This week’s guest is Jordon. Jordon comes from a long family line of Mennonites, but Jordon is bookish and musical and never quite fit in.

He grew up in the church, but with two older brothers already having left the church, by 21 he was also out. He’d never had a television, went to public school, or really knew anything beyond the small bubble he was in. University changed all of that. 

“The sense of community I was getting from the friendships I was making outside of these church communities…was really kind of gratifying.” 

Over years of therapy and some world-traveling, Jordon has come to terms with his upbringing. He’s found fulfillment as a professor, discussing philosophy with students and continuing to learn and grow. 

Quotes

“My own beliefs continued to evolve away from the conservative stuff that I grew up with…” 

“[Purity Culture], it just seemed so backward to me.” 

“I had a moment where I really realized that  I didn’t enjoy going to church. I didn’t like the music. I felt really out of place…I realized I’d been pushing myself to go…”

“I remember having a really profound sense of the problem of evil…”

“The sense of community I was getting from the friendships I was making outside of these church communities…was really kind of gratifying.” 

“It wasn’t just that people didn’t go to college, it was actively discouraged.” 

“I grew up without TV, so what do you do with yourself? You read.”

“I couldn’t really go anywhere without running into people that I’d grown up with. It just felt like, ‘I can’t escape from this place…I need to get away from it.’”

“I wanted to believe. I actually really wanted to believe. I didn’t want to let go of it, but it was gone. There wasn’t anything bringing it back.”

“I was alienated from the community I grew up in. Never fit in there. Never belonged there…later, I felt alienated from the [mainstream] society that I was in.” 

“[Buddhism] just didn’t click for me; it just didn’t work. Those traditions seemed to have the same issues as the tradition I grew up with, just in different ways.” 

“I tried reading a couple of the Christian mystics. I just found it—to be honest—just kind of repulsive…the self-effacing language.” 

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Attribution

“Waves” track written and produced by Makaih Beats

David Ames  0:11  
This is the graceful atheist podcast United studios Podcast Network. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the graceful atheist podcast. My name is David and I am trying to be the graceful atheist. Please consider rating and reviewing the podcast on the Apple podcast store, rate the podcast on Spotify, and subscribe to the podcast wherever you are listening. Remember, we have a merch store on T public, you can get all of your graceful atheist and secular Grace themed items, you can find the link in the show notes. If you're in the middle of doubt, deconstruction, the dark night of the soul, you do not have to do it alone. Join our private Facebook group deconversion anonymous and become a part of the community. You can find us at facebook.com/groups/deconversion. Special thanks to Mike T for editing today's show. On today's show, my guest today is Jordan. Jordan grew up in a very insular Mennonite environments. He didn't have TV, he didn't go to public school. But when he went to university, everything changed. Today, Jordan is a PhD candidate in philosophy. He teaches about the self. Here is Jordan telling story.

Jordan, welcome to the graceful atheist podcast.

Jodon  1:44  
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I've been a fan of the show for a while. And I've been interested in coming on and having a conversation with you.

David Ames  1:53  
Fantastic. Thank you for reaching out. It sounds like you have Mennonite background, which we'll obviously get into here in a minute. Let's just start. Tell us about what it was like growing up for you. What religious tradition? Did you grow up it?

Jodon  2:07  
Sure, yeah. So I did grew up in the Mennonite tradition. For listeners who might not be familiar with that. It's a small religious group that originated in Europe. And basically broke away from the Catholic church over disagreements about things like baptism. So one of the central tenets of the Mennonite tradition and the Anabaptist tradition in general. So there are other groups that are associated, that might not call themselves Mennonite would be that they baptize people who are of of age, not rather than baptizing, infants, things like that. So that was one of the major things that they disagreed with, over sort of the mainstream Catholic and Protestant groups at the time. So that's kind of the origin of it. But one of the other central tenets is non violence or pacifism. So I grew up with that, as well. But in general, is a pretty insular kind of upbringing. I'm from a pretty small town in Pennsylvania, I grew up on a farm. So there's kind of like a tradition of, of agriculture, that kind of thing, or very working class kinds of kinds of jobs. So that's sort of part of the whole kind of culture. I went to a very small religious school as well. Didn't go to public school for for 12 years. Okay. Yeah. So that's the kind of general setup as it were.

David Ames  3:40  
And then the question I often like to ask is, you know, when you were growing up, was it something that you took on yourself? Or was it something you were just kind of following? In your parents in the community?

Jodon  3:50  
Yeah, so my family history goes back to Germany and Switzerland, the origins of these groups, right. And then they came over from Europe to escape religious persecution because the Catholics didn't like them the process and like them, so they came over to the to America. And so it's, it's that's the family tradition. That's the tradition I grew up in. My parents were Mennonite, my grandparents were Mennonite, my great grandparents are Mennonite going back many generations to Europe. Yeah, so very much something I grew up with. There's very much that sense of history, I think, as well, you know, that kind of awareness of it as you're growing up. That's, that's something that does get talked about a lot as well. So, yeah, in school as well as church.

David Ames  4:40  
Okay. I'm gonna ask the question just a little bit different internally. Did you have like a personal sense of faith or like, Were you just going through the motions, or was it something that you owned yourself and your youth?

