February 25, 2025 • 62 mins
In this episode of Cults and the Culting of America, hosts Scot Loyd and Daniella Mesteneck Young engage in a deep conversation with Scott Okamoto, who shares his journey from evangelical Christianity to questioning the very foundations of his beliefs. The discussion touches on themes of identity, race, and the struggles of belonging within high-control groups. They explore the dynamics of critical thinking versus apologetics in Christian education, the impact of the model minority myth, and the role of empathy in Christianity. Scott reflects on his experiences teaching at a Christian university and the challenges he faced while trying to foster a more inclusive environment. The conversation culminates in a discussion about the current state of Christianity and its intersection with social justice, as well as Scott's ongoing work in helping others navigate their own journeys out of high-control groups.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:25):
Welcome to Cults and the Culting of America podcast.
My name is Scott Lloyd.
As always, I'm joined by the knitting cult lady, Daniela Mesteneck Young.
Daniela, good to see you tonight.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Good to see you, Scott.
I need to give you some kudos right now because I repeatedly see these videos from youdealing with anti-racism and why you're using your voice to talk about why America treats
(00:52):
black people so poorly and just, you know, this is what I'm always trying to get myaudience to understand is that like we deconstruct and then like you have the most
powerful voice in American society right now as a straight white presenting.
Christian presenting man.
So just like kudos, it gives me a lot of inspiration to see you like in this fight and Iappreciate you.
(01:16):
Well, thank you, Daniela.
I appreciate that.
It is always an honor to speak to those issues.
And I think obviously during the day and age in which we live, we need to speak aboutthose issues more.
And I'm very excited about our guest tonight.
Joining us is Scott Okamoto.
And Scott, welcome to CULTZ and the CULTING of America.
(01:39):
You have a fascinating story and I can't wait to get into it.
As I was telling you before we came on, your story really parallels mine in a lot of ways.
So Scott, welcome.
Take a moment and introduce yourself to our audience.
Yeah, Danielle and Scott, thanks for having me.
It's an honor to be here and I'm really excited to have this conversation.
(02:02):
yeah, as you said, I have a similar background as yours.
I grew up as an evangelical Christian and depending on how we define cult, I mean, I kindof think most of Christianity is a cult with high control and
yeah, and all the ways they enforce the rules.
(02:22):
but I had it pretty easy cause I was at a kind of a lazy Christian, church.
they didn't, you know, like the worst cults will do the thing where they like separate youfrom your family or, take control of your finances.
They didn't do any of that.
It was, it was kind of like, here's all these rules that you should strive to.
(02:43):
And if you screw up once in a while, God will forgive you.
We might forgive you.
And so I grew up, you know, a conservative Republican in Southern California.
I went to college and did intervarsity Christian fellowship.
I was, because I'm Asian American, I had a mission to be a better Christian than my white.
(03:12):
peers and friends and community.
Because I knew I didn't measure up to the standards of how I looked or where I'm from.
I'm a fourth generation American.
never had never been to Japan, but I was seen as a foreigner and as an immigrant.
so my way of dealing with that was to be a better baseball player and to get my huntinglicense and to know sports and to be an incredibly
(03:41):
evangelical Christian.
I witnessed to my friends, I witnessed to my teachers.
I look back now, those poor teachers having to listen to me ask.
I can relate to that.
was so obnoxious as a young Christian.
I remember in junior high school, I carried my big Bible under my arm.
I was weird.
(04:02):
Yeah.
you know, Scott, what you say is so interesting because I think what's true about kind ofall high performance groups is your number one goal is don't stand out, right?
Don't stand out, which is great if you look like white Scott here in evangelicalChristianity, right?
(04:23):
Less great if you look like me in the military or like you in American evangelicalChristianity.
And I was even noticing this on the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders documentary, right?
Like they have a look, which is blonde with blue eyes and big boobs, right?
And if you have that look, you can be kind of mediocre, but every bit away from that lookyou are, you have to be really good.
(04:50):
And I think like in that way, they do kind of isolate you because you're always running onthis track, trying to like be perfect.
Yeah, for sure.
I felt invisible for most of my childhood, growing up in a pretty much all white schooldistrict at the time.
And my church was mostly white.
(05:13):
Ironically, my church was more diverse than my school.
And we had a couple of black friends and a couple of other Asian friends and Hispanicfriends.
But definitely knew that if I was going to get ahead and do the things that I felt
felt like I was qualified to do, to be a leader, to be a worship leader.
I picked up the guitar.
(05:33):
That was my weapon.
It was like, if I could get on that stage, and this is so embarrassing, but you know, theworship team, it's the hallowed space.
It's good to be on the worship team.
know, like suddenly I was seen, you I'm that kid that can play like Van Halen licks on theworship team.
(05:55):
And so there I was like trying to like shred and play all these, you know, slow, beautifulworship songs.
You know, they're easy, like three chords.
I was trying to out white whiteness so that I could just at least get my foot in the doorand to do all that.
And as I got older and as I got to college and I mentioned intervarsity, you know, Istarted to, you know, wonder like, why do I have to do this?
(06:20):
Do I want it?
Do I even want to belong?
to this cult, to this tribe of people.
And the farther I went, I realized I didn't.
Less and less.
And so by the time I got out of grad school, I got a master of arts in writing, moved backto LA.
My wife and I lived in San Francisco.
(06:42):
Moved back home to LA and I started teaching at Azusa Pacific University, which is this,know, it's like Sunday school, but you get a degree.
It's not a real school.
But I felt like I'm still kind of a Christian.
can, and maybe, know, this will help my faith that was slipping away.
(07:03):
And so I signed up, I got hired and I had a great time dealing with these kids thatreminded me so much of what I was like.
But I had one foot out the door and as far as faith went and being at Azusa definitelypushed me all the way out.
I was like,
So there are no answers to my question.
(07:26):
I tried to talk to theology profs and biblical studies profs and no two of them everagreed on anything, if theologically, how you read the Bible.
But they still wanted to enforce all this stuff.
Don't drink, don't have sex, don't be gay, especially don't be gay.
And so I made it through there for like 15 years.
(07:48):
I got hired full time.
I write in my book, I wrote a book called Asian American Apostate.
I decided I didn't believe in God right after the 2004 elections with this, when Bush gotreelected.
Cause I was like, if this is Christianity, if a vote for Bush is a vote for God, aseveryone was saying on my campus, I don't want either, know, I'm out.
(08:15):
And then they offered me a full-time job.
And so.
I stayed.
I turned down a job at USC and it hurts my heart every time I say that.
To stay at APU because I felt like I was helping the BIPOC kids start a revolution.
I was involved with a completely illegal underground LGBTQ club that was very secretiveand just starting out.
(08:43):
It would eventually become a nationally known group called Haven.
think they were on like CNN and, you know, because they went public.
And eventually that was the issue that they were, I saw the writing on the wall.
I got pulled in to be fired and argued my way back into a job with the Dean.
(09:04):
Cause I taught argumentation.
You're like, that's my, that's my zone.
You're not going to argue me out of anything.
And yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
Scott and I were like, are we the same person?
Like.
And then the very next day I quit.
I came home and was like, hey, I was going to be fired.
But I talked myself back into the job and my wife was like, what in the hell are youdoing?
(09:27):
Why would you want to go back there after all that they've done to you?
Because I was in trouble for 15 solid years for everything, for teaching English, fortalking about, I'm not sure if I can cuss, but I would talk about the etymology of swear
words as an intellectual thing, not just to be swearing.
We talked about sex and sexuality and feminism and race and social justice and all thesethings would get me in trouble.
(09:54):
Students would call the president of the school and tell on me.
And I'd get hauled in to talk to my boss.
My boss was cool in the English department, but it was like, yeah, you got anothercomplaint.
It like, it averaged out to about one or two a semester.
So it was a rough 15 years.
yeah.
And that's so interesting because I too taught at private Christian universities for most,yeah, for most of my career.
(10:20):
I was a speech and debate coach and I too got in all kinds of trouble, but it'sinteresting, you know, because a lot of times when we talk on this program about cults and
high control groups, everyone thinks, well, you know, that's a fringe group, but what youand I experienced
was the mainstream of Christianity.
(10:42):
And, you know, it's become big business now with mega churches and things of that nature.
And you're exactly right.
They may be on a spectrum when it comes to high control groups, but they're stillenforcing behavior and thinking.
And ultimately, they're after your free labor.
mean, I've gone to some of these church growth conferences and I mean, they actually teachpeople
(11:09):
you know, how to recruit volunteers, how to celebrate them, because your bottom line, yourbudget, it benefits from all of this free labor.
So you experience that firsthand.
Yeah, I mean I got paid, but not very well.
(11:32):
yeah, I usually think with anything mission-based, you end up finding like you're givingmore than you're getting really paid for.
But I just have to say, like, I love when the speech and debate and English andargumentation focus of cults blows up in their face, right?
Because like what you two were saying about like being good of argument, I mean, this isthe story of why cult babies
(11:56):
do okay in college, right?
Because we're taught to build arguments and craft arguments and sound good and havesupport.
I always did this thing in college when I didn't know how to answer an essay question, Iwould write three more paragraphs and then usually would get an A.
But anyway, I just wanted to say, I love that it's this tool that they teach us in cults,but then sometimes it just breaks for us because we're like, hey, but.
(12:25):
How come there's no answer?
know, how come?
Or they just give a bad answer like the same answers I got when I was a kid with the sameones these people with PhDs were getting you know, like what about suffering what about
You know theodicy this, you know bad bad things happen to good people.
Why?
Oh, you know sin as if that Okay.
(12:50):
Yeah, so so there is no answer but your point about oh, yeah.
Oh, no, I was gonna say to Daniel's point about you
critical thinking and argumentation.
They use these words, especially in academia, they don't mean it.
really mean by critical thinking, mean find all the arguments as weak as they might be toprove the gospel, you know, that Jesus did die and go to heaven and be resurrected and
(13:15):
died for your sins.
Like that to them is critical thinking.
And anything that questions that or contradicts that is seen as of the devil.
And I know how you run a college or school.
where you're not allowed to even think about other views and other ideas, but that'sChristianity.
that I was going to make because when in these in these places of Christian higher ed andeducational institutions, you have a whole department that is dedicated to theology and
(13:46):
what they call apologetics.
But the difference in apologetics and real scholarship is that apologetics always startswith a an idea, an end in mind, right?
They believe it to be true.
And so then they look for all of this evidence to confirm what they already believe to betrue, whereas real scholarship goes where the evidence leads.
(14:14):
And it's not about confirming something that you already believe.
they pull these students in, and especially in the last few years that I was involved withChristian Higher Ed,
young men, especially, we're eating this up, right?
So you've got this whole alpha masculinity type movement, in Catholic, right?
(14:40):
Yeah, absolutely.
Theology bros, absolutely.
And even in Catholic traditions, where we see this reassertion of this, what I call toxicmasculinity, and they have an answer for everything.
but they're not really thinking through the issues.
