138: ‘Holy Runaways’ And The Search For A Spiritual Home

In this episode we explore what it means to lose our faith and community because our beliefs, or sometimes our very selves, put us at odds with the expectations of others. Can there still be a spiritual home on the other side? 

Plus there’s a special announcement about a new book club featuring Holy Runaways. DM @wheredowegopod to get Keara’s email address if you want to join.

Partner with us for $3/month (USD) to hear Purity Culture News & Views this week. 

Show Notes:
Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion by Matthias Roberts

Matthias Roberts (he/him) is a psychotherapist specializing in religious and spiritual trauma and the author of Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion and  Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms. He hosts Queerology: A Podcast on Belief and Being and holds two master’s degrees from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, one in theology and culture, and one in counseling psychology. His work has been featured by O: The Oprah Magazine, Bustle, Woman’s Day, Sojourners, The Seattle Times, and many others. He lives in Seattle. Connect with  Matthias on Instagram

Full Transcript of Devi’s interview with Matthias Roberts:

Devi:
Mathias, welcome back to Where Do We Go From Here? It is great to have you.

Matthias:
Thank you, it’s good to be back, good to see you.

Devi:
Yeah, so good to see you. I think you are the person we have had the most on our show. Like you’re the most recurrent guest of all the people who have been back. Yeah, well, I think it has a lot to do with who you are, but also the work that you do. And you have a new book out called Holy Runaways. And you are touching on a topic that is so

Matthias:
It’s an honor.

Devi :
adjacent to purity culture, I think, and that is deconstruction. Where did Holy Runaways, like where did the book come out of from your own life?

Matthias:
For me, so after I wrote my first book, Beyond Shame, which was all about purity culture and kind of recovering, I was then left with… It sounds too linear to say I was then left with really big questions about faith, but in some ways, like… This is reductionistic, but I kind of worked through some of those things and then found, like, I still have all these really big questions.

I am trying to figure out what do I actually believe about faith, church, these things that have been such integral parts of my life, and I’m beginning to wonder, should they still be, do I still want them to be integral parts of my life? And I think I started looking around and seeing like so many other people are asking these questions too. And at the same time, I was, had been, and was reading, some theologies that were deeply meaningful to me and felt like they were giving me some language and a little bit of a path that felt like here’s something that I think works for me that I can actually really get on board with and tie my belief to that is still there but has maybe taken a different shape. So.

I wanted to share some of that with folks. So it was a big mix of all these questions, some ideas, and really wanting to try to work through it for myself too.

Devi:
Yeah. I have to say, I’ve not finished reading your book. I’m about halfway through. And I was very surprised to discover that you write a lot about our shared alma mater. Yes. So, Mathias, for people who don’t know, I went to the same university that Mathias, Mathias and I graduated from the same university, except he’s a lot younger than me. And Mathias, I my last year of university was the first year of the university president that you discuss in your book. And I ran a series, I was editor of the student newspaper, I ran a series of articles. The last article was about sex on campus.

I ran a series of articles on, so I wrote an article on people who were having premarital sex on campus, wrote their stories, whatnot.

Matthias:
Okay.

Devi:
Anyway, I had to have a meeting with him. I’m sitting in his office crying, whatnot. So when I read about your experience with this particular person, why don’t you share the story actually? So you were in the closet at JBU. We’ll say the name, it’s all good. People know where I went to university.

Matthias:
Yeah, it’s not hard to find, yes. Ha ha ha.

Devi :
Well, when you were in the closet there, you talked about the gathering, which I know what you’re talking about, which is a chapel service that’s kind of underground on Sunday night. And before your last year of university, you thought maybe you were going to get to speak in your senior year and you thought you’re going to take this opportunity to come out. And what happened?

Matthias:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so the school at the time when I was a student, this was the point when folks like Wesley Hill, some other people who are really prominent kind of side B, people who are speaking into the kind of LGBT experience from a Christian perspective. And the school had been, like the school I think even brought in Wesley Hill.

Devi:
Oh really?

Matthias:
and Janelle Paris and like a few people to like talk to faculty around this experience. So there was this kind of sense as I was a student of like this is the conversation we are having on campus but I didn’t know anyone who had actually who was actually out on campus. I think there were a few folks but I didn’t really know anyone and so I wanted to speak in the gathering at this.

Devi (she/her) (05:06.668)
Right.

