In this week’s episode of Faith for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Chelsea Kim Long about her journey of remaining rooted in Christianity while challenging the patriarchal structures and teachings that have shaped her faith. They explore how motherhood and embodied experience led her to question religious messages about women’s bodies, emotions, and intuition, and how a more expansive understanding of God and the Christian tradition helped her reclaim parts of herself she had been taught to suppress. Together, they consider what it means to be “faithfully dissident,” why Christian community should prioritize how people live over whether they hold the right beliefs, and how making room for diverse perspectives can lead to a more inclusive and life-giving faith.
Mentioned in This Episode
Books:
Faithfully Dissident Daughters by Chelsea Kim Long
Quit Like A Woman by Holly Whitaker
Permission to Matter by Bekah Stewart
The Sin of Certainty by Pete Enns
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Jared: [00:00:00] 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.
In today's episode, we're talking about reclaiming Christian faith with Chelsea Kim Long.
Pete: Now, Chelsea is a writer and co-leader of a neighborhood faith community. Her newest book is Faithfully Dissident Daughters, which is what we're going to spend some time talking about today.
Jared: All right, let's dive in.
Chelsea: For some people, it's very liberating to just be like, "I'm out." Like, "I don't... None of this is for me anymore." But for me, I actually experienced it as grief. I totally felt like I belonged somewhere, and then very quickly I started to just see all the ways that I didn't belong, and it was so disorienting.
And so my entire journey is, how do I get to retain my Christian identity in a way that doesn't ask me to suppress so much of who I am?[00:01:00]
Pete: Chelsea, welcome to our podcast.
Chelsea: Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here.
Pete: Yeah, we're glad to have you too, and to talk about an important topic. So, to get right into it, you have this phrase faithfully dissident, which is really cool. We love that. So, tell us maybe a little bit of your story about your faithfulness and your dissidentness.
Is that a word, Jared?
Jared: Dissidence? Dissidence.
Chelsea: Dissidence. There you go.
Pete: No, I wanted to use -ness, okay.
Chelsea: I like to say that I was born faithful. I see myself as a cradle Christian, kind of born into a white evangelical family, asked Jesus into my heart at the age of three, you know, went to youth group, church, uh, did sword drills, all the things.
Like, I have a lot of credentials in the evangelical world. And I was homeschooled through sixth grade, went to Christian high school. Um, actually, fun fact is that at my high school senior prom, which was not a dance because we were not [00:02:00] allowed to dance, it was a banquet, I was named the countess of Christianity in my high school. So-
Pete: Wow ...
Chelsea: all of that to say, yeah, I was, like, very-
Jared: We'll make sure to put that in your bio-
Pete: Yeah ... that's a resume builder right there.
Chelsea: Yeah, exactly I think so. And I was also a performer in a Billy Graham crusade as a child. So, you know, people like to sling these accusations and I'm like, "Bro, I know the culture, okay? I was the culture and, you know-
Jared: You're a Hebrew of Hebrews one might say.
Chelsea: Exactly. Thank you so much. So me and Paul have that in common. Um, so yeah. So I, that was my upbringing, and then I kind of just kept following the steps of, like, what I was, quote unquote, "supposed to do" as a faithful Christian woman.
I met my husband on a mission trip. I was young when we got married. We got pregnant a couple years later, and so it's really that first pregnancy that in hindsight started to turn me into a dissident within the culture [00:03:00] that I was raised in. Because, you know, long story short, I realized that, you know, my original sin in the culture was being female in a very patriarchal system of religion, and wanting to see my femininity, my life experience reflected in the image of God when I was really brought up with- I would say exclusively male images for God and male metaphors for God.
And of course, we have, you know, the Father and the Son. And I... It wasn't really until I became pregnant and I was so deeply kind of tethered to my body in a really unique way that I realized I don't see my life, like my embodied life as a human woman reflected in the image of God, even though I had been told my whole life we are all made in the image of God.
But it felt like the inverse wasn't true. I couldn't see myself in the image of God. And so [00:04:00] that put me at odds with the worldview and culture that I was raised in because I realized over a long period of time that I couldn't really kind of comply and remain within a system that wasn't willing to see me.
So that's where I see this interplay of the faithfully dissonant. The faithfulness piece is that I am continuing to remain rooted in the tradition, in the love of God, the way of Christ, but I dissent from any distorted expressions of faith that would harm, exclude, or diminish the dignity of anyone.
And those are things that I discovered along the way that were beyond just my identity as a woman in the culture.
Pete: So Chelsea, I, to follow up with that. I'm sensing it wasn't really difficult or traumatic to hold on to some of your tradition growing up. I know some people, like, they just bag it all.