(15:00):
And that's why we see with church declining membership and attendance declining in allareas, you see that one bump, that one increase with all of the bros going back to church.
Yeah, and admittedly I tried to be one of those bros when I was in college I went you knowI I was such a big Christian that I would I didn't even think about going to Christian
(15:22):
college because I Was gonna be salt in life salt and light in the real world and so I wentto UC San Diego And I thought I'm gonna save the school I guess And I got my ass handed to
me every step of the way
There were professors who knew more than me.
I had party animal frat boys that knew more than I did as far as like the Bible and stuff.
(15:45):
And all my little trite things that worked so well in middle school, as far asapologetics, Josh McDowell stuff really doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.
As soon as someone asks a question about it, it's like, oh, and you just repeat what youjust said.
Oh, the analogy of the wristwatch.
(16:06):
Someone had to make it.
And as soon as they start pulling that analogy apart, you're like, yeah, okay, I gotnothing else.
I thought that would work.
I was wrong.
Yeah, and to your point about the Theo bros and the masculinity, it doesn't take muchintellectually to knock those people off their chair, right?
(16:26):
From where they're sitting.
It takes courage because they're menacing and they're threatening and they're dudes, youknow, and they're posturing with all this masculinity.
But if you get below that and just actually look at what they're saying, it's so easy topull apart.
Some of my students hated my guts because they're trying to do this, assert their things.
(16:48):
I would even say, okay, write a paper.
you can't have sex before marriage?
Where does it say that in the Bible?
well, I'll show you.
Not a single student ever found that passage.
Right.
It doesn't say, in fact, there's a lot of sex before marriage in the Bible and it's not abad thing.
You know, it doesn't even condemn incest for goodness sake.
(17:09):
It's just so easy when, because yeah, I think in America, in the Western world, theassumption is that we are like based in Christianity or puritanical things.
so these arguments, know, people who don't care that much will let these arguments fly,you know.
yeah.
Because I know people who aren't even Christian, like, you you shouldn't have sex or, youknow, you shouldn't drink too much.
(17:33):
And fine, but where'd that come from?
You know, it's sort of ingrained in our culture.
So you take someone that's been raised in this and indoctrinated in this to all thedifferent degrees between like my little, you know, Christian light upbringing to
Daniela's cult, was it the children of God, right?
You were in...
(17:54):
That's intense, you know, and I heard your interview with Tia Levings who did the the IBLPstuff, you know, yeah, I mean, my goodness, like beating kids as a, as a practice of
parenting, you know, like the whole spectrum of it.
But in the end, we're all indoctrinated to just assume these things and not question it.
(18:14):
And as soon as you start questioning it, people get really upset, especially at college.
The best, the best compliment I ever got was when a kid was trying to have me fired,literally wrote a letter.
to have me fired.
And he said, Professor Okamoto would be great at a place like UCLA or Berkeley, but hereat APU, know, he doesn't, he doesn't like teach our values or something like that.
(18:37):
And I'm like, I'm teaching freaking English, man.
It's just, it's just English.
You know, it's so interesting, because you all are talking about religion, but I'm justlike, just thinking about the military this whole time about how like my whole experience
in the military was like men, presupposing that they do it the best, right?
(18:59):
And like, they know the outcome and making all these rules to keep us out of, of combatand like telling us that it can't be done, right?
And there's so much of this.
And then even the way like,
Was in the military I was like, I just took them at face value that when they say criticalthinking they mean critical thinking and they want that and especially when they say
(19:21):
You're the intelligence officer, know, so in my second memoir actually that I haven'tpublished but it is a video book on my patreon I have this moment where we're going to
Afghanistan the second time and I'm briefing I'm the intelligence officer and I'm briefingthe threat and so I say Afghanistan
also known as the Graveyard of Empires.
(19:45):
And afterward, this major, so someone like one rank above me, comes up and pulls me asideand he's like, what are you doing?
And I said, sir, he's like, no, that's not the message.
It was really this moment of like, that's not what we say, that's not what we do.
And at one point he was like, what do you think that does to morale?
(20:05):
Yeah, you know, we are an empire.
and I literally looked at this man and I said, like, with all due respect, sir, I'm theintelligence officer, not the chaplet.
You know, like my job is supposed to be to be here to point out the threat to you, likenot to keep up morale.
It's not my fault that you're sending us into the 18th year of a war that we all knowwe're losing or whatever.
(20:26):
Right?
Like.
And it's just like you get to this point where you're like, you don't even
Like they don't even want the apologetics to be really testing things, right?
Like you don't even want the person who's supposed to be focused on the threat to be likestepping outside of the line too much of what you're supposed to be, like what the message
(20:52):
is supposed to be.
Yeah, I was born at Fort Dix and I hear your, and I'm always blown away when you can makethat comparison on your videos about the similarities between the military and Christian
cults.
And it's very apt.
It's a lot of the same high control, control your day to day life and your thinking, yeah.
(21:19):
And you know, this was even the other thing, like when you said like, yes, there's thisrange of sort of like extreme of what cults are.
And one of the things of like my experience was meeting people like you and Scott who grewup in quote unquote normal evangelical America.
And like, if you just hear the high line of my story, like, I grew up in this cult.
(21:43):
It's like, wow, that's so extreme.
But then I hear your
normal experiences and I'm like, no, like we did that, right?
Like I honestly think the children of God is just the extreme that you're likeconservative Mormons and evangelicals and Catholics, like that level of control that they
(22:05):
wish that they had, right?
Or like the performance that you're doing.
You know, when I logged in and I saw all this music equipment behind you, I was like, yep,baby, like we know this.
Yeah, I was the worship leader for the cult, so, you know.
The performance, but you know what else I think is interesting is that people like me andyou and Scott who are the thinkers and are the ones that are gonna question, I think it's
(22:33):
so interesting that we like, at first we tried to do it in the framework that they gaveus, right?
Like I wanted to be an expert.
I've always been good at being an expert.
So I was the memorization queen.
I was the sharpen your sword drill queen.
It's the kiss of death in Christianity.
you know, and I see this in both of you Scots, like becoming these professors where youget to do speech and debate and you get to kind of argue.
(22:59):
And so I think even when you were in, you know, it's funny to look back at us as cultbabies and see like our personalities were there, they were formed, you know, we were
questioning, you were pushing back, you were, as you said, getting in trouble for 15years, right?
It was just that.
parallels me for 15 years growing up in a cult getting in trouble.
(23:20):
Like because you were always doing that, because you were always testing the boundaries.
So I think that's pretty cool too, you know.
It was fun.
You know, I grew up the good kid, the, the Uber Christian, but to get to APU and suddenlybe seen as kind of evil, I gotta admit was kind of a trip.
It was like, Ooh, I'm scary.
(23:45):
strikes me that taking the path that you did that as an Asian American, I want to talk alittle bit about this because we also talk about on this show the sort of the the meta
cult of white supremacy, right?
So as an Asian American, your group of people are often characterized as the modelminority.
(24:10):
All right.
It strikes me that as an Asian American with the Christianity card that you were poised,right?
Set up to be a showpiece for Christianity.
Had you not had these darn, you know, thoughts.
(24:31):
Yeah.
Yeah, it was a trip growing up in the eighties, I guess, when I kind of came of age as ateenager.
Because there was no multicultural programming.
It was just survival and the early beginnings of Christian nationalism that we see today.
(24:52):
I'll say this.
The good part about being Asian is most of the cults don't want me.
No one that looked like me was going to be on shiny happy people.
and you know, they, they, they steered clear of, my kind.
that said though, the new apostolic reformation is very diverse and it started right whereI live in Pasadena.
And so, you know, like crazy Che on and Cindy Jacobs, they can, they can just roll inthere as a woman, a white woman and as a Korean guy, Queen American man.
(25:21):
like, I'm a prophet.
And they're like, cool.
And so, the thing that they don't talk about is.
is race and and you know churches today are trying to have this conversation and they'reabout 20 or 30 years behind, you know, the rest of the world when it comes to this.
But yeah, I I grew up knowing that I was not.
(25:44):
I never thought I could be like a head pastor.
No, wouldn't have even crossed my mind because not white guy.
I thought maybe I could be a worship but even I never saw a worship leader that wasn'twhite.
in the eighties and even in the nineties.
So just trying to figure out how to carve out an identity, because I wanted to be part ofthis group.
(26:08):
I grew up in this church and in this movement and this evangelical thing that was growingup all around me.
But I kind of knew that there was a ceiling, this glass ceiling kind of thing where I wasnever gonna be the guy in the room.
And even when in the nineties,
the evangelicals kind of, some of them got into this diversity thing.
(26:29):
And I had some good conversations in InterVarsity in my chapter in San Diego, it wasalways still diversity is still a white person in the middle of the room, the center of
the room.
who surrounded by the non-white and non-male people that they allowed to be on the side.
(26:52):
It was never going to be an equal seat at the table, equal footing.
And so the funny thing though is like, even with racism, patriarchy, all the things,that's not why I left Christianity.
I was ready to live the rest of my life fighting the good fight for social justice.
(27:13):
and for racial reconciliation was the buzzword of the 90s.
And I knew there was racism.
I knew there was sexism in the church.
And I just felt like that was my mission to help, to be a missionary inside.
so people think, well, you're just angry at the church.
That's why you left.
No, not why.
(27:34):
That was my mission.
I was going to do this for the rest of my life and I was happy to do it.
I left because of a whole bunch of other reasons.
The Bible doesn't make a lot of sense and yeah, the politics and yeah, all of it.
I keep thinking of the military when you're talking, because like the cult I grew up in, Inever wanted to be a part of, I never really tried, but in the military, I really tried
(27:57):
and I really, it's almost like they'll, these organizations that are not equal, they'lluse the us versus them against you, right?
It's that whole like, you're not like other ones, you know, like you're the good one.
And you even said like,
you were being exposed to more diversity in the church than you were like in your school.
(28:20):
So it's, don't know, I'm writing a musical and one of the lines I'm definitely putting inthere is Alanis's more set, we'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect.
But in the military, like you're only perfect if you're a six foot two straight white manwith blue eyes.
(28:40):
Oof.
And then every, you know, every denomination you are away from that, you have to workharder and you know, you're never gonna quite be there and even if you're better.
So this is also why I find that like talking about cults does such a good parallel totalking about like our society and these things that are going on right now, because this
(29:01):
is what, like what we experienced in cults is kind of what America is going through atlarge right now.
Yeah.
And to Scott's point about the model minority thing, the model minority myth was always adouble-edged sword.
Sure, it gave some East Asians, not Southeast Asians and not South Asians, but your bigthree, Korean, Japanese, Chinese.
(29:30):
It gave them a little bit of status.
We're the good ones.
it was just white supremacy using us as a wedge between other people groups, particularlyagainst Black communities.
We came here and faced all kinds of discrimination, but we didn't have slavery.
We didn't have Jim Crow.
(29:51):
We had other things.
My parents were born in incarceration camps.
But if we're going to, we can't play that oppression Olympics.
We have to build coalitions.
with everyone willing.
