Rabbi and Journalist Jay Michaelson (#366)

Summary

Religion on the Mind

Episode #366: Rabbi and Journalist Jay Michaelson

Host: Dr. Dan Koch
Guest: Jay Michaelson – writer, journalist, rabbi, teacher on mysticism, psychedelics, Judaism, and law, author of the “Both/And” Substack
Release Date: December 8, 2025

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Episode Overview

This lively conversation between Dr. Dan Koch and Jay Michaelson explores the intersection of religion, psychology, and culture—zeroing in on how religious experiences shape meaning-making in contemporary life. Jay, whose journey traverses Jewish mysticism, Buddhism, journalism, and queer spirituality, offers a wide-ranging perspective on pluralism, religious trauma, spiritual experience, and the rise of nihilism in the 21st century. The episode also engages head-on with issues like the rise of authoritarian religiosity, spiritual exclusivism, and the challenge of sustaining meaning and "lowercase-r" religion in an age of polycrisis.

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Main Theme

Navigating Religion and Meaning in an Age of Chaos

The conversation aims to probe:

• The value and challenges of religious life—both in traditional and “piecemeal” (lowercase-r) forms
• The psychological and social roles of religious identities and mystical experiences across traditions
• The rise of nihilism and meaning-crisis in Western societies and why reactionary, authoritarian forms of religiosity are gaining traction
• The necessity and limitations of pluralism and humility in religious discourse

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Jay Michaelson’s Religious & Spiritual Autobiography

• Background: Raised in conservative (but liberal-minded) Jewish household; moved toward observant Jewish practice in young adulthood, later incorporated Buddhist practice and meditation, eventually teaching and writing in both.
• Experiences:
  • Enchanted by mystical and marginal forms of Judaism, less by mainstream practice
  • Explored Buddhist meditation within a Jewish framework; later, “non-nightstand Buddhist” serious practice, leading retreats and writing about meditation ([05:08–07:26])
  • Tensions and fusions between spiritual and political/journalistic identities—initially separate, later unified:
    “Dad actually advised me... you’re trying to stay credible or something in the journalism world by hiding all of this religion and spirituality stuff. But what’s interesting about you... is the mix.” —Jay ([07:28])

2. “Weird Religion People” and the Social Perception of Faith

• Both host and guest acknowledge the outsider status of taking religion seriously in liberal settings ([08:16–10:33]).
• Notable Quote:
  “I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in.” —Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi (quoted by Jay) ([09:37])
• The in-group/out-group dynamics persist for religious professionals—attributed wisdom, but also projection and incredulity.

3. Ecstasy, Experience, and Liberal Religion’s Failure to ‘Deliver the Goods’

• Jay discusses the historic absence of ecstatic, deeply felt religious experience in liberal Judaism compared to Orthodox and Hasidic settings, and the parallel within liberal Christianity ([18:54–22:25]).
• Tension: Liberal services matched Jay’s values, but lacked passionate “juice.” The traditions he disagreed with had the ecstasy.
• The modern expansion of alternative spirituality and meditation partly fills that gap, often secular on the surface but “filled with the sacred” ([21:12–21:57]).
• Jay’s Diagnosis: Liberal religion often struggles to provide communal ecstasy, contributing to the “meaning crisis.” ([20:14])

4. Pluralism, Perennialism, and Respect for Religious Difference

• Discussion of “perennialist” views: the idea that all religions share a universal core. Both are skeptical—it risks flattening genuine difference and assuming a “God’s eye view” ([22:25–24:47]).
• Both highlight the limits and appeal of pluralism as a “fact about the world,” as well as the persistent pull of religious particularism ([34:01–34:47]).
• Jay on pluralism:
  “There’s simultaneously more universalism and more particularism... for me, like, yeah, you do it that way and that’s different from this way—and maybe we get different results even... as a nondualist, right, that’s all faces of the sacred and some undefined.”

5. Insider/Outsider Trauma and Overcoming Religious Prejudice

• Jay: Growing up Jewish on Long Island, Christianity was “defined by all the shitty things you people did to us.” The process of moving beyond that required both encountering open-minded Christians and his own mystical experiences with Christ figures ([42:24–48:56]).
• Notable Quote ([43:54]):
  “Christianity was defined by all the shitty things you people did to us. And also it was monolithic. I think that’s another thing... which is ludicrous. Right. But that was how I from the outside understood it as a teenager and as, as a kid.”
• Both note developmental aspects—group prejudice as a feature of adolescence and early experience.

6. Nihilism, Meaning Crisis, and Conservative Religion’s Contemporary Appeal

• Jay: Meaning structures from work, community, and religion have collapsed under late capitalism, fueling a pervasive nihilism—especially among youth ([56:28–59:06]).
• While “hyper-capitalism” plays a role, it is this nihilism that leaves people susceptible to “hard-core,” authoritarian religious and nationalist movements ([60:59–62:18]).
• “The best answer to nihilism seems to be really, really conservative stuff. Right. So nationalism, very conservative religion...” —Jay ([58:36])

7. Lowercase-r Religion and the Futility of Piecemeal Spirituality

• Dan summarizes Jay’s “lowercase r” religion thesis: that moderns try to construct meaning by intentionally pulling from various traditions, but this bricolage cannot compete, in a time of chaos, with the “juice” of robust traditional forms ([62:18–65:36]).
• “When there’s... chaos set to increase with the rapid increase in AI and whatever economic dislocation... the conditions for a hard right response to that are intensified.” —Jay ([65:35])

8. Pluralism, Catastrophizing, and the “Wide Road” Problem

• Dan introduces the psychological “wide road” metaphor: Some aspects of psychological or spiritual malaise will always be with us; the challenge is acceptance and prudent mitigation, not utopian “solutions” ([67:11–69:34]).
• Both agree that efforts to combat nihilism and authoritarianism are necessary, but ultimate societal control is an illusion—focus is best placed on prudence, humility, and “mitigating the ill effects” ([74:51–77:34]).
• Notable maxim:
  “People get stupid wholesale and they get wise retail.” —(Quentin Crisp, quoted by Jay) ([77:45])

9. Religion, Power, and American Exceptionalism

• Speculation about the limits of American susceptibility to true fascist movements, given national character and historical resistance to large-scale central authority, even among right-leaning groups ([80:01–83:58]).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• Jay’s tongue-in-cheek spiritual autobiography:
  “I’m fully enlightened and I experience no pain or suffering in my existence day to day. So that’s really all you need to know.” ([04:46])
  (Immediately followed by: “No, that is false.”)

• The challenge of pluralism:
  “I like to think of pluralism as a fact about the world that we have to deal with. Maybe that’s the cognitive therapist in me, as opposed to... an approach.” —Dan ([34:01])

• Jay on “the juice” versus in-group/out-group cost:
  “If I had to choose, if somebody said you can have all of that juice but you have to pay for it with in group out group or not, I really do think I would choose not.” ([45:27])

• Insights on conservative resurgence:
  “It’s rarely good when you have a deficit of meaning among a large angry populace.” ([71:49])

• Dan on focus and humility:
  “As a cognitive therapist, I have to remind myself, I don’t know the future. And if anybody did, they would become a billionaire instantly.” ([74:51])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Jay’s religious journey: [04:46–08:16]
• Ecstasy & “delivering the goods” in religion: [18:54–22:25]
• Pluralism and perennialism critique: [22:25–24:47]
• Addressing religious trauma and healing: [42:24–48:56]
• The meaning crisis and rise of nihilism: [56:27–62:18]
• Lowercase-r religion and worries about the future: [62:18–65:36]
• Wide road/narrow road: psychological realism: [67:11–69:34]
• Catastrophizing vs. prudent acceptance: [74:51–77:34]
• American resistance to state “fascism”: [80:01–83:58]

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Resources & Further Reading

• Jay’s Substack: Both/And
• Books by Jay Michaelson:
  • God vs. Gay: The Religious Case for Equality — “Argues that the majority of our shared religious values, Christian and Jewish values, argue for dignity and love and companionship and things like that.” ([84:46])
  • Enlightenment by Trial and Error — Personal spiritual autobiography, blending Buddhist, Jewish, and contemplative insight ([86:15])

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Tone and Language

The episode’s tone is intellectually curious, wry, self-deprecating, and nuanced—blending deep scholarly engagement with “a little bit of cussing.” Both host and guest are open about their backgrounds, the oddities and tensions of being “weird religion people,” and their disagreements with both fundamentalist religion and smug secularism. Humor and humility are present throughout.

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For Further Engagement

Jay will likely return as a guest for a future “I Don’t Believe in That God” episode—conversations designed to compare religious worldviews and clarify nuances within and across faith traditions ([14:05]).

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Skip-List

Opening ad, Patreon announcements, and “Back of Mind” segment at the end (about emo lyrics and the song “Jesus Christ” by Brand New; from [86:56] onward) are non-core content and can be skipped without missing the main interview.

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Compiled by Religion on the Mind Podcast Summarizer – preserving the full ambition, humor, nuance, and pluralism at the heart of Dan and Jay’s conversation.

Transcript

[Jay Michaelson]

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[Dr. Dan Koch]

Hey everybody, I am getting Josh this audio note from away from my office, which is why I'm recording it on my laptop, which is why it doesn't sound very good. So please forgive me, but I wanted to let you know that for patrons of this podcast, we are going to be hosting a Christmas party Zoom hang on. Tuesday, December 16th at 5:00pm Pacific, 8:00pm Eastern. That's Tuesday the 16th, 5:00pm pacific, 8:00pm Eastern. We don't know exactly what we're going to do for it yet, but we are going to try and make it fun. We're going to play a game or two. We may get a special guest to join us. Also, Joy will be joining us for that little party and we'll do some Q and A, but we're going to kind of mix it up. So if you are able to join live, that will be awesome. We'll send links out to everybody who is a member of the Patreon campaign and if you're not yet and this is your reason to do it, then head over to patreon.com dankoke that link is always in the show notes. Okay, we're looking forward to some holiday cheer. Although I will admit that when Joy asked me if I could wear reindeer ears or elf ears or a Santa hat, I expressed some hesitation, to which she replied, okay, fine, you can go as Scrooge. So maybe that's kind of my default starting place, but I will look forward to spending time with you all.

Hey guys, just a very quick heads up that after my conversation with Jay today, which I really enjoyed and hope you will too, I'm including a back of mind segment. This is the first time we're trying this out for a topic that is interesting to me and I think will be interesting to some of you, but maybe not most of you and you can just opt in or out of that. But I wanted to make it known that if you'd like to keep listening after that conversation, I'm going to be playing a clip of my buddy Jed and I talking about emotions and lyrics to the song Jesus Christ by the band Brand New. So check that out if you're interested. And let's hear from me and Jay.

