I Infiltrated a Christian Ministry as an Atheist

You know, they're getting ready to fire you, Drew. — Like, intellectualism and racism can potentially come from the same demonic influence. — So, if y'all could like keep him in your prayers, a this is not what he wants to do and that he is okay and accepts being who God himself. — This little boy came up to me and asked me point blank, "Mr. Drew, do you love God? " So, you've all heard about my time at my evangelical Christian university, and now it's time to talk about the time that I worked for a Christian ministry as an atheist. Interestingly, I got this job because I basically pulled off a kind of ethical scam at my college. In my last semester at college, that was fall of 2015. At my school, everyone who lived on campus had to purchase a meal plan every semester. This was basically an account that you would put money into that could only be spent at the school cafeterias around campus. At the end of my senior year, I realized I have a ton of funds in this meal plan that I am not going to use. At the end of every single semester while I was at this university, students would be in a similar situation. So, a few dozen students during like the last two weeks of every semester would buy, you know, a hundred burritos or $500 worth of pizza and just hand it out around their dorm building or something like that. I thought, you know, I don't want my money to just go back to the catering company that runs the cafeterias, and I also don't want to just waste all of the food. So, is there a way that I can use these funds in a positive way? There was a huge homelessness crisis in my college town at the time. If I'm honest, I would bet that it's actually even worse now. And I thought that's where I should be trying to get the food to these food insecure people. Other students and I brainstormed on how we could accomplish this. And what we arrived on was we can create a signup sheet where students can sign over a bunch of their unused meal plan money that would go into a fund that would then be donated to a pretty large local homeless shelter so that they could buy food for their food pantry. We knew that we would have no problem getting students to sign over this money. Most students had at least $100 of unused money at the end of every semester. So, we knew it would be no problem to get them to sign up. The issue would be convincing the catering company that ran the school cafeterias uh to let us use the money in the way that we collectively actually wanted to. So, here's where the uh scam part kind of comes in. I met with the cafeteria manager and I acted like I was a kind of lowerassman who was very unconfident and didn't know what I was doing when I actually was pretty confident this was going to work. And uh I told her it would be my wildest dream to have students donate like maybe $800 or $1,000. Wow, that would be incredible. So, can we do this? you know, if we if I bring you the signup sheet and it has like 800 bucks or something, can we donate that money from your meal plans over to the homeless shelter? And the lady responds and is like, yeah, sure, whatever. She obviously was not taking me seriously, but she did kind of say yes tentatively. Um, this was a dishonest tactic from me because I personally knew that I alone was going to donate at least $300 and I knew a handful of other people who were also going to donate about that amount. So, like guaranteed we were going to raise a few thousand. Uh, and I just didn't I didn't want to tell her that. So, one of my friends I was working with was on the chapel announcement team. uh which meant that she gave announcements in front of our 2,000 seat chapel every couple of days. So we had her immediately announce this in front of the entire school who was mandated to attend that chapel service. So everyone in the school knew about this within I don't know a couple of days of this meeting where we were given permission to do this. Okay. Then we ended up distributing flyers to every mailbox on the entire campus just to remind people, hey, you can sign up to give away your it was called flex cash. I'm going to call it that. You can give away your flex cash to this homeless shelter to feed people uh instead of letting it go to waste or buying a million pizzas. Um I started going to class and the faculty all knew that this was happening even though they didn't even know that it was me that was one of the people that was behind it. Then importantly, we set up a booth where we had one of these signup sheets at the entrance of our main cafeteria at every single meal time through the duration of for uh the rest of the semester. So, I think we were doing this for a month or 3 weeks or something like

that. Then I contacted the university's press manager to see if we could get the word out even further to all of the faculty to make sure that they all knew about this and also maybe to get some local news coverage. And what ended up happening is that the uh press manager for the university contacted our city's main newspaper and got a reporter to come out and interview me about this. And by that time, we had raised uh well over $1,000. So the point of all of this publicity for this program was not just to raise money, but was also to um turn that tentative sure whatever you can do this. I guess will donate the money from the cafeteria manager into a oh if I back out every single person on campus knows about this and is going to hate me and I'm going to land us in a PR disaster for our company. Um and yeah, that ended up working at a certain point. Um, I was having follow-up meetings with her and she kept um, locking the door of the cafeteria and the office at the scheduled time of our meetings in order to try not to meet with me. But luckily, the staff of her cafeteria knew who I was, thought the idea was cool because, you know, they were wage laborers who were not siding with management. Um, and uh, and they would just unlock the door and let me into the meeting. So, yes, the plan ended up working out and she was not okay with it. In the end, we ended up signing up students to donate about $8,000 and we actually were able to work with the cafeteria's wholesale uh food supplier to purchase food at wholesale prices with that $8,000. So, it was a lot more than we could buy from a grocery store at the same amount of money. And then we met up uh at the school's cafeteria freezer where they had ordered and stored all the food. And the students personally um that had worked on this picked up those boxes and put them in trucks and then drove them to the homeless shelter where we packed out their freezer like a whole wall of their freezer was just us. It it was pretty cool. The cafeteria manager was very pissy while we were loading up all of this food and really made as little eye contact with me and spoke to me as little as possible um because I had hoodwinkedked her. Um but you know what? I didn't really care that she hated me because I graduated like 2 days after this and never saw her again. Throughout this process, as it became clearer to people that I was one of the main people involved in this effort and people, you know, saw me on the front page of the city's newspaper doing this. Uh, I was getting a lot of praise. You know, at this Christian school, people were saying that I was exemplifying the fruits of the spirit, that I was living a true spirit of Christian charity and this kind of thing. And you know, while I think that normally would have been very flattering, I would have really liked that because my entire life's mission was to like be a good Christian and be Christlike and all this kind of stuff. Um, at the time in my last semester of college, I had begun to deconstruct my faith. And to me, this effort was very consciously not about Christianity. It was not about God. It wasn't because Jesus told me to or he would be happy about it. It was um it was a humanist act. I was just doing it because I saw people who I want I wanted to like help because they needed help. Um I thought every person deserves to eat and uh I had an opportunity to act on like the basic sense of empathy that I had. And so that's what I was doing. It didn't have anything to do with Jesus or spirits or anything. Um, and so I actually found a lot of the kind of praise a bit irritating uh for that reason. Now on to the bit about the homeless shelter. after I did this, uh, I was very much on their radar. And about a month after I graduated, if that, it might have been two weeks after I graduated, they let me know that they had a job opening and that I had shown initiative and uh, they really liked my university and worked with students from there all the time. And so, they would like to offer me uh, an interview for that position before they like put it out publicly. I think as you might have guessed this was an evangelical Christian homeless shelter. Everyone who attended there or ate a meal there even had to attend a church service or a Bible study which were provided on their campus. All the employees importantly had to be Christian too. Actually I had to write a kind of statement of faith on

