacity to hold multiple perspectives on something much less yours, that is automatically underneath mine because I am the man Like you're just talking, like 17 layers of cement right To get to a space. So this is just. This is one of the dynamics that I see play out over and over again. And I don't want to act like women are not immature in those ways and I don't want to be like bashing men in this, but that's part of the package that evangelicalism gives you in marriage, in that dynamic, and so if you are formed in that with those expectations, women do all this domestic labor. They do this emotionally, but like there's a there's an internal capacity on both sides that I have to, I think have to be expanded. But then within that, some of those the implications of, like those core beliefs start to come to play when it comes to patriarchy and control.

Keri: 45:04

So I think you're just continually confronted with what do I actually believe? Or, oh, is this residual from the old way? Or why am I getting so triggered that you want to disagree with me right now? You know like it's. It feels like maybe not work on the spiritual evolution, reconstruction side that we ever stopped doing, like it feels like continuous. My dream is that whatever relationships we're in have capacity for that kind of evolution, what you know marriage partners, friendships, family relationships. So I think it's a gift that you're able to embody that to your wife too.

Kyle: 45:40

And even like name that dynamic for us on that group. Yeah, well done.

Randy: 45:43

I'll check in with Emily just to make sure, but yeah, I mean, I've said this to my church a number of times that, um, religion and I don't think this is a evangelical problem, I don't think this is even just a Christian problem Religion, I think, has the capacity to turn the best people into the worst kind of assholes. Because when you tell someone I'm going to give you the keys to the universe, like all of the mysteries that all human beings have ever wondered about in human history, I'm about to tell you the answers to them all. That right there will fuck with your head, right, and it will turn you into the worst.

Keri: 46:16

It sounds stupider now than we ever have Like with what has emerged in science and psychology and emotional health and physics and just all of the things that like we know now to hold that same thing. It's so absurd now right To even imagine building a religion, building a belief system, on that, and I guess the only thing you can really have to motivate that is burning in hell for eternity if you don't do that right.

Randy: 46:42

Yep, carrie, I'm always personally stunned by your impressive transparency in the way you live in such an honest way, use your experiences to just teach and bring others into life. So you've got some experience around this and you've been kind of hinting at it a little bit. Are you willing to just go into a little bit about how your this isn't just theoretical for you, this isn't just? I have a bunch of conversations with people because I'm executive director of the Post-Evangelical Collective. You've gone through some of this stuff. Would you be willing to share just a little bit of your experiences with this?

Keri: 47:16

Sure, I probably talked a little bit here and have in other spaces. Like my deconstruction in many ways was first, it was a really like expansive journey of going from a really conservative Southern Baptist place, which is where I met the man that I married, you know, which has really conservative views on marriage and women in leadership, and I was a restaurant manager. Like I worked in the marketplace and was, before I was 20 years old, I have been giving the keys to a $5 million a year restaurant. So I was, like in charge at a really young age and had to learn how to lead people who had been in the industry for longer than I had been alive and like had to earn, work my way up and earn credibility and bust my ass, like you know, in leadership. So when I came into the church, I was aware of what parts of me needed to be like put to the side and I think there were lots of things at play. But I was, you know, six months into becoming a Christian and the pastor of the church told me to marry this man and had this job, working in ministry and like. There's so many beautiful things that came out of that, but it was. I was definitely jumping really quickly into a system that required I put parts of me aside and that was probably unfair to me and unfair to the man I married and it's not what I believe now about faith, but at the time it was really influential and really transformational and like sacred parts of my story that are still, you know, have led to I have two kids from that marriage.

Keri: 48:44

Um, that spiritual evolution went from Southern Baptist to then Willow Creek, which was this massive evangelical church that was known as egalitarian. Women could lead. They had women elders. It was very expansive. They talked about not just compassion work but like also justice as a part of it. And we're doing really beautiful things globally and taught me about post apartheid peacemaking work and Israel, palestine, you know, conflict, like it was very enriching and transformational in a lot of ways.

