ASM193 Suffering, Ableism, and the Prosperity Gospel with Stephanie Tait

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this week we're talking to stephanie tate about the view from rock bottom on ask sciencemic [Music] science faith welcome past science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life or at least i usually do but this week we're going to talk to one of my favorite people stephanie tate about her new important book because do you say let's get it started [Applause] [Music] as i mentioned in the intro this week's a little different we're gonna talk with stephanie tate who's one of my favorite people stephanie probably doesn't know this but as i started confronting and becoming aware of ableism in my life and then further down the road became aware that i'm an adult with autism spectrum disorder uh stephanie's work was one of the go-to sources for me to learn about ableism and its impacts on society and learn how disability communities are structured and how disability advocacy happens and i have been digitally following her for some time and uh if you are not familiar with stephanie i'm sorry but you will be now stephanie is an author speaker and disability advocate and trauma survivor and she aims to do what she believes is sorely lacking in our trending conversations around christianity to partner sound theology and practice with the unashamed acceptance of struggle in the present tense her new book the view from rock bottom examines the influences of the prosperity gospel in the modern church and urges us to a deeper and more robust theology of suffering stephanie thanks so much for joining us on ask science mike thanks for having me now you got me all emotional that was really sweet i wasn't expecting that dug on it i'm so sorry i i hate how often that like uh my earnest appreciation for people makes them uncomfortable at the very beginning of the show well it kind of threw me off kilter a little bit but it was very nice i had no idea that my work meant that much to you because i look up to your work so i had always found it an honor to even be considered a peer or a friend but to know that you learned from me that's i don't even really have a way to describe that uh when i left twitter for a while uh i cheated because i would get on twitter and look only at specific profiles so i wouldn't go to twitter.com i would go to twitter.com and then different people there were about a dozen of those and you were one of that dozen oh well when you left twitter it it got sad like i'm kind of glad when you're back a little bit it was a sad place i keep a pinky toenail on twitter at all times now so that's uh i feel like all my favorite people leave but not just leave but leave at the same time it like goes and shifts like you'll leave and nish why seth will leave and nicole cliff will leave it everybody will leave all as a chunk and i'm like all that's left are guys that want to yell at me in my dms or like literal nazis so i think i just need to read the room and leave when you guys leave and get on this rotation with everybody i mean it's the only way i've found to like have a healthy relationship with that form of media is to just leave it pretty often and like recharge and come back and wade through the nazis again like that's the that's the difficult thing i think about our social relationships that are centered on social media today is there's so much profound value like i have learned more on twitter maybe than any other media platform ever but to get to those amazing voices you have to move through crowds of neo-nazis and it's just such a bizarre dynamic um well and it's really hard for people like me who are chronically ill because i mean i didn't set out to build a platform or you know be an author or speaker or any of this stuff it sort of sprung organically out of the fact that uh i'm the world's most extroverted extrovert and yet i'm also chronically ill and disabled so i spend a lot of time effectively bedridden or stuck at home especially in the winter and so social media sort of became this natural outlet where i could find a way to try to connect with other humans and without having to get up and go expose myself to germs or push my body back past what it could handle that day and i didn't mean to have like connections with strangers it really started the way most people's social media started just friend the people you know on facebook but um i think it really boiled down to i have unusually attractive kids so i used to take a lot of pictures of them for instagram and people would be like oh these kids are cute i'm going to follow your account and after a while i had this huge following on instagram and i was writing a lot of thoughts on facebook because i had very little in-person chances to discuss them with people so i sort of blurted my whole world out in little almost micro blogging if you will on facebook and these pictures on instagram and somebody came to me back when i was still a professional photographer at a conference and said you realize if you put those two things together that's literally a blog that's i mean you can monetize that you can turn that into a job you can you can do something with this uh and when when you are chronically ill and disabled it's difficult to find work that can fit your limitations sometimes and it's not that easy to get on disability i've never qualified despite losing many jobs when i couldn't show up consistently anymore so it's hard to find a source of income so blogging sort of fell into my lap as maybe this is a way i can be a person who's stuck at home and monetize my thoughts somehow so i came into this world via the mommy blogging route but i didn't mean to do that that was just sort of me trying to find connection on social media and so now that it's become this garbage place filled with so much hate and literal nazis and people screaming at each other without really making any kind of connections the people that are gonna get hurt by this the most are people like me who depend on this for some sort of connection to the outside world when they can't physically get up and go