Welcome back everyone to Religion on the Mind, the podcast that aims to explore psychology, religion and spirituality with a minimal amount of self satisfied tribalism and a maximal amount of of care and intellectual humility. How well do we do you be the judge? And I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. And today I am joined by Jay Michaelson, writer, journalist, rabbi, academic work on mysticism, psychedelics, Judaism and law. I've got 25 questions for you about your scholarly law work, Jay, so I hope you're really ready to dig into precedent and. No, I'm kidding. There's Buddhism in your story, there's Jewish mysticism in your story, and there's cultural criticism in your current work, which just makes you like a really interesting conversation partner for me, I think. And so I'm really looking forward to where this conversation might go. And thanks for being here.

[Jay Michaelson]

Thanks, Sam. Thanks for that introduction. My objective is to learn sciencey sounding terms that confirm my priors about the role of religion in life and public life. So I'm going to be taking notes.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You could just go to ChatGPT for that. You don't have to have a conversation with me. I should also say you write the both and substack, which now listeners go, oh, duh, of course. Dan wanted to have him on both and is like a catnip to my depolarizing soul. I want to start with your religious autobiography because that's sort of the backdrop of this show and you have just, just even saying Buddhism and like Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism or whatever, like already, that's just really fascinating. So can you give us a brief autobiography of religion in your life?

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, well, first, you know, I'm fully enlightened and I experience no pain or suffering in my existence day to day. So that's really all you need to know.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Wow.

[Jay Michaelson]

No, that is false.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You've really arrived as a. You're a Bodhisattva among us.

[Jay Michaelson]

You might say I only appear to be in this form out of compassion for you wretches who I have to save from perdition.

No, I'm just a nice Jewish boy gone bad. I grew up in a very traditional American, middle of the road Jewish environment. But maybe I should turn this around and ask you for when you first realized you were a weird religion person. For me, that was pretty early. Just walking alone in the woods and things like that. I became a nightstand Buddhist for a while, which means I had Buddhist books on my nightstand, but not a lot of practice. Those seem to speak to how I saw things a lot Way through college I took just an undergraduate seminar in Jewish mysticism. An academic seminar. Not a religious indoctrination, but the currents that I was drawn to in spirituality in general, I then found in Jewish spirituality. And I had that in my background and it felt there was kind of a kinship there. So for almost 10 years, I would say that was my main practice. I became more Jewishly observant. I ended up getting a PhD in Jewish thought. I wrote a book about an 18th century heretic that finally came out two or three years ago after many years of gestation. Yeah, I was never interested in the mainstream of sort of normative American Jewish life, but I was very interested in the marginal, weird mystical pieces. In my 30s I became a non nightstand Buddhist. I started on the meditation path through what's called Jewish meditation, which was really kind of vipassana insight meditation in a Jewish container. I now teach in that hybrid form. There's a week long retreat, silent retreat, I'm co leading at the end of December of 2025. This year through that door, I got a little more serious about the Dharma as a philosophy and as a practice, not just as something around meditation. So yeah, I went in deep a lot of long silent meditation retreats, wrote a couple of books about meditation. Eventually after coming back from some long retreats, actually even worked at a meditation app with Dan Harris, who probably a lot of your listeners have hear of.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You have the 10% happier guy.

[Jay Michaelson]

That's right, yeah. And so I worked at the 10% Happier app for a while, curating a podcast for them and leading a lot of meditation. I shouldn't tell you this because now I don't know, definitely shouldn't tell the listeners this, but my most popular meditations put people to sleep. You know the sleep meditations that they.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Have on the Everybody, everybody needs an angle.

[Jay Michaelson]

It's very strange. I'll meet people on the street. I actually met someone because I have this career in journalism as well. And so I met someone in a CNN recording studio. Was like, are you the same guy who puts me to sleep every afternoon for my nap in the middle of the day? Yeah, that was my most popular one was like how to take a power nap. It's funny that those worlds occasionally converge. I used to try to keep the spiritual and the political legal part separate, but as both and your subset as well. Dad actually advised me. He's like, you're trying to stay credible or something in the journalism world by hiding all of this religion and spirituality stuff. But what's interesting about you this is him talking is the mix. And, you know, since he had a New York Times bestseller and as you know, a multimillionaire, I listened to all of his advice.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, seems like a good default there. So that, that takes me back to answering your earlier question about when I realized I was a weird religion person. And then I want to come back to some of the Buddhism and Judaism stuff. But before answering it, I have had a similar experience. Just moved up from Seattle to a smaller college city called Bellingham. Very liberal. The Northwest in general. I've lived in the northwest for 15 years. It's sort of known for being, quote, unquote, unchurched. That's kind of the evangelical language for it. But the other way is just people don't go to church here. It's one of the least church attending, least religiously identifying areas, I think now second only to New England.

[Jay Michaelson]

Do you really need church if you have old growth forests, you know, towering majestically overhead?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, maybe not. But I also felt like, oh, maybe I should kind of hide the ball about, like, as I finished all my grad school and internship and opened my therapy practice and thinking, well, maybe I'll have like religion clients from the podcast, but locally, maybe it would be weird or like unhelpful. And it's opposite. Everyone's like, that's fascinating. That's genuinely helpful and unique. 75% of my friends have something in their story that relates to the kind of stuff you specialize in. And I'm like, oh, cool. Like, pleasantly surprised to find that. So maybe there's a sort of a shared experience there.

[Jay Michaelson]

Well, and I think one of my teachers, this well known sort of hippie rabbi named Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, said, I don't believe in the same God you don't believe in. And I've been playing with that a lot, even just the last few weeks on the substack, just what I've been writing about. It's funny the way I was, like, introduced when I was. I was on CNN for a couple of years on a couple of their shows, and always writer and attorney and rabbi. It was that tone of incredulity, disgust, and yeah, I think certainly taking on a clergy title, you just accept that you're going to receive a bunch of projection, which is fine. That's part of what makes it work. They also project positive attributes like, you must be really wise, little do they.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Know, or at the minimum, you're willing to listen to me tell you about something very hard that happened in my life.

[Jay Michaelson]

That's right. That's right.

And you've probably heard other people talk about that. So even if you're not wise, you're experienced. Yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You won't freak out. Basically, it's safety.

[Jay Michaelson]

I almost feel like writing some other article, but just based on that saying, I'm not religious the way you hate religious people.

But I'm endlessly perplexed and fascinated by both weird religion and what I would say is normative religion, which I think is even weirder, especially in America. Definitely the weirdest stuff is, like, White House prayer circles and exorcising demons that possess entire cities, and nothing Scientology has cooked up is as weird as the nar. So I'm still like, that's maybe the.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Real mark of the new apostolic Reformation, by the way, is what that NAR means.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yes. Yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

These are the. Well, it's okay. I have talked about them not too long ago, but I don't do nearly as much journalism as you do. I am actually increasingly trying to anchor episodes in current events, but that's less because I want to be a journalist and more because I like it as a way to utilize people's natural interest. I'm this way, too, like, with current events and. And news or like, you know, a new Scorsese movie comes out, and I have a bunch of interest around Scorsese content for a couple months, and if somebody could tie that to something else helpful or interesting, then I would be. That would be great. I would enjoy that. So I've been enjoying doing that, but less about the journalism and more like a way to sort of talk about. Like, after Charlie Kirk's assassination. My favorite episode that we did about that was in talking about the ways in which psychology might explain the martyrdom narratives. You know, like, what. What does that tell us? Why do we engage in martyrdom narratives? And what can we expect to happen downstream from that if that becomes a normal way of thinking about him, that, you know, things like that.

[Jay Michaelson]

No, no, that's catnip for me. I mean, I think that's. Well, yeah, to use a religious metaphor, preaching to the choir here, but I just think that's the only way to understand the dominant forces in American politics right now. I don't think it's possible. And politically, I'm pretty progressive, but the level of religious illiteracy among. Not the hard left, but even just the sort of. The people on Jeffrey Epstein's email list, apparently the sort of mainstream journalistic establishment have views of religion that were conditioned by the shitty experiences that they had as a child. And, and so part of it's like the whatever unprocessed, low key or not so low key trauma that they have. And part of it is just bad assumptions based on. And so even, you know, in the wake, I did a fairly long piece on Charlie Kirk trying to, you know, everyone on the left pounced on the five most offensive things he said. Right. Everyone on the right pounced on the five most beautiful, anodyne, inspiring things that he ever said. And the complexity. And that was even true by the way of his presumed assassin where the left, you know, the left wanted him to be one way, the right wanted him to be another way. In fact, he's a very much the person who shot him is this very 2025, extremely online figure. Really complicated, a real mix of nihilism and other nihilism. So it felt like all of the major players in this drama were not really that well represented. But that wasn't one of the episodes of yours I just binge listened to, so I'm going to check that out.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So you mentioned. Yeah. That you've been binge listening. I do appreciate that kind of familiarizing yourself with the show. Obviously no expectation for you to have done that, but I was just thinking you and I should do another episode in the future. It's a type I haven't done in a while, but I've been meaning to get back to it and your story earlier reminded me of it. These are episodes called I Don't believe in that God. And they are episodes where I have someone on who does not identify as Christian or religious or something like that. And then it's an interview where I try and understand where they're coming from and we just sort of talk it out and then at the end we sort of compare notes and usually in the final analysis there will be some difference because I am a practicing Christian, practicing liberal Christian, like liberal Protestant in the old kind of mid century way, the kind of skeptical of miracles Christian. But I also don't believe in the God that they don't believe in. Usually like usually 80% of the thing that they don't believe in I also don't believe in. And that can be kind of an interesting way of framing it. So let's just put a pin in that. Jay, that might be a fun low hanging fruit for you and I. I'm already really enjoyed talking to you. I want to go back to your weird religious person. I actually do have an answer to the question of when I figured out I was A weird religious person. And it involves multiple guests, multiple times. Guest friend of the POD Jim Wellman, professor at University of Washington I went in to have lunch with him years ago, before I decided on the psychology route. I had realized I could not get a job as a theologian and I was not going to get a theology PhD which had been probably my default plan. And so I was going to try a comparative religion masters with him and just learn a bit more and kind of, I think I thought I would enjoy it and whatever. And I kind of present him. We have lunch, I introduce myself, I show him this idea I'm working on. And he's just like, you're not weird like the other religious people. And I was like, what? I'm not what? And he was like. He's like, dude, most people who really want to talk to me about the work that I do are fucking weird. And I had literally never thought of it that way. And in part I think that's because being raised evangelical, the true believer, let's call them, high schoolers and older, so the sort of young emerging adults and young adults, those individuals in that world who take it all very seriously and sort of take the theological claims at face value and engage with them, we were prodigiously rewarded for that. We were given honor and taken seriously. We were the future pastors, missionaries, youth leaders, or even just kind of faith leaders in the community. We were the future Fellowship of Christian athletes, coaches. We were, you know, like all that kind of thing. We were the future young life directors, Christian camp counselors, all those things, like the people not only that you need to run the institutions, but really the people who are bought into the mission. And so it was shocking to me in my late 20s, 30ish, or whatever, maybe early 30s, to hear from Jim that, yeah, like a lot of people who like this shit are weird because that was like a new idea to me. And I wonder if I was gonna ask you what form of Judaism you were raised in. Was it more reform, kind of the open handed, kind of science friendly analog to liberal Protestantism, or was it more conservative Orthodox, something like that?