Keri: 49:10

But my husband and I just didn't go at the same pace even then and then on the heels, like I had kind of a faith shattering there when I spoke up about injustice and was just obliterated by the organization, not believed. My credibility was diminished. It was a really harrowing experience that led to kind of my faith shattering and that also brought stuff up for the person that I was married to, and so we had some divergences about how we walked through that, about, yeah, what that revealed to me about some of the systems and structures, about leadership, about men and women. I mean, he knew about these things that I was reporting but was like really invalidating about the comments that had been made. So, like, when I start working through the implications of what it was like and the inappropriate things that were said, it just shed light on like, okay, we're in a really different place and how we view these things, and we did a lot of work over the course of many years to try to see if we could view those things the same way. I will even say some of those things you can change your mind on, but your body doesn't change and that still leaves the consequences of those. Or, like you can say, the right things we like, especially even in Reconstruction world. We like to read new books about new ideas and sort of intellectualize our theology, and I'm pretty committed to like what we actually do says more than anything. How we do what we do says more than anything but what we say we believe, and so there were just there were some gaps in my marriage that we tried really hard to work through and ultimately just landed in really different places, even in what we imagined the purpose of marriage is. So I think I could go lots of different directions and explain more, but is that a helpful kind of overview, like, ultimately, when I picked up the pieces of that shattering some of the places that that landed in me in theologically even were too much of a stretch, and what was really difficult is, like you know, the, the places that we didn't agree had varying levels of implication in my life, right, and so I think the decision to get divorced came from sorting through lots of those, and it started eight, nine, 10 years ago around like inclusive and affirming theology.

Keri: 51:30

And then it's one thing to like wrestle through ideas.

Keri: 51:33

It's a different thing to determine that you're the one that sets the ideas or the beliefs for the family and as you're raising kids in that like so I even approached it as, hey, I'm okay telling the kids this is what I believe in, this is what you believe, and like really equipping them to work through some of these things, and that was just like disrespectful and not on the table, like, but I want to be honest with the kids, I'm taking them to this love wins party where we're going to be celebrating pride, and so I want to honor you.

Keri: 52:01

What do you want me to tell them that you believe? And this was just like way too confronting to even have a conversation. So it was, it was. It was really tricky. And then when you get into conversations about women or about children, or about how you're going to parent right, like the actual threads of the implications of this were impacted lots of areas of my life and at the end of the day, if you believe in like ontological inferiority, like I tried to find over cause, I don't think I want to hold these things with lots of capacity for gray, lots of empathy, but they do become untenable for a variety of reasons.

Randy: 52:37

Yeah, thank you for sharing, carrie. And again, any one of these questions just be like nope, opting out of that one when you were first thinking I think this might be it, like I think I don't know if I don't think we're going to last. I think divorce is like when you were like confronted by that. Can you just give us a little bit about how scary that was? How, what was that journey like on that road to where you got to?

Keri: 53:05

Yeah.

Randy: 53:07

And I ask that because of it's so couched in if you get divorced in the evangelical church, in our imagination that means the ultimate failure. In many ways that means, like so many things, for you have gone wrong and you're in so much error right now.

Keri: 53:23

Yeah, and it's. There's no hope that you're ever going to be in good graces again. It's like the one unforgivable thing, and I mean the church that I was working at would not let me stay in my role anymore on the heels of this decision. So it's not just like relational and the family loss and all the dreams that you have for your family when you choose to marry somebody and you think that it's for your entire life. And it's not just the commitments that we made to heal generational sin in our family you know, like that was one of the visions that we had for our marriage and it's not just the friend loss and the splitting up of assets and the security loss like all the things that are baked into that. It's also like the practical implication of I'm going to have to step out of my job if I make this decision.

Keri: 54:06

And they you know I mentioned earlier asking them for permission. They gave me permission. They met with both of us multiple times. They met with our marriage counselor. They met with the person that did our trauma intensive that they sent us to. They had all these conversations. They met as an outward. They gave me permission to get divorced and still said but you cannot stay in this lead role. You have to step out. What they wanted me to do was just step in the backgrounds and get divorced in the shadows and not tell anybody. And I was like well, I've pastored this community for three years, I want to be really honest with them, I don't want to go hide in the back, and so I let people know I was stepping out of my role because of this really hard decision. It was years like painstaking work and I never imagined that divorce was an option. All of those years I thought you just stay in it, no matter what. That's what I thought healing generational sin was just stay in it no matter what.

