Episode 6: Jonathan Jong – Faith & the Fear of Death

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.

Pete  

Hey folks, welcome to this episode of Faith for Normal People. And today we’re talking to Jonathan Jong, about faith and the fear of death. You might remember our interview with Jonathan from season six of the Bible for Normal People—and if not, you know, folks, it was a great episode, we highly recommend listening to that episode, for more really great insights into how science and religion interact.

Jared  

Right. But for this episode, as a reminder, Jonathan is research fellow, assistant professor at Coventry University Center for Trust, Peace and Social Relations. He’s on Twitter, he has a new book, “Experimenting with Religion: The New Science of Belief,” and you’re getting the preview of an upcoming attraction. The new—

Pete  

A premonition of death, so to speak. In this whole episode.

Jared  

Pete  

It’s good stuff. 

Jared  

Alright, folks, let’s get into it.

Jonathan  

Pete  

Jonathan, welcome back! Not just welcome, but welcome back to our world here.

Jonathan  

Thank you so much for having me back. It’s great to be in the new podcast.

Pete  

Yeah, the first time it was the other podcast- 

Jared  

We don’t speak of that.

Pete  

The other god-ordained podcast. Anyway. So yeah, well, welcome to this episode. And we want to talk to you about a topic that’s really important and universal: and it’s death anxiety. So, let’s just start with that. Let’s not assume that anyone’s ever heard of any of this stuff. What is death anxiety? What does that mean?

Jonathan  

So I’m going to be very imprecise when I use the term “death anxiety,” I tend to use it interchangeably with, for example, the fear of death. Though there are distinctions made by neuroscientists and psychologists and philosophers between anxiety and fear. So, these are technically two separate things in the scientific literature, but I run roughshod over these distinctions and treat them as meaning more or less the same thing, and I’m gonna say a little bit about why I do that in a moment. But maybe some listeners might be interested in the scientific distinction. So roughly speaking, fear—according to neuroscientists—typically refers to a response to, you know, like an immediate or concrete threat, something right in front of them right now. Whereas anxiety refers to a response to an anticipated or more abstract threat, right. So, it’s more kind of long-term in that sense. 

So you might say that fear is acute, and anxiety is chronic. And it’s just the idea of whether or not it’s a concrete or abstract thing that you’re afraid of. So, that’s how the distinction tends to play out in the scientific literature. And if you understand it in that way, then the fear of death specifically is experienced only when death is imminent. So for example, you’re, you know, falling off a building or something like this. Whereas death anxiety can be experienced at any point in one’s life, right. So, today, for example, even if your own death for you is quite an abstract thing, you can still be anxious about that, though neuroscientists might say that you can’t really be fearful of it in that technical sense. 

But as I said, I use the terms a bit more loosely and when I do so, I am mainly interested in anxiety. So, the kind of negative feelings that you might feel, even now, about your death, even though that might be quite an abstract thing to you in the future. But I also include other emotions like sadness and anger that we might feel when we consider that we are mortal, that we will one day die. And the reason I do this is because I think sometimes the scientific distinctions are very helpful theoretically, but the kind of lived experience of the fear of death, and death anxiety, and even grief about death are kind of bound up in one another in ways that I think, is kind of unhelpful when talking to a general audience. So, even kind of posturally, for example, it’s not that helpful to draw these fine distinctions that are very helpful to scientists. So when I say “death anxiety,” you know, you can also hear a fear of death or even just negative emotions about death and dying, in particular your own death and dying.

Jared  

Right, and how long have scientists been studying this in particular? Like, what’s the history of how we’ve observed or studied death anxiety?

Jonathan  

Yeah, it’s a really good question—I should probably first say that I am not a clinical psychologist. So that’s by way of a caveat. I know academics make these very, very fine distinctions between different kinds of scholars that look very similar. But like, I don’t want to tread on other people’s toes here. I think it’s probably fair to say that we can trace the study of death anxiety to Freud. You know, who in many ways is the kind of father figure if you like—maybe ironically, for the entire field.

Pete  

Jonathan  

Yeah. So, that’s a joke for the Freudians out there. 

Pete  

Jonathan  

Yeah, so we can trace the study of death anxiety back to Freud. But this is ironic for another reason, which is that Freud didn’t really think that the fear of death or death anxiety was a fundamental force in human psychology. He had patients who had the fear of death in quite an acute way. But he mainly thought of this as a symptom of other sorts of inner conflicts. He mentioned guilt, for example, that a fear of death is in some way, a product of kilts that comes from somewhere else. And some listeners might know that Freud thought that sexual conflicts are at the root of lots of psychological problems. And you know, unsurprisingly, Freud also links sexual conflicts and guilt about sexual conflicts to the fear of death. 

So having said that Freud didn’t think that the fear of death was fundamental, lots of other people after Freud did, and Freud’s work inspired a lot of debate and disagreement about precisely this question, about whether or not the fear of death is like a part of you know, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s this idea that, that we have these different levels of need, where if we fulfill the very bottom level, like you know, our need to satiate our hunger, that’s a precondition to satiating other more abstract needs, like the need for self fulfillment. And so some psychologists right after Freud, in the early to mid 20th century, thought that the fear of death was really, really important as a central feature of human psychology, and that includes a way of explaining lots of psychological disorders. So—and these debates continue today about whether or not the fear of death is somehow fundamental to human beings. And not only do these debates happen among Freudians, and post-Freudians, but in some ways, it’s percolated into what we might call “mainstream psychology.” 

So, there’s an interesting thing about Freud, which is that he’s the psychologist that everybody can name. But it’s probably true to say that in the average psychology department in North America and Western Europe, there are very, very few people who will call themselves Freudians. And this has been true, I would say, since at least the 1960s and 70s, there’s been a move away from Freud in psychology departments, although you still see lots of Freudian language used in popular culture—and also other departments like departments of English literature, or philosophy or theology, for example—but even those of us who don’t think of ourselves as Freudians, and even who criticize Freud, for maybe being unscientific or something, cannot help but owe a lot to him, including having inherited these questions about about the fear of death. 

