Snarky Faith

In this episode of Snarky Faith, Stuart talks with comedian, writer, and SiriusXM host John Fugelsang about his new book Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds. https://amzn.to/4b8yKKF

John grew up Catholic, spent years working in comedy and media, and has become one of the most recognizable voices calling out the way religion is used to justify cruelty, nationalism, and political power. In this conversation, he and Stuart dig into the strange marriage between faith and authoritarianism in America, the selective way the Bible gets used by modern fundamentalist movements, and why the loudest voices claiming persecution often hold the most influence.

They also explore the strange cultural divide between Catholic tradition and evangelical apocalypse obsession, why satire and humor can be powerful tools for exposing religious hypocrisy, and where people who genuinely take the teachings of Jesus seriously might still find space today.

It’s a sharp, funny, and thoughtful conversation about faith, power, scripture, and the ongoing fight to separate the teachings of Jesus from the machinery built around them.

Big thanks to these outlets that make the Christian Crazy possible:

• Right Wing Watch

• Christian Nightmares

• Friendly Atheist

For more Snarky Faith:

🎙️ Snarky Faith website

📸 Instagram: @stuartdelony

▶️ YouTube: @snarkyfaith

🩵 Bluesky: @snarkyfaith.bsky.social

📘 Facebook Group: facebook.com/snarkyfaith

☕ Snarky Faith shirts and mugs available here

Check out other fantastic Quoircast partners:

The Heretic Happy Hour Podcast • Wild Olive • Jonathan Foster • The Church Needs Therapy • Honoring the Journey Podcast • Spiritual Brewpub • Bros Bibles & Beer • Liminal Living • The Social Jesus Project • I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist • The God Squad Pod • Radical Love Live • Second Cup with Keith • Unbelief Podcast • High Minds Collective • Evangelicalish • Beyond the Torch with Todd & Leslie

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most people who leave religion do not just leave behind doctrine. They leave behind ritual too.

The prayers. The candles. The songs. The moments that gave shape to grief, fear, celebration, guilt, forgiveness, and change.

In this episode, Stuart talks with Jeremy Steele about his new book, Rituals for Heretics and People Who Aren’t Sure About God (https://amzn.to/4mzdL7R), and why ritual still matters even when belief falls apart.

Jeremy argues that rituals are not just “church things.” They are human things. We already use them all the time, whether we realize it or not. We replay songs after breakups. We light candles when we lose someone. We revisit places that matter to us. We hold onto objects, routines, and small symbolic acts because they help us process what is happening beneath the surface.

The conversation explores what happens when people deconstruct harmful beliefs but never replace the rituals that once gave their lives structure and meaning. Stuart and Jeremy talk about why rituals can still be powerful outside of religion, how they help us process change, and whether modern people are quietly rebuilding new forms of spirituality after rejecting the old ones.

They also wrestle with bigger questions:

What do you do with ritual after you lose belief?

Is ritual still meaningful without God?

Are we replacing religion, or just translating it into therapy language?

What gets lost when we throw everything away?

Can people heal from religion without losing their connection to wonder, mystery, and meaning?

If you have ever left church but still felt like you lost something important along with it, this conversation is for you.

Big thanks to these outlets that make the Christian Crazy possible:

• Right Wing Watch

• Christian Nightmares

• Friendly Atheist

For more Snarky Faith:

🎙️ Snarky Faith website

📸 Instagram: @stuartdelony

▶️ YouTube: @snarkyfaith

🩵 Bluesky: @snarkyfaith.bsky.social

📘 Facebook Group: facebook.com/snarkyfaith

☕ Snarky Faith shirts and mugs available here

Check out other fantastic Quoircast partners:

The Heretic Happy Hour Podcast • Wild Olive • Jonathan Foster • The Church Needs Therapy • Honoring the Journey Podcast • Spiritual Brewpub • Bros Bibles & Beer • Liminal Living • The Social Jesus Project • I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist • The God Squad Pod • Radical Love Live • Second Cup with Keith • Unbelief Podcast • High Minds Collective • Evangelicalish • Beyond the Torch with Todd & Leslie

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when faith stops chasing certainty and starts making room for mystery?

In this conversation, Stuart is joined by editor and foreword writer Keith Giles, along with contributors Mo Thomas and Nish Dubashia, to discuss Volume One of Quantum Theology (https://amzn.to/4ctuHYv).

The conversation explores the strange overlap between spirituality, mysticism, and ideas found in quantum physics. Instead of seeing the world through the usual religious binaries of right and wrong, saved and unsaved, insider and outsider, the group asks whether reality is actually far more interconnected than we have been taught.

Keith talks about why he wanted to create Quantum Theology and gather different voices to explore these ideas. Nish unpacks his idea of “diamond Christianity,” which pushes back against the fragmented, dualistic thinking often found in modern faith. Mo reflects on the difference between ego and the true self, and how mystical experiences changed the way he understands identity, consciousness, and purpose.

Throughout the discussion, the group wrestles with themes of wholeness, mystery, consciousness, deconstruction, and what it means to build a faith that leaves room for doubt instead of pretending to have every answer.

If you have ever felt boxed in by rigid theology, exhausted by certainty, or curious about how science and spirituality might overlap, this conversation will give you a lot to think about.