Keri: 54:56

That's what I thought healing generational sin was was that you stay, no matter what. When we finally I mentioned that, you know it was 10 years of asking for marriage counseling and when we finally went. So part of this too has to do with, like, the trauma of my shattering, because it shattered everything. It was like a dark night of the soul experience for me and on the other side of that I had to work through the wounds of that experience, the betrayal of all of these people that were, like you know, in my life and in my community. I had to work through that. My partner didn't really want to enter into the pain or grief or any of that with me, and so there was a lot of rejection there, like within our partnership. That was really hard.

Keri: 55:37

Again, I think some of that I can have empathy for him and I think he would even say like he was not. He was really malformed emotionally so he did not know how to show up to that work. But when I began to see the ways that, like our attachment wounds, the family we grow up in, impact how we show up and each of our unique trauma in our story impacts how we show up and that kind of stuff. Your history is at play all the time when you're unaware of it, and we can do work to become aware of it and to show up for ourselves in different ways and reorient those neural pathways and our reactivity, like in our bodies when we're triggered, whether it's by our partner or our kids. So I have been on this journey of trying to reorient some of this in my own life and in my own story and my vision for a relationship would be somebody that wants to continue to do that kind of work and to grow and to heal and ultimately he just was not interested in engaging. It's really hard work. So that part made it clear for me.

Keri: 56:34

But up until that point I felt like for a long time and we were separated for quite a while and I just kept thinking like, surely and honestly I can say now, part of that, like I probably could have been done sooner had I not had all of those kind of layers of formation. But my own brokenness, like I will try over and over and over and over and over again, because you know what we do is we. We also play off that wound from our parents Like I wanted that kind of love. So if my partner will just show up for me, then maybe. So I was working out all kinds of wounds, staying as long as I did, and he had his own adaptive patterns for how he dealt with the pain of those wounds or avoided dealing with it. So there was a lot of disassociation and just checkout and disconnection.

Keri: 57:16

I think when I saw the implications of those things in my own life, the unwillingness to kind of meet me and engage in that work, and I actually think then that's the most loving thing to do for him, it's like I don't want to keep begging you to show up to do this work.

Keri: 57:32

It's too painful or it's too terrifying for you to do. And I am really clear at this season of the kind of values that I want my life to espouse and I want my actions to line up with my words. I want what I believe to drive and like I think what you believe fundamentally is so outside of what I believe, even about the sacredness of humanity, like these are massive things that I think it was spring to him also to say and I don't think he ever would have chosen divorce, I don't think he ever would have opted out of it and I think he probably carries a lot more of the shame and you know, than I do, because he was much more steeped in and formed in that evangelical world. So I still, so I still have a lot of empathy for him.

Randy: 58:15

So my story is like tiny bit similar but definitely so far is ending in a different way. I mean, I remember my wife kind of got. My wife and I have four kids and when we were in the course of having four kids I felt like my wife became kind of a different person than I'm married, you know like, and I was like where where's Sarah, where'd she go? Truth is, I was just an absolute moron who didn't realize that having kids hanging off of you all the time and you know being with those kids all the time, and and then you get another large kid who's expecting to hang off your body, you know when those, the other kids go to bed all of those things contribute to you feeling like a shell of a person, right, go figure, idiot pastor.

Randy: 58:58

And all of a sudden my wife started emerging out of that like kid malaise and started reading some things for herself again and started thinking for herself again and started having theological thoughts, all the things that I had been longing for for like the first number of years in our marriage. It started happening. The only problem was is that she was reading some people and some things that I wasn't super secure about. I didn't know them. And then when she started telling me like this is some cool stuff here, and it started very benign right, like we've talked to Baxter Kruger Kyle, like no one knows him except for us and you know, for other listeners.

Randy: 59:34

he's a lovely person, very, very like, non-scary.

Randy: 59:41

But when my wife was telling me some of the things that she was, you know, reading and considering and learning in some of his books, I think because it was baked into me this patriarchal world and I was like egalitarian at this point we had women elders, we had, you know, I embrace women in leadership at the church but there was something that was baked into me that said you are supposed to be the person who has all the smart thoughts about God in your family, right, because you're a man and also because you're a pastor.