Like, it's been so difficult, but you, you sort of are, um- Uh, you're [00:05:00] taking the good along with you? Is that a way of putting it?
Chelsea: Totally, and you know, I think what happened is I was having these experiences of motherhood, and it, and it started with that pregnancy, and then kind of just kept going from there all along my reproductive journey, which is not something that there's a lot of light shone on within church spaces.
I expected motherhood to kinda be this pinnacle of my experience, and in so many ways, it is. I love being a mother. I have three kids now. It's beautiful, it's joyful, and it also brought a lot of trauma into my life that I didn't have a way of reckoning with it theologically. And it is kind of like the classic issue of suffering, right?
But it's also this uniquely kind of feminine lens of being raised with a theology and even spiritual practice that had been really shaped through the male lens, and so inherently kind of left out that feminine [00:06:00] experience in how we see God, how we're practicing, how our church is structured. And so for me, I experience, actually, you know, we talk so much about deconstruction and, um, for some people it's very liberating to just be like, "I'm out."
Like, I don't, none of this is for me anymore. But for me, I actually experienced it as grief primarily.
Pete: Hmm.
Chelsea: Because I really felt like I deeply belonged in my upbringing, in my family, in... Like, I had a great upbringing, great family, um, loved it, and all of a sudden I felt like I, it, I don't know. It almost felt like this night and day, like I totally felt like I belonged somewhere, and then very quickly I realized, I started to just see all the ways that I didn't belong, and it was so disorienting and, and full of grief.
And so my entire journey is how do I get to retain my Christian identity in a way that doesn't ask me to suppress so much of who I am?
Jared: Well, and maybe to follow [00:07:00] up on that in terms of who, who you are, I wanna go back to a phrase that you used, which was this embodied experience, and it sounds like that was a real catalyst for a lot of these things.
And, I think maybe people have heard this phrase of embodied experience, but especially from a feminine perspective, as a woman, why is that so important? Because I think for a lot of men, it's either taken for granted or it's just sort of like the water that we swim in, or it's, you know, some people are just in their head so much that they don't even understand what you're saying.
So can you maybe take a minute to unpack this idea of an embodied experience and how that could be so powerful for you as you, like, shifted... It was powerful enough that it had you shift all of this tradition, all of these things that you believed, with a lot of theological oomph. So maybe take a minute to unpack that.
Chelsea: Absolutely. And, it impacts all of us. And so for, you know, like one [00:08:00] example is, you know, there's a lot of conversations around this purity culture that many of us were raised in, and it influences men and women. And I think taught all of us to, like, demonize our body to some extent, right?
There's, like, all these scriptures I kinda have at the top of my head, you know, like, "Beat your body and make it your slave." And, um, so there is a lot of Christian teaching, and has been historically, about the separation of kind of flesh and spirit, um, you know, mind and body, and these distinctions that we make, and obviously this elevation of kind of the spiritual, um, and then this degradation of the physical or the body.
And that's also not exclusive to Christianity. Like, a lot of, you know, traditions kind of tell us we have to transcend our body and whatever. So this is, you know, a different way of kind of- I think for me, just kind of naming, we live our lives in our body, [00:09:00] and to your point, so many of us have been raised in religious traditions that really operate, like, in our heads and ask us to kind of ignore, suppress, fear what's happening in our body.
Um, and for me, I was able to do that for a really long time, but there was something about pregnancy that just is, like I said, it just put me in my body in a completely new way. And, like, it makes sense that if I was raised in a structure that was primarily shaped through the lens of men, like, that experience is almost invisible or taken for granted. And so I had no ability to kind of read my experience onto my theology. And, and I don't know, I think maybe that's just my personality. Like, I think I was just kind of born to be thinking these thoughts about God. And so it just kind of struck me in this particular way of I need to be able to feel [00:10:00] like God can understand what I'm going through in my body.
And the Christian tradition, I find it kind of ironic that it has become this kind of disembodied tradition because if we think about the core of the faith, it's the incarnation, right? It's the word became flesh. It is God inhabiting, uh, you know, human flesh. And so to be asked to ignore whatever is happening in our body, when I look at it through this new lens, it feels actually kind of deeply Christian to consider what is happening in our bodies when we're thinking about our spiritual lives.
Pete: Chelsea, what were some moments in your life, I guess, maybe when you were younger or whatever, where, you just felt like your body was not respected or was a problem, and that leads to all sorts of other things.
So, I mean, just, it, it, [00:11:00] it might help people, right, who are listening here if there are specific moments either in church or outside of church that really fed that and really drove that home to you?
Chelsea: I think it was so normalized in the culture that I was raised in to police women's and girls' bodies particularly.