And Asian Americans, and I'll say this, Asian Americans need to recognize their place.
And we have to recognize that Black Lives Matter.
(30:15):
We have to recognize the work that Black people and communities have done to allow us tohave these movements and to be part of them.
It makes me so angry when I hear like of people, and it's usually older people who leaninto the model minority thing.
It's just like, no.
You're being used by white supremacy and that ain't it.
(30:38):
That's, that is not gonna go a forward.
And I appreciate you saying that because that's, it's just a testimony, right?
To how big and powerful and pervasive white supremacy is.
I mean, it's ingrained in all of our institutions to the fact that, you know, it evenendeavors to separate people to lift one minority up over another.
(31:03):
And you're exactly right.
I want to talk a little bit about
your journey, if we can return to that, was there a particular moment that the light bulbwent off and you said, okay, I'm done trying to fulfill this mission of helping the church
(31:24):
see that their racism and all of that.
Or was it, in my case, it was sort of like a, I remember spinning records, right?
Some of the records would have a slow fade at the end.
was no abrupt end to the song.
It sort of like faded out.
I feel like that was my story.
(31:45):
What about yours?
yeah, same.
It wasn't anything, one huge thing.
And my heart goes out, you I know people who had horrible experiences in a church or in aChristian setting that was abusive and in harmful in so many ways.
I can't imagine, you know, for me, was like death by a thousand cuts kind of thing where,you know, I accepted the racism and I was an early feminist of the late eighties and early
(32:12):
nineties and...
I was ready to fight for my sisters in Christ, you know?
And yeah, to me it was more just seeing things.
Okay, like for me, Sandy Hook was a big one.
Where is God?
know, learning about the Holocaust.
(32:32):
That is a tough theological thing.
know, reading Elie Wiesel, who had a relationship with God, but he was pissed at him.
He was angry and I was like, you can do that?
It's like, yeah, it happens all the time in the Old Testament actually.
Moses and Jacob and all these people who kind of fight with God a little bit.
(32:58):
That was so far out of my understanding of things.
And so once you get to that point, most of the teachings and indoctrination don't add upto the realities of life.
One of my guests on my pod I have a podcast called chapel probation where we talk aboutsurviving Christian schools and one of my guests is a good friend and Like he had a moment
(33:23):
where you know We're taught that you pray and if your life is good and you're right withGod God answers your prayers well his father got some rare cancer and He was part of this
Assemblies of God, you know very charismatic church
And they were all assured, we're gonna pray and we're gonna beat this because God isfaithful and blah, blah.
(33:45):
Well, his dad passed away and that was huge for him.
know, it's like, but we did everything right.
We went to church, we did the Bible studies, I memorized the verses, I witnessed topeople, you know, we did all the things that we were told and God didn't answer the
prayer.
You know, the father passed away.
And I think all of us, we're honest, even Christians today have to...
(34:10):
have to acknowledge that that whole mystery of prayer is kind of a sham.
Because, you know, and even when I was a Christian, I would have these conversations inour Bible studies, you know, like, well, wait, if God is all-knowing, doesn't he already
know what we want?
Or we need, we should be praying for, so aren't we wasting both of our time spending allthe time?
(34:31):
Because you read in the Bible, you know, Daniel praying for like three days.
It's a long time.
When the world was easy.
saying for three days.
know, he, what are we asking of God?
And what is the point to it if God already knows what's going to happen?
You know, and what if the thing I'm praying for runs contrary to God's, plan, his all goodand perfect plan, you know, then how am I supposed to know that?
(35:01):
so,
beyond that, right?
If you think about prayer, you mentioned Sandy Hook.
Every time there's one of these shootings, invariably Christians will come out of thewoodwork sending quote unquote thoughts and prayers.
And what that does, right, is a cop out because if you spend your time praying, yeah, whatcan you know, there are things that we can do, but no one's willing to do it because
(35:29):
everyone is praying, right?
yeah, yeah, yeah, and apparently not praying very well because it's not working
right?
Yeah.
And so it becomes a cop-out in much the same way, the promise of Christ's return and theapocalypse and all of that.
I was raised in a tradition that was imminent.
(35:52):
It could happen at any time.
But what it did, it kept us focused on some unknown future point when you look around theworld and there's all of this tragedy, there's all of this heartache.
that we could have done something about, even in our localities, if we pulled our money,if we pulled our resources and actually went out and helped people.
(36:14):
But because we were so fixated on the rapture happening that we were like, well, you know,that's none of my concern.
You know, I'm leaving this world behind.
And it serves as a cop out of dealing with the real world issues.
And I think this is really, really relevant in our politics right now.
And I'm seeing it a lot on the left.
(36:35):
It's like, it's easier to just panic right now.
And let me tell you, so the children of God, right?
We were the entertainment cult.
That was what we produced was entertainment, right?
And we produced Joaquin and River Phoenix and Rose McGowan and...
we made all these videos, right?
Like I was a child actress and all these videos that were made and produced at very highlevel and distributed around the world.
(36:59):
And so we had this one that was like late eighties, know, Cold War vibe and the song, itwas a music video and the song was 20 minutes to go.
And it was this, you know, when like the Hawaii launched the warning for the nukes byaccident.
And it was like, the bombs are incoming, right?
Literally 20 minutes to go.
(37:20):
How much love can you show?
you're like, if you think the rockets are incoming and the world is gonna end in 20minutes, you're gonna sit down and hug your family, right?
You're gonna think about your last memories.
You're gonna maybe go outside and have some conversations with the neighbors.
(37:40):
You're not gonna go fight back, right?
So keeping you in this constant state of apocalypse, right?
Right now I hear
things from the left, like, we can't protest, because they're trying to do martial law,you know, and things that are just like, no, they want you panicking.
(38:01):
Because if you're panicking, if you're in apocalyptic thinking, I even see it in corporateAmerica with, the robots are coming, right?
Then they don't actually have to prepare you, their workers, for what's actuallyhappening, you know, like,
we are living through, this is gonna get into a question we're talking about later withtech cults, but like we've kind of lived through an apocalypse in my opinion, which was
(38:29):
the industrial age running smack into the information age and like nothing being leftuntouched.
like everything in our world has kind of been in this constant mode of panic since then.
And it gives,
in my opinion, like it gives the authoritarians and the cult leaders the power becauseeverybody's scared.
(38:51):
Nobody's fighting back.
That's true.
Scott, when we talk about your departure from the evangelical world, what did yourinterpersonal relationships look like?
Because I know for a lot of people, this is the issue, right?
(39:12):
I know a lot of people who will have conversations with me and say, you know what, you'reright, but I've got too much invested.
I've got too much family.
I've got too many relationships.
It would be too disruptive.
to all of my relationships if I made a declaration or if I left or if I spoke out againstwhat is happening.
(39:33):
Was that difficult for you and what did that look like in your journey?
It was not difficult because as I write in my book, as I was teaching at Azusa and itjust, at the time when I started there, an Asian American arts and activism community was
starting up and my cousin was kind of a central figure in this and she brought me in.
(39:59):
I had never really leaned into an Asian American community before.
I had...
Asian American friends, but as far as like an identity in a group of people that werepredominantly Asian American hadn't really experienced it.
Cause I was always like, I, you know, build bridges and you know, don't just hang out withAsians.
(40:20):
got to witness to everybody.
Right.
So, I got more and more involved with this group as, I, I started not hanging out withchurch people, most of whom I didn't even like.
and being sort of seeding this whole other community in life.
(40:40):
So by the time I left, I had already stopped going to church long ago.
I was still teaching at APU, still had a lot of Christian friends and still do.
If Christians will be friends with me, I can be friends with them, but most of them don'twant to.
So yeah, by the time I left APU, that was like my last foothold into anything Christian.
(41:02):
I had this amazing...
chosen family group of people who are just waiting for me to come and just be there.
And so I didn't have to live two lives anymore.
So I was lucky.
And I write all about this in my book about the, it made me be a musician again.
I hadn't played music in like 10 years.
(41:24):
It made me understand who I was as a man, as a man in community fighting againstpatriarchy and racism.
It made me realize how colonized my mind was to whiteness.
And I always say, there's nothing wrong with whiteness.
It's just whatever majority culture holds all the power in any culture.
(41:46):
In Japan, it's Japanese people.
They're the worst.
They treat Filipinos and Koreans really bad.
And if you're talking about social justice from that framework, you're talking aboutJapanese people in this role that I'm seeing is whiteness here in America.
Having that opportunity to be a part of that community was, it also accelerated my way outbecause this is real community.
(42:12):
This is real love.
This is real caring.
There's no thoughts and prayers there.
It's like, if there's a need, we, we all round up each other and figure out how to meetthat need.
thoughts and prayers are not even like, in the, in the, in the lingo in the, the, in theresponse to anything.
and so being involved with things, you know, like, since my
(42:33):
my folks were all, and my families were incarcerated during World War II.
The Japanese American community by and large is, it can be somewhat conservative, but wedo not put up with people being rounded up.
so, you know, after 9-11, communities were very vocal speaking out against rounding upMuslim Americans.
(42:55):
And we're really, like, my community is real big on reparations for Black people and,
immigration, sanctuary status for our city of Los Angeles.
We have a real heart for people because we've been at the bottom.
We've been just completely cast away and locked up for no reason.
(43:15):
And so I think that gives us a lot of empathy.
And empathy is something that's very lacking in Christianity in American society today.
They're literally preaching in the SBC that it's a sin to have empathy, which just blowsmy mind.
I saw that.
I think there was even a book or a sermon that was published, The Sin of Empathy, whichreally is, wow, it's scary, it's dangerous.
(43:47):
But I think we see that, you know, it's across the country now with what's happening inthe government, what's happening even in local communities with this reassertion of white
Christianity, Christian nationalism, this conflation of quote unquote Christian valueswith patriotism and all of the language that goes with that just perpetuates these
(44:15):
oppressive ideologies.
Yeah.
It sounds so weird to say, that's where we're at.
That's where Christianity is now.
Donald Trump is the standard bearer for Christianity.
We've got a few minutes left, so tell us about your book and about your work now and wherefolks can find you.
(44:37):
You mentioned your podcast.
Tell us what's going on and how they can access all of that information.
Yeah, you can find me on Instagram and Blue Sky and Facebook if you're old.
I have a podcast called Chapel Probation, as I mentioned, and it started out as just AzusaPacific people that I knew, and I was hoping it would help me get a platform to write a
(45:00):
book.
But after the first maybe 10 episodes, I started getting emails from people all over thecountry.
I went to Liberty, I went to Bob Jones, I went to Wheaton, went to Moody.
And a whole bunch of schools I had never even heard of.
There's a lot of Christian schools out there.
And so I opened it up from that point on and I'm in my, I just finished my fourth season,130 something episodes.
(45:26):
It's going great.
I love being able to help people tell the, and I'd say 90 % of my guests don't have aplatform.
They just have a story.
And I love just helping them tell it to say, this is what I went through as a woman atthis school or as a black.
person at this school, as a queer person, as a trans person.