Randy: 1:00:03

And all of a sudden my wife started bringing me smart thoughts about God that weren't from me and that actually I don't know if I agree with. And all of a sudden I just started turning. Not all of a sudden I was a defensive douchebag, right, and instantly was telling my wife these thoughts are not welcome here. She started going further in and deeper and I remember like literally where we were in the conversation that we had, when Sarah came to me and said like hey, there's this philosopher, theologian kind of person named Pete Rollins. Don't laugh too hard, kyle. We've talked to Pete Rollins, carrie, and Kyle has his thoughts on pete um did we call him a philosopher?

Keri: 1:00:40

is he a philosopher?

Randy: 1:00:42

don't give me that's like a very don't do it, I just already introduced him that way and I'm like definitely not a theologian and I would say philosopher. But, kyle, I'm not going to get you started. Yep, um, well done, way to have some restraint. But she came to me and said there's a thing called atheism for Lent that I kind of want to do and where they talk through all you know, a bunch of work from Nietzsche and a bunch of work from other agnostic or atheist thinkers, and you just kind of toss these ideas around for the 40 days of Lent. What are your thoughts? Tossed these ideas around for the 40 days of Lent, what are your thoughts? And I was like, are you trying to get me fired? Like, is that your? That that's fun for you?

Randy: 1:01:24

This idea of like undermining our whole family reality. You know, like I'm I'm joking about this, but that's kind of exactly how I responded um, of just complete insecurity, accusing her of of basically trying to sabotage our livelihood and also asking all sorts of questions that I thought were outside of the realm of Christian orthodoxy, and asking all sorts of questions that made me really uncomfortable with the fact of is my wife still a Christian or not? Does she believe the stuff that we've said, that we're all about for our whole relationship, right? I mean I'm talking years of friendship and then a little while of dating because we're evangelicals and years of marriage and all of this stuff that we it felt like we built this worldview and this you know life together and now she's starting to ask some questions that might be actually eating away at the foundation of it. That's what I felt that I didn't realize was going on right, and I just basically kind of lashed out. I didn't say you're not allowed to, but she did not have my blessing and what that basically told her was like my husband is no longer a safe place to talk about the stuff that's going on. That's deepest in my soul and you can just imagine what that does to a marriage, what that does to a relationship.

Randy: 1:02:38

I mean, I don't remember exactly how long it was like almost a calendar year, and it took me going on sabbatical first of all like needed a lot of healing. I didn't realize how I was becoming a shell of a person because I was so burnt out by the work of ministry I couldn't see straight, I couldn't see reality. I feel like, and it almost like melted in some ways pretty quickly once I got on sabbatical. But then we were able to go on a spiritual retreat and I was able to get with we got with a husband and wife spiritual direction team and, long story short, I'm not going to go into all the conversations about all the healing that happened or whatever, but being able to confront that and name that.

Randy: 1:03:16

And having me be confronted by a couple of people who I gave a lot of trust to and say you violated some things here, randy, and you, you need to own it Like you need to own some of these things, being confronted and being able to have outside people speak into our dynamic and speak into the reality of how my role and my theology contributed to diminishing the personhood of my wife and contributed to breaking trust between us. We basically just had to do the work of looking at each other with weeping and tears and owning each of our shit, and mostly me owning that and realizing I would way rather lose my job than lose my, lose this marriage, than lose you as a person. And realizing and looking face to face with the ugliness of the insecurities and the defensiveness and the the certainty like that, that was really the thread for me, that I felt like my wife was asking questions that was not only going to make me lose my job but also going to take away everything that we had just built, everything that we had just kind of together agreed to build a life on. That's a really tough reality and really confusing thing, and I'm not trying to say that to let myself off the hook, but I'm just saying it took so much work to get back to a place of saying, yeah, I haven't been, I haven't trusted you, my wife being able to say to me and me being able to say that's because of my actions, like I've, I've I destroyed trust. It was nothing that you did, it was something that I did. So I'm trying to put on display my wife just having some questions and my wife considering things that were outside of the, the safe playground of, of evangelicalism, of the religion that we were, we're living in. Just those questions were enough to drive this wedge in between us that if we hadn't had outside help, if we got too deep in it, I think I'd be having a different conversation. And now, really, my wife was the one like the reason that we're having these conversations on this podcast is because of my wife's spiritual journey that she kind of led me into right, right, like all of these conversations, many of these thinkers.

