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Bethel, Gold dust and more oh my!

I really thought I’d seen it all.

Twenty years in and around megachurch culture will do that to you. NDAs, stagecraft, manipulation, money games, I was pretty sure nothing could actually surprise me anymore.

Then someone messaged me on TikTok.

They told me about churches targeting elderly people, cozying up to them, and quietly steering their money and inheritance toward the institution while the family has no idea anything is happening behind the scenes.

That shit hit me harder than I expected.

Right now I’m a caregiver for my grandmother in memory care. I see up close how vulnerable she is. How much she trusts the people around her. How easily confusion and isolation shape what she says yes to. People who study elder financial exploitation talk about this exact mix, how cognitive decline, health issues, and dependence make older adults prime targets for financial abuse. It’s not theoretical, it is the profile. So when I hear churches wrapping financial pressure in “legacy” language and spiritual guilt, it doesn’t sound like generosity to me. It sounds like people taking advantage of someone who can’t fight back.

Most of the time when I write, I’m telling you my own story, the rooms I sat in, the things I heard with my own ears, the culty script I lived in for twenty years.

This time, it isn’t my story.

It’s someone else’s. Someone who trusted me enough to say, “This happened in my family.”

They described a church getting close to an elderly relative. Lots of talk about “stewardship” and “leaving a legacy.” Then help with money and inheritance decisions that just happened to push more toward the church. All of this going on while the family had no idea those conversations were even happening

And yeah, churches talk about planned giving all the time. That part isn’t new.

It sounds harmless: legacy giving, estate planning, “sowing into eternity,” making sure your money goes to what really matters. But churches are still institutions. They know how to wrap a financial ask in holy language, how to make pressure sound pastoral, how to make an older person feel like giving more is the same thing as being faithful.

Estate planning itself is not the problem. It’s normal and good to make plans for your money, your home, your wishes, your family as you age. Even church affiliated guides talk about estate planning as a way to reduce stress, protect loved ones, and clarify your wishes

What’s not fucking normal is when the institution that benefits financially from those decisions starts shaping them in private.

What’s not fucking normal is when family members are cut out of the room.

What’s not fucking normal is when the church suddenly becomes the most trusted voice in conversations about wills, assets, and end-of-life choices.

What’s not FUCKING normal is when concern from children or grandchildren gets reframed as greed, bitterness, or a lack of faith.

You can call that ministry from the stage, but if you’re targeting vulnerable elders for their money, you’re grooming them, not caring for them.

Once you stop letting the churchy language blur things, the pattern is pretty obvious.

You start with elderly members who are loyal, isolated, grieving, or deeply attached to the church. Then the contact ramps up, more visits, more “pastoral care,” more prayer, more talk about “church family.” Eventually the stewardship talk gets heavier: legacy, eternity, impact. Then comes the “help” with paperwork and beneficiaries. By the time the actual family realizes something happened, it’s already been spiritualized and signed.

And if they ask questions after the fact, they get painted as selfish or greedy.

That move is so god damn tired

Isolate. Spiritualize. Shame anyone who names what happened. Same playbook,

Culty shit isn’t always bunk beds and chanting and someone predicting the end times.

Sometimes it’s a nice sanctuary, a legacy brochure, a soft voiced pastor, and a quiet conversation with an elderly person who trusts you. Sometimes it’s a church stepping into emotional and spiritual authority and using that authority to benefit financially. Sometimes it’s exploitation getting rebranded as “faithfulness.” Fuck that.

And yes, people inside church systems have started naming this. One United Methodist resource on elder financial abuse warns that people who exploit the elderly often show up representing churches, visiting hospitals and nursing homes, using a “mantle of respectability” to get access and trust. Christian watchdog groups point out that elders hold a huge share of wealth, and estimate millions of cases of financial abuse each year with over a hundred billion dollars lost. State securities regulators have publicly warned that scams using religious trust and spiritual language are on the rise, with losses in major church linked investment frauds approaching the billion dollar range. When you put all that next to stories of churches “helping” with legacy gifts in private, it stops sounding like paranoia and starts sounding like pattern recognition.

If you’re caring for an aging parent or grandparent and their church involvement suddenly starts to feel secretive, financially intense, or just off, you’re not greedy for noticing. You’re not anti-church for asking questions. You’re not dishonoring anyone by wanting to know who’s influencing major financial decisions.

You’re paying attention. That matters.

For me, sitting in memory care with my grandmother makes this all feel even sharper. I watch how her reality shifts in a single afternoon. I watch how easily a calm, trusted voice can sway her. I watch how much power anyone has who shows up consistently and speaks with confidence. The idea of a church using that kind of access to quietly move money around makes me nauseous.[sec +1]

I really thought I’d heard it all.

Turns out I hadn’t.

If a church is using ministry access, spiritual authority, or “legacy” language to steer elderly people into giving away assets while their families are left in the dark, that isn’t generosity. It’s predatory.

And yes, this absolutely qualifies as culty shit

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Further reading / resources:

If you want to see how big this problem is outside my story:

• Elder Financial Exploitation, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

• Elder Financial Exploitation White Paper, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

• Protect Older Americans from Financial Exploitation, American Bankers Association

• Elder Financial Exploitation on the Rise, MinistryWatch

If you are someone or know someone who signed an NDA to protect one of these places lemme know in the comments IF YOU DARE MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!

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NDAs in church? What the fuck!

