Episode 20: Jared Byas – The Revelations of Jared Byas

Jared

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared

And I’m Jared Byas.

Attention, students! Which is everybody, by the way. Summer School 2023 continues with our July class on Heaven and Hell in Black Theology, very excited about this one, taught by Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman. This class will take place live for one night only, on July 26th. Put it on your calendar, July 26th from 8-9:30pm ET. And as always it’s pay what you can, and when you sign up you get the live one-night class, you get a live Q&A session, a link to the class recording, and downloadable class slides. Of course if you join our community the Society of Normal People, you can get all our classes for $12/month. So for more information and to sign up, go to www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/summerschool.

Hey everyone, it’s me, Jared. And in this episode of Faith for Normal People, I’ll be continuing my story but from a different angle. Last episode, we focused on the facts. This time, I wanted to focus more on the feelings, and the more personal aspect of that story. So another shoutout to our creative director Savannah who really helped me with the process, with the timeline, asking the right questions, pulling the threads together. So thank you so much. Here we go!

Jared

Last time, I talked about the facts and the figures, kind of a timeline approach. And now, let’s talk about some of the feelings. Let’s talk about the transitions. And sort of: how do I think about my faith now? And hopefully I can kind of process some of this out loud, because I haven’t done a lot of reflection on it. And I struggled with the question around the faith transitions, because I think for me, my faith is so wrapped up now in how I treat other human beings. It’s a very practical and a very ethical framework. Where earlier in my faith, it was a lot about getting questions answered. It was about who is God? How does the universe work? It was very much a cognitive discovery process of—I want to know and understand how the world works. And my faith has shifted completely away from that. Not that I’m not interested in how the world works, but it’s not tied up in or bound up in my faith at this point.

As a kid, I would have gone to the Bible to understand who I am as a self, let’s say. But in my 20s and 30s, I read a lot on psychology, about the nature of the self, or internal family systems, and how do we develop a self and what are ways that our childhood would have affected how we view ourselves and our self perception? And what are healthier ways of viewing ourselves versus unhealthy ways of viewing the self? I don’t get that from the Bible, and I haven’t really gotten that from my church setting. And so either it has nothing to do with your faith, if you have this bifurcation between those two things, or it has everything to do with my faith if everything is part of my faith. 

And I tend toward that latter piece which is to say: everything is a part of my faith. And so I don’t need to say how has my faith shifted as though my faith is one piece of the puzzle, and I have all these parts of my life. It’s much more holistic than that, where who I am is a Christian, and so however I view this self and how I navigate the world has to be part and parcel of that faith conversation.There’s not a distinction for me anymore. It’s integrated into my whole life. 

When I was living in Virginia, we were a part of this intentional community, they had church services a couple of days a week. And it was a very intentional community. So we did kind of everything together. Meals together, and these sorts of things. And that’s what they were doing before we got there as a family. And when we got there as a family, they had stopped doing the church services. And they were really wrestling with their identity of like, who are we as a faith community if we’re not doing church services anymore, but we’re still doing all this other stuff, like we’re getting together twice a week to have potlucks. And there was all this stuff happening, but the formality of it had gone away. There was no one in charge, there was no organizational structure, the community just kept being a community. And they had this like crisis of faith about it. And when I got there, I kept saying, like, I think you just graduated into life. I think you just took the training wheels off. The formality and the structure was there to uphold it, but now it has a life of its own. The community is organic, and it’s growing, and it’s compelling to just be a part of what’s happening. 

And so I think about that in terms of faith, where, for me, like, I’m not worried that if I don’t go to church for a long time, my faith is going to suffer. I don’t worry that if I don’t do these formal structural things, that my faith isn’t going to be upheld. That seemed to me, for me—I don’t think this is true for everybody—for me, that was all training wheels to get to a place where my faith is so integrated into my life, there isn’t a distinction between those things. I go to church as a part of my life, because I want to have community and they’re my friends. And it’s a place I want to be. It has nothing to do with a should or an ought or an obligation. It’s all just life. And part of my life is I go to a place on Sunday morning to be in a place with people I care about and I like and to be a part of a community and to read Scripture together and to do all these things. But that’s not at all any distinction from the other things I do in my life, or the other choices I make.