Big thanks to these outlets that make the Christian Crazy possible:

• Right Wing Watch

• Christian Nightmares

• Friendly Atheist

For more Snarky Faith:

🎙️ Snarky Faith website

📸 Instagram: @stuartdelony

▶️ YouTube: @snarkyfaith

🩵 Bluesky: @snarkyfaith.bsky.social

📘 Facebook Group: facebook.com/snarkyfaith

☕ Snarky Faith shirts and mugs available here

Check out other fantastic Quoircast partners:

The Heretic Happy Hour Podcast • Wild Olive • Jonathan Foster • The Church Needs Therapy • Honoring the Journey Podcast • Spiritual Brewpub • Bros Bibles & Beer • Liminal Living • The Social Jesus Project • I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist • The God Squad Pod • Radical Love Live • Second Cup with Keith • Unbelief Podcast • High Minds Collective • Evangelicalish • Beyond the Torch with Todd & Leslie

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most versions of faith are built to keep things stable, predictable, and controlled. That’s kind of the problem.

In this episode, Stuart sits down with Jeremy Jernigan to talk about his book The Edge of the Inside (https://amzn.to/4dFlzlQ) and the idea that real spiritual growth doesn’t happen in the center of organized religion—it happens out on the edges, where things are less certain and a lot more honest.

Jeremy draws from Richard Rohr’s concept of “the edge of the inside” to describe a space many people are finding themselves in: not fully “in,” not fully “out,” but somewhere in between. It’s a place where inherited beliefs start to crack, questions get louder, and the pressure to perform certainty finally gives way.

They get into why so many people are stepping away from church structures—not because they’ve lost faith, but because they’re trying to salvage something real from it. Deconstruction comes up, not as a collapse, but as a necessary step toward something more grounded and less performative. It’s less about tearing things down for the sake of it, and more about refusing to pretend something works when it clearly doesn’t.

A key thread in the conversation is the difference between fragile faith and what Jeremy calls anti-fragile faith. Fragile faith needs everything to stay intact—no tension, no contradiction, no hard questions. Anti-fragile faith does the opposite. It actually grows under pressure. It expects disruption. It can handle doubt without falling apart.

They also reframe the cross—not as a neat theological answer, but as a pattern. What looks like failure, loss, or collapse can actually be the beginning of something more honest and durable. That shift matters, especially for people who feel like their faith has “failed” them.

There’s also a practical side to this conversation. What do you do when your old community doesn’t fit anymore? How do you find people who won’t try to fix you or pull you back into certainty? And how do you keep moving forward without needing everything nailed down?

If you’ve been sitting in that in-between space—too aware to go back, not sure where you’re going next—this episode names that experience without trying to clean it up.

Big thanks to these outlets that make the Christian Crazy possible:

• Right Wing Watch

• Christian Nightmares

• Friendly Atheist

For more Snarky Faith:

🎙️ Snarky Faith website

📸 Instagram: @stuartdelony

▶️ YouTube: @snarkyfaith

🩵 Bluesky: @snarkyfaith.bsky.social

📘 Facebook Group: facebook.com/snarkyfaith

☕ Snarky Faith shirts and mugs available here

Check out other fantastic Quoircast partners:

The Heretic Happy Hour Podcast • Wild Olive • Jonathan Foster • The Church Needs Therapy • Honoring the Journey Podcast • Spiritual Brewpub • Bros Bibles & Beer • Liminal Living • The Social Jesus Project • I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist • The God Squad Pod • Radical Love Live • Second Cup with Keith • Unbelief Podcast • High Minds Collective • Evangelicalish • Beyond the Torch with Todd & Leslie

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week on Snarky Faith, Stuart talks with Chris Jones, host of the Spiritual Hot Sauce podcast, about a question a lot of people are quietly asking right now: what if Jesus and the religion built around him aren’t the same thing?

Chris approaches faith from the other side of deconstruction — not trying to rebuild the same structure, but trying to strip it down. He makes a distinction between worship and discipleship, arguing that it’s possible to admire Jesus without actually living the way he taught. For Chris, the real work isn’t about belief as much as it is about embodiment.

The conversation moves through the ways religious systems can shape — and sometimes distort — how people read scripture, and what happens when someone approaches those texts without the usual filters. They also get into suffering, not as something to avoid or explain away, but as something that can reshape a person depending on how it’s navigated.

Chris shares parts of his own background, including growing up in a pastor’s family and eventually stepping outside that expected path. That shift becomes part of a larger theme in the episode: how people rebuild identity after stepping away from inherited beliefs, and what it looks like to pursue something more personal, and less controlled, on the other side.

This isn’t a conversation about abandoning faith. It’s about what remains when the structure cracks — and whether something more honest can take its place.

Big thanks to these outlets that make the Christian Crazy possible:

• Right Wing Watch

• Christian Nightmares

• Friendly Atheist

For more Snarky Faith:

🎙️ Snarky Faith website

📸 Instagram: @stuartdelony

▶️ YouTube: @snarkyfaith

🩵 Bluesky: @snarkyfaith.bsky.social

📘 Facebook Group: facebook.com/snarkyfaith

☕ Snarky Faith shirts and mugs available here

Check out other fantastic Quoircast partners:

The Heretic Happy Hour Podcast • Wild Olive • Jonathan Foster • The Church Needs Therapy • Honoring the Journey Podcast • Spiritual Brewpub • Bros Bibles & Beer • Liminal Living • The Social Jesus Project • I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist • The God Squad Pod • Radical Love Live • Second Cup with Keith • Unbelief Podcast • High Minds Collective • Evangelicalish • Beyond the Torch with Todd & Leslie

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.