Rhett and Link talked about rejecting Christianity and leaving the church after growing up in church and being missionaries, ministers, Christian performers, etc. Rhett and Link each dedicated an episode of the Ear Biscuits podcast to explaining their process from 'sold out for Jesus' to leaving the church. Rhett's is Rhett's Spiritual Deconstruction - Ear Biscuits - February 9, 2020 @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qbna6t1bzw)
He said he had a calvinistic background.
Rhett and Link, being the lifelong friends they are, were open with each other about this process practically from the beginning, but they are different people and have very different stories.
Summary
He was disillusioned by how the canonization of the Old Testament was not clean, there is a young earth vs. millions & billions split within a church that claims to have "the truth."
When he had doubts, he went to apologetics to redrive his faith.
He read The Language of God by Francis Collins, a book that validates evolution by a Christian geneticist. We have a fused chromosome with vestigal telemeres in the middle, apparently from great apes. We also share retroviruses with "close relatives" of our species.
Evolution is not a desperate attempt to explain away God - it is actually reasonable and evidence-based.
Since Collins and even C. S. Lewis believe in theistic evolution, he knew he had a reasonable belief system, but he felt betrayed by Christian experts who misrepresented Evolution. Now there were two camps - Adam & Eve are historical or they are inaccurate. Evolution doesn't really support Adam & Eve, and he feels the former camp is forcing a belief in their existence.
There is no evidence for the exodus, no Egyptian records of Israeli captivity, no support for Joshua's conquest of Canaan vs. a simple branch forming within the Canaanite peoples. But of course archaeology is always shifting and having massive reversals, so we could always find the evidence later.
Still, he could not believe the Old Testament as literal.
But Jesus is what matters.
He was a full-time minister so questioning his faith put his livelihood at risk. It hurt his wife if he brought it up, since she is Christian and trying to raise Christian children with him.
He moved to California, joined an evangelical church, and adopted California Christianity. In a diverse place, you are confronted with gray all the time. Vocalizing doubts about evolution, Adam and Eve, homosexuality, etc is more common in L.A., while these questions were discouraged in North Carolina. The Bible is not true, but it resonates and feels true in day-to-day life. Of course, people blame LA for Rhett's loss of faith, but the doubt crept in long before he moved to California.
He was finally courageous enough to examine Christ from a historical angle and found His existence is not as clean as he had hoped.
Jesus seems to be a mix of propaganda and real history, which was deeply unsettling.
Rhett could not lean on the facts of the Bible, but the Bible tells you 'My thoughts are higher,' so he tried blind faith to see if there would be a breakthrough.
He wondered how a 'burning in the bosom' could have more value for a Christian than for a Mormon. How is he not a coward? How does he force himself to have faith? But he did not want to lose the foundation of his life.
He tried the worldview out and acted as though the Bible was wrong. The Bible suddenly felt more human.
He asked unaskables - Would God order His people to slaughter men, women, and children by the thousands? Is every religious experience outside of my sect illegitimate? Are the majority of people who ever lived going to spend an eternity in Hell? He also asked what would happen to his marriage, what he will teach his kids, and what he can replace Christianity with. What is his life's meaning? What is his purpose?
He was angry at the great thinkers who lied and mischaracterized the legitimacy of his religion. He was an atheist for a flash, then he became merely open-minded. He lost appetite for certainty.
He identifies as a hopeful agnostic. We may not need to know what the truth is. History indeed moves toward a point, guided by a god. But he is more focused on his life and the certain. His wife is doubting now. Marriage is having a second wind, and they navigate this together.
He is surprised to have secular friends who are good people. He thought church was keeping him off the street and from doing drugs. He hasn't changed since leaving church, though. A lot of morality doesn't need the Bible to back it up, since there are social consequences. In fact, he has an innate desire to be moral, and that likely pushed his faith, not the other way around.
My response
Overall, he seems to trust Christian thinkers over God, expect a 'clean' path from God's revelation to man to the Bible and modern Christianity, and have bottled up questions and doubts over the years that his church would not allow him to address. Link's story reveals how wrapped up they were in church culture, and it makes me wonder if they never knew what it meant to pursue a relationship with God. Church is a separate thing.
"Truth" is seem to be central to Rhett's faith. At the same time, "not questioning" seemed to be central to his community.
I'm not sure what he defines truth as, since he seems to expect all truths in all fields and all subjects to be able to be derived from the Bible or religious retreat speakers or his church sermons. There are things the Bible does not cover clearly, and though greater revelation can come from the Holy Spirit, it's not like the Bible puts exceeding importance on spiritual truths, since they will be outdated at the time of resurrection anyway (1 Corinthians 13). I wonder if he is even familiar with 'inerrancy' vs 'infallibility' and the myriad of stances on it?