I used to get bent out of shape about a lot of doctrinal or dogma issues. Can women be in leadership? Can this happen? Can that happen? What about LGBTQ? A lot of that. I went through my atheist phase. And when I went through my atheist phase, I realized nothing about my life changed. Like, I didn’t believe in God anymore. Nothing changed, which was a radical experience. Because growing up, I was taught if you stopped believing in God, you become the worst version of yourself. And Christianity was holding back the worst parts of you, and if you don’t have that, you’re gonna go out and murder people, orgies on the street, infidelity, that’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna just randomly impulsively steal stuff from the store, like, I don’t know. But that was like what was in my head.

And then I just said, well I gotta take the plunge, because it’s not tenable anymore to believe in the God I was taught to believe in or the faith that I was taught. So I just stopped believing that stuff. And lo and behold, almost nothing changed. And that was a huge moment for me of clarity to say, “Oh, my faith has formed me as a human being. We are not separate. I don’t just stop believing, and all that my faith has taught me through my years, all the faith formation and ethical formation, just stops being a part of my life.” If that were the case, I would argue that hadn’t been a part of my life all along. It wasn’t integrated into who I was, it was an external force, like a rule, keeping me from acting out of my true character and true nature. 

And so to stop believing that and to see that nothing really changed, then I had been shaped in this way. And that was a profound realization then, that said maybe maturity and wisdom is no longer needing to hold it as a rulebook, but simply to be formed by it. And that these dogmas or things I felt like I had to believe, they could come and go, and it actually wouldn’t really change my life. That what changes my life over time is a pattern of belief. And it’s a habituation. And it doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen by accident. And that actually gave me a great foundation for where I am with my faith now, that it allowed me to play with belief, to be more curious, to be more playful about ideas and thoughts rather than thinking, “Oh, if this one thing changes, then my whole life is going to fall apart.” I’ve traded in beliefs dozens, maybe hundreds of times since then, and not one of them has created a house of cards of my life that then fell apart. 

What brought me back? Two things that brought me back. One was the recognition that no matter what I do, I will always be a Christian in my formation. Culturally, in terms of my value set, in terms of my upbringing and sort of cultural DNA, I will always be a Christian. So I will either be a Christian, or I’ll be a reaction to my Christianity, but I can’t get rid of that part of me. Just as importantly, I didn’t want to get rid of that. I liked a lot of my upbringing in my faith. I liked my church experiences for the most part. I look back on those fondly, and I look back on those profoundly, as really shaping the rest of my life. I mean, I took my faith so seriously, it was such a large part of my upbringing and my childhood, that I didn’t want to let it go. I wanted to wrestle with it and figure out how to bring it into the rest of my life for the rest of the years that I had left. And so in some ways, I think it was just stubbornness of saying I like it, and I refuse to let it go. And so that struggle and that wrestle was, it has to now serve these greater purposes in my life around happiness and goodness and truth and beauty and the things that I value, which, frankly, I probably got from my faith in the beginning. 

And then there’s just all these, this baggage and these things that get in the way of those things along the way. And realizing that for me, I didn’t need to throw out my faith to hold onto those things. There was an avenue for me to navigate that, and I know that’s not true for everybody. And I think some people do need to get rid of it all. And I don’t judge that. And that’s not for me to decide. But for me, the value of wrestling and struggling and figuring it out was greater than not.

It’s not, for me, about what’s true. When we first started the podcast, I would have people reach out to me to like, almost coach them through a faith crisis of, “Oh my gosh, I’m realizing these things about the Bible. And I’m realizing all this other stuff, and I need you to like, help me save my faith.” I didn’t know that’s what they were asking me to get on these calls for, but I would get on because they would just say like, “I’m struggling with my faith.” And many times they would leave more frustrated or hopeless than they got on, which is unfortunate, but it’s because they thought I had found the one way to argue my way back into my faith. Like they thought I was going to give them the golden argument about why the Bible is this or that, even though it has this or that problems or whatever. 

