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- [00:01]
Sean Ellie
Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place, what it's doing, what it's done and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Support for the Gray area comes from Fetch Pet Insurance do you have a pet? According to a study from a pet insurance company from a few years ago, every six seconds a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000, and it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch pet insurance comes in. According to consumeradvocate.org, fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. You can get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the US and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com save right now to get your free quote. That's fetchpet.com save. Most arguments about God's existence get stuck in the same place. One side says, show me the evidence. The other side says, you're asking for the wrong kind of evidence. The atheist treats God like a hypothesis about the world, something to be tested, verified, or dismissed. But the most interesting believers are talking about a different kind of thing. It's more like a way of being in the world. It's about belief, but not in the conventional empirical two plus two equals four sense. And so a lot of God debates go sideways because each side is using words in different ways, and often neither seems fully aware of that fact. I'm Sean Ellie, and this is the Gray Area. Today's guest is Liz Bruinig. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic and one of the most thoughtful religious writers working today, in my opinion. Liz wrote an essay called the Evidence that God Exists. But it's not really about the evidence that God exists. It's about why the search for proof of God misunderstands what faith is. She writes from the perspective of a believer who has struggled with her own faith in different ways, and she ends up really pushing me on my spiritual journey and my own ambivalence about the existence of God. What I like most about Liz's piece is that it rejects the idea that religion is just bad science or primitive superstition, and it also rejects the impulse to prove God using the tools of science. This leaves space for a richer, more existential conversation about religion. And that's what I brought Liz on the show for, to think seriously about religious experience without reducing it to either proof or delusion. Liz Bruinick, welcome to the show.
- [03:58]
Liz Bruenig
Thanks for having me on.
- [04:00]
Sean Ellie
I feel like I should at least ask about your childhood. You grew up in Texas in a Methodist household. You, you write about it. How religious was your childhood?
- [04:12]
Liz Bruenig
You know, everyone was religious, so we went to church and I went to vacation Bible school, and I, you know, was a Sunday school teacher. I did music camp and all that stuff, and it was just like a, you know, seamlessly integrated into life.
- [04:29]
Sean Ellie
Have you followed the arc where you, you kind of grow up religious, you're into it, and then you fall away, and then maybe later in life, you. You boomerang back?
- [04:37]
Liz Bruenig
Yeah, essentially. It. It all happened very young for me. So I, I guess I was in high school, towards the end of high school when I began to think, you know, these were. These were the Bush years. And evangelical Christianity in particular was super dominant. And it was totally, totally melded with, you know, with the right wing. And I mean, it remains that way today to a certain degree. But I wasn't on board with that politically. And so I began to think that the sort of new atheists who were kind of traveling the country at the time and staging debates, people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and so on, I began to think maybe they had a point, that this was all just sort of contrived and ridiculous. And I, you know, I don't think I ever lapsed totally into unbelief because even when I, you know, was in a period of pretty significant doubts, I still prayed. But, yeah, it was much less certain about it, you know, than I had always been growing up for a period there.
- [05:44]
Sean Ellie
Yeah, yeah, I'll admit the. I was a new atheist, bro, for maybe three or four semesters. They really got me. They really got me. And that's actually related to where I really wanted to start this conversation, which is where I think a lot of conversations about God go sideways. The frustrating thing for me, and I think you know what I mean? And if you don't, then you can tell me. Religious people sometimes want it both ways. They will talk about God as though God acts in the world. God heals, God commands. God created the earth 6,000 years ago. God authored this particular book. God will punish you if you have sex with the wrong person, and on and on. And these all sound like empirical Claims about reality. But when asked for evidence, you know, God becomes ineffable, you know.
- [06:40]
Sponsor/Announcer
Right.
- [06:40]
Sean Ellie
And to me, this is a dodge, right? This is. This is turning faith into bad science. Do you see it any differently? Am I being uncharitable? And if I am, like, please tell me.
- [06:53]
Liz Bruenig
Well, so let me see if I have this right. The claim here is that religious people say that God exists, but then when asked for evidence, they can't really produce evidence that is like, you know, is answerable to, you know, public reason, essentially that, you know, is. Is legible to, you know, the. The typical kinds of evidence we require for, you know, existence claims. Is that right?