(45:46):
Try to cover all the different aspects of how crappy it is to not, well, just to evenwhite people suffer at these schools.
And it's made for them and it still sucks.
so, yeah, that's chapel probation.
My book is called Asian American Apostate.
It's sort of my memoir about teaching at Azusa Pacific and...
Trying to be a Christian for the first part and then just losing it all and then justfomenting revolution wherever I could and If they weren't gonna fire me, I might still be
(46:15):
there.
I liked being I never I never tried to like make anyone not be Christian.
I always Wanted to help them be because you have to teach Christian, Stuff it's a it'saccredited and i'm an english professor, but you know faith integration is what they
called it and
And I was good at it.
(46:36):
I got reviews from students saying, feel like I'm a better Christian thanks to ProfessorOkamoto.
And so I felt good about staying there.
Was I lying when every time I signed my contract?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wasn't going to church and I didn't believe all the, you know, the Bible's inerrant andI didn't believe, you know, Jesus died for my sin to stay.
But I felt like I had carved out a niche space in this, you know, if you need to talkabout.
(47:01):
what it's like to be gay or what it's like to be oppressed as a woman or a BIPOC person.
My class was the one to take and it was like this underground secret until it wasn't.
And then that ended.
You know, one thing I always think when I look at revolution, but also when I look atgetting people out of cults is like, there are the people that are running the halfway
(47:24):
houses, right?
The people that have are doing what you're doing, right?
Like they're there.
You probably radicalized so many students, right?
Without knowing, right?
Just by answering their questions, just by being there.
But like you still had to have.
half of yourself in the cult.
And I always, I think there's actually kind of a natural time for folks like you and Scottwhen you're coming out of the cult yourself, that you're like really actually cut out for
(47:53):
that work of kind of being like halfway in and holding the door open for a bunch ofpeople.
But eventually, at least for me, I found like I can't do that work because it's still too.
mission, right?
You still it's too much all the time.
It's still asking you to sacrifice yourself to be there for these students.
(48:18):
But yeah, I think it's almost like when you are a new convert and you have yourmissionizing phase.
And then when you're on your way out, you have like helping everyone else out phase.
I don't know, I kind of love it.
And scott might have seen this too is as radical or evil or whatever as I People thought Iwas I don't think that many people radicalized because of me I think if anything a lot of
(48:45):
christians dug their heels in more, you know, who really radicalized people bible teachersThis is what the bible actually says And this is what it doesn't say that you think it
does
That I feel like radicalized way more people than, you know, flaming liberal me or Scott,right?
(49:06):
It's like teaching argument.
Great, argumentation is one thing.
You can't really argue people in and out of these head spaces.
But man, if you show these people what the Bible actually says, that's the game changerthere.
Absolutely.
reason that a lot of high control Christian groups like the King James Version, because itis archaic, because it's archaic English and it's difficult to understand.
(49:35):
And so I get such a kick out of it though, because I'm like, the whole reason King Jamesdid a Bible is to get the church off of his back because he was super gay in public.
so.
in his court.
Yeah.
And it sounds like Yoda.
That's the one thing I like about the King James.
(49:56):
Sometimes the diction is a little odd.
And, you know, but this, this also goes back to like a bigger thing I like to say, whichis like real experts will draw the edges of their expertise in Sharpie and like real
professors and scientists and educators will engage with you about what's in the text,right?
(50:20):
Like if that's what you're teaching and a student comes up with it, you know, like I had aCatholic professor and I decided I wanted to
to get at her.
And so I was going to write an essay about all of the homo erotica in Dante's Inferno andwhatever.
Right.
And like, it was fine.
(50:40):
I didn't get in trouble, right?
Like she didn't like it.
But she's a professor.
She's engaging with like, what's on the page?
What's the argument being made?
And
bad, the homoerotic.
even, I was just playing it up.
I was saying there's this whole argument here.
I did another paper in my masculinity literature class about how Hemingway was theultimate feminist because of these things that he couldn't even see.
(51:06):
I was just, for the first time in a school where I could make an argument and people wouldengage with that argument and not tell me that I was evil.
And this is what I think is one of those things where like,
if an expert, you you bring them something else and they get mad at you for that, likethat's not a good sign, you know?
(51:30):
Like usually true experts and true, you know, academics are gonna engage with the actualargument itself.
Exactly.
let's let's go down that road.
Let's let's see where we end up.
Yeah, that's.
I remember the first time I heard the term white privilege, I was like, literally excited,because I finally had a term for a thing that I had noticed, right?
(51:55):
And I was like, thank you.
And this is almost how I felt in my own kind of like anti-racism, you know, post-cultjourney is like, I know all this stuff in the back of my head, and I just get more and
more information.
And I'm like, grateful for it, you know, and it's like, I think
That is something that no matter what, we have to like learn that way of looking atlearning when we are outside of cults that like, as my Scott was saying earlier, you know,
(52:27):
we're here to almost like disprove our theories, not to just prove ourselves right.
And speaking of theories and questions, Daniella, you had one that you wanted to bring ourattention to.
Yes, okay, so we are doing a thing now on the Patreon.
Check out our Patreon if you want access to all of my stuff in one place, includingUnAmerican, my book, Deconstructing Whiteness and White Supremacy, that will come out.
(52:55):
And the question is from one of our Patreon members, I would be very interested to hearyour thoughts on the cult of the tech industry, if you think it's one and their
ideologies.
I've been reading blah, blah about the broligarchs.
And I would be interested to see if you had any thoughts on the cult dynamics of the techindustry and disillusionment of the public workers.
(53:19):
And boy, do I ever, I mean, I think this is so relevant right now because what we areseeing in our government is literally like a marriage of Satan between Christian
nationalism and tech bros.
And Elon Musk is playing, you know, move fast and break things with the government.
But this kind of goes back to what I was saying, right?
Where like everything was going along in the industrial era and we kind of knew how theworld worked, or at least like the people running the world felt like they knew how it
(53:48):
worked.
And then we had this apocalypse, which was the information era, right?
Literally nothing has remained untouched.
Literally by the time I was studying international security in 2010, the internet goingdown was the largest disaster in the world.
right, ahead of nuclear war, because by the way, the nukes are on the internet, right?
(54:09):
Like nothing remained untouched.
Everything changed.
People's lives fell apart.
People died.
People's entire American dream vanished or was created, right?
And then who did we have come out of this apocalypse leading the way, the tech industry,right?
And you have your Steve Jobs.
(54:31):
And so,
Like actually one of the big wins of the 20th century was that after World War II, like wemoved away really hard and fast away from charismatic leadership and into bureaucracy and
science and you know, the person who has the degree has the job and we want CEOs to begood managers.
(54:52):
And then came this huge apocalypse and we started following people like Steve Jobs, right?
And thinking that like charisma and brashness mattered more.
And I actually make this comparison in my book I'm writing now, The Culting of America,where I'm like, at some point there wasn't that much difference between marching around
(55:13):
the cult commune quoting quotes from our leader or Bible verses, marching around KandaharAirfield quoting General Petraeus and the things that he's said about winning the hearts
and minds and counterinsurgency.
And then I left the army and I went straight to work for Microsoft and everyone is likeliterally Satya Nadella quotes on their desk.
(55:35):
And like, I was just like, okay, like you couldn't have an iPhone because we worked atMicrosoft and how dare, you know, it was very, and actually one of the things that Satya
Nadella did that scandalized everyone was he was like, we're not winning in the smartphonemarket.
So we're just going to let our apps be on
(55:57):
iPhones, which was a very smart business decision, scandalous to the cult, right?
Like, how dare you let the non-Microsoft people into play, right?
So I do, I think, and then a lot of tech companies patterned themselves on cults.
(56:18):
Right?
And this is, think there's a larger story here about we started studying brainwashing, westarted studying the military, we started studying organizational psychology all at the
same time, and all those things are tied together.
But like, tech cults, like a big company in the early days called Trilogy, like moving itspeople to San Antonio so they could be isolated and starting up universities to mimic what
(56:43):
cults do.
Zappos, very, very similar, right?
actually emulating cult leaders saying, of course, they were gonna be the good ones.
But really just saying, like, we're gonna use all these human motivation tactics to getlabor.
But we're gonna give you a mission, right?
(57:05):
And the tech cults really brought this into entrepreneurship, brought this into all ofbusiness, right?
So like Walmart, Walmart's mission should be
to provide low-cost products to Americans, right?
But if you go to their website, it says their mission is to provide low-cost products toAmericans to transform their lives.
(57:30):
And this is the thing that the tech cult has brought in, right?
Like every single accountant and person, right, is making a difference and is changing theworld.
And what I think ties back to evangelicalism so well, because I call it missionizing.
when you take the mission and you weaponize it and you use that great mission, right?
(57:52):
Whether it's we wanna save the world for Jesus or we wanna end cancer or we wanna go toMars, cults always promise space travel.
And you should sacrifice for that, right?
And sacrifice, which is my step four of cults, always ties to step eight, which isexploitation of labor, right?
And it's all about getting your labor.
(58:12):
And that's what we see like.
I'm writing or I'm editing the exploitation of labor chapter right now, which I lead inwith Twitter and present Doge.
And I can't even write it because things keep happening too fast.
And to your point, you know, it's really interesting that, you know, 2016, thought, youknow, the first Trump term, thought this guy, this is the last white guy, right?
(58:39):
This is the last, this is the last stand for white supremacy.
But now in the second term, have, you have Donald Trump who doesn't even use email ispassing the baton to the guy, right?
That's, that's supposedly leading the tech.
revolution.
So white supremacy is not going away.
(59:01):
It's just being passed to a new generation that are now harnessing technology to spreadthis ideology.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is the same thing we see with all of our systems, I think, like webuilt all these systems, but then we built human biases into the systems, right?
(59:22):
So like, we look at who built the AI and it was like white guys and Asians, right?
And so like, yeah, and Alexa recognizes women's voices 77 % less, you know, just like, so.
I mean, this is, but it's also one of those things that like, the cult always seems greatuntil it's not, right?
(59:46):
And then you're locked in this system and we're trying to undo it.
I don't know, I've got my answer now for people that say that both sides are just asculty, which is I wasn't selling 50 to 200 cult books a day when the Democrats were in
office.
So our people are running the country now, y'all.
(01:00:07):
And I think,
I mean, at least the good thing is like we have relevant information to give people andlike we know what to expect, right?
We know what they want, cause we all lived that.
And Scott, I'm so excited about your book.
I love the title, Asian American Apostate.
Like, do you put that on t-shirts?
(01:00:27):
Because you could sell so many of those on TikTok, I feel like.
of that and if you look at the cover we made it look like a Bible it looks like one ofthose like Gideon Bibles that it's kind of sacrilegious, so it's kind of fun
I will be getting with you to get a copy of me talking about that to my TikTok audiencesas well.
Definitely everybody, please like and subscribe to the podcast and check out all the linksfor Scott's stuff will be in our show notes.