And almost always what I could say was—No, Christianity rings true in this larger sense. Not in any objective, factual, “it’s because it’s the most historically accurate,” those were not at all the reasons. Ultimately, I had to say—when people asked me, “Well, why are you a Christian?” I’d say, “Because I want to be. That’s why I’m a Christian.” And that was such an unsatisfactory answer for a lot of people. Because it’s so subjective. But my whole thing is, it is subjective. But if you’re gonna dismiss that, just be aware, you’re dismissing it out of an objectivist privilege or bias that is modernistic, and it’s enlightenment based. And it’s all—there’s many wonderful, good things about that, but let’s make sure we understand that it is in that context. 

And so for me, the redemption of my faith goes parallel with—I cannot separate it from—my redemption of subjectivism. And me as a subject. And that me wanting something, me wanting to participate in the story and in the community, and in the context of Christianity, me wanting it—is a reason enough. Where I think for a lot of people, they want it, but it’s like they feel like, I don’t want to look a fool. I don’t want to not be able to articulate why and have it be reasonable and convince other people. That’s the faith tradition I grew up in. So without that, my wanting to isn’t valid. It’s not good enough. Like that’s a good starting place, but ultimately, if we had a society where everyone just did what they want to do, you know, we’d fall apart or whatever. I don’t think it’s that simple. I think there’s a lot more value in listening to our want-to’s. And sometimes that’s enough. Depending on the context and what we’re talking about, if we’re talking about my faith, me as a human, what I want is actually really important to that conversation.

I think we do get into the realm of an entire framework or mindset of obligation, of shoulds, of oughts. And sometimes we slip truth into that. Like, we don’t want to have to be subjective or step out in sort of existential freedom to just choose what we want, which I would say is a path of love. And that’s opposed to this path of obligation. And we put truth on the side of obligation where it becomes a tool to coerce others. Where truth becomes, “Well, if it’s true, it doesn’t matter how you feel about it.” That’s a very politically charged phrase right now.

And I actually run across this in family business work a lot where people in a family business, they have a lot of feelings toward one another, negative feelings. They’re frustrated, there’s baggage from years past. And they come to me. And what they want me to do is they want to have a video camera set up 20 years ago so they can see what really happened. And that’s supposed to then dictate how we must feel like, “Well if we could go back, you would see that you were wrong and I was right. And therefore you shouldn’t feel this way. And I shouldn’t feel this way. I should feel that way.” And it’s so disappointing when families realize 1) we don’t have access to that and 2) that’s not the way of love. That’s obligations and shoulds. And partly, that mindset is how we got to where we are now. Rather than if in the moment, we could say some of this is subjective. How I feel in light of what happened is valuable and it’s subjective, and no amount of objective truth is going to change that.

Do I feel like I love God? For me, to love others and to love God are one and the same thing. And part of that is because of my baggage from my tradition, where loving God came first. And what that meant, very practically, was that you had quiet times every day, you read Scripture at certain times, you went to church every day. That is what loving God meant. Even if to do those things you had to neglect your family, or those things actually were so secondary to that. There were people in my life, where there would be two screaming toddlers who needed fed and needed changed. But the husband’s priority was to take an hour by himself and have quiet time, while the wife dealt with all of that. And that was an unacceptable practice for me.

Do I feel like I love God at this point in my faith? In the spirit of the John literature in our New Testament, I would say the only people who could answer that truthfully is not me, but the other people in my life. Do I swing that pendulum too far toward not making a distinction enough between loving God and others? Maybe. But I will choose that side of the pendulum over the other side, any day.

As far as my relationship with God, I think I don’t know right now what that means. I have too many questions around what we’re talking about when we talk about a relationship with God to be able to answer that honestly. I don’t at all dismiss anyone else’s experience with God and what that connection is, I think that’s wonderful and beautiful, and a great thing. I think, for me, I have too many questions about what I mean when I even use the word God to understand what a relationship with God would look like or be. 