out and find it so it's hard because on the one hand i understand why people walk away but on the other hand like i wish there was a better way to fight to fix these places and address these issues somehow and i don't know what those answers are i honestly don't i understand all the reasons it's hard to censor crap content i do but abandoning ship leaves a lot of people like me feeling like where are we going to connect with other human beings in a meaningful way if we're sort of trapped in our houses if that makes sense yeah it does i mean one focus for me has been trying to create more um alternatives to the big corporate platforms i actually don't think social media is inherently toxic i think the algorithms that curate what is presented on social media to make the most engagement so the companies make the most money creates the toxicity so indeed i've been experimenting a lot with different open source social media platforms to try to figure out if there's a plausible way to make social communities where the participants are in charge and own the platform and i've started experimenting with that with the litter just a little bit but i actually have aspirations to create like you know what if we had a a twitter-like instance where uh you know all the people are on it controlled that instance and set the conduct policies and and uh we didn't rely on some semi-benevolent or malevolent corporate overlord to decide who gets to stay we could just say guess what we don't allow nazi speech here which is actually what we've done on the liturgist social media instances we've just said hey no nazi stuff allowed we are explicitly lgbtq affirming you don't have to believe that but this is not a space you can talk about it if you're not and you know this is a place that is is inherently um and explicitly accommodating people at different disability levels and that's an expect expectation to be a part of this community um and the more i spend time in spaces like that the more shocking it is for me you know when i get on twitter or facebook because their goal is not to curate the best community like their goal is to make the most money and often they make the most money when the community is the most toxic that's a tirade i don't want to go down though because it's too far from what i want to talk about today um what i'd like to get back to is this theme of like disability and then uh income like the way our society is structured you're valuable if you make money uh yeah i i don't think that's an overstatement i think some people listening might say mike you can't say that but i just mean if you look at what it takes to have shelter and food and safety our society offers that to people who can make money and people who can make money are people who can contribute to like a system of capitalism that's the way we structure and so you're in this intersection here um where you're an amazing teacher uh but your disability means like it's hard for you you're you're you're chronically ill and how has that felt like so you've launched this book and i've been watching you're doing like a lot of podcasts right now and i i so appreciate that you like took the time to do this show but um how has that felt how's that been for you and your energy level uh to write a book and be on this virtual book tour how are you feeling um i'll be brutally honest it's rough it's really rough i took two different extensions on getting the book turned in itself to the publisher so the book is delayed just about a year from when it was supposed to release um because it's just it's unpredictable in the beginning it was 100 that i didn't recover as quickly or as much when i started treating lyme as i had expected um i had sort of fantasized that i was going to start treatment we finally knew what was really the core root of my problems we were going to get this therapy and i was just going to rebound and have my life back and it didn't really work out that way so the first time i had to take an extension because i was just physically not capable to really get down and do the work uh the second time i had to take an extension was more because our life basically blew up in the middle of writing the book we almost lost our house because of medical bills and so the plan we came up with to save it was essentially to remodel our kitchen ourself doing our own labor so that we could get the value up of our house and refinance so i had to take a second you know extension which basically wrecked me and i wrote that book pretty much in the course of a summer to get it turned in on time which was a lot on my body um and i don't know if i ever really fully recovered from that i've kind of been hanging in the best i could since then uh since launching i have done mostly podcasts right now and it's not just because travel is hard on my body it's actually predominantly because i've been getting a lot of inquiries uh to come promote the book in person at places but they always i would say 90 to 95 percent of them seem legitimately surprised that there's a cost involved in asking me to do that when i present my travel costs to them and i've been waiving my speaking fee actually for any event that sort of book tour if you will like for promoting the book right now uh which means i'm essentially offering to work for free there's no profit margin for me if i waive the speaking fee and i present my travel costs and 90 to 95 of the time right now the responses seem to be sort of oh like doesn't your publisher pay for that which is no that doesn't happen or or or b the worst one is they sort of act like they were doing me a favor by giving me a chance to promote my book so they're really taken aback that i would charge for my time to come speak to their church or their group or whatever they're hiring me for so i would actually love to get out and and share the book with more people travel wise but right now it's less because my you know because of my body issues and more because i can't afford to go pay to work that's i already don't make much of an income doing this i certainly can't afford to also go pay to do my job either so the