Jodon  4:55  
Right? Yeah. So I think pretty Early on, I had an intuitive sense that there were issues with faith tradition I grew up in. Nonetheless, nonetheless, I still believed in God. And that was something that I took upon myself personally, from a relatively young age. So in the Mennonite tradition, at least the tradition I grew up in, which was quite a conservative variety of it, you joined the church, somewhere around the age of, you know, between the ages of maybe 11, and 15. That's kind of the typical age range. So you joined the church, that usually goes along with becoming a Christian. So you invite Jesus into your heart, and then you join the church at the same time you become a member, you have to go through a little kind of process of that. So I did not do that. And my parents church. So I wanted to find some kind of alternative, I guess to that, because at the time I did identify as a Christian, I did believe in God, but I didn't want to be part of the church that I grew up in.

David Ames  6:05  
Interesting. Do you want to expand that a bit? What were some of the issues you were seeing? And why did you make that decision? So yeah,

Jodon  6:12  
yeah, there was some precedent for, you know, me not being part of it in the sense that I did have two older siblings who had left the church, one of them had never joined the other left. After joining. I knew I wanted to go to college. So another thing to mention is that there isn't really a tradition of going to college or higher education in general, in this kind of tradition. There's no intellectual tradition really at all. People don't go to college, they go through, you know, through high school, a lot of people didn't graduate from high school, a lot of young people left, you know, around, you know, grade eight, 910, that kind of thing to that was pretty common, at least when I was growing up. Yeah, so since that was a priority for me, I felt like that sort of came into conflict with some of these, the basic ideas of religious, you know, tradition I grew up in, but also, you know, the rules I grew up with were very restrictive. You know, it was a situation where I grew up without TV, for example, ya know, TV, pretty traditional dress styles, so particularly intense for women. But for men, too, there were a lot of rules. I was allowed to wear shorts as a kid, things like that most mostly button up shirts. You couldn't go to the movies, things like that. So there was always a sense of kind of missing out on that even as a kid, you know, just not wanting to have to deal with all these rules. So I wanted to get away from that I wanted to be part of something that wasn't so restrictive.

David Ames  7:55  
You mentioned, you know, it's fairly insular, like, was school then an opportunity to expand out of that, or was that also as insular?

Jodon  8:06  
It was just as insular? Yeah. So the church community that I grew up in there were like, you know, a few associated churches that were part of kind of a organization, right. Okay. With similar belief structures, similar beliefs, and so on, there's some variance, but very little. And then those churches supported a small school that went from grades one through 12. So that's where I went to school for 12 years. So it was run by the church, all the teachers were Mennonites, from the same kind of traditions. There was religious education that was part of the curriculum, and pretty much everything we studied. So yeah, it was definitely not an opportunity to kind of get break out of that.

David Ames  8:47  
So I'm curious where the drive to go to college came from? Was that within your family then or something else?

Jodon  8:53  
So I am a first generation college student in the sense that nobody else for prior generations had gone to college, but two of my older brothers did go to college so that again, there was a little bit of a precedent there for that. There were the two siblings that I had, who also were not part of the church.

David Ames  9:10  
Okay. And then it sounds like in, you know, not just church shopping, but you begin to have some issues in your teen years. First, let's start with kind of moving away from Mennonite Church. What happens next after that?

Jodon  9:25  
Yeah, well, so initially, I actually went to a different Mennonite Church. So around the age of 17, I stopped going to my parents church. And I went to a different Mennonite Church. So it was still Mennonite, but it was it was a much more kind of mainstream kind of Protestant church. So the church I grew up in, you know, it was just like sort of acapella singing, you know, hymns, that kind of thing. This church, people didn't have the traditional dress styles, music at a worship band, that kind of thing. So we would have just looked kind of like more of like a mainstream Protestant church to somebody looking on on. So I went there for a while because a cousin I had went there, and they sort of invited me to join their band because I played guitar and bass and stuff.

David Ames  10:09  
Yeah. And was that fulfilling for a while.

Jodon  10:13  
In the short term, it was nice to get away from the really restrictive tradition I grew up in. But ultimately, you know, after I spent a little bit of time there, you know, maybe a year or so I really didn't realize it really didn't fit in there. My own beliefs were continuing to evolve, it was still very conservative in certain ways. And I don't know, I just had this real pervasive sense that I didn't belong there, you know, so. Yeah, so at that point, I, I was dating a girl who went to a Presbyterian Church. So I was kind of bouncing around for a little bit, not really going anywhere consistently. And then, when she and I started seeing each other I have attended her church for a while the Presbyterian Church.

David Ames  10:57  
And I'm curious, then, was that significantly different than the more modern version of the Mennonite church? Not significantly?

Jodon  11:05  
No, there, there are a few things that were a little different, but they were relatively small differences. Yeah. At that point, it was still a pretty conservative branch of Presbyterianism. At the time, I did like the pastor, I felt like he was a nice guy who also, you know, he was highly educated. And that was sort of different, I guess, like, listening to sermons at the time. So there was a difference there. But ultimately, I experienced kind of the same thing. You know, I realized that that kind of environment. My own beliefs continued to evolve, I think, away from, you know, the kind of conservative stuff that I grew up with. And some of the conservative teachings of the Presbyterian church really didn't sit well with me.

David Ames  11:52  
Would you mind getting into the specifics? Like what Yeah, so you've you've mentioned, your beliefs were evolving, like, well, like, in what direction? What were what were some of the changing?