And so that would look like, you know, these examples such as when it was time... You know, going back to the homecoming dance or banquet, I'm sorry. We literally had to... I can't remember if we had to bring our dress in and try it on or if we just had to bring a picture of it to get it approved by the, like, office, someone in the office, a woman in the office who would say, "Okay, that dress is modest enough for you to wear to the homecoming banquet."
Um, I mean, my entire kind of adolescence into college, it was very normalized for people to make comments on my body. I mean, I think most women have an experience of [00:12:00] men commenting on their bodies in ways that are like a shade off of inappropriate. You know what I mean? And it's meant to be a compliment.
Like, "Oh, uh, if I was your age," like, "Oh, I bet you have all the boys chasing after you." But that made me feel really uncomfortable from a young age. And it also taught me that my body is an object to be commented on, um, that I don't really have the ability... No one modeled for me saying like, "Hey, that's, let's not make comments."
I think that's becoming more normalized now in parenting, like, "Let's not talk about other people's bodies." Um, and even, you know, again, the modesty piece is so huge for that, like feeling shame if I had the tiniest bit of cleavage, and, and so much shame literally just for the shape of my body.
Because I was... I mean, I'm an Enneagram one good girl, rule follower, was never trying to lead someone astray. And yet I felt so much shame just for existing in my body, the shape of my body, the form of my body because I was a woman, and because that might lead a man into temptation. [00:13:00] And so being pregnant wa- I mean, I...
It's like you, you distance yourself from your body because you feel ashamed of your body. But when I was pregnant and then going through, like, all of these experiences, um, I could not escape my body. Like, I just couldn't do it because I, I was... This was just deeply happening in my body.
Jared: Well, I wanna maybe, um, talk about something that's related to that but maybe a little distinct, and that is, um, this distrust of your own body because I think that is tied to this embodiment, too.
That not only, like, from a purity culture, it is that your body is this object, and it's often actually a weapon that Satan is using against all the boys in some ways. But there's also a sense of distrust, your own instincts, your own feelings, your gut, your intuitions, all of that.
So what were the biggest influences on that message for you?
Chelsea: You know, when I talk about the [00:14:00] body, I do include things like your intuition and also emotions. You know? Um, growing up, again, I think there was... And a lot of it is very gender-coded, like what emotions are appropriate for certain people to show.
Women are not supposed to show anger, right? And, um, I have always been this, like, deeply feeling, kind of like gut type person, and so again, felt so much shame about my emotions and, you know, was told that that was, like, a lack of spiritual maturity that I had so many emotions rather than just, like, this is the type of person that you are.
And as you mature, you may learn to manage them or, you know, have different strategies that are healthier for expressing your emotions. But, like, it's not inherently wrong to experience any emotion. And so yeah, I think there's a lot of, um, I don't know, there's a lot of scriptures that are used to help, you know, to kind of reinforce this [00:15:00] message that you can't be trusted.
I think of, even like trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. Right? It's like don't trust yourself, trust what God says. Um, a big one for me is like the verse that says the heart is deceitful-
Jared: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm ...
Chelsea: and desperately wicked. So I have a whole kind of exposition in my book about how that verse was weaponized against people to mistrust your intuition, mistrust your heart, and now I really see that as kind of this indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
You know, when we talk about the body, there's a verse that always comes up which is like, "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, therefore honor God with your body." And I think growing up, I always joke, like every verse came back to like, "Don't have sex before marriage," you know? So that was another one.
It was like, honor God with your body means, meaning stay pure.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: Keep your temple clean, right?
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: And I've kind of flipped that verse on its head too of emphasizing the second half which is, your body is a [00:16:00] temple of the Holy Spirit, which is extremely incredible and powerful to think about like the indwelling wisdom of God lives within us.
Those of us who are, call ourselves believers and who follow Christ, we have access to the Spirit, to the wisdom of God, and I think God speaks to us through our intuition, through those gut feelings, through our emotions, you know? I think every emotion kind of has a quote, unquote "God-ordained purpose," and of course, throughout our life and experiences and trauma, those things can get twisted, and then they can cause issues like anxiety or other mental health things.
Um, but I think at their core, I truly believe that God created humans and called us good. And so what does that mean if we can see all parts of ourself as good?
Jared: How do you navigate the messaging [00:17:00] between, you know, 'cause the Bible itself has a lot of self-sacrifice, humility language. How do you distinguish between maybe a healthy, uh, sacrificing for others, looking out for others, versus, like, this self-erasure idea or being, uh, I think a lot of people will call it, like, being a doormat for people and just, uh, not being able to trust yourself?
So how do you distinguish or navigate between those? 'Cause I think that's the fear, is that if we, if we don't talk about that we need to have humility and self-giving and all of that, we're losing something central, and that people are gonna run away to being just selfish people.