I’m way more comfortable in the realm of like I said earlier, I do want to love God in the way that I love others. And for me, Jesus is an important piece of that, because it is this connection of the Divine to the human for me. It makes possible that line of thinking, whereby, again, John, 1 John, 2 John, this line of how do we love God—it’s through our love of other people. I’m good enough right there. Like for now, that’s where I’m good at living. 

I have spent a good chunk of my life with this special connection to the divine. And I fully recognize, I’m very self aware, that it might be my own baggage. Because again, I grew up in a charismatic tradition that overemphasized the personal relationship with Jesus. Not just personal but deeply emotional. That is how your spiritual maturity would manifest, is how emotional you got in your expression of faith in God, so that the only thing that mattered was this almost romantic or erotic relationship with God. And that somehow, supposedly, was going to spread out into a love for other people. But I just saw way too many instances where it didn’t. Everything was caught up in this ecstatic emotion-based relationship with God. And I think that just shaped my personality around this in a way that it just is what it is now.

When I talk about my faith community over the years, I think I have two responses. And it really goes to a bit of the core of who I am, which is being a kid who was very sensitive, and probably very emotional. And then being the grown up who had learned how to shut that off out of self defense. And so the knee-jerk response for me is that I value community, but it’s not that important to me. Because I don’t know, I don’t need it. But I think probably the deeper answer is, there’s a reason I keep coming back to it. There’s a reason that it has become something that I, whether I emotionally identify with it as a need and something I really want, the reality is I’ve always been a part of it. And so the data betrays my emotions around it. And I think what it is, honestly, is I long to belong to a group, but I’m always terrified of being rejected by that group. And my faith journey has confirmed many, many times that I will be rejected by that group if I don’t toe a certain line, and my personality is terrible for toeing lines. So I have to choose between being true to myself and how I really feel and how I want to express myself or belonging, and I’ve always chosen being true to myself at the detriment I think of a lot of my feelings of being excluded.

I do think there is a habit we’re not even aware of in our church communities, that we only show up as part of ourselves. Because we pick up on implicit clues, that if I bring this part of myself, it will not be accepted. And I’m terrified to be rejected completely. And so I would rather just preempt that, and shut off this part of myself and only bring that part of myself, whether it’s a personality trait, or a certain belief, or a certain question. And I think for me, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, I’ve never been that good at that. The honest truth is, what I was good at was being a chameleon. 

Who I was, was the person who could show up to a room and be whatever anybody needed me to be. And that’s probably why I got to be a leader early and why I got to be a pastor early is because I was very good at reading the room immediately, and knowing how to bring myself. And the parts of me that I wasn’t bringing, I didn’t feel that strongly about. So it was easy for me to hold that back. The leaders and guides in my life who helped that to change for me were my LGBTQ friends who showed me the definition of courage, to say this is too important of a part of me to hold back, and I know to bring it fully in this space will be pain and it will be hurt, and it will be rejection. And I always had that in me, but I think I was maybe too afraid to do that. And so my queer friends helped me, like oh my gosh, just to just to reflect on their experiences. And to say how courageous you have to be to say “it’s worth it to show up as me” knowing this was going to be the consequence. And that inspired me to start showing up more fully in spaces as I was, as I am. And it also helped me to go into it with my eyes wide open to realize we have to count the cost. Because there is a cost to showing up as ourselves in culture at large, but probably much more in more conservative Christian spaces.

And I would say on the flip side, for me, personally, my personality, how I was doing that was a form of manipulation. I would manipulate spaces in a way that I kind of could feel safer. And if I can manipulate the space in a way that helped me bring a little more of myself, then that felt really good. I always wanted to look good and be liked in a space. But I also wanted to be myself. It’s like, sometimes you can’t do both of those things. And so if I could manipulate a situation or not ever lie, but kind of tell a half truth, so that I’m not disagreeing with someone or making someone uncomfortable, then I would do that. But I found myself in a situation maybe five years ago, four years ago, where no matter what I tried, I could not manipulate the situation. And I was always so good at it. I was good at being a chameleon. But I couldn’t manipulate the situation. It kept being worse and worse for me. And so I was like, well, that’s not working. I’m already bringing a lot of pain on myself by trying to manipulate this. Why don’t I just be honest, just straight up vulnerable and honest about who I am and where I am? And what came out of that was I realized I’m actually not a bad person, I’m a good person.