Jodon  11:59  
Yeah, I mean, some of that was political. So over time, I became more politically liberal. So the Mennonites, despite having, you know, like, despite adhering to things like pacifism, for example, that might sound sort of liberal in a broad sense. At least a group I grew up with, were very politically conservative. Now they don't participate in, in politics, so they don't vote, or hold political office or, or government jobs or anything like that. There's like a kind of separation between those groups and the outside world. But they did kind of espouse a kind of conservative political view. So I grew up with, you know, parents who listen to conservative talk radio, and things like that, right. So that's kind of the political atmosphere I grew up in. And over time, you know, I kind of moved away from that and realized my own political beliefs were more liberal than that. So that was part of it. But also just, you know, the, the Presbyterian Church still felt, I felt conservative ways as well, that weren't like necessarily codified. So there were a lot of people there who I guess had, you know, kind of a more conservative outlook in terms of politics, but also just in the way they kind of carried themselves or presented themselves and things like that, that didn't necessarily make me feel super comfortable. There are a lot of still kind of prohibitions around sex and sexuality that, that I wasn't super comfortable with. But that was a big part of it. That felt kind of just as conservative as the world I grew up in. To be honest, the Mennonite World did not like that either. I started to really feel like that didn't align with my own values. Yeah.

David Ames  13:46  
Would you say like, was there some purity culture? Like, for you, specifically? Are you referring to like LGBTQ support?

Jodon  13:54  
Um, I mean, some of both, really? Yeah. So definitely, the purity culture was something I was more aware of at the time. And that was the kind of thing that really affected me, because I, you know, I brought up this teaching that, you know, sex outside of marriage is wrong. And then I remember a specific instance, actually, while I was sitting in this, at this in service at this Presbyterian Church, and the minister who I had come to respect, partly because of his education and things like that started espousing this kind of view of like, you know, being against, you know, sex outside of marriage, or premarital sex and things like that. And I remember being really turned off by that, you know, it's just seems so at the time, it's seems so backwards to me. And, you know, I was again, I was just I wanted to be free of some of that stuff. I had grown up with it. And I was starting to move away from it. And so that was the thing I think that really kind of cemented it for me at the time. Yeah, and also, I just I realized I had a moment where I really realized that I didn't enjoy going to church. I didn't really like the music. I felt again, I just felt kind of out of place. This is not the place for me. And I realized that I had been kind of pushing myself to go even though I didn't like it. And I had this moment, one Sunday where I went, or I intended to go, and then I just drove by the church and drove around for a while. And I realized, I don't want to go, why am I why am I going? I don't want to do this.

David Ames  15:17  
How did you answer yourself? I mean, what did you decide? Do you just weren't going back? Or?

Jodon  15:23  
Yeah, yeah, I decided not to go back. Yeah. after that. I was like, why am I forcing myself to do something I don't want to do doesn't make any sense. Yeah, but yeah, the purity culture stuff was definitely a major, a major part of that for sure. For me at the time.

David Ames  15:44  
And would you say, at this time, did you still have a sense of faith? You know, in other words, differentiating deconstructing the church versus deconstructing God? Right. Like, which, which of those were you in which category?

Jodon  15:57  
Yeah, at that point, I was still identifying as having a personal sense of faith, you know? Yeah. So, uh, but I was kind of over the more kind of structured organize forms of, of Christianity. But I still would have identified as having some kind of faith that kind of started to really go away for me around the same time as the time I stopped going to church. So this would have been around the time I was maybe 21, early 20s. So you know, it kind of left my parents church at 17, even though it's still going to the Mennonite school. So I finished out them in high school while going to, you know, a much more liberal, quote unquote, liberal Mennonite church then went to the Presbyterian Church. And at this point, I was in college, I was still living at home with my parents. But, you know, I was taking college classes and learning a lot. I'm sure that was part of the influence, too, of just getting a sense of the outside world in a way that I kind of hadn't before. Yeah, yeah.

David Ames  17:03  
Were there any particular things? Like any specific doctrines that fell first?

Jodon  17:11  
The doctrines part, I mean, I think for me, it wasn't a doctrine so much as I remember really having a profound sense of the problem of evil, you know, at the time, that was something that really started to bother me. But even before that, you know, like, I was having real issues, making sense of the idea that, that I could pray to God and that God would influence or have power over my life in certain ways. Because then I thought, well, what's the point of me having any kind of sense of ownership over my own life? Like, how can I have any agency or ownership over my own life? How can I take pride and things I've done, or even feel guilty about things that I've done or anything like that, if I have no real control over my own life, or if some kind of external force can just kind of change things around without, you know, me having any control over it whatsoever? That just seemed really troubling. So I remember at the time, you know, I still prayed and things like that. But I remember thinking, like, I can't really pray to have this thing changed, because then I'm not living a life that I could be proud of, or have any kind of agency over something like that. So that really bothered me at the time. And then around the same time, the problem of evil kind of thinking about that really started to bother me as well. The idea that that suffering is in the world and that how can I how can I reconcile the suffering, even even the own things that I experienced with the good are benevolent, all powerful God?

David Ames  18:46  
Just as a side note, I think, you know, apologetics is very focused on answering that question. And to my mind, the fact that it is a question that we identify it as the problem of evil is the problem, right? You can make as many rationalizations and justifications for that, but almost everyone has to grapple with that issue and come to some conclusion about it.

Jodon  19:13  
Yeah, and for me, the kind of standard ways of responding to that issue that I read about or that I started to investigate just weren't satisfying to me. Right? Yeah, the idea that you know, free will or something like that as one way out of it. Just didn't quite convinced me or compelled me.

David Ames  19:39  
So, you know, it sounds like you're having very serious questions and learning a lot in college exposed to maybe the wider world bit, you know, walk me through like the next steps. What happens after that?