my job application for this position. Now, I wanted the job. Working at a homeless shelter was the type of thing that I wanted to do right out of college. But to say that I was unsure about my Christian faith uh would be an understatement. I wasn't sure if I even considered myself a Christian anymore at this point. There was a little bit of ambiguity maybe for me, but I yeah. Uh, so I was in this place where I decided I guess on my application I'm just going to phone it in and write what I would have written 6 months ago when I did feel pretty strong in my faith. And so I wrote under the field that says, "Please describe your relationship with Christ and share your testimonial. " I was saved at a very young age. Christ led me at that young age to be extremely interested in his creation. Much of my spiritual growth since then has been a product of God leading me in study in his word in church, philosophy, and quiet times and the sciences/humanities in school. This has led to a deeply personal relationship with Christ in all areas of life. I would apologize for my handwriting, but I've kind of come to the realization finally at the age of 31 that I'm pretty sure that I have what could be classified as a disability. Um, almost can't physically write with my hand. I can type, uh, but I always struggled in school when it came to using a pencil. Weird because my job is being a writer. But that to say, uh, I'm going to ask you guys to go easy on me about my handwriting because, uh, yeah, I literally cannot do better than that. What I find really funny about my testimony here is that I was trying to be as honest as possible by saying things that I really did do. Like my life was centered around learning. I really like to learn about science and the humanities and philosophy and that sort of thing. I just kind of um tacked on Christianity on top of that. So I'm really into learning and that brings me closer to God. Ironically, it was my constant obsession with learning new things and challenging preconceived ideas that uh actually led me out of Christianity. I knew full well in applying to this place that my application was not going to be the last place where I would have to kind of phone in or perform Christianity. If I were to get this job, I would have to act like a Christian every day or else risk getting fired. uh in the code of conduct it even says I will conduct myself in a Christlike manner in speech, attitude, and attire. Obviously, if you say, "Yeah, I don't really believe in God. " Um that's not really Christlike. This code of conduct, which was stapled to my job application, by the way, also said that certain biblical principles should always apply to all relationships. volunteers or staff, this is implying, should remember that the true authority in their lives is the word of God and relationships that violate biblical principles are always wrong. So, this goes on to discuss inappropriate romantic and sexual relationships like with clients. Obviously, that's unethical even outside of a biblical framework. But with that type of language in the code of conduct, um, if I was caught saying to someone that I disagreed with Christianity, that could be seen as not having a biblical relationship with someone, especially if they were a client. Because evangelical homeless shelters are not there to like just feed and clothe people. They're ultimately there to actually save their souls. and giving them food is just a way to get them in the building and give you an opportunity to preach to them. So, I submitted my application. I think I was the only person that they interviewed and uh at the end of the interview, they offered me the job straight away and handed me the paperwork to like officially become an employee. Now I was speaking to who would be my direct supervisor who I'll talk about uh her supervisor and then also the big boss who was my supervisor's dad. Uh yeah, there's some nepotism there. But after the interview, which obviously went well, the the big boss says to me, "Now, Drew, before you leave, before you go home, I got to ask you this question, which I'm not legally allowed to ask you during a job interview, but you're not voting for Bernie Sanders, are you? " Yeah. I have to say I wasn't very surprised at this question because I grew up in a house where Bernie Sanders would have been considered a communist. In fact, I know that my parents do call him like an extreme radical communist who wants to steal all of rich people's money that they got through exploitation. But anyway, I told this guy, uh, I don't