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The part they never announce from the stage

In a lot of megachurches, pastors and senior staff sign non‑disclosure agreements. Not volunteers. Not the random guy in the third row. The people who actually see what happens behind the scenes.

That’s a big reason you don’t see many of them out here telling the truth once they leave. It’s not just “they’re trying to be gracious” or “they don’t want to be divisive.” There is paperwork in place that says, in plain language: if you talk about what happened here, we will come for you.

I know that world from the inside. I got hired by a church at eighteen and stayed at that same church for twenty years. I worked every job they gave me, stood on every stage they told me to stand on, carried more secrets than I knew what to do with.

When they hired me, NDAs weren’t a thing yet. Nobody sat me down and said, “Sign here so we own your story.”

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The moment they tried to cash in a contract I never signed

Fast‑forward two decades. It’s time for me to leave.

They call me into a room and start “reminding” me of what I had signed and what I am not allowed to talk about now that I’m walking out. They tell me that if I ever speak poorly about the church, they will come after me for ten thousand dollars.

Ten thousand dollars, for telling the truth.

They say it like it’s already established. Like we all agreed to this in some hazy, holy moment.

I’m sitting there thinking, “I don’t remember signing anything like that.”

So I go looking for this sacred document they’re hanging over my head.

There isn’t one.

There is no NDA on file for me. I never signed it. Nobody ever put it in front of eighteen‑year‑old me and said, “this is part of following Jesus here.”

When I tell them that, they start scrambling. Because suddenly they realize they have a long‑term insider with no leash on him.

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The offer: ten thousand dollars for my silence

They regroup and come back with a new plan.

“Okay. We’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you sign this contract saying you won’t speak about your experience here.”

Same idea, different direction. Instead of threatening to take ten grand if I talk, they offer to give me ten grand if I promise not to.

And tucked inside that contract is another clause:

I would agree not to work at another church within an eighty‑mile radius.

So it’s not just my story they want.

It’s my future.

They want to make sure that if I ever take another ministry job, it has to be far enough away that nobody compares notes. Nobody hears what happened. Nobody sees the pattern.

This is the same place that preached forgiveness, grace, community, “we’re a family.” The family is now offering cash in exchange for pretending nothing happened.

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Ten thousand dollars poorer, twenty years louder

I said no.

No NDA.

No “we’ll pay you to forget.”

No “we own your story now.”

I walked out ten thousand dollars poorer and twenty years louder.

And that trade was worth it.

Because once you see how these NDAs actually function, you realize they are not about protecting “the work of God.” They are about protecting the brand, the leaders, and the machine.

They exist so you never hear about:

• the bullying behind the scenes

• the financial nonsense

• the emotional manipulation

• the cover‑ups

• the quiet firings

• the pastors who get moved around like chess pieces after they cross a line

You do not hear those stories because the people who lived them are legally muzzled. All you ever see is the polished stage version and the annual baptism numbers.

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Why this matters if you’re still in church

If you’re sitting in a church and something feels off, but nobody will name it, this is part of why.

Your “shepherds” might be legally bound to protect the institution more than they are spiritually or morally bound to tell the truth. When a pastor disappears and the line is “God called them to a new season,” there might also be a document on a hard drive that says, “You will never speak of this.”

If you are a pastor or staff person who did sign one of those contracts, I see you. I know how heavy it feels to carry stories you are “not allowed” to say out loud. I know what it is like to have your silence purchased and sanctified at the same time.

I didn’t sign.

So I’m going to keep talking.

I’m going to keep saying what I saw behind the LED wall, handing you language so your body can stop screaming “this feels wrong” while your brain tries to keep up with the sermon.

If you want more of this and the rest of the culty shit I learned pastoring and working in and around a megachurch, that’s what this Substack is for. I take these stories further here, rip the systems, and let you see the pattern.

Thanks for reading.

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I was standing in a parking lot after a church service I didn’t attend, talking through a window to someone I’d known for years. They knew my story. The 14 years leading from the front. The sermons. The late-night hospital runs. The weddings, the funerals, the prayer circles, the mission trips, the budget meetings that went nowhere. They knew all of it.

And they looked at me, kind as they could, and said it.

“I just think if you had really believed, you’d still believe.”

I didn’t say anything for a second. I just kind of looked at them. Because I genuinely didn’t know where to start. This was my first time hearing this but it wouldn’t be my last.

I grew up in the faith. Gave my life to it at a young age and meant it. Spent over two decades waking up and orienting my whole existence around something I believed was true. I wasn’t faking it. I wasn’t performing it for a crowd. The belief was in the body. It was in how I processed grief and hope and fear and joy. It was in the way I read the world. Twenty-plus years of that. Fourteen of those years standing in front of congregations and meaning every word.

And the response to all of that, once I walked away, was: you were never really in.

Okay. Let me introduce you to something.

There’s a thing in logic called the No True Scotsman fallacy. The name comes from a thought experiment, and it goes like this: someone makes a claim, say, “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” Then you point to an actual Scotsman who did that exact thing. And instead of adjusting the claim, the person moves the goalposts. “Well, no true Scotsman would do such a thing.”

You see what just happened. The definition of “Scotsman” got quietly edited so the inconvenient example no longer counts. The original claim stays pristine because anyone who challenges it gets expelled from the category retroactively.

That’s it. That’s the whole move. It’s not complicated. It’s a way of protecting a belief by making it unfalsifiable. Nothing can ever disprove it because anything that would disprove it just gets reclassified as “not a real example.”