Chelsea: Yeah, I think it's really interesting 'cause I feel like underlying that argument is just a complete lack of trust in people, which, I mean, maybe is warranted, right?
I think so much of our religious structures, and not just Christianity, have become, like, um, ways to keep people compliant and to kind of, um, give people a set of values that they should live by [00:18:00] because we're afraid that people can't I guess, self-govern or aren't able to control ourselves. Mm-hmm. And I don't know, maybe that's true, like, but, um, I have found with myself this shift from, you know, following Christ as, like, a set of rules to follow, to following Christ as kind of this discovery of who did God create me to be, and I, like, when there aren't, when there isn't all this pressure on me that I'm gonna do something wrong or that I'm gonna miss the will of God or whatever- I have found so much more freedom and ability to, um, show up in the world in, in kind of, like, wholeness of myself. I understand, and I'm not against, like, humility, um, sacrifice. Like, I think those are all beautiful things. One thing I think that I would say to that, if we're talking about this lens issue of the tradition being largely shaped by men, it feels like, again, women [00:19:00] have a more deeply embodied experience of self-sacrifice.
So, a good example from kind of scripture is this, the idea of the Eucharist. It's like, "This is my body broken for you."
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: Right? "This is my blood shed on your behalf." And for men, m- men don't have... I mean, I guess men have like, war that they can think of, like, going off to war, but for women, we inhabit that in our body.
When I went through labor and delivery, that was my body being broken to bear life to, for my children, right? When I'm nursing my babies, that is my blood that is, like, somehow magically by biology being converted into food that literally keeps my child alive. So there's a way in which... You know, I don't wanna deny our entire tradition.
I, like, we started the conversation, I am a Christian. I value the tradition. It is, like, deep in my bones and my roots and my family, and what I would love to [00:20:00] see is more space for a variety of perspectives on how we are interpreting scripture and tradition, because there are so many perspectives that just haven't been listened to.
And so when we think about- You know, uh, like there's this author that I really like who writes in the sobriety space, which feels kind of random, but her name is Holly Whitaker. She wrote a book called Quit Like a Woman because she got sober, and she felt like Alcoholics Anonymous was really not helpful for her personally, which was a very controversial take, um, because obviously it's kind of the top modality for recovery.
But she talks about how AA was founded by men, written by men, who were, like, these, like, kind of power-holding businessmen, right? And so she talks about the 12 steps. It's like notice what they're asking these men to do. Become right-sized, don't question the rules, humble yourself, admit your weakness, be [00:21:00] self-aware about what's wrong with you, you should listen to other people.
And Holly Whitaker says these points are actually instructions on how to be a woman. It's kinda like a tongue-in-cheek thing, but it's like, yes, for those who have been on the underside of power, I don't know that we need to be asked to erase ourselves and be humble when actually we have already been shoved down, so maybe our spiritual journey is actually to, like, be more lifted up.
Pete: That's a fascinating take, actually, on AA. I'm a little familiar with it.
Chelsea: I understand it's tough. Like it's unorthodox. I get that, and I'm not the only one saying these things. There's a writer, Bekah Stewart, who has a spiritual formation book called Permission to Matter. I would recommend that for your listeners, 'cause she talks a lot about, like, I think she calls it becoming human-sized.
So, it's, the journey is not one-size-fit-all. Right? Like, for some people being human-sized or, I think that's how she says it. Like, they need to be knocked down a peg. For some people, they need to be lifted up a peg. Yes. So I'm advocating for more space for [00:22:00] people to have the experience that they need to have.
Jared: Well, that, I would even go further on that take and say that's also, we need to do that when we're applying the Bible because we have to recognize the context in which the Bible is written. And you know, I said early jokingly, like, Paul is described as the Hebrew of Hebrews.
Like, Paul is in, within an oppressed people group or a downtrodden people group, at least within his culture, he is kind of an elite. He is someone who has, you know, studied the Scriptures and things like, and is a man. And we have to realize that within, uh, even our Bibles, maybe that advice was from a certain perspective, where for Paul, he needed to be, you know, humbled and brought down.
But maybe even the admonitions in our Bible need to be contextualized in that same way. So. Ugh. Yeah.
Pete: Horrible.
Jared: I know.
Pete: What an idea. That's theoretical, Jared. Anyway.
Chelsea: Isn't there just one unified version of theology that we're all supposed to agree with?
Pete: I think so, and it's the one we have. I mean, at least that's what we [00:23:00] teach here at the Bible for Normal People.
Jared: For sure.
Pete: You know, Chelsea, your journey from your youth into your adulthood and all that, um- W- here's something that might help people too who are listening. What, it, I mean, I found myself, when I was sort of coming out of a crisis moment 20 years ago, I was just grabbing for things that made sense, and I found some dialogue partners either in books or ancient people, things like that.
