Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 2190

Introduction and Guest Welcome

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's September 2, 2026, and today we have a former megachurch pastor here to talk about his own religious transition and deconstruction after becoming a legit megachurch pastor. This is a long part in a series on Mormon Stories podcast of guests who were members of other high demand religion churches or traditions that weren't Mormon. And we have with us today Dr. Todd Phillips, who is also known as the deconstructed pastor. Todd Phillips, welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast.

Todd Phillips [00:00:43] Thanks, John. I appreciate you having me.

John Dehlin [00:00:45] So, in your glory days of being an evangelical pastor, did you ever think you'd be on Mormon Stories Podcast?

Todd Phillips [00:00:52] No, it's the last place I thought I'd be. Things have taken a turn really quickly

John Dehlin [00:00:59] at the peak of your megachurch pastor. Tell us where you worked just so people can get a sense for the heights you achieved.

Todd Phillips [00:01:07] Yeah. So the last 10 years I was pastoring was McLean Bible Church for seven years. That's up in the Washington, D.C. area. And then I was at Lake Point Church just outside of Dallas, Texas for just over two years.

John Dehlin [00:01:20] And these are mega churches. How big?

Todd Phillips [00:01:22] Yeah, McLean Bible Church at the time had 12, 14,000 people. On the weekend, Lake Point was just a little smaller, maybe 8 to 10.

John Dehlin [00:01:29] And you've preached to audiences that large?

Todd Phillips [00:01:32] Yeah, on the weekends. So each one of them had a senior pastor and I was a teaching pastor, so I took about half the pulpit time each year.

John Dehlin [00:01:41] And then just really quickly, your training, just so that people get a sense, because I was surprised to see how educated you are.

Todd Phillips [00:01:49] I have a Master's of divinity with biblical languages from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I did a doctoral fellowship at Princeton Theological Seminary and then got my doctorate actually from Dallas Theological Seminary. So way over educated.

John Dehlin [00:02:04] And your. Your high school graduating class? Just so I can date you. I can age you.

Todd Phillips [00:02:08] Yeah, 1986.

John Dehlin [00:02:09] So you're a year older than me, basically.

Todd Phillips [00:02:11] I'm 57. I turned 57 last week.

John Dehlin [00:02:14] I just turned 57.

Todd Phillips [00:02:15] Did you really?

John Dehlin [00:02:16] That means you graduated young.

Todd Phillips [00:02:17] I was young. I was 16.

John Dehlin [00:02:19] Yeah. I was 17.

Todd Phillips [00:02:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:20] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:02:21] Fun.

John Dehlin [00:02:21] All right. And we're both Texan because I grew up.

Todd Phillips [00:02:23] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:02:23] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:02:24] We got a lot in common.

John Dehlin [00:02:25] Lot in common. All right, well, thanks for joining us. Just really quickly, please like and subscribe. We don't do product endorsements or anything like that. We exist at the generosity of our donors. So if you're a donor. Thank you. If you're not A donor and you value this type of content. To become a monthly supporter, you go to mormonstories.org donate and become a monthly donor. We are getting sued by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We think it's a false, inappropriate lawsuit. In my opinion, it's to silence and bankrupt us. You can learn about that as well@mormonstories.org, i believe it's legal, but we're also taking support for our legal fund from that what we believe is inappropriate lawsuit.

John Dehlin [00:03:09] So, anyway, we're excited to have you joining us today. We will be doing this interview in two parts. We're not going to sacrifice the long form, but we've learned that breaking our interviews up into two parts allows YouTube to translate the audio into multiple languages. And so that's important enough to where you should just know we're going to do the long form, but we're going to be in two parts. So just so you know. Anyway, one of the things that was so fun to see, and we just talked about this before we started, one of the fun things to see in your outline, you listed three, let's just say, influential presences in your deconstruction or reconstruction.

John Dehlin [00:03:47] And you listed Ed McClellan, Brit Hartley and a little bit of Mormon stories. And I thought, oh my go. Ex Mormons or progressive Mormons or Mormons in social media have had a decent influence. If those are the three you're mentioning.

Todd Phillips [00:04:04] I wouldn't say decent. I would say massive, well above decent. Yeah, quite an impact on me.

John Dehlin [00:04:09] Oh, well, I mean, I'm really honored and on behalf of our community, I'm so happy to hear we've been helpful. And hopefully my hope is that part of why I brought you on is because Mormons can see their journey sometimes even more clearly through the experience of someone outside the tradition. So that's why I brought on Scientologists and Jehovah's Witnesses and Orthodox Jews and the like. But also because if we can help other traditions, you know, reach and help the same amount of people as we have, I think that's gravy. So hopefully we can help you do for your tradition what we've helped our tradition do.

Todd Phillips [00:04:55] Well, I've taken a lot of, I've taken quite a lead from you, just learning from the videos and the interviews you've had. And I hope this is one of those for others that are questioning the Mormon faith or any religion for that matter, your videos of these Mormon stories, the crossover is quite remarkable. I learned a lot by watching these videos. Early on, and that's why they had such an impact on me.

John Dehlin [00:05:17] Yeah. The last disclaimer I just want to say is I do not identify as an atheist and I do not identify as an anti Christian. I am pro people believing in a divine being if it helps them and if it helps the world. And I am pro Christianity to the extent that Christianity leads people to do healthy, happy things. And so I'm not. I do not conduct this interview with the desire to lead people out of belief in God or in Jesus, even if that's sometimes where people end up. I just want to state at the outset that's not my goal here, even though that may be where you are and we'll wait to see where he is. But I just want to state that up front because I get accused of that way too often.

Todd Phillips [00:06:05] Yeah, it makes sense. And I will say I consider myself a non resistant, non believer. And we'll obviously share this in my story. But, yeah, I have no agenda other than to share my journey and help people who are primarily evangelical Christians who are questioning some of those theological precepts feel safe in doing so, regardless of whether that takes them back to their original Christian faith, some adjusted form of theology, or where I currently find myself.

John Dehlin [00:06:32] Yeah. Yeah, perfect. All right, well, let's jump in. Normally I say, where does your Mormon story begin? But you don't have a Mormon story before today, so. Or maybe you do, but I also know you kind of converted to evangelical Christianity in adulthood, sort of. So where does your faith story begin? Or your secular story before your faith story?

Todd's Childhood and Family Background

Todd Phillips [00:06:53] Yeah. So I grew up.

John Dehlin [00:06:55] Take us back to your childhood, I guess.

Todd Phillips [00:06:56] Yeah, I grew up without much religious context at all. In fact, the only thing that we would do to go to church was my aunt actually took us or suggested we go. My mother and I would go with them on Easter and Christmas to church, to candlelight services in Austin. I can't even remember the Methodist Church name. But we went to the Methodist Church. Yeah. And we would go. I would say I probably went half a dozen times during my childhood, maybe more.

Todd Phillips [00:07:24] And then I was. I went to an Episcopalian private elementary school. I got a scholarship to go, and my mom was. Was all over that. So she sent me there from second through sixth grade. And we had chapel every day. And, and I, I. When I look back on it, I would say I assumed there probably was a God because we talked about God a lot inside those chapel services, but that really was the extent of it. It was just a God out there that might be There. And it didn't affect my life or cause me to think a certain way in my childhood. So I really didn't have any connection to that whatsoever.

Todd Phillips [00:07:59] It wasn't until I was 24 that my life was. I would say it was kind of an existential crisis for me. I was 24.

John Dehlin [00:08:07] Before we get there, really quick, tell me about your home in terms of a father, mother, a divided family, divorce, siblings. Just. I just like to have a little context.

Todd Phillips [00:08:17] Yeah. So I'm an only child.