podcasts have been great because not only do they let me work from home but you know they don't involve having to travel anywhere but it's more of an issue of i can't afford to go out to places right now unless people actually pay me what it costs to come there it's frustrating it's it's sort of this weird intersection of on the one hand um people understand that i'm disabled and they're they're very understanding of that but on the flip side there's still sort of this expectation that i should be able to support myself entirely from income that they're not willing to offer for my work so it kind of just goes around and around of like yes you're disabled and that's sad and you have these big medical bills and we understand that and so you should definitely try to get some work to try to cover your bills but on the flip side i'm doing this work and sort of being told well but that doesn't count like not that work that's more of a hobby you need a real job to support your you know your speaking your teaching your writing you know maybe you'll sell enough books to cover your income which for the record that also never happens so and because there are so many other authors who are working other jobs or who um and you know for christian women a lot of them have spouses who can support them in a lot of cases people like me often can't survive in this industry or their voices get pushed out because if we can't make a living doing this work i can't just go pick up a quote-unquote real day job to support this this is my job this is my attempt to do something from within my limitations and so if i can't find a way to support myself while doing this then that's it it just sort of ends and i stop teaching and that and that's it i'm just done thank you for sharing that stephanie that was not something i was expecting to share but it's uh i've had approximately three more of them just in the last week alone so it's kind of on the front of my brain that i get very excited when people offer me opportunities i'm excited to share this message my worst fear is that i will put three years of work into this book and it will just sit in boxes somewhere in a warehouse because nobody knows about it so i want to get out and spread the word i want to connect with people that will respond to this message and it was always a dream to meet people in person and get to share some of those sacred pieces of our pain stories i love when i have the opportunity to do that to hug someone in person who's offered me a piece of that story is huge but if i can't afford to get on the plane and go do that it all just kind of comes to a grinding halt at this point let's uh let's roll the clock back so you've got three years of work into this book what made you decide like you wanted to write a book where where where was where did the genesis of the view from rock bottom begin well technically when i i'll tell you a little story when i was little my parents gave me an old typewriter uh i set it up in my room and i decided that i was going to be a journalist so i typed up fake little newspapers with totally fake made-up stories and i'm pretty sure this is illegal but i used to go around on my bike and slip them into people's mailboxes at random i don't think they appreciated that at all but um this this is sort of how it started i've always i've always written uh i have probably a sixth grade teacher that would say that she knew that this was going to be what i did uh i didn't know that though because back then i was very practical and i thought you know what your only choice is to really make a living at writing are like journalism maybe editing like i didn't see a real career path here so i sort of pushed it aside as something i did as a hobby and and left it at that and pursued sort of more real jobs as i saw them uh so it's always been something i've done i just never knew that i was going to want to write a book and get published like this until a few years back when i was actually working on a totally different project entirely i was working on a bible study for special needs parents um i have a son who's autistic and because i'm also disabled there was sort of this disconnect for me with that community um i got sucked into the autism mom thing for a little while and it never really sat right with me there's a lot of weird tropes that go on there a lot of weird ableist disrespect where parents really dominate the narrative and don't listen to actually autistic people so i was working on this project and i was doing the lifestyle mommy blogging thing and i got an offer to go speak at a christian university in eugene and i had to talk prepared it was really fun it was really upbeat and we had suffered our seventh miscarriage in the year leading up to this talk and i had a night where i don't really know what came over me but i posted something on my blog that was not in brand that was basically should have been a journal entry and not a blog post and i shared it with the world and got a phone call from the guy who i was my contact at the college the next day basically saying so i read your blog and i was pretty sure i was getting fired and they were gonna ask me to not come speak but instead what happened was he said i don't normally do this and i never tell my speakers what to speak about but if there's any way you'd consider it i really think you need to speak from that i really think there's something in your pain story there's something in the way that you're so willing to open up these wounds and talk about them in the context of faith and spirituality that our students would respond to that they get plenty of upbeat fun inspirational messages this would be something different we don't get that a lot so if you'd be willing to do you want to come at this from a different angle and the theme of their chapels that year was uh sacred and i was like i don't really know how i tie suffering to sacred and so i just sort of did a word study on suffering and wrote out some random notes and some verses literally titled it sacred suffering because i had no idea what to do with it showed up with basically those loose