Every civilization in history put a temple at its center. America was the first to try to build a nation without one, and Wes Crawford argues that we couldn't stand the empty space, so we made the country itself sacred. The church historian and author of One Nation Over God walks through how the Constitution became scripture, how kneeling during an anthem became sacrilege, and how voting the wrong way became something close to heresy. Wes points toward a different way of loving a country, the kind that lets you critique it from the inside, the way John Lewis did crossing the bridge at Selma. He'll also tell you about the finest glass of wine he ever had, which he never actually drank. If you've felt the pull of American faith and never had words for what was happening, this conversation hands them to you.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/MfrBF0wjEAk

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

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Links:

• Wes' new book: https://amzn.to/4fAPlc3
• Wes' Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/wescrawford325/

Keith Giles spent two years digging through gospels that didn't make the cut, the ones buried in a jar in the Egyptian desert in 1945 alongside fifty other texts the church decided not to count. On this episode, Jeremy pours a Bordeaux blend and sits down with the author of the Quantum Gospel series to ask what it means that the people who assembled the New Testament were doing canon math with politics in the room. They get into the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the idea that the Spirit might still be speaking through novels, sunsets, and Alanis Morissette songs, whether the canon ever reopens or not. Jeremy calls Keith a heretic in the first five minutes. By the end, you might wonder if that's just another word for someone who kept reading.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/wby8uEafFKQ

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

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Links for Keith:

• www.KeithGiles.com
• https://www.patreon.com/c/KeithGiles

Lauren Peiser has spent time making wine in Italy, working at a seminary, and writing a Substack that will make you use your imagination. In this episode, she brings a concept called "wild magic," the kind of transformation that can't be packaged into a sermon or a stage talk. She talks about Mary not as the untouched ideal of purity culture but as someone who chose to birth Christ in the dirt, in relationship, in the wild. She talks about Jesus not as the individual savior of white American Christianity but as a guy whose whole resurrection depended on everyone around him. And she makes the case that contamination, the bacteria, the yeast, the mess, the people who ruin your clean theological identity, is exactly what makes anything worth drinking. If your faith reconstruction is still mostly happening in your head, Lauren is here to remind you there's a whole body attached.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/MRbSfOcRenw

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

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Lauren's Substack: https://laurenaltimont.substack.com/

What do saints, sinners, and zombies have in common? In this episode, Jeremy sits down with author Matthew DiStefano to talk about his book on The Last of Us, the video game that somehow became one of the most philosophically serious explorations of what it means to be human. This conversation goes places you won't see coming: the MLM structure of Christian nationalism, why empathy is more dangerous than we admit, why our morality is less about our convictions and more about our context, and what it feels like to play a character you hate, only to discover you've started rooting for them. You don't need to be a gamer. You need to be someone who's ever wondered what you'd actually do when the world falls apart.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/tGczdlIaiPw

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

Ben introduces the idea of the "feral spirit," a way of understanding spiritual encounter that doesn't require institutional scaffolding to be real. He talks about what happens when churches try to manufacture the Spirit's presence instead of simply making space for it, the difference between rituals that help us remember and rituals that help us control, and why a thousand dolphins playing in the ocean off Santa Barbara is actually a decent theology of joy. There's poetry, there's a 26-year-old Bordeaux, there's Walter Brueggemann on the freedom of God, and somehow it all holds together. If you've ever felt like the Spirit left the building long before you did, this one is for you.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/xWAjix_cyVo

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

Join us for the Wine and Whiskey trip in Oregon on September 25-27: https://communionwineco.com/events/wine-and-whiskey/

What do you do when the very people who introduced you to Jesus can no longer recognize the Jesus your faith has led you to? C.E. Jarnagin is a priest, researcher, and author who's asking that exact question in his new book The Congruent Life, and he brings a rare combination of Anglican liturgy, pastoral honesty, and zero tolerance for religious veneer to the conversation. In this episode, Jeremy and Chad work through what it looks like to hold your full humanity inside a faith community, why Christian nationalism and the Jesus of the Gospels are not remotely the same, and how a small church of 160 people (including a dozen former pastors) might actually be doing something the megachurch model couldn't.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/uTzs1Mo9F2c

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

Links:

• https://www.instagram.com/chadjarnagin
• https://www.threads.com/@chadjarnagin

Bethany Cseh is a pastor who spent years standing at a pulpit she wasn't sure she was allowed to occupy, internally justifying each sermon as something other than what it actually was. That tension turned out to be the beginning of a longer, stranger education. In this episode, Bethany joins Jeremy to talk about co-pastoring two completely different churches with her husband, what happened when they tried to merge them into one service, and the counterintuitive theology that emerged from the wreckage: that God is revealed more fully through our distinctions than despite them. They also get into merit badge theology, walking as a spiritual practice, and why John Piper is the last person you want picking out a wine for you.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/ZpURVmhmfyc

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

Beau Stringer spent years as a lead pastor in evangelical spaces. He's on the other side of that now, working in adult discipleship at one of the largest United Methodist churches in the country and making the case that mainline churches are the best thing most deconstruction-adjacent Christians have never heard of. His image for them: public libraries. Quiet, scattered through communities, not selling anything, full of wisdom, and genuinely open to everyone, including the guy with the shopping cart and all his belongings. In this conversation, Beau and Jeremy dig into how you read the violence of the Old Testament alongside the Sermon on the Mount, why faithfulness sometimes looks like a shrinking church, what happens to a pastor's theology once the job stops limiting his imagination, and why grief might be the most honest response to leaving behind a faith tradition that raised you.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/-oCLLdUojqY

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/patron-sign-ups

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in