John Dehlin [00:08:18] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:08:19] My dad left when I was six months old, so I didn't have a lot of connection with him at all. He would show up about once a year through my childhood, I'd say a dozen times. I would see him between, you know, birth and 16 or 17, and just consider that normal. I just thought that's the way things were. My mom raised me. She was full time at the Internal Revenue Service. I was kind of a latchkey kid. My grandparents lived next door, so we lived in a mobile home park in Southeast Austin.

John Dehlin [00:08:49] Nice.

Todd Phillips [00:08:49] And we were in the left trailer, and my grandparents were on the right. My grandfather was a gas station attendant. My grandmother was a former army nurse, and she worked at the state hospital for many years, night shift, quite often. So it was a. I look back, it was a bit chaotic, but it just seemed, again, normal to me. So that's. That's my background. So I saw my mom at night, but I spent most of my time kind of being brought up in many ways by my grandmother. They were both incredible women. So I was raised by two women. I was an only child. And that's kind of the backdrop of my upbringing.

John Dehlin [00:09:27] And what were your middle and high school years like, just in terms of what were you into? Did you get into trouble? Were you a super athlete, super academic, or a burnout? Where were you?

Todd Phillips [00:09:38] Yeah, so in middle school and high school, I came out of this elementary school, private institution, and getting into public school was quite a shock for me. Just a different world. And in Austin, they were busing. So they were moving people from schools all over town and busing them to different places to create some more integration in what were largely unintegrated schools.

Todd Phillips [00:10:02] And so it's quite a shock to me. I would say I was very open. I wasn't particularly a jocker. I took honors classes, so I was in debate. I broke my back. I actually broke my vertebrae in my freshman year. So I was a football player till then.

Todd Phillips [00:10:22] That was my sport. And then I did gymnastics in the off season. So I broke Injured my back to the point where I couldn't do sports anymore after my freshman year. So the rest of my high school was spent actually doing debate. And so I shifted from sports into debate. And because of that shift, I. I met a lot of people in a lot of different arenas, you know, in and inside high school. And so I kind of had friends in all areas.

John Dehlin [00:10:46] Here's a question few people will probably ever ask you. Did you double Ruby? You know what that is?

Todd Phillips [00:10:51] No.

John Dehlin [00:10:52] I thought that was the distinction in Texas for, like.

Todd Phillips [00:10:54] Oh, for the debate.

John Dehlin [00:10:55] Debate distinction.

Todd Phillips [00:10:57] I told you about my memory.

John Dehlin [00:10:58] It's been too long.

Todd Phillips [00:10:58] Yeah, it's been too long. I won the Austin City Lincoln Douglas debate.

John Dehlin [00:11:03] I remember you were ld.

Todd Phillips [00:11:04] You weren't standard Lincoln Douglas.

John Dehlin [00:11:06] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:11:06] LD debate. Yeah, I loved it.

John Dehlin [00:11:08] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:11:09] I loved it. Yeah. So that was my thing. So I had a lot of friends in a lot of different areas and didn't cling to one group like jocks or anything like that. Because of debate. I got interested in politics, and I really, really flourished in that debate environment. And my teacher. My debate teacher was the. That taught me into taking honors classes, which I was kind of avoiding until she had an influence on my life.

Todd Phillips [00:11:36] And I was also quite a partier. So, I mean, there were a lot of pieces or aspects to my life that I went out a lot because I didn't have a lot of, I think, fatherly influence. And I kind of ran my roost, so to speak. The two women that were raising me tried to kind of control me, but that was a challenge.

Todd Phillips [00:12:00] I was very. I think for me, I was always looking to connect with people and always felt like even though I knew a lot of people, I was a bit on the outside looking in. I always felt a little different. I'm not sure why it didn't cause me not to build relationships and have friends and go out and do fun things, but I was really moving in a lot of different directions, just trying to find myself, I think, for quite a long time.

John Dehlin [00:12:25] And I'm guessing. And I think we talked about this, that debate you mentioned. You did boy state?

Todd Phillips [00:12:30] American Legion, Boy state. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:34] It seems like that's pointing you in the direction of possibly law school, possibly politics. Is that kind of by the time you're graduating from high school?

Todd Phillips [00:12:41] Yeah, I was considering it from my junior year on, considering law and politics both. I was probably leaning toward law. It wasn't. You know, I haven't talked about this in a long time, but when I graduated from high school, I had a 4.0 debate. You know, I kept my grades up, but I was also making some poor decisions as far as alcohol and drugs and things like that. And so my freshman year, I went from a 4.0 in high school to my freshman year at University of Texas was a seven. I got very aggressively involved in drugs and partying and making really, really poor decisions in life. And there were a lot of different reasons for that, but it caused me to really. It really kind of derailed me, obviously, from law school and some other goals that I had and kind of put me on a trajectory that turned out to be quite negative.

John Dehlin [00:13:34] I'm sorry about that. Yeah, and we'll talk about that first. Did you know this is just for fun? I'm being silly for a second, even though this is a serious topic. Did you know you were at. Did you go to UT your second year?

Todd Phillips [00:13:48] No.

John Dehlin [00:13:48] Oh, you dropped out after your first year?

Todd Phillips [00:13:50] Yeah, after. Well, they. They put me on probation, so I went to. I went to Texas Tech University and I was there for three years after that. I didn't graduate from Tech, but I did go to Tech, so I just. I needed to get out of the environment. It was too much like high school. It was just like a bigger high school. I was 16 when I went to college. Yeah, I was way too young. I was emotionally immature.

John Dehlin [00:14:07] Okay, you dropped out of.

Todd Phillips [00:14:09] Yeah, so I left ut, went to Tech.

John Dehlin [00:14:10] Okay, okay. Okay. So did you finish your undergrad?

Todd Phillips [00:14:15] Yeah, so I got. I went to Texas Tech University for about three years. About Raiders.

John Dehlin [00:14:19] Was that Bobby Knight years?

Todd Phillips [00:14:21] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:14:22] Nice.

Todd Phillips [00:14:23] You've got a good. I wouldn't have remembered that without you. The Tech was great. I left there a semester before

John Dehlin [00:14:34] I

Todd Phillips [00:14:34] graduated, fell in love with this girl, and moved to Houston and didn't finish college. It wasn't until I became a Christian at the age of 24 that I decided to finish my undergrad and go off to postgraduate studies for theology.

John Dehlin [00:14:49] So you moved to Houston for a girl?

Todd Phillips [00:14:50] Yeah, I moved to Houston for a girl. I sure did.

John Dehlin [00:14:52] There are worse places than Houston.

Todd Phillips [00:14:54] No Houston school. I enjoyed it. Yeah. And then I moved when that. When that didn't work out. After a while I moved back to Austin. So.

John Dehlin [00:15:00] Okay, so pre.

Todd Phillips [00:15:02] A scenic route through college.

John Dehlin [00:15:04] So pre. Conversion to Christianity or evangelical Christianity. What were you doing professionally?

Todd Phillips [00:15:12] Well, I spent a lot of years in. In insurance. I actually got an insurance job when I was still at Tech. Liked it, made good money with it. So I did that for quite a while. And it was, I would say my. From 17 or 18 till 24, when I had my conversion experience. Those were some very difficult years of just trying. I was still trying to find myself. And it was that freshman year of college when things went off the rails with drug use and some other decisions that I made that really put me on a trajectory that continued in a very negative way for about seven years until I became a Christian. Christianity was really what brought me back from the brink.

John Dehlin [00:15:58] Yeah. As religions often do. Did you get married or have kids during that time. Time period that you want to talk about? And I'm not saying in detail. I'm just saying, yeah, I had a.

Todd Phillips [00:16:09] That the girl in Houston I was married to for a very brief time. So we got married. Divorced within a year and a half. Just those kinds of poor decisions over that seven years. No kids then.

John Dehlin [00:16:19] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:16:19] I have three kids now from another America.