When you don’t ever bring yourself into a space, it’s always like, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’m just manipulating everyone to think I’m a good person.” [Chuckles] And so to come out with a lot more confidence, it’s like, no, I trust myself, like, I genuinely just want to love people. And I want to do things the right way. And I trust that and I will make mistakes, but my intentions are there. And if I can keep showing up in that way, then I feel good about that. And so it started me on a journey of where I am now where I trust that what I want in life is to love people well. And so if I can trust my own sort of North Star on that, then I can come out of every situation feeling like I did my part. I did what I could do. That doesn’t always mean it comes out with people liking me, or I get to belong to every space, but I trust that I’ll be in the spaces I need to be in if I can show up as myself. And that’s a place where I’m accepted.

This is probably just a function of age as I get older, I just don’t have time to be in spaces where I can’t be myself. I get more and more annoyed with even things as simple as going to dinner with friends at like a friend’s house in this like middle class subculture, where it’s like we clean up, we’re all nice, we play nice. We’re doing the pleasantries. I just have less and less time for that. Because it’s not how I am the rest of my life. I’m intense, and I ask inappropriately personal questions right out of the gate, and I want to get into intense conversation and I want to debate on important things. I want to do that within three minutes of meeting someone. And if it’s like, no, we’re going to have an hour where you’re going to, you’re going to pretend like this is how your house always is. And we’re not going to talk about anything that might create any conflict. I’m not saying any of that’s bad. I’m just learning that’s not me.

As the person who helps run Bible for Normal People, and as a co-host, I don’t think necessarily that this is a place where I’m always 100% authentic and open—I think Faith for Normal People is a space where we are trying to create an opportunity for both Pete and myself to be more 100%. As a part of Bible for Normal People for the last seven years, there is a sense in which we are guides, and we are teachers. And so I take that very seriously. And it’s important that I’m not saying things that wouldn’t allow people to be where they are, or to bring them along in a step that they need to take—that it’s too much of a jump for people. And so I think Pete and I both have been very aware of that. And I take that very seriously.

Bible for Normal People as a whole hasn’t been a place where I feel like I could bring my full self, but I do not at all resent that. That was intentional. And that’s been a choice. And I think with Faith for Normal People, we are now intentionally making a choice to break that wall down a little bit more and be more vulnerable and more raw where it seems like our, our listeners and our audience, you folks, hopefully can come along with us on that journey. We just wanted to make sure that it was a place where people did feel like they could do that. And that was our priority was to create that space and not necessarily have it be that space for us.

The solo episodes of Faith for Normal People that I’ve done, it’s me fumbling my way forward in trying to be more open about my experiences and my feelings. There’s other spaces where that’s not as difficult. But spiritually speaking, I’ve always been in places of leadership where it was not appropriate for me to be that. It would have not that would not have been appropriate given the power dynamics and the role I was playing. And so this is new for me. So I don’t know how to talk about my own experiences or my own feelings, I don’t have a lot of practice with it. And I’m much more interested in and curious about other people being able to explore that for themselves. And I am happy to bring that on. I’m not unwilling, I don’t think I’m afraid to unpack my own experiences and my own feelings. I just don’t think I’ve had the tools or practice yet to do it. I would say I do a pretty good job of processing my own feelings and other things in other arenas. It’s just a new set of concepts for me to like, work with. 

Religiously, I do much better in the world of like relationships, and in play interpersonal relationships, and how we connect emotionally as human beings and intimacy and connection and what’s appropriate, and boundaries and roles and all that at that level. But when we start getting into spirituality and Christianity and my faith, I just don’t have a lot of practice. So hopefully, this will draw it out of me.

Outro  

Jared  

Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.     

Pete  

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Jared  

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Outro

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.