(01:00:57):
Thank you so much, Scott, for joining us.
And we encourage everyone to go check out your information, buy the book, and spread thegood news, right?
The good news or bad news, however you want to look at it, that the culting of America istaking place right before our eyes.
And yeah, just to echo Daniela, like the podcast, share the podcast, and tune in nexttime.
(01:01:24):
And we'll see you all on the next episode of Cults and the Culting of America.
Welcome to Cults and the Culting of America podcast.
My name is Scott Lloyd.
As always, I'm joined by the knitting cult lady, Daniela Mesteneck Young.
Daniela, good to see you tonight.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Good to see you, Scott.
I need to give you some kudos right now because I repeatedly see these videos from youdealing with anti-racism and why you're using your voice to talk about why America treats
(00:52):
black people so poorly and just, you know, this is what I'm always trying to get myaudience to understand is that like we deconstruct and then like you have the most
powerful voice in American society right now as a straight white presenting.
Christian presenting man.
So just like kudos, it gives me a lot of inspiration to see you like in this fight and Iappreciate you.
(01:16):
Well, thank you, Daniela.
I appreciate that.
It is always an honor to speak to those issues.
And I think obviously during the day and age in which we live, we need to speak aboutthose issues more.
And I'm very excited about our guest tonight.
Joining us is Scott Okamoto.
And Scott, welcome to CULTZ and the CULTING of America.
(01:39):
You have a fascinating story and I can't wait to get into it.
As I was telling you before we came on, your story really parallels mine in a lot of ways.
So Scott, welcome.
Take a moment and introduce yourself to our audience.
Yeah, Danielle and Scott, thanks for having me.
It's an honor to be here and I'm really excited to have this conversation.
(02:02):
yeah, as you said, I have a similar background as yours.
I grew up as an evangelical Christian and depending on how we define cult, I mean, I kindof think most of Christianity is a cult with high control and
yeah, and all the ways they enforce the rules.
(02:22):
but I had it pretty easy cause I was at a kind of a lazy Christian, church.
they didn't, you know, like the worst cults will do the thing where they like separate youfrom your family or, take control of your finances.
They didn't do any of that.
It was, it was kind of like, here's all these rules that you should strive to.
(02:43):
And if you screw up once in a while, God will forgive you.
We might forgive you.
And so I grew up, you know, a conservative Republican in Southern California.
I went to college and did intervarsity Christian fellowship.
I was, because I'm Asian American, I had a mission to be a better Christian than my white.
(03:12):
peers and friends and community.
Because I knew I didn't measure up to the standards of how I looked or where I'm from.
I'm a fourth generation American.
never had never been to Japan, but I was seen as a foreigner and as an immigrant.
so my way of dealing with that was to be a better baseball player and to get my huntinglicense and to know sports and to be an incredibly
(03:41):
evangelical Christian.
I witnessed to my friends, I witnessed to my teachers.
I look back now, those poor teachers having to listen to me ask.
I can relate to that.
was so obnoxious as a young Christian.
I remember in junior high school, I carried my big Bible under my arm.
I was weird.
(04:02):
Yeah.
you know, Scott, what you say is so interesting because I think what's true about kind ofall high performance groups is your number one goal is don't stand out, right?
Don't stand out, which is great if you look like white Scott here in evangelicalChristianity, right?
(04:23):
Less great if you look like me in the military or like you in American evangelicalChristianity.
And I was even noticing this on the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders documentary, right?
Like they have a look, which is blonde with blue eyes and big boobs, right?
And if you have that look, you can be kind of mediocre, but every bit away from that lookyou are, you have to be really good.
(04:50):
And I think like in that way, they do kind of isolate you because you're always running onthis track, trying to like be perfect.
Yeah, for sure.
I felt invisible for most of my childhood, growing up in a pretty much all white schooldistrict at the time.
And my church was mostly white.
(05:13):
Ironically, my church was more diverse than my school.
And we had a couple of black friends and a couple of other Asian friends and Hispanicfriends.
But definitely knew that if I was going to get ahead and do the things that I felt
felt like I was qualified to do, to be a leader, to be a worship leader.
I picked up the guitar.
(05:33):
That was my weapon.
It was like, if I could get on that stage, and this is so embarrassing, but you know, theworship team, it's the hallowed space.
It's good to be on the worship team.
know, like suddenly I was seen, you I'm that kid that can play like Van Halen licks on theworship team.
(05:55):
And so there I was like trying to like shred and play all these, you know, slow, beautifulworship songs.
You know, they're easy, like three chords.
I was trying to out white whiteness so that I could just at least get my foot in the doorand to do all that.
And as I got older and as I got to college and I mentioned intervarsity, you know, Istarted to, you know, wonder like, why do I have to do this?
(06:20):
Do I want it?
Do I even want to belong?
to this cult, to this tribe of people.
And the farther I went, I realized I didn't.
Less and less.
And so by the time I got out of grad school, I got a master of arts in writing, moved backto LA.
My wife and I lived in San Francisco.
(06:42):
Moved back home to LA and I started teaching at Azusa Pacific University, which is this,know, it's like Sunday school, but you get a degree.
It's not a real school.
But I felt like I'm still kind of a Christian.
can, and maybe, know, this will help my faith that was slipping away.
(07:03):
And so I signed up, I got hired and I had a great time dealing with these kids thatreminded me so much of what I was like.
But I had one foot out the door and as far as faith went and being at Azusa definitelypushed me all the way out.
I was like,
So there are no answers to my question.
(07:26):
I tried to talk to theology profs and biblical studies profs and no two of them everagreed on anything, if theologically, how you read the Bible.
But they still wanted to enforce all this stuff.
Don't drink, don't have sex, don't be gay, especially don't be gay.
And so I made it through there for like 15 years.
(07:48):
I got hired full time.
I write in my book, I wrote a book called Asian American Apostate.
I decided I didn't believe in God right after the 2004 elections with this, when Bush gotreelected.
Cause I was like, if this is Christianity, if a vote for Bush is a vote for God, aseveryone was saying on my campus, I don't want either, know, I'm out.
(08:15):
And then they offered me a full-time job.
And so.
I stayed.
I turned down a job at USC and it hurts my heart every time I say that.
To stay at APU because I felt like I was helping the BIPOC kids start a revolution.
I was involved with a completely illegal underground LGBTQ club that was very secretiveand just starting out.
(08:43):
It would eventually become a nationally known group called Haven.
think they were on like CNN and, you know, because they went public.
And eventually that was the issue that they were, I saw the writing on the wall.
I got pulled in to be fired and argued my way back into a job with the Dean.
(09:04):
Cause I taught argumentation.
You're like, that's my, that's my zone.
You're not going to argue me out of anything.
And yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
Scott and I were like, are we the same person?
Like.
And then the very next day I quit.
I came home and was like, hey, I was going to be fired.
But I talked myself back into the job and my wife was like, what in the hell are youdoing?
(09:27):
Why would you want to go back there after all that they've done to you?
Because I was in trouble for 15 solid years for everything, for teaching English, fortalking about, I'm not sure if I can cuss, but I would talk about the etymology of swear
words as an intellectual thing, not just to be swearing.
We talked about sex and sexuality and feminism and race and social justice and all thesethings would get me in trouble.
(09:54):
Students would call the president of the school and tell on me.
And I'd get hauled in to talk to my boss.
My boss was cool in the English department, but it was like, yeah, you got anothercomplaint.
It like, it averaged out to about one or two a semester.
So it was a rough 15 years.
yeah.
And that's so interesting because I too taught at private Christian universities for most,yeah, for most of my career.
(10:20):
I was a speech and debate coach and I too got in all kinds of trouble, but it'sinteresting, you know, because a lot of times when we talk on this program about cults and
high control groups, everyone thinks, well, you know, that's a fringe group, but what youand I experienced
was the mainstream of Christianity.
(10:42):
And, you know, it's become big business now with mega churches and things of that nature.
And you're exactly right.
They may be on a spectrum when it comes to high control groups, but they're stillenforcing behavior and thinking.
And ultimately, they're after your free labor.
mean, I've gone to some of these church growth conferences and I mean, they actually teachpeople
(11:09):
you know, how to recruit volunteers, how to celebrate them, because your bottom line, yourbudget, it benefits from all of this free labor.
So you experience that firsthand.
Yeah, I mean I got paid, but not very well.
(11:32):
yeah, I usually think with anything mission-based, you end up finding like you're givingmore than you're getting really paid for.
But I just have to say, like, I love when the speech and debate and English andargumentation focus of cults blows up in their face, right?
Because like what you two were saying about like being good of argument, I mean, this isthe story of why cult babies
(11:56):
do okay in college, right?
Because we're taught to build arguments and craft arguments and sound good and havesupport.
I always did this thing in college when I didn't know how to answer an essay question, Iwould write three more paragraphs and then usually would get an A.
But anyway, I just wanted to say, I love that it's this tool that they teach us in cults,but then sometimes it just breaks for us because we're like, hey, but.
(12:25):
How come there's no answer?
know, how come?
Or they just give a bad answer like the same answers I got when I was a kid with the sameones these people with PhDs were getting you know, like what about suffering what about
You know theodicy this, you know bad bad things happen to good people.
Why?
Oh, you know sin as if that Okay.
(12:50):
Yeah, so so there is no answer but your point about oh, yeah.
Oh, no, I was gonna say to Daniel's point about you
critical thinking and argumentation.
They use these words, especially in academia, they don't mean it.
really mean by critical thinking, mean find all the arguments as weak as they might be toprove the gospel, you know, that Jesus did die and go to heaven and be resurrected and
(13:15):
died for your sins.
Like that to them is critical thinking.
And anything that questions that or contradicts that is seen as of the devil.
And I know how you run a college or school.
where you're not allowed to even think about other views and other ideas, but that'sChristianity.
that I was going to make because when in these in these places of Christian higher ed andeducational institutions, you have a whole department that is dedicated to theology and
(13:46):
what they call apologetics.
But the difference in apologetics and real scholarship is that apologetics always startswith a an idea, an end in mind, right?
They believe it to be true.
And so then they look for all of this evidence to confirm what they already believe to betrue, whereas real scholarship goes where the evidence leads.
(14:14):
And it's not about confirming something that you already believe.
they pull these students in, and especially in the last few years that I was involved withChristian Higher Ed,
young men, especially, we're eating this up, right?
So you've got this whole alpha masculinity type movement, in Catholic, right?
(14:40):
Yeah, absolutely.
Theology bros, absolutely.
And even in Catholic traditions, where we see this reassertion of this, what I call toxicmasculinity, and they have an answer for everything.
but they're not really thinking through the issues.
(15:00):
And that's why we see with church declining membership and attendance declining in allareas, you see that one bump, that one increase with all of the bros going back to church.
Yeah, and admittedly I tried to be one of those bros when I was in college I went you knowI I was such a big Christian that I would I didn't even think about going to Christian
(15:22):
college because I Was gonna be salt in life salt and light in the real world and so I wentto UC San Diego And I thought I'm gonna save the school I guess And I got my ass handed to
me every step of the way
There were professors who knew more than me.