really follow politics. I'm not really political. Which wasn't true. In preparing for this video, I actually went through my phone's photo library and looked at every single photo that I took in this six-month period of my life that I'm going to be telling you about. And I found that just an hour before I went in for this interview at this homeless shelter where this guy asked me about Bernie Sanders, I had saved a Bernie Sanders versus Hillary meme about Radio Head that I sent to one of my friends. So, yeah, suffice to say, I actually was a uh Bernie fan at the time. It might surprise some of you guys that a person who runs a homeless shelter would be very pro- capitalist and anti-working class in the way that his question clearly expressed. Um, but as someone who grew up in evangelical Christianity, this for some reason is totally a thing. people who do Christian charity even have very anti- poor ideas. So naturally, I didn't find it surprising at all when years later in more recent times, certain evangelicals started arguing that empathy itself is a sin, especially if it motivates you to support social justice. This debate over whether it's acceptable to even care about certain kinds of people has even gotten big enough to make it into the news. Over 50 sources have reported on this. And while left and centerleaning sources connect this phenomenon to Christian nationalists and conservative Christians, right-leaning sources, as of the time of this video, are hardly covering the story at all. That fact alone is a valuable insight into this story. I was able to gain this insight at a literal glance because I found this story on Ground News, an independent app and website I've not only partnered with and promoted for years, but actually do use in my real life every day. For real, I genuinely recommend it to my friends in real life. Their platform organizes every published perspective on an issue in one place with data on each outlet's political bias, credibility, and financial incentives. I use their Vantage plan, and you can get 40% off that Vantage plan by going to ground. news/skeepic. While right-leaning sources haven't covered this story, Ground News has a great feature called their blind spot feed, which is dedicated to surfacing important stories that are being completely ignored by one side of the political spectrum or another. So, right-leaning ground news users stand a way better chance of seeing the story than they would without ground news. Having this feature right there on your phone or in your email inbox provides a ton of value, especially right now as the media landscape gets more chaotic nearly every day. I can't promise you better news, but I can promise you a better way to read it if you go to ground. news/skeepic or scan the QR code on your screen. There you can get the same Vantage plan I use every day for just $5 a month. Taking advantage of these tools is a great step toward reading the news skeptically and staying properly informed. Okay, so the job that I got was basically working in the women and children's shelter portion of this homeless shelter rather than in the larger men's side. My daily duties were basically assisting in child care and some case management, especially in the evenings. I did a lot of playing on the playground with kids, which was super fun. But I did a little bit of everything. Sometimes I was just uh organizing or cleaning or uh hosting volunteers or ordering new car seats for the moms who were living at the shelter at the time. Immediately I loved this job. I like working with kids and kind of wish that I was still able to do that in some way, but unfortunately I just make propaganda for the internet. Uh I was 21 and I was already married actually at this time. But in looking as young as I did, I was regularly asked if I was the teenage son of one of my co-workers, uh, this was a this was like a almost daily thing that someone would go, "Do you do you live here or do you work here? " Sometimes we didn't have a lot of kids at the shelter though, which meant that I would have a lot of time to kill. I spent a lot of that time actually playing guitar in the public areas and in my office at the shelter, but I also did a lot of thinking about questions surrounding Christianity and I often got pretty existential. On one particularly slow day, less than a month after I got this job, I was in my office thinking about the afterlife and how I had been taught that if there is no afterlife, then there is no point to this life. This is a really common Christian idea. People like William Lane Craig say this all the time. But I found no good evidence for an afterlife at all. So did that mean that there was no point in me helping anyone or being happy or

or doing anything in my life? Could there be no meaning in my life because of this? While thinking about this, this wave of intense fear came over me. And this was the one and only time that I ever closed and locked my office door. I closed and locked that door, crawled underneath my desk, and started having a panic attack. I was experiencing this thought spiral, thinking, "I can't possibly have any meaning in my life. Nothing matters. Why ever try anything at all? I'll never be happy. " And then I remember even saying aloud to myself, "How could anyone ever find meaning in life without like the Christian worldview? " basically. And then I started thinking, you know, a lot of people haven't even been taught Christianity or taught about an afterlife. And clearly by their continued existence on this earth, they have found some sort of meaning. How could they do that? It's possible clearly, but I didn't get how they could do that. After going over this in my head again and again, curled up underneath this desk, I ended up thinking, what if being taught this idea that nothing matters unless there's an afterlife is itself contributing to my fear? What if I'm afraid because Christianity taught me to be afraid so that I wouldn't question or leave it in the first place? Fortunately, my sense of panic began to subside with the thought that maybe Christianity created this problem in me and in people generally in the first place in order to sell us the solution. So that implies that maybe this problem isn't really a problem in the first place that I could get out of it. So I resolved that I would try to break out of this dichotomy. You can either have purpose in your life with God or have no without God. I needed to explore ways of thought outside of this dichotomy in order to get rid of this fear. So, I kind of tabled the fear and this question as much as possible for a moment while I explored how to create meaning in my life as a non-Christian. As you guys know, uh this ended up working out very well. I certainly do not suffer from a feeling of lack of meaning in my life. Uh if anything, sometimes the intense sense of purpose that I feel, especially under uh Christian fascism right now, can be quite overwhelming. Uh luckily I have community to help me deal with feeling overwhelmed. Um but yeah, I don't struggle with uh with, you know, crippling nihilism and depression like I was told that I would if I ever left the faith. All right. Now, let's talk about how I skirted around the rules as a non-Christian here. So, one of the things that I did every day was to provide activities for the kids under my care, particularly in the evenings during women's Bible studies that happened a few times per week. I was told that I was to incorporate my own Bible lessons for the kids into our regular activity time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I felt pretty uncomfortable with this given that I was on my way out of Christianity and that I had just realized how incredibly harmful one of the core teachings of Christianity was to me. I did not want to do Bible studies. So I came up with a system to deal with this. Most of the time on Tuesdays and Thursdays I was the only adult present in the like activity area whether inside or outside. So I would not do any sort of Bible lesson but instead a craft or a game. Now these would teach lessons like you know patience and kindness and sharing and all the good kids activity stuff but they would not be explicitly biblical lessons. The kids and their moms really like this. The moms would often tell me that they could see in their kids' behavior that the activities were instilling you know good values in them and made a positive impact. Now, if an employee asked what we did in a past activity, I would describe what we did, but use biblical language. So, if we, if I was teaching them about patience through some kind of activity, then I, you know, said things about, you know, learning the fruits of the spirit in longsuffering or, you know, something like this. Uh, and that usually pacified