Jodon  19:52  
Yeah, so one other thing I should mention too, around this time, is that you know, I think a lot People find a sense of community in, in faith communities or traditions that they grew up in or that they're involved in, right. And that was just really lacking for me, I just didn't feel like I fit in or had a sense of community in these places, I would try to integrate myself into them, but it just never really took for me. And some of that was just cultural difference, like the things I was interested in or like talking about, or whatever, just didn't fit or align with the traditions I was kind of around at the time. So. And then in a church, you know, again, there's no intellectual tradition, right? People weren't, you know, reading or debating some of these kinds of questions that maybe I was kind of starting to think about, I started become really interested in literature or music, philosophy around this time. So I was interested in all that kind of stuff, right. And I started to kind of form a group of friends in my early 20s, that were interested in that stuff, I was playing in bands and kind of getting more involved in the little local music scene, actually, that popped up at the time. So I was really kind of, I think, getting more of a sense of community from that. And I just didn't have a sense of identification with their sense of community from these churches that I was attending, you know, at the time. So yeah, even the kind of music that was, you know, being played at church, I just didn't, I didn't like any of it. Really, I, you know, I participate in the praise and worship band, it was nice to have, you know, an outlet to like, play music with other people at the time. But, you know, I felt, I felt like the music was kind of corny, and it just didn't really do a lot for me. But I'd also grown up with just like these really rigid hymns. And those felt like really traditional, and they didn't, they didn't appeal to me either. So just like no kind of outlet there, that really worked for me. So there's a lot of things at the time that just weren't working. But the sense of community I was getting from some of the friendships I was making, outside of these church communities, and then also like a sense of community from the music scene. And, and also, like, sense of intellectual fulfillment that I was really discovering in college was really kind of gratifying. I was going to like a public, you know, you know, public, nonsectarian university, you know, that was nearby. So I wasn't like, part of a religious institution at that point for at my education. Yeah.

David Ames  22:14  
Everything that the church fears is people going on to get an education in a secular environment. And yeah, but there's a reason why they fear it right.

Jodon  22:23  
There is and so that was, that was something that really impressed itself upon me growing up. It wasn't even just that people didn't go to college, but it was actively discouraged. Right? So even my father was, like, you know, don't like don't go, you know, like, he basically really didn't want me to go, and he couldn't sort of out now prohibit me from doing it. Because, you know, it was my own person, some sense, but he, he was totally opposed to it. I heard other people, you know, ministers and things like that in in sermon saying, like, you know, we really discourage this kind of thing, right? Because probably for the reasons that, you know, for the kind of influence that those things did have, or for me, in some sense, yeah,

David Ames  23:04  
yeah. Yeah. For what it's worth, I had, my pastor warned me before I went to Bible College of all places. So yeah, this runs pretty deep, this anti education bent, I think, within the church.

Jodon  23:19  
Yeah. And for me, I think I was a natural student, you know, it was something that I just had like a really strong kind of inclination towards, I was always really good at school, as I was interested in learning. And that was pretty, pretty different from most of the kids I grew up with going into this little Mennonites school, because again, the tradition was kind of in the opposite direction, a lot of people left school at grade eight grade 10. Or if they did finish, you know, there's just a culture of kind of like thinking that education was, you know, not valuable. And so I grew up around that. So I think like, that further kind of separated me in that sense, because I was good at school and interested in it, kind of like reading things on my own, that separated me and also gave me a kind of outlet, I think, at some point, just that kind of intellectual fulfillment for me. So that was a huge, huge outlet. And I think just kind of way out of this whole kind of a restrictive world I grew up in.

David Ames  24:24  
Yeah, and you talked about just reading on your own, you know, that you're actually exposed to the world a bit by just reading to seeing that, that not, not everyone lives in this restrictive way. And that alone can be a really dangerous thing.

Jodon  24:39  
Yeah. So that's the thing. I spent so much time at the library as a kid again, I grew up without TV. So like, what do you do with yourself? Well, you read? Yeah, yeah, so I just I read compulsively just I read all the time when I was a kid and like kind of going into my teenage years into my 20s or just reading all the time.

David Ames  24:57  
Anything stand out from that like either fiction or nonfiction that really had an impact on you?

Jodon  25:02  
Yeah, it's interesting question. I mean, there's stuff that I read later that definitely had a direct influence. But I mean, when I was younger, I was just, I was just reading anything really that, you know, like, I remember like, kind of exploring kind of maybe like late teens, early 20s, when I was first going to college as well like reading things like, you know, classic novels or classic literature on the road, you know, or Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, stuff like that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So those were connections to a world that was outside of much, much larger than the world that I grew up in. And I was really interested in literature. So I started studying literature College. At the time, yeah.

David Ames  25:52  
I feel like we're right on the edge here of the story. Is there a moment where you decide like, I don't believe I don't want to assume maybe, maybe you still do? Like, what? Where are you at now? And how did you get to where you're at now?