Matthias (05:14.748)
student-led chapel service and kind of share some of my story of saying like, I’m gay. And at the time I was celibate and I was kind of really, really careful in this to talk about like, I believe I should be single. I believe that’s God’s calling. And yeah, so I put in the outline, the Office of Student Ministries or whatever they were called,
called me in and said to me, like, you know, this is intriguing, but we are going to need a word for word manuscript of what you plan to say. Which to my knowledge, no one else had been asked for. Like that was kind of a, not a normal thing. And so I was like, okay, like it’s a sensitive topic. Sure. So I wrote out and I spent months working on, like what exactly am I going to say?

Devi:
Mm-hmm.

Matthias:
and then being really careful to try to re-emphasize the school’s policy on LGBT relationships, which was, you know, there couldn’t be any. And long story short, like, it went all the way up to the office of the president, and the president decided, like, that he didn’t feel the school was ready to have a student come out, despite, for me, despite the fact that these were conversations that were they weren’t behind closed doors. And I understood at the time, but I don’t think I was able to feel how devastating that was. It was really painful.

Devi:
Yeah. Yeah, I have to say I so resonated with it even though I’m not, I’m not, even though I’m straight. Because to me it, the story, which was obviously real, is a picture of I think what Christian communities do to people who do not fit the typical evangelical story in so many

different ways there are people who don’t fit it, right? Like I think that story could have easily been somebody getting up to say, I’m questioning my faith about something. And it’s like, you’re fine, we’re fine as long as you stay, we’re fine with you staying in this one particular place in our community. But as soon as you start to give voice to the ideas, the thoughts, the questions,

As soon as you give voice to your story, that’s no longer, it’s sort of no longer allowed, which is really, I think, what your book is about. I am curious, so there’s a lot, deconstruction is a popular part of our language now. And deconstruction is like something that happens, even though it happens on the inside, it’s the verb, right, to deconstruct.

Matthias:
Yes.

Devi:
Runaway is a noun, it’s an identity. Are you doing that on purpose? Is that to sort of shift the conversation away from the things that we do to what we are?

Matthias:
Yeah, you know, it’s a noun, but it’s also an action to run away. And, and I, I mean, I was, I was thinking through and kind of trying to really feel through my own experience and I have never quite felt like deconstruction felt like the right language for my experience. Um, it’s not that I don’t like, I don’t think it’s a good word. I use that word all the time. Uh, but, but as I really thought through, like my experience, I was like,

Devi:
Yes, true.

Matthias:
This felt more like running away from something. It was a gradual process and then it kind of snowballed, but it really was, I ran away from a place that once felt like home and then no longer felt like home. In search of that sense of home again, I wanted a new home. And… Sure, deconstructing beliefs was part of it, but there was so much more in the equation. And yeah, I think there is some sense of identity in it, of kind of giving new language, we are runaways. I think that is helpful, but I don’t love the sense of, we’re gonna take on these identities, I am a runaway, and therefore that means X, Y, and Z. That can get us into trouble.

Devi (she/her) (10:05.118)
Yes. No, of course, because I mean, you’re a therapist. You understand how significant identities are in what and how they shape us. Yes, I appreciate that. Here’s what you say in the book, “Whether we were cast out or have run away on our own volition, we are not going blindly. We are all looking for something. Most of us runaways have tasted deep goodness and we want to taste it again. We have told ourselves wonderful stories and spent years imagining how different life could be. We want more, we want better, a place to rest, a place to call home.”

Tell people about that because I think so much of what people who don’t deconstruct or who are people on the outside of deconstruction, they look into that process and what they see is people who are just looking for a reason to leave Christianity. And you’re saying something very different here.

Matthias:
In my experience, many if not most of the folks who are in this deconstruction world are people who have been profoundly hurt. And who have been able to kind of look at the institution of our faith. Churches and say like something isn’t adding up here. Something isn’t right here.

these values that I have been taught as being, you know, tenants of the faith in some ways, weep with those who weep, work towards justice, like these things that I think in many different church communities, that’s language that is used. And yet, I think many of us have found the limits of what that actually looks like, right?
I mean, that was my experience. I pressed against the limits of what justice could be. And that is painful, that’s shattering, that’s heartbreaking. And I think this deconstruction is the first of many steps, or one of the first steps towards looking for a faith that actually encompasses and can work with that pain, that injustice.

Devi:
Yeah. That’s so good. I’ll just read this other little section, which is something you just said, but I want to ask you a question about purity culture after. We want to believe God or the divine or whatever is out there is love. And yet we’re also questioning the massive disconnect between who our faith communities say they are and what they are doing in the world.