people pretty well. They were like, "Oh, that sounds like a great Bible lesson. Awesome. " if they asked what we were going to do in the next activity or in future activities um or if an adult happened to join me for an activity time with the kids, I would always have a more plausibly biblical lesson already planned. This meant that yes, I did end up doing Bible lessons for these kids sometimes, but I'll tell you how I tried to do harm reduction with this endeavor. As a Christian ministry, we owned every single DVD that had ever been produced by Veggie Tales. I grew up with Veggie Tales, so I already knew which ones were heavier with the Bible stuff and which ones were a little bit lighter and just said, you know, God loves you and wants you to be good to your neighbor, which is, you know, it's fine. I would always have one of the more secular Veggie Tales DVDs already picked out to be shown. So, when employees asked me, you know, what are we going to do? It was always the most secular Veggie Tales show that I could possibly find. Then they would join in on that and uh yeah, the other employees always approved of me showing Veggie Tales and then just discussing it even in somewhat more secular terms with the kids. This worked really well for a while, but eventually something happened that I had not planned for. My boss asked me to plan a Bible study specifically about Noah's ark. I'm not sure why, but she wanted me to do that. I asked her, is this meant to be like a history lesson, you know, telling them that this story literally happened and it's a matter of historical record? or do you want me to emphasize more uh the moral lessons of this story? I thought maybe I could get away with asking a question like this, but she looked at me super puzzled and expressed that of course this really happened. What are you talking about? She asked me why I would even ask that and whether or not I thought that the story was true. uh that escalated in a way which I was not prepared for and I very gently said that I don't think a worldwide flood happened. She then asked me okay do you believe in the other stories in Genesis? Like do you believe in Adam and Eve? Do you believe that God created the earth? Do you believe in all this other stuff? and I said I believed in an old earth and I'm not exactly sure what I think about um you know some other stories trying to keep it like non-offensive and not give more detail than I had to. She then straight away asked like oh so do you believe in evolution? And I was just like I can't just say no. That'd be a lie. So I was like yeah I think that's most likely. She responded saying, "Okay, well, we hired you because we thought you were a Christian. " And I didn't know how to really respond to that. So, she got up out of the room and walked to the office of the executive director and asked him what she was supposed to do. The executive director then called me into his office right away. All because I questioned whether or not Noah's arc should be taught in a literal way. The memory of sitting in this guy's office and getting grilled is so burned into my mind. I can still remember the way I sat in the chair, the way he looked, the fact that I was a little bit lower than he was because his hair his chair was higher than mine. And uh later on after I was years removed from this job, I actually went back and took this photo of um the inside of that office so that I don't know I could commemorate this happening and hopefully heal from the experience. He started asking me straight away what the implications of my belief in evolution were. I tried to give as little information as possible and say, "Oh, you know, I I don't really know. " And he hit me with, "Well, the most important thing for your job is if a child asks you, how do I get to heaven? How do I receive salvation? Who's the God of the universe? " Drew, you are here to tell them that Jesus is

the only way. That is how you receive salvation. And if you can't believe that, if you cannot believe in the story of the life of Jesus because you believe in these other things, then I'm sorry, you can't work here. I sat there uncharacteristically silent and then responded that made sense. I got where he was coming from and I just want to make sure to serve the shelter. Well, he interrupted me before I really said any more and just said, "Uh, I want you to go home today and sleep on it, but then come right back to my office when you come into work tomorrow and talk to me about this. " So, I went home and contemplated what it would be like to lose the very first job I got right out of college uh within I don't know a couple months of even getting it and then what I would tell my parents as to why I lost this job. They thought that I was still very devoutly Christian. The only person who knew that I wasn't really thinking of myself as Christian anymore was my wife. So if I got fired, it my life would be catastrophically wrecked. And importantly, Taylor was still in college and did not have anything other than a tutoring job. It was a couple hundred bucks a month. So very serious consequences if I got fired. So naturally, I slept on it and realized what I have to do is walk in there, sit down with this guy, and tell him, you know, you made so much sense. And I think that you're right that the most important parts of Christianity are really the um events of Jesus life, his life, death, and resurrection. And that brings us a possibility of salvation. If a kid was to ask me, "How do I go to heaven? " then I'm going to tell him that. Lead him down the Romans road as we call it. Um, and so that's what I did. I went to that guy that guy's office and said all of those things and he was basically like, "All right, really glad to hear it. You're doing a great job here. Go ahead and go back to your office. " I walked away literally from this encounter with quite a different understanding of my position not only at the shelter but also in life in general. I was not a questioning Christian who was just uncertain about ideas surrounding the supernatural and God and the afterlife. I was not just someone who wasn't sure, who was pretending to be sure for the sake of getting along with other people. I was an allout atheist who did not believe in the supernatural in any form. Definitely didn't believe in God, was not a Christian in any way whatsoever. and that I had effectively infiltrated a Christian ministry where the only way that I could continue to serve people in a material way, you know, help them get food and shelter was to live a carefully constructed lie. And you know, I wanted to keep this job not just to stay employed and not just to uh not have to deal with certain very inconvenient social consequences, but also because I just wanted to help the people there. I had come to believe that everyone deserved to have their basic needs met and that a better life for every person was possible if people like me just worked toward that future regardless of whether we did that for God or not. Not only that, but the people that I served at the shelter, they deserved love and care, and I had those things in abundance. And providing that for them, I knew would help more than any sermon ever could. So, I was very happy to at least momentarily hold on to this job, even if it meant pretending to be a Christian. in almost every waking moment of my life. Obviously, this situation was super stressful and one of the ways that I coped with that stress was by kind of making a joke out of it for my Snapchat. Now, I couldn't reveal to anybody that I was an atheist, but I wanted to make fun of the idea of getting fired for a stupid reason. And so, I made this little skit with one of my co-workers. — What's going on? You know they're getting ready to fire you, Drew.

