Name: Christianity's Dirty Secret - Why Conservatives Lose Their Faith In Seminary
Uploaded: 2025-04-01T17:31:47.000Z
Duration: 18 min 50 s
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Christianity has a dirty little secret and do you know what it is?

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Actually probably a lot of dirty little secrets but one of the ones I want to talk about today is the dirty little secret that a lot of pastors ministers etc lose their faith when they go to seminary.

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And I want to talk a little bit about why this is and I think part of this is prompted due to a lot of comments that I've gotten on my channel geared at my education because I often start videos by saying I have a Master of Divinity which is the formal degree you get to go be a minister.

I have a Master of Arts in Theology that I did after that and I have a PhD in Christian origins.

So by the way this is a good spot to say if you haven't already done so do subscribe.

But what happens is I get so many comments from people who are like all that education and you still don't know the truth or you know you have a PhD but you don't believe the bible or you don't believe the truth you don't believe what I believe and I think it's ironic as I think about the process of educating people and what education is actually for.

I think it's one of the most interesting things in Christianity.

We don't really talk about that when people are in churches the leaders who go to get trained to lead those churches often find themselves in a position where they have to leave.

Think about the fact that somebody will go off to seminary and end up completely leaving the religion instead of coming back and leading the community they had intended to lead.

And I think from the other side like for somebody who doesn't know what's happening in that seminary you kind of make up stories and the two most common stories that I hear is that you somehow got tricked by liberal professors.

It's really common that like you went and listened to liberals and got totally tricked and that's why you now believe liberal things and why you're not a Christian anymore.

And I think this is just an incredibly stupid argument.

Like if you actually believe that somebody will have a career in mind, feel like they are called by God, go off to seminary and just be susceptible to brainwashing after all of that call and all of that like excitement they had for doing the calling, they picked a career, they went off and got brainwashed by professors.

If you want to believe that you can but that's ridiculous.

That's absolutely well they were never really saved, they were never really Christian.

I mean I don't really know why people are so obsessed with saying this.

Because instead of saying they went off to seminary and learned something so damaging to their faith or their beliefs that they couldn't in good conscience come back and lead us, I'm still in this community if I'm this person.

So it's easier to say well they were never really one of us to begin with.

And then all of this conversation goes along with this idea that biblical scholars are biased.

Because I see this a lot too and it's you know in my comments.

Maybe I should stop reading the comments but I love I like reading comments.

But I see a lot of people say like well biblical scholars are biased against the truth that like you somehow have this again often liberal but like bible scholars don't actually believe the truth they're just out to get you.

When I was a teenager the movie God's Not Dead came out and it sort of I think serves as a really important commentary on what evangelicals think about education.

They think that you go in and an atheist philosophy professor is out to get you and destroy your faith probably because they are angry at God.

Maybe God did something they're mad at God and they just have all these unworked father figure resentment issues with God and they need to work through that and maybe they get saved at the end.

I think it's a really oversimplistic movie and parable but I think it is a true expression of a certain type of way that a certain type of Christian thinks about education.

And it's worth stopping to think about this.

Not just because people leave the faith or would-be Christian leaders leave the faith which is an important question.

But probably the big question that comes from all this is why does a certain type of evangelicalism see itself as fundamentally at war with education?

And you see this in famous people trying to get school boards to teach creationism alongside of evolution.

You see it in the assault of biblical criticism or good history that apologists launch.

You see it as this sort of battle of world views that a lot of people think they are in between Christian apologists and atheists, secular humanists, postmodernists, relativists, fill in the blank with your favorite category of evil person that a conservative Christian often thinks they are out to war against, to fight against.

But I think one of the simplest ways to understand this is that conservative evangelicalism, I use the word fundamentalism, I know these are problematic terms, but I think one of the easiest ways to understand this is that these movements are fundamentally pushbacks to modernity.

These movements emerged in the 20th century as a pushback to modernity, as a pushback to education.

And I've often said that when you look at the birth of what was happening in churches, in Germany especially, in the end of the 19th century, and in the universities in Germany, you were seeing a lot of higher criticism.

You were seeing people look at the Bible and say, like, we have thousands of manuscripts, they contradict each other.

How can we use science to get back to the original manuscripts?

This is, you know, even secular scholars now will say this is problematic in today's day and age, but this was what people were thinking about.

Or they might say of the historical Jesus that this is the Jesus of faith.

We've inherited what's called the Christ of faith, which is a Christ who is mediated by the church.

So how can we actually get back to who the historical Jesus would have been?

What the historical Jesus would have been teaching as a first century Jew in Palestine?

Again, very problematic now for historians, but this is the And as a result, American Christianity pushed back, and we saw like this snowball into the 20th century, this movement that was very anti-intellectual, very at its core, fighting against that.