John Dehlin [00:16:21] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:16:22] Yeah.

A Conversion Experience and Early Faith

John Dehlin [00:16:22] Let's get to your. Your Saul on the Road to Damascus experience.

Todd Phillips [00:16:27] Yeah. So I found myself in Denver, Colorado, at the age of 24 and still no undergraduate degrees, trying to figure my life. And I just realized that things weren't. They just continued to not go the way that I thought they would. And I remembered who I was in high school. I remembered debate. I remembered Boys State. I remembered wanting to be a lawyer. I always, in the back of my mind, knew politics was a passion. And I just lost that path. I mean, it just seemed like a million miles away.

Todd Phillips [00:16:56] And at the time, I was living with a girl in Denver. And it was a very unhealthy relationship as well. It was just a continuation of seven years of bad decisions. And I found myself one night just thinking to myself, I couldn't sleep. I still remember this.

Todd Phillips [00:17:17] I remember thinking, you know, if I keep going this route, I'm just going to keep going down this path, and it's just going to get worse and worse and worse, and I can't stand it now. This is a horrible place to be. This is not who I'm supposed to be. This is. This is another person's life that I'm living and I shouldn't be doing this. I owe it to myself and my family and friends and the world not to be in this kind of train wreck of choices.

Todd Phillips [00:17:42] And I just remember thinking, I need to do something. And right about that time, and I don't remember if it was right before or right after, but my mom would call me every once in a while. Didn't like where I was either. Always wanted me to make some better decisions, come back to Austin, go back to school, all that stuff.

Todd Phillips [00:17:57] And she called me one night and said, hey, I ran into an old friend of yours and who is a Christian now. She was looking for a way to get my attention. And this guy that was now a Christian supposedly was a guy that I did a lot of partying with and just drugs and alcohol. Very poor decisions during a chapter in my life. So I remember him in that world and the idea that he would be a Christian and even further than that. He had a DVD out, a song. He was a singer now and he had a Christian dvd. And she was all excited to have seen him at a concert.

Todd Phillips [00:18:35] And I remember thinking, that's there's no way that's a scam. This guy's making money off these CDs. It's anything but he's really a Christian or that he's changed his ways. And one night, really late one night, that really bothered me. And so I called him back when you called people collect and had them take the charges when you made the phone call. So I tracked him down on information, found his number, called him at 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning, and he answered the phone and accepted the collect call.

Todd Phillips [00:19:01] And I remember saying to him, listen, I know it's late, sorry to call you so late. I know it's been years. My mom told me that she saw you at this concert and that you're a Christian. I just have one question. What's the scam? I just need to know what's really going on. And his simple answer was, look, it's not a scam. I'm a Christian now. Jesus has changed my life. I do have an album out.

Todd Phillips [00:19:24] It's just my life's changed. And if you want to know more about it, I can tell you about it. Well, that started a conversation that went on for a month, John. It was every night, several hours, for maybe just a bit over a month.

Todd Phillips [00:19:38] And he would tell me the story of Jesus. He would quote Scripture. And what he didn't know is I had an old Bible from my Episcopal private school in a box and I had gotten that Bible out. And he would quote a passage from Matthew or First Corinthians or wherever, and he didn't know it. But I had a notepad because I couldn't flip my Bible quickly enough to find out if he was telling me the truth. Because I figured if I catch this guy in a lie one time, I got him and I can just move on. But what he said to me was compelling.

Todd Phillips [00:20:12] So I would write on a notepad every single passage and then when we'd hang up after two hours that night, I'd go back and I'd read every single one of those passages. So without him knowing it, I was validating and verifying everything he was saying and reading the Bible every night. And this lasted for a month. I mean, it must have been 60, 70, 80 hours of conversations and scripture reading.

John Dehlin [00:20:31] What a nice gift he gave you.

Todd Phillips [00:20:33] Yeah, it was crazy. So at the end of this month or so, he said, listen, I've told you everything, Todd. I mean, you have the whole story and the whole gospel story from an evangelical Christian perspective. You can be forgiven of all your sins, past, present and future. The stuff you haven't even done yet.

Todd Phillips [00:20:49] You can start a new life. All these bad decisions that you've made just disappear, and you can start a brand new life. And I remember thinking to myself that this is true. This is huge. But he told me, he goes, look, I've told you everything. I want you to get the keys off your counter, go get in your car. Go drive out on a hillside tonight somewhere outside of Denver. Look out over the skylights, go talk to God and just do what he tells you to do. And I was like, no way. And I hung up the phone and I grabbed the keys and I got in the car and I went on that hillside and I did exactly what he told me to do.

Todd Phillips [00:21:25] And I really. It. It's. It's one of those memories that just, you know, it's etched in my mind and certainly in my emotions. I remember being in that car by myself, and I remember saying to this God that I, you know, that. That I had been told was there. You know, look, if you're real and there really is a Jesus and everything in the Bible is true, and I really can start over. I've tried everything else.

Todd Phillips [00:21:52] I've got nowhere else to go unless I want to continue down the path I'm on. And so if you're there, I'm in. Forgive me. Start a relationship with me that's real. This guy told me to tell me I'm going to give my life to you. And so I'm. I'll hand over my life and my decisions, and I want to start a relationship with you, like almost verbatim what he told me to say, kind of the sinner's prayer.

Todd Phillips [00:22:16] And for me, now, I don't see it this way any longer, obviously, where I am right now. But for me, at the time, it was maybe one. Well, it was definitely one of the most profound moments from an emotional Experiential perspective. I had a very powerful experience in the car that night.

Todd Phillips [00:22:32] So much so that I came off the hillside and woke up the next morning. It may have been the morning after. So one or two mornings later, later, and sat down with the girl that I was living with and said, look, I know this sounds weird, but I met Jesus on a hillside when I went out in the car last night or the night before.

Todd Phillips [00:22:52] And I'm a Christian now, and everything that we're doing here just seems off. It doesn't seem like it's right for my life. I don't think we're right together. And I'm going to move back to Austin pretty soon. And you're welcome to come back with me.

Todd Phillips [00:23:08] I'm guessing. I'm going to go to church every day. I'm not sure exactly how that happens now, as a Christian, but I'm going back to Austin. My family's there, this guy's there. There's a church there that I can go to, and you're welcome to come with me, or you can stay here and just keep everything that we've created together and I'm out of here. And she said, I'll keep everything.

Todd Phillips [00:23:28] And so she stayed. I went back to Austin, moved in on the couch of this friend's apartment, and started going to Hyde Park Baptist Church in Austin in February of 1994. So that was it. And when I say like a profound experience, it wasn't an intellectual exercise. I mean, I really do believe this. If he would have told me about Buddhism or Mormonism or Catholicism, any religion that would offer me a clean break, any religious ideology that would give me freedom to move forward without my old life, any forgiveness, opportunity, new chapter, I would have gone that route. It happened to be an evangelical version of Christianity that I was offered that day. It still doesn't negate. The profound experience that I had in

John Dehlin [00:24:25] that car is not called a theophany. Isn't that what it's called? And weirdly, that's how Mormonism started. Joseph Smith had a theophany, or at least that's what he claimed. I think he did.

Todd Phillips [00:24:36] So, I mean, yeah, I've had an experience like that. So when I hear those kinds of religious experiences, I assume that it happened because I certainly experienced it.

John Dehlin [00:24:48] That's what William James wrote about in the variety of religious experiences. It's tale as old as time.

Todd Phillips [00:24:54] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:24:55] And I'm glad it happened for you.

Todd Phillips [00:24:57] Yeah, it certainly got me on track. I don't know what would have happened

John Dehlin [00:25:02] without that yeah, no, I think.