Now apply that to faith.

“Real Christians don’t leave the faith.”

Someone leaves.

“Well, they were never really a Christian.”

The belief system stays undefeated. It just redefined the terms. If you stay, you were real. If you leave, you were never real. The conclusion was always going to be the same regardless of the evidence. That’s not a theological position. That’s a closed loop.

And here’s what it actually does, what the move is actually for: it keeps the belief system’s hands clean. If someone who genuinely believed and genuinely served and genuinely gave everything they had for 20-plus years can walk away, then the system has a problem. That person is evidence of something. So the easiest fix is to say that person was never actually an example of the thing.

Expelled. Problem solved.

It’s not pastoral care. It’s not theology. It’s a defense mechanism dressed up as discernment.

What bothers me isn’t that someone disagrees with my conclusions. That’s fine. Disagree. Make the case. I’ll listen. What bothers me is the retroactive deletion of something real.

Because it was real.

The early mornings studying texts I believed were sacred. The nights I sat with people in the worst moments of their lives and prayed with them and meant it. Saving myself for marriage because I believed God cared about that. Quitting a music career I loved to go full time into ministry because I believed I was called. Standing over my kids and dedicating them to a God I believed was real and present and paying attention. The belief that what I was doing mattered eternally. I built my identity around it. My relationships, my calendar, my sense of meaning, my understanding of suffering, all of it ran through that framework. It shaped me in ways I’m still figuring out.

You don’t get to take all of that and call it fraudulent because the ending didn’t go the way you wanted. That’s not honoring anyone’s story. That’s protecting your own comfort.

I’m not angry about where I ended up. I’m clear. There’s a difference. Anger is hot and reactive. Clarity is just seeing the thing plainly for what it is.

And what I see plainly is this: the No True Scotsman move, when deployed against someone who has deconstructed, is telling a person that the most sincere years of their life were an illusion. That the grief they felt when they walked away from something they loved wasn’t real grief because the love wasn’t real. That the community they built and served didn’t count because they’re on the other side of a line now.

There’s real cost to that. Not just to me. To anyone who hears it while they’re still in the middle, still working through what they believe, still deciding whether they’re allowed to ask questions at all. What it communicates, whatever the intent, is that the price of honest questions is having your whole history voided.

That’s the thing I want to name. Not because I need anyone to validate what I went through. I don’t. I was there. I know what was real.

But there are people reading this right now who are still in it. Still sitting in pews or just barely left or standing in their own parking lots having their own version of that conversation. And I want them to know that someone calling your faith fake because it didn’t last forever is not a theological argument. It’s not insight. It’s not pastoral wisdom.

It’s a fallacy. Dressed up in church clothes.

And you don’t have to accept the premise.

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The evangelical church is one of the most dangerous places for people who are neurodivergent.

I did not know that when I walked in. I honestly thought I just had a special connection with God.

I am ADHD and dyslexic. I did not get that diagnosis until much later, which means my brain was already a loud, glitchy place before I ever heard a worship song. At fourteen, I was already flooded with false narratives:

I am not good enough.

I am not as good as that person.

Something is wrong with me.

Then I stepped into church, and instead of challenging those thoughts, they confirmed them.

All my internal “I’m bad” became “I’m inherently sinful.” Every intrusive thought became “the enemy.” Every doubt became “spiritual warfare.” Nothing actually got dealt with. I just learned new words to shame myself with.

Hyperfocus, but make it holy

One of the strange gifts of ADHD is hyperfocus. When my brain locks onto something, I can obsess over it for hours. As a kid and as a musician, that meant I could get lost in creating, arranging, and problem solving.

The church did not see that as brain chemistry. They saw it as the Holy Spirit.

If I stayed up all night designing a service or writing a song, that was not me in a hyperfocus tunnel. That was “God downloading ideas.”

When I was leading worship, my ability to read the room, track everyone’s micro reactions, and adjust in real time was not pattern recognition and sensitivity. That was “discernment.”

Every quirk of my neurodivergent brain was relabeled as a spiritual gift. And honestly, that felt incredible.

Because underneath the chaos, I had always felt like a problem. And suddenly this whole machine was telling me:

You are not a problem.

You are anointed.

Prophecy, anointing, and ownership

On top of that, I had leaders, including celebrity Christians, prophesy over me. They told me God had a calling on my life. Anointing. Destiny. That he was going to use me to do great things.

If you are a neurodivergent teenager who already feels broken, that is the most intoxicating thing anyone can say to you. Of course I believed them. Of course I doubled down.

What I understand now is that they were not just naming my gifts.

They were claiming them.

If your creativity, your sensitivity, your ability to read a room are “from God,” and God’s primary address is the church, then those things no longer feel like they belong to you. They belong to the institution that says it speaks for him.

My ADHD was not just “special.” It was leverage.

Ursula and the Little Mermaid voice

Leaving that world was terrifying.

My faith in the Bible went long before my belief in the Holy Spirit did. I could let go of the text faster than I could let go of the sensations I had been told were divine. The rush on stage. The creative surges. The gut feelings in a room.

Someone from a very famous charismatic church once told me point blank that my voice was a gift from God and he could take it away if I ever turned my back on him.

So when I started thinking about leaving, I had this cartoon level fear that God was going to turn into Ursula and rip my Little Mermaid voice out of my throat. Like I would wake up one day, open my mouth, and nothing would come out.

That is how deep the branding went.

They had not just baptized my brain. They had put their logo on my vocal cords.