- [07:27]
Sean Ellie
Right?
- [07:27]
Liz Bruenig
Yes, yes. I mean, that. That is definitely the case that, you know, the evidence for the existence of God, you know, Iek, the philosopher has this great line about the reasons for being in love only make sense when you're already in love. They don't make sense if you're not in love. And it's like, yes, the evidence for God existing really only makes sense once you already have accepted God exists. And Thomas Aquinas says, you know, knowledge follows or understanding follows belief, not the other way around. And so this is just one of those things that's kind of sui generis and arises with respect to not all religions, but Christianity in particular.
- [08:13]
Sean Ellie
The piece you wrote in the Atlantic, which was the impetus for this chat. In that piece, you are. It's not really a book review, but you're responding to a book. And the book is basically trying to make a scientific case for God or trying to put God on a scientific footing. I mean, talk about why you think that's a mistake.
- [08:37]
Liz Bruenig
Yes. So there's this funny graphic at the beginning of that book that looks like a parabola, right? And they're like, when scientific discovery was first getting off the ground, essentially during the Enlightenment, all of these pieces of evidence people had taken as proof that God exists, like, I don't know, weather patterns, the idea that all of the planets and the sun revolve around the Earth, et cetera, started to be disproven. And so gradually, through that process of scientific discovery, people fell away, they stopped leaving because things they had taken as evidence of God's existence wound up being explained by natural phenomenon. But now they say we have new scientific evidence that points towards the existence of God. It cannot be explained by natural phenomenon. It's like sort of like facially a little silly, right? Because what we have right now, scientifically, and I'm not a scientist, and this is just my impression will Almost certainly be explained with natural phenomena at some point down the line. And then what happens to all of the people who said, okay, I'm going to give religion a try because it seems that there are all of these pieces of evidence that can't be explained any other way, well, then they will fall away. And so I feel like they're kind of, in a way that seems a little bit naive in light of their own observations setting people up for failure.
- [10:09]
Sean Ellie
Was it Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Sorry Neil, this, if you didn't say this, he's a friend of the show. I'm sure he'll forgive us. But I think he, he called religion an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance. Basically, basically saying what you're saying, right, that like, oh, religion begins as a kind of, you know, proto science or first philosophy. And then over time, as we learn more, it just gets, you know, increasingly discredited. And then I guess on a long enough timeline, there's just nothing left. Right. It's just, you know, the whole house of cards collapses. I mean that seems to be, I think it, I think that's unfair to reduce religion to that. But if you're a religious person and you get yourself on this road, that seems to be where it leads.
- [10:56]
Liz Bruenig
Yeah, I think it's just going about faith in a, you know, kind of with training wheels on. Like the idea of faith is precisely that you don't have the kinds of evidence that typically prove things to be fact. That's what makes faith distinct as a type of belief from, you know, evidence based facts. And so the effort here is to kind of try to marshal factual evidence with the typical kind of proof as, as, you know, as evidence that God exists. But I think that's sort of not how it's supposed to work. And I think people can kind of get down a bad path by going in that direction.
- [11:44]
Sean Ellie
How is it supposed to work?
- [11:47]
Liz Bruenig
Well, I think the idea is you just have to trust. You have to believe. And if it were, if it were established by facts, then you wouldn't have to trust, you wouldn't have to believe. And I think faith is something that is necessary because there's this rift between humanity and God. If you're a Christian, you trace that back to the fall of man where there's essentially low trust. God doesn't exactly believe you when you say with your words that you love him because he has this piece of evidence with respect to human beings perpetually falling into sin and disbelief and so on and so forth. So he asks you to Trust him as an act of good faith, right? As a. As a sign that you are genuinely willing to give yourself to God to believe.
- [12:46]
Sean Ellie
Do you feel personally addressed in that way? As though there is something summoning you to believe in that way, to take that leap of faith, as opposed to just being self directed and deciding this is a leap you want to take because it's a leap you want to take, or do you actually feel called in that way or questioned in that way?