So, can you maybe talk a little bit about s- I mean, I'm hearing echoes of people. I sort of hear Richard Rohr a little bit in there. Maybe I'm wrong. But, can you just, you know, help us understand what sort of influences did you have?
Chelsea: Absolutely. I will often say that contemplative Christianity saved my faith because it gave me a really new lens for me with which to see scripture, to see the tradition, to see practice.
And when I was kind of in my deepest, darkest moments [00:24:00] of deconstruction, questioning everything, I felt super lost because, again, like I said, there was this grief of I don't know myself outside of my identity as a Christian and I don't want to. Like, I still love God, I still love Jesus and wanna be a follower of Christ, but I don't know how to do it because I can't do it.
And I would even try to, like, do the same spiritual practices that I had always done and just felt like I was hitting against a wall. And so, yeah, Richard Rohr was one of the first kind of really influential thinkers. I also, um, got really into yoga, which I don't know if that's allowed to be said here.
But I learned a lot from the practice of mindfulness from, like, the Buddhist and the yoga traditions. And, I was so grateful for contemplative Christianity because I got pretty deep into... Like, I got certified to be a yoga teacher and had, like, a small period of time where I thought, "Oh, maybe, maybe this will be my path."
And then just realizing... I mean, [00:25:00] it's almost like a native language. Just like I grew up speaking English, Christianity is my native language, and also it's, it's my tradition and so I resent being told, like, "Well, what you're doing is not Christian," or, like, "You don't really know what it is." I wanna keep it because it's really, really precious to me.
And so contemplative Christianity was definitely a path. Richard Rohr, um, Cynthia Bourgeault was another one who kind of sent me down this, um, more kind of contemplative, mystical path. And then I... From there I kind of just started... I read so widely. I feel like you guys will appreciate this. I had a year, I think it was maybe 2017, where my New Year's resolution was to not read any books by white men, and especially, like, spiritual or religious books because I was like, "I wanna challenge myself to read really widely and to read from a variety of perspectives." So I remember I read, like, Esau McCaulley during that year. I don't even remember all the people that I read, but I just was very committed to... I read James Cone. Like, I just was like, "I [00:26:00] wanna learn about other," you know.
I never grew up knowing about liberation theology or feminists or anything like that. It was like we had, like, Wayne Grudem Systematic Theology, and I, I learned, like, apologetics in my Christian high school, you know what I mean?
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: Um, and so it was... I often say, like, it was equal parts infuriating but also liberating to realize that the tradition that I had been raised to see as, like, so complete is actually so vast.
Jared: Yeah.
Chelsea: And of course spans history and spans tradition. And even now we have all of these multiplicity of denominations, and I just happened to be raised in one- portion of Christianity that wanted to invalidate kind of everyone else's experience. But as soon as I was able to, like, be exposed to those ideas, it felt like a homecoming, and it felt like, I don't know, a redemption of all the things that I loved so deeply [00:27:00] about my upbringing and still value, like I get to keep those.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: And I also get to keep the parts of myself that I had been told, you know, were wrong or were bad or that I should suppress or I should feel shame about. And so it became, I mean, it became kind of a reclamation project and, my lens is particularly like around this idea of the feminine. Um, but it's like, it was so fun for me to kind of go on this journey of exploring what have people said about God throughout time and space and over centuries and in different traditions? And, and can we make this argument that perhaps there's more space in the image of God that can include women, too?
Jared: Mm-hmm. I don't wanna put you on the spot, but I think a lot of our listeners are gonna resonate with kind of parts one and part two.
The grew up in this tradition, went through kind of a deconstruction where I'm rethinking, I'm going through a faith transition, and kind of [00:28:00] part two, wow, I've been widely read now, I see these vast traditions. And I think some people are struggling with kind of where to land. So if you could talk about, not that you need to lay out your statement of faith, but you said like the feminine is an important lens, but where do you hang your hat theologically?
You talked about a reclamation. What are those kinda core things? 'Cause I think a lot of people feel like because they were in some ways duped by one tradition, now they're scared to hang their hat on things, so they, it's like a perpetual I'm just gonna keep reading. And, and for some people that's fine, but for other people, they wanna feel grounded in a set of theological beliefs or principles or, or something that now feels, um, a little bit more tangible than just a ongoing search.
So have you found a little bit of that, like I've landed in a new theological posture that has these core tenets for you? What, what would those be?
Chelsea: Yes. I appreciate the [00:29:00] question, and I often joke that I am a theological free agent, and also ecclesiological free agent, which means I don't belong to a denomination, ecclesiology, church.