Turns out I am just really neurodivergent

Here is what actually happened.

I left.

My voice did not disappear.

My creativity did not dry up.

My ability to read a room did not vanish.

What did change is that I finally got a diagnosis. I finally sat with professionals who could explain why my brain races, why I hyperfocus, why I notice a hundred things in a room that other people miss.

And instead of calling it “anointing,” they called it ADHD and dyslexia. Instead of saying “serve more, pray more, give more,” they talked about tools, meds, strategies, and accommodations.

They did not promise to deliver me from my brain. They helped me live with it.

It hit me:

Turns out I am super neurodivergent.

All those years I thought I had some mystical hotline to the Holy Spirit, what I actually had was an untreated brain condition being praised when it benefited the church and pathologized when it did not.

When my hyperfocus helped them, it was God.

When my executive dysfunction got in the way, it was disobedience.

Language I wish I had

If I could go back and hand that fourteen year old kid some language, it would sound like this:

• You are not evil. You are wired differently.

• Those racing thoughts and shame spirals are not demons. They are symptoms.

• Feeling deeply and noticing everything is not “too much.” It is a nervous system on high alert.

• You do not need another altar call. You need a diagnosis and a therapist who will not blame you for existing.

And maybe the most important one:

• Your creativity, your voice, your sensitivity, they are yours. You can share them with a community if you choose, but no one gets to own them in the name of God.

Why this still matters

I am telling this now because I see a lot of people like me getting pulled into the same trap.

Neurodivergent folks are catnip for high control religion. We are often hungry for structure, desperate for meaning, used to feeling “too much,” and eager to help and fix things.

A system that says “you are broken, but we can turn your broken into holy” feels like home for a while.

But if your church:

• calls your symptoms “sin,”

• calls your people pleasing “servanthood,”

• calls your hyperfocus “calling,”

• and never once suggests screening for ADHD, autism, or anything else,

that is not care. That is exploitation.

They did not help me understand my brain.

They rebranded my ADHD as the Holy Spirit and called it a miracle.

I am still untangling that. But at least now, when my brain lights up and I drop into a creative tunnel, I do not have to wonder if God will revoke it if I ask too many questions.

It is just me.

And that is more than enough.

I am convinced the majority of people writing today’s worship music are no longer Christians.

If we were to place our current worship music songwriters all on a scale with right-wing, Christian nationalist, white supremacist Zionists on one side and fully deconstructed, anti-Evangelical trolls on the other, I feel the middle would be completely empty.

It should be noted, I go into much deeper depth about the hymns vs. contemporary music debate for our subscribers, so if you want to see that, subscribe today and you will have access to that article! But that’s not what this essay is about.

First, the ugliest. The white supremacist Christian nationalist shit. Look at the song “No Longer Slaves.” I shouldn’t have to point out just how dangerous this premise is. You are taking American evangelical Christians, arguably the most privileged, self-serving, and exclusionary group in the country, and adding to their persecution complex.

Just saying God is saving them from their slavery is an egregious insult to all Black Americans. I can guarantee you somewhere between Louisiana and North Carolina there are white families gleefully singing “I’m no longer a slave to fear, I am a child of God” while a family heirloom couch sits on their property, upholstered in the skin of a Black slave, stuffed with the hair of many others. But, because Paul said we are no longer slaves to sin, white Christians feel the need to identify as former slaves?

(Totally off topic, but remember when Five Iron Frenzy said serving or seeking ourselves “would be a slavery to ourselves it isn’t free”? Even at the time I first heard it and was fully entrenched, I thought that was about the stupidest fucking lyric I had ever heard.)

But even if you have the mental gymnastic skills required to brush off that argument and say it’s fine, just know the lyrics get worse. There’s a line in the bridge that says, “You split the sea, so I could walk right through it / All my fears were drowned in perfect love.” What is that alluding to? The parting of the Red Sea. Which was in Egypt. Which is in Africa. And what happened in that story? God saved all the Israelites and killed all the Egyptians. All of them. “All the host of Pharaoh.” So, we are comparing God’s love for white American evangelicals directly to God killing Africans. A 1:1 comparison. There is no other explanation.

But it all balances out because on the other side of the scale we have people sticking lines in songs to get these Evangelicals singing all sorts of fun things.

“This Is Amazing Grace.” Great song, right? I would argue it’s even better than the original “Amazing Grace” since it wasn’t penned by the captain of a slave ship. But, as a grammarian, there was one line that always bugged me. “Who made the orphan a son and daughter.”

Syntactically, it doesn’t work. The orphan is a singular noun, not collective, so it establishes a single referent. The complement “a son and daughter” implies one person occupying both gendered roles simultaneously. So, we have a whole bunch of people who scream there are only two genders now publicly praising God for making intersex children. It’s beautiful, really. And, I guess you could make the argument that they didn’t mean it, but that is stupid. This is a song written by MULTIPLE professional wordsmiths and probably passed through a dozen or more hands before being published. They know what words mean. They know how to use them to create imagery and meaning. And, if it was a simple mistake, they would’ve caught it in the proofreading. It is such an easy fix, too. “Who makes the orphan a son OR daughter” or “who makes the orphans a son and daughter” would both fix it and mean what people think they are saying. And they chose to go with the intersex option.

Other times, the trolls are out just for shits and gigs.