- [13:06]
Liz Bruenig
So I do feel called in that way. And I also feel like people have these experiences of the divine all the time. They just metabolize them in different ways. And, you know, electing to make the decision to metabolize a first person experience in a certain way is sort of taking that evidence as it comes, which is not a usual kind of evidence, and, you know, making the personal decision to pursue it into faith.
- [13:37]
Sean Ellie
The part of your essay that I suspect people will either understand immediately or reject immediately. Easy personal experience at the bus stop in 2011 that you write about. I'd love to talk about that. I mean, what happened there?
- [13:55]
Liz Bruenig
Yeah, you know, it was just a kind of typical day. I was in college. It was early on in my college career, and I was waiting for the bus. I was alone. It was like kind of a wooded street. And I looked down to the end of the street and there was this sort of enormous gust of like bracing wind, and it whirled around the corner and sort of created a sort of vortex and threw all of these birch leaves up in a spiral. And I just had this feeling that, you know, I was looking at something that was looking back and that there was a sort of eye contact being made. And I thought about it for a long time after that, and there were various other thoughts that came to mind. The spiral has always been an interest of mine. You know, Plato gets into the importance of spirals. Spirals seem to be how you learn. You know, instead of going directly to a point, you sort of circle around it and around it, getting closer and closer over time, retreading the same ground until you get it. And so that stuck in my mind that there was this spiral and there was this sensation and there was this kind of awe. And, you know, I debated with myself what it meant for a while. And then, you know, of course, eventually I settled on the interpretation that I write about in the article, which is that this was a real sort of direct experience of divine presence. And there have been others since then, but that was the sort of major one that kind of marked a departure from the way my life had been before to the way it became after.
- [15:41]
Sean Ellie
Well, the internal debate in your head is interesting to me. You're trying to figure out, all right, what the hell do I do with this? How do I interpret it? What was the tension there? Because you talk about asking yourself, all right, what is it going to cost me intellectually to accept that this was God and not try to, you know, explain it away as brain chemistry or pattern seeking or whatever, whatever that part of your brain was telling you it was, what did you feel like you had to let go of intellectually?
- [16:15]
Liz Bruenig
Yes. So that was, you know, like I said. And I mean, as we talked about, I had the sort of echoes of the new atheists in the back of my mind. And, you know, I think about the figure of Christopher Hitchens who was so cynical and dismissive and, you know, it is easy to think that people who are intelligent should be cynical, skeptical, dismissive, and that the most intelligent thing to do is to take experiences like that and diminish them completely. Nothing happened. I was just standing there. The wind blew. Isn't it ridiculous to identify it as meaningful? But then, you know, on a deeper and more elemental level, I knew it was meaningful. I felt it right there. And so this debate began to seem very petty. Why try to diminish something I knew was not small? And what if it is the case that experiences of revelation like this, A, don't make you stupid if you decide to metabolize them as such, and B, are just sweet, generous. You don't have to presume every time you feel something elementally that it reflects reality. But I would say that I'm an intuitive person and that I, over time, have began to trust my intuitions more and more. You know, like people talk about falling in love right when, you know, you know. And there was definitely a time in my life where I didn't trust myself in that respect. And I sort of searched all the time for, you know, evidence, empirical evidence, that what I assumed was taking place really was. But after so many experiences not trusting your gut and then seeing things pan out exactly as you felt they would, you start to say, well, maybe there's some part of me that has access to certain kinds of truth that are not superficial and empirical. And this was kind of the beginning of that.
- [18:28]
Sean Ellie
The skeptical response to that would be, why call that God? Why not just call it awe or beauty or a sublime moment?
- [18:44]
Liz Bruenig
Well, those are all just aspects of God. Sublimity, beauty, awe. These are all qualities that most properly belong to God. And they, you know, this sort of forms our ideas in the mind of God. Right. And so when you feel awe, when you see something sublime, when you see beauty or hear it in terms of music, you are locating a trace of the divine, of divine presence. At least that's how I understand it.
- [19:16]
Sean Ellie
So an atheist might say, yeah, I've had those moments too. Right. I just. I don't think they point to anything divine. What I'm really asking is, would you say that you and the atheist are having the same experience and just interpreting it differently? Or do you think faith, actually having faith, being oriented to the world in that way, actually reveals something that a non believer cannot see or cannot experience? If that makes sense. That's really what I'm trying to ask.