Todd Phillips [00:25:05] And being a person, that's kind of all in. I mean, I just. Going to Sunday school wasn't enough. And then obviously my education and everything came from that and then pastoring. But, you know, the first few months when I got back to Austin, I just remember feeling this tremendous weight lifted off me. I mean, the world was on my shoulders and it was gone. I still, I can tell you it was just that it was that dramatic from an experiential perspective. Now I no longer believe that was actually God transforming my life. It could have been the version of evangelical Christianity that I was part of for so many years is what I question now. But the experience was incredible.

John Dehlin [00:25:52] So how did you change your life?

Todd Phillips [00:25:54] Well, when I got back to Austin, I started going to Hyde Park. I went forward a few weeks, a few Sundays later to officially accept Christ in front of the church and agree to be baptized. I was baptized on February 6th.

John Dehlin [00:26:09] Is that a megachurch? Was it then Hyde Park?

Todd Phillips [00:26:11] Yeah, it was considered a megachurch. Had about 2,500 people on the weekends. And back then in the 80s, that was a pretty large church. Things have progressed since then for large churches, but yeah, it was a large church. And I was baptized on February 6th. I started giving my testimony in Sunday school classes. I was kind of the bad boy gone good.

Todd Phillips [00:26:35] And inside the Southern Baptist Church, that was quite a story. And I was being encouraged to tell that quite often. So I would go to Sunday school classes. And then I eventually got in front of the Hyde park church and gave my testimony in front of the church. And then after that happened many other Baptist churches around Austin, somehow the name got out. And so I would be invited to come speak at these other churches and tell my story of God's grace and transformation in my life. And that's really what kind of started me in ministry. I didn't plan on it. I was just trying to go to church and be a good Christian and put borders in my life.

Todd Phillips [00:27:13] I needed some borders and I got a job at Dell Computer. At Dell. I was there for about two years. So that was the first job I had post Christian experience. And it allowed me to work full time there, kind of get my finances in order and continue going to Hyde park while I got my undergraduate degree and Dell actually financed my undergrad degree from Concordia University.

John Dehlin [00:27:39] Love it.

Todd Phillips [00:27:39] Yeah,

John Dehlin [00:27:42] it's been a while since my Microsoft days where I thought about Dell. But Microsoft and Dell go way back. They do, yeah. Okay, so you get your degree and you're working for Dell. Where do you go next?

Early Ministry Career and Church Work

Todd Phillips [00:27:54] Yes. I was in Dell for a while, a couple years, and then I got invited by the singles minister at Hyde park to be on staff at the church. And so that was a major transition from what am I going to do with my life? I'm working at Dell, maybe I'll just continue being in sales or whatever. But I had a passion for ministry and this guy, singles minister John Walters, knew that. And so he kind of fashioned a position for me, kind of an intern role in the singles ministry. And that's really what started me in ministry. So I was getting my undergraduate degree, finishing Concordia, started working for John at Hyde park, and at the same time I started a ministry, a new Sunday school class.

Todd Phillips [00:28:35] He said, well, why don't you come in and help me start a Sunday school class and reach out to Dell. Because there was just a bunch of young 20 somethings at Dell. I was 24 at the time, so everybody was my age at Dell. Everyone was in their mid-20s. And so he said, start inviting people, we'll create a Sunday school class and you can help lead it and then invite people to it. And so we started a Sunday school class. So I helped lead that for six months while I was getting finishing up Concordia and then decided I was going to go to get a seminary degree.

Todd Phillips [00:29:05] So now I was going to go, I felt called, we call it called by God, to go into ministry full time. So I accepted the call and agreed to go to Southwestern Seminary to get my Master of Divinity program or degree with Biblical languages because I wanted to be a preacher.

Todd Phillips [00:29:22] So that all happened within that one or two year timeframe as a very young Christian. One of the interesting side notes about that is when I started that Sunday school class, I at that time John also took me and about five guys, five other men through a Experiencing God Bible study. It was by Henry Blackaby, I still remember it. And it was a 12 week Bible study on how to give your life to God and your lifestyle to God, to adjust your life and to discern what he wants you to do and to make that crisis of belief to decide exactly how to submit your lives to his purpose.

Todd Phillips [00:29:55] And that that Bible study had a massive impact on me. And so when that 12 week study was over, I said, John, I want to teach something like this and I want to invite lots of people to maybe a Sunday night or Monday night event because a lot of people don't want to get up on Sunday mornings because all my friends party on Saturday nights. So he's like, great, what do you want to call it. And at the time, it was just a single sort of get together thing. That's literally what it was called. And then we called it the Bottom Line, a citywide Bible study.

Todd Phillips [00:30:23] And I started inviting friends of mine from Dell that I knew from there to this Tuesday night event. And that thing is really where my ministry started. So we invited some people the first night. About 50 people showed up.

Todd Phillips [00:30:39] John. I was supposed to ask John the singles minister to actually preach the first night. I was just putting the whole thing together and I didn't know how to preach from the Bible. I had no idea what I was doing. Well, he was out of town that weekend and so there was no one else to teach. And I knew some people were showing up. So I ended up preaching out of Genesis chapter one.

Todd Phillips [00:30:58] That's how much I knew about things. I just start at the beginning of the book and I don't even remember what I said. It was probably horrible. But 50 people showed up to that Bible study. I preached my first sermon, if you want to call it that, or Bible study that day. And over the next four weeks, we went from 50 people down to 12.

Todd Phillips [00:31:17] Everybody left. It was like, no thanks, thanks. But those 12 people stuck with me. And they said, you know, Todd, we're all Christians. We've been around for a while. We see your passion. We're going to keep going with you and you can teach or we'll teach together and we'll just do this Bible study together. So we got down to this group of 10 or 12, I think it was 12. Actually the number was 12, including me. And over time that grew to 2,500 people over the next 18 months. And as my teaching got better, more people showed up. We went from a small fellowship hall to the chapel to the main auditorium at Hyde park over time.

Todd Phillips [00:31:55] And so we, we ended up filling kind of standing room only at the, at the Hyde park church on Tuesday nights. And that's, that's where I really felt God moving in my life. Using my speaking skills and maybe some of the debate background that I had and my passion for the word.

Todd Phillips [00:32:13] And I saw God blessing a ministry that I was involved with. And I'm like, this is what I'm supposed to do with the rest of my life.

John Dehlin [00:32:21] Really quick. How did becoming a Christian and beginning the ministry change your day to day behavior? Just some examples of how you cleaned up your life. Just.

Todd Phillips [00:32:35] Yeah, you know, I haven't thought about this in a while, but it was really interesting. It was pretty radical. When I decided to make a shift and felt like there really was a clean break from my old life, from those seven years of bad decisions. I took it really seriously. I went through a phase where I threw away all my DVDs, I threw away all my VHS tapes of all the movies I was watching. Nothing that wasn't Christian music was okay for my ears. I stopped drinking because of Southern Baptist church. So that's one thing that's kind of, at least back then, was part of what you did. No drugs, no alcohol, no secular music. Very few secular movies. They had to be positive, have a good theme about them. I mean, I took it very seriously and so threw all that stuff away, basically.

John Dehlin [00:33:24] You became a Mormon? Just kidding.

Todd Phillips [00:33:25] Yeah, maybe. I mean, it was a very radical transformation. And I remember at that time.

John Dehlin [00:33:31] What about dating? Did you change how you dated?

Todd Phillips [00:33:33] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So I was in physical relationships before that and didn't see any problems with, you know, sex before marriage. And then when I became a Christian. Yeah. That part of my life radically changed, you know, so I stopped being physically involved. I read I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which was a book about just, you know, being completely pure before marriage. I read there was a guy named Bill Gothard that had a certain ministry that he was talking about how to really live a Christian life and how you could actually become a spiritual virgin again. I mean, I bought into the whole thing, man. I was all in. I was like, I am truly new. Right. Not only am I letting go of that old chapter, I'm spiritually a virgin again, and I'm offering myself up clean to anybody that I might marry. I dove in deep.