notes and a few slides of bible verses and just started talking and what came out was 35 minutes of material that i have listened to the recording and i honestly don't remember saying a lot of that it was sort of a weird borderline pentecostal spiritual experience where what came out of me was something very special that i have no explanation for there was a lot of crying in that room there was also a lot of laughing in that room it was a really unique time and i walked away from it feeling like wow that was cool and i thought that was the end of it but almost a year later from that talk somebody reached out to me via twitter and said i was at that talk a year ago i'm still chewing on it like there was a lot there to unpack and i was an adjunct professor at that school but now i have a job with this publishing company that publishes christian books have you ever considered writing a book and i was like i don't have an agent i'm 50 steps back and he was like i work in covers i can't actually get you a publishing deal anyways but how would you feel about me bringing the recording of that talk and the link to your blog to an acquisitions editor and we just see where it goes and two weeks later i had a book deal in front of me it was the craziest series of events i still have no literary agent i still you know i'm like a baby i've skipped 18 steps and i don't know what i'm doing in this industry but i knew that this was the book that i was really meant to write i tossed everything that i had been working on before and i threw myself a hundred percent into this project because it felt like a culmination of like this is really my heart song this is what it looks like for me to walk through the world as a chronically ill disabled person who still considers herself a christian but whose faith looks absolutely nothing like what it did when i was raised in this faith i don't consider myself an evangelical anymore but that's probably the community that my theology partially lines up with still i guess um but it looks so different from the way that i was raised and more importantly it looked so different from the way i expected it would look as an adult like my life has just not gone remotely the way i saw it going and yet i'm still a hundred percent a person of faith and i didn't know how to sort of rectify these two ideas and put them together and explain how i got here and so that's sort of where the book came from was i know there are other people out there like me who feel a little bit spiritually homeless and who don't really know where they fit anymore because they can't really line up with the faith of their youth but they're not really ready to walk out and empty the pews or that that doesn't really fit for them either so i wanted to put something out there for people like me i wanted to put something out there that was sort of a middle way of here's a very emotional in some ways but also very logical book that lays out you know here's a lot of bible verses in there of how i came to the place i came with sort of my new understanding of what it looks like to leave room for suffering and leave room for grief and leave room for unanswered questions and not have trite explanations for everything all the time so in some ways i always knew i was going to be an author and in other ways it just sort of fell into my lap which is a crazy story ask science mike is made possible by the support of a few key sponsors i'd like to tell you first of all 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science mike it's they're just just a lot of really different folks um there are some like evangelical christians who listen and there's a very similar number of atheists who listen and there's uh uh pretty much every christian denomination that you can imagine uh shows up in pretty significant numbers um but we also have a a greater number of people who aren't sure what they identify at or uh positively reject any specific religious affiliation uh the so-called nuns or no spiritual affiliation would or religious inflation would be the largest block of listeners of this program uh so you know this book the view from rock bottom uh definitely explores suffering you know through a lens of of scripture and theology and there's these themes in the book around the prosperity gospel and i know that for like 20 of the audience that's all they need they're going to amazon right now and looking up the book we're going to ask sciencemike.com and looking at this episode where there'll be a link in the show notes you can click one link and go straight to the book and get it uh but then everybody else is going wait what why am i even listening to this episode that was so fascinating about this story about disability and now we're talking about all this jesus stuff again uh i wanted to read if that's okay with you a very small excerpt from the book to help frame uh where you're coming from for people listening to the program is that okay with you yeah that's totally cool okay uh so this is from the book itself belief in the prosperity gospel is not always characterized by the stereotypical sense of entitlement to financial wealth it is far more commonly expressed in the sincerely held belief that making good choices will guarantee a certain level of security and reward i had to set the book down when i read that um these days i'm kind of a really fluffy episcopal episcopalian uh i've been a baptist i've been an atheist i've been a methodist these days i'm a guy that just digs the liturgy for reasons he doesn't understand and i don't think a lot about the prosperity gospel anymore at all but when i read those words i was stunned by how deeply interwoven the ideas of the prosperity gospel are not only in almost every christian denomination but also in our approach to capitalism secularism we have this widely held belief that good behavior has merit and merit produces a comfortable lifestyle automatically and i was so struck how in the book it's not just a [Music] christian exploration of the prosperity gospel but it actually speaks to some of the foundations of certainly an american but to some degree