And the way this manifests itself these days, is in social psychology, which is my own field, in a theory called Terror Management Theory, which I’ll say a bit more about later. So, that’s kind of one way to trace the history of the study of the fear of death, which is in terms of the question of whether or not it is a fundamental motivator in human psychology. But there’s a parallel stream, which I think in some ways has been better received by the general public, which has to do with the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in the late 1960s and the 1970s. So, Kubler-Ross was working with patients who were dying, who had terminal illnesses, and she got really interested in stages of dying, what she discerned to be the ways in which people coped with their own imminent mortality. And this eventually became her work on stages of grief, about other people’s dying—or really about anything else. But initially, it was work with terminally ill patients. And she was interested in what process they went through in thinking about their own dying, and only later that she looked at, for example, family members who are coping with their loved ones’ deaths and that sort of thing. 

So, you know, your listeners might know the five classic stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But of course, it’s now, it’s now de rigueur to say that Kubler-Ross never intended for these stages to be, you know, rigidly sequential or universal. They’re kind of helpful ways of thinking about the process that lots of people—though not necessarily everybody—goes through when they think about their own dying or other people’s dying. So, that’s kind of two parallel streams of the history of the subject. And as I say, Freud would be early 20th century to mid 20th century. And Kubler-Ross picks up this other strand in the 1960s and 70s and it’s carried on since then.

Jared  

Well, before we jump into those, specifically, maybe a little bit more—at least on the Kubler-Ross, and you said Terror Management Theory—I wanted to back up and ask, from what we can tell, you talked about this, is this a fundamental motivator in human psychology? And as someone who’s a Native American, I sort of, it didn’t happen until I was a little later, maybe a late teenager, early in my 20s, doing kind of research in my own history, and background, and tradition of this understanding—and you can correct me if I’m wrong—but there was a sense that this fear of death was a little less in Native cultures, because of the cyclical view of this life-death cycle that we can’t…There’s no sense of escaping death at all, there’s simply what we do is we live our life, we live long, then we die, and that feeds life for the next generation. And that’s how we fulfill our purpose, is to provide life for the next generation, and be part of this network of being in a lot of ways. And so, is it fundamental as a motivator in human psychology for humans in general, or is this like a modern Western problem, or challenge or issue or however we want to frame it?

Jonathan  

Right. This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. And it’s surprisingly difficult for various sorts of reasons. The first is in some ways a measurement problem, right? So, I think there’s a kind of assumption being made that people fear death, right? That seems obvious to us, at least in the modern-West. But actually, if you ask people, like in a questionnaire, or if you give people a psychological scale where we can quantify how much people fear death, it’s not very common. People don’t tend to say that they fear death, they might say that they fear other people dying, or they might say that they fear the dying process—you know, like whether or not it’ll be painful, or whether there’ll be lonely, that sort of thing—but it turns out that even in the modern-West, people are very reluctant to say that they fear death itself. And so, there’s this interesting paradox or contradiction in this assumption that we make, which “Oh, yeah, you know, like, death. People don’t like death, people fear death.” But actually, when you give people questionnaires, or ask people during interviews, people rarely say—even in the modern West—that they fear death. And to some extent, the theorists, who suppose that the fear of death is fundamental and is psychologically really important, there’s a sense in which I think they’re accusing all of us of deceiving ourselves, of lying to ourselves and to, you know, psychologists when they’re being asked about their fear of death. And this is usually described as a kind of denial.

Pete  

Yeah, they’re not going to admit it. 

Jonathan  

Yes, exactly. So what you make of that, like, that’s hard to say, right? So should we take people at face value when you ask them, “Are you afraid of death?” And they say, “No.” So you say, “Okay, right. That’s evidence that actually people on the whole are not afraid of death,” or should you take seriously the theoreticians’ claim? That “Well, you know, they would say that, because they are trying to protect themselves from this, that or the other thing, and in fact, very deep down inside, they are actually terrified of death and they’re trying to kind of cover it up in some way.” And it’s very difficult to know how to shore up evidence one way or another.

Pete  

Jonathan  

Even in the, in the modern Western world. And the other reason it’s a complicated question to answer is because, of course, we can kind of draw a line around the modern West. And then, you know, the question is, well, okay, Native cultures, but like, what are those? And there’s so many of them, how far back do you go? Which cultures do you look at? And it turns out that they’re just lots of different attitudes floating around about death, some of which are stoic, right? In the way that you’ve described. And in other cases, it really does look like there is terror of death—and not only of death, per se, but also of the dead—which is not something that we think a lot about here in the West, except if you watch, you know, like horror films or something like that. But you know, there are cultures in which part of the ritual during a funeral is to stamp on the graves of the dead, as it were to make sure that they don’t come back out to get you. And so there’s fear of not just of dying, or of death itself, but also of the dead. And so it’s very hard to kind of generalize what non-western, non-modern cultures are like.

I think it’s fair to say, however, that negative views of death—which is to say, the idea that death is bad—we find it in lots and lots of places, not just in the modern-West, but also before the modern-West, and also in either the modern or non-modern, non-west. So, I’m Chinese by ethnicity and culture and we mark deaths, and celebrate death, and remember death in quite different ways from the way that I’m now accustomed to in the Christian West. But I wouldn’t say that the Chinese are traditionally less afraid of death. So, for example, you know, we have a taboo about the number four in Chinese. And the reason for this particular taboo is that it’s a homonym for the word for death and we don’t like the number four because we don’t like death. And then we have, you know, the “Hungry Ghost Festival,” which is about ensuring that we supply the dead with enough, for example, food and other kinds of sacrifices, so that they don’t come and haunt us. So, we have this element of a fear of the dead as well. So, I don’t know if it’s a peculiarly modern Western thing, this negative view of death or fear of death. But as I say, it is hard to make these kinds of generalizations comparing the West and everyone else.

Pete  

Jonathan  

Yeah, so, I don’t have data on this—And I don’t think anybody has data on this—But I think my intuitions are in that direction, too, that if there’s something interesting about the West, in the modern era, it is this notion of avoidance or denial. And you can see this in various manifestations, right? So, for example, I mean, how many euphemisms do we have for death? We don’t seem to like the word. So, we’ll avoid using the word as much as possible, we will say, you know, “so-and-so passed away,” or “they’re in a better place now,” or “they kicked the bucket.”

Pete

“Bought the farm.”

Jonathan  

Yeah, absolutely. But we don’t like the word death anymore—And maybe, maybe that’s a sign of denial. And in my experience, as a parish priest, I’ve noticed that people don’t even really like the word “funeral” anymore. Not only do they prefer to have “Celebration of Life services,” as opposed to funerals—so they want them to look very different—but even if it is a funeral, they want to call it something else. They want to call it-

Pete  

A celebration of life. 