John Dehlin [00:34:25] Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you were happier than you were in Denver.

Todd Phillips [00:34:29] Oh, by far. Yeah. I mean, look, it put borders around my life. It structured my life in such a way that I didn't have to. And this became a problem down the road. But I didn't have to make any choices for myself. The religion did it for me. And the walls around me were high and very thick and it was comfy. And I was very passionate about it because my life had changed. Now I've become an evangelist for Christianity and the version of Christianity that I'd been given.

John Dehlin [00:35:02] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:35:02] And because of my speaking skills and my kind of all in personality, I was convinced, you know, God had called me to evangelize the world.

John Dehlin [00:35:10] Love it. Let's talk about. There might be Mormons that don't really. Or ex Mormons or members of other faiths that really don't know a lot about kind of the core tenets of your flavor of evangelical Christianity as you were learning it and preaching it in the late 90s. So what were the core tenets, distinguishing tenets of your brand? What was your brand of evangelical Christianity and what were the core tenets theologically?

Evangelical Theology and Core Beliefs

Todd Phillips [00:35:39] Yeah, a lot of people put the Southern Baptist Church, Bible churches, non denominational churches, kind of in the same vein. Evangelicalism, as it's kind of playing out now spiritually, politically and otherwise in our culture is a little different. But my version really came from two premises. One was God is perfect. He's all loving, all knowing, all powerful, perfect in every way, incapable of making poor choices, bad decisions, doing anything evil. It's that God, that version of God. And then in addition to that, his word, this Bible from genesis to Revelation 66 books, the Protestant Bible is the perfect revelation of a perfect God. And it's perfect also in every way. It's without contradictions or errors in any way, shape or form.

John Dehlin [00:36:24] It's a setup.

Todd Phillips [00:36:26] Yeah. And so once you. So those two truths, so to speak, were the lenses for both my eyes and the lenses through which I saw all of life. And because of that, I took the Bible very seriously. And it was a version of Christianity that speaks of Jesus being the only way, you know, to God and that even other denominations that didn't take the Bible seriously or didn't see the miracles necessarily as true or didn't believe they were necessary to be a Christian. We believe that you had to believe all the miracles. That in fact the miracles were an expression of Jesus proving who he was and establishing his authority on earth and in heaven and making clear who he was and that he was the only way to eternal life. And so that construct was the type of Christianity that I bought into and preached for 20 years.

John Dehlin [00:37:31] Was there a. And this is going to sound maybe a little bit geeky, I don't know, but was there an age of the earth component? Like, was the Earth 6000 years was a literalistic young earth creationist kind of thing?

Todd Phillips [00:37:44] Yeah, there were plenty of people in Hyde park who believed that. I found it interesting. What I decided to do as a young Christian was I remember thinking to myself, that seems strange, that doesn't fit. But I've been making poor choices for the last seven years. And so I can't trust myself. Right. And what the Bible seems to say is that the earth is young. And I guess God could have orchestrated it in such a way. I'm just going to buy in because everything else that's happened so far has been working for Me. So it wasn't a critical thinking process. It was a tribal. This was literally my salvation. This was my way out. This was my new life. And if something didn't make sense, that was less important, if not unimportant. What was important was the tribal truth that I just submit my life and my imperfection to God's perfection.

John Dehlin [00:38:43] I call it an emotional and a social conversion.

Todd Phillips [00:38:47] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:38:48] Intellectuals, tertiary, literally.

Todd Phillips [00:38:50] It's way down on the list. Yeah, it really is, John. And I didn't see it that way.

John Dehlin [00:38:54] Yeah, but I mean, it cleaned you up. That's the. The irony is.

Todd Phillips [00:38:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:59] Sometimes you're. We make bad choices and we. We need guardrails. And if that means shutting off your cerebral frontal cortex so that you can have guardrails, the emotional and the social will clean your act up.

Todd Phillips [00:39:11] Yeah, and it did. And for that purpose, it worked extremely well.

John Dehlin [00:39:15] Yeah. Okay. So literal Adam and Eve.

Todd Phillips [00:39:18] Oh, yeah, absolutely literal Fall, original sin, Noah's Ark. I mean, listen, I'll tell you that this is a bit of a side note, but I went introduced, got introduced to a guy named Bob Cornuke. This guy was a friend of the astronaut Irvin, and Irvin was a big Noah's Ark hunter. He was an adventure guy. And so Irvin and Bob Cornuke met, and Bob was a Christian and kind of took over Irvin's ministry to find Noah's Ark. And I met Bob at a conference and he was like the real life Indiana Jones. I spent several years traveling with him and his ministry. He invited me, as a young pastor and potentially kind of to be in his ministry for a while.

Todd Phillips [00:40:02] I never did that, but I went to Iran. We were there for nearly three weeks. We were on mountainsides. We were on Mount Sabalon. He didn't believe Mount Ararat was the actual place of Noah's Ark. It was the mountains of Ararat, plural. He took the Bible literally, and therefore it was in a different place. It was in Jebel Mosa, which was another mountaintop in Iran. So we flew into Tehran. We spent almost three weeks in Iran looking for Noah's Ark.

Todd Phillips [00:40:29] I went on the Exodus route, the traditional exodus route. And he actually was over in Saudi Arabia looking at where he thought the real Mount Sinai was. He looked for the shipwreck of Paul. I mean, I was in it. There are three books. He has a trilogy of books on his search for Noah's Ark. Oh, and then we went to Ethiopia. We were in Ethiopia for three weeks. Went to. Just on the Eritrean border looking for the Ark of The Covenant went all over the world looking for all these relics.

John Dehlin [00:40:56] That's awesome.

Todd Phillips [00:40:57] Yeah, man. Loved the trips. They were great. And I really. I believed it. All right, so I was on a mission.

John Dehlin [00:41:03] Yeah, I took it very seriously. Yeah, yeah. So in terms of. I don't know if Christology is the right word, but, like, what was it about Jesus that was crucial to the salvation of mankind? Just for those who don't know about Christianity, just at a high level.

Todd Phillips [00:41:19] Yeah. He's shown, at least in the New Testament. Well, he's shown in very many different ways. But I believed, and this is important to say this before I talk about Christology. My view of the Bible was that it was univocal, meaning it had one voice. So from Genesis to Revelation, it was a single story, single voice. That voice was God speaking through men. And because of that, everything matched. Right. And so any supposed discrepancy in the theology of Christ, any Christology I might have had to harmonize. Even though there are very disparate perspectives on Jesus, his purpose, his life, his actions, the theology underpinning what he did. There are varied Jesuses in the New Testament. But I had a.

John Dehlin [00:42:04] You're giving the ending away.

Todd Phillips [00:42:06] I'm sorry.

John Dehlin [00:42:06] No, I'm joking. I'm teasing.

Todd Phillips [00:42:07] No, no, no, it's good.

John Dehlin [00:42:09] It's important.

Todd Phillips [00:42:11] The evangelical Christian Jesus I was given that version of Jesus was that he really was. When I say the way, the truth and the life, the. The. The article was key. He's not a way, he's not a truth, he's not a life. He's the way, truth and life, totally. So no one comes to the Father, to God, but through Jesus. And so salvation is found in the person and works of Jesus Christ and him alone. And it's specifically the version of Jesus that I was talking about. But I assumed that I had found the right version of Jesus and that many other Christian denominations, we would call them mainline denominations, maybe today, Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, they didn't fully understand the person and works of Christ, as the Bible clearly, clearly showed.

John Dehlin [00:42:59] What did they get wrong? What did Protestant.