“Oh come on my soul, don’t you get shy on me” is perhaps my favorite line of contemporary Christian music. I mean. What the fuck is that? And it’s repeated over and over. Just a bunch of high-haired, holier-than-thou old women singing “come on my soul, don’t you get shy on me.”

On Sunday morning, I can’t look at the band during that song or I’d lose my shit. Choir and worship team seem so sincere, but in the measures leading up to it, the drummer and bassist start making eye contact and biting their cheeks. Then the guitar players are smiling ear to ear trying to catch their eyes, but by this point, the rhythm section is staring dead-eyed at the floor trying to keep their shit together. By the third CUM ON MY SOUL, the whole band is dissociated and can’t look a soul in the face, whether it has cum on it or not.

And of course, when you point this out, people will tell you you have a dirty mind. But seriously, if you hear “come on my [anything], don’t you get shy on me,” there is no other way you can interpret it. And yeah, with the slave shit, there is some biblical basis people can use to justify it, but here, no. There is not one syllable of the Bible that says your soul can be shy or need prodding. This line is only there for shits and gigs.

by J. Spartacus

Churches should pay taxes. Full stop. But that’s not what this is about.

Part of the reason churches have their non-profit, tax-exempt status is because they are supposed to do good works to benefit the community. And some do. In my opinion, no one does this as well as the Sikhs. Many Sikh temples operate a tradition called langar, a free community kitchen where anyone, regardless of religion, background, income, or status, can sit down and receive a hot meal with no questions asked. Rich or poor, believer or atheist, stranger or neighbor, everyone eats together as equals. It is one of the clearest examples I have ever seen of a religious community putting service and human dignity ahead of performance or profit.

Meanwhile, churches shutter their doors and tell people who lost their homes in a hurricane to go sleep at the mattress store.

And then there are the churches who do performative charities, and actually hurt their communities in the long run, just so they can have the temporary glory.

I’m on the board of a local nonprofit. We mainly service low-income Black and brown families. And while our charity has been an established part of our community for over 50 years, times are getting harder. Most of our funding was federal. And right now the federal budgets are ruled over by a POTUS who thinks Black and brown people are less than human. And all our federal funding went away. We are doing what we do now on a shoestring budget with lots of volunteers and local donors.

A church met with our board asking about how they could help us. We sat down with them, explained our mission. Explained our financing. Where we got our materials from. What our volunteers did. How we reached out and got new clients. We really thought we were going to expand our mission.

Then the church ghosted us. That’s ok, lots of people flake. It’s just something that happens in the nonprofit sector.

Yet, soon after, the church announced a new program they were doing. The name was almost the same as the name of our charity. And they had the same mission. And the same clientele. And while an outside observer may think they were doing a lot of great things in the community, they were actually doing fuck all. Because they brought no additional value. They aren’t reaching anyone we aren’t reaching. They aren’t doing anything we weren’t doing. They bring nothing new to the table.

But, if the same services are being offered to the same people, what’s the problem?

If you are old enough, you may remember when home internet first became available in the 90s, there were mom and pop internet providers all over the city. They had competitive prices and exceptional service. Then the national providers came in. Still the same great service, but even better prices. Who could pass it up? So we all switched to the national guys, and our local companies went out of business. And as soon as that happened, they tripled their prices. Not only were the small businesses shut down, but everyone in town was worse off than before the national guys came in.

This is what they are doing.

Every grant we apply for asks how many people we are servicing. When our numbers drop, they stop funding. I can think of a half dozen local charities that ceased operations in the past 5 years because of this church, and once they were gone, the church lost interest in the programs they created. And once the church stopped, there was no one there to fill the hole left. Our community is worse for having had their “help,” and they don’t give a shit.

Hey, my name is Joshua. I used to be a professional Christian for 20 years 14 as a pastor

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The lacrosse car moment

We were sitting in the car right before my son’s very first lacrosse practice.

Up until that moment, I had coached him in baseball for eight years. I knew the drills, I knew the kids, I knew the parents, I knew exactly who he was on that field. This was different. New sport, new coaches, new teammates, and for the first time I was not going to be out there with him.

He grabbed his stick, opened the door, and I could feel the nerves in him and in me. That little squeeze in your chest when you are about to walk into something totally unknown.

The old version of me, the pastor version, wanted so badly to pray the feeling away. I wanted to grab his hand and say, “Let’s give this fear to God. Let’s ask Him to take it.” I wanted to do the thing I had been trained to do my entire life: reach for some spiritual language so I did not have to feel how scary it actually was.

But he got out of the car. The door shut. And I was just left there. Alone with the feeling.

There was no worship song playing, no church language to hide behind. It was just me, a quiet car, and this deep ache of watching my kid walk into something new without me.

Sitting in that feeling, instead of praying it away, pushed me into a deeper reflection.

My mind went straight back to my own childhood, to a day when I was the new kid on a team. I remembered standing on the edge of the field, not knowing anybody, wondering if I would be good enough, if I would make friends, if I would belong. I remembered how intense that felt in my body.

We went on to win a championship that year.

But the important part of that memory was not the trophy. It was the reminder that the fear did not mean I was in the wrong place. It meant I was human. It meant the moment mattered.

Sitting in the car after my son walked away, I realized how many times in my life I have tried to avoid that exact feeling by making it “spiritual.” I prayed it away. I “gave it to God.” I told myself that if I had enough faith I would not feel that way at all.

For the first time, instead of asking God to remove the feeling, I let it stay. I let it say what it needed to say. My son was doing something brave. So was I.