Regardless, the Church doesn't have the detailed "truth" on how the world was created or human genetic history. We have some answers, but clearly Scripture only covered so much. Science doesn't have answers either, though. It can only observe the current physical universe and develop theories and models to explain it. These explanations are a functional foundation for engineering, but they can't be treated as concrete answers when they are forever being rocked by new discoveries. And more, cosmology isn't even within the rational scientific method's scope.
He seems to reject the human element of Christianity.
It's all from God, yet, but the church canonized the Bible over time, there are multiple historical perspectives and accounts, there are similar and overlapping myths, a new covenant brought new practices, Gentiles were grafted in, etc. Also, heresy exists, and not everyone is a good representative of their own camp. How could a religion form around God and the Law and the Prophets and the life of Christ and the Apostles over a period of thousands of years "cleanly?"
He redrove his faith with apologetics?
I've always been presented with apologetics classes as preparation for discussing my faith with other people, not myself. Apologetics experts are no replacement for God. If it's just a system you arbitrarily try to align with, what's the point?
I outright pray to God to reveal my doubts and disbeliefs. And I read the Bible to combat them. He really doesn't make it sound like he went to God first for anything, and he really doesn't make it sound like the Bible is central to his search for truth, despite claiming it should be held to that standard. He just quotes the verses atheists know, so I wonder how deeply and frequently he examined the Bible. He was a pastor and missionary, so I am sure he's read a lot of Bible, but it really bothers me how marginalized it is in his own discussion of the Bible's authenticity.
Did everyone for real not let him or anyone in the church ask questions?
Especially for someone so into apologetics, it's absurd to me that you would not question anything in the Bible or Christianity before joining church staff. Children in my Sunday School growing up asked why God would kill people with a flood. It's natural to wonder that at some point, isn't it? Would those children get scolded in his church or something? It sounds like an issue of being taught to be a Christian instead of coming to God through Jesus yourself. Link says if you asked questions in their old church, you were viewed as a problem case. What! There are so many people in my church who would crave for someone to ask questions, pivotal to the faith, frivolous scholarly kinds, wisdom-based, or otherwise. And I do ask my elders a lot. It sounds so unhealthy to not ask questions.
I hear people say they got out of their small town church and that it was totally a cult, and I get offended "cult" is thrown around like that. Real cults can leave devastating damage on people and their families even after escaping. These "cult survivors" just make it sound like mommy and daddy forced them to go to church when they hated it, which is so not a cult. But hearing someone actually explain their church in detail for 2 hours...yeah, that actually does sound like a cult. All his friends and reputation was wrapped up in this church. His job was at this church. He met opposition if he ever tried to ask questions. He was downright scared to talk about his doubts or leave. Uh, that's kind of cult-like actually. Rhett gave me a new empathy for these people.
Did he not believe in demons or any supernatural force outside of God?
If even many Christians are cautious of their own religious experiences, of course it is sensible that there would be legitimate but unclean religious experiences out there. He and Link seem extremely offended that I would de-legitimize the spiritual experiences of false prophets and those who give great spiritual significance to mundane occurrences, though, while upholding the Prophets and those that are consistent with Scripture.
Did he not understand spiritual warfare between the spirit and the flesh?
When he explains how his ego burns against people who misrepresent him, and he wants to be a jerk sometimes, that is the kind of "bad person" Christianity keeps you from being. That is his (my and everyone else's) innate desire in the flesh - serving yourself. 'Doing drugs' is such an immature view of sin, I'm surprised he talked like that as a former preacher.
As God grows in your life and your self diminishes, your pride and desire for serving yourself will no longer be so incensed against your neighbor and will be replaced by love and joy.
Just how do I take it in general?
It's really shocking someone like this who has been prominently Christian for so long and worked with Big Idea Entertainment and everything would stop being Christian over these fundamental hurdles to accepting God. God's total destruction (the Amalekites, Sodom & Gomorrah, the Flood, Hell, etc) in the face of Him being a God of Salvation and Redemption, God's rejection of homosexuality and other sins despite His love, and the disappointment that Scripture focuses on God's plan of redemption instead of the revelation of every secret and mystery - these are not complex, obscure issues only addressable by the masters of apologetics. They are very immediate questions that every Christian of all ages has probably had to address. Children ask these to Sunday School teachers.
I wonder if more sermons and Christian media should explicitly address the matter of God's saving of the remnant (which can necessitate the destruction of the majority) and His desire to be first before any self-serving pride, idolatry, or worldly identity (including homosexuality). As often as I hear "I don't follow the mean God of the Old Testament, only the nice Jesus of the New Testament," I don't think I've ever received a sermon or VeggieTales skit dispelling that meme. These are huge stumbling blocks for people, though, so they are a huge opportunity for the church to direct people to read their Bibles and discover God's character and the pattern of His behavior.