Jodon  26:05  
Yeah, I'm an atheist now. I think there was a period. So after I stopped attending the Presbyterian Church, there was a period where a brief period where I still had a kind of sense of faith. And then that pretty quickly faded. And then I was in this kind of state where I would call myself an agnostic for a long time. Yeah. So there was a moment when I was traveling, I was I was a little bit lost in my early 20s. So I had actually taken a break from college at the time, this was around the time of the 2008 economic crash, it wasn't a great time to like, have left college to be honest. But I had trouble finding work and stuff. But I managed to find a job scrape some money together. And I was doing some backpacking. So I was traveling around in New Zealand. I didn't realize it fully at the time, but it was really my attempt to sort of get away from the past. Get away from my upbringing, because it's such a pervasive thing. I mean, I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, I couldn't really go anywhere that, you know, without running into people that, you know, I'd grown up with, it just felt like the sense of like, I can't escape from this place, you know, I need to escape from this place. I can't sort of get away from it when I'm here. Right. So I, I went to New Zealand, which was pretty much as far away as I could get. Yeah, it's pretty fun. But yeah, I remember, you know, going to a church there just going in and participating in communion, the service there, and I'd already kind of, you know, at the time was Experimenting a bit with, you know, with alcohol and sometimes drugs. And I felt pretty far removed from it in that moment. And I realized, I think in that moment when I was in that church that I no longer had any real belief. Right? Yeah. So that was kind of a real breakthrough moment for me. So I kind of came back from that. I realized that I was an agnostic, and I had this conversation with a friend at the time who, who said something along those lines, like I sensed that now you're an agnostic or something like that. And I think I might have denied it at the time that I realized after that conversation is like, okay, yeah, I think I am agnostic. Now, I don't really, you know, I don't really feel any sense of the presence of God. Like I used to feel. I felt really bad about that for a long time. I continued to try to pray and I wanted to believe, you know, I actually really wanted to believe I didn't want to let go of it, but it was gone. And there wasn't any bringing it back.

David Ames  28:54  
Yeah, yeah. I think that is really common Jordan, that that, you know, wanting to want to believe. And, and, and just, it's just not there. It's, you know, like you say, it's just gone. So, so were you feeling guilty then? Or what? What was that experience life as you've kind of acknowledged your agnosticism?

Jodon  29:15  
Yeah, I felt guilty and also pretty depressed. I felt pretty lost at the time. So I grew up in this very rigid world with a lot of rules. And I kind of reacted to some of those rules by wanting to get as far away from them as I could. And some of that was like, you know, I grew up in a culture that you know, we're any kind of self indulgence or any kind of pleasure was kind of forbidden in a lot of ways right? So I kind of swung the other way for a little bit and again, like I was kind of experimenting with with alcohol which I didn't have any experience with or things like that or or smoking weed things like that, that I didn't grow up with that were totally foreign to me and

David Ames  29:53  
sure, pretty also common to just especially like if you know, you grew up in a repress it environment where you're not able to be yourself make adult choices, that kind of thing, then then you get out. And it's pretty natural to just swing the other way for a bit and experiment with all kinds of things.

Jodon  30:12  
Yes, I was experimenting with a lot of stuff. Eventually, I was pretty depressed, but struggling with some of those mental health kinds of things at the time. But one of the things that really made a huge difference for me at the time was just going to therapy. So that was another thing that hadn't really grown up with, but there's some family history for me with some mental health stuff, particularly depression and things like that anxiety. So I was kind of aware of it a little bit. At the time, I relocated myself and moved to Pittsburgh, and basically ended up finding a way to start therapy. So I did a lot of therapy between the ages of like 23, and maybe like, 27, something like that. 28. So sort of like my early to mid to late, late 20s. There, I did a lot of therapy. So that really kind of helped me. I don't know, fine, fine, a little bit more of a balance kind of accepts the kind of unusual upbringing that I'd had. I think, in retrospect, I felt pretty alienated a lot of ways from mainstream American culture, just because my background was so different from other people's, that I just felt like there wasn't a lot that I had in common with, with other people that I might meet. And it wasn't even something that I was totally conscious of, I think I think it was like a deeper kind of deeper sense of just kind of alienation. So I was alienated kind of from the community I grew up in, never, never fit in there never belong there, really. And then a little bit later, I felt sort of alienated from the society that I was in. But therapy kind of helped me resolve some of those feelings. Yeah.

David Ames  31:53  
And then I'm curious, was the therapists that you worked with? Were they willing to kind of point the finger at that the religious experience at all? Or was it just the insular nature of the community that they would?

Jodon  32:07  
I think it was both. Yeah, I definitely had to work through aspects of both of those things. And to be honest, the for the religious community I grew up in there was no separation between those two things. Right. It was insular and insular because of the religious commitments of the people in the community. And because of the religious commitments in the community, it was insular, right? So it kind of went went both ways. So one of the central tenets was just like this idea of separation from the world, right? So the idea being that we need to be separated both in our appearance and our behavior, and literally separate like, by having our own schools and things like that, right. It was only when I became a little bit older, and I encountered people who'd grown up, you know, in, like, the Orthodox tradition, or things like that Orthodox Judaism and things like that, that I realized, oh, there are other communities that are just as restrictive and in some ways, just as insular as the one I grew up in, in different but related ways, you know, that I started to realize that I wasn't alone, right. And even even with this kind of experience, but yeah, it was, it was definitely some of both of those things, for sure. The both the insularity and the religious stuff.

David Ames  33:17  
Yeah, and I think you've rightly have pointed out that this is maybe a another level of a bubble. Right. So not just the typical evangelical experience of, of being within the Christian bubble, but also, like you say, physically, the community is separate physically, you have these, you know, different appearance different, a different changes. And I think that's a good comparison to the Orthodox Jewish tradition as well, were very, very, very separate. And, and that's going to have an effect on a kid, and obviously, come out as you grow up and recognize the impact that's had on your life.