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, it was capital C, conservative, which means in the Jewish movements, but it's kind of a misnomer. The conservative movement's actually one of the more liberal movements, which is annoying that that's the reality, but it's just slightly more conservative than reform. So that's how they got named that way. But yeah, very science friendly. I became more religious when I was around 21, 22, and it scandalized My mother, my father was anti religious and just put up with it because that was the deal he made with my mom. But my mother was really committed to a certain kind of American liberal Judaism that was feminist, it was very particularist, it had strong feelings about Israel, but it was also very kind of, yeah, middle of the road democratic politics, I would say. All of a sudden, I started taking it way too seriously. I was like, I stopped answering the phone on the Shabbat on Sabbath, and weird things started happening. And then I started keeping kosher more strictly did. And she kind of hated that. It was kind of funny. There was a spectrum. I don't want. This is very Jewish. I'm going to talk about my mother for the whole hour, but.

I'll write.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

A few more questions as follows, just to make sure you can hold that.

[Jay Michaelson]

Anything less religious than us, those guys were basically Christian. And anything more religious than us, those guys were crazy. The Orthodox. So it was a very narrow band of acceptability. But I think, you know, I think one of the big differences, at least I'm curious how this lands for you based on your experience. You know, what I would say is a common, let's say evangelical prayer experience or ecstasy experience or being filled with the Holy Spirit experience. That's fucking weird. In mainstream Judaism now, it's different in the last 20, 30 years. But until the last 20, 30 years, it was only the most religious. The people in the Black Cats who really saw prayer as that ecstatic, transformative a practice and would feel unashamed of entering into some kind of a trance state or however they understood it theologically in a group. And we were much more polite than that. And it's really. It's maybe now more actually 30, 40 years. In the last half century, there's been an expansion of non Orthodox ecstatic spirituality in the Jewish community. But that was like a unicorn, you know, as I was coming up, and it's funny, I just wrote about this recently in the Substack about liberal religion failing to deliver the goods.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Oh, we're talking about that today, Jay. That was the one that. That's the reason that I asked you to come on.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, that's why I'm here. And you know, I tell a story in that piece, which is still true today, that when I was 19, 20 in college, just exploring spirituality, you know, the people who I agreed with politically and socially and like, how we lived our lives, you know, their prayer services were boring and nobody really cared about it. Like, it was nice. It was singing. It wasn't Terrible, but it was bad. And then the people who had really great. They're getting into it charismatically, ecstatically, in a spiritual way during prayer services or anything else. Just in daily Jewish life, which. The ritualization of Jewish life is almost infinite as you get more along toward an Orthodox way of practicing. Those guys I didn't agree with about anything, but I wanted to hang out with them for prayer. And so, yeah, I went to Israel and lived there for a few years. And every Friday night was in a Hasidic prayer environment, having that experience. And I really treasure that. I don't think this was before I came out also. So there was a little easier to. And in your 20s, to be a sort of single, unattached young Jewish man in Jerusalem was kind of normal. By the time you're 30, that's not normal anymore. So I'm really grateful for that decade that I had to be immersed in that. In that life. And eventually I just. I didn't outgrow it. That sounds sort of patronizing, but I just shifted the way I was living and. And also through meditation, I was able to cultivate some of those states of loving kindness and. And holiness. It was funny because it was ostensibly secular meditation, but it was filled with the sacred for me. And.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, well, I think that is obviously, like, it's going to become clear to people that's a real. A real topic of convergence between your interests and mine, which is sort of maybe obliterating that secular sacred divide a little bit, or at least problematizing it and pointing to commonalities while wanting to take seriously. For me, anyway, I'll say wanting to take seriously the language that people use to describe their own religious experience. Their spiritual experiences.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah. I've just been thinking the last few weeks again that as we move further along this kind of, I don't know, encompassing pluralistic path, I get more respectful of the differences rather than less. So I work a little bit in the area of psychedelic spirituality. And the first generation of that whole movement was very perennialist and universalist, which is to say there's one core to every religion. All religions are basically the same. Just. It's like window dressing. That's different.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, this is the Houston Smith kind of approach. Yeah.

[Jay Michaelson]

Just so happens that that core of all religion is what I practice, and it exclusively.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

It's like coastal American liberal Protestantism, basically.

[Jay Michaelson]

Right. Unitarian Universalism or something, infused with Westernized Vedanta, which was really popular among religion academics in the 40s, 50s and 60s.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

If you really want to be A good perennialist, you need to be steeped in a liberal mainline Protestant theology. But then you want to go to the Esalen Institute at least a few times and hang out with the LSD folks and get a little bit of that. And then, yeah, helpful if you're on a coast and you can meet some, some yoga and meditation teachers that are coming from an Eastern perspective. That's really the recipe for a successful perennialist philosophy. Right.

[Jay Michaelson]

So there's a few of us pushing against that in, in the psychedelic religion field, you know, in the academic space. But I find, you know, I just read somewhere, I forget, some famous person said, you know, I kind of. I believe in everything and nothing simultaneously precisely because I have no interest in effacing the differences, let's say, between Judaism and Christianity and seeing these as different paths up the same mountain. Different mountains? I don't know no mountain.

There's simultaneously more universalism and more particularism. They're not in tension with one another. For me, like, yeah, you do it that way and that's different from this way, and then maybe we get different results even. I'm not even claiming that we get to the same psychological states of mind. But yeah, I mean, as a non dualist, right, that's all faces of the sacred and some undefined. That's what's so helpful about ineffability. Right. We don't have to have anything in common because ineffability is just a negative capacity. So behind the cloud of unknowing, I don't have to inquire that much more.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So I have fairly regular spiritual experience.

As I have interviewed people and talk to friends and theologians and scholars and bandmates and different people over the years.

[Jay Michaelson]

Oh, right, you're in the Pacific Northwest. You have. That's like a requirement of residency. Right? You have to.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

But even, even worse, I was raised in California, so I, yeah, like the, the. I was raised on a punk rock Jesus. Really like punk rock and evangelicalism really is how I would describe my upbringing in California. And because it was California, punk rock is a bit more holistic. It was like a, a pretty big culture, not just music. But I have noticed that I occupy an interesting space relative to others because compared to maybe the average person who has roughly my theology, my metaphysics, my sort of, what do I think is probably going on, you know, at the sort of the core questions of being and divinity and all this stuff, I have like more kind of tangible spiritual experience.

I say that the language of personal relationship with God is like pretty accurate. Like for me, like at least in a very basic sense of like there is inter. It feels to me like other interpersonal experiences that I have, I turn my attention as in a phone call, you know, or like talking to somebody, you know, it is, it has a lot of those things I experience receiving something in return. So this sort of back and forth relationality. So I have more of that than a lot of those people who sort of. I agree with. And then the people who tend to have more of those experiences I don't agree with. And I am like this, you know, I will. To them it sounds like I'm demystifying and turning everything into science and empiricism and stuff, which is, and it's interesting because I do struggle with, you know, dualism in the sense of like my body, soul or spiritual realm and imminent realm. Like I, I basically just don't believe in a spiritual realm in, in the way that maybe I guess the way we've thought of it since Descartes and the Enlightenment or something like that. But yeah, so I find that tension within myself and you know, so in some ways I like to say that I was born. I'm a liberal mainline Protestant, born 50 years too late. Like, you know, maybe back then, you know, if you're reading Carl Rahner and Paul Tillich and I was going to.

[Jay Michaelson]

Say Tillich's on your shelf, but he's in your life, right? Like there's like there was that flowering of really creative. I mean now I think we associate liberal mainline Protestantism with like the most boring possible answer, right? It's like, you know, I'm just a Presbyterian and we eat bread. Like, you know, you know, there's not like a. But there's actually, you're opening something for.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Me here that I think is really cool. So. And it's related to the psychedelics work. I don't, I'm not putting too much weight on the actual things that the drugs do. But the fact that that psychedelic work has become so sort of cross religious, ecumenical. It like people are interested in it across traditions. That actually I think is a kind of a way of understanding what turns me on is it's like, no, no, no, no. So my liberalism contrasted with evangelicals, for instance, who are, you know, that's where I come from. My liberalism compared to their faith makes me way more open and interested in other religions, for instance, and way less interested in exclusivistic accounts of Jesus work and God's whatever opinion about us as Christians and stuff. And so for a Lot of people that would make them go, well, that's gonna correlate with like less religious experience, less whatever. But the psychedelics stuff is a counterexample to that. It's all about experience. It is fundamentally an experiential, you know, pursuit and topic, but it's also fundamentally open minded because of what those drugs do to a brain and the way that they, I mean, you know this better than me probably, but the way that they turn down the default mode network in our brains, which is the thing that kind of keeps us tethered to reality as we sort of use those terms in a very basic sense, like I remember my name and who I am and where I've lived and where I come from and that's my wife and these are my children. And if you give me enough mdma, I'm going to forget all of that. Like, you know, and I haven't, that's, I haven't had that experience personally. But like, you know, that's a simplistic way of saying it. You what?

[Jay Michaelson]

I recommend it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, I know a lot of my friends do, I might get there. But like, do you know what I'm saying? Like, that's actually a way of like, yeah, it's open minded, but it's still experiential. So I'm still, I'm interested in debating with these perennialist ideas of, well, there's one primordial religion and these like. And I'm like, no, I don't know about that, but I'm interested in that because I'm sort of open to these questions and I don't know, maybe I'm experiencing a bit more lowercase e enlightenment than I'm able to express verbally. But there's something about that nexus that is helping me understand this kind of odd particularity that it seems like I inhabit relative to most of my peers.

[Jay Michaelson]

It's the same as 19 year old me choosing which service to go to. Right. Like your brain is aligned with the more liberal minded, cosmopolitanly minded. I don't even mean politics, just on religion, right? Just on what the many avenues, many pathways. You can probably change some liturgy if you want. You don't need to take this biblical text quite so literally as you maybe did, but your subjective first person spiritual experience has an intensity that rivals the people on the more conservative side who really do value those experiences, but who tend to laminate them into a very particularist theology.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So do you have a hard time? As I sometimes do and as my clients very often do, I don't mean to put myself above my clients there, but I just mean it comes up a lot of like, okay, but if that's true, usually we think the more serious air quote, which basically means conservative, the more literalist, the more whatever, the more faithful, the people who go to church two or three times a week instead of, like me every other week, we tend to think, well, those are the people who have the experiences. And there's a default assumption that people, probably their thinking about God is more accurate because they're like, really in the scrum. And I am over here, you know, smoking weed and considering how it all might come together and not feeling particularly required to do anything. Right. You know, like, there's a natural tension there. Do you feel that tension or is that a Christianity thing or. I'm curious.