- [19:46]
Liz Bruenig
No, I think that the experiences are the same. Yeah. So to take an example from the Bible, you have people who are present for miracles, and they're not Christians because the religion itself doesn't exist yet. But they see the miracles and they start thinking about what it could mean. But that means that they witnessed the same thing everyone else did. Some of them came to the conclusion that it was miraculous and that Jesus was doing miracles because he was the son of God. And some people came to the conclusion that's not what was happening. And, you know, the same experience viewed by the same people, they still came to different conclusions. And I think that's generally how it goes.
- [20:37]
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- [22:43]
Liz Bruenig
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- [22:58]
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- [23:22]
Sean Ellie
AI agents took over my work and I absolutely love it. Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind. Now they live inside Monday.com so they see the full picture. My work, my team, the whole company. And I don't have to worry about the data. It's safe, which means I'm free to focus on the big stuff. Knowing everything runs smoothly in the background. It's completely shifted the way we work. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday.com. Who's your favorite Christian writer? The one that maybe shaped you the most?
- [24:08]
Liz Bruenig
St. Augustine. Yeah, my great love.
- [24:13]
Sean Ellie
I read St. Augustine in college, in grad school actually, and I was moved by the beauty and the intimacy of the Confessions in particular. I mean, it's. Why is that the one for you?
- [24:28]
Liz Bruenig
Well, he's a great writer, very, very prolific. And he kind of tackles all kinds of things, tackles ethics, which I find really interesting. Christ ethics and sort of how weird and alien they are in the context of late antiquity. He feels especially human. He doesn't necessarily feel so heavenly and that the only thing that's happening to him is non stop direct mystical revelation, which can be kind of hard to understand. He has those moments and those experiences and they result in his conversion. But then he also sort of grapples with it in a really human way. And I mean, one of the great lines from the Confessions that sticks with me is he's. He's talking to God and he says, why do you mean so much to me and why do I mean so much to you that you would punish me for failing to love you? Like, why? This doesn't. It doesn't make any sense to him. But he's only asking that question because he already knows the answer. And it's just something that grappling with it and figuring it out is just a process he has to go through to accept what he already knows. And that's where you get the famous, you know, my heart is restless until it rests in the. Yeah.
- [26:00]
Sean Ellie
Have you read much? Dostoevsky?
- [26:02]
Liz Bruenig
Love Dostoevsky. Yeah, definitely.
- [26:07]
Sean Ellie
Good. Because I wanted to ask about him. I would say probably him more than any other Christian writer forced me to maybe step back a little bit from my cynicism and think a little more richly about what's going on here, right? Like, about religious experience rather than being so dismissive of it in the way that, like, the new atheists were, right. And like one, one, you know, he's kind of a. A Christian existentialist, right? I mean, existentialism sort of like my way in to him. And he gave me this idea of faith as like a motive force that, you know, religious belief isn't necessarily about empirical truth in the way we were talking about earlier. Right. Like it is an orientation to the world that makes a way of life possible and that is its own justification. Right. But then that sort of like points up the question I've been circling around, I guess, which is, you know, is faith a way of life because God is real or is God the name for the reality disclosed by that way of life?
- [27:18]
Liz Bruenig
Yes, well, you know, do. What in particular in Dostoevsky are you thinking about?
- [27:25]
Sean Ellie
What did you, like, you look at a book like the Brothers Karamazov, right? In that book you have both the most, like, beautiful case for God and also the most devastating rejection of God.
- [27:38]
Sponsor/Announcer
Right?
- [27:39]
Sean Ellie
That's what the whole Inquisitor scene really is about, right? Like just making a devastating case against religion as this sort of institution of control and authority that, that human beings need because they cannot tolerate their own freedom. But then you also have this character of Father Zosima who seems to be giving a very similar vision of religion that you give. Right. It's very much like it's a choice to love. It's a choice to see the world through a particular lens and to reap all the fruits that come from seeing the world through that filter. And I don't know how common that is. I don't know how many Christians actually read books like that. The serious ones do. But I think for most people they just, you know, you're a Catholic or a Baptist or evangelical or whatever because your parents were. And they're that way because their parents were. And their parents were that way because of where they were born and so on and so forth. But they don't really interrogate it in that way.