Jodon  33:58  
Right? Yeah. And maybe another point of reference for people who might not be familiar with this kind of tradition would be the Amish. Right? I think most people are familiar with the Amish communities. So I mentioned that just because, you know, the community I grew up in wasn't as restrictive or as insular as the Amish, most Amish communities, but it was several degrees, you know, removed from that, in some sense. So people had cars and things like that, you know, but, you know, the traditional dress, the, you know, the abstaining from things like, you know, like, watching TV or things like that, right. And I was growing up kind of in the late 90s, early 2000s. So there's no internet, right? Or it's very limited. It's not like it is now where, you know, like, just having access to the internet would sort of allow you a portal to the world, you know, in a lot of ways. So not having a TV meant just sort of being cut off from popular culture almost wholesale right?

David Ames  35:05  
Okay, so, you know, therapy sounds like that really helped. I want to hear the story of going from agnostic to you call yourself a self an atheist now. So what was that transition? Like?

Jodon  35:15  
Yeah, interesting thing is that took place over quite a number of years. And it happened in stages. And this is one of the things that really impressed itself upon me just like hearing other people's stories in this podcast or other podcasts, you know, how common that is. But I did go through a brief period where I was probably about 25, or 26, when I tried to find a way to come back to certain aspects of Christianity, I was kind of seeking in a way for something to replace the religious belief that I'd had, I think I still felt guilty about it, I still miss certain aspects of it. For a while, I was reading a lot about Buddhist traditions, I even went to, you know, Zendo, a couple of times, like, Zen Buddhist meeting. And I just, it just didn't, it didn't click for me, it didn't work. Those traditions seem to have the same issues as the tradition I grew up in just in different ways. I started reading some of the Christian mystics. So that was one way I tried to kind of like find a way back into Christianity, I thought, Well, okay, maybe I can reject all these aspects of, you know, the, you know, the, the more structured belief system, but maybe I can find some kind of very personal way of connecting with some idea of the Divine, you know, and so I tried, I tried reading a couple of the Christian mystics, and I just found it, to be honest, kind of repulsive, I remember at the time, just being totally turned off by a lot of the self effacing language that really bothered me this idea of like, Oh, I'm so terrible, I'm so horrible, you know, like, I'm like this depraved, you know, like, sinful, you know, being and only God can kind of pull me out of that, I just found that I found that just a huge turnoff in these in these mistakes that I was sort of reading. So that was, I think that was that was when I was like, Okay, I don't think that there is any way I can kind of pull anything out of this. It's just, it's just too far removed from things I believe. At the time, I also remember that I started listening to a series of lectures by Dale Martin, who is in the religious studies department, or at least used to be in the religious studies, studies department at Yale University. There are this open yo courses online. And I started listening to a series of his lectures on the history of the New Testament. And it was the first time that I'd ever really considered the historicity of the Bible as a document. And just realizing the ways in which it was constructed. I just realized, oh, yeah, of course, this is totally constructed by human beings. Like, I probably believed that before, in some vague sense, but hadn't really kind of worked through it in a systematic way. And once I started listening to his lectures, I was like, okay, yeah, I, at this point, that's completely out the window for me in terms of like, being able to, like, affirm any of these beliefs as being, you know, from God or something like that, right. So that was a major influence on me at the time. And at this point, I'm around 2425 years old, I'm going to therapy, I returned to college, I'm studying philosophy. Now. I'd started out doing an English degree and then kind of switched over to philosophy. So I'm learning how to think systematically and critically about all kinds of things.

David Ames  38:58  
I want to touch back on the historicity issue within the Mennonite tradition, was the Bible focused on important was there a sense of authority? inerrancy, those kinds of things within that tradition?

Jodon  39:13  
Oh, yeah, very much. So yeah, so the Bible was seemed to be the divinely inspired inerrant Word of God. There, the group I grew up in was pretty rigid about only using particular translations. So they pretty much just use the King James Version. That was the version that they felt was most I guess, authoritative or close to adhere most closely to their own beliefs. I know one thing that a lot of people were pretty concerned about and this was like a nother major tenant was in the in the King James Version. You know, the wording suggests something like women should wear a covering over their hair. So that was a major, major belief that was part of that tradition. At the time that I grew up with, and so like, for example, that kind of belief, they felt like the King James Version of the Bible most clearly articulated. And in more modern translations, there's more ambiguity around what that meant, and so on. Right? Yeah.

David Ames  40:19  
Interesting. I think you've expressed something that I felt as well, where you just kind of make the assumption like you've been taught, this is authoritative, it's trustworthy, what it has to say you can rely on and then when you actually go to investigate yourself, you find that it's basically a house of cards, right? And for people who have grown up in a tradition that, especially to have the doctrine of inerrancy, that can just be devastating. That's the beginning of the end for most people.

Jodon  40:52  
Yeah. And I had some sense, I think, even before, like I was saying, Before, I kind of started investigating in a more systematic way that there were aspects of the Bible that weren't, you know, that were more literary or seemed to come together in ways that were influenced by people. But I hadn't really thought about how far down that went, I guess, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So investigating that a little bit more just out of interest sake, you know, really helped me get a get a sense of, of, of why the Bible no longer works for me and all these other aspects of Christianity, why they weren't something that that was going to work for me. I think at that point, I would have, you know, I started out kind of being an agnostic with who was sort of undecided. I mean, I guess the term agnostic can mean a lot of things, right? Does it mean that you that you reject certainty in God, but that you still believe? Or does it mean that you reject certainty and in the existence of God, but you don't believe you know, that kind of thing. So I think I started out as an agnostic, who felt like, a lot of doubts there that I couldn't kind of resolve. And because of that, I couldn't affirm a belief in God. But then I kind of moved along the spectrum of agnosticism. And then for a while, I was sort of probably would have said, well, I have some theistic, you know, inclinations or something like that, like, I still think maybe there's, yeah, maybe there's some kind of like, divine author of the universe, but it's totally just has nothing to do with Christianity or something like that, right. So there was a period of time where I would have probably said something like that like, almost like a deistic kind of thing, like God created the world and just kind of let things work like clockwork. But eventually, I reached a point where I felt more comfortable with the idea of atheism. And I can't point to a specific moment for that. But I think like some of these points along the way, are clearly pushing me in that direction. Yeah.

