Ep. 24: Liberation, Belonging, & Coming Out w/ Flamy Grant & Ben Grace (Heathen Podcast)

Show Notes

Episode Summary

What happens when you realize your religion does everything except foster wholeness, flourishing, and love? For Flamy Grant and Ben Grace, two of the four hosts of Heathen Podcast, it meant searching for belonging, liberation, and authenticity beyond the confines of religion. We chat with them about what they found, where they found it, and what truly unconditional community and acceptance looks like.

Bio

Flamy Grant is what happens when a queer kid with dreams of being a pastor keeps getting kicked out of church: She becomes a singing, preaching, polygender drag queen who creates a podcast about apostasy.

Ben Grace was raised in a divergent sect of Christianity called The Christadelphians but left Australia to write songs about our universal search for belonging, spiritual homecoming, and desire to live seen and unashamed.

Heathen Podcast is about how to move on from bad religion with fewer casualties. For the past five years, Heathen has been creating safe space for folks in the process of moving away from their religious origins into uncharted territory, providing resources, and welcoming uncomfortable conversations about identity, faith, patriarchy, race, spirituality, and what it really means to do community without shame.

Follow Heathen on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (@HeathenPodcast), check out Heathen Happy Hour on YouTube, and listen to their podcast.

Quotables

• “The whole dream of being a pastor? I can do that in drag, it turns out, and do it better than I probably could have in other scenarios.” (tweet this)

• “The divine is about justice for the poor and the marginalized and the outcast and the people on the fringes. I looked around my white middle-class church, and I couldn’t find that.” (tweet this)

• “In religion, we’ve sold ourselves out for a cheap belonging, rather than teaching people to know and love themselves and be fully who they are.” (tweet this)

• “I thought my religion was good and community and love, but it wasn’t those things. It was all conditional.” (tweet this)

• “You don’t have to find the whole answer to everything in one place.” (tweet this)

• “To even know who you are, you need to sometimes be removed from places where you’re being told that aspects of your personality are unwelcome or unworthy.” (tweet this)

• “If I leave, there’s no other voice left for any other queer kid who may be closeted, who may not understand their sexuality yet. They will grow up with the same oppression that I endured.” (tweet this)

• “I cannot stand with people who tell me or others that they’re not loved or, worse, that God doesn’t love them. That is such a heresy.” (tweet this)

• “The more you practice embodied living and learn to trust yourself, the less sense all of the shame ends up making and the less weight you carry.” (tweet this)

• “I don’t need a bunch of evangelicals to accept me, but man, it would be nice if some of them could experience some of the liberation that I’ve felt.” (tweet this)

• “The work I saw my queer friends doing is the holiest of work. It is what we all need to do because we all need to come out and be ourselves. To just be ourselves is hard work.” (tweet this)

• “Live in a garden, not in a prison. Come out from those places where you feel locked down.” (tweet this)

Timestamps and References

• [04:04]—Flamy Grant’s brief faith background and how she started the Heathen Podcast

• [09:29]—Ben’s brief faith background, how he got out of fundamentalism, and how he joined Heathen Podcast

• [16:00]—Why Flamy uses the word “liberation” to describe her deconstruction journey and what she feels she found freedom from

• [24:35]—How Ben found community outside of religion and how his community shapes him

• [24:44]—Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner

• [30:30]—How to find community when you’ve left (or been forced out of) church

• [32:00]—Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night by Barbara Brown Taylor

• [37:57]—How Flamy is learning to hold space for everyone and their stories, and why she stays somewhat connected with evangelicalism

• [45:17]—Why Ben is always looking for ways to make space for those who still believe what he used to believe, but also where he draws the line

• [50:56]—“I celebrate myself,” from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself

• [51:30]—Why Flamy wants everyone to feel the freedom of fully embracing who they are

• [55:42]—Why Ben thinks everyone needs to learn from the work the queer community is doing

• [59:30]—“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (from Song of Myself, 51 by Walt Whitman)

• [01:04:05]—What gives Ben hope for the future of faith

• [01:07:23]—What gives Flamy hope for the future of faith

• [01:10:10]—Ben’s final thoughts on finding common ground with others

• [01:13:23]—Fun Rapid Fire questions

• [01:26:44]—As If Words Could Heal the Wounds by Ben Grace

• [01:27:50]—askheathen@gmail.com to join the private Facebook group

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Credits

This episode was produced by The Sophia Society. Music is by Faith in Foxholes, and sound engineering is by Joshua Mudge.