the world view of the entire more developed world um you're making me so happy right now i literally sat in a meeting with the publisher when we were starting the marketing and they were like if you had any goals like what's your goal with this book what do you most want people to get out of it and i had a couple but my number one goal was i really don't want to just preach to the choir my hope here is that a lot of people who don't think they believe the prosperity gospel people that would say oh yeah joel osteen that's you know that's garbage and i don't buy that and i don't think god wants pr you know preachers to have planes or any of that silliness i want those people to walk away with a new understanding or new definition for the prosperity gospel and to recognize i would say 95 percent of us are operating with prosperity gospel theology it's absolutely rampant in especially in christian churches but you're right it's the basis for our capitalist system in this country i tried very hard to draw some very deliberate lines between that thinking and how it affects me politically as a disabled person i told a story about the way somebody talked about you know ensure of asking health insurance companies to ensure pre-existing conditions is like asking car insurance companies to insure a junker car that's already been totaled and how dehumanizing it was to sit through that in a church setting by the way is where that happened and i was trying very clearly to draw these lines explicitly not sort of in a roundabout way where everyone can get what they want to get out of it but very clearly say you can't hold these belief systems privately and not have it affect the way you structure society not have it affect the way you treat the people around you this isn't a personally held belief that it's just about you there's no way to believe i got what i have in this life because i earned it all and this is what i deserve without also believing that people that are in systemic poverty people that are disabled people that are struggling in whatever form well why didn't they make good choices like i did i now have no empathy for them because i i can't picture a world in which that would have happened to me because as long as you do what you're supposed to do and you behave and you make the correct choices there's a certain baseline minimum quality of living that you're definitely going to have like sure bad things might happen to you but there's still a baseline security of you should have a roof over your head and food and you're not going to be homeless on the street and in actuality that's not how life works at all my story was just sort of a very extreme example of that but i'm not alone there are a lot of people who have followed whatever they thought the rules were and done what they're supposed to do and it didn't work out for them and not understanding that we all believe some of this prosperity gospel nonsense doesn't allow us to connect to those people let alone to start looking for solutions so to hear that you got that out of those two sentences it's like everything i could have asked for in somebody responding to the book that's exactly what i was hoping someone would walk away with hmm you know um you kind of carry that further in chapter eight um which is called a declaration of interdependence and you open with uh you don't name names but i immediately knew you talked about a particular um you know i every church i've ever been in um fundamentalist conservative to fluffy progressive protestant they all use this curricula all of them um it's okay if you even name the curriculum i don't like speaking oh that's fine now dave ramsey in this context sure uh is something i went through uh i used it to get out of debt i used it to uh i've never had a lot of debt until fairly recently uh but we had a little bit of debt and i you know i said well i want to be able to richly and generously bless people i want to be a generous person so yes i need to get rid of my debt and i need to put my financial house in order so i can give away a lot of money uh and i will say i i actually did that that was my goal that's where we went high income living in a city with low living expenses uh and and i i've it felt so good to be the savior of the world financially i just have to tell you um i just felt like i was not just a good person but a holy sanctified person because i was living a good life and god was blessing me for it and because i was doing the right things and god was blessing me i was able to really fund a lot of charitable work and uh then i lost my faith and i lost uh any idea that god was blessing me but in my like atheist world view it was still well i'm just doing the right things and that's producing a set of outcomes that mean i'm financially successful uh so if anything like my prosperity i think it's an even deeper more internalized prosperity gospel when god's no longer involved like that's even more like profoundly i could see that you know what i mean like it's not even god it's just no this is an automatic function of an unaware universe if you just do things well then you're fine financially and you can help other people uh and then i you know i went on a very similar road that you've been on i i decided i think i'll be an author i think i'll uh i think it's a great money making endeavor that one yeah so i had what people would call a real job i was a i was an executive in a large advertising company and i just wanted to help people right that's what i want to do with my life so i knew it would be a little bit of a drop in income or even a dramatic drop in income but i knew we'd just work it out because i do the right thing right and in time the money would be there and uh after some time i'd actually i did build like a viable income uh not actually to be an author as much as being a podcaster and a speaker uh then i then i started getting sick and my healthcare exchange insurance was not as good as my corporate health insurance and so even though i was still making decent money um my health care costs boy they had no trouble outpacing my income yeah and then