[Jay Michaelson]

I used to feel that tension and I really don't for now up to almost about 20 years. And it really came from. You know, I like that metaphor of the scrum. I'm not sure a scrum is the best place for accurate theological reflection. Right. What is a scrum? Right. You're in a community of people, right. You're tightly bound together. You have a certain. You work as a team, right. And you're putting the ball over the line or whatever.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

By the way, this is rugby. If people don't know anything about rugby, the scrum, is that the play in rugby where everybody starts. It's like a bunch of people, like, all smushed together. That's the script.

[Jay Michaelson]

It's like. And there's a lot of. In group bias and verification bias in there. There's a high incentive to conform to the ideas of the group, to do what the group is doing, because otherwise you're going to get smeared on the field by the other guy.

Yeah, I feel like, sure, they're having. I want to validate their mystical and. Or spiritual experience or whatever word we want to use for it and just see that it's also. It's funny. I feel like the lamination metaphor, which was important for me, is now totally dated. I don't know if anybody under 40 knows what lamination is, but you take a piece of paper and you would smash it between, like, plastic and then it's like one of those hard laminated cards that you can spill orange juice on and keep and just wipe off. It's laminated. That experience is laminated into a very particular theology that the only way to heaven is through me. And it's just hard to reconcile that theology, which every religion has, with every Other religion. Right. So it's like, if only. If the Jews are the chosen people and only the Jews have the truth of the Torah and the yoke of the commandments. What about, I don't know, 1.4 billion Hindus? And so I agree that they have a. It's almost like different scales. Like, I think that that person in the evangelical scrum is having a very authentic spiritual experience, the sacred. And because they're in a scrum, I think it's conditioned and then also interpreted in a way that just doesn't hold up to the empirical evidence of the other 90% of the planet.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I like to think of pluralism as a fact about the world that we have to deal with. Maybe that's the cognitive therapist in me, as opposed to, like, you can also talk about pluralism as an approach, you know, an internal approach that one takes. But I like to start with, it's just a fucking fact. Most religions, like you're saying, or all major religions, have some version of exclusivity that they claim, and these claims on their face are incompatible with each other. And if you want to at least just have your eyes open to the reality of the world, then that's a really good fact. One of the first few, to start with, to go, how am I going to square this? You know, like, what sense do we make of this, of this fact?

[Jay Michaelson]

I just see only two alternatives. And I know neither of us likes a binary, but, you know, one, I know that the Simpsons character Apu has been canceled, but before he was canceled, you know, Homer Simpson says something like, yeah, Jew, Christian, other looking at Apu, and Apu says, I won't do the Indian accent, of course, but Apu says, you know, Mr. Simpson, there are 1.2 billion of us. Right. Like, other. Right. That's one is to just like, all right, Other. I don't have to think about that, you know, and so you don't think about that. You know, the other polar example is that you probably know his name, the missionary who was rowing to that solo to that island of cannibals.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. With the more recent guy. The more recent. David something. Yeah, yeah.

[Jay Michaelson]

So, like, that's the other is like, he did so much research on who hasn't been reached by the gospel, which is the only exclusive path to truth and salvation, that like, you know, road to an island of cannibals to deliver it to them. And I'm not mocking that act. I mean, it cost him his life. Right. So those seem to be the two alternatives. Other, which is I'm not going to think about it or everybody else is wrong. And so you better go enlighten as many of them. And we Jews have an uncomfortable history with the Crusades and Inquisitions part.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yes. So within Christianity, I think there is another option. You do have something like Christian universalism. And Christian universalism can take different forms. So one of the forms, and I believe this was Carl Rahner, the mid century Catholic theologians approach, but I could be misattributing it to him, but it's the sort of anonymous Christian answer. So what you can say to sort of square the problem from a Christian theological perspective is you can say, well, Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him. But you don't need to know. CS Lewis also seems to have believed this as well and possibly Billy Graham, that you don't need to know. This is the way I say it. You don't need to know what the bridge is made of to walk across the bridge. So it might be that Jesus, like so in the four spiritual laws and some of these other like massively, you know, 100 million copy printed pamphlets within American Christianity, you have an image of like a gulf between God and man and then the cross is the bridge between the two. So I just think, okay, let's just say something like that exists, you walk across it without knowing that it's a cross, you could still get across the chasm, be saved. Right. And you're just, you do it with incomplete knowledge. What I don't like about that view, that particular way of doing Christian universalism, is the same thing that I don't like about perennialist philosophy as we talked about earlier, which is it kind of implies that you've got a God's eye view. And I don't know why you would have a God's eye view and not other people, not other cultures, not other religions. It's a little too easy, right?

[Jay Michaelson]

If there's two worlds, you know, this world and the other world, and what's bridging it is honoring the ancestors by venerating the shrines throughout Japan. I don't know that that has a lot in common with the other bridge. You know, it feels like that system has a difference. I mean it may, there may be ethical commonalities, right? There may be, you know, sure, we could like be creative and you know, but my sense is that Shinto and Christianity have slightly different cosmologies and what it is to be in right relationship with the other dimension.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. So on that Kind of everybody else is an anonymous Christian universalist claim. What you're saying is they're all sort of mistaken in the way that we love children, even when they're wrong about things.

[Jay Michaelson]

You know, it's not the best. Right, it's not the best.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

However, there, there's a, there's a, there's a softer claim embedded within that about sort of the amount to which any person really does have a sort of full throated explanation of what they're doing. And I like the part that says we don't really know. I mean, you know, so there's a nice kind of. There is also an embedded humility. But then it sort of takes it too far and says, but we do know this thing about their eternal destination. There's a non anonymous Christian version of Christian universalism that would say something like whatever it is that God did through Jesus, God did it for everybody. And sort of stops. There would then be just in theory more open to learning about other things. And then there's kind of like a further. This is sort of my, like super fuzzy. Like if I, if you had to pin me down today, I would say Jesus of Nazareth was uniquely plugged into whatever is real and true in the sort of ultimate sense of things in a way that maybe he was the only one to be that plugged in and maybe not. And I have no way of answering that question. I certainly will not have definitive proof that allows me to answer that question during my lifetime, which is really the only time scale that matters here. And so I will lean into a Christian life that follows Jesus with sort of a maximal open handedness to what that might mean for other people. And I'm just gonna sort of trust that I don't have to figure that out and you know, like lean into my. Lean into humility there as much as possible.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, I'm 100% on board with that. I think my binary choice was only for somebody who's really committed to a more robust exclusivist position.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

[Jay Michaelson]

Whereas yours got fuzzy enough. Right. But it's funny, when you were describing I did grow up with a fair amount of kind of Christian trauma, like low key, that word is now being overused but lowercase. What I mean by it. Yeah, what I mean by it is when I was a little kid, I grew up on Long island, so everybody was either Jewish or Catholic. We didn't know about Protestants really, there were a lot of Catholics. It seemed like the Christians seemed really dumb and yet they controlled everything. They were like the bullies, right? We were definitely second class. I was raised with the anti Semitism industrial complex and all of the sort of stuff that comes with that. And it takes time to get over that. And I could go on a sidetrack about that, but I won't. So there was this real resistance and I could have anything on my altar, but not Jesus. I still have. I have a ton of Buddha statues around. My daughter, who's about to turn eight, jokes about it all the time. She's like, I thought we're Jewish, how come there's Buddha everywhere? It's like, well, you know. So finally I did some work on that and had this. Had a similar kind of coming to terms with how I relate to Jesus, which is this exactly the way that you just did and being me. I wrote an article provocatively titled How I Finally Came to Accept Christ in My Heart. And that was published in a journal I edited at the time that was a print and online journal. I remember I was at a big Jewish festival and we were selling copies of it and some guy took the thing open to that page, his eyes bugged out. He took all of the copies of the journal and threw them in the garbage because he thought we were trying to proselytize. It was pretending to be a Jewish.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Magazine, but secretly he thought you were like messianic Jews.

[Jay Michaelson]

Jews for Jesus. I was Jews for Jesus. Basically, like suckering them in with the menorah on the COVID but then inside. And it was a funny collision of particularism and pluralism. Yeah, he was pissed.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

We don't have. That's funny. We don't have to go into this too much if you don't want to, but I am actually curious because I'm curious from just like a psychological perspective, almost like I'd be curious with a therapy client in terms of like, what did you particularly have to overcome to the extent you feel comfortable sharing personal stuff here about that kind of standard American antisemitism, this sort of second class religion stuff of it.

I'm curious what you figured out about what you had to get past and how you got past it, because that sounds like a meaningful hurdle, like a tough thing to get through.

[Jay Michaelson]

I've never been asked that question before. So I'm thinking in real time. I think there were a number of different pieces. You know, one, I think I'll phrase it provocatively, which is that liberal minded American Jews, because of the last two years of war in Israel Palestine, are now discovering some of the ambivalence that a Lot of liberal minded Christians have had for hundreds of years like oh, our religious community acting in our name can be. Or our just national community, wherever you want to put it is, is doing things which we really, I'll just put it mildly, really disagree with or really find troubling.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right.

[Jay Michaelson]

And I think there's that. So for me growing up outside of that, I didn't have that space. Right. Christianity was defined by all the shitty things you people did to us. Right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And also it was monolithic. I think that's another thing. There was one thing called Christianity.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, that's right, there's. Which is ludicrous. Right. But that was how I from the outside understood it as a teenager and as, as a kid. And you know, like the anti Semitism that I directly experienced was just bullying. Anti Semitism. Like we shared a bus with a Christian prep school and like I was teased a lot and they called me Jay the Jew. And there was just what, like I never had any serious, you know, not. That was great.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No. But it is also, it does, it does very briefly highlight sort of something that comes up a lot which is the main dark side of the benefits of religious practice for people. The main sort of collection of negatives clusters around in group out, group stuff. That's really the main cost for all the benefits you get of the meaning, the values, the directionality, the community, the tight knit stuff. And the thing you pay for, the thing you pay for that with is you're gonna, on average you're gonna have a harder time with people who aren't in that group.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah. And that's, you know, I just cast my lot in again, it was like now in my 30s or so with the people not wanting to do that. Like if I felt I did get to the point, and I am at the point still now all these years later where I don't feel I need to sacrifice spiritual intensity to be in a pluralistic world. I feel like between the meditation piece, the Jewish pieces, the psychedelic pieces, the earth based pieces, I'm in a group called the Radical Fairies, which is this kind of pagany oriented thing. And I celebrate Beltane with them every year and it's great and very ecstatic and embodied.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Am I hearing multiple religious identification here.