Todd Phillips [00:43:01] Yeah, Protestant theology. From my perspective, mainline Protestants didn't take as seriously the miracles, the virgin birth, the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus. And that was at a core, because if Paul says, if Jesus has not been risen and we assumed a bodily resurrection, then we should be pitied. Christians should be pitied among all because it's the linchpin of Christianity. So the bodily, physical, resurrection into a glorified body of Jesus and his ascension into heaven was Absolutely essential. And if you believed it was a spiritual ascension, then there isn't a physical salvation for our sinful bodies into a glorified body in the coming age. And that version of Jesus and his bodily resurrection, that is the core of evangelical Christian doctrine. And it's required that you believe that specific version of Christianity to be saved, to be forgiven of your sins, to be in right standing with God and to have eternal life.

John Dehlin [00:44:03] So God cares about what you believe, not just how you act, but what you believe.

Todd Phillips [00:44:07] Yeah. And I find it. I don't know if.

John Dehlin [00:44:09] In that mindset.

Todd Phillips [00:44:09] Yeah. And I think what's hard for me sometimes. And again, this is the end of the story. But I don't want to forget this. When you say what you believe, I told people from the pulpit for 20 years, just decide to believe. And what I find remarkable. Now turn it off. Basically, you can't choose what you believe. You are either convinced of something or you're not. And the idea that God holds you morally accountable for an action you cannot take was really one of the things

John Dehlin [00:44:33] that did you in.

Todd Phillips [00:44:34] That dismantled me. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:35] But at the time, it makes complete sense. Yeah. God, if you don't have the right beliefs, you're not crossing the pearly gates.

Todd Phillips [00:44:43] Yeah. And we had a version of Christianity that believed that you were not only not crossing the pearly gates, but you were going to eternal suffering and hellfire.

John Dehlin [00:44:51] Literal flames.

Todd Phillips [00:44:52] Yeah, man. I mean, it was suffering for eternity.

John Dehlin [00:44:54] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:44:55] And that seemed reasonable.

John Dehlin [00:44:57] I know that comes up later for you. So that's the undoing of a lot of evangelical pastors, is the belief in hell.

Todd Phillips [00:45:04] Yeah. I think what happens is, as you go through the process, you start to the borders you need for your life, the structure that social and cultural importance, lessons. And at some point, some people, at least I did start to ask, the intellectual curiosity comes back and says, wait a minute, I'm okay now.

John Dehlin [00:45:26] It's like training wheels.

Todd Phillips [00:45:27] Yeah. Yeah. They're off. I've gone to my Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary indoctrination school. I've gone, you know, I've done all this.

John Dehlin [00:45:35] I've cleaned up my life.

Todd Phillips [00:45:36] Yeah. I'm good there. Right. And I don't feel that I'm in danger of falling off that cliff any longer.

John Dehlin [00:45:41] Yeah. Now you can turn your brain.

Todd Phillips [00:45:43] Do I think Adam and Eve were real? Right. And then. And then the questions. Right, the questions start to come up.

John Dehlin [00:45:49] Yeah. Okay. So literal hell, burning hellfire. And then what did it mean to be saved? And. And then the second part. What role did baptism and confirmation have in salvation as well.

Todd Phillips [00:46:03] Yeah. So what it meant to be saved was to be right in right standing before God, so that that was salvation. It happened through Jesus. Jesus provided the way to be forgiven of sins. He reconciles us. Christ reconciles us to God. Although we were enemies of God, we're now friends with God. We are clothed in Christ. There's a passage that speaks to that. So God looks down and no longer sees my sinful self. He sees the perfection of Christ covering me. I'm covered with Christ. These are the kind of things, the kind of religious imagery that we get from many different New Testament passages.

Todd Phillips [00:46:36] And I bought into that. I was a wretched, sinful, worthless person. But for the fact that I've been saved by grace through faith in Jesus and that my worth is not just tied to, but is in Jesus and only in him. And but for Him, I would still be wretched.

John Dehlin [00:46:57] I'm laughing. I got in trouble once. I had some orthodox Mormons on sitting in those chairs, and I called that part of Christian theology insidious. I hate the belief. When I hear you say an enemy of God, I'm just like, we're creations of God. He's a loving father.

John Dehlin [00:47:21] If we're just being human as he designed us, the idea that we're his enemy, even when I was a faithful Mormon, it just. It never felt quite right to me. And so I called it insidious. And so then they, with their sound bites or their, you know, in their shorts on social media, sure. Were basically accusing me of being an antichrist and saying that I believed Christianity was insidious.

John Dehlin [00:47:47] No, that's not true. There's so much about Christianity I love and still support, but it is so triggering for me to hear this idea that God creates us and then we're immediately his enemy and that he's gotta punish his own child.

Todd Phillips [00:48:04] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:04] And make him suffer and bleed and die, because that's the only way he could figure out. And again, I'm giving the ending away, but you kind of led me there because I just. I can't stand that teaching. But I don't mean it disrespectfully for those for whom it's sacred.

Todd Phillips [00:48:19] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:48:20] But it just doesn't. It just is triggering for me now.

Todd Phillips [00:48:23] Well, I think. I think it's. I think I share that trigger. You know, I used to preach it as a beautiful picture that we were enemies with God, but now we're friends. And I would say it with passion and I would just lean into it as though it was the most important thing that anyone could hear. And again, I understand some people believe that still. But for me, over time, it became not just problematic, it became. It was theologically, it was structurally problematic. I mean, it just. It fails to make sense in light of the whole story.

John Dehlin [00:48:56] For me, especially if you had the theodicy, this idea that God's all loving, powerful fit. If God is all loving, why are we ever an enemy? And if God's all powerful, couldn't he come up with a different plan? Right.

Todd Phillips [00:49:11] Again, into story stuff. Right. I did a video on the eight reasons I find myself no longer believing in the. Specifically the evangelical Christian God. And these are the reasons. Right. These are the ones that kind of build on top of themselves and finally cause me to question.

John Dehlin [00:49:32] Okay, so really quickly, something that when I was a believing Mormon at Katy High School in Houston growing up, I never got. Cause Mormons don't believe in this idea of being saved, that it's a combination of faith and works, but faith without works is dead. And so we don't have. There's no such thing as being saved in the Mormon tradition.

John Dehlin [00:49:52] You get baptized, you get the gift of the Holy Ghost, and then you work hard to hustle through obedience to win God's love and favor. But there's never, like an altar call being saved. And I would always question my buddies in high school, oh, so I go get saved and I go, oh, I believe. And then I'm good for the rest of my life. What if I kill someone? These are the types of. And I know this is really obvious sort of questions from the realm you were in, but what did you believe about the role of, like, that altar call being saved and that being an important part of what you call salvation?

Todd Phillips [00:50:32] Yeah. I was told back then, and certainly bought into it, that there's a sinner's prayer, for lack of a better phrase. Now, what that prayer was, nobody really knew, but there was a prayer that a lot of people would pray. And basically, God, I know that I'm a sinner. I fall short of your plan for my life and your glory.

Todd Phillips [00:50:49] I'm in need of a Savior, and I acknowledge that. And because of that, I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, accept his payment on the cross. He became sin for me so that I wouldn't have to pay the penalty of it. He paid the penalty for me. That's substitutionary atonement. And I receive that free gift of eternal life and salvation from Jesus and through Jesus, and ask you to come into my heart and be in relationship with me. That's kind of the core of the prayer. And then at that moment, at that moment, you're saved. You're saved. You're in the family of God. You're birthed into the family of God.

Todd Phillips [00:51:25] And just as crazy as it would be to say that you could be unbirthed into your mother's womb, you cannot be unborn from the family of God. You are eternally secure in this relationship.

John Dehlin [00:51:36] And that second part is the one I never understood because I'm like, once saved. The term I heard growing up is once saved, always saved. I'm like, wait a minute, what about a murderer? You know what I mean?

Todd Phillips [00:51:46] Yeah. I preached once saved, always saved. In fact, it was the core message of every sermon that I had.