— Is it because I say uh oh, Spaghettiios every time something goes wrong? — Mhm. Yeah, Drew, you're out of here. — Uh-oh, Spaghettiios. — It made me feel better to make that and then have people on Snapchat just see it as a joke while I knew that there was a deeper meaning there. Not too long after I almost got fired for not being Christian enough, a woman who was staying at the shelter, I believe one of the moms of one of the kids that I was regularly working with told me that she had something on her heart that she needed to tell me. Now this is like evangelical Christian speak for um some spiritual force, God, whatever has revealed to her that she needs to say something that's very important. She said that she saw the way that I worked with the kids and the women at the shelter and that she wanted me to know that she could see the Holy Spirit working through me, that I was a shining example of Christlikkeness. She went on about this, kind of repeating herself uh a few times. And in my own head, listening to her say this, I just kept thinking, "That's nice, but wow, she really can't tell I'm an atheist. This is crazy. I thanked her, told her that I was flattered and was just trying to do my best and was happy to help people there. That was my job. And then I walked back to my office and started thinking about how, you know, seeing something spiritually is really a matter of interpretation, isn't it? I was very confident that there was no spirit working in me or through me. I would be the one to be able to tell that better than anybody being myself. And yet she says that she witnessed that. So she had to witness something that was not there in an objective sense which would be perceptible to me. So her observation of the spirit had to come from her own mind, not from my person or my actions. I could only conclude that the way that the spirit is seen generally is really through the application of an interpretive framework. Basically, people see things in a spiritual way because they interpret them as such, not because there is necessarily actually an objective spiritual substance that can be witnessed or measured in some kind of ex external or objective way. seeing a supernatural claim from this very unique vantage point where I could be quite confident that it was in fact false because it was about the inner workings of my very person confirmed to me that I was on the right track in my thinking about Christian metaphysics in general. I was probably right to doubt them entirely. As it turned out, I was not the only one doubting Christianity to some extent at the shelter, though. I went into work one day, went into my office, which was shared with my direct supervisor. She was there glued to her desk, looking very sad and disturbed. She asked me if I had ever heard of the other books that were left out of the Bible. Understandably, I think I was a bit afraid to answer this question, honestly. But I very gently said yes. I had heard of non-cononical early Christian literature before. Sometimes the way that people describe those books are like books left out of the Bible because they were very important to early Christians in often the same way that canonical books of the Bible were. She very frustratedly then said that a more liberal family member of hers recently told her about these books and that she looked it up and found to her horror that these books really existed. This was true. She angrily said that no one had ever taught her about that and she asked if I had ever been taught about it. I said no. Uh, I was not taught about this in my church or by my parents. She asked, "Well, then how do you know about them? " I carefully responded that I just kind of saw something about this on online one day. She then like leaned back in her chair and threw up her hands in frustration and said, "Why didn't anyone teach us about all this crap as kids? I don't want to know anything about any of this. I just want to live my life and I want to love Jesus and I don't want to be worried about all this stuff. Now, I didn't tell her this part, but I knew exactly how she felt because

that's the way I felt about a lot of things while I was deconstructing my faith. I didn't really know what to say to her because I didn't want to end up in the same situation I had been in before. So, I just kind of sympathized with her like, "Yeah, that's I mean, it's really it's really frustrating. I'm sorry about that. " And I did that until fortunately, I think she changed the subject. When she did that, I was incredibly relieved that it didn't look like that day I was going to be facing another hostile inquisition in which my job was potentially in limbo. A positive thing that came from this conversation was that my direct supervisor, I think, realized that she could share her own skepticism or doubts of certain Christian or even conservative ideas with me without any consequence, which is something that she would do again later. Uh, okay. Now, I guess I have to talk about our all staff training that happened in the early summer of 2016. Oh my god. Everyone that worked in every part of the shelter was assembled into one room to do a all day training session, which happened every year. We all got there at 8:30 a. m. and were handed a big stack of papers that we would be discussing and using throughout our training. I ended up taking photos of a few of these papers because I just had to show someone maybe in the future potentially how [ __ ] weird this stuff was. I suppose one of the first things we discussed was the overcoming abuse God's way kyulemon. That spelling is indicative of how well thought out the rest of this is. This was a program that some fundamentalist Christians had come up with for support groups for people who had been abused in various ways. Let me read you a couple of the topics that were supposedly um confronted in these support groups. Uh one was sexual addiction and by that they meant to talk about sexing and social networking. Basically, that amounted to sending lewd photographs of yourself to someone consensually or receiving these consensually. Um, or posting something somewhat revealing on like Instagram that was considered to be a part of sexual addiction, these people. But for some really crazy stuff here, there was some programming for support groups on ancestral sins and root strongholds, which we'll get into in a little bit. There's also one for breaking soul ties which are uh spiritual ties that can develop in various ways in the mostly charismatic evangelical mind. But the main way that I was taught that soul ties develop was through sex. So, I was taught that you when you had sex with someone, you um not only knit your body parts together, but you knit your souls together. And that if you separated from that person, then you would be ripping your soul and damaging it. Uh and so I think I think that this was a support group to help people who faced suffering because they had sex with someone become therefore soul tied to them and were in a bad way because of that. Now what is a stronghold? It's something that we ended up talking a lot about in this training. I was not really taught about strongholds in this exact way uh as an independent fundamental Baptist, but I'll do my best to explain what the kind of more charismatic people who like to use this language uh use it for. A stronghold is basically language that is used for uh a sin that you keep coming back to over and over because it like has power over you. So a stronghold of lust or someone having means that they have a habitual cycle of coming back to falling into lust, engaging in this sin over and over again. There's another connotation to this though, and that is a connotation of demonic influence. Maybe not for everyone, but in this case, yes, I do think these trainers were implying that demons were involved in creating strongholds for people. So if you had a stronghold of lust, that meant that there was uh a demon or demons that had