[Jay Michaelson]

That, you know, I get the juice where it's where I can find it and that includes in, you know, I've done, I don't have a practice of doing zikr, but I've done zikr a bunch of time and times in Sufi and Muslim context that's been great. I was at midnight mass at the Vatican, you know, one time and you know, that was pretty great. I've been to mega churches. I felt like I bit like there have been a variety of these experiences but if I had to choose, if somebody said you can have all of that juice but you have to pay for it with in group out group or not, I really do think I would choose not. You know, the last couple of years being a Jewish American writing about politics in the public sphere has just made that more clear for me. So back to your original question, how I like got rid of my Christophobia. Part of it was that part of it was just meeting, you know, meeting people obviously like meeting believing Christians and getting to understand their faith as they understood it, not as it was. And you know, like who were the Christians I knew as a teenager? Like a bunch of assholes. Right. Like I didn't, you know, these weren't people who took it seriously and really followed the path. You know, they did whatever they were doing. You know, those are, you know. Yeah, I leave it at that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

There's also, there's a developmental lens there too. You were all younger.

[Jay Michaelson]

That's right, right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And so a little bit of it is just like if all that had happened in your 30s, it'd be different than high school, you know, or whatever.

[Jay Michaelson]

Right? That's right. And it is funny though, flashing back to something you said, you know, a little while ago, like I do feel I just had a dust up with a well known journalist about religion and it did feel like he was still basing his ideas on religion by like whatever shit happened to him when he was 15 or 13 or whatever. And it was just like, yeah, I get that. And also there's, you know, if we judged everybody by what they did and said when we were 14 or 15, and I would just add, I wanted to be, to not leave out this part that there were some non ordinary experiences over the years where entities that really did seem like Jesus Christ showed up in various places, forms. Oh shit. And I had to deal with that in some way. And even if I understand that as a projection of myself, my subconscious, I still have to deal with it like that. That's something that's in there. I don't understand it that way. But even if I did, if I had that reductive view, I'd still need stuff to process. And so yeah, I think it was just the degree of taboo that I used to feel. And to an extent I don't still feel it But I'm still aware of that sense, that strong sense, like anything was better than Christianity. Like I could, you know, I could become a Muslim before I could become a Hindu. I could, you know, like any of those. And it's even true, you know, there are these jokey Jewish hybrids. So like I'm a Buju, right, a Buddhist Jew. There are Hindus, there are Jew fees, Jewish Sufis. In fact, a lot of American Sufis are Jewish, just like a lot of American Buddhists are Jewish. But like when we get to Christianity, then it's like the bad guys, right? The Jewish Christians or the Jews for Jesus or something. Like there's not. I have a colleague at the Emory center for Psychedelics and Spirituality where I work who's a Baptist minister. I call her like my Baptist soul sister, sometimes my Baptist clone or something like that. And that's as close as I can get to like embracing a true. It's not a hybrid identity, but whatever. Like a true commonality, I guess we used to say ecumenical identity. And it's just the degree of the taboo is still, and I see it, you know, among friends all the time. It's still very prevalent.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

It's interesting, it's got me thinking about a common prejudice in our sort of more left leaning circles where it's like, I do think that a heavy emphasis on Marx and other sort of questions, you know, so called critical theories and things like this, the sort of, the various worldviews. And I'm not this kind of academic, so I'm speaking in generalities on purpose of like a critical view of the world that is, you know, heavily criticizing systems and heavily looking at power and privilege, these sorts of lenses which are, you know, still very much in vogue, that there's a way in which, like the fact that Christianity in America is still the big dog in the park and in some very overt ways, especially with President Trump, you know, like literally walking the halls of power, there's a kind of like, well, we don't need to question our, that bias that we have because that bias is sort of baptized in anti empire sort of critical language of like, well, we're on the side of the right people to be with. And so that stuff is righteous indignation and righteous anger when it is. And it's also cognitive distortions and confirmation bias. It's both. It's both. And Jay.

[Jay Michaelson]

Well, it's funny how. It's funny how again, I feel like Jews are now getting a taste of what that might be like. You know, we were more or Less, except for like the real bigots, you know, for liberals, we were kind of on the more or less on the right side for a while, you know. And sure there were people who were anti Zionist or anti Israel, you know, 50, 60 years ago, but that was a pretty small group really. And because Israel hadn't done the stuff that it's been doing lately and it just hadn't. And now, you know, there is, and it is laced with antisemitism sometimes and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just political critique. But now there is this, this like I have a desire to distance myself from like the Jews who I think are doing bad stuff the same way I could imagine. You know, if I were a liberal Christian, I would want to like quickly hesitate, quickly hasten to say, by the way, not endorsing all the homophobia parts.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

JD Vance guy.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, not that guy. Right, right. I'm Christian, but not J.D. vance. You know, I'm like the Quakers over here.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You know, I'm like a relevant, cool Christian.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, that's right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I've been saying some version of that since I was 16.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, there is that now in the power sense, it was always like nerdy, I think, to be too religious, but now it's also right, just as you said, for sort of deep seated, progressive reasons. It's deeply sus, like the kids say. Right. That's pretty sus, like you're going to church. Do you know who else goes to church? J.D. vance. And he's not the worst, as you know.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, and it pops up. Look, I have an interesting angle on why there's confirmation bias. And something you said earlier put this in mind when you said, I think you had this interaction with this guy that really he seemed to be kind of reliving what happened to him as a kid at the hands of Christians or whatever. And I'm a spiritual abuse researcher. That's what my research is in. The scale has been published and validated. We're working on another study to look at relationship between spiritual abuse and adverse childhood experiences with a couple sociologists. So I know, I mean, I'm well aware of the pitfalls of the tremendous evil and suffering and all of that stuff. I work with religious trauma clients all the time. And so I got invited on a podcast, sort of like a religious trauma type podcast, and the host was asking me questions and it was like becoming clear that the host had a, like a very negative view of religion. And so at one point I asked the host, I was like, so what do you make of all the research that shows all these benefits of religiosity. And the host was like, I haven't read that research. And I was like, well, other. Other. Exactly like you're saying. I just don't even have to consider that. It's like, but you started a religious trauma podcast, so I would hope that you'd be the kind of person who would feel the need to look into that.

[Jay Michaelson]

I would hope that, too, from a therapeutic point of view.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And this was not a therapist. It's just a podcast.

[Jay Michaelson]

But, yes.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Jay Michaelson]

So if you're working with somebody who's been damaged, who's been suffered spiritually, therapists.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Have a better record. I would say.

[Jay Michaelson]

You want it. You want to, like, Right. Recognize that it's not all, like, garbage. Right. That, like, that's part of the problem. Right. It was bound up with all the goodies, and that's where the abuse, you know, it's so pernicious. Right. It's precisely for that. If it was all garbage, it'd be easy to just be like, well, yeah, just don't be a Mormon anymore. Don't be a Christian anymore. Don't be whatever. Don't be whatever anymore. Like, it's. That would be easy if that's all that people had to do to heal.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

The example I give for liberals like myself who might be skeptical is like, I say, okay, I work with a number of gay Christians who are coming to terms with their sexuality and their faith simultaneously, usually coming from conservative families, sometimes conservative immigrant families, Right. Like, you know, with a strong homeland, you know, Christianity, which has this additional cultural conservatism overlaid. And I say, okay, imagine for those clients what it's like for them to be in an Episcopal or Methodist or Church of Christ or ELCA Lutheran service and see a gay couple holding hands in the pew a few pews ahead of them. Imagine for someone who still identifies with a lot of Jesus and finds that to be still kind of their best ethical framework. And, you know, you could fill in various gaps for various individuals about how much sort of spiritual or ecstatic experience they've had or not had, but even just someone who's comfortable with the Gospels. And then they see active, loving gay couples in a liberal church, like. Like, imagine how much good that might do for them. And most of my liberal friends are able to sort of picture that, and then they can go, oh, yeah, okay, so we could sort of separate out the bigotry from the other benefits and stuff. I guess the point is just. And this is why I love the title of your subsect so much at both. And it's like that, the black and white, the all or nothing, the categorical thinking is. It's so ingrained. And we could talk about why, you know, there's evolutionary psychological descriptions that I like quite a bit. There's scarcity, mindset sort of here and now. There's. You talk about fight or flight systems. We could talk about meaning making and identity formation. We can talk about like Jonathan Heights, you know, and others like the, the different moral matrices, the different moral taste buds that people seem to have, like, again, pluralistic representation around what they find to be very morally important across populations. And all that stuff is very helpful. But first you just have to get someone willing to go, oh, maybe this is good for other people, even though it hurt me.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, I want to run my future column, Bayou, and see what you think.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Let's go.

[Jay Michaelson]

So I was just reading, I was in exchange with somebody who's written a few books on the meaning crisis, and he was kind of ascribing the meaning crisis to capitalism.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Give us a real brief. Like when you say meaning crisis, it's capital M, capital C. This is a thing that cultural critics are writing about. But if people don't know that term, could you give a little bit of that?

[Jay Michaelson]

Sure. So especially in Western democracies right now, a lot of the structures that provided people a sense of transcendent meaning and not transcendent, necessarily otherworldly, but just transcending my own selfish, momentary interests have really crumbled. Right. So family structures are changing, people are getting married later, having fewer kids, economic structures where men in particular America used to really identify with their work and with moving forward. The American dream of homeownership, which is now almost entirely unattainable for 90% of the country, and also patriotism and a sense of common culture and a lot of these kinds of things, which can sound somewhat conservative, have sometimes for very good reasons I would say, decreased in importance and in prevalence in the last half century. And a lot of folks are reporting correlating with that is an explosion in a mental health cris, in a loneliness epidemic, in a masculinity crisis, in deaths of despair arising the opioid crisis. And a lot of the sort of. This is also very much a Trump post Trump phenomenon, right? Where sort of coastal America woke up to the fact that maybe even a numerical majority, but certainly 100 million Americans are really dislocated and unhappy in profound ways and that they're not. It's not because they're just, they're racist rednecks. It's because there are systems that, that used to give them meaning are falling apart.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Is this, by the way, what you call, you use a term called the poly crisis sometimes. Is that those various crises you just laid out? Is that the poly crisis?

[Jay Michaelson]

The poly crisis is usually adjacent, but different. And it's like all of the shit hitting the fan at once. So there's the climate crisis, there's the resurgence of nationalism, there's intense economic inequality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, anyway, so you've been working with, you work on meaning crisis. You were talking with somebody else who works on meaning crisis. Crisis. That's where you were at.

[Jed Payne]

Yeah.

[Jay Michaelson]

And capitalism is part of that, right? Capitalism, hyper capitalism, you know.

So you know the fact that you used to have a Main street and you used to be from a town that was different from the other town and you went to this store and you ate this real restaurant. They were, you owned the, you knew the owner. So hyper capitalism has destroyed all of that. Right. So capitalism, definitely.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And you might have paid more for a worse product.