um my daughter madison had anorexia and the stress of trying to pay for my existing medical costs and fund her health care put me in some pretty bad places emotionally so i started needing like trauma therapy because some stuff from earlier in life started bubbling up and then this got into a cycle of of constant um emotional dysregulation uh in a way that was like kind of exciting podcast download sure went up when i was having mental breakdowns on the air every other week uh very compelling radio but then you know this led to a cycle where i was my feelings and my my self-medicating strategies primarily uh through unhealthy eating we're just wrecking my body and you know i end up in the hospital and in an er and you know how much it cost to go to the er and stay overnight a couple years from the hospital and get all those tests if you have bad insurance the insurance company looks at this this is oh we're not going to cover any of this until you meet your outrageous deductible yeah and uh and the next thing i knew uh we were just broke just completely broke and i can remember how many times in my life i'd see someone in dire straits who'd been okay and think they were being tested by god and i can remember how many times when i got past that and i was an atheist and they would say well if they would just focus on the fundamentals they can work this out and i'm a i think i'm an uncommonly empathetic person but even i was having those thoughts and it wasn't until i experienced it firsthand that i did everything both christian theology and american capitalism tell you to do i work really hard i i save a lot of money i spend very little i live below my means uh if no matter who you ask by the way of living i'm fulfilling the torah so to speak yeah the the money torah and uh and the only reason we're not leaving our car right now is because people gave generously to a gofundme that's it that's why i'm like have a a house right now um i'm sure that eighth chapter really uh must have hit you hard then is my guess yes it did i have to be honest that eighth chapter was not what i had originally sold them in the outline in in the original outline i can't even remember what it was but it was something much more upbeat and it was actually supposed to end on that chapter it was not supposed to have the final chapter about hope um i added that later but the eighth chapter was i think something about authenticity and i don't remember but um i started writing thinking i was going to write the authenticity chapter i had outlined for them and i just felt like i couldn't walk away leaving the conversation about suffering about grief about prosperity gospel theology about any of it in in a context where we could make the mistake of making it all personal and individualized and leave it at that i didn't want to risk that to put it in sort of like a church sunday morning context i didn't want to preach a sermon that was so vague and so nice at ease that people could just hear what they want to hear and clearly say well we're not talking about that though like it doesn't apply to that though because that's half of what i see going wrong and where i see the disconnect right now between evangelicalism and what we see going on politically when people are around us saying i just don't understand how we got there i don't understand how they can support that i do i can totally understand it because this theology of suffering stuff we've gotten this wrong for so long and this prosperity gospel thinking is so infected our belief systems it's not a stretch for me to see how we got here this is the logical outpouring of this kind of thinking and i felt like i couldn't do the book justice if i didn't take a chapter and dig in in a very tangible logical no dancing around this i'm clearly saying what i'm saying where i put this in context and say this this affects how we treat each other this affects how we vote this affects what we feel like we owe our neighbor and this affects where we see ourselves in systems of you know as i put in that chapter givers and takers and who's who's the generous giver and who's that needy taker over there and how we see things like when we talk about the poor who is the poor and what does that have to do with me are those those people that are over there so that i can give to them and that shows how charitable i am or shows how good god is or is it something deeper than that i i just didn't think i could do the message justice without making these points relevant to someone who might be able to bury it under i don't know the assumption that this is just about how my personal relationship with jesus as evangelicals would put it so i turned that chapter in not completely sure my publisher was gonna go for it my publisher is a little bit more conservative than i am to put it lightly and i was very afraid that i would get pushed back on that one and they would say i had taken it a little bit too far i did have one editor not my primary editor but a copy editor along the way who wanted me to remove those references to dave ramsey because she felt like people are gonna know who you're talking about and that might make them uncomfortable and i basically wrote a note back that said i'm very okay with them being uncomfortable that's what i'm going for so let's go ahead and leave that in and if dave ramsey wants to take it up with me he's more than welcome he's blocked me on all my social media channels so i'm not sure where he'll get a hold of me but i'm here if he wants to chat so let's just leave it in but that chapter honestly the seventh and eighth chapters are probably my favorite two chapters in the whole book so i'm really glad they left it in but it's huge for me to hear that that it was so impactful and meaningful to you because i was concerned i'm not gonna lie you're my friend so i can say this to you uh i was a little bit concerned that you might not actually like my book in the end i you've been so supportive all along the way and i'm very public on on twitter and facebook about what i believe about things but the book like you said it is written from a very clearly