- [28:38]
Liz Bruenig
And that may be the more beautiful form of belief. Yeah. When it's simpler and it comes more naturally and it's not something that you have to tie yourself in knots over. It may be the case that the sort of intellectual thinking Christian is the one who's subject to all of this torment, like Ivan in the Grand Inquisitor scene. He's the one who's really suffering from the encounter with all of the evil in the world. And Alyosha seems more capable of bearing it and loving him, despite the fact that he is essentially assaulting him intellectually with the, the evil and deviance in the universe. So, you know, I do kind of respect and feel in many cases kind of defensive of Christians who haven't had to struggle as much with it. And I guess I don't envy them, but I admire them.
- [29:39]
Sean Ellie
Do you really think it might be a more beautiful form of faith to be unthinking in that way? And I don't mean unthinking in a derogatory way at all. I mean like a non questioning. Right. Do you not think it's. Even though it's a struggle, but like by interrogating it in that way, you end up on the other side with a much deeper and a much richer kind of faith. But you may also just end up confused and at odds with yourself.
- [30:04]
Liz Bruenig
I just think about the like centuries of medieval peasants who built the great cathedrals who were probably not struggling a great deal with it. They were just doing the practical work of creating this, this act of worship to God. This is immense beauty. And you know, was their faith less rich, was their faith less real than the faith of someone who is a kind of nerdy dork Christian in modernity, like myself, who, you know, reads a bunch of books and goes to school? You know, you Stand in the shadows of those cathedrals in Europe, which I did while I was in grad school, I was at Cambridge. And you feel like they almost understood something that has been lost to us now in modernity, that they believed and felt in a way that was much more pure and much more direct and unmediated, that is almost no longer accessible to us.
- [31:05]
Sean Ellie
Yeah, but you do talk about, you know, or you admit that having faith means. Yeah. Accepting the possibility that you may just be naive or even worse, delusional. Maybe that isn't worse. But is that vulnerability just part of the bargain, part of what faith has to be?
- [31:27]
Liz Bruenig
Yes, I think it's part and parcel with what faith is. And in fact, accepting the fact that you could be wrong, that people have reason to call you naive or stupid or delusional, is kind of part of the sacrifice you make.
- [31:44]
Sean Ellie
You interpret your experiences through the language of Christianity and Christ. Someone raised in another religious tradition will have a similar experience and interpret that through the language of that tradition. Does that throw anything into question for you at all? Does it even matter? Or do you look at different faith traditions as basically just, you know, climbing the same holy mountain from different sides, but. But all ending up in the same truth?
- [32:11]
Liz Bruenig
I think that, you know, God exists, and as with anything that exists, a lot of different people are going to happen onto it. And you read the different religious texts of different religions throughout history, and they all kind of seem to be, you know, as I was talking about with the spiral circling and circling around something that they all share in common, more or less. After I wrote that piece, I got emails from people of all different kinds of religions who had, you know, similar experiences, felt the same way. And I very felt very, you know, I felt a lot of familiarity, felt like I had a lot in common with them. You know, we all sing in tune about the existence of God. Now, the particulars have been known to drive people pretty insane and again, have been the driving force behind a lot of violence and a lot of, you know, atrocities at times. But I do think that there's a commonality there, at least of the basic insight that there is more to the world than meets the eye. That I think is important, and I think that is shared.
- [33:27]
Sean Ellie
You mentioned Christopher Hitchens and, and I'm paraphrasing here a little bit, but he, he once said something like, you know, good people will do good things and, and, and bad people will do bad things, but the most reliable way to get good people to do bad things is to give them divine sanction. Tell them this is for God. This is what God wants. This is your ticket to salvation. And if you do that, you can get them to do the most extraordinarily good or awful things. Maybe that's a little bit unfair and a little bit simplistic, but I think it, it's true enough to give me pause. It certainly didn't when I heard it. What do you think when you hear it?