But in so doing had a relationship with a person.

[Jay Michaelson]

That's right, you had those human relationships and you had a sense of place. Right. And it wasn't all strip malls. And likewise at work. Right. Where 50 years ago, certainly 100 years ago or so, you would have much more likely to be working at a smaller place. Right? Where you knew people, where you're building something, you were doing something. Even if you worked in a white collar context, it'd be like a firm where you were part of some business now the stereotypical, like an Amazon warehouse employee or something like that. So it's much harder to get a sense of meaning out of work. And people don't stay at the same place for 50 years and get a gold watch when they retire. That's not how it works. So capitalism plays a big role in that. But I've started to feel like it's really nihilism that is the bigger ingredient. And it is both. And I believe everything I just said about capitalism. But I also think, especially I start looking at the extreme edge cases, like Tyler Robinson, the Charlie Kirk assassin, but also like, like there is a profound nihilism that seems almost omnipresent right now. It's extremely online, right. There's no. For younger people, it's the full awareness that they may not have a habitable planet by the time they get to be my age or if they do It'll be torn by refugee crises and wars and so on. And they're aware that the system is rigged anyway. And it leads not to sort of, let's say a Bernie left socialism or something like that, but to nihilism. And the best answer to nihilism so far seems to be really, really conservative stuff. Right. So nationalism, very conservative religion. The sort of Jordan Petersons of the world getting back to what they perceive to be traditional religion. I could just spend the rest of the time talking about that, dude, but I won't. And also fascism, whether we want to call it fascism or not, but like the more hardcore version of nationalist, authoritarian.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Far right nationalist authoritarianism. Sure. Yeah. Even if it's not. Even if it's not 45% of America, but, you know, like, certainly in the militias and stuff.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, it's 20%, you know, and that. And I read something you're saying on survey.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

On survey data.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah. In terms of. And it always used to be around 15 to 20%. It's interesting. Like, there's a lot of writing now and scholarship on populism and why it grows, but. And then it's usually some weird kind of combination of circumstances for populists to really take power. Right. Like, had we not had Covid, we wouldn't have had the post Covid both recession and also post Covid insanity that happened to America, and Trump probably wouldn't have beaten that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Crisis gives opportunity.

[Jay Michaelson]

Right. So same in Germany in the 20s and 30s, early 30s. So I'm very interested in the meaning crisis. It's not something I experience as we talked about before, subjectively. I wrote about that in the column that you saw, but it's hard to imagine anything being powerful enough. I see the appeal of conservative religion to somebody who's just in a nihilistic place where everything is ironic and nothing means anything. And I watch AI Slop for four hours a night, and I don't know if any more progressive version can really fight that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. So this was really. This was the set of ideas that I was really intrigued by and wanted to have you on to talk about. So I'll do a little quick summarizing and you can fill it in, but you have a piece about small R religion, and I take you to mean by that. Like, it's not like capital R religion is the. Is organized religion that you do through a particular denomination with its own set rituals, doctrines, et cetera. Small R religion is more like piecemeal, as I understand it from what you're saying. It's like an intentional approach to one's life where you're kind of maybe at its most effective. It would be someone who's aware of what they've lost in multiple domains by not being religious and consciously choosing to address those needs and shortcomings through a variety of approaches as opposed to one capital R religion. So you kind of get it in the aggregate. First of all, does that sound roughly correct?

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, I think that's right. The equivalent of like, like the most extreme lowercase R might be like Unitarian Universalism where it's like religion with a God optional religion. And again, I'm not putting that down. I'm just like. But that's maybe one extreme.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

It's lowercase R. But the first page of a book or of a chapter where the lowercase R is physically larger because it's the first letter but it.

[Jay Michaelson]

Is not an uppercase R. That's right, exactly. But I think it's true for any, any post scientific religious movement doing a more int. I like your use of the word intentional there. Like an intentional reconstruction of what the religion is. And you know, we understand that the world was not created by an anthropomorphic deity 6,000 years ago. That's okay. There are still the sacred texts are still sacred. Myths are important. These are, these are our shared myths. We realize they're myths. We realize they weren't written by God but by many different authors. We realize we're on board with all this.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I mean there's a few, there's a couple, couple both hands I might throw back in.

That you embedded in there.

[Jay Michaelson]

I can also square that circle. And this is how God reveals God's self in history. That's fine.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Depends on what we mean by God wrote it. You know, things like that.

[Jay Michaelson]

That's all lowercase R, right? That's all, that's all stuff where it's not literally like the, you know, Jesus loves me. This I know for the Bible tells me so it's different from that. And yet when I. It's.

What was in that article was. It's so frustrating in a way because for me that really works. I live in that world and I love it. And yet it doesn't seem to have a chance compared to, I don't know, Russell Brand getting baptized or whatever moment we want to have as this emblematic moment. And that's worrisome, right? I mean when there's. Because the chaos is just set to increase with the rapid increase in AI and whatever economic dislocation. So it looks like we're headed toward a place of more nihilism, more anomy, more chaos, less economic opportunity. And so that means to me that the conditions for a hard right response to that.

Are intensified.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. So when we talk about worrisomeness, I guess what I notice.

[Jay Michaelson]

I want your religion to win. I don't want Dineen's religion to win.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right, I know. Yeah.

[Jay Michaelson]

You know, Or I don't want Yoram Khazoni's religion to win, and I don't want Pete Hegseth's religion to win.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So that's so interesting because. So you're. Yeah, you're teeing me up perfectly when you're talking about what's worrisome. I'm hearing you mostly mean the sort of material details on the ground and the sort of sociopolitics, but especially the real, actual politics and power and where that gets sort of centralized and then what will that further do to the world sort of a thing. And I think it's. Maybe it's just indicative of kind of where my mind tends to live is I tend to first think about the individual experience of meaning and lack of meaning and all. Like, I maybe think of it, like, for a client or something. Something like that. That's my default. I'm not a journalist, I'm not a cultural commentator. So that's probably the whole game right there. That's why maybe my mind goes there and your mind goes the other place. But so when I think of, like, yeah, there's, of course, there are manifold dangers. I do. I want to register and maybe we can come back to this. I pick up on a little bit of catastrophizing. Jay, I'm a little skeptical of some of your doomer.

[Jay Michaelson]

I'm an anti catastrophist. It's funny. Like, I really am.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, maybe we could work on some more consistency there.

[Jay Michaelson]

No, I'm kidding.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I'm kidding. But like, there's this phrase attributed to Jesus of the road is narrow that leads to life, and the road is wide that leads to destruction. And growing up evangelical, that was always exclusively interpreted as salvation. So that was about us being the faithful remnant and the church will always be somewhat persecuted because we're always the people on the narrow road and they are always the wide road. But ever since I read the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, I've been interpreting that passage as psychological, not soteriological, the study of salvation. And I just think of it like. So in a context like this, I would go, well, if what you're saying is like talk about the person working the, you know, working the high school diploma job and coming home. And on their cheap Android smartphone, they're scrolling AI slop and Instagram reels for four hours, maybe with a six pack, falling asleep and getting up and doing it all again. I just sort of think like there will always be a big population of human beings that will be kind of drawn to that life now. There are things we can do materially to make their lives better. Like I am a Ralsian when it comes to the, the distribution of goods and opportunity. Like I really buy. I've talked about it before, it's probably been a little bit, a little while. But his thought experiment of the veil of ignorance that like, you know, we'd want. If you knew that you were going to be born into a society with a variable set of resources and different ways it might be allocated, you'd want to be born into a society where everybody had some minimum decency of life, minimum level of autonomy and you wouldn't want one where some people would not have that because others have so much. And that is the real world. That is actually how we're born into the world. I totally believe all of that. And then I also, there's like a little bit of acceptance of the wide road is always going to be wide. If Jesus is correct, if Jesus ever said it, if those words are true in a psychological sense, then, then the poor you will always have with you and the people on the wide road you will always have with you. Because it's a truth about human psychology. The wide road, how does that hit you?

[Jay Michaelson]

I like it. I think I want to clarify my concern which is less a kind of paternalistic. Well, I don't know if it's paternalistic. I am concerned for those people and their welfare. Your hypothetical slop scroller. But I'm more concerned about the harm they cause to others. And sometimes it's extreme like mass shooting events and sometimes it's systemic like tolerance for what ICE is doing right now to legal residents of this country, let alone the illegal ones. And so it's like, yeah, I mean I am concerned. I feel like that's more of a missionary concern of like how do I make that person's life better and help them find meaning. But I'm mostly, yeah, I just am concerned about the like maybe it is catastrophizing but the species wide suicidal behavior is the knock on effects manifesting, you know. Yeah. So. And if, you know, I remember, I forget which film this was, but it was One of the many films about virtual reality before virtual reality existed. And at one point they go into this, like, place where all these guys just want to get jacked in to the Matrix, basically. And so they're just gaming their entire lives. Like they get up to sleep and poop and then they.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I think about that kind of sci fi a lot. Lot. As AI gets stronger.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting religious question.

As a political matter, I almost. I don't know if I really want to, like, I certainly don't want to ban it or force people to live the life that I think is more meaningful than that life. So I'm sort of concerned. I wouldn't want my daughter to live that life. I guess if she chose it, you know, fully, volitionally, that's. That's her choice. But it does feel like.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, you would be option chosen it.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, I would.

So there's that. And it's also like, Right, there's. The malefactors of great wealth are engineering that world. Right. I just listened to a great episode of a podcast I listened to called Panic World about the Internet, about OpenAI's pivot to be moving AI slop after saying that they're about the benefit of humanity, but they need to make money to save humanity. So they started upstorms. So, yeah, it's like.

The systems are causing that. I don't like the word enslavement, but whatever it is, they're causing that dependence on that kind of abusive relationship with technology. But again, my main concern is that the rest of us are out here suffering the consequences of that in a variety of ways. And you don't have to violate Godwin's Law to say we're not headed to Nazi Germany. But it's rarely good when you have a deficit of meaning among a large angry populace.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, definitely agree. Let's do. Okay. Because we have a little less than 10 minutes. So we're gonna solve it. Well, no, but I want to get you. I want to ask you about climate catastrophe, because you mentioned the magical.

[Jay Michaelson]

Can I just add one more thing before we do that? Because that's a pivot.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, well, it's not a real. But yes, I'm.

[Jay Michaelson]

I think there's a good. I mean, I forget where I was reading. I think it actually was from one of the more conservative Catholics who I was reading to research. I was reading Rene Girard to see how J.D. vance got Gerard wrong. And then I had to read all these other people. And there is a version of how Some of these thinkers understand original sin or even just what it is to be a fallen human, sinful human being that I didn't grow up with. And it's not really part of my religious worldview, but that I do think has been a value of like, it's a little more Buddhist, actually. It's like these are, you know, all humanity.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Jay Michaelson]

We are all subject to, in the Buddhist language, greed, hatred and delusion. Yes. And the majority, numerical majority of humans are going to continue to be subject to greed, hatred and delusion. So undertake the Bodhisattva vow to liberate all sentient beings and know that that will take thousands of lifetimes because, you know, that's what it's just since they don't have a savior figure in that form.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Otherwise that's the way you do it. Yeah. You get it through time.

