Slow Train to Heck

Welcome to the finale of a podcast about people, sharing their stories of deconstruction and leaving behind toxic religious systems... so what happens next? I've got one more story for you.

Podcast episode about Hegel's God: https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/hegels-god

Slow Train To Heck - the Substack: https://slowtraintoheck.substack.com

Thank you all for listening for the past two year...

In this final conversation on Slow Train To Heck, Matt and Mandy Ottaway share the story of their lives together: Growing up in evangelicalism, attending Moody Bible Institute, getting into youth ministry in their early 20s... eventually with Matt realizing the restrictive intellectual cage that his ministry position required and Mandy experiencing the burnout of a life dedicated to church ministries while trying to raise their kid...

Matthew Burkholder joins the podcast to share his experience of growing up immersed in purity culture, starting all the way back as a kid in a Christian bookstore surrounded by the key texts of that ideology. We talk about the lasting damage that can be done by teaching children to hate the natural things that make them human, and the subsequent roadblocks that are created that can get in the way of healthy spirituality. We also ch...

Olivia Grigg shares her experience of Christianity and the spiritual trauma that it caused her, and gives her take on religious trauma as a whole from her perspective as a social worker and counsellor focused on helping people navigate changing beliefs, deconstruction, and that religious trauma. She discusses how many church environments force us to betray ourselves in many ways, from an early age, and normalize the lack of boundar...

Laurel talks about the link between dysfunctional families and dysfunctional fundamentalist churches, and how people in abusive situations who are desperate for love are reeled in by the promise of love from leaders who manipulate that desire for the purposes of control.

She also shares her own story of growing up in an abusive environment and how she has since found freedom from environments that use fear as a method of c...

This week I'm joined by Kevin Wilcox (see his previous appearance on the podcast in Episode 6) to talk about how you might be able to maintain or forge relationships "across the aisle" - is it possible for an evangelical and an exvangelical to be friends, and if so, how? What needs to be considered when entering into a relationship like that? What boundaries need to be established, what considerations need to be take...

This week I had the pleasure of chatting with Jannah Rulfs, who grew up Pentecostal in Southwestern Ontario and has since left the church. Jannah has a lot of really insightful things to say about the anxiety and fear that Christianity generated in her as a young teenager, the challenges she has with some of what Christianity seems to require of young people in terms of evangelism and certainty, and how she relates to Christianity ...

Alexandra and John share their experiences growing up Christian and the fear-based narratives they lived within. Eventually, they entered the mission field, living in China for some time, and eventually worked for Christian nonprofits. What they saw in these arenas further confirmed what they had grown up experiencing of Christianity - the system is broken. The way Christianity said Christians would act was not at all how the Chris...

Cassy shares her story and talks about her mental illness and sexual assault, and processing these heavy things while also processing her faith deconstruction. Cassy is an incredibly strong person who has come through a lot of really hard things, and I hope her strength inspires you as much as it did me.

Please take note of the content warnings below and mentioned in the opening, as this episode digs into a few things in d...

The Slow Train is back, and with it comes David Hayward, a.k.a. the Naked Pastor. David is a former pastor who has since become an artist, creating amazing paintings and cartoons that challenge aspects of religious environments in ways that provoke conversations - in fact he's recently released a collection of cartoons called Flip it Like This which you can check out right now and put it on your coffee table if you want to spa...

Walter Schultz hops on the Slow Train to Heck to share his story of being required to attend church as a child, the confusion that caused him when presented with two wildly opposed worldviews between Sunday School and public school, and how his relationship with his mother was what ultimately helped him escape that world and leave it behind.

Content warnings: spousal abuse, generational trauma, residential schools/church a...

This week Marie Wall shares her story of joining, living in, and ultimately Escaping the Church of God fundamentalist Christian cult in Aylmer, Ontario. She shares her harrowing experience of being slowly worn down by the church until she joined, then being brainwashed to believe that there was no hope for her outside their walls. After a deep descent into depression, she was able to escape and has never been happier. 

Con...

Jake Kroeker chats with us this week about his time at Trinity Bible Chapel, a fundamentalist evangelical church in the Waterloo Region of Ontario that has been increasingly positioning itself at the forefront of a growing Christian Nationalist movement among evangelical churches here in Canada. Jake talks about what motivates people who adhere to Trinity and churches like it, what his path out of that environment was, and how we c...

We rejoin Luke Williams this week as he shares the remainder of his story, detailing the changes in his life after he left Christianity. Luke covers a whole bunch of life experiences and viewpoints, including exploring polyamorous relationships and cannabis and other drugs; working with the homeless, and organizing conventions; inconsistencies in the Bible and the human influence on its creation; and how his personal politics and v...

Luke Williams joins the Slow Train to Heck to share his journey through and out of Christianity. Luke has lived through many different experiences in his life, and the message of suffering, and the expectation of suffering both now and in the future, was a strong one. However, Luke was able to move beyond that message and share his story with us now.

I'm a big believer in people being able to share all of themselves a...

Andrew Benson is a freelance writer, entrepreneur, pastor, and hiking enthusiast, who has worked in ministry all over Canada. Andrew and I have a great chat in this episode about what deconstruction looks like as a pastor, what deconstruction means to him, how interacting with people of other beliefs and cultures has impacted the way he sees things now, and what it might look like to hold things gently after redefining our beliefs.

Carly Butler is an indigenous woman who was born in the US, but now lives in British Columbia. Carly grew up in a Christian environment characterized by fear: Fear of government, fear of persecution, and most of all, the fear of the apocalypse. That fear drove her mother to take her to Canada to escape the coming tribulation, and things progressed from there. Carly's life is an amazing story of resilience in the face of overwh...

Amanda joins us this week to talk about her exit from the church and how she never fit the mold the church wants her to. She also shares her experiences as a mom of autistic children, and the challenges of being part of a church community who expected her kids to act a certain way - and how her and her kids' experience of Christianity caused her to feel like a failed Christian, and how the framework of evangelicalism had a neg...

Rev. Sarah Heath, author, designer, pastor, life coach, and host of great podcasts like Revcovery, joins us on the Slow Train to Heck this week.  Sarah grew up in Ontario working at Christian camp where she discovered her own innate leadership skills which would eventually translate to her being a great leader in church ministry. When she moved to the Bible Belt in the USA, she encountered a different version of Christianity than t...