John Dehlin [00:51:53] So what did you do with murders when you believed that?

Todd Phillips [00:51:55] Well, I mean, if it was based on belief. So the concept is that it's based on belief. You believe the right things, then you're saved. Right. So if you believe Jesus died on the cross for your sins, it's a free gift. All you have to do is receive it. He's already done all the work he's done everything he's paid for. The murder he's paid for, the lying he's paid for. Everything that you're doing you've done or will do. And so there's no way you can earn your way to heaven through works. It must be through the salvific work of Jesus on the cross that you come into relationship with God.

Todd Phillips [00:52:23] It is the only way. And so nothing you ever do is ever going to get you into or out of heaven. It's what God has already done, past tense, through Jesus. So there's this constant push toward. You can't do any way to earn yourself into heaven. And because of that, there was no way to get there except for Jesus. Therefore, no heinous crime, no murder. He's already paid for all those things that you might do or may have already done. And there's no way for you to absolve yourself of the penalty for those things. That's why Jesus had to die.

John Dehlin [00:53:00] So murderers get off free if they're saved.

Todd Phillips [00:53:02] They didn't get off free. Jesus died for that murder.

John Dehlin [00:53:05] Right, but they don't have to.

Todd Phillips [00:53:07] Yeah, they are forgiven. They are reconciled because of what Jesus did. Now again, we keep jumping to the end of the story, but, I mean, the idea of substitutionary atonement is ridiculous in my opinion. It's just absurd. You don't make things right by having an innocent person pay for someone else's guilt, the person who does something wrong. The issue of fairness and justice requires that that person pay the penalty for that crime. And no innocent person can jump in and take that for someone else. But that's the entirety of the message from an evangelical Christian perspective.

John Dehlin [00:53:44] Yeah, and what I had to. So that's, I mean, I was raised definitely with the, what'd you call it?

Todd Phillips [00:53:53] Substitution, Substitutionary atonement like that.

John Dehlin [00:53:56] I was definitely raised with. Not with the one saved, always saved. It was faith and works. But definitely with the substitutionary atonement or whatever that, that part specifically. I didn't learn until relatively recently that not all Christians, you can be Christian and not believe in substitutionary atonement. But I didn't realize that. I thought it was all. That's what the atonement was, you know.

Todd Phillips [00:54:19] Yeah, there's, there's substitutionary atonement, there's, there's a reconciliation theology, there's literally half a dozen of different Christologies related to the cross. What was accomplished on the cross, what actually happened in the spiritual realm because of Jesus death. And there are many and varied perspectives on that based on many and varied passages in the New Testament.

John Dehlin [00:54:43] And I'm curious if you've come across this in the flavors of Christianity you learned about. In Mormonism, the most important act wasn't on the cross. It was in the Garden of Gethsemane. In Mormonism, Jesus, when he knelt in the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, that's when he took on the pain and the suffering for all our sins. And we're taught that he bled from every pore in the Garden of Gethsemane because he was so overwhelmed from suffering in that prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane for everyone's sins, past, present and future. And in Mormonism, it takes it one step further. There were even prophets that taught that it was for other planets too, people who lived on other planets, like just this massive one time event of suffering for everyone.

John Dehlin [00:55:28] That's where he overcame sin. And then when he was hung on the cross, died and then resurrected after three days. That's where he overcame death. So he overcame sin in the Garden of Gethsemane and death on the cross and in the tomb. Is that very interesting? Is that new?

Todd Phillips [00:55:47] Yeah, yeah. So I would go to a passage that said that Christ, who knew no sin, became sin for us on the cross. So in my Christology and in reference to the cross specifically, at some point he becomes, he in his flesh becomes all of our sin for all humanity and kills it, pays for it on the cross in bodily form. Now, the only way it's verified that he has the authority to do that is if he raises from the dead three days later. Paul says if the resurrection didn't happen, we should be pitied. So he becomes sin on the cross. He then validates the. The that he actually accomplished that and finished it. It is finished on the cross because of the resurrection, that he defeated death as well. If he'd not been raised from the dead, nothing on the cross would have mattered.

John Dehlin [00:56:37] Yeah, interesting.

Todd Phillips [00:56:37] Yeah. But the Garden of Gethsemane. No, I, I didn't. I, I've. I've not heard that.

John Dehlin [00:56:41] That's new.

Todd Phillips [00:56:41] Yeah, that's.

John Dehlin [00:56:42] Yeah, that's core Mormon atonement theology.

Todd Phillips [00:56:46] Interesting.

John Dehlin [00:56:46] Mormons are very Christian. That's. Even now you know that the church has excommunicated me. And I still hate it when people say Mormons aren't Christian just because, like, they believe in Jesus.

Todd Phillips [00:56:57] I would have said that.

John Dehlin [00:56:58] Oh, of course.

Todd Phillips [00:56:59] I grew up as an evangelical Christian.

John Dehlin [00:57:01] Yeah, no, but I mean, I hate that because, like, they believe in God. They believe in the Bible. They believe that Jesus died for our sins. They believe that he took on our pain and suffering, that he resurrected after the third day. They read the Bible, they love the New Testament. And I know there's. Oh, but they don't believe the Bible's perfect. Or. Oh, they don't believe that, but once saved, all is saved or whatever. Some little, to me tangential kind of thing where you can find a different version of Christianity that doesn't believe whatever that thing is that disqualifies Mormons. You can find other Christians that are somehow in the club that don't believe that thing in the same way, but somehow Mormons, because they're the redheaded stepchild, get excluded.

Todd Phillips [00:57:45] Well, for us, I'll tell you what it was for us, for our church, it was the. It was adding to the Bible. It was another testament. And we saw that as it was canonized. This was the perfect word of God. And therefore, this cannot be from God, because this is from God. And weirdly, it really was that simple.

John Dehlin [00:58:03] No, no. And weirdly, Joseph Smith was ahead of both of us and your tradition because he saw errors in the Bible, so he believed in the Bible. In fact, one of our articles of faith is. One of our articles of faith that Joseph Smith implemented was we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. We also believe the book of Mormon to be the word of God. So he saw the errors in the Bible and he did produce additional scripture, but he had a New Testament basis for that. Because Jesus said, you know, other sheep I have that are not of this fold, they shall also hear my voice.

John Dehlin [00:58:38] And he talks about the stick of Joseph and the stick of Jacob and Ezekiel and that there'll be two scrolls that join in my hand. And so even Joseph Smith was basically saying, you can interpret scriptures in the Bible to allow for additional scripture. Sure, sure. I'm not trying to argue Mormon theology. I'm just.

Todd Phillips [00:58:59] No, no, I'm listening. I just. No, I find it. I find it personally fascinating. Yeah, I really do. Because I know very. I know I studied in comparative religions about Mormon theology at a very basic level, but it's been. Since seminary.

John Dehlin [00:59:11] Yeah. Anyway, fun. Okay. So I understand your Christology, your atonement, you know, and all that. How critical. For Mormons, baptism by immersion was crucial and the gift of the Holy Ghost were crucial. And you did it at 8. What was it for? What role did baptism or confirmation play at all for?

Todd Phillips [00:59:31] Yeah, in Southern Baptist theology, immersion was important, but it was a symbol of something that already had been done.

John Dehlin [00:59:36] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:59:37] So it was a. That we'd already been forgiven, that we die to our old self. We've been birthed into a new kind of life.

John Dehlin [00:59:44] It wasn't a saving ordinance.

Todd Phillips [00:59:45] It was not a saving ordinance.

John Dehlin [00:59:47] In Mormonism, it's a. You can't get into heaven that scripture, if you're not born of the water and the spirit. Mormons interpret that to mean literal baptism by immersion or no entrance into heaven.