Randy: 1:05:42

When we were in the first year of this podcast, sarah, my wife was so jealous that I get to talk to these people that she was like you're welcome for introducing me to those people. You know what I mean. All that to say, the way we were discipled. I felt like I was actually doing my job. I felt like I was. I was being a good husband. I was, I was being a good husband. I was being a good pastor. I was protecting my church. I was trying to protect my family. I was trying to protect our livelihood and keep food coming in on the table. All of these things raced into my head as she started just telling me these are just some questions that I've had, or this is a book that I want to read. That, even as I say that out loud now, is like I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed of how stupid that sounds and how ridiculous it is that my wife wanted to read some books and ask some questions and I thought she was actually trying to sabotage our lives.

Keri: 1:06:30

It's really powerful to hear you own that and to name that. You thought that you were doing the God honoring thing. I mean, I think this is what's so tricky about situations like this is this is what you were told by the authority in your life, like was honoring God.

Keri: 1:06:47

And I know people who I'm not ascribing this to your situation, but who experience now dynamics that were in their marriage that they use the word abusive. This is, like really common. When I talk to couples about it and they will say, well, he was emotionally abusive or he was spiritually abusive or financially abusive. And I think what's really hard to hold is when you both ascribed to this way of being and to these decisions and to these dynamics. Together you're allowed to change your mind, but there's, you submitted yourself to that in some way. Right, like I could, I could look at this in my own story. How much agency did I have in submitting that?

Keri: 1:07:27

But I think to be able to name, yeah, the dynamics of evangelical marriage can get to the extent of abusive If they're removing somebody's agency, if you think it's your job to lead your family in these ways and it then does harm like it just feels like a really complex way to name. Yeah, it's really gray in a lot of these and it's really healing to hear you name, like I really was trying to do what I thought was the most God honoring thing. I'm like leading my family, you know, or if I did, if I had moved past those and there were cultural scripts about being the man I was supposed to go first, or I needed to lead or not. Like it's really meaningful to hear you just be able to self reflect and identify those that were at play, those you were given and those that were just in you.

Randy: 1:08:09

Yeah, and it's embarrassing to say, to be honest with you, and it also blows me away that this wasn't that long ago, right Like this was literally probably six or seven years ago that we're talking about having.

Keri: 1:08:23

So, as your friend, I want to say thank you for sharing so vulnerably, as somebody who, like, finds healing and you owning those things don't let shame be the writing thing here Like your willingness to push past the shame of that and to own, like, no, this, this was hard or this is embarrassing, but you've seen something different and you've changed because of what you've seen and you're embodying a different way now and that's how you're going to bring people along in that journey. Is you being willing to be that vulnerable?

Randy: 1:08:47

Thank you, yeah, yeah, thanks for saying that, carrie, and I mean, the fun thing is is that it was literally only six or seven years ago, right, and now, all of a sudden, this thank God, this spiritual evolution that I was led into by my wife has changed the way I show up in the world. It changes the way I see myself. It has changed the way I relate to people. I mean, you could talk to a number of people who are really close to me my wife first and foremost, but a number of other people and they would tell you Randy's a different person than he was five, six, seven years ago. And it's like now.

Randy: 1:09:23

So much about both our marriage but also just the way I try to show up in the world and man, I'm not a finished product and I'm not like I have not arrived. But that's the encouraging thing about this is it's embarrassing for me to say out loud this was my response when my wife wanted to read a fucking book. But what's really encouraging for me is I see the world totally different than I did five, six, seven years ago, and that means I see my wife completely differently and our intricacies about our relationship are so different and so much more beautiful and rich. Because I had a few people who were bold enough to get in my face and say this is your fault, you know, and like not in that particular way, cause I don't think I would have received it, but like you got to own your shit, bro. And it's just so remarkable to me that, um, there is the potential for saying divorces kind of this is the most gracious, loving thing for us to do right now is to say we got to be done and I don't want to try to change you, I don't want to try to destroy things, let's just that's the best.

