Unshaken Faith

Jen Hatmaker says she no longer believes in a literal hell—but this isn’t just a debate about one doctrine. It’s a revealing case study in how deconstruction can reshape the entire Christian faith.In this episode, we break down Hatmaker's reasons for rejecting hell and examine a pattern we see again and again in progressive Christianity: bad experiences or bad theology are identified, but instead of going back to Scripture to correct them, biblical doctrines themselves are discarded.Is the biblical doctrine of hell really cruel? Is believing you know the truth inherently arrogant? Does rejecting Calvinism require rejecting Christianity? And what happens to evangelism when there’s ultimately nothing to be saved from?We also tackle a bigger question: When something in Christianity makes us deeply uncomfortable, who gets the final word—our feelings or God?This isn’t ultimately about Jen Hatmaker. It’s about where deconstruction can lead when Scripture is no longer the authority by which everything else is tested.

In the last few years, various groups of evangelicals have gotten together to write position statements on cultural subjects for believers to sign onto in an effort to establish and gain consensus on some controversial things. Some have been good, some not so good. The latest one, called the “Confession of Evangelical Conviction,” aims to establish principles around political thought for Christians. The lead author of the statement is Skye Jethani, who co-hosts the Holy Post podcast with Phil Vischer, whom you probably know as the creator of Veggie Tales. Today, Alisa and Natasha talk through several of its major points using it as a case study of how commonly heard statements about politics within the church right now can sound good but are actually quite misleading.

Alisa, Natasha, and Frank just returned from their 6th Unshaken Conference in Pittsburgh. Thank you to everyone there who played a part in making this Unshaken such a success. As always, they ended the day with a Q&A session, and also as always, they received far more questions than they could take. So today Alisa and Natasha wanted to answer a grab bag of questions they especially liked from the ones they couldn’t get to Saturday.

Taylor Swift is one of the biggest pop stars alive today. Her recent album, The Tortured Poets Department debuted with a total of 2.6 million sales, which is her biggest debut and the top selling single-week sales since Adele’s 25 almost 10 years ago. CNN reported that it became the first album to draw over 300 million streams in a single day in and the first album to reach one billion streams in a single week on Spotify. Slate reported that her single Fortnight debuted as the biggest song in the world launching at No. 1 both the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Gloabal Excl. U.S. charts. Last week, Alisa listened to several songs on the album and forced Natasha to listen to a couple of them and they have thoughts!

Orange Curriculum is considered to be the most widely used Sunday school curriculum in the country. Last week, it came out that the founder, Reggie Joiner, and the CEO, Kristen Ivy have both resigned due to their admission of having an inappropriate relationship together. This came out just days before Orange's huge annual conference. These things can be rattling to those who have been somehow touched by the ministry in question, and by those who are connected to it by family or other relationship. In today’s episode, Natasha and Alisa talk about how to process the moral failings of leaders of Christian organizations and share three takeaways on how to process events like this. They also offer some hope they have for Orange going forward.

We’ve all seen the deconstruction stories that flood our social media news feeds. We’ve heard the claims of “toxic theology,” and the #exvangelical propensity to identify historic Christian doctrine and ethics as oppressive and harmful. But what if there is a connection between deconstruction and modern impulse to seek therapy, psychological diagnoses, and therapeutic language to explain away objective truth claims about God and morality? If you haven’t heard words and phrases like Iatrogenesis, Social-Emotional Learning, and Gentle Parenting, Alisa and Natasha will define those terms and show how they represent a massive shift in the worldview of our current culture. They also explore how those topics are related to the deconstruction phenomenon.

Have you ever that if you grew up as a conservative Christian, you were indoctrinated into a fear-based view of God and shame-based view of yourself? Or that the fundamentalist “Christian Gospel” damages children by telling them that they are born into this world intrinsically bad and repulsive to God, learning that their sinfulness is to blame for the brutalization, torture, and death of God’s son? Well this is exactly what Jim Palmer, the chaplain for the American Humanist Association who also holds the title of Founder of The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality says. In today’s episode, Alisa and Natasha unpack some of these claims.

Frank Turek joins the podcast to talk about the mantra “Follow your heart” and how that is leading culture into the chaos of social media narcissism, divorce, and transgender ideology.