Jonathan  

A celebration of life. Exactly. So there’s an interesting shift in language that I think has something to do with this sense of avoidance or denial. And even if it’s not a denial of the reality of death, I think there’s a denial of the badness of death, that somehow we’ve lost a sense of the appropriateness of grief and mourning. And, again, there are many manifestations of this. So, I come from a very liturgical Christian tradition. So, we wear liturgical colors for religious services, and traditionally, the liturgical color for a funeral would have been black. But in the last, I would say, two or three decades, this has become less and less common, for even priests to wear black. You will still see people turning up to funerals in black, I think that’s still quite normal. But the religious professionals themselves have shifted to wearing purple or white, which is a bit less, you know, kind of aggressive and austere as black.

Pete  

Less death-y. 

Jonathan  

Yeah, let’s death-y! That’s right. 

Pete  

Jonathan  

The only exception to this I’ve seen recently, in public, has been Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral and all the priests came out in black and it really surprised lots of people that they did, because it’s not really the done thing anymore. And of course, you know, I think there have been all kinds of ways by the psychiatric professionals, the mental health professionals, to try to draw a line in what they consider to be inappropriate amounts and durations of grieving, right. So, at some point, we begin to think that too much grief or too much mourning is pathological, that it’s a sign of something bad, like depression or something—and that’s a relatively new move for psychiatrists and psychologists to go, “Woah, wait a second, you know, maybe we shouldn’t mourn for very long.” And then of course, they have to ask interesting questions like “How long is too long?” And you know, and people now feel embarrassed when they cry at funerals, which is interesting, because not very long ago, even in the West—and certainly, still now in some parts of the Near Eastern and East Asia—wailing during funerals was not uncommon, but it’s just much less common now. There’s a lot of this sedating of our responses to death and dying, I think, which perhaps has something to do with, as you say, avoidance or denial.

Jared  

Well, does this have anything to do with Terror Management Theory? Maybe you can introduce us to that, because that’s a term I’ve never heard before. So, maybe you can unpack that a little bit. 

Pete  

That’s how I do my banking.

Jonathan  

Jared  

Terror management? Yeah.

Jonathan  

Yeah. I sometimes like to say all management seems like terror management to me. But Terror Management Theory itself is a theory, which I work on quite a little bit. Although I tend to tell people that I’m not a Terror Management theorist, which is to say, I don’t necessarily believe the theory, but I work on it because I find it very interesting. So Terror Management Theory came about in the 1970s, a bunch of graduate students, Jeff Greenberg-Thompsonski and Sheldon Solomon were grad students together in the 70s. And they read a book by Ernest Becker—who was an American anthropologist and social theorist—and the book was called “The Denial of Death,” and it won him posthumously a Pulitzer Prize. And so in graduate school, they began to kind of try to figure out ways to turn Becker’s philosophy, if you like, into a scientifically testable set of hypotheses, and eventually a theory. So they published their first academic paper on Terror Management Theory in 1986 and there have been literally hundreds of experiments under this theory since then, including some of my own. So, what Becker says is the kind of opposite of what Freud says, right. So, I said earlier that Freud didn’t think that the fear of death was fundamental to human psychology. Becker’s viewis that the fear of death is the fundamental motivator for all human aspirations and achievements. It is, in that sense, a very aggressive, very kind of mono-causal, very ambitious, and, you know, simple—not to say, simplistic—theory about human psychology and human behavior. The basic idea is that human beings are aware of our deaths and it is so distressing, so terrifying, that we do anything that we can to push away the thoughts of our own mortality. We pursue literal immortality and also symbolic immortality.

And literal immortality is quite straightforward, right? It is, in fact, ways to live either longer or forever. So you know, for example, eating well and doing exercise, or believing in a religion that assures you of the afterlife. These are all examples of pursuits of literal immortality. And symbolic immortality is a little bit more kind of amorphous, and it’s a very large category. One kind of prototypical example of symbolic immortality is having children. So, having children living vicariously through your children, who will hopefully, and in most cases, live beyond your own lifetime. But if you think of that as the paradigmatic case of symbolic mortality, of living through somebody or something else, then you can begin to see how lots of other things that human beings might do look a little bit like the pursuit for symbolic immortality. So, for example, living through your art, or your science, your work of various kinds, living through the only two God-ordained podcasts on the internet.

Pete  

Maybe we’re really going overboard here. Managing our terror.

Jared  

Jonathan  

Yeah, exactly. That’s right. So that’s exactly what Becker would say! Becker would say that this is a classic Terror Management Strategy. Right? 

Pete  

Alright, let’s turn this away from me just for a minute here and let’s stay clinical, alright?!

Jared  

Jonathan  

Okay. So, that’s symbolic immortality, too. And then it gets a little bit darker, right? Which is that he then says, “Well, okay, you know, so we can live through our children, we can live through our work.” But there are also these other things that we are parts of that are likely to live beyond us, which is our groups, our nation state, our religious tradition, our ethnic groups, our cultures, that kind of thing. And that can be positive, right? So we can be proud of being British or being American, you can be proud of Chinese culture, for example. But it can also manifest itself in quite negative, quite toxic, quite dangerous ways, especially when talking up and investing in our own cultures, our own nation states, our own religious traditions comes at the expense or denigration of another ethnic group, or another culture, or another religious tradition. Right? 

So, for Becker, at the heart of prejudice, at the heart of prejudices of all kinds, also is this attempt to pursue symbolic immortality by enhancing the esteem of our group by denigrating the esteem of other kinds of groups. So, for Becker, this really is an all encompassing theory. And in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, this became formulized by the three psychologists I mentioned earlier, into a series of testable hypotheses. What they wanted to know, in quite basic terms, is “Okay, if Becker is right, then presumably, if we confront people with the reality of their mortality, they will begin to behave in ways that look like this pursuit of literal or symbolic immortality.” And they wanted to know “Well, do people do that?” Right? So, when we confront people with their mortality, do people behave in these ways that Becker would have expected, that Becker would have considered “immortality projects” is the delightful phrase that he uses. Do people take on the mortality projects when they’re being confronted with the fact of their own mortality? 

And it turns out that—hundreds of studies later—it turns out that it’s a pretty reliable effect, that when you get people to consider their own eventual deaths, they begin to act out in lots of ways. Some positive ways, so, there’s some evidence that people will contribute more to certain charities when they’re being made to confront their own deaths, presumably, because they want to leave a positive legacy behind. And also in some quite kind of quirky and unusual to me ways which is, you know, it turns out that there’s at least one paper showing that when people think about death, they want to have more children, and they even want to name children after themselves more than they otherwise would do. 