Randy: 1:10:27

And then there is another story where humans can change and we can actually change the way we see things like marriage While we're in a marriage. We can change the way we see things like marriage while we're in a marriage. We can change the way we see the human that we're married to and the brilliance in them and the beauty and the goodness in them and the agency in them and the imago dei in them that I had just been programmed. I felt like to diminish and to look straight through and past. Look straight through and past. What I'm trying to say is there's potential for different outcomes if we want to embrace this new way of living and new way of seeing things. So let's just try to round it out a little bit, carrie. What is a potential? Do you think better way and different way than what we've been programmed, the way we've been discipled?

Randy: 1:11:12

and kind of molded into what are some, some keys, just some real simple ones, that might actually change these dynamics and conversations.

Keri: 1:11:21

Totally. I have to say sort of in jest, but I have to name like the hard things that you don't want to talk about, that you get divorced because of you actually have to talk about in divorce, so you don't get to escape.

Keri: 1:11:32

Like this is one of the things I chuckle at from time to time like we have to be more dialed in on a calendar. You know how hard that was when we were married to do calendar like you have to now. On finances, we talk about finances more like it's just wild to me. If you have children, those things are not going away, you know. So you have to reinvent new ways of relating and I think that that's a vision for me and relationships in a lot of ways.

Keri: 1:11:58

And even I mean I don't know how romance gets pitched. You know in Disney movies how evangelicalism tells you like that one savior is going to come and save you or they're going to complete you. You know the rose petal, like if you have sex you're giving away parts of you. You want to be whole and complete and I'm sure that there are people that got married in that paradigm that have found enriching ways of relating to one another and being married and kept what fit and let go of what didn't right and have grown together. But even like my being a single person and being a single mom my predominantly like I have my kids and being a single mom predominantly like I have my kids the majority of the time and their dad lives far away and so this was not on my bingo card. I never, ever imagined that I would say those words. But my understanding of family is so much more expansive now. It was when we were married in beautiful ways, but now, especially being single, my understanding even of love like of what love actually is and of the invitation for all of us to be love and for that to be like people's embodied experience of us, like that goes beyond romantic love and impacts how I want to show up to him still, even though the boundaries of that relationship and the commitments and agreements you know have adjusted significantly. But I think in general, like I I imagine relationships being a place that embody mutual flourishing, like where that paradox of give and take and of growth and constriction and and support it, like I think there's beautiful implications to being partnered. Single people still have to find meaningful relationships in which those get lived out, and I think I have probably 12 soulmates in my life, like people that are, that are platonic relationships but that are that level of, you know, depth and connection and chemistry and and that's a delight in my life right now it's a, it's a lifeline in my life in some ways, but those relationships are actually what's impacting how I look at. Like if I were to be partnered again, how would I reimagine what this looks like?

Keri: 1:14:04

I do think relationships, one of their primary purposes is to be places that we get to evolve, and you have to have a level of safety and belonging right In order to be able to evolve, both to yourself and to the person that you're engaging in that work with Um. So I think just the invitation for you know we didn't talk about like sacrifice and the role that it plays in marriage and even dog marriage. I think that's really interesting because it's like a sacrifice of cutting yourself off versus like coming home to yourself and making a I don't know empowered decision to sacrifice for the sake of your part, like there's some paradox, I think, in some of those things, but relationships being a place that you experience flourishing, that are places of belonging, where you get to, you know, come home to your hopeful self, be witnessed by somebody else in that and your goodness celebrated in that. And, you know, depending on your level of commitment, there's sexual benefits to those too.

Randy: 1:14:58

But yeah, yeah, our listeners heard us talk about theology beer camp all the time. We were inviting people to it. We went to it in Denver. It was a fantastic time. And are you familiar with John Tatomino? He's a scholar at Vanderbilt University, but he taught, he specializes in interreligious studies and he gave us the statistic that a shocking amount of homes in the US and marriages in the US are based on interreligious marriages. Do you remember Kyle?