[Jay Michaelson]

After thousands of lifetimes, there will be enough salvation that people be saved. But that's what it takes. And I do find that comforting in a certain way. I think it was right after Trump won the second time that I was turning to sort of the darker, turned corners of Buddha Dharma, the kind that's not taught in mindfulness workshops around the country.

Because there is a very similar. Where it's similar to stoicism, the real kind, not the fake.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jay Michaelson]

And it's similar to that thread within Christianity. And I do think that's, you know. Yeah. Unfortunately, that's led a lot of conservatives to be anti democratic. Right. It's like, because we're all sinful beings and we're never going to transcend that. You know what? Democracy is overrated and we shouldn't really do that. Well, it doesn't have to lead that maybe, I don't know, it doesn't have to lead there.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Maybe that's the common thread with the catastrophizing that I'm a little bit reacting to or that I. I'm calling catastrophizing. Let's just be honest. It might not be.

[Jay Michaelson]

I call it science. Yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I call it good, true wisdom. No, but there's like.

What I am reacting to in both your words and then the example you just gave of like, yeah. These sort of anti liberal post liberal religious conservatives who are like, so we just need to get the power of the state back involved and let's get back to the Middle Ages so that we can tamp down on all of this evil and corruption. In both cases, it feels to me like trying to control too big of an outcome, like almost in a daoist way, which I don't really have a lot of knowledge of Daoism. I have read and meditated on the dao de jing a couple times through Taoist. I'm a knights. I. I've incorporated into my prayer practice a bit. But the idea of like the sort of core idea of Wu Wei, of actionless action, or in a kind of shitty English version, like going with the grain of the wood instead of against the grain, which is not to say not doing anything, but it's doing things in sort of like in a natural and efficient way. Just I find so much freedom in that. Like, and it also seems to me to be like, better. Like it's more effective and it's more realistic and it actually is kind of anti catastrophizing. It's like, because it. I hope I'm making sense here. It's a way of looking at all these problems that turns down my own certainty of how shitty things are getting. Because as a cognitive therapist, I have to remind myself, I don't know the future. And if anybody did, they would become a billionaire instantly. And we'd have Biff from Back to the Future too, you know, with his sports book. Like, nobody has that ability. We are actually all just in the now and sort of doing our best to project and kind of guess and like, it helps me focus on, well, what is the. What's going with the grain quote unquote, in my particular life, where do I. Where do I have opportunity to do things that will help? And.

Something I think I'm kind of reacting to is like, well, let's solve fascism and nihilism. Fucking good luck, dude. Like, you're not gonna solve that.

It almost feels to me like a waste of my mental energy. Now I'm really. Now I'm pressing it harder to get a reaction out of you, I'll admit. But that can feel dead endy to me a little bit. Whereas only a very slight shift of what you're doing into more just the individual psyche element of it would not feel like a dead end. I'm interested in the same questions and stuff.

[Jay Michaelson]

Well, you found the right vocation, right? You're a therapist. So where you find an individual case of lack of meaning.

You work with a great, great queer icon. Sir Quentin Crisp said, people get stupid wholesale and they get wise retail, right? It's like society will make you pretty dumb. Maybe that's Quentin Crisp version of the Wide Road and the Narrow Road.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I mean, really, I think it is. Like, I. I think those sci fi Films.

[Jay Michaelson]

I'm not sure who is turning over in their grave faster. Quentin Crisp or like the conservative Christian who holds by that teaching. Had I just put it in, like this queer icon who. So I think, yeah, I mean, I do think on a systemic level. I think for a lot of the. I think, look, I don't think things get solved, but I think if we could get America back to our 15% nationalist wackos, you know, what Hillary Clinton called the deplorables, and it not being a mass movement that controls all three branches of government right now, good enough. I am satisfied. Like, I don't. And it doesn't need to be a utopian socialist world at the end. Right. It could just be, like, a little less cruel.

And a little more prudent. So it's true. I do sometimes to a fault. I mean, I have at times in my life. I mean, I used to run a Jewish spiritual organization and we ran retreats. And so I have worked on smaller scales in ways that's been really nourishing for me. But it is true. Just temperamentally.

You know, it does feel like. I don't know if we're facing existential risks, that's the term from effective altruism, but we've got some pretty serious hardcore ones that are present without catastrophizing. But that's a good point. I mean, I think my main takeaway is the wide road, narrow road piece, and it does lead. So then the subsequent question is like, well, how do we mitigate the ill effects of widespread nihilism? And one answer to that is a very conservative answer. Right? Hardcore law and order, Right? So.

Worried about mass shootings and graffiti and the satanic panic. Well, I got a plan for that. It's private prisons and rounding people up. All right? So it's hard that the progressive solutions to these problems are less immediately viscerally appealing.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

There's just the question, though, of whether Americans would really go along with that if it was enacted at a higher scale than it's being enacted. Like, I'm watching the Ken Burns American Revolution right now, and I'm listening to letters written in 1760 in Boston, and I'm like, kind of still sounds like Americans today. I actually think that if Trump. Like, my personal belief is that if Trump, Trump or whoever comes after Trump tries anything on the numerical order of what the Nazis did or other, what Putin has done or whatever, there's just no fucking way. It is one of the worst things about America, like our kind of bullheadedness around that Stuff. And it is now something like I saw Aaron Wren, who's like a right leaning culture commentator who I'm planning to have on the show and, and mixing things up a little bit, saying he's like his Thanksgiving post was I am thankful for don't tread on me conservatives who are not his type of conservative. He's like a center right kind of guy, educated guy, but he's like, man, I've never felt more grateful for the presence of. Call that 15% of America or whatever it is. And that 15%.

Will not go along with the kinds of, I think the kinds of really catastrophic scenarios that we imagine with state power being used in these fascistic kind of ways.

[Jay Michaelson]

Well, it is a funny quirk of America, specifically America, where the people who kind of like hardcore nationalism also dislike big federal state action. Right. Like compare that to India. Right. So the people who are supporting Modi in India, they don't really mind that state action is happening on very large levels and that it can affect large Muslim populations. And they're okay with that. Like they're okay with a strong leader. I think that's also true in Russia. Right here, Trump has to do this little thing where it's like it has to be just the illegals or whatever and it's just over there. And it's true that even at that I follow the polling data pretty closely. Like a lot of that stuff polled really badly in the election that just happened and they're trying to figure out if how much, how much they can scale around the 2026 election. So I also have that a little bit of, I guess it's optimism that it is something about the American character. It goes back to the west and it goes back all this like deep seated libertarianism stuff. I don't know, I'm a little less sanguine that those angels will prevail within the right when there are also a lot of people who would be very happy to lock a whole lot of people up. And yeah, it's not going to look. Fascism doesn't mean Nazism. Right. Spanish fascism didn't look like that. Portuguese fascism didn't look like that. You know, there's no. Even Chilean nationalism didn't look like that. So it can look like things that are a lot more moderate than the worst possible thing, but that still hurt a lot of people. So to the extent I'm still, to the extent that religion plays into that or religion as the agent that addresses these profound questions of meaning that right now aren't being addressed very well, in other contexts. Right. And I think the conservative critique of liberalism is right, that it's a little easier to cut something down than to build something up. Right. So unlike those conservatives, I think religion has a lot of shitty aspects that deserve to be cut down. But it's also true that when there's not a constructive project alongside it, there's going to be a lot of people who are not access to, Like, I've been very lucky to access all the weird mystical stuff that I have. Most people aren't interested in that, and even if they were interested, they couldn't access it. So what about the Wide road, people? Is still a question for me.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

A good question to end on, but I don't think it's going to be the end, Jay, because this was an extremely engaging, fun, funny, natural conversation with you. So I will be pressuring you overtly and I will use. I'll use, you know, dirty rat.

[Jay Michaelson]

Unleash your Twitter army.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I will. Yeah, I'm gonna, like. I'll contact some people that know you well and sort of put the. Turn the screws on them to make sure that you come back on to that. There's a lot of stuff that we could have got to that we didn't and probably four or five different topics. So I will look forward to having you back. And we'll have a link, of course, to your substack and maybe. I know you've written a number of books. Are there one or two that are particularly relevant to the conversation we had today that we could also link to directly?

[Jay Michaelson]

You know, for a little while, we talked about, like the believing gay couple in the synagogue, in the church, rather. I wrote a book called God vs. Gay the Religious Case for Equality, arguing that the majority of our shared religious values, Christian and Jewish values, argue for dignity and love and companionship and things like that. That was my most directly activist book. It didn't have any of the weird mystical theology stuff in.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I think it's cool because the most popular episode of this show is the gay affirming one, because that's the number one issue coming out of evangelicalism and stuff. So that would be kind of. But that was a very. Like that argument that Daniel and I made in that episode was about primarily a psychological argument about the authors of the New Testament accepting norms in the ancient near east around sexuality and being a penetrator versus a receiver and all that. That all the power dynamic bullshit made its way into the text. Yours would be a very different kind of an argument. I think people Might really appreciate just kind of coming at it from a totally different angle.

[Jay Michaelson]

Yeah, it's different. And then for the spiritual autobiography, I think it's my least selling book called Enlightenment by Trial and Error, which kind of collects my own kind of spiritual autobiography. It was the book that I wanted to read when I was like 25, 26, but that didn't exist, which was like somebody who didn't yet have all the answers and how they found out whatever limited answers they have. So those are the two.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I love that.

[Jay Michaelson]

And nobody bought it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, I might have the same thing, but I've kicked around an idea, an idea of a subtitle which would be a par baked spiritual autobiography.

[Jay Michaelson]

Nice.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Or half baked. Half baked. Feels like weed. I meant it more like bread. Yeah. And then I. I ran it by someone like, what is par baked? And I was like, well, okay.

[Jay Michaelson]

Well, ironically, what's on the COVID of that enlightenment book is a big bread loaf of masala. So there you go.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

All right, well, Jay, we'll. I'll have you back. This was fantastic, man. Thank you so much for your time.