I had party animal frat boys that knew more than I did as far as like the Bible and stuff.
(15:45):
And all my little trite things that worked so well in middle school, as far asapologetics, Josh McDowell stuff really doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.
As soon as someone asks a question about it, it's like, oh, and you just repeat what youjust said.
Oh, the analogy of the wristwatch.
(16:06):
Someone had to make it.
And as soon as they start pulling that analogy apart, you're like, yeah, okay, I gotnothing else.
I thought that would work.
I was wrong.
Yeah, and to your point about the Theo bros and the masculinity, it doesn't take muchintellectually to knock those people off their chair, right?
(16:26):
From where they're sitting.
It takes courage because they're menacing and they're threatening and they're dudes, youknow, and they're posturing with all this masculinity.
But if you get below that and just actually look at what they're saying, it's so easy topull apart.
Some of my students hated my guts because they're trying to do this, assert their things.
(16:48):
I would even say, okay, write a paper.
you can't have sex before marriage?
Where does it say that in the Bible?
well, I'll show you.
Not a single student ever found that passage.
Right.
It doesn't say, in fact, there's a lot of sex before marriage in the Bible and it's not abad thing.
You know, it doesn't even condemn incest for goodness sake.
(17:09):
It's just so easy when, because yeah, I think in America, in the Western world, theassumption is that we are like based in Christianity or puritanical things.
so these arguments, know, people who don't care that much will let these arguments fly,you know.
yeah.
Because I know people who aren't even Christian, like, you you shouldn't have sex or, youknow, you shouldn't drink too much.
(17:33):
And fine, but where'd that come from?
You know, it's sort of ingrained in our culture.
So you take someone that's been raised in this and indoctrinated in this to all thedifferent degrees between like my little, you know, Christian light upbringing to
Daniela's cult, was it the children of God, right?
You were in...
(17:54):
That's intense, you know, and I heard your interview with Tia Levings who did the the IBLPstuff, you know, yeah, I mean, my goodness, like beating kids as a, as a practice of
parenting, you know, like the whole spectrum of it.
But in the end, we're all indoctrinated to just assume these things and not question it.
(18:14):
And as soon as you start questioning it, people get really upset, especially at college.
The best, the best compliment I ever got was when a kid was trying to have me fired,literally wrote a letter.
to have me fired.
And he said, Professor Okamoto would be great at a place like UCLA or Berkeley, but hereat APU, know, he doesn't, he doesn't like teach our values or something like that.
(18:37):
And I'm like, I'm teaching freaking English, man.
It's just, it's just English.
You know, it's so interesting, because you all are talking about religion, but I'm justlike, just thinking about the military this whole time about how like my whole experience
in the military was like men, presupposing that they do it the best, right?
(18:59):
And like, they know the outcome and making all these rules to keep us out of, of combatand like telling us that it can't be done, right?
And there's so much of this.
And then even the way like,
Was in the military I was like, I just took them at face value that when they say criticalthinking they mean critical thinking and they want that and especially when they say
(19:21):
You're the intelligence officer, know, so in my second memoir actually that I haven'tpublished but it is a video book on my patreon I have this moment where we're going to
Afghanistan the second time and I'm briefing I'm the intelligence officer and I'm briefingthe threat and so I say Afghanistan
also known as the Graveyard of Empires.
(19:45):
And afterward, this major, so someone like one rank above me, comes up and pulls me asideand he's like, what are you doing?
And I said, sir, he's like, no, that's not the message.
It was really this moment of like, that's not what we say, that's not what we do.
And at one point he was like, what do you think that does to morale?
(20:05):
Yeah, you know, we are an empire.
and I literally looked at this man and I said, like, with all due respect, sir, I'm theintelligence officer, not the chaplet.
You know, like my job is supposed to be to be here to point out the threat to you, likenot to keep up morale.
It's not my fault that you're sending us into the 18th year of a war that we all knowwe're losing or whatever.
(20:26):
Right?
Like.
And it's just like you get to this point where you're like, you don't even
Like they don't even want the apologetics to be really testing things, right?
Like you don't even want the person who's supposed to be focused on the threat to be likestepping outside of the line too much of what you're supposed to be, like what the message
(20:52):
is supposed to be.
Yeah, I was born at Fort Dix and I hear your, and I'm always blown away when you can makethat comparison on your videos about the similarities between the military and Christian
cults.
And it's very apt.
It's a lot of the same high control, control your day to day life and your thinking, yeah.
(21:19):
And you know, this was even the other thing, like when you said like, yes, there's thisrange of sort of like extreme of what cults are.
And one of the things of like my experience was meeting people like you and Scott who grewup in quote unquote normal evangelical America.
And like, if you just hear the high line of my story, like, I grew up in this cult.
(21:43):
It's like, wow, that's so extreme.
But then I hear your
normal experiences and I'm like, no, like we did that, right?
Like I honestly think the children of God is just the extreme that you're likeconservative Mormons and evangelicals and Catholics, like that level of control that they
(22:05):
wish that they had, right?
Or like the performance that you're doing.
You know, when I logged in and I saw all this music equipment behind you, I was like, yep,baby, like we know this.
Yeah, I was the worship leader for the cult, so, you know.
The performance, but you know what else I think is interesting is that people like me andyou and Scott who are the thinkers and are the ones that are gonna question, I think it's
(22:33):
so interesting that we like, at first we tried to do it in the framework that they gaveus, right?
Like I wanted to be an expert.
I've always been good at being an expert.
So I was the memorization queen.
I was the sharpen your sword drill queen.
It's the kiss of death in Christianity.
you know, and I see this in both of you Scots, like becoming these professors where youget to do speech and debate and you get to kind of argue.
(22:59):
And so I think even when you were in, you know, it's funny to look back at us as cultbabies and see like our personalities were there, they were formed, you know, we were
questioning, you were pushing back, you were, as you said, getting in trouble for 15years, right?
It was just that.
parallels me for 15 years growing up in a cult getting in trouble.
(23:20):
Like because you were always doing that, because you were always testing the boundaries.
So I think that's pretty cool too, you know.
It was fun.
You know, I grew up the good kid, the, the Uber Christian, but to get to APU and suddenlybe seen as kind of evil, I gotta admit was kind of a trip.
It was like, Ooh, I'm scary.
(23:45):
strikes me that taking the path that you did that as an Asian American, I want to talk alittle bit about this because we also talk about on this show the sort of the the meta
cult of white supremacy, right?
So as an Asian American, your group of people are often characterized as the modelminority.
(24:10):
All right.
It strikes me that as an Asian American with the Christianity card that you were poised,right?
Set up to be a showpiece for Christianity.
Had you not had these darn, you know, thoughts.
(24:31):
Yeah.
Yeah, it was a trip growing up in the eighties, I guess, when I kind of came of age as ateenager.
Because there was no multicultural programming.
It was just survival and the early beginnings of Christian nationalism that we see today.
(24:52):
I'll say this.
The good part about being Asian is most of the cults don't want me.
No one that looked like me was going to be on shiny happy people.
and you know, they, they, they steered clear of, my kind.
that said though, the new apostolic reformation is very diverse and it started right whereI live in Pasadena.
And so, you know, like crazy Che on and Cindy Jacobs, they can, they can just roll inthere as a woman, a white woman and as a Korean guy, Queen American man.
(25:21):
like, I'm a prophet.
And they're like, cool.
And so, the thing that they don't talk about is.
is race and and you know churches today are trying to have this conversation and they'reabout 20 or 30 years behind, you know, the rest of the world when it comes to this.
But yeah, I I grew up knowing that I was not.
(25:44):
I never thought I could be like a head pastor.
No, wouldn't have even crossed my mind because not white guy.
I thought maybe I could be a worship but even I never saw a worship leader that wasn'twhite.
in the eighties and even in the nineties.
So just trying to figure out how to carve out an identity, because I wanted to be part ofthis group.
(26:08):
I grew up in this church and in this movement and this evangelical thing that was growingup all around me.
But I kind of knew that there was a ceiling, this glass ceiling kind of thing where I wasnever gonna be the guy in the room.
And even when in the nineties,
the evangelicals kind of, some of them got into this diversity thing.
(26:29):
And I had some good conversations in InterVarsity in my chapter in San Diego, it wasalways still diversity is still a white person in the middle of the room, the center of
the room.
who surrounded by the non-white and non-male people that they allowed to be on the side.
(26:52):
It was never going to be an equal seat at the table, equal footing.
And so the funny thing though is like, even with racism, patriarchy, all the things,that's not why I left Christianity.
I was ready to live the rest of my life fighting the good fight for social justice.
(27:13):
and for racial reconciliation was the buzzword of the 90s.
And I knew there was racism.
I knew there was sexism in the church.
And I just felt like that was my mission to help, to be a missionary inside.
so people think, well, you're just angry at the church.
That's why you left.
No, not why.
(27:34):
That was my mission.
I was going to do this for the rest of my life and I was happy to do it.
I left because of a whole bunch of other reasons.
The Bible doesn't make a lot of sense and yeah, the politics and yeah, all of it.
I keep thinking of the military when you're talking, because like the cult I grew up in, Inever wanted to be a part of, I never really tried, but in the military, I really tried
(27:57):
and I really, it's almost like they'll, these organizations that are not equal, they'lluse the us versus them against you, right?
It's that whole like, you're not like other ones, you know, like you're the good one.
And you even said like,
you were being exposed to more diversity in the church than you were like in your school.
(28:20):
So it's, don't know, I'm writing a musical and one of the lines I'm definitely putting inthere is Alanis's more set, we'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect.
But in the military, like you're only perfect if you're a six foot two straight white manwith blue eyes.
(28:40):
Oof.
And then every, you know, every denomination you are away from that, you have to workharder and you know, you're never gonna quite be there and even if you're better.
So this is also why I find that like talking about cults does such a good parallel totalking about like our society and these things that are going on right now, because this
(29:01):
is what, like what we experienced in cults is kind of what America is going through atlarge right now.
Yeah.
And to Scott's point about the model minority thing, the model minority myth was always adouble-edged sword.
Sure, it gave some East Asians, not Southeast Asians and not South Asians, but your bigthree, Korean, Japanese, Chinese.
(29:30):
It gave them a little bit of status.
We're the good ones.
it was just white supremacy using us as a wedge between other people groups, particularlyagainst Black communities.
We came here and faced all kinds of discrimination, but we didn't have slavery.
We didn't have Jim Crow.
(29:51):
We had other things.
My parents were born in incarceration camps.
But if we're going to, we can't play that oppression Olympics.
We have to build coalitions.
with everyone willing.
And Asian Americans, and I'll say this, Asian Americans need to recognize their place.
And we have to recognize that Black Lives Matter.
(30:15):
We have to recognize the work that Black people and communities have done to allow us tohave these movements and to be part of them.
It makes me so angry when I hear like of people, and it's usually older people who leaninto the model minority thing.
It's just like, no.