So I think it's important for me to say throughout my entire journey, I never stopped being a part of a Christian community.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: So part of my story is I stopped attending my white evangelical church, but I pretty quickly after that moved, I live in San Diego, and I moved into this intentional faith community, which at the time was actually kind of like a planted faith community, a la like Shane Claiborne kind of inspired.
Um, so this urban neighborhood and this group of people, it was actually planted by an evangelical organization at the time and so I moved into that community because we had close family friends. My husband's best friend from childhood lived in the community, and so it was partly practical, like we wanted to live by our close friends, but it was also for me, this effort at like, [00:30:00] well, I don't know how to be a Christian right now, but I also desperately want to stay a Christian because that is just so core to who I am and my life and my practice.
So we moved into this faith community, which is a very kind of non-traditional, kind of like a house church, I will say sometimes for people to kind of understand, but just like group of family and friends and, um, so we have a Sunday gathering that's very like a church-like environment. And the thing that was really interesting and I guess revolutionary for me at that time in my life is that I had never been in a religious or faith space that didn't ask me to like sign on some dotted line about what I believed in order to belong in the community.
Jared: Right.
Chelsea: And for the community, and still to this day, now fast-forward, I've been here about 11 years, and I help co-lead the community, and it's evolved in a lot of ways. But the core remains that like our goal as a community is not to ever say like, "This is what we [00:31:00] believe, like you must believe this in order to be a Christian."
I know like Brian McLaren has written about this move from like orthodoxy to orthopraxy, right? So it's this idea that like, what if Christianity wasn't so much about like right belief? Because I think most of your audience probably has lots of examples of people who say they believe the right thing, they affirm the creeds, and yet the fruit of their life is extremely toxic and creates a lot of chaos and pain.
And so for, I think, a really nice move to make is like, what does it actually look like in your life to follow Christ? Like, what are those practices? Regardless of what your stance is on the doctrine of salvation or the doctrine of hell or whatever, I think it's accurate to say that faithful Christians throughout the history of the church have had a variety of views on any given kind of topic.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: And so there's a lot to explore there, which is a lot of the exploring that I have done, and I don't [00:32:00] think you're asking me to like say what I believe about hell or whatever. Yeah. But I think it's less of a concern or like a fear of I need to believe the right thing in order to be saved or go to heaven after I die, and more of a what does the life of Christ show us about how we should live?
And then beyond that, it's not just this individual project, right? It's this communal project of, like, my life and the work of the Holy Spirit in my life is validated by the community of people that I'm around. It's validated by the fruit of my life. And so for me, being deeply rooted in this Christian community that's very kind of non-traditional from what you think about when you think of church, has been the most transformational experience for me in terms of walking out my faith, if I, you know, if I wanna use that phrase.
So I don't know if that answers your question in a really satisfactory way. But I mean, it looks very... I mean, if you came to our Sunday gathering, like, it would feel and look Christian. I mean, it would [00:33:00] be quirky, but it's like- ... we read liturgies together, we pray together in a variety of ways, you know? We read the Bible together.
We read books about the Bible, and we discuss. We read books about theology, and we discuss. Like, we grapple with what is happening in common events, and how are we relating that to what it means to be a Christian, and how we're showing up for, in our own lives, for our neighbors, for, you know, for the greater community.
And so, you know, it's... I understand that the way that I talk about things doesn't necessarily sound like how we are used to Christians talking about things, but for me and my community, it's like a deeply Christian expression.
Pete: Well, I think for a lot of other people, too, you know, which is happening, I think, more and more around us.
Um, yeah, you mentioned following Jesus and not so much the, you know, the doctrines and things, and I think you've probably experienced, as I have too, people saying, "Well, the way to follow Jesus is to maintain pure doctrine, the doctrines that Jesus himself laid down." [00:34:00] And that's a hard argument to extricate yourself from.
Just, it's a little bit boring to me, that argument, but still, people use that. And, um, that, that leads me to a bigger question. It's so big, it's probably unfair, but I wouldn't mind your quick take on it. Um- Why is this happening? You know, why, why is, why, why? You know, why don't people just stop? Why don't men just stop?
Why don't they stop objectifying women's bodies and young women's bodies when they're in churches? You know, why, like, it just, it's all over the place.
Chelsea: Yeah. I mean, it's like the Epstein files. I don't know. Like, I don't know. I wish it would stop, too. And I don't know. I mean, I think, an annoying answer is, like, patriarchy, right?
A system where men have been put at this hierarchy of control. And for me, and I think inherent to that [00:35:00] hierarchy is harm, which I don't know if people would disagree with that statement. But I'm like, again, kinda like look at the fruit. Like, what if we just tried something new? You know what I mean?