But it also manifests quite negatively, in exactly the way that Becker predicts, which is that when people are made to confront their own mortality, people tend to behave more nationalistically, and more racistly, and more sexistly, and that sort of thing. So it does seem like there’s a lot of meat, a lot of traction in this theory. Now, I say all that but I should qualify by also saying that there have been recent attempts to replicate some of this work. Which is just to try to repeat the experiment to see whether we get the same results. And there have been a few quite high profile and quite rigorous failures to replicate some of these findings. So, it’s true that there are hundreds of experiments about this. But that’s not necessarily to say that the finding is very, very robust, because I think there’s a lot of work being done in psychology at the moment to try to check all the findings to see if they still hold up to a more rigorous scrutiny than when they were first published. Right? So, as I say, there are lots of studies that seem to suggest that there’s something to Terror Measurement Theory, but we’re still waiting to see whether they hold up to a more rigorous analysis and replication.

Jared  

Well, maybe we can focus on that relationship between death anxiety and religion. And there’s a few, there’s sort of the origin question, because I think some people believe that our fear of death is what actually caused religious belief in this sort of social evolution of how we evolved, is that—that came first, fear of death, then we kind of created religion out of that. But then there’s also just currently like, what is the relationship between death anxiety and religion now? Are religious people more likely to have less day death anxiety? Like, what is that relationship about?

Jonathan  

Great, so we’re gonna answer your second question first—in some ways, because it’s easier to answer, although the answer is messier. And also, because a lot of my work has been on exactly this question, trying to figure out whether or not, today, is there some kind of relationship between the fear of death, death anxiety, and religious belief or commitments? So there are two, there are, roughly speaking, two ways of answering this kind of question. And the first is to look for patterns in traits, like the fear of death as a trait, and religiosity as a trait. So, that’s one thing that you can do, and to do something like an experiment where you, you know, confront people with the fact of their mortality and see what happens on the other end. So, on the first front, there are at least 100-150 studies on this since the Victorian era. It’s been a question of great interest to lots and lots of people. And in general, if you put all the studies together, what you would find is a very weak, what we call, a negative correlation. So, the more religious a person is, the less they fear death, all else being equal. So, that’s what happens when you put all these studies together. 

So, here’s the problem with that approach, which is that these studies have mostly been run in the modern West, among populations who are overwhelmingly religious. So, what we have is a skewed sample, right? You have lots and lots of religious people answering these questions and so in a way, it looks like this pattern—and is a very weak pattern anyway—it looks like this pattern could just be driven by the fact that the sample is overwhelmingly religious. So, there’s an open question about what happens if we try to look at non-religious people, right? Now that in the 21st century, we have more and more non-religious people—who are happy to say that they’re non-religious, happy to say that they don’t believe in God and an afterlife or something like this—What happens then? Though, as it turns out, in that question, there’ll be fewer studies, just because it’s a more recent phenomenon that we have lots and lots of people who are happy to say that they’re not religious, at least in the West, for example, in the US or the UK. Secularization has been happening for a few decades now. But in the grand scheme of things is a relatively recent phenomenon. I’ve run a few of these studies myself, and, like, from my reading of the data, I would say that A) whatever relationship exists between the fear of death and religious belief, at the level of traits, is very weak. So, it doesn’t make much of a difference either way. But if there is a pattern, I would say that it’s a kind of upside down U-shaped pattern, in which the very religious people, and very non-religious people—so you know, like very devout atheists, right? So, imagine very devout Christians, and very devout atheists—They fear death less than kind of people in between. So, in that case, one way of describing this pattern is that it’s not what you believe that matters to the fear of death, it’s how much conviction you have about the thing that you believe. Right. 

So, it’s kind of agnostics and non-denominal people in between who are a little bit more anxious about death than people who are very certain in their faith. Now, whether or not you think that’s a good thing I will leave your readers to judge or maybe we can talk about that later on. That’s just the kind of like empirical finding and in general, most of the work, as I say, has been done in the West, in America, in the Uk, in Western Europe, and there’s relatively little data from outside of these contexts, but at the moment, that’s my view on what the pattern is. A, very weak and B, this kind of inverted, U-shaped pattern. 

So, another kind of pattern you can look at, besides just giving people questionnaires, is to look at people’s religiosity in different phases of their lives, right? So, do people get religious just as they get older, for example, and closer to death? Do people get more religious as they approach death? If, for example, they’re terminally ill? Is there very much evidence for deathbed conversions, for example? So those are questions that we can ask, which are a bit more difficult to answer, because research of that kind is ethically tricky, right? You know, you don’t necessarily want to turn up to a hospice, and then ask aggressive questions about your belief in the afterlife.

Pete  

Jonathan  

And so there’s not very much work on this. But the work that does exist, which is very sensitively done, tends to find that there’s very little evidence that people get more religious as they approach death.

Pete  

Okay. Yeah. Well, I was I was gonna just maybe broaden the discussion out a little bit, because, you know, on one level, there’s the clinical study, and what studies have shown, which are fascinating—And I think important, because, you know, we tend to have anecdotal kinds of things when we talk about things like deaths but there are studies, and it’s very important to know that—but I’m also wondering, just…you’ve got these two hats on. You’re a priest, and you deal with people, and you think about these as a person of faith, you think about these things yourself, I’m sure. And not to put you on the spot, but I just want to, maybe, explore that with you because I think that’s an important angle as well. So, I mean, for example, as a Christian, how—if I can ask this question—how do you reflect personally, at this stage in your life, on death? I mean, maybe especially because you work on the topic—again, in a professional sense—but how is that filtered down into your own psyche? 

Jonathan  

Gosh, that’s a big question.

Pete  

It is! So give us the gist.

Jonathan  

I will say, I’ve been interested in death for a long time, since I was a child—And this is partly, you know, me being worried about my mother’s mortality. She’s perfectly healthy and alive, but you know, I think being a little bit morbid as a child, I thought, “Well, one day my mother will die and that doesn’t seem like a good thing.” And then, as a teenager, one of my best friends died of an asthma attack and I think, so death was kind of, if you like, “in the air,” and in my mind, and in some ways, the fact that I do research on this is not that surprising, given what I was like as a child. But I don’t know if I would have said that I was all that afraid of death until I had my first child and then suddenly, my mortality mattered to somebody concrete and real and dependent on me for their survival and happiness, right, like… And that has nothing to do necessarily with being a priest—although we’ll get to that in a moment—but I do think that these thoughts about your own mortality kind of change depending on life circumstance—and, you know, you might be able to relate with this as well, where you know, having children suddenly makes your life more important in some way, there’s more at stake in that sense, than there was before. 