- [34:08]
Liz Bruenig
Well, I think people can do bad all by themselves. And I'll take Hitchens as a case in point because he was a major supporter of the Iraq war, like huge, absolutely could not wait for that bloodshed, and did it as a complete atheist. Right, as an avowed atheist. And so he's sort of a great example of someone who. It didn't take God to make him interested in violence and bloodshed. He did it all by himself. And I take that to be true of people across the board. Right. It's often the case that people doing violence are religious because, you know, religion is just kind of shared and common by a lot of people in the world, especially historically. And it's sometimes the case that people do violence because of religious belief or they do violence with religious belief as a pretext. But I sincerely doubt that humankind would live in peace and prosperity if it were not for religion. That seems a little naive to me. No one will be more forthright with you about sort of innate human evil than Catholics. And, you know, I strongly believe in that. My, my other work has to do with the death penalty. And you see a lot of good people, otherwise good people doing very bad things. And they're motivated not by religion, but by anger, certain interpersonal disputes mostly.
- [35:51]
Sean Ellie
No, people will always find bad ideas and justifications for whatever it is that they want to do.
- [35:57]
Liz Bruenig
I think there's a, like an Aesop's fable, right, that ends with a tyrant will always find a pretext for their tyranny.
- [36:32]
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Sean Ellie
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Liz Bruenig
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- [38:47]
Sean Ellie
When you think about just the state of of your faith in America right now, does it depress you? Does it excite you? Does it worry you?
- [38:56]
Liz Bruenig
I mean, it is so depressing.
- [39:01]
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- [39:02]
Liz Bruenig
And you know, I also don't like the politicization of Christianity, the sort of weaponization of it in particular, especially by people. And I mean, I'm thinking about the current administration who so clearly hold it in low esteem, if not contempt, Right. And are completely cynically capitalizing on the fact that there are earnest believers who trust them. You know, I think Trump has said, you know, we're going to bring religion back in a big way. You know, this is Trump is the most overtly non religious person in America potentially. And I see Christians around him try to convince themselves that, you know, no, on some level that's just hard to understand or that he has a hard time expressing he really does believe and though he is not one of us, he cares for us and so on. They compare him to like biblical kings who though they were non believers, were good to the Israelites. You know, I think to myself, well, just like look at the fruits of his belief, such as they are right. I mean, it's a lot of bloodshed, a lot of violence. Unconscionable stuff.
- [40:18]
Sean Ellie
Yeah. Well, you asked about me. You know, I watching and I'm. I've lived all over the country, you know, but I'm now back where I grew up in. In the Deep south on the Gulf Coast. There's a lot of Christians here.
- [40:30]
Liz Bruenig
Whereabouts?
- [40:32]
Sean Ellie
Gulfport, Mississippi.
- [40:34]
Liz Bruenig
Lovely. Wow.
- [40:35]
Sean Ellie
Yeah. No, it's home. I love it. But watching the way they justified their support for Trump under the banner of Christianity was really the last straw for me. And it reminded me of what turned me off on religion when I was younger, you know, is that all the religious people, all the religious people around me seemed so cocksure. There wasn't a lot of humility. It was just certainty. And I don't like that. I think that's dangerous. But it seems to be what happens when faith becomes institutionalized and kind of what you were saying earlier, part of this cultural identity. And once that happens, it loses itself completely and just becomes a machine for justifying its own behavior. Maybe it is. Is this just something that happens, or do you think it can be resisted? I mean, is it maybe just combining religion and politics in that way is just the demise of both?