in some way influenced or come to inhabit your soul or spirit or person in some way that were uh influencing you to come back to this sin over and over. So a stronghold could mean habitual sin. It could also mean a house where a demon lives inside of you. So some of the strongholds we talked about in our training made me all the more worried for my job. Doubt and unbelief was apparently a stronghold influenced by demons potentially. Cults which uh us you know fundamentalist evangelical types were totally not a part of. We weren't in a cult. We were in the real religion. False preachers, false prophets, false tongues. I'm not totally sure if that means lying or if that means speaking in tongues falsely, but either way, and this was the one I think that really got me at the time, the stronghold of error has a subcategory of racism as well as intellectualism. Like intellectualism and racism can potentially come from the same demonic influence. And then we have compromise on this list as well. Apparently that's quite sinful and potentially demonic. And you know, I had to take a picture of this one because a stronghold of Antichrist was indicated by attempts to take the place of Christ, which kind of just meant like trying to understand things outside of like the Bible. Opposes Christ's deity aka cult. So if you just didn't believe that Jesus was a a god then or god then you were in a cult apparently. Um harasses or persecutes believers which ultimately meant like disagreeing with them. We all know that Christian persecution means not giving them everything they want all the time like they're a child and uh atheism. So, turns out that I simply had a stronghold of Antichrist that I needed to resolve and I wouldn't have to hide my deep dark secret at work anymore. It definitely felt just fantastic that all of my co-workers were being taught to watch out for atheists because they're the antichrist and all that stuff. But I do have to say I think maybe it would have been just as bad to just be a woman in this training because let's look at this handout. I think this was included to just be a joke or make us laugh, but it's no less sexist if it's supposed to be funny. Nine words women use. Fine. This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up. Apparently, women just can't communicate and they're really immature. Five minutes. If she's getting dressed, this means half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house. So, women just have ridiculous double standards. Nothing. This is the calm before the storm. This means something and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine. So, there you guys get this. Like this is all just a an incredibly sexist sheet talking about all of these failings that women have that come through in their ridiculous manipulative language that they use. And like one of the trainers was a woman. And I just kind of like really sucks that her relationship apparently was one where this was thought to be funny and not at all demeaning to women. This is one of the worst ones to me. That's okay. This is one of the most dangerous statements a woman can make to a man. That's okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake. So, not only do women immaturely just as an entire group not communicate their actual emotions. They lie. They're manipulative. But they will regularly and habitually um just lie to you so that they can plot how to intentionally, emotionally or otherwise injure you in your relationship. Like this is manosphere [ __ ] right? I obviously took pictures of this stuff because I thought it was so absurd. But what I learned during the lunch break at our training day was that my direct supervisor, who I shared my office with, also thought this stuff was really, really stupid. Uh, she ended up complaining to me about how ridiculous this training day was. And while I did not question anything we were told because I just didn't want to lose my job, my direct supervisor ended up kind of questioning one of the training people and making the person mad just by asking questions like, "So, how do we know that this is a stronghold of antichrist just to compromise with someone, you know, stuff like that? " It was really entertaining

and cathartic for me to watch. Great to be on the same side as my supervisor. If you happen to be watching this, maybe you are, I don't know. Dear God, thank you for challenging these training people. Holy [ __ ] All right, let's talk about another training day which was more fruitful. We once had a detective with the police department in the city come in to give us training on recognizing gang activities since we worked with very impoverished people and I worked with you know teenage boys sometimes being able to recognize gang activity was important. I am for the record resisting the urge to give an anti-cop sermon where I talk about how at the systemic level the police in this country and in a lot of other countries as well ultimately uh amount to being a violent gang in themselves. But that's enough. That's not what this video is about. Let's continue. Anyway, in this training, I became very aware that white supremacists were very active in our local area of East Texas and actually did more violence across the country, like much than all other violent groups, whether they were gangs or whatever. This detective showed us aerial footage of KKK meetings that had happened recently in rural areas not very far away from where we were in East Texas. I suppose that the clan held these meetings out in rural areas for the sake of privacy, but I guess these um police were on to them and surveiled them. And uh I remember just seeing hundreds if not more people gathered around in these fields all doing clan stuff. I surprisingly learned a lot of accurate information about white supremacist groups in the country at that training and I ended up looking up some of this stuff and learning about more of it on my own later and realizing that I had actually been taught the white supremacist great replacement conspiracy theory as a child. You can hear me talk about that in my video where I talk about all the conspiracies I was taught as a fundamentalist homeschooler. Unfortunately, this literal KKK born conspiracy theory is just a normal conservative talking point and belief thanks to the popularity of Christian fascists like Charlie Kirk and Jack Pasobic. There are people in the current administration who wholeheartedly buy into this stuff. And I mean 15, 20, even maybe 10 years ago, this was considered to be extremely racist to the point where it if you believe this, you were suspected of being involved in potential terrorist activities. Now your Christian mom probably thinks this stuff. It's God. I'm sorry. It's just it's really [ __ ] up and scary. On a brighter note, let's talk about my first Pride event, which I attended while I was working at this Christian homeless shelter. It was June Pride Month and there was a big Pride festival happening in the downtown of the city of the homeless shelter. And I went by myself and just walked around and looked at the displays. Being a small East Texas town, there were just as many Christian displays and booths there, affirming ones, but still Christian ones, as there were secular pride displays. I didn't really know what to do or say at a Pride event given that I had never been to one or talked to anyone who had ever been to one. So, I just kind of walked around looking at the displays and there was like some uh there were some drag queens there that were like singing, I think. And I just kind of watched that for a little bit. And I did that for all of 15 minutes before I got nervous that someone might see me and that because this was a pretty small town that would get back to someone at my work and then that would lead to me being questioned again. Right? So, I left and regretted not getting to see more and maybe learn how to interact with the queer community. Now, with it being June, that meant that it was time to run our annual camp for the shelter. We had a kids day camp that was for homeless and lowincome families. It lasted for six or eight weeks, I can't remember exactly, and that started in June. I would be lead counselor. I would kind of direct the other counselors as well as our few dozen kids. Uh, one thing I did not have any creative control or direction over though was our camp shirts which my supervisor got. Yes, I acknowledge they're pretty terrible. I straight out of Compton the movie like