We see questions of integrity at stake. How can the faithful hear Jesus’ words about caring for other people and not act on them? In your experience as a therapist, and your experience of working with many people who have left Christianity or have deconstructed, what relationship do you think purity culture has played in that leaving? Do you think it plays a part in that leaving?

Matthias :
You know, I do. I think it would be reductive to say the purity culture is the only reason. Like, I think you hear maybe hear some of my hesitancy here because of some of the discourse I have seen around, like, people who deconstruct only want to do that because they want to sin sexually, right? And I think it’s easy to pigeonhole into some of those.
Do I think is related? Absolutely. I think like in one of the core arguments of the book, in some ways, is that it is our natural human, I would say God designed empathetic responses that lead us on these journeys. And empathy is an embodied experience.
sexuality is also an embodied experience. When we have been taught to be cut off from our bodies, like we’re being taught to also be cut off from all these other things as well. I don’t think it just affects our sexuality. And so I see links there, absolutely. And I think sexuality certainly can be one of those points, as it was for me. I don’t fit sexually and therefore I need to figure out or find a place I do fit. But I think there’s a lot of complexity there.

Devi :
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I guess in that sense, yes, you’re right. Thank you for saying that, that it can be. I don’t want people to think that I’m saying people were looking for, like looking to just, I want to be able to have sex with who I want to have sex with. That’s definitely not what I mean. I think what we’ve noticed is just that question of integrity when what happens when the people who told you your whole life that this is the one thing you can’t do, this is absolutely the most significant part of your faith is are your sexual decisions. I mean, implied, explicit, everything. And then those same people turn around and are like, if we don’t vote for President Trump, everything is screwed, right? Or like this pastor sexually abused somebody and we aren’t gonna talk about it, we’re gonna keep him on staff. That’s what’s happened in the last 15 years. I guess, do you think that has an impact on people’s faith?

Matthias:
for sure. Absolutely. Because I think it continues to highlight the double standard that has always been there, but it’s coming into starker focus. Some people are allowed to sin sexually when it’s convenient for the larger movement. And I mean, that is a predictionistic what I just said, but like essentially that. Yes, right.

Devi:
Well, it is. Some people are.

Matthias:
And that is, I mean, infuriating. I mean, I have so much anger just again in the injustice of this because, yeah, and then to say like, well, you are being cast out because of your sexual sin, but we’re going to keep these people in power and actually not just keep them in power, but support them in this. That.

Devi :
Yeah. Fund them. Yeah.

Matthias:
Yes, that is so hard to wrap my mind around.

Devi :
Yeah. So Holy Runaways, it kind of traces your story while also providing theological, psychological, a lot of context for everybody’s experiences. Something happened to you when you left Arkansas. You went to Seattle to do your master’s degree in counselling and theology at with Dr. Dan Allender. And you had this encounter around your thesis with this professor. And she says to you, “I’m asking you to consider what you’re rooting your project in. Why do you think you are trying to build something from a theology of shame?” Okay. What is a theology of shame? And how do we…build our theologies out of it. How have we done that?

Matthias:
You know, if we work with this definition of shame that I think Brene Brown has popularized, like shame is that voice that says, I am bad. There’s something fundamentally wrong with me. That starts to give us a pretty clear answer, I think. It’s the theologies that espouse the sense that human beings, humans, are fundamentally bad, evil wrong. Which that is so deeply ingrained in much of Christian theology that to even say, like, that’s a theology of shame sounds somewhat ridiculous. But I believe it is. I believe that those are theologies of shame. If we have a starting point that we are all but worms, or whatever more palatable variation of that is, we are rooting in something other than…

Devi
Yeah.

Matthias
God’s love. And I know that I know, I mean I have been in these worlds for my whole life, I know there are many ways around that and to disagree with what I am saying. I am very well aware of that. And I still kind of hold to that as a really kind of basic sense of this is shame.

Devi:
Hmm. And I guess what does a theology of shame built out in somebody’s life, basing our lives on a theology of shame? What sort of impact does that have?

Matthias:
It’s hard to generalize here because I think it can look so specific based off of the varieties of shame of our particular community. But I think it can look like being cut off from our bodies. I think it can look like using our theology as a salve to make us feel better.

when we are deeply hurting. Like I think of folks that I know who…

just believe that they are so broken, so dirty, so fundamentally inherently bad that the theology acts as a salve to them. So it’s not actually providing healing, it’s just kind of covering over, it’s reinforcing the wounding, you are bad, but here’s who is good. And that, I think people can exist in that for their whole lives.