Todd Phillips [00:59:58] Yeah. And see, we would perceive that as born of water, as a physical birth from your mother's womb. Born of the Spirit is being saved by Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit upon salvation. So baptism is a symbolic. Is a voluntary act of a believer who's now become a follower of Jesus to voluntarily show the rest of the world that he's died to his old self by going down into the water and dying and then being born into his new life by coming out of the water. So immersion was a very important symbol. But a person would go to heaven with or without baptism.

John Dehlin [01:00:32] Okay.

Todd Phillips [01:00:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:33] And thanks for doing this. It's almost like we're Bible bashing. But, you know, neither. Neither of us really believe anymore. No. In the sense of our old selves. Friendly Bible bashing. How we interpret doctrine, certainly.

Todd Phillips [01:00:46] Yeah. I just. I find it. Right. I've always been very intellectually curious about theology, and even after saying, you know that I no longer believed in Christianity. I'm almost obsessed with theology and philosophy and having these kinds of discussions. It's a healthy process for me.

John Dehlin [01:01:06] Yeah. Okay. One additional question that is the linchpin of Mormonism today. It's authority. So Joseph Smith taught that unless you have authority from the laying on of hands of someone who has authority, you can't baptize, you can't lead a church, you can't save humankind. That the saving rituals in Mormonism, which is baptism, confirmation, gift of the Holy Ghost, and then eventually the Aaronic priesthood, the Melchizedek priesthood, and then eventually the endowment ceremony, which you get in the temple, and then temple marriage, which makes your marriage and your family last in heaven.

John Dehlin [01:01:50] All of that stuff is done with priesthood authority that is administered through the laying out of hands. And so literally, Joseph Smith claims that John the Baptist ordained him to the Aaronic priesthood, and then Peter, James, and John came back as angels, ordained him with the Melchizedek priesthood, and gave him the authority to lead God's one true church and to administer the saving ordinances. Did y' all care about authority? And if so, how did you establish authority?

Todd Phillips [01:02:27] Yeah. Quite interesting from a Southern Baptist perspective. The priesthood of the believer is really at the core of Southern Baptist theology, meaning that each individual has the full ability, by the power of the Holy Spirit living inside them, to read and interpret and discern the truth of God's word. So you don't need a ecclesiastical intermediary like a priest, to tell you what the Bible says, or even a pastor, that the Holy Spirit is your intermediary. There is no human intermediary needed. And that's a huge, huge thing in Southern Baptist theology. So that's the denomination that I kind of spiritually grew up in. So I came to the Bible.

Todd Phillips [01:03:09] I came to this sense of authority by authority that God himself has given me, that the Holy Spirit is confirmed in my spirit. And so when I feel called to ministry, no one else can take that from me, I'm called to ministry. Nothing you do or anyone else ever says even a church authority can change that.

John Dehlin [01:03:29] Fascinating.

Todd Phillips [01:03:29] Yeah. So it's quite on its head from what you were talking about. That's why Southern Baptists almost think the Catholic Church may be the Antichrist. Right.

John Dehlin [01:03:38] Why spell that out?

Todd Phillips [01:03:40] Because of the ecclesiastical authority that humans are conferring themselves as authority, which allows for corruption within the system.

John Dehlin [01:03:48] Yeah, right. Oh, it's like a McDonald's franchising licensing model. Right. With Southern Baptists, with Mormons and Catholics

Todd Phillips [01:03:57] oh, with Mormons and Catholics, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:58] Oh, I see.

Todd Phillips [01:03:58] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:03:59] You're saying you don't have our brand endorsement, legal contract, authority, and so whatever you do, is it legitimate? But we are a legitimate legal franchise. So it does lead to corruption.

Todd Phillips [01:04:11] Yeah. It's quite ironic, isn't it, that the Southern Baptist denomination is the largest denomination still, I think, in the country. So it's got this organizational structure and this hierarchy in practice, but theologically, that's anathema. It's a very strange thing to watch.

John Dehlin [01:04:28] Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you don't have this idea of unless you have baptism, because that was one of the things that was a stumbling block for me in Mormonism. I'm like, really? Like, unless you have a Mormon baptism. I did the math in high school. When I'm. When my friends are watching the God Makers and telling me I'm in a cult, I'm thinking, no, no, no, wait. We're God's one and only true church on the earth. But then I'm like, okay, wait, we have 6 million people in the LDS Church worldwide, there's billions of people. I did the math once. It was like less than one half of 1%. And I'm like, God kind of. God is kind of a bad marketer or a bad salesman, because there are very, very few. I mean, I know the Bible says narrow is the gate and few there will be or whatever.

Todd Phillips [01:05:17] That's pretty narrow.

John Dehlin [01:05:18] That's pretty narrow. Watch it. No, it's true. But literally, that's where the baptism. This is just a conversation, but that's where the baptism for the dead Mormon teaching comes from. Because Joseph is like, well, if you have to have a Mormon baptism to get baptized, and over 99.9% of the people who've ever lived won't ever get a Mormon in baptism, that means all those people are going to hell. If baptism by immersion with authority is the only way to get into heaven. So the only way Joseph could get out of that theological conundrum is to allow people to get baptized after they're dead. But what an inefficient, ridiculous solution. But it's the only way to make it all logically mixed.

Todd Phillips [01:06:03] Yes. If you assume those presuppositions, then that's the only thing that can be bit. But that happens in all denominations in all religions. Right. It must be true. And therefore I have to find a way to that truth rather than it could be wrong. Right. That can't be the case.

John Dehlin [01:06:17] Yeah. And then just because this is striking my memories Was it. Did I remember my Baptist friends not being allowed to dance? Was that part of your speaking of

Todd Phillips [01:06:31] the priesthood of the believer? So it depended on which church. But yeah, overall Southern Baptists did not drink and did not dance. So almost kind of like the Footloose movie religious kind of ideology. No dancing, no drinking, no fun.

John Dehlin [01:06:44] Yeah, yeah. And then talk quickly about like what the beliefs were around the second coming, the millennium and the Judgment and that sort of thing.

End Times, Heaven, and Evangelical Eschatology

Todd Phillips [01:06:55] Yeah. So the Left behind series, the books by Tim LaHaye, I guess they came out in the 90s. I guess it was around the time I became a Christian in 94, maybe late 80s. But the left behind series had a massive impact on Southern Baptist theology. They were already pre millennial, meaning that Christ would come and return and take his flock, his church, up into heaven and then there would be a thousand year, the tribulation and the thousand year reign and all that would happen later. But Christians would not experience any of the tribulation and the challenges that came with the end times. I didn't do a lot of study on end times.

Todd Phillips [01:07:32] That was one of the problems I had from the beginning. I just thought there was a lot of interpretive problems with end times theology. And I personally had some problems with the Left behind series, even though it became very popularized. But almost everybody I knew bought into that perspective on Jesus coming back again to take his church home. And then there would be this tribulation and this Antichrist would come and there would be a new heaven and new earth after that.

Todd Phillips [01:07:58] But it was interesting to me how many people were obsessed with end times theology inside the Southern Baptist Church. Be watchful. It could happen. We don't know the day or the hour. Look into the heavens. Be watchful, be ready, be prepared. You have to live your life in such a way that you're prepared when he comes.

Todd Phillips [01:08:20] And it was a very fear based, in my opinion, very damaging theology. Now I understand, at least from my perspective, from a scholarly perspective, Revelation is a treatise, a tome. It's a political book dealing with the oppression of the Jewish people during the first century. I mean, it's very clear. It's addressing Nero. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of imagery in there that deals with the political motivations of the time.

Todd Phillips [01:08:50] And no critical scholar questions that. It's only religious people with certain lenses over their eyes that have been given a certain dogma that then reverse engineer the text to address and to validate the dogma.

John Dehlin [01:09:03] Right. And then I'm always curious, you