Believing that the very act of asking these types of questions was in itself an assault on Christianity.

And at this point in time, there were sort of two different paths I think that Christianity could have taken.

The one is the conservative evangelical path, where we bury our the sand and push back against modernity and pretend that all of the things we believed in the dark ages should stay true, and that if we can just get back to the Bible as this magical book that we can just understand, and God has everything in it.

It's the final word, and it's the pushback against science.

It's the pushback against any kind of political question, any kind of legal question, that the Bible has all the answers.

We could was formed in a very different time than we have now.

We recognize that these people wrote down these things, and they're potentially imperfect, but it was how they understood the world.

We recognize that there's a cultural background or a literary background behind the New Testament, or the works of the Bible in general.

And that we can critically and openly engage with the faith and still kind of stay connected to it, but ask a lot of hard questions.

I think those are the two types of visions that you could have had for Christianity at the turn of the 20th century.

You had all of these terrible things, and even biblical studies has its own terrible legacy of how it got caught up in the Nazi world.

Because like I often say so much, I will say before, like in the late 19th century, a lot of good biblical criticism was coming out of German universities, but then a lot of these people got wrapped up in the Nazi party, or at the very least had to like deal with what was happening there, and it changed the face of history.

For a lot of different complicated historical reasons, the Christianity that many, many people inherited, especially in an American context, and I'm not even American.

You might think from my accent that I am.

Sometimes I drop in the occasional A or a boot, which should tell you I'm Canadian.

But even I grew up in the echoes of this type of American evangelicalism, which was very anti-intellectual.

I've often said like, I grew up reading apologists and thinking I was doing intellectual work.

I never took a science class after grade 10 because I believed I was being persecuted by being taught evolution.

Some of the stuff is ridiculous, but it's the reality of how I viewed the world as an evangelical.

So how does this come back to seminary, and why do so many people lose their faith in seminary?

Well, if you have conservative evangelicalism as a movement that is fundamentally anti-intellectual, fundamentally built on a pushback to historical critical study of the Bible, on a pushback to liberal, and I mean small liberal here, not big L liberal, but you have this movement that was a Christian movement built on being anti-education, being anti-intellectual, and you have people going to seminary, and what are they going to do?

They're going to learn Greek and Hebrew, and they're going to look at texts and realize the same things that the German biblical scholars in the late 19th century realized.

Holy crap, there are a lot of different manuscripts.

Holy crap, early Christians read other things of scripture beside the things that are in our New Testament.

Holy crap, this Greek word doesn't mean what I think it means, or the writings of Paul that I thought were just really, really clear when I read them in King James Version English are actually much more complicated, or the figure of Jesus is more complicated than I thought, or the Gospels seem to have a literary relationship to each other.

Why is that, and how can they be eyewitness accounts if they're copying each other?

The problem is when you're looking at religious practice, of evangelical conservative religious practice, it's very easy to stick your head in the sand and pretend that what you're doing is true.

It's easy to pretend that the things you believe are true, like the Bible is the inherent word of God, and when you have apologists working really hard to help people stay deluded, to help keep people dedicated to maintaining this lie without actually saying, like, look, the emperor has no clothes, people in the pews don't ever realize the serious problems with their tradition or with the way they've been taught to view the world.

But when you have somebody going to study Christian history or manuscript history, getting background in, like, critical thinking about texts and looking at manuscripts, looking at variations, looking at how doctrine emerged, looking at the history of the church, it doesn't take a liberal professor to trick you into questioning the things you believed, because all it takes is looking at the evidence.

You just look at the evidence and realize the things you believe are wrong, and you realize that the sad little ways that the apologist gave you to protect your little box of faith fall flat.

You realize, as I realized, that my apologist heroes never actually took the time to do any serious study.

It doesn't take a liberal professor tricking you for you to question faith in seminary.

It just takes an honest open look at the Christian tradition to realize that it is more complicated than anything that I was ever given.

And the wild thing is, the thing that just drives me bonkers, is that most of these people, instead of going back to their communities and being like, we need to talk because this is more complex than we ever realized.

There is space for this in some communities, but not the communities I grew up in.

You're like, I don't believe the right things anymore, so I have to leave.

So the communities keep their head in the sand.

They get the leaders that are willing to either toe the line or the leaders who don't have proper education or haven't asked the right questions or whatever.

They will get leaders who uphold their very oversimplistic, dumb view of the Bible, the world, et cetera, because they self-select those leaders to fit with their biases.

And the people who have actually looked at the complexity of the Christian tradition and understood there are problems don't get to stay.

They end up usually having to leave or they end up in more mainline progressive denominations.

This is the dirty secret of Christianity, but here's where the chickens are coming home to roost.