You're being used by white supremacy and that ain't it.
(30:38):
That's, that is not gonna go a forward.
And I appreciate you saying that because that's, it's just a testimony, right?
To how big and powerful and pervasive white supremacy is.
I mean, it's ingrained in all of our institutions to the fact that, you know, it evenendeavors to separate people to lift one minority up over another.
(31:03):
And you're exactly right.
I want to talk a little bit about
your journey, if we can return to that, was there a particular moment that the light bulbwent off and you said, okay, I'm done trying to fulfill this mission of helping the church
(31:24):
see that their racism and all of that.
Or was it, in my case, it was sort of like a, I remember spinning records, right?
Some of the records would have a slow fade at the end.
was no abrupt end to the song.
It sort of like faded out.
I feel like that was my story.
(31:45):
What about yours?
yeah, same.
It wasn't anything, one huge thing.
And my heart goes out, you I know people who had horrible experiences in a church or in aChristian setting that was abusive and in harmful in so many ways.
I can't imagine, you know, for me, was like death by a thousand cuts kind of thing where,you know, I accepted the racism and I was an early feminist of the late eighties and early
(32:12):
nineties and...
I was ready to fight for my sisters in Christ, you know?
And yeah, to me it was more just seeing things.
Okay, like for me, Sandy Hook was a big one.
Where is God?
know, learning about the Holocaust.
(32:32):
That is a tough theological thing.
know, reading Elie Wiesel, who had a relationship with God, but he was pissed at him.
He was angry and I was like, you can do that?
It's like, yeah, it happens all the time in the Old Testament actually.
Moses and Jacob and all these people who kind of fight with God a little bit.
(32:58):
That was so far out of my understanding of things.
And so once you get to that point, most of the teachings and indoctrination don't add upto the realities of life.
One of my guests on my pod I have a podcast called chapel probation where we talk aboutsurviving Christian schools and one of my guests is a good friend and Like he had a moment
(33:23):
where you know We're taught that you pray and if your life is good and you're right withGod God answers your prayers well his father got some rare cancer and He was part of this
Assemblies of God, you know very charismatic church
And they were all assured, we're gonna pray and we're gonna beat this because God isfaithful and blah, blah.
(33:45):
Well, his dad passed away and that was huge for him.
know, it's like, but we did everything right.
We went to church, we did the Bible studies, I memorized the verses, I witnessed topeople, you know, we did all the things that we were told and God didn't answer the
prayer.
You know, the father passed away.
And I think all of us, we're honest, even Christians today have to...
(34:10):
have to acknowledge that that whole mystery of prayer is kind of a sham.
Because, you know, and even when I was a Christian, I would have these conversations inour Bible studies, you know, like, well, wait, if God is all-knowing, doesn't he already
know what we want?
Or we need, we should be praying for, so aren't we wasting both of our time spending allthe time?
(34:31):
Because you read in the Bible, you know, Daniel praying for like three days.
It's a long time.
When the world was easy.
saying for three days.
know, he, what are we asking of God?
And what is the point to it if God already knows what's going to happen?
You know, and what if the thing I'm praying for runs contrary to God's, plan, his all goodand perfect plan, you know, then how am I supposed to know that?
(35:01):
so,
beyond that, right?
If you think about prayer, you mentioned Sandy Hook.
Every time there's one of these shootings, invariably Christians will come out of thewoodwork sending quote unquote thoughts and prayers.
And what that does, right, is a cop out because if you spend your time praying, yeah, whatcan you know, there are things that we can do, but no one's willing to do it because
(35:29):
everyone is praying, right?
yeah, yeah, yeah, and apparently not praying very well because it's not working
right?
Yeah.
And so it becomes a cop-out in much the same way, the promise of Christ's return and theapocalypse and all of that.
I was raised in a tradition that was imminent.
(35:52):
It could happen at any time.
But what it did, it kept us focused on some unknown future point when you look around theworld and there's all of this tragedy, there's all of this heartache.
that we could have done something about, even in our localities, if we pulled our money,if we pulled our resources and actually went out and helped people.
(36:14):
But because we were so fixated on the rapture happening that we were like, well, you know,that's none of my concern.
You know, I'm leaving this world behind.
And it serves as a cop out of dealing with the real world issues.
And I think this is really, really relevant in our politics right now.
And I'm seeing it a lot on the left.
(36:35):
It's like, it's easier to just panic right now.
And let me tell you, so the children of God, right?
We were the entertainment cult.
That was what we produced was entertainment, right?
And we produced Joaquin and River Phoenix and Rose McGowan and...
we made all these videos, right?
Like I was a child actress and all these videos that were made and produced at very highlevel and distributed around the world.
(36:59):
And so we had this one that was like late eighties, know, Cold War vibe and the song, itwas a music video and the song was 20 minutes to go.
And it was this, you know, when like the Hawaii launched the warning for the nukes byaccident.
And it was like, the bombs are incoming, right?
Literally 20 minutes to go.
(37:20):
How much love can you show?
you're like, if you think the rockets are incoming and the world is gonna end in 20minutes, you're gonna sit down and hug your family, right?
You're gonna think about your last memories.
You're gonna maybe go outside and have some conversations with the neighbors.
(37:40):
You're not gonna go fight back, right?
So keeping you in this constant state of apocalypse, right?
Right now I hear
things from the left, like, we can't protest, because they're trying to do martial law,you know, and things that are just like, no, they want you panicking.
(38:01):
Because if you're panicking, if you're in apocalyptic thinking, I even see it in corporateAmerica with, the robots are coming, right?
Then they don't actually have to prepare you, their workers, for what's actuallyhappening, you know, like,
we are living through, this is gonna get into a question we're talking about later withtech cults, but like we've kind of lived through an apocalypse in my opinion, which was
(38:29):
the industrial age running smack into the information age and like nothing being leftuntouched.
like everything in our world has kind of been in this constant mode of panic since then.
And it gives,
in my opinion, like it gives the authoritarians and the cult leaders the power becauseeverybody's scared.
(38:51):
Nobody's fighting back.
That's true.
Scott, when we talk about your departure from the evangelical world, what did yourinterpersonal relationships look like?
Because I know for a lot of people, this is the issue, right?
(39:12):
I know a lot of people who will have conversations with me and say, you know what, you'reright, but I've got too much invested.
I've got too much family.
I've got too many relationships.
It would be too disruptive.
to all of my relationships if I made a declaration or if I left or if I spoke out againstwhat is happening.
(39:33):
Was that difficult for you and what did that look like in your journey?
It was not difficult because as I write in my book, as I was teaching at Azusa and itjust, at the time when I started there, an Asian American arts and activism community was
starting up and my cousin was kind of a central figure in this and she brought me in.
(39:59):
I had never really leaned into an Asian American community before.
I had...
Asian American friends, but as far as like an identity in a group of people that werepredominantly Asian American hadn't really experienced it.
Cause I was always like, I, you know, build bridges and you know, don't just hang out withAsians.
(40:20):
got to witness to everybody.
Right.
So, I got more and more involved with this group as, I, I started not hanging out withchurch people, most of whom I didn't even like.
and being sort of seeding this whole other community in life.
(40:40):
So by the time I left, I had already stopped going to church long ago.
I was still teaching at APU, still had a lot of Christian friends and still do.
If Christians will be friends with me, I can be friends with them, but most of them don'twant to.
So yeah, by the time I left APU, that was like my last foothold into anything Christian.
(41:02):
I had this amazing...
chosen family group of people who are just waiting for me to come and just be there.
And so I didn't have to live two lives anymore.
So I was lucky.
And I write all about this in my book about the, it made me be a musician again.
I hadn't played music in like 10 years.
(41:24):
It made me understand who I was as a man, as a man in community fighting againstpatriarchy and racism.
It made me realize how colonized my mind was to whiteness.
And I always say, there's nothing wrong with whiteness.
It's just whatever majority culture holds all the power in any culture.
(41:46):
In Japan, it's Japanese people.
They're the worst.
They treat Filipinos and Koreans really bad.
And if you're talking about social justice from that framework, you're talking aboutJapanese people in this role that I'm seeing is whiteness here in America.
Having that opportunity to be a part of that community was, it also accelerated my way outbecause this is real community.
(42:12):
This is real love.
This is real caring.
There's no thoughts and prayers there.
It's like, if there's a need, we, we all round up each other and figure out how to meetthat need.
thoughts and prayers are not even like, in the, in the, in the lingo in the, the, in theresponse to anything.
and so being involved with things, you know, like, since my
(42:33):
my folks were all, and my families were incarcerated during World War II.
The Japanese American community by and large is, it can be somewhat conservative, but wedo not put up with people being rounded up.
so, you know, after 9-11, communities were very vocal speaking out against rounding upMuslim Americans.
(42:55):
And we're really, like, my community is real big on reparations for Black people and,
immigration, sanctuary status for our city of Los Angeles.
We have a real heart for people because we've been at the bottom.
We've been just completely cast away and locked up for no reason.
(43:15):
And so I think that gives us a lot of empathy.
And empathy is something that's very lacking in Christianity in American society today.
They're literally preaching in the SBC that it's a sin to have empathy, which just blowsmy mind.
I saw that.
I think there was even a book or a sermon that was published, The Sin of Empathy, whichreally is, wow, it's scary, it's dangerous.
(43:47):
But I think we see that, you know, it's across the country now with what's happening inthe government, what's happening even in local communities with this reassertion of white
Christianity, Christian nationalism, this conflation of quote unquote Christian valueswith patriotism and all of the language that goes with that just perpetuates these
(44:15):
oppressive ideologies.
Yeah.
It sounds so weird to say, that's where we're at.
That's where Christianity is now.
Donald Trump is the standard bearer for Christianity.
We've got a few minutes left, so tell us about your book and about your work now and wherefolks can find you.
(44:37):
You mentioned your podcast.
Tell us what's going on and how they can access all of that information.
Yeah, you can find me on Instagram and Blue Sky and Facebook if you're old.
I have a podcast called Chapel Probation, as I mentioned, and it started out as just AzusaPacific people that I knew, and I was hoping it would help me get a platform to write a
(45:00):
book.
But after the first maybe 10 episodes, I started getting emails from people all over thecountry.
I went to Liberty, I went to Bob Jones, I went to Wheaton, went to Moody.
And a whole bunch of schools I had never even heard of.
There's a lot of Christian schools out there.
And so I opened it up from that point on and I'm in my, I just finished my fourth season,130 something episodes.
(45:26):
It's going great.
I love being able to help people tell the, and I'd say 90 % of my guests don't have aplatform.
They just have a story.
And I love just helping them tell it to say, this is what I went through as a woman atthis school or as a black.
person at this school, as a queer person, as a trans person.
(45:46):
Try to cover all the different aspects of how crappy it is to not, well, just to evenwhite people suffer at these schools.
And it's made for them and it still sucks.
so, yeah, that's chapel probation.
My book is called Asian American Apostate.
It's sort of my memoir about teaching at Azusa Pacific and...