That is when I realized this thing I had been unlearning in my own life has a name.

People call it spiritual bypassing.

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“Let go and let God” as a way to avoid things

For most of my life, I thought I was being spiritual. Looking back, I can see that a lot of the time I was just really good at not dealing with my own stuff and calling that faith.

I put myself in unsafe situations because I was convinced that God would protect me. I went on trips, stayed in unhealthy ministry environments, tolerated emotional and spiritual abuse from leadership, and wrapped all of it in this idea that if I was faithful, God would keep me safe.

When it did not feel safe, when something in my body was saying “this is not okay,” the response was always some version of “Have you prayed about it? Have you surrendered it? Have you laid it at the foot of the cross? Are you trusting God, or trusting yourself?”

I did what I was told. I prayed it away.

Nobody told me that the problems I kept “giving to God” were not going anywhere. They did not vanish. They did not evaporate into the heavens. They just went quiet and settled deeper in.

They turned into panic. They turned into shame. They turned into confusion. They turned into bad decisions that I then had to explain away with more spiritual language.

Spiritual bypassing let me act like I was healed while my body was trying to tell me something was very wrong.

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When prayer becomes a way to avoid ourselves

One of the strange things about spiritual bypassing is how good it sounds from the outside.

It sounds mature. It sounds obedient. It sounds like “deep faith.”

If you feel anxious, you are told to “cast all your cares on Him.”

If you are angry, you are told to “give that bitterness to the Lord.”

If you are deeply hurt, you are told to “trust that God will heal it in His timing.”

When nothing changes, we are rarely invited to question whether the tools we were given are incomplete. Instead, we are invited to question ourselves.

Maybe you did not surrender enough. Maybe you are still holding on. Maybe you do not really believe that God is capable. Maybe there is some hidden sin blocking your healing.

Over time, this trains you to doubt your own inner world. You start to believe that every alarm bell in your body is just a lack of faith.

Spiritual bypassing takes real pain, trauma, abuse, fear, and doubt, and covers it with a religious phrase so that the system never has to change, and you never learn how to respond to it in a grounded, human way.

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The cost of never actually dealing with anything

I have started to see how often I used prayer to avoid dealing with what was right in front of me.

Prayer became the place I dumped my anxiety, my doubts, my anger at leadership, my questions about the Bible, and my fear that I had given years of my life to a system that was hurting people.

Instead of naming what was wrong, I told myself to press in, to pray more, to “trust God’s plan.”

Over time, that had a cost.

I never really learned how to listen to my own body.

I never learned basic emotional skills.

I did not know I was allowed to say, “This is harmful and I am leaving.”

I stayed in situations for years that were slowly destroying me because I thought leaving meant I was failing some spiritual test.

I was asking God to remove a kind of pain that was being created over and over again by the very environment I refused to walk away from.

It is like standing in a house that is slowly filling with smoke and instead of walking outside, you kneel in the living room and ask God to make you less bothered by the burning in your lungs. When you start coughing, you assume it is a sign that you still do not trust Him enough.

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Prayer is not the problem

I am not angry at the idea of prayer itself. I am angry at how I was taught to use it.

For years I used prayer to silence my own intuition. I used it as a way to avoid hard conversations. I used it to stay in jobs and relationships that were not healthy. I used it to hand off responsibility for my mental health.

Instead of calling something abuse, I called it “spiritual covering.”

Instead of calling something unsafe, I called it “stepping out in faith.”

Instead of setting a boundary, I called it “loving like Jesus.”

Instead of going to therapy, I called it “taking it to the Lord in prayer.”

I wrapped my fear of change in religious language and called it “waiting on God.”

Eventually I had to admit that if my version of faith kept me from protecting myself, it was not making me more loving or more grounded. It was making me easier to control.

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What healing has started to look like

Healing for me did not look like a more intense worship night. It did not look like a better quiet time routine. It did not look like more fasting or more journaling.

Healing looked like calling what happened to me trauma, not “a season of testing.”

It looked like naming abuse as abuse, not “spiritual authority.”

It looked like realizing my body is not the enemy, it is my home.

It looked like letting myself be angry about what I went through, without rushing to forgive on a schedule that made everyone else comfortable.

It looked like sitting in a therapist’s office and saying out loud things I had only ever prayed in secret.

It looked like realizing that my problems were not still there because I had not “surrendered enough.” They were still there because I had never actually been given tools to face them. I had only been given language to talk around them.

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If this sounds familiar, you are not failing

If any of this sounds a little too familiar, I want to be clear about something.

You are not less spiritual because you cannot pray it away.

You are not a disappointment because your trauma did not vanish after a retreat or a worship night.

You are not broken because your anxiety came back once the music stopped.

You are a human being who was taught to cover deep pain with spiritual phrases.

If you were told “You do not need therapy, you just need Jesus,” or “Medication means you are not trusting God,” or “Boundaries are unforgiveness,” or “Your doubts are an attack from the enemy,” you were not being taught to grow. You were being taught to disappear inside your own life.

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A thought for you, if you are still in it

If you are questioning your faith right now, here is a thought for you:

When something hurts, when something feels off, when you cannot stop thinking about that one story or that one meeting or that one thing that happened behind closed doors, what is your first instinct?

Do you immediately try to pray it away, worship it away, speak a verse over it?

Or do you let yourself feel it, name it, talk about it with someone safe, maybe even get professional help?

If you notice that your instinct is always and only to make it spiritual, it might be worth asking who that really protects.