Pete  

Jonathan  

So, in my own life, that certainly was a turning point. It made me much more interested in thinking about death more personally, right? So, having done research on death, on death anxiety, as a social scientist, for a long time, as soon as I had a child, I thought, “Wait a second, like, I need to spend more time just existentially thinking about my own mortality,” in a more kind of straightforwardly personal kind of way. I think that there are two ways to think about my own relationship with death and dying and one is as a theologian, right. So the theological part of my job, which involves preaching and writing and that kind of thing. And then also my approach to death and dying, in a much more kind of like human, person-to-person, flesh and blood, what happens when I sit next to somebody who is dying? Or what happens when I visit a grieving family kind of situation? And these are not unrelated things, but I think they are slightly different tasks. The thing they have in common, I think, is that I want myself, and Christians in general, to take death very seriously. And this sounds like a silly thing to say, because what could be more serious than death? 

But I think going back to what we said about the West, and our current tendency to deny or to avoid death, I think there is a kind of glibness about the way we deal with death right now, which is that we don’t really want to confront it. Or if we do, we want to quickly move beyond the awfulness of death and kind of go to the stoic, peaceful, you know, “he’s in a better place now,” like, “you will grieve but not forever,” kind of phase of things. Whereas I think that there’s something important for Christians and for myself, as a priest, to allow people to grieve, to allow people to confront that, actually, death is awful. That Christianly conceived, death is maybe the most awful thing. And the theological arguments are very simple, right? So, you know, here’s the premise, life is good. Here’s another premise, death is the cessation of life, ergo, death is bad, QED. And like I say that glibly, right, but actually, I think that argument is sort of difficult to chip away at. Like, if we affirm, as Christians, if we affirm that life is a good thing, then it’s being taken away must be a bad thing. And then, you know—if you want to deal less with syllogisms, and more with biblical material—it’s not for nothing, I think, that Jesus never meets a dead person that he doesn’t bring back to life. Right? Jesus never tells the Widow of Nain and that, you know, “Oh, you know, your son is in a better place, now.” He never tells Mary and Martha, that “It’s okay. Death is just a natural part of life.” Like, Jesus has no time for that kind of, like ridiculous platitude. What he does, is he brings them back to life. And I think that’s important. As Christians, we must acknowledge that, if it means anything, it must mean that Jesus himself thought that being alive—all else being equal—is probably better than being dead. And that death is not a thing to be accepted, necessarily, but something to be defeated. 

Again, to go back to a theological register, Christians are now happy to talk about Christ coming to solve the problem of sin but the New Testament rarely talks about sin without also talking about death. And the church fathers were very clear that Christ came to defeat sin and death, that it is death that’s being defeated by the death of Jesus and his resurrection. So, whatever one makes of the afterlife, of the reality of the resurrection, either Christ’s or our own, I think at the level of “Is death a bad thing?” Christians have kind of always thought so. And by watering that down, by trying to move too quickly to a place of acceptance, or a lack of grief, or something like this, I think we’re not doing our own faith, tradition, justice. And as a priest, I want to inhabit that, I want to allow people to grieve. I don’t want to rush people into accepting either their own mortality or the death of their loved ones. And for that reason, I think I’m quite critical of the move in the last 20 or 30 years for both theorists and practitioners to reflect on and encourage something they call “the good death.” As if there is such a thing as a bad death. Or maybe as if there’s such a thing as a good death. And my worry about talk of a “good death” is that it moralizes death in a way that, you know, if you don’t die in a calm and accepting manner, then there’s something wrong with you. It’s almost sinful, and if not sinful, then at least pathological. And I want to resist that. I want to say, well, actually, some people may well rage against the dying of the light, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe, that’s a truthful reflection of the badness and awfulness of death. And, of course, Christians have something to say about the afterlife, something to say about resurrection, but just at the level of the death itself, I think what Christians have to say about death is that it is bad. It is so bad that God had to come and solve it as a problem.

Jared  

I think that’s a fantastic way to articulate that balance of things. And it just is… It’s sort of short circuiting how I grew up, in sort of the tradition that I have to sort of articulate, “No, there is a very deep Christian tradition, and a very biblical sense that death is bad.” And, you know, again, I wonder if there’s this cultural influence we talked earlier about, kind of the modern West and denying, it’s almost like we’ve now employed Christianity to aid us in our denial of death. But it’s often flipped around the other way to say, “Oh, no, we’re just doing this because it’s Christian. It’s the Christian thing to do to deny death.” But what I’m hearing is, no, it’s a Christian thing to do to acknowledge it and to acknowledge that it is not something to gloss over, or it is something to grieve and grieve deeply. So, what’s the correlation between—and maybe there isn’t a correlation, but I’m curious—does death anxiety…You know, what are ways, you know, culturally or sociologically that we can reduce death anxiety? Have there been studies on where, if we grieve more, or we allow for these practices that have been pretty ancient around grief, that it reduces death anxiety? Or are there studies to figure that out?

Jonathan  

Very surprisingly, there are very few studies about how to reduce death anxiety and there’s quite a straightforward explanation for why this is the case. So, let’s go back very briefly to the history. So, this history that I provided earlier, had a lot to do with Freud and when Freud’s influence waned in psychology departments, say in the 50s 60s and 70s, there was a move for psychologists to go to a kind of more, we say “scientific model,” you might say a more physiological model, or a cognitive and behavioral model of thinking about human persons. And one of the things that that did was to move the prioritization of death anxiety, per se, down the list. So, for example, the two most important diagnostic manuals—so these are like categories of psychological disorders—so the two most important psychological diagnostic manuals are the DSM and the ICD and neither of them have death anxiety as a specific disorder. So, they categorize the fear of death as a specific phobia. So in that sense, it is a phobia, like any other phobia, so the fear of spiders, for example, or the fear of public speaking, or something like this. And in that sense, the therapy for death anxiety is exactly like the therapy for the fear of spiders, which involves various kinds of, for example, desensitization, which is where you expose the patient to the thing in small doses before you get them to large doses. So, the classic example is, if you’re afraid of spiders, what the therapy looks like is, we will show you a picture of a spider first and then get you to, you know, practice breathing exercises, or you know, to assure you that there’s nothing to worry about, there’s nothing to panic about. Then, after you get used to a picture of a spider, we might show you a video of a spider then once you’re okay with that, then we’ll show you a live spider but in the cage and then once you’re okay with that, you know, we throw you into an elevator full of spiders or something like this.