But I don’t think that’s what we’re called into in my belief system as of who God Jesus calls us into as being you know made in the image, beautifully and wonderfully made. I am not trying to deny the reality of harm and evil and our profound capacity to do that as human beings. I think

we need to take that seriously. But I think freeing us up from this shame allows us to take that far more seriously than just sitting in our own kind of muck without a sense of healing in the here and now being present.

Devi (she/her) (22:03.538)
Yeah. Okay. So talk about why it is.
It seems like what you’re saying is the real healing that we need, like that are at a soul level that we need. I’m not talking about like the maybe like, I have an issue with this and I need it fixed healing. Just the soul level healing to maybe deal with some of those, the parts of ourselves that may be broken comes from a different kind of theology, right? So you’re saying a theology of shame is not what is actually going to heal us.

Something else needs to heal us at a more fundamental level. What is that?

Matthias:
Yes. It may cause people to roll their eyes, but I deeply believe it is love. And this sense of knowing ourselves to be loved by one who is perfect love. And I think, you know, I really latch on to this idea of it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. That word kindness.

not the condemnation of God, but that kindness. I think it is far more difficult for us to tolerate kindness, delight, people seeing goodness within us. I think that is far more difficult for us to sit with than people who tell us that we are condemned, evil, degenerate, wrong. It’s far easier for us to believe those things than to believe that we are.

deeply and profoundly loved, even in our capacity to do so.

Devi:
There’s this part in your book where you reference Dr. Hilary McBride’s book, The Wisdom of Your Body. And there’s one line in here that just, it’s in a section where you’re talking about regulation. We’ve talked a lot about regulation on this show. I have kids who are in speech therapy and occupational therapy. I think about regulation, self-regulation, co-regulation.

all the time, every day. And I think about it in terms of colors. Are you in the red zone, the green zone, the blue zone, the yellow zone? So regulation is kind of our way of bringing ourselves into equilibrium. I don’t know if that’s accurate, like an accurate definition, but that is my experience, like a sense of an even temperature instead of spiking up, spiking down.
And there’s a lot of research that indicates that we need each other to be able to regulate well. And what you say about Hillary’s work is that there’s a way in which evangelicalism taught us to regulate, that this is the direct thing that you say. “Being broken becomes what regulates us.” Wow. Can you talk a bit about that? because that feels huge.

Matthias:
Yeah. brokenness, that sense of there is something fundamentally broken, fundamentally wrong about me. It is regulated, I mean I think it’s kind of an odd thing to say, that can regulate us. And yeah, I think many of us probably have experience with what that feels like, with what it feels like to regulate in our brokenness.
I think it’s the same thing that shame is regulating in the fact that it’s something that we can return to provide soothing. Oh, I did this wrong thing. I am so broken. There is a pain in that, but there is also a soothing in that. It’s because I am so broken. There’s something so wrong with me. And that… can be a system that keeps us in this state of, it’s kind of like we have to keep returning to the sense of, yeah, well, I’m so broken. I’m so wicked. I’m so wrong. Instead of something that can actually provide us, like integration, I am broken. I mean, I think that’s true. I’m not arguing that human beings don’t have brokenness, but…
I don’t believe it’s fundamentally who we are. And so we can acknowledge, yes, I am broken. I have the capacity. I do, do things, terrible things all the time, right?

But that’s not who I am. I am deeply loved and I have just as much capacity for good as I do for harm.
there are different ways, I think, to be regulated than just this sense of brokenness. And it is such an easy one to fall into.

Devi:
Yeah, I think a lot of people are listening to you right now, and they understand deeply what it means to be regulated by being broken. What are you offering as an alternative? Like what’s something better for us when it comes to that? Like what can regulate us in a way that does lead to integration?

Matthias:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m thinking through, like, think about the, the pastors, the, the preachers who use brokenness as a fundamental talking point. I mean, sometimes people use the language of like, I go to a church that actually talks about sin, that takes them seriously. Um, and, and that continued reminder of you are a sinful being.

Devi:
Yep.