- [41:43]
Liz Bruenig
I mean, it certainly has. Religion and politics, especially in the United States, especially on the right, have certain noxious interactions. You think about mixing like ammonia and bleach, where it's two kind of volatile things, and then you put them together and you get something really toxic. I think that is definitely something that takes place. Like I said, I grew up in Texas. I saw a lot of that with Dubya. The evangelicals could at least say, look, he's one of us. In general, he's kind of squeaky clean. With Trump, it's way harder to make that argument. And so the arguments themselves become much more twisted and sort of incestuous. They become totally immune to all critique because it's just a feedback loop. And it becomes hard for people who are bought in to that to even listen to critiques from other Christians. Right. So you have, for example, Trump tweeting that he hates the Pope, that he wants a different pope, yada yada, because Pope Leo wasn't really on board with the war that's currently going on or the sort of mass deportations that Trump set up. And so even those, you know, a kind of counsel from a soft spoken Pope who is himself an American, just arrived to MAGA ears as completely unacceptable, insulting, and therefore, you know, basically heretical. I don't know that they use those words. But you can definitely see people like Vance and Bannon and so forth openly wishing for a kind of Avignon papacy. And that's really, among other things, pathetic. It demonstrates what seems to be, like I was saying earlier, kind of cynical prostitution of the faith and a total insensitivity to the actual things that make Christianity hard, like loving your neighbor. That's hard. It's way harder than it seems. Right? It's all fun and games to be, be nice to people who are nice to you. But I mean, there's. There's a verse in the Bible that, you know, if you, if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even the pagans do that, right? What makes you a Christian is that you love your enemies, is that you love people who hate you. And there is not a jot of that on the Christian right.
- [44:18]
Sean Ellie
So what would you say to someone like me? Or what would you ask me as someone who is not really religious, but curious and respectful and open minded about it, not dismissive, but alienated in all of these ways? What would you ask me? Or what would you want to know?
- [44:40]
Liz Bruenig
When you were reading the Brothers Karamasov, what did you think of Alyosha?
- [44:47]
Sean Ellie
Honestly, I. I thought of him as a kind of. Naive, childlike, you know, in the way that children are. Someone who had just not lived long enough to have had their, their vision of the world cracked apart so that cynicism could spill out of it. Right.
- [45:12]
Liz Bruenig
Is that something that makes you think, are you worried about him, what will happen to him? Or do you feel like he is maybe putting aside a certain duty of adulthood there?
- [45:27]
Sean Ellie
Am I worried about him? That's such an interesting way to put it. I thought he was. Give him a little bit of time and he'll become a cynic like the rest of us, you know? Was that George Carlin line, right? Like, crack open any cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist. That's kind of how I. That's kind of how I saw him. But that's me speaking from the position of a cynic.
- [45:52]
Liz Bruenig
Do you still think of yourself as a cynic?
- [45:55]
Sean Ellie
No, I think I still have cynical instincts, but I have worked really hard and I've had some life experiences that have helped me overcome them. I'm aware of them in a way that I wasn't before, and I've judged them to be bad and unhealthy and I'm trying to overcome it, but it's still a part of me. I think it's always going to. I am just wired to question and doubt. I just am, even at my own expense. And so that part of me is still there. But I think I've become much less cynical as I've gotten older and become a dad. I think becoming a dad changed everything for me. Like being cynical in that way felt criminal. I see it as my duty to keep that light alive in my kids as long as I can. And to be cynical in front of them would be a breach of like my duty as a dad. So I don't feel like I can afford to be cynical in that way anymore. But it's still in there.
- [46:56]
Liz Bruenig
Do you feel like being cynical maybe protects you from certain things?
- [47:04]
Sean Ellie
Oh, 100%.
- [47:06]
Liz Bruenig
Like what?
- [47:08]
Sean Ellie
Well, it's an excuse, right? It's an excuse to not actually engage and take chances. Well, it's all fucked anyway, right? What's the point? You know, I mean, I've probably justified a lot of inaction over the years, right? People are like, well, you know, you're so into politics and you know, you have so many ideas and you're always talking about it. Why aren't you, why don't you get involved? Why don't you, you know, join a campaign or, you know, become a community organizer? And I was always like, yeah, yeah, you know, it's all fucked. I just, I'm interested in it, but there's no point, you know, it really becomes self justifying in that way. Right? I mean, you, like you said, you can talk yourself into or out of anything and cynicism is a way to talk yourself out of the world and out of your responsibility to act in it and, and be meaningful in it.
- [47:58]
Liz Bruenig
I'm interested in, you know, so you were describing the process of becoming cynical is like this process of growth into adulthood where you start out really idealistic and you, you know, cracked open and all the cynicism spills out. But it sounds like that process hasn't been one way for you. You said you had some life experiences that kind of sent you back in the other direction. And so being a dad was one of them. But what, what were some of the others?
- [48:28]
Sean Ellie
I took a lot of psychedelics,
- [48:32]
Liz Bruenig
all right?