Jared  

So, with death you just expose them, you just kill them a little bit?

Pete  

You almost died, are you okay? See you tomorrow!

Jonathan  

This is where it gets interesting, right? So, the Christian tradition, the Christian liturgical tradition, in particular in the West—so this is the Catholic tradition inherited by some Protestant denominations—have kind of always had a daily practice of contemplating mortality. Right. So, the prayer known as compline, or night prayer—which involves, for example, the devotees from Luke’s Gospel, “Lord, let your servant depart in peace.” The night prayer for the Western tradition is, in some ways, quite a straightforward meditation on your own mortality. And so, if therapists are right about systematic desensitization, and whether or not it works with death anxiety, as well as the fear of spiders, then there seems to be some resource within the Christian tradition itself, where we are continually reminded of our mortality through the practice of a daily prayer, night prayer or compline. 

But there may be other ways that Christian theology in practice can help with death anxiety and to mitigate its more negative, more violent, aggressive implications, which is that while I said that Christians have always maintained that death is bad, Christians have always also maintained that Christians should behave like they’re already dead. And we have a very good example of this in how we think about baptism. So, the two dominant ways of talking about baptism is A, as a cleansing ritual, right? So you’re being washed of your sins, and probably in the modern-West, that is the way that people mostly talk about baptism, as a way to wash away your sins or original sin or something like this, as a fresh new start. But the other dominant biblical and early Christian way of talking about baptism is as death. Right? So Saint Paul says, we are “baptized into the death of Christ.” And so, in that sense, then your baptism and the practice of immersion baptism makes much more sense here than what we usually do now, which is pouring water or sprinkling water. Baptism is a kind of drowning, right? So, we are drowning new Christians, and we’re drowning them so that they die to themselves and then they are resurrected into a new kind of life, in which they can live selflessly, they can live without the normal trappings of being alive. Which is to say, without the concomitant rights, and desires, and preferences, and property, which are the proper domain of the living. The dead don’t have rights, the dead don’t have property, the dead don’t have preferences. And so, if we can live as if we are dead, then we can come quite close to living in the self-sacrificial way that Jesus models for us, and makes possible for us by his own death and resurrection. 

And then, if you think about the Christian life in that way, as being about self-sacrificial love, it makes a lot more sense of the very specific injunctions we get in the New Testament, such as to love our neighbor as ourself, and not just our neighbor, but also our enemies. And to, if we have two coats, and someone else needs one, we give them our second coat—you know, which is, you know, 50% of our coats, right? So we have split our coats equally in that sense—So when you think of the Christian life as being about living as if you are dead, which is to say self-sacrificially, with greater regard for what someone else needs than what you need, then this close relationship between being dead, being baptized into death, and being a Christian, I think holds a lot of promise for how we deal with our kind of physical mortality.

Pete  

Yeah, one thing that sparked in my mind is something that I heard Richard Rohr say many years ago that the Christian life is about learning to let go of things on a continual basis. Which is sort of like a dying to self to be symbolized in baptism. And if you do that your whole life when the final letting go comes, you’re ready, because you’ve been doing it your whole life. That struck me immediately. There’s a wisdom to that which doesn’t romanticize death, but also treats it as realistic, but inevitable and realistic, but also something that can affect the pattern of our existence, which is—it’s a way of conquering it in a sense. You know, I know Richard Rohr certainly believes in an afterlife, but I’m just—you know, that’s a particularly Christian way of thinking about it, which I’m sure other religious faiths have ways that are very similar, maybe even older than Christianity. But—and that’s not very American, that’s not very Western, as I see it. It’s also not very Christian, in terms of at least the church influences that I’ve had, you know, with celebrations of life instead of funerals and “don’t cry, they’re in a better place,” “heaven needed an angel,” that kind of stuff. And that first, doesn’t work number one, when you think about it for two minutes and secondly, it’s not really consistent, I’d say with the Christian tradition, broadly considered.

Jonathan  

Yeah, certainly, with the ancient Christian tradition, I think, in some ways, one of the jobs that we have now as theologians, as ministers, is to try to retrieve a Christian tradition that is older than the last 150 years in America and Britain, right. And I think we very often confuse modern Christianity for Christianity. And I’m not suggesting that the only true, and relevant, and valid Christianity is the Christianity that existed between the year 200-450 or something like that. Like, I’m not suggesting that we should hark back to a very specific golden age of the faith. But I do think that one of our jobs is to try to interrogate our current situation. What does the Christian faith look like now? And how does that actually compare to the long history of the faith? Are we an anomaly? And if so- 

Pete  

You have to sort of bring our tradition into a submissive—I want to use the word submissive conversation, meaning without assuming that we’ve reached the eschaton here and the way we see things as the best way, but to relativize that by being in conversation with the past, but also without valorizing moments of that past. Which is, as you know, a tendency in Christian history to do just that, you know. You just go back to the fifth century, or the fourth century and we’ve got the creeds and that’s the highlight of the history of Christianity—I don’t know about you, I hear that all the time. And I’m thinking, “Well, no, it’s a valuable point and we have to be in conversation with it, because it’s part of our tradition. But that’s not going to answer our existential questions.” But it’s still something that there’s going to be a richness there that can relativize our culturally conditioned—again, it’s simplistic to say—but our Western, culturally conditioned, way of thinking of the nature of reality. So that conversation, I think, I agree with you, definitely runs us out. 

Jonathan  

That’s right. And I think that’s important, even when we think that we’re right now. So for example, you know, I happen to think that we are more right now about the role of women in the church, or about the status of same-sex relationships, certainly about slavery, right? We’re right about those things now, in a way that our forebears were wrong about. But one of the things I’m interested in doing is to go back to our forebears, to the Christian tradition and to ask questions about, “Wait a second, are there theological resources even there that helped us think about same-sex marriage or women’s ordination or something like that?” And I think that that’s a promising enterprise, is that one of the things that is tempting to do in the modern era is to just talk about, for example, same-sex marriage or women’s ordination in purely secular philosophy terms, rather than doing the harder work of going back into the ancient Christian tradition—and the, you know, and they would have disagreed with us now about these things—But I wonder whether or not there are resources, even then, even there, to help us bolster our current views and to and maybe even to sharpen them, to interrogate them a little bit? What are the ways in which even when we are right, we have also kind of capitulated too much to a kind of unhealthy modern way of thinking, which the ancient Christian tradition can say something interesting about.