Matthias:
and God is the perfect redemption for that. That I believe keeps us stuck in this sense of brokenness and we have to keep returning to it, right? We have to keep going back and hearing these awful, awful things about who we are as people because it provides some soothing. It’s like, oh yeah, I’m being reminded of who I am. I need Jesus. I don’t disagree that we need Jesus. But. what would it be like to continue to have reminders that we are profoundly and deeply loved? And that love is calling us into these places, and I talk about this later in the book, my definition of love comes from a therapist named Abbie Wong Hefter, who uses what would traditionally be called, is like, attachment theory language to describe love.
attunement, containment, and repair, which is a profoundly complex definition of love. It’s not just, I love you, you are so loved. Love is an attunement. I see you. Attunement, Dr. Dan Siegel defines attunement as feeling felt, which is an odd definition, but I feel felt in your presence. You feel me, I feel you. That’s attunement.

Containment is that regulation, that co-regulation. You can hold my complexity without flying off the handle, without getting defensive. And then repair is like, there’s fundamental failure always within human relationships. We cannot do relationship perfectly, but is there opportunity to then repair that relationship? Is there capacity for repair?

Devi :
Yes.

Devi:
Yeah.

Matthias:
Abby Wong-Hefter calls that love. Like she says, those three things have to be present or else it’s not love. And when I first heard that, that blew my mind. Because I thought about all the communities that I had been part of, many of the communities I’ve been part of, and realized like so many of these, they could do some of those. But all three of them together, I have very few experiences of that.

Devi:
Wow.

Devi:
Right.Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting when you layer on to that definition. You know, first Corinthians 13, love is patient, love is kind, does not envy or boast, keeps no record of wrongs. There’s a long list of things in that passage that actually you could categorize into, into attunement, containment and, and repair, because, you know, love is patient,

Matthias:
Yes.

Devi :
Like all of that is that attunement, right? That we’re taking the time to actually pay attention to the person that we love, to know them as they are, not how we want them to be. Yeah, there’s so much there. Matthias, in your experience, both as a runaway yourself or in deconstruction and in working with people who do…

Can you talk us through what helps? Because we know that, look there are deconstruction stories that we can feel comfortable with because they end up back with Jesus, right? And then there are deconstruction stories that we really, that Christians will really struggle with because they are more like a deconversion story. And it involves walking away from any kind of Christian faith. What are your, what are your words for people in any stage of that process about what helps?

Matthias:
you know for me when I when I think about this fundamentally I believe often in order to heal we do need to leave the spaces where we have been harmed before healing can happen. And for many folks that does mean leaving the church. Some folks can find churches that are different enough.

in my life I went to the Episcopalian Church for a while and that was different enough from the churches that I grew up in that I could start to heal and find healing and have a different faith experience. I think for other folks like there isn’t something different enough. There aren’t churches that are different enough to provide that space and so for me it doesn’t actually bother me at all.

that some deconstruction can look more like deconversion or is deconversion. But I think we also go back to these questions of what do we then actually believe about God? And what do we believe about what faith is? I believe that God has got this and that we don’t have to be frantic about the state of human souls.

Because God’s got this. And that gives, in my worldview, so much spaciousness to pursue actual healing. So what helps? I think getting away helps. I don’t think we can heal in the same spaces that have traumatized us. Or if we can, it is very, very difficult.

What also helps, I think, is slowing down, learning how to start to pay attention to our bodies. God gave them to us, I think, for a reason. There is an intelligence in our bodies that is there, that I think is divinely given, that we can learn how to pay attention to, when we talk about regulation, what regulates us, what disregulates us. Learning how to pay attention to that can start to be a compass then for what healing might actually look like in our own particular journeys. But I also think learning compassion is maybe one of the biggest tools along this journey. Learning self-compassion, being able to learn kindness for ourselves and others because many of us have not existed in a space where kindness has actually been accessible to us. And that can be a really difficult thing to learn. So I realize I’m not giving like a steps. I’m not even giving tools necessarily. And yet they are tools. Because it is indeterminate.

Devi:
They are.

Yeah, no, they absolutely, absolutely are. As we kind of bring this to an end here, Mathias, you are still a Christian. You’re not somebody who walked away completely or anything like that. What kept you?

Matthias:
It is, and this is really what I explore in the latter half of the book, is kind of discovering the work of the philosopher Rene Girard and then the theologian James Allison who unpacks Girard’s philosophy. It is this sense of what is love? And how does that actually show up in this story of God in Jesus?

Devi:
Yeah.

Matthias:
and what does it mean about the violence in the world? They put forth a very compelling to me, very compelling way of understanding the story of the gospel that feels true in my bones. And I can get on board with it and say like, this frees me up, not only to be a human, but to also… be able to love deeply and confront the very real violence and injustice that permeates our lives.