Like, what if we just tried putting women in charge? What if we had a woman president? Let's see how that works. Like, we don't know, because we haven't tried it yet. So I don't know. I mean, I guess to use a deeply Christian terminology, like, I don't know, humans are fallen, right? It's the sin nature.
I don't know. Mm-hmm. But I think, um, power is very seductive, um, you know? And so, it seems like it's difficult for men who have power to not abuse power, and I don't understand that as a woman because I think another half of the lie is then women don't pursue power because we're afraid that we're gonna harm people if we have it.
So-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Chelsea: I don't know. I think there's so many conversations that need to be had.
Pete: Right.
Chelsea: Um, and I think, you know, even [00:36:00] beyond, like, the human piece of it, I think that's why I argue kind of this theological piece, because I'm curious about if, if s- I mean, I think of course we would all, most of us would probably say, like, "Well, we know that God is not really a man.
We know that God is not really our father," right? Like, literally. It's a metaphor. And yet it feels like there's so much pushback on if we start to talk about metaphors for God that are feminine. It feels like heresy. It's really uncomfortable, and my argument is, well, it just kind of feels reasonable to say if we know that all of us are made in the image of God, then there's something in the image of God that is feminine, and we have not been able to really see that when our primarily, our primary image for God is male.
So again, I don't want to, like, take that away, and I'm not some, you know, wild feminist, like, calling God she all the time, you know? I [00:37:00] just think if we can... It's not about, like, replacing. I don't wanna, like, take the patriarchy and make it a feminine version of that. Like, I wanna kind of rebalance, and what I try to do in my work is kind of point out this feminine lens.
Like, you might not see this in scripture if you haven't been taught to read it this way.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: But there actually is a faithful, there's that word again, way of reading the text in which we start to notice, like, yes, of course, Jesus called God Father, and that's really beautiful, and that's a beautiful metaphor.
And also, what are the ways in which we see God operating in more of a feminine mode, and what are the ways in which God is actually named as feminine in the Christian scriptures? Which feels crazy for some people, because they've just never heard that, but-
Pete: Right ...
Chelsea: it's there.
Pete: Well, it feels like going against the Bible.
I mean, and that's probably at the root of much of this because you can, you can anchor a patriarchal view in [00:38:00] biblical texts. The question is, yeah, but what's the Bible for? Is it for doing that? Is it for doing something else? And that's why the contemplative-
Jared: Well- ...
Pete: influences are pretty dynamic.
Jared: Yeah, you saying that reminded me in, in seminary, I had a professor, seminary professor, right, PhD from probably some pretty esteemed college, said, that God as Father was not a metaphor.
That was actually the case. And God as Mother-
Pete: That wasn't me, was it?
Jared: Yeah, and that's the big reveal here is Pete. No. Okay. Uh, but God as Mother was metaphor. And it, it's like the logic of that is so baffling. Yeah. The only explanation is a Biblicism that's like, well, because the Bible says it more often that God is a father and doesn't really come out and say God is a mother, therefore, that's actually true, and God as a mother is just a metaphor.
Pete: The clearer texts interpret the less clear texts.
Jared: Yes, which is ironically called the perspicuity of scripture.
Pete: Yes.
Jared: Gosh. But anyway, yeah, it's [00:39:00] like baffling to me that- when you have that Biblicism where it feels like you're going against the Bible, it can lead you to some maybe wacky conclusions.
Chelsea: Right, and I don't know. I mean, I don't want to just say like, "Well, I'm gonna use my Bible for my ends," you know what I mean? And, but I do think that we have to, I don't know, we have to say the ways in which the text has always been used to justify various cultural norms. And so my argument is like, you know, it kind of feels like we're in a time of big upheaval about what it means to be a Christian, what it means to belong to church, and, and reimagining some of those things. And my piece is, hey, what if, for the first ti- I mean, I'm not obviously the first person. I'm building on this legacy of feminist and womanist theology and all these things. But like, what if we were ready as a church to kind of incorporate more of these ideas into our everyday kind of practice, our everyday view [00:40:00] of how we're seeing scripture, how we're talking about God, whose voices we're allowing to kind of, or interpret the text for us and tell us what they see. Because I think for a long time, I was just told like this is just theology, this is just the interpretation, but it was never named like, yes, and a white man said that because-
you know what I mean? Or whoever it was. Like, I think it would be more honest to just name that all theology is contextual, right, to the person who is interpreting the text, and that's also true for the Bible of being a product of its time, you know?
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Well, as we, um, wrap up here, I'm curious if there are areas where when you, as you've gone through this journey, that there were pieces of it maybe that were harder to let go [00:41:00] of and pieces that were easier? 'Cause I think the argument sometimes that, uh, I see is it's sometimes hard to get rid of the fundamentalism part of it, that you can just swap, or the sense of certainty maybe is another example, where it's like, "Yeah, I've changed my beliefs, but now I'm certain about this set of beliefs rather than the other."