Does it protect you?

Or does it protect the system that caused the harm in the first place?

Here is what I know now. Pain that you only ever “give to God” but never actually work through does not disappear. It just shows up in different ways.

It shows up in your relationships.

It shows up in your body.

It shows up in your sleep.

It shows up in how you react to your kids, to your partner, to yourself.

You do not heal by pretending you are not hurt.

You start to heal the moment you believe your own story.

By J. Spartacus

I felt called to the ministry when I was 14. At one of those emotional cry sesh nights at summer camp. That led me to go to a Christian university. I was ordained. I was hired. And. I am still there today. But I don’t know if I ever believed.

I remember as a kid, every revival preacher who came through town would say a lot of people miss heaven because they believe in their heads but not their hearts. And I know that was a tactic to scare people into rededicating their lives to Christ, so they could walk the aisle at the end and boost the ministry’s numbers. And of course it was also said to guilt you out of your money. If, in that moment, you are making a commitment to give Christ everything, easiest way to build up some credit is by writing a check, right?

I am sure many people in that room, hearing the same words, had a feeling of dread and panic come over them. How could they not? It had been drilled into all of us that we weren’t worthy of heaven, and the only way to get there is to dedicate your life to Christ. When this was first presented to us, we were told we only had to pray sincerely to God to allow Jesus in our hearts, and we would be saved. Forever. Eternally.

But then we got older. And now the preachers were telling us that unless our every waking thought and action were dedicated to glorifying the Lord, then we weren’t really saved. We prayed the prayer as children, but our lives made it obvious we weren’t really sincere when we did, and if we died today, would we be sure our name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

And I’ll tell you, those evangelists scared a lot of people. Every service would see waves of people going down front.

But it didn’t scare me because even if I could never believe in my head, there was no doubt I believed in my heart. If my heart was the key to heaven, I would make it.

Even as a kid, the apologetics didn’t get to me (side note, if you are unfamiliar with the term apologetics, it is just a word Christians use for holy gaslighting). My Sunday school teacher would say we knew God was real because there had to be a creator. You can’t make something out of nothing! The other kids seemed to take it in. Accept it. But to me, that argument disproved God. If we can’t get something out of nothing, how did God get there? If we had to have God to make the Earth, we had to have something else to make God, right? They told me he’d just always been there. That was an answer my brain couldn’t understand or accept.

Their answer was we can’t understand God. I even had a preacher tell me if we understood what God understands, that would make us gods, and you can’t have more than one God! (Although most of Genesis would disagree with him on that last point.)

Some people took comfort in thinking we didn’t need to understand. God does, and that’s enough. That was a bullshit answer to me. And I needed an answer. It is not an exaggeration to say it was always on my mind. How could it not be? If I didn’t work this shit out and force my brain to believe things it was screaming at me not to, I would burn in hell. For eternity. Worst possible physical pain forever with no relief. But luckily, even if my head didn’t, my heart still believed. Surely that was good enough for heaven.

Once I surrendered, what a weird word we use to accept a calling, to the ministry, I took some comfort in knowing I would study theology in college. All of these preachers know the Bible way better than I do, and they have no problem believing. Once I have the knowledge they do, faith will be easy.

That was not the case.

Some things I learned brought me comfort and faith. Some things made me more cynical. Some things did both.

For instance, I was very relieved to hear most of the noteworthy Old Testament stories were not meant to be believed literally. Job. Jonah. Noah. Tower of Babel. They were all allegories. The original audience did not believe them to be real, and we shouldn’t either. Hearing that was such a relief. No wonder I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t supposed to! But then we were told these weren’t things we should ever tell our congregations if we wanted to keep our jobs. What kind of fucking bullshit is that? We are all supposed to perpetuate a lie? That hurt my faith.

So, I graduated and took a job in ministry, but I had already decided I couldn’t be a senior pastor. I couldn’t stand up in front of people and pretend that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the books bearing their names. I couldn’t get up there and preach a Christmas or Easter sermon with conviction because the stories don’t match. I am amazed every Easter when the preacher telling the resurrection story confidently says who met Mary Magdalene at the tomb as if there weren’t three other Gospels saying that’s not true. And why is the Christmas sermon always Luke’s version? I like Matthew’s so much better. Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his parents lived there. There was no manger or animals or any of that shit because it would be weird for people who lived there to go to a barn to have a baby. And the best part about Matthew’s version is it’s the only one without glaring historical inaccuracies.

I took a role where I knew I could have an impact and be the voice against harmful practices. Is it working for me? No. The only real difference in my church and the others in town is while we all have a fog machine, my music minister is the only one who got a lecture about being the literal cliché of church excess and waste, and how if he really believed what he says about the power of the Holy Spirit, then he wouldn’t think we needed a fog machine to do the Holy Spirit’s work.

So, why am I still here? I don’t know. On one hand, it feels wrong to walk by a burning building and do nothing when you could attempt to save the people inside. For a while I thought of myself as Sotomayor, Kagan, or Jackson. The voice of reason and compassion in the midst of the warmongering, fearmongering, corporate ass lickers on the court. But despite their best efforts, Trumpers are still gonna Trump. History will remember them as the good ones, but the fucked up shit they want to prevent is still happening.

I don’t know how long I can last in my current, soul-killing role. But, while I am here, I will be a voice from the inside, shining a light on the evil, selfishness, and self-promotion on the inside.