had recently come out and this was a popular type of shirt especially in our area. It didn't really make sense for a kids camp, but that's the shirt that we had. The camp was difficult for many reasons. One of those being that the workload was so heavy that I worked 12our days minimum every day, often more than that. But another challenge was that I spent all of that time with very Christian people and I had to kind of even ratchet up pretending that I was a Christian, too. Like every morning, the counselors would meet up before picking up all the kids. We would do some planning and then have like prayer time together. I usually let others pray over the group, but sometimes I couldn't avoid praying aloud for the group myself. It would be extremely suspicious if I, as the lead counselor here, never prayed aloud like everybody else did. So maybe once a week for this six to eight weeks, I an atheist would take everyone's prayer requests and then pray aloud over us all. I will say that while this wasn't my favorite thing to do, it definitely was not hard to do at all. I was raised Christian. I had just deconverted from Christianity and so I was used to doing this. So I just played the role and I don't think anyone suspected a thing. All right, let's talk about one particular prayer request that one of my counselors gave. Content warning here for transphobia. Uh I actually recorded a couple of people talking about this prayer request and there is some direct mockery and name calling of uh of a trans person. And yeah, if you don't want to hear that, I understand. Go to this timestamp. So, funny enough, I was actually transaffirming at least ideologically in my own head before I even became an atheist. I just hid that before I became an atheist publicly because that was super taboo. So, when one day one of my counselors was giving a very transphobic prayer request, I guess I decided to secretly record her. For what reason, I'm not entirely sure. I wouldn't have been able to show anyone and be like, "Look, this is transphobic. " But maybe I thought if I document this, maybe someday I'll be able to show like, "Hey, this is [ __ ] up. " Um, I guess today is that day — you know if that's what you really want to do or not without the side effects being — irreversible. So, if y'all could like keep him in your prayers that a this is not what he wants to do and that he is okay and accepts being who God made him to be because he did not try testosterone. — Okay, I want to just comment on the fact that she said that this person did not try testosterone as a way to deal with dysphoria. like you didn't use gender affirming hormones based on the gender I think you are in order to deal with your dysphoria. I've never heard anyone else actually say like, "Oh, well, I think that you're a man and so you should try testosterone if you're feeling dysphoric. " But she decided to say that. — That's why — decided to go the other way. And uh anyways, so you can keep them in your prayers and that he is content and at peace with me. So — have there been signs of anything before this or is it just all of a sudden or what was it like? — No, it's been leading up. Okay. The little girl I've been babysitting. It's her dad. Um, and since she was 6 months old, they have been introducing she has been around her dad as his other name and has seen him crossdressing. — Wow. — Yeah. So, I asked my counselor, "Oh, did this happen just all of a sudden or is it something that there's been signs of before the person uh decided to transition? " And my counselor's like, "Oh, yeah, no, no. there we like they've known about this has been going on for a really long time. And I mean to me I think I was asking about that just to kind of inquire about the narrative of like rapid onset gender dysphoria basically which is total [ __ ] Uh which her answer tends to reflect. — It's just weird. My best friend and I don't see eye to eye on everything. Um she was okay with some of it a lot more okay than I would have been. And so

yeah, I mean, it's been coming on, but it's gotten worse and worse. And he's been severely depressed. — Oh my gosh. — Yeah. So, they got a lot of stuff. So, if you think about it, if you don't mind, just send me right with God and get right with — find out who. — Yeah. You want uh this person to find out who they really are and what their true identity is, but they're not allowed to explore that. And they have to actually agree with you on what you think their identity is because you know better than them. Like you [ __ ] hear yourself. — Where's the depression coming from? Is it — a lot of different things? — But that's part of it. — Yeah. I asked uh oh, where's the depression coming from? And uh it's like maybe the depression that this person is experiencing is not just coming from oh a whole bunch of different life circumstances. Maybe a big contributing factor is that people talk about them like this and think that they know better in their life than them. Like I know that my typical audience knows this like the basics of you know affirming trans people and all that. It's just I wish that I could argue with these people a little bit in real life. — So, gotcha. — Yeah. If all the misgendering and shittiness was not bad enough coming from this lady, uh I'm sorry. It gets even worse with what one of my counselors responded and said, "Y'all will get a kick out of this. When I was in sixth grade, there was this kid. I was not a good person. and not a good kid. And so I was like still not a good person, but I'm working on it. But I did a lot of stupid things. And this one kid, — all right, the clip cuts out for a second right there. But uh he's talking about bullying a kid in sixth grade for their gender nonconformity. — I gave him a hard time back then. Called him names, this that whatever. Okay. didn't see this guy until I went to the hospital. And guess who my anesthesiologist was? — The last person to put me to sleep was that freak. — That's crazy. — Yeah, I bet you didn't feel good about that then. — I was like, "Dear God, please protect me and all my work. " — Yeah. If you didn't make out that last word, it's orififices. Um, so while this guy acknowledged that it's wrong to bully people, he still concluded his little anecdote with an insinuation that trans people are all sexual predators and that they'd be attracted to him in all his glory. Yeah, I'm sure. You know, in listening back to that, I do kind of wonder about my approach there in saying like, "Oh, I bet you regret bullying this person then. Uh, but kind of doing that in just like a joking way. " Obviously, everybody laughed. Um, I don't know. Obviously, what I could do while keeping my job was limited, but I guess let me know what you guys think was the right thing to do in that situation. Anyway, this sucks. I wish that I could fire these people retroactively. Now, for more on my boss's potential uh deconstruction process, at some point in the summer of 2016, there was some kind of crisis that was being reported in the news cycle, and the religious right was unironically responding with the phrase, you know, we're sending them thoughts and prayers. I would guess this was probably a gun violence thing because the religious right likes to say thoughts and prayers or something like that still instead of you know actually saying let's do something to prevent this from happening again. I was frustrated about this and I guess my boss was also frustrated about this because she sent me this comic making fun of the whole thoughts and prayers thing. Yeah. Uh even I was a bit surprised by that. At this point I was pretty certain that she knew I was not super Christian, but she also knew that I knew that she was not the model believer either. So I as a result became less worried about getting fired because if she ratted me out for disbelief, maybe I could do the same thing to her. Now I wouldn't have done that and I don't think we would have done that to each other at this point, but the