Kyle: 1:15:27

Yeah, I was a lot. I don't remember the specific stat, but I thought of this too, kerry, when you were talking about considering dating someone who wasn't a Christian, and how not unusual that is anymore.

Randy: 1:15:38

Yeah, so basically, john was saying how this is becoming more and more of a reality is that there's mixed religion marriages and homes where we observe some Jewish holidays and we observe some Christian holidays, homes where we observe Muslim holidays and we observe some Christian holidays, homes where we observe Muslim holidays and we observe some, you know, sikh holidays, whatever. And it just works actually and it's kind of part of like the fabric of America is we're all different and we come from different beliefs and and we make it work, but it blew us away and by us I mean Kyle and Elliot and I, as we were listening to this, because it's not in our in our work, yeah, yeah.

Randy: 1:16:12

But it tells me that there's hope for if I'm in a marriage where the expectation was and we entered into it, where we're totally lock stock, you know, really united in what we believe and what we're about and all that stuff, and then something changes. The reality is is that it is possible to have a meaningful, beautiful life giving relationship, partnership, marriage, whatever you want to say with someone who you don't agree with everything about that? Right, Like, as a matter of fact, as I say that, how like shallow of a relationship does that sound like? When, if this person just starts to disagree with me about something that I believe I might need to end our relationship or marriage? Right, I'm just trying to say is there a paradigm in which we can actually allow one another to be real people and to believe what we believe? That might not match up perfectly with what we believe, but we're actually going to be better for it in the long run as individuals and as a couple. Is there a way to do that?

Keri: 1:17:07

Right, I love the beauty of like what you're describing there with the different values. This was such an interesting conversation with my best friend and I like want to bring her voice into this because I was saying like, listen, the dating pool of quote unquote Christian men that do not think I am a total heretic and should be burned at the stake is like a very small, if we're just going to talk about to be a.

Keri: 1:17:30

Christian and a woman and we're like I. Just so, when you, you think about like to find a man who holds the same values as me, and actually this guy was like super curious about like so what do you think about Jesus? And he had come from an evangelical world and had just deconstructed and deconverted. But there was so much like shared alignment about our values, about how we see the world, about the goodness that we want to call forward and people, about what we imagine. You know, like there was a lot of really meaningful alignment and so it was really interesting connection to explore of like um, could I? And he was like I would love to come hear you preach sometime, Like that would be so cool. And if he had other practices that were faith practices, whether it was yoga or whether it was, you know, tarot card reading or like. I think part of this probably really depends on, well, several factors, but I think there's a lot of beauty in being able to hold somebody else's faith tradition and being able to even be curious about it and want to know what it is, and a household that could have the capacity for that. So some of this, too, is really internalized old evangelicalism that, like I have a buddy who is deconstructed and talks about this kind of stuff on social media and his dad was like Bob Jones University, like very conservative, fundamental. In that worldview, the behavior of your children is the indicator of how good of a Christian you are right, and this obedience-based model. So I think you've got to sort some of that stuff out of.

Keri: 1:19:07

Like, what is your job as a parent to dictate what your children believe? And this is a disconnect in my marriage too. And, and I think how you view children and how you view agency and how you view I don't know, do they? Do kids get to think for themselves? And if so, at what age? You know, like, do I'd rather ask my kids questions about how they see the world than tell them how I think they're supposed to see the world, like every day.

Keri: 1:19:32

But that's a posture thing. I think at the end of the day they're going to decide what they believe about faith. So I think I love Jesus and I know what he means in my life and I just I know that my kids will have firsthand experience of how much I love and adore and want to submit my life to Jesus from how we spend money in my house to you know like they're going to get that and hopefully it's going to be a winsome enough experience that they're going to be really drawn to Jesus because of their experience with me. But that's not something that I feel led to dictate as a parent, and I think the idea of this like, did you say, multi-faith marriages, multi-religious marriages is beautiful, and some of the most beautiful kingdom work I see, even these days, is in multi-faith spaces where people are trying to pursue good work together in the world beyond religious constraints.

Randy: 1:20:21

Yeah, yeah. Well, Carrie, maybe can you. We used to do this, Kyle. Remember when we used to like give blessings every once in a while?