And, if my cover is blown, that will just expedite my egress, but I am not worried. Sure, someone reading this may recognize something I am talking about, put two and two together, and theorize that it is me. But I’m not worried. Because the things I am talking about are happening at every church in every city in this country. If I am doing my job right, everyone reading this should recognize their own, current or former, church, and try to figure out which minister is a liberal traitor talking shit. In a way, it will be like the ending of Spartacus in reverse. Instead of everyone standing up and declaring, “I am Spartacus,” the witch hunters scattered across this country will each convince themselves they’ve found me. Every congregation will have someone suddenly viewed with suspicion, someone the church decided must be Spartacus. And 99.9% of them will be wrong. Because I am Spartacus

If you’ve found me from TikTok or Instagram, this is where I slow down.

No 60‑second hooks, no algorithm bait just stories about what it did to my head and heart to grow up between the punk scene and the church machine, and what it’s taken to become a whole person again.

Here’s what you can expect if you stick around:

• Weekly essays about the weird, culty stuff I learned pastoring and working in and around a megachurch, told like stories—not sermons.

• A weekly deconstruction comic that turns church absurdity and trauma into a comic you can actually laugh at.

• A weekly anonymous insider column from a friend who still works in ministry but no longer believes, writing under a pseudonym about what it’s like on the inside right now.

• A recurring advice column called “Ask the Smokin Hot Wife” where my wife and I take a satirical look at your “most urgent” questions—from modesty culture to marriage BS to whatever the evangelical internet is melting down about that week.

Most of what we make here will stay free.

If you want to go deeper, there’s a paid tier that unlocks:

• The Lukewarm Vault – extra stories, extended cuts, and things that are too specific for public feeds.

• Director’s Cut essays that take one TikTok, story, or comic and walk through the whole unedited version.

• A physical zine collecting the best essays, deconstruction comics, and “Ask the Smokin Hot Wife” highlights from the month, plus other odds and ends from this little backslider club.

If you’re just here to read and feel a little less alone, you’re welcome.

If you want to help me keep making this stuff, upgrading to paid is how you do that. Either way, I’m glad you’re here.

Now, here’s where this all started for me.

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I grew up in the Bay, and my first real sanctuary was 924 Gilman and every sticky, dimly lit room that would let a bunch of kids yell into microphones and call it a set.

924 Gilman is a legendary all‑ages punk club in Berkeley—volunteer‑run, no rockstars, no corporate sponsors, just kids and bands trying things.

It’s the kind of place where bands like Green Day and Operation Ivy cut their teeth long before anyone cared, and where the rules on the wall matter more than whatever’s trending.

My uncle played in No Use for a Name, and I thought he was the coolest person on the planet.

He was my window into this whole other world—music, shows, stories from the road.

Around the same time, my friend Pat dragged me into church.

So from the beginning, I wasn’t in one world and then the other.

I was trying to live in both at once.

Gilman was holy to me.

The floor was disgusting, the sound was blown out half the time, and I loved it.

Nobody cared if your theology was tight. They cared if you showed up, moved with the crowd, and meant it when you screamed.

Church was holy in a different way—or at least that’s what I was told.

Hands raised, eyes closed, fog machine instead of cigarette smoke.

Same language of “come as you are,” completely different fine print.

Eventually I went from the crowd to the stage.

I got in a band, we clawed our way into playing Gilman, and for a while that was the whole dream. Then somehow that same kid ended up on Warped Tour sleeping badly, sweating constantly, playing fast, loud songs to people who understood the language of breakdowns and blast beats

Meanwhile, back home, the church had decided I was a missionary.

Every time I plugged in an amp, they were telling people, “We’re sending Joshua out to the lost. Look at what God is doing through our church.”

My band became their sermon illustration.

My life became their slide deck.

At church I was “our missionary to the punk scene.”

Inside the building I eventually wore the title—pastor, worship leader, the guy on the mic.

On the road I was just another dude in a van trying to make gas money and not lose his voice.

That’s where the split really started to hurt.

On one side: the kid who adored his uncle and wanted to live in that punk, Gilman, DIY‑community world.

On the other side: the version of me the church talked about like they owned the rights.

They framed every show as an altar call I hadn’t agreed to.

Every story had to be edited so it ended with “and that’s when Jesus…”

Any part that didn’t fit the testimony template got cropped out.

I learned really quickly that there was Church Me and Actual Me, and only one of them was considered holy enough to put on a screen.

And if you’ve been around that world, you know how fast it escalates.

You stop telling the whole truth in small ways because you don’t want to blow up the narrative they’ve built about you. You start preaching their version of your life back to them because it’s easier than arguing with people who think they hear from God about you more clearly than you do.

The wild part is: I actually did have real encounters with whatever we’re calling God in those years.

But it wasn’t because the church branded my life correctly.

It was in the moments that felt like Gilman when people showed up for each other with no cameras, no giving envelopes, and no one trying to turn it into a series.

I didn’t have language for it yet, but I knew this much:

• I knew what it felt like when a room was honest.

• I knew what it felt like when people meant what they screamed.

• I knew that “come as you are” could exist without a bait‑and‑switch.

So when I finally left the church world, I wasn’t starting from zero.

I had fragments of something real planted in me from those early nights in the Bay with my uncle’s world on one side and Pat’s church world on the other, and me trying to stand in the middle without tearing in half.

If you’ve ever felt split between the world that raised you and the world that saved you, I don’t have advice for you.

Just a question:

What was your Gilman?