Trying to be a Christian for the first part and then just losing it all and then justfomenting revolution wherever I could and If they weren't gonna fire me, I might still be
(46:15):
there.
I liked being I never I never tried to like make anyone not be Christian.
I always Wanted to help them be because you have to teach Christian, Stuff it's a it'saccredited and i'm an english professor, but you know faith integration is what they
called it and
And I was good at it.
(46:36):
I got reviews from students saying, feel like I'm a better Christian thanks to ProfessorOkamoto.
And so I felt good about staying there.
Was I lying when every time I signed my contract?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wasn't going to church and I didn't believe all the, you know, the Bible's inerrant andI didn't believe, you know, Jesus died for my sin to stay.
But I felt like I had carved out a niche space in this, you know, if you need to talkabout.
(47:01):
what it's like to be gay or what it's like to be oppressed as a woman or a BIPOC person.
My class was the one to take and it was like this underground secret until it wasn't.
And then that ended.
You know, one thing I always think when I look at revolution, but also when I look atgetting people out of cults is like, there are the people that are running the halfway
(47:24):
houses, right?
The people that have are doing what you're doing, right?
Like they're there.
You probably radicalized so many students, right?
Without knowing, right?
Just by answering their questions, just by being there.
But like you still had to have.
half of yourself in the cult.
And I always, I think there's actually kind of a natural time for folks like you and Scottwhen you're coming out of the cult yourself, that you're like really actually cut out for
(47:53):
that work of kind of being like halfway in and holding the door open for a bunch ofpeople.
But eventually, at least for me, I found like I can't do that work because it's still too.
mission, right?
You still it's too much all the time.
It's still asking you to sacrifice yourself to be there for these students.
(48:18):
But yeah, I think it's almost like when you are a new convert and you have yourmissionizing phase.
And then when you're on your way out, you have like helping everyone else out phase.
I don't know, I kind of love it.
And scott might have seen this too is as radical or evil or whatever as I People thought Iwas I don't think that many people radicalized because of me I think if anything a lot of
(48:45):
christians dug their heels in more, you know, who really radicalized people bible teachersThis is what the bible actually says And this is what it doesn't say that you think it
does
That I feel like radicalized way more people than, you know, flaming liberal me or Scott,right?
(49:06):
It's like teaching argument.
Great, argumentation is one thing.
You can't really argue people in and out of these head spaces.
But man, if you show these people what the Bible actually says, that's the game changerthere.
Absolutely.
reason that a lot of high control Christian groups like the King James Version, because itis archaic, because it's archaic English and it's difficult to understand.
(49:35):
And so I get such a kick out of it though, because I'm like, the whole reason King Jamesdid a Bible is to get the church off of his back because he was super gay in public.
so.
in his court.
Yeah.
And it sounds like Yoda.
That's the one thing I like about the King James.
(49:56):
Sometimes the diction is a little odd.
And, you know, but this, this also goes back to like a bigger thing I like to say, whichis like real experts will draw the edges of their expertise in Sharpie and like real
professors and scientists and educators will engage with you about what's in the text,right?
(50:20):
Like if that's what you're teaching and a student comes up with it, you know, like I had aCatholic professor and I decided I wanted to
to get at her.
And so I was going to write an essay about all of the homo erotica in Dante's Inferno andwhatever.
Right.
And like, it was fine.
(50:40):
I didn't get in trouble, right?
Like she didn't like it.
But she's a professor.
She's engaging with like, what's on the page?
What's the argument being made?
And
bad, the homoerotic.
even, I was just playing it up.
I was saying there's this whole argument here.
I did another paper in my masculinity literature class about how Hemingway was theultimate feminist because of these things that he couldn't even see.
(51:06):
I was just, for the first time in a school where I could make an argument and people wouldengage with that argument and not tell me that I was evil.
And this is what I think is one of those things where like,
if an expert, you you bring them something else and they get mad at you for that, likethat's not a good sign, you know?
(51:30):
Like usually true experts and true, you know, academics are gonna engage with the actualargument itself.
Exactly.
let's let's go down that road.
Let's let's see where we end up.
Yeah, that's.
I remember the first time I heard the term white privilege, I was like, literally excited,because I finally had a term for a thing that I had noticed, right?
(51:55):
And I was like, thank you.
And this is almost how I felt in my own kind of like anti-racism, you know, post-cultjourney is like, I know all this stuff in the back of my head, and I just get more and
more information.
And I'm like, grateful for it, you know, and it's like, I think
That is something that no matter what, we have to like learn that way of looking atlearning when we are outside of cults that like, as my Scott was saying earlier, you know,
(52:27):
we're here to almost like disprove our theories, not to just prove ourselves right.
And speaking of theories and questions, Daniella, you had one that you wanted to bring ourattention to.
Yes, okay, so we are doing a thing now on the Patreon.
Check out our Patreon if you want access to all of my stuff in one place, includingUnAmerican, my book, Deconstructing Whiteness and White Supremacy, that will come out.
(52:55):
And the question is from one of our Patreon members, I would be very interested to hearyour thoughts on the cult of the tech industry, if you think it's one and their
ideologies.
I've been reading blah, blah about the broligarchs.
And I would be interested to see if you had any thoughts on the cult dynamics of the techindustry and disillusionment of the public workers.
(53:19):
And boy, do I ever, I mean, I think this is so relevant right now because what we areseeing in our government is literally like a marriage of Satan between Christian
nationalism and tech bros.
And Elon Musk is playing, you know, move fast and break things with the government.
But this kind of goes back to what I was saying, right?
Where like everything was going along in the industrial era and we kind of knew how theworld worked, or at least like the people running the world felt like they knew how it
(53:48):
worked.
And then we had this apocalypse, which was the information era, right?
Literally nothing has remained untouched.
Literally by the time I was studying international security in 2010, the internet goingdown was the largest disaster in the world.
right, ahead of nuclear war, because by the way, the nukes are on the internet, right?
(54:09):
Like nothing remained untouched.
Everything changed.
People's lives fell apart.
People died.
People's entire American dream vanished or was created, right?
And then who did we have come out of this apocalypse leading the way, the tech industry,right?
And you have your Steve Jobs.
(54:31):
And so,
Like actually one of the big wins of the 20th century was that after World War II, like wemoved away really hard and fast away from charismatic leadership and into bureaucracy and
science and you know, the person who has the degree has the job and we want CEOs to begood managers.
(54:52):
And then came this huge apocalypse and we started following people like Steve Jobs, right?
And thinking that like charisma and brashness mattered more.
And I actually make this comparison in my book I'm writing now, The Culting of America,where I'm like, at some point there wasn't that much difference between marching around
(55:13):
the cult commune quoting quotes from our leader or Bible verses, marching around KandaharAirfield quoting General Petraeus and the things that he's said about winning the hearts
and minds and counterinsurgency.
And then I left the army and I went straight to work for Microsoft and everyone is likeliterally Satya Nadella quotes on their desk.
(55:35):
And like, I was just like, okay, like you couldn't have an iPhone because we worked atMicrosoft and how dare, you know, it was very, and actually one of the things that Satya
Nadella did that scandalized everyone was he was like, we're not winning in the smartphonemarket.
So we're just going to let our apps be on
(55:57):
iPhones, which was a very smart business decision, scandalous to the cult, right?
Like, how dare you let the non-Microsoft people into play, right?
So I do, I think, and then a lot of tech companies patterned themselves on cults.
(56:18):
Right?
And this is, think there's a larger story here about we started studying brainwashing, westarted studying the military, we started studying organizational psychology all at the
same time, and all those things are tied together.
But like, tech cults, like a big company in the early days called Trilogy, like moving itspeople to San Antonio so they could be isolated and starting up universities to mimic what
(56:43):
cults do.
Zappos, very, very similar, right?
actually emulating cult leaders saying, of course, they were gonna be the good ones.
But really just saying, like, we're gonna use all these human motivation tactics to getlabor.
But we're gonna give you a mission, right?
(57:05):
And the tech cults really brought this into entrepreneurship, brought this into all ofbusiness, right?
So like Walmart, Walmart's mission should be
to provide low-cost products to Americans, right?
But if you go to their website, it says their mission is to provide low-cost products toAmericans to transform their lives.
(57:30):
And this is the thing that the tech cult has brought in, right?
Like every single accountant and person, right, is making a difference and is changing theworld.
And what I think ties back to evangelicalism so well, because I call it missionizing.
when you take the mission and you weaponize it and you use that great mission, right?
(57:52):
Whether it's we wanna save the world for Jesus or we wanna end cancer or we wanna go toMars, cults always promise space travel.
And you should sacrifice for that, right?
And sacrifice, which is my step four of cults, always ties to step eight, which isexploitation of labor, right?
And it's all about getting your labor.
(58:12):
And that's what we see like.
I'm writing or I'm editing the exploitation of labor chapter right now, which I lead inwith Twitter and present Doge.
And I can't even write it because things keep happening too fast.
And to your point, you know, it's really interesting that, you know, 2016, thought, youknow, the first Trump term, thought this guy, this is the last white guy, right?
(58:39):
This is the last, this is the last stand for white supremacy.
But now in the second term, have, you have Donald Trump who doesn't even use email ispassing the baton to the guy, right?
That's, that's supposedly leading the tech.
revolution.
So white supremacy is not going away.
(59:01):
It's just being passed to a new generation that are now harnessing technology to spreadthis ideology.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is the same thing we see with all of our systems, I think, like webuilt all these systems, but then we built human biases into the systems, right?
(59:22):
So like, we look at who built the AI and it was like white guys and Asians, right?
And so like, yeah, and Alexa recognizes women's voices 77 % less, you know, just like, so.
I mean, this is, but it's also one of those things that like, the cult always seems greatuntil it's not, right?
(59:46):
And then you're locked in this system and we're trying to undo it.
I don't know, I've got my answer now for people that say that both sides are just asculty, which is I wasn't selling 50 to 200 cult books a day when the Democrats were in
office.
So our people are running the country now, y'all.
(01:00:07):
And I think,
I mean, at least the good thing is like we have relevant information to give people andlike we know what to expect, right?
We know what they want, cause we all lived that.
And Scott, I'm so excited about your book.
I love the title, Asian American Apostate.
Like, do you put that on t-shirts?
(01:00:27):
Because you could sell so many of those on TikTok, I feel like.
of that and if you look at the cover we made it look like a Bible it looks like one ofthose like Gideon Bibles that it's kind of sacrilegious, so it's kind of fun
I will be getting with you to get a copy of me talking about that to my TikTok audiencesas well.
Definitely everybody, please like and subscribe to the podcast and check out all the linksfor Scott's stuff will be in our show notes.
(01:00:57):
Thank you so much, Scott, for joining us.
And we encourage everyone to go check out your information, buy the book, and spread thegood news, right?
The good news or bad news, however you want to look at it, that the culting of America istaking place right before our eyes.
And yeah, just to echo Daniela, like the podcast, share the podcast, and tune in nexttime.
(01:01:24):
And we'll see you all on the next episode of Cults and the Culting of America.
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