Jared  

Well within this as we wrap up our time here, maybe one final question. You’ve dropped several things, I think even just the night prayer within the Christian tradition, and Pete talking about continual letting go, what would be something that if someone has this death anxiety or has this fear of death, and maybe in some ways—given kind of how are some of our listeners give us feedback on this—maybe became Christian or was hoping that their Christianity got rid of their death anxiety and it hasn’t in the way that they’ve practiced it? What maybe is a word or two for someone in terms of some of these ancient practices or even just things that you’ve come across in your research that might be a good way forward, not just for individuals, but maybe for us as a church as a community.

Jonathan  

Sure, I think the first thing that I want to say is that, some amount of the fear of death is totally appropriate, right? There’s something like toxically masculine about wanting to not fear death at all. I mean, death is scary, and it’s okay to be afraid of death. And hopefully, for most people, it will not be pathological in the sense of getting in the way of leading a fulfilling life. But being afraid of death, I think it’s totally appropriate. Not for nothing that Jesus wept, like in the Garden of Gethsemane, and at the tomb of Lazarus, right. 

And I think, let’s not valorize the kind of total apathy about death that some level of fear is appropriate. The second thing I’d say about this is that it’s very useful to do the thinking about death socially. Occasionally, I run something called a “death cafe,” which is not at all like a Christian practice. It was invented in like the early 2000s, I think, by a Swiss sociologist, and it’s just a gathering of people to kind of have a frank and open conversation about death, and in particular, their own mortality. But also, you know, maybe they’re own bereavement. And I think that, you know, if you’re in a church context, or if you just have a bunch of friends who you think would be happy to, like, have a chat about death, that’s quite a good model. There’s lots of information on various websites about this at deathcafe.com, which is their main website. I have my own kind of way of doing death cafes in a church context, which works quite well, I think. So, ministers might want to consider doing that kind of thing in their own church context, or their small groups, something like this. So, I think that’s quite good. They think the exploring of the Christian tradition, for example, through looking at compline, or reconsidering the relationship between the Christian life and dying to yourself, and what that might look like in your own Christian life, as among other things, that preparation for your eventual death is also a good thing to begin doing now, at any point of your Christian life to rethink what your Christian life looks like, seen through this lens of dying, of dying to yourself, in part as a preparation for your own actual dying in the future.

Jared  

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for coming on, and explaining death and our fear of it to us. 

Pete  

Jared  

Yeah, really appreciate having you on.

Jonathan  

Well, thank you so much!

Jared  

And now for quiet time…

Pete  

…with Pete and Jared.

Jared  

Alright, let’s take a few minutes to reflect on this—and I think it’s a great episode for us to just be personal and maybe share a little bit of our own experience. I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that came up for me in terms of my experience with death. But what about you kind of—

Pete  

Nothing.

Jared  

Did you experience this fear of death when you were younger? Or how did your?

Pete  

I have no feelings about any of this topic. I’ve kept it at bay. No, see like—Jonathan said something that really resonated with me because I was petrified of death as a child and I’m trying to think of why and partly—maybe this is territory for my team of therapists to deal with—But my father was like, 40, when I was born, and he was much older than other parents—I worried about my father dying—not my mother, she was 11 years younger than my dad. But I remember thinking that my dad was—this is weird—my dad was 53 years old, but he was actually 50. So I got his age wrong. By three years, I took that as a premonition that my father would die at 53. So he didn’t, he lived to 85. But my point is, that is his death was like a constant like, thing in the back of my mind. And I think what happened is that when you get older, you bury that stuff—pardon the pun—but you you sort of bury those, at least I did. And it didn’t come up again until later in life, like in my 50s—I’m in my early 60s now—but not as a fear but more as like, “Okay, well, what’s next?” You know, and start thinking about it more curiously. You know?

Jared  

Pete  

So, I don’t, you know, honestly, I don’t have a fear of death. It’s more like, I hate getting ready for a plane ride. I’m anxious for like two or three days before that, but the trip itself is okay and I know that. I sort of feel that way. It’s like, this thing is coming. I’m not particularly afraid of it, but I’m a little bit, maybe, ansty. Part of me just wants to get it over with to know if I’m right or not. You know what I mean? 

Jared  

Right, right. Mhmm.

Pete  

“Okay, I was so off, oh well!” You know, or I won’t have any consciousness at all. I mean, whatever, you know, but I don’t know, I just I’m thinking about this. And I like the clinical topic and side of it because it helps you think, it doesn’t detach me from it. It just gives me language to be thinking about this whole idea of deaths. 

Jared  

Right, right. Yeah. It gives you categories of thought. To be able to be processing and be thinking of it.

Pete  

Yeah. Language, catagories, right. 

Jared  

Yeah. 

Pete  

Well, how about you? 

Jared  

Yeah, I think for me-

Pete  

You’re pretty messed up…

Jared  

I was the same. I mean, I think we—again, it’s interesting, our parallel lives in some ways—but I wouldn’t say I had a lot of fear of death as a kid, I had a lot of frustration, as a kid.

Pete  

Oh!

Jared  

I thought about death all the time. And it wasn’t about my parents. And it was interesting to hear Jonathan talk about his, you know, with his mom and you with your dad. And I keep trying to say maybe it was displaced, but I don’t think it was I was probably 9 or 10, and it was the realization that I will die someday and I didn’t like it. Because I really liked being alive when I was nine or 10. Life was great. 

Pete  

Jared  

It was the frustration, I think, for me, it was an element of control. That everything in my life up to that point, I had sort of been able to, you know—I was pretty- I was a trickster, I was able to kind of get what I wanted, I could manipulate a situation, I could figure out how to be at the front of the line of things if I needed to be at the front of the line. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

And I remember being awake at night, night after night and this was a nut, I could not crack.

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

That I would die. And it was, like, my little brain kept trying to, like, do what it normally did, which is like, “Well, if I’m confronted with something that makes me uncomfortable, and I don’t want it, I just problem solve, figure it out.” And I just kept dead end, dead end, dead end, over and over- You know, probably neurotically. And so, that was huge for me, I think to do that as a young kid. Because what it allowed me to do was opened my mind up to the fact that, maybe there’s other things in my life I can’t control, because I kind of hit the one wall that I thought, “Oh-“

Pete  

That’s pretty deep. Jared, I’m sorry, for 9 year old or 10 year old Jared.

