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Social No Para: Ben on Christianity, Ministry, Music (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-14 17:13:40
Edited:
2024-08-14 20:07:06
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

[Bad audio for CJ, great audio for Ben (he/him).]

Lovely return to the new era of Social No Para with a hefty dose of Christianity.

Discussing the benefits and drawbacks of religious organizations, parasocial relationships with pastors, and the difficult to describe but impossible to mistake 'Shape' of a relationship with God.

Files

Social No Para: Ben on Christianity, Ministry, Music

[Bad audio for CJ, great audio for Ben.] Lovely return to the new era of Social No Para with a hefty dose of Christianity. Discussing the benefits and drawbacks of religious organizations, parasocial relationships with pastors, and the difficult to describe but impossible to mistake 'Shape' of a relationship with God.

Comments

Just Connor

loved this conversation, the back and forth build up of religious ideas goes hard, lots of amazing takeaways

Lou Corben

This was healing to listen to <3 are you still planning a Queer Christianity video at some point?

Ohbranana

Ben you're super cool! Thanks to both of you for the convo. :) Very grateful to get to listen in on conversations like this.

valentin

it's good to have this conversation blasted into my brain 5 days before my youth groups summer camp starts

Aeyun

Ben is delightful.

Lucas Regis

Christianity talk is always real af on the CJ The X Patreon! Ben sounds like a great hang haha, intelligent and delightful to listen to! And doing the literal God's work! I found really interesting to get an in-depth look on the highs and lows of churchgoing, as someone who was kind of run off from that world very early in my life. This gave me the motivation to actually start the MacMurray read of month!

Lynora Stallsmith

There's not many folx I can listen to talk about Christianity without dying inside a lil bit, but y'all win. Quakerism has been a really good place to land for me after growing up fundamentalist. It's hard for me to want to be a part of something that I've seen traumatize women (as y'all mentioned) so deeply, but there's also parts of things that I grew up with that still resonate with me. Especially hymns. I feel like music transcends the judgement and dogma somehow. I opted not to come see the live show in part because of the sort of trauma response that can be triggered with the god thing. -------------------------------It's super interesting to me that y'all continue to take part in churches who preach stuff you seem pretty against, enacting change from the inside, as it were. People who attempt to start from scratch so often end up forming cults, like you mentioned. Hard to know what the "right" approach is. Always enlightening to see how others approach it.

Zofia Graham

I am very late to this conversation but I appreciate CJ's work so much as someone who is reconnecting with my spirituality and Christian roots as of recently. I really liked hearing Ben's perspective as well - I think what he is doing working with kids is so important and it even brought me to tears hearing some of y'all's stories. The world of (I assume?) evangelical churches that y'all describe is very foreign to me despite growing up Christian - my churches never had bands, theater, worship teams or anything like that. I kind of had to put away some of my biases surrounding that type of worship listening to your convo and it is cool to hear that y'all coming from such a different tradition have come out with the same sort of conclusions that I and my family have from our own spiritual place. On that note, though, I was wondering if y'all have ever explored different Christian traditions? I grew up in the Episcopal church, which is much closer to the Catholic end of the spectrum in terms of worship practices but is also quite progressive politically. While of course my church is not perfect I feel like a lot of the harmful aspects you describe of your church's teachings like the misogyny and purity culture have not really been a factor at all in my Christian experience as a kid and today. But then again, we also didn't have those great artistic outlets for self expression so maybe it's a mixed bag in some ways. Something y'all said near the end kind of stuck out to me though, when you say that there is a lack of Christian elders that are really contemplating the big questions - I feel that to be pretty untrue in my experience. There are so many progressive churches like my own that include people from all walks of life just coming together to ponder Jesus without all of that baggage of fire and brimstone stuff, so I just kind of wonder what's the rationale of choosing to stay with these churches that have such problematic beliefs. Again, this may just be my own biases towards what I grew up with and I fully believe that you don't need to worship in any particular way in order to fully experience God, but when y'all talk about disillusionment with modern Christian establishments I felt there was something missing from the conversation there. Idk if either of you will ever see this but just wanted to add my thoughts.