[Jay Michaelson]

All right, thanks, Dan. This fun?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, so you guys know I have been playing around with the occasional top of mind segment, Top of Mind, Top of religion Mind, where I put something at the beginning of an episode, usually solo recording, just me that I've been thinking about. It's been on the top of my mind and ideally has something to do with the main topic at hand of the episode. I've also been interested in doing this back of mind thing really recently, which is like, okay, maybe something that a smaller percentage of listeners to Religion on the mind will care about, but some of you might like it and actually find it really interesting. You know, maybe this is where I would put reflections on movie or TV shows or something like that. And in this case, I am releasing an episode, or I released an episode on Friday. Last Friday. Friday. On my music podcast, which I don't talk about very much because there's not a ton of overlap in content or listenership. But it's called Pretty Good Vibrations. And in particular, I've been doing this series of segment based, kind of having some fun, but also doing some kind of deeper conversation on emo songs called the Emo Diaries. And Friday's episode was about the song Jesus Christ by Brand New, a song written lyrically from the perspective of the speaker or the singer of the band, Jesse Lacey, addressed to Jesus Christ. That is the straight up meaning of the song, the sort of context of the song. It was a Radio hit.

Back in 2006 when it was released. That alone kind of makes it interesting. And I think that for anybody interested in. Well, especially if you like that band Brand New and you like that song Jesus Christ, you know, that's sort of the. That would be the person who would most enjoy the full episode, which Josh will put a link to that episode in the show notes here today. But I thought there's a segment where we're kind of talking about. We play a clip of the song and then Jed and I, my guest on the show, Jed Payne of church and other drugs, he and I do an emotion wheel exercise and we talk about the emotions that the song brings up in us, which then leads into some conversation about the lyrics. And I think it's interesting and I think a lot of you might find at least this sort of 15 minute segment interesting. And if you do, then maybe you could go listen to the whole episode or other episodes if you like, but if not, just enjoy this. So putting it at the end of the episode to sort of signal that I don't have huge expectations for everybody to love this, but I thought enough of you would. So here is about a 15 minute clip of the brand new Jesus Christ Emo Diaries episode of Pretty Good Vibrations, which you can find anywhere that you listen to podcasts.

I'm gonna, I'm just gonna roll us into our next segment. So this is called the Emo Wheel. I have sent you, Jed, to your phone, a link to an emotion wheel, which is a therapeutic tool that describes various emotions in increasing levels of depth. As you go out to the end of the wheel and what you and I are gonna do is listen to the entirety of Jesus Christ by Brand New. The listeners will hear 30 or 45 seconds and then we are going to talk about which emotion or emotions the song is bringing up for us right now as we listen here and now.

[Jed Payne]

Today and updating it during the song.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, no, just like at the end, I'll say, okay, what was the primary emotion that you found yourself feeling? Healing. And then we'll talk about why we think that is, do a little therapy, motion recognition work, which is one of my favorite things to do, especially around music. So here is Jesus Christ by Brand New.

Do you think that we could work out a song?

[Jed Payne]

Some know it's you and I. It's your song.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, you come for the people like me.

We all got.

What'd that bring up for you, Jed?

[Jed Payne]

All like somber.

Regretful, disillusioned, resolute.

Definite.

Powerlessness. Like I Wanted to say roof, like, but it's like hope hopeful in a way.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Dude, this is insane. Okay, because we, we had a very similar experience. I was gonna let you talk, but here's what I wrote down. Existential angst into.

Somewhat resigned acceptance.

[Jed Payne]

Yes, resigned.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, those were my three. I kind of had a three feeling. Sweet. And I'll say a little bit, I think I can say kind of quickly what that meant and then you can respond. So. So the existential angst is around the sort of idea of like, there are these. I think as a cognitive existential therapist and just in my own particular personal theology, I think that our questions that we have about God and God's place in our lives are ultimately, they're not answerable in the way that, that other questions are answerable such that we can come to an answer and most clear thinking individuals will agree with us that we have in fact answered the question right. So, you know, like, for instance, to take a sticky example, if someone's like, hey, do you think that Jesse from Brand New is in a good place in his life now, given all the stuff he's gone through? Has he been sufficiently chastened for his wrongdoing? Well, I would say after having a public scandal acknowledging it, canceling a tour and then losing a son and going through that, probably the answer is he's duly chastened. He's now a person with some new levels of maturity. I don't know that for sure. I don't know that for sure, but I would guess so is, was Jesus divine? There's just not where you can't get an answer like that with the same level of, of clarity or whatever. And so that's where it starts that I, I want that to be true. And I, I suffer from that stuff. And it takes me back to my 20s, but it's still there in my 40s.

[Jed Payne]

The unquestionable is questioned and offers no reply, as Aaron Vice would say.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And that leads into that kind of resigned acceptance. Like, I have done a lot of work around that kind of question and I work with my clients around these questions and, and part of the work is to accept, to resign oneself to that. Some level of these questions are fundamentally unanswerable, but other levels, more at a personal level, are answerable. And then that's like, that can be a beautiful, meaningful process. And then by the end, just kind of like, you know, the lyrics there, which, by the way, I didn't know what these lyrics were until like a month ago when I started prepping for this episode, we had to reschedule it. It's. We all got wooden nails. We turn turn out hate.

[Jed Payne]

In fact, so long to figure out the.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

The double turn. The double turn. What is he saying? We all got wooden nails and we turn out hate in factories.

[Jed Payne]

Not wooden. Wood.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Wood and nail.

[Jed Payne]

That was another one that. I always thought it was wooden.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Wooden nails wouldn't do very much. Unless you're.

[Jed Payne]

Wait, actually, actually, do you have. I've actually, do you have wood and. Or is it wooden? I've read it's.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

What? And it's.

[Jay Michaelson]

And. Okay.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah. It has to be. A wooden nail would only work on, like, paper. It has to be a soft. Well, nails go.

[Jay Michaelson]

No.

[Jed Payne]

I mean, no, that's like an Amish thing, is like, they're in Japanese construction, obviously.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, okay. Do you think it's about Japanese architecture or the fucking cross, Jed? What's more likely?

[Jed Payne]

Yeah, you're right. You're right, you're right. I. I digress. I yield.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, but. Yeah, so. But that idea of, like, I know you'll come for the people like me, but we have wooden nails and we. We are so good at creating hate. And like, honestly, Honestly, that hit one way in 06. I didn't know exactly what the lyrics were, but it hits differently in 2025. Like, it makes me think about fucking crisis merchants on social media. And the way to get powerful now in politics is to just stir up people's various hatreds and to do so very effectively. And then I was like, you know, I. Like, this is like a hopeful thing about Christianity that, you know. Well, it is built on a hope that. That all that gets worked out. And I just kind of found myself, like, slightly unexpectedly leaning into that hope towards the end of the song. That was my little journey. I said it was going to be concise. I fucking lied about that. So go ahead.

[Jed Payne]

Well, and one lyric that. And it's. It's. I guess it's not written down, but that part where the secondary vocal is. Is it. Anyone now? Is he saying, anyone now?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Everyone now.

[Jed Payne]

Everyone now. Okay. Everyone now. What? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it's almost like. So I think this song is great because it's. If most Christians are honest with themselves, most people have had this inner dialogue or this inner questioning with God or if you're brave enough. Right. And it's almost like he exhausts all. It's like, okay, I've asked every question I can ask, and now it kind of is what it is.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Jed Payne]

And it's like, all right, you come to the end. These are my questions.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, right.

[Jed Payne]

Yes. These are my fears. And I don't know if we're there yet, but one of the theories of this song is that it's the. The driver's plea from limousine. So that is one of the theories.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That's a different song on the record that we're going to talk about later.

[Jed Payne]

Yeah, and.

Yeah, that's. It's the. Especially like the.

The lines that hit so hard. The. Do you think that everything good is happening somewhere else? No, I'm not scared to die. I'm a little bit scared of what.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Comes after that part hits.

[Jed Payne]

And what did you do those three days you were dead? That's such an awesome question.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, okay, now this is where we're gonna. Okay, so first of all, we are now officially in the segment called Lyric Corner, which this episode is actually called Lyric Corner, parentheses. Yes.

[Jed Payne]

Yeah, that's a good one.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Thank you.

[Jed Payne]

It's a good one.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Just peppered a few in on this episode for you. So I have a thing. I actually have a thing about that lyric. And. And okay, I was. I was actually going to start a new occasional segment, the unintentional comedy segment. And I am actually so. I'm even tempted to name it the brand new Jesus Christ Unintentional Comedy Award, because I actually put down the following line as. Now I kind of laugh. Jesus Christ, what did you do those three days you were dead? Because this problem's gonna last more than the weekend. That is good. No, it does not. Okay, let's say it does not work for me anymore. No, why don't you tell me? Let me see if you can convince me. Let me, let me. Let me be moved by your defense.

[Jed Payne]

Okay, well, let me try to assemble it. I mean, it's like.

It is almost like to me, it's asking in a way of like, what did you do with your three day reprieve? Like you. It's almost like he had time off. Jesus had time off to not be Jesus or to not be. You know, it's okay.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

In a certain theological framing, there's like an interesting question of quote unquote, what did he do?

[Jed Payne]

Yeah, on the one and the popular, if you even want to call it that theological is going to be that he went to hell.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

He went to hell. That's like early church fathers sort of thought of it that way. Yeah.

[Jed Payne]

And so. And then solved the problem in that three days and came back. So to me, he's like, it's like so you got three days. You have a weekend typically in America. Right. To whatever you're going through, you better. You got three days to suck that shit up and then clock back in type of deal. And that's one way to look at it. Right?

[Jay Michaelson]

I think that is a, like, that's.

[Jed Payne]

The, the you so many books you could write on what God himself did during his three day vacation with death. What did you go through?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, I think, you know, this is maybe where it's just like, like those questions are. Now we're into religion on the Mind territory here, my other podcast. But those are the questions where they, they're so unanswerable that they sort of, to me, they kind of point to, oh, I'm asking the wrong question kind of a thing. Like, where it's like, oh, maybe I would feel like if I'm going down that path, I'm kind of missing the point because there's nothing really a way to answer that. And it. So if anything, it needs to be more poetic than time spent. Like, how does the soul of Jesus of Nazareth experience time while dead? Is like, unanswerable. There's no, we can't, we have no way of answering a question like that. That's not, it's sort of outside English language and human language.

[Jed Payne]

And if, if his pro. And if at a simple reading, if his problem is being alone. Okay. And that's like Jesus's time when he was cut off from the Father for three days.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Oh, I see. Okay. That I like. Yeah, that's interesting. So then this is maybe thinking about depression or you know, kind of lingering angst or whatever. Like, this is, this is, is lifelong. I just, I think that the, the straight ahead invocation of the weeknd. It just feels to me like it's, it's just too cheap.

[Jed Payne]

Sure. But it's a very, it's a very American metaphor, though.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, no, I'm, I am heartened and interested in your take here. I, I am somewhat convinced by your rebuttal battle.

[Jed Payne]

Yeah, like, that's, that is a very Americana that, that's kind of our thing is that like, the weekend's the weekend, the work week's the work week, and it's very symbolic of rest and like seven days. And like, I think, I think it's, it's genius in its simplicity because it's like, oh, that works. It may have been lazy, but it works. It's like kind of like a doofus stumbling upon like something very profound.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, okay, that's my take. Yeah.