Jared  

Yeah, I did think about death a lot. My son actually, one of my sons, does it similarly and so I’m like, “oh, maybe it’s like a genetic thing.”

Pete  

Okay.

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

But yeah, so that, it took up a lot of my thinking. My teenage years was a lot of thinking about death.

Jared  

But not as a fear, but as this element of control in my personality. 

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

Because it kept coming up as this thing that cannot be controlled. 

Pete  

Uh huh.

Jared  

And yeah. So…

Pete  

Well, I think I wasn’t really around death as a child actually.

Pete  

I didn’t have… I had one grandparent that I knew and she lived until 2004 or so. So, I didn’t really have that. I do remember when I was early in seminary, there were two events. One was a couple of students at where I taught were killed in a car accident, like the first month that they arrived on campus, and they had families and things like that. And also, one of the staff members—I mean, I never met this person,—but her brother died in a car crash, too. So, those things were collapsing in on me, that was for me in my mid 20s, I think an existential wake up call. And then I got really afraid that my sister can die and anymore, I can die. Forget that I have kids, I had a son at that point. Right? 

Jared  

That’s true.

Jared  

Pete  

So, like Jonathan said, you know, a child will changes everything, because then it’s not just a fear of your own death it’s a fear of their death. 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

You know, and like, you know, helicopter parenting, all that kind of stuff comes into it. So-

Jared  

Well, do you think some of it is—because he said, it’s not necessarily that they’re afraid of the dying, I wonder for me—like when I think of my kids. In some ways, I’m not afraid of their dying. I’m afraid of the pain for them. But I’m also afraid of my own grieving. Like that’s-

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

It’s a catastrophic and tragic event.

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

That will have emotional reverberations- 

Pete  

For the rest of your life. 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

Exactly. 

Jared  

And so the impact of it on me and those around me and those around whoever it is that’s died, I think my fear and my trepidation with death is more that, than it is the event. Like me dying, like I wouldn’t know. My kids, it’s not—set up the best scenario for them where there’s no pain or whatever, I’m still going to be terrified because of what it means for those of us who are living, who care.

Pete  

Right. I think that’s a big thing for any parent, and some will have lived that, right. 

Pete  

So-

Jared  

Absolutely. 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

It’s not easy. And yeah, there is the not actual my dying, but others around me dying that I don’t want to have die. 

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

Again, and that’s too simplistic, maybe, but, you know, our isolation from all this stuff-

Jared  

Mhmm, yeah. 

Pete  

-Doesn’t help. Like back in the old days. “Well, we got five kids, honey, two well make it.” You know?

Jared  

Right. Well, and then there was the practice of not even naming your kids until they’re a couple years old. 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

Because why be attached? 

Pete  

RIght, right.

Jared  

Why go through the trouble? The chances of them surviving-

Pete  

And they dealt with that and of course, they greatly mourn death as well. I’m not suggesting they’re like, “Oh, well.”

Pete  

“Have another kid,” kind of thing. But still, you’re more in touch with death and we have a whole industry that shelters us from that reality. You know, and so, Caleb Boyle, you know, the-

Jared  

Right.

Jared  

Confessions of a Funeral Director. 

Pete  

Yeah, the ex-funeral director, who’s done a lot of writing about being an ex-funeral director, but, you know, he’s around it all the time. And it took its toll on him. Right. So, you can be around a too much. But you can also be away from it too much. 

Jared  

Well, when you say “the industry that keeps us from it,” I mean, I would say in my tradition, Christianity was that industry. I mean, it was part of that complex of things that keep us away from experiencing death-

Pete  

Or pain in general. 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

Right. 

Jared  

Yeah, exactly. It’s part of this larger thing of—which seems to be a part of this, like, prosperity, health and wellness, theological tradition, where all we should experience if we are Christians are good things. And yeah, I just think it ignores the reality of what’s in front of us.

Pete  

Well, and one other thing that came to mind, too—and this is not getting nerdy, this is actually to me very practical—But, you know, death is awful, death is the enemy, which is a Christian way of thinking—And you know, I can’t say that I disagree with that—But you know, we don’t want to die because we’re wired for life. That’s evolutionary. I’ve even—I was going to ask Jonathan this, but I’ve heard—if anybody knows the answer to this, email us—but I’ve even heard like neuroscientist talk in terms of it’s encoded into our DNA to die.

Jared  

Pete  

Right. So, that’s a big, natural part of things and that’s the cost of doing business if evolution is how things happen, you’re going to die. And, is it the enemy? Or is it the necessary thing? So that I process, it’s part of my own processing of the nature, of the reality that we’re dealing with and to think of it as more… Something potentially gentle that all life endures rather than the enemy that I have to keep at bay for as long as possible. I do believe he should keep in shape, don’t eat Oreo cookies all day. Don’t do what I do, right? I mean, life is precious.

Jared  

 Especially lemon Oreo cookies…

Pete  

I love lemon oreo cookies, Jared…. Anyway, so all that is to say, there were various factors for me that go into me thinking about the nature of death. And you know, what comes after—as something will come after, and maybe nonexistence but something happens after, right. So-

Jared  

What I hear you saying, maybe—I’m putting my own spin on it is—maybe there’s a way to reframe, or maybe update our tradition where it doesn’t have to be an enemy. But it also doesn’t have to then be the celebration, right? You don’t have to deal with these extremes where it’s celebration or enemy. It can be something we all relate to and endure together. You know, life has lots of these experiences that are painful, but that are-

Pete  

It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be angry.

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

It’s okay to be morose. It’s okay to be undone by death. In fact, we probably should be and without that there isn’t going to be any sort of healing if you keep it at bay all the time, but-

Jared  

Right. Excellent. 

Pete  

Jared  

Alright. Well.

Pete  

This is such an uplifting conversation. 

Jared  

Exactly. See you folks.

Pete  

See you!

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 TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.

Pete  

And, if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join. 

Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. 

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, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.

Jonathan  

I hope, if you have a third podcast, maybe I’ll be on that too!

Pete  

Jared  

Yes, yes.

Pete  

We’ll keep doing that for your benefit.

Jared  

Pete  

This is—I’m sorry. This is all Terror Management Theory. We’re just trying to expand our influence. 

Jonathan  

Yeah absolutely right! 

Pete  

Yeah, I hear you. I hear, I get it. Okay. 

Jared  

Excellent.