prospect of uh mutually assured destruction did keep me feeling safe in my job at that point. This next bit is one of the first things I knew I needed to include in this video. It is about the worst thing I ever did to keep my job, at least in my opinion. So, at camp, there was a Bible study, devotional time, I think every day, and one of the other counselors really led that up. My boss knew that I was not the right person to be leading those. So, she kind of just asked other counselors to do that, even though I would have been kind of the natural person to do that as like the lead counselor. Now, several weeks into the camp, one of my six-year-old campers had become very attached to me. God, he's got to be like 15 years old now. One day, the devotional Bible study time emphasized the importance of loving God with all of your heart. Afterward, this little boy came up to me and asked me point blank, "Mr. Drew, do you love God? " I just kind of froze. I didn't want to lie to him. My honest answer would have been, "No, because I don't believe in God. " But you can make up your own mind about God. And no matter what conclusion you come to about that, we can still be friends. But of course, if I said this, this little guy would probably really internalize that and then tell someone else what I said. And I would absolutely get fired for that. Cuz remember, one of the big bosses painted a scenario for me in which if I gave the wrong answer, I would be fired for sure. This was basically that scenario. So I had to give the answer that my bosses required of me or else lose my job. Although I will say that it wasn't just my job that was at stake here. I was the de facto leader of the camp entirely. Um, my boss didn't always or even regularly show up for work at several points during this camp. So, I had to hold the camp together myself. If I got fired, the camp would almost definitely collapse completely immediately. So, I did the best I could. I guess I in response to his question acted kind of distracted like I could hear someone calling my name off in the distance and started looking around and was like, "Uh uh yeah, yeah, sorry. Someone um someone's calling me over here. I got to go. " And I rushed off so we couldn't continue talking about it. I still feel pretty bad for lying to this kid, even in this way. And it's something that has kept me up nights several times actually. Uh, you know, I never felt bad for hiding my atheism from adults, even if it meant lying. This was just self-preservation in that instance. But this lying to a kid was very different. Okay, let's try to go out on a more positive note here, though. The homeless shelter had its own chapel that had, you know, pews and a stage with some instruments and electrical equipment and that kind of thing. I realized at some point while working there, you know, I could probably have my band practice in this chapel um and my drummer could use their drum set and this would basically be a free practice space for us uh that's available most of the time. So, I approached the people in charge of the schedule for the chapel and said, "Hey, you know, I work over at the Women and Children's Shelter. I have a Christian band. " It wasn't a Christian band. It was basically Weezer, but original songs. Um, I have a Christian band. Can my Christian band practice uh in the chapel? And unsurprisingly, the people said yes. So, we secured that practice space. When they asked me for details about the band, I did reassure them that while we might have a harder edge, sometimes we use distortion on the guitars and sometimes it was a little bit loud. uh everything that we do is informed by Christian

principles and a desire to show love and praise and worship to God. So if we get really into our music and it's a little bit loud, that just shows how much we like love God or something. Now, unfortunately, my band never uh made it out of the practice room, so to speak. It would have been fun to play some gigs, but it was really more just about having fun. I was the rhythm guitarist, the main songwriter and the lead vocalist. Uh the drummer was kind of like backup vocals and drums. He was actually like super musically talented and has since come out with some music stuff and I'm a little bit embarrassed by how bad my I think songwriting was compared to his talent that emerged later. But anyway, and then uh we had our basist who I actually taught to play bass just so that he could be the basis in the band. And then Taylor was our lead guitarist and I can't remember if she did some backup vocals, too. Fortunately, we did play in front of an audience a couple of times because sometimes when we'd be practicing, the men from the men's shelter would hear us because they were right next to the chapel and come in and just sit in the pews and listen because it was something to do, not because I don't know, we actually sounded very good. And one time when this happened, uh, we were on a pause between songs and a guy was like, "Oh, like play something heavy or something like I think kind of joking. " And so I consequently played him uh, Reigning Blood by Slayer because I was playing around with that riff at the time. Yeah. So that's how I played uh I don't know like kind of satanic sounding thrash metal at a Christian chapel under the guise of being the leader of a Christian band. The men listening to that seem to really enjoy it, by the way. They did not report me. I did not get in trouble. I played the Slayer riff uh without any consequence whatsoever. All right. So, I left this job at the very end of July in 2016. Taylor had found an aviation job in Fort Worth, which was far away. Uh, I made very little money at this place, and we didn't really want to stay in East Texas forever, so it made sense for Taylor and I to move away. Even with how challenging this job was, I absolutely hated putting in my notice. And on my last day, I took this big image of my uh absolutely trashed office right after camp ended. I again, I had been working like 12 to 16 hour days every day for 6 to 8 weeks. So, my office was a absolute disaster, but I just wanted to have something to remember that part in my life. Now, as I was leaving, other people there seemed sad to see me go. Um, I got along really well with everyone there. Like, I think I was pretty wellliked. And I thought about before actually walking out that door, going around and telling people, you know, kindly, by the way, I've been an atheist the whole time I've worked here pretty much. Uh so as you can see atheists can not only be good people but you already like one of them. So please like don't be bigoted against atheists anymore. I didn't end up doing that because I h I needed to put some of the people that worked there as references on my resume. So, I guess uh they probably ended up finding out that I was an atheist later when I'm sure many of them stumbled across my YouTube videos. But this may be the first time that any of them really have confirmation that I was in fact an atheist who worked at a Christian ministry and everything worked just fine. All right, thank you guys so much for watching. I've been Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic. A special thanks to my patrons for their constant love and support. And praise be unto River, our lady and the personal savior of this channel. If you are an apostate in need, like I once was, then there are resources linked in the description to help you find community and mental health support. Remember to be kind to others in the comments. And until next time, stay skeptical.