christian context and as much as i don't consider myself a part of evangelical culture anymore his fingerprints are still all over there that's still the background i come up in and so i made some very deliberate choices in the way that i wrote the book that i wanted it to be approachable content for evangelicals i did not want to just preach to the choir if you will of people who already agree with me i wanted to say some things that i hope would resonate with people who are still evangelicals and so i was afraid that by making those choices that i might have written a book that was not quite as accessible to people who maybe don't have such positive feelings about that culture or who are coming at things from a different angle and so it helps to hear that somebody that i know and respect who's very much a logical thinker uh could find so much meaningful content in the book and not feel like it was over spiritualized or over jesus the answer for everything because that's everything i was trying you know to get away from with this book but i wasn't entirely sure how successful i would be i don't know if that's just you know normal author fears of never knowing if you've communicated clearly enough what your goal was but it helps to hear that someone i respect that i do not consider you know jesus evangelical all the time still felt like there was a lot of meaningful content in the book that spoke to them on an emotional level you know i know it drives people crazy but i really do uh feel like i am both a christian and an atheist [Laughter] no none of the atheists like it when i say it but it's because i have a a brain-centered understanding of spirituality and i just understand that i have some networks in my brain that process the world with a materialist atheist worldview and i have other circuits in my brain uh that very much process things the way that christians do and those those might be logically mutually exclusive but they are not neurologically mutually exclusive so what i would say is the christian and me uh really enjoyed a thoughtful execution of you know what an evangelical would call a high view of scripture um because so often people with a quote high view unquote view of scripture produce really harmful ideas into the world and so that was actually really redemptive for me to read but then the atheist in me was able to read critically and say well this is a person who values a book that maybe you don't value as much anymore which is also kind of [ \_\_ ] i'm a daily bible reader again right i just don't say that publicly because i don't making my non-religious listeners uncomfortable but i i'm a daily bible reader again and the atheist in me saw these larger themes about society whether people identify as christians or not in the west they're shaped by christian thinking in christian theology yes secularists and atheists and i think we and i'm going to count myself as a seculars for a moment uh we ignore that at our peril and so i so appreciate people like you who are unapologetically christian but who approach this ancient tradition with some acknowledgement of its roots as something that came out of marginalized communities and who can hold to you know christian theological tenets in a way that produces more flourishing in the world uh and not create some kind of artificial divide between the elect and the unelect so for everyone listening all of my friends whether you are a secularist or a christian you know whether you are evangelical or a mainline protestant or catholic or whether you don't express any specific religious affiliation anymore i just can't recommend the view from rock bottom enough to you because it's so honestly and eloquently and beautifully confronts our widely held notions of what it means to be a good person in our relationship to money and to resources and i truly believe that the more people who read this book the better the world we live in will become stephanie where can people connect with you if they want to learn more uh my website is stephanietaterites.com tate is t-a-i-t that's my canadian husband's fault don't look at me uh and that's kind of got links to everywhere else uh i'm on twitter quite a bit as steph tate writes that's where i keep my feistier opinions that i don't necessarily want sharing with you know aunt so and so or the members of my church that follow me uh so if you want the tamer version you can follow me on facebook i don't have a page on facebook yet i'm still working on it and i say tamer but i still get in trouble on facebook quite a bit i just saved the really feisty stuff for twitter it's sort of the rough cut stuff uh so you can search for me on facebook stephanietait i still don't have a page i'm working on it but you can just send me a follow request there that's pretty much the best places thank you so much for taking time today i know what doing all these interviews costs because i do a lot of podcast interviews myself and i'm so honored that you spent this time with us today thank you thanks you know i really hope that you've enjoyed this interview with stephanie tate i'd love to know what you thought about it um send me a message on social media uh if you enjoyed this show you know i i'm always trying to make what you like and uh often at science mike is the sound of one hand clapping so if you want to go on social media tell me if you like this episode help me know if you want to hear more interviews in the future i want to thank all my patrons on patreon for making science mike possible at all thank you for your long-standing and consistent support i have been so pleased to see uh the recent increase in in patrons and uh patron amounts i guess it's almost like if i make the podcast regularly that that helps uh jokes aside though you all have no idea what you mean to me i'd like to thank uh caitlyn hermstad for producing mass science mike i'd like to thank greg nordine for sound designing and producing ass science mike i'd like to thank jed bodiford for writing that wonderful theme song and i still love and i'd like to thank you all for listening i can't wait to talk to you next week