Kyle: 1:20:30

Way back in, like season one.

Randy: 1:20:32

Can we do that again? Are you okay with it? Sure See, that was a reluctant. Sure we're going to have to. We're going to do a carry, but we're going to have a conversation afterwards because it might not make it through.

Keri: 1:20:41

You might not have really meant it.

Randy: 1:20:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, I just know that this conversation in particular is really, really personal for a lot of people who are listening. This conversation in particular maybe you can't share with your spouse or your partner because of what it would turn into. And so I just want to say and I'm just going to bless some people and Carrie, maybe afterwards you can do the same in your way If this conversation was a breath of fresh air and felt like water in a desert for you, we just bless you to know that you're not alone, to know that you have friends and comrades and companions who desert for you. And we just bless you to know that you're not alone, to know that you have friends and comrades and companions who are with you.

Randy: 1:21:20

If this conversation was painful for you because it brought up old hurts and pains and shame and fear and insecurity, we bless you to know who you are and to know that you're loved and to work out of those places of insecurity and fear and shame and to know that there's just so much more for you.

Randy: 1:21:40

If you feel trapped and you felt trapped for a long time and you don't know what to do, we just bless you to find the courage within yourself and the humanity within yourself and the beauty and goodness within yourself. We bless that voice and that guidance that you felt for a long time. If you've made it through and this is just a kind of a confirmation of where you've been and a moment of pride we're proud with you and we're excited and grateful. We hold gratitude with you that you're at that place and we just bless you to have less judgment, less judgment for yourself, less judgment for your partner or spouse, less judgment for your operating system that contributed to the pain and the shame and the fear and the dehumanization. We bless you to just walk out of those places and into wholeness.

Keri: 1:22:35

Yeah, I would add to that. If you felt validated somewhere in that conversation, if you heard something that felt true to your experience, may you connect deeply with that inner wisdom that always was and is and continues to be there, that voice of the divine that is a unique, distinct representation of the wisdom of God in you. May you be attentive to what felt validated. If you felt seen in your grief, may you stay close to that grief. May you listen to what the scars or the wounds want to share, such that they become medicine in your own life. They become wisdom in the world instead of poison that festers within you. May you be present to the grief and receive whatever healing, whatever reorientation the divine wants to offer you in the midst of the pain.

Keri: 1:23:24

I know over and over again that wherever we feel kicked in the gut or brokenhearted, that's where God's presence resides most. So may you wait until you find it. And if you felt inspired by parts of the conversations, may you get curious about what it looks like to take a risk, like we saw Randy do. May you be someone who leads out with vulnerability and truth, telling and with connection that you would meet somebody, your partner, and that even just one small step towards one another, of opening your heart and your posture, towards what it looks like to reimagine relationship. And if you felt lonely or alone in that journey, may you just remember that you belong to yourself and to the divine and to all created things, and that you have a part to play here.

Randy: 1:24:08

Carrie Lattiser, executive Director of the Post-Evangelical Collective, and just all around, lovely and remarkable human. Thanks for joining us and giving us your rich perspective, carrie.

Keri: 1:24:19

Thank you guys so much for having me. It was a pleasure to be with you.

Randy: 1:24:39

Thanks for listening to A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar. We hope you're enjoying these conversations. Help us continue to create compelling content and reach a wider audience by supporting us at patreoncom. Slash apastorandaphilosopher, where you can get bonus content, extra perks and a general feeling of being a good person.

Kyle: 1:24:55

Also, please rate and review the show in Apple, spotify or wherever you listen. These help new people discover the show and we may even read your review in a future episode.

Randy: 1:25:03

If anything we said pissed you off, or if you just have a question you'd like us to answer, send us an email at pastorandphilosopher at gmailcom.

Kyle: 1:25:11

Find us on social media at at ppwb podcast, and find transcripts and links to all of our episodes at pastorandphilosopherbuzzsproutcom see you next time cheers. I feel a little bit like the last person in the prayer circle that I didn't volunteer for and everybody's looking.

Keri: 1:25:32

You want to jump in? It's just been quiet for about 15 seconds kyle if you want to get all like mushy and blussy man, I'm so here for it, all right, good all right.