David Ames  42:53  
I am what we say all the time. Here's, you know, it's not one thing, it's 1000 things, right, it's, you discover about yourself, I no longer believe, and then you can, in hindsight, look at some of the things that pushed you that direction. But yeah, it's not something that necessarily happens all at once.

Jodon  43:19  
For sure, and I think a big part of it, too, was getting over the guilt that I felt. And it's complicated, right? I mean, some of the guilt was associated with just me not being able to be a Christian anymore. But some of it was also went further back, you know, I you know, I have four siblings. So three of us are not members of the church to our so there's a lot of pressure on me as the youngest of five kids, you know, to my older brothers that kind of already left the church, there was a lot of pressure on me to join the church to be part of it, because I was the youngest of five, I was almost like a kind of tiebreaker, I think, in a way, you know, you know, it's sort of like, well, if he's, if he's part of the church, then at least most of our kids are in the church. Right, that

David Ames  44:07  
successful parenting, successful parenting. Yeah,

Jodon  44:10  
so there's a lot of there's a lot of pressure there. And I think that, just knowing on some level that I was probably disappointment in a lot of ways to my parents. Because of that, I probably felt a lot of guilt about that, I think. And my relationship with my parents wasn't very good for a lot of those years. It's much better now. I'm a little bit older. I'm in my 30s. But, you know, I think probably for me, and for them just kind of coming to terms and being able to accept each other for who they are. Right? was a big, big part of that journey in that process as well.

David Ames  44:45  
I want to talk a little bit about now, you know, it sounds like education, therapy, travel, reading, all those things were really positive impacts on your life. What is fulfilling to you now, what are the things that you look to You for some of that existential need that we all human humans have.

Jodon  45:05  
Yeah, well, the funny thing is I did end up becoming an academic. So I'm a PhD student now, after I finished my bachelor's degree in philosophy, I sort of worked in restaurants for a while and kind of bounced around between doing different things. But eventually, I went on to graduate school, enrolled in a master's program, and philosophy did that. And then went on to go into a Ph. D. program. And that's what I'm doing now. I'm currently working on my dissertation. So there's always been, I think, for me, like a real sense of fulfillment in learning. And I think even just going back to like, you know, when I was a kid, like, I can remember sitting in church service, you know, in like the sweltering like Pennsylvania summer, you know, humidity and a button up shirt, just sweating and listening to the sermon and just kind of questioning some of those things. Like, wait, this doesn't sound right, this doesn't fit together. Right. So I think that kind of philosophical kind of attitude that I had, even from the time I was probably 1012 1314 years old, just kind of carried through for me, and I'm still, that's still a big part of who I am, and, and how I live my life now. So that's something that I find fulfilling, I still find, you know, a sense of community. I think friendships are extremely important. And maybe that sounds sort of obvious, in some sense. But I think it's an easy thing to overlook. Especially if you're in academia, sometimes you can get sort of caught up in the individual pursuit of learning or things like that. But yeah, friendship, connection with other people community, even through music, again, things like that. I think those things are still important to me. Yeah.

David Ames  46:55  
And I think friendship is one of those things, as you become an adult, you have to be more and more intentional about, yes, you know, actually giving time to your friendships, that is not as easy when you've got lots of other obligations.

Jodon  47:07  
Yeah, and that's definitely true. And it is the case that if you don't have kind of like a prefabricated community for you, right, you have to kind of go out and create it for yourself. And part of that is finding the kinds of friendships that you do kind of connect with and things like that. So for me, that was a thing I had to learn early on, as well, because it was like, Well, I don't feel super comfortable, or like finding like a place for myself in these like church communities, I'm kind of bouncing around between. So I'm going to have to find, you know, a sense of community somewhere else, or friendships outside of that, you know, and I think that's a big part of what allowed me to, to leave, right. Something else dimension too, is that these communities do retain most of the people that, you know, grow up in them right. Now, my family is pretty unusual in the sense that the majority, my siblings are not part of the church. But that's, that's very unusual. Most families retain all their kids and our faith. Yeah.

David Ames  48:18  
Jordan, as we, as we wrap up, main question that pops up for me is, you kind of buried the lead. The, you know, your PhD candidate in philosophy sounds like that's been a major part of your academic career. Yeah, a lot of philosophy is literally about the question of the existence of gods. I'm curious if you maybe trace your experience of that when you first began your Bachelor's to where you are now and how you feel about those philosophical arguments.

Jodon  48:44  
Yeah. So my particular area of of expertise, the thing I work on is not necessarily directly related to that. So I work on Yeah, I work on questions. I work on French and German philosophy. I work on questions concerned with self awareness, self, self knowledge, self consciousness, and how that relates to human rationality. In a broad sense, that's what I work on. Now, those questions aren't totally removed from questions about the existence of God, because those are questions about knowledge about pistol Knology. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So in that sense, they there there are connections. But I've always been interested in some of these questions that directly relate to like belief in the existence of God and so on. Right. So, yeah, I mean, those things. I don't spend time systematically studying them in the way that I did. But there was certainly a time you know, in my early 20s, especially when I was kind of like, going through my bachelor's degree in particular, and kind of after that, that I was kind of like, going through more of like, the philosophy of religion stuff and thinking systematically about some of that stuff. You know, I also teach because, you know, part of my program is that I I work as a teaching assistant for the university that I attend. And I teach I teach introductory courses in philosophy. And so some of the introductory courses, you know, we talk about proofs for the existence of God and things like that. So that is something where like, I go through those with undergraduate students on a regular basis.