So the certainty itself is kind of the harder thing to let go of, and are there, like, some structural pieces or some harder things that you're like, "Ah," over the years it was like, "That stuff was easy to let go and change and transition," and then there's some stubborn parts that just, like, I had to dig even deeper to kinda see what was at play?
Chelsea: Absolutely. There's a book, uh, The Sin of Certainty. No, I'm just kidding. I, um-
Jared: That's good. I set it up just for that reason.
Chelsea: I know ... and you knocked it out. You did. That was great. And we always have to, you know, put the plug in.
Pete: Check’s in the mail, Chelsea.
Chelsea: I did say that I didn't read w- books by white men, so I'm sorry, but I did read that one.
Um, but I do see that, I feel like I walk [00:42:00] this weird line of tension be- and that's really what the faithfully dissident stance. Mm-hmm. It's a stance of tension.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Chelsea: Uh, and I get kind of feedback and criticism from all sides. I get criticism from people kind of more conservative than me, who are like, "You're not a Christian."
Like, "What you're doing is not Christian." Like, "You are totally out in left field." Then I get criticism from people who have either deconverted or whatever, didn't grow up in Christianity, who are like, "Why do you care?" Like, "Why is it relevant?" So for me, I'm like, well, I have kind of responses on all sides, but I think there is something about, I will often say, like, the enemy is not any church denomination or person.
It is that fundamentalism. It is that need and desire to be right, and that need and desire to be certain, which kind of brings me back to that, you know, idea of embodiment. It's like, it lives in us when we have been raised in a culture that [00:43:00] is so certain and that is so rigid and, like, needs every single thing to be in place for it all to work.
And so it's super disorienting when, you know, the one domino falls because then it's like, wait, but I needed all of that to work in order, you know, for any of it to work. And so I had a lot of moments like that. I think maybe the practical advice that I would give folks is that we feel that discomfort means that something is wrong, right?
So we have this feeling that if we feel uncomfortable about something, that means that it's immediately wrong. And so I don't wanna tell people, like, "Don't mistrust yourself," but maybe just move with caution. And so when I was, like, really deep in this journey, especially when I was studying, for example, like, yoga philosophy or mindfulness from, like, a Buddhist perspective, I would be reading these books and I, what I call, like, the fundamentalist in my head was, like, really loud.
Like- ... "Okay," like, "Be [00:44:00] careful. This is heretical." Like, "This is right." But also, so often I think I would be doing this, like, translation work, and I actually had an amazing yoga teacher who was very respectful of my faith as a Christian, who would check in with me and be like, "Hey, this is how we talk about this idea in yoga philosophy.
Like, how is that hitting you as a Christian?" Which was such a cool experience for me. Um, but to be able to trust my discernment, that's like a big word that's used in Christian spaces, but I also feel like it's kind of fake because I was raised to be, like, believe that I have the power of the Holy Spirit and I can, you know what I mean, discern.
But also, if I discern something that didn't align with the interpretation or scripture, then I must be wrong.
Jared: Correct.
Chelsea: So I'm like, that's not- actually, that's, again, goes back to compliance.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chelsea: But, like, true discernment, which is a muscle that takes a long time to grow if you have grown up in a culture that has taught you explicitly, "Do [00:45:00] not trust yourself," right? Um, outsource the authority to God, your pastor, your husband, you know, if you're a woman. And so I don't wanna, like, underplay how difficult that is because that was a really long journey for me. But even from early on, I remember, you know, reading this book about meditation and being like, "There's nothing about this that doesn't align with my worldview as a Christian."
And actually, I found those practices to be extremely helpful for me, even to enhance my own relationship with God as a Christian. And so I think that's something. You know, we were trained to read unfamiliar as dangerous and to demonize practices that we are unfamiliar with, that we hadn't encountered.
Um, and so I think for someone who wants to, you know, explore, yeah, to just really, like, be with yourself in that process, and don't just, like, run away from things immediately. [00:46:00] So.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, Chelsea, thank you for, um, taking the time to speak with us and, uh, I had a wonderful time hearing your wisdom and your experiences, and I'm sure our listeners will as well.
Chelsea: Thank you so much. I loved talking with you guys, too.
Jared: If today's episode stirred something up for you, we'd encourage you to find people to talk to about it, and if we can help, we want to.
Pete: The Society for Normal People is full of people who just listen to exactly what you listen to and are probably having similar thoughts and feelings.
Some of them figured it out, many of them haven't, and all of them are okay with that.
Jared: That's kind of the whole vibe, actually.
Pete: Come process with people in the Society. The link is in the show notes or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