- [48:32]
Sean Ellie
And without going into too much detail because you want to sound like a crazy person, start trying to explain a trip. But what happened is I would say I had a model of the world that I was reasonably confident about and I saw things and had experiences that exploded those premises. And I felt like I don't have the answers. But also I have no idea what is going on, that the world is not just strange, but far stranger than I can even imagine. And so therefore, I would say it made me spiritually curious in a way I was not before. And I'm grateful for that, truly.
- [49:26]
Liz Bruenig
Where does mystery fit into all of this? Do you feel like there's more space in it for mystery in your life, or is mystery just a frustrating thing?
- [49:36]
Sean Ellie
No, I think there's more space for it. Again, I think I was less happy when I thought I had it figured out. I read Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. I'm like, this is all. Of course. This is gibberish. All I need is chemistry. No, Now I'm just. The show is called the gray area for a reason. The whole conceit of the thing is that we should be open to doubt and we should not retreat into certainty and just be open to the possibility that we do not know and that some things aren't knowable. And that's. That's okay. So, yeah, no, I think I have more space for mystery, and I'm glad for it. I think we need mystery.
- [50:29]
Liz Bruenig
How come?
- [50:32]
Sean Ellie
Well, I mean, it's. You want to live in an enchanted world or disenchanted world? You know, I. I don't. There's a reason why I didn't go into science or, you know, I'm not. I've always been more interested in the questions than the answers. So a world without questions is, like, unimaginable to me and undesirable. So I rue the day all our questions have been answered.
- [50:57]
Liz Bruenig
Do you feel intuition like the kind I was talking about? I mean, you had talked about feeling called or drawn to it at times, but does that. You know, do you have those feelings sometimes of, like a kind of languageless
- [51:15]
Sean Ellie
intuition, like the kind at the bus stop?
- [51:19]
Liz Bruenig
Sure.
- [51:21]
Sean Ellie
I don't think so.
- [51:23]
Liz Bruenig
What about love?
- [51:23]
Sean Ellie
I mean. Well, that's. Yeah. I mean, I would say the. The birth of my children, you know, those. Those are moments where the. The love you feel renders speech so superfluous. And this is why I'm grateful that we have the language of religion and the language of spirituality, because every. Even that isn't quite enough, but it's at least more like poetry. It's like gesturing at something that is really beyond words. So, yeah, I mean, I feel that kind of love in those moments, but I have never had an experience like the one you described at the bus stop. Not really. Maybe I will. I mean, frankly, I wish that. I hope that I do. I hope that I do. And maybe I've had experiences like that, but I was just blind to it. I don't know. Let me caveat this. I have never felt, seen or perceived in the way that you described, except when I was on Psychedelics. That's it. Never in my Never in my normal waking life have I felt anything like that.
- [52:36]
Liz Bruenig
Well, life is long and who knows where both of us will end up.
- [52:47]
Sean Ellie
Yeah, indeed. And I don't know, this went somewhere I did not expect it to go, but I'm glad that it did. And I really do appreciate the way that you write and the way that you bring your yourself to the work. Earnestness is punished mercilessly online. You've had your own travails on the Internet. But I'm really glad that you write the way that you write and that you were willing to come on the show and talk about it. So thanks.
- [53:25]
Liz Bruenig
Thanks so much for having me.
- [53:32]
Sean Ellie
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. To be honest, that was maybe one of my favorite conversations ever for a lot of reasons. And I appreciate the fact that Liz really pushed me at the end like that. I'm not sure a guest has ever done that, but it was kind of fun. And even if you've been listening to this show from the very beginning, you probably know a whole lot more about me than you did before. Anyway, hope that wasn't a bad thing. As always, we want to know what you think, so drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or you can leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please also rate Review subscribe to the podcast. This episode was produced by Thor Neueriter and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney. Fact Check by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com. to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile now. I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back, so I thought it was would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch upfront payment
- [55:29]
Liz Bruenig
$45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required. $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms.
- [55:37]
Sean Ellie
Best thing that's ever happened to you. Financially. Go easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?
- [55:48]
Liz Bruenig
No.
- [55:49]
Sean Ellie
How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.