David Ames  50:19  
And what's that experience for you personally?

Jodon  50:21  
Yeah, it's really interesting for me personally, because not only am I kind of working through it myself, every time with the students, but it's also interesting to kind of see how students will respond to it with their own beliefs, right. So I mean, my job as a philosopher is not to teach people what to think it's to teach them how to think, right, you know, and I want them to like, systematically examine their own beliefs, and think about them, you know, critically, right, no matter what they are. And if they if those are, you know, religious commitments or whatever, that's fine, as long as they're thinking about them critically. That's what's important to me as a teacher. But just kind of seeing how students respond to it. And I learned I learned stuff from undergrad students, right. Like, they will bring up interesting points about some of these arguments even now. Right? After all my years of education, I still hear like, interesting, it's still interesting to me to like, talk through some of these arguments and things like that now. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not as though I'm I ever, you know, it's not as though those questions are open for me in the same way they were when I was younger, but at the same time, I have to kind of come back to the arguments with an open mind in a way think about what are the strengths and weaknesses of these kinds of arguments?

David Ames  51:43  
Well, we may need to have you come back, and you can school us on the self? And, you know, that's a pretty deep topic in itself. I'm sure. Jordan, any any any topic that you were hoping to get to that we haven't hit yet?

Jodon  51:57  
Um, well, one, one of the things i i I wanted to mention, just because one of the reasons I wanted to come on the program is that, you know, I think it's important for people who might be growing up, or be part of these kinds of more restrictive groups, so Mennonites, Amish, you know, Orthodox, Jewish groups, things like that, perhaps conservative, conservative Islam, things like that, that are very restrictive, and conservative, you know, it can be very alienating to be to be in in those groups and feel like you want to leave and that there's kind of no clear way out, so on. But you know, I just want to emphasize that, you know, like, one of the things I learned through my experience with therapy, actually, is that even people who didn't share, like the kinds of restrictive background that I had, that there are pieces of other people's experiences that you can find that you can kind of share right in common. And I think that that's a way of finding, you know, some kind of common aspects of your experience that really helps you feel less alone if you're in that kind of situation.

David Ames  53:15  
Yeah, I can't agree more. I say all the time, some of the magic about the show is the diversity of experiences, the diversity of faith traditions, the diversity of the way people have dealt with that. And, you know, who knows who's going to react to your story, Jordan, you know, in a way that they don't to mine or the next person's you know, but you've learned from hearing other people's stories. And I think that's super powerful. Yeah. So Jordan, thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing your story with us.

Jodon  53:42  
Yeah, it's been my pleasure. Really appreciate your

David Ames  53:50  
final thoughts on the episode? Jordan story reminds me again, of how difficult it is for precocious kids growing up in a very insular environment. And Jordan's environment was even more small and limited than many of the evangelicals who are the typical listener of this podcast, no television, no public schools. And he escapes two books. I love that I absolutely love that. And it is a testament to how education or in I mean, this in the loosest sense of the term, the reading of other experiences is a way to escape the limitations of where you grew up or the bubble that you grew up in. I feel for Jordan, I could hear the guilt that he feels for being one of the three children who left you know he wants to support his parents, but obviously he needed to move on with his own life and experience his own autonomy. As I joked with him at the end, he kind of buried the lede. He is a PhD candidate now and in some very deep heady stuff about the self, the existence of the self. That is absolutely amazing. We'd love to have Jordan back on to dig into that in further detail. But I enjoyed talking to him about how he now teaches entry level philosophy, which again, is often about the existence or the non existence of God. And he has to put himself in that position of more agnostic to teach that and I think that is wonderful and amazing. I want to thank Jordan for being on the podcast for telling his story, for living his own life, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, Jordan, for being on the show. The second Degrace Thought of the Week is about independent thought. I think one of my character flaws is that I have to figure things out on my own, it's very difficult for me to learn from someone else. And what I'm saying here is that I'm kind of pathologically independent. My wife jokes with me, my family has joked with me over over the years, I have to feel it, touch it, see it, to believe it to know that it is true. This is a particularly bad trait within the Christian bubble, because I was always asking myself questions. And recognizing some questions. I couldn't touch like if I actually found the answers to those that I wouldn't like what I found. And so I avoided those questions. But Jordans story reminds me that you can be within a community. And, again, I think belief is very much tied to community and the sense of not wanting to leave your community is terrifying when you realize you no longer hold the same beliefs. But be brave, be willing to have independent thought you don't have to take it as far as me you can learn from others. But when you recognize that your thinking no longer fits within the insular community that you grew up in, be willing to move on to experience the world. The world is so much bigger. There's so much more diversity and more things to experience, and you will grow as a human being. As you do that. Next week, our Arline interviews Mandy, you will not want to miss that conversation. Until then, my name is David and I am trying to be the graceful atheist. Join me and be graceful. The beat is called waves by MCI beats. If you want to get in touch with me to be a guest on the show. Email me at graceful atheist@gmail.com for blog posts, quotes, recommendations and full episode transcripts head over to graceful atheists.com. This graceful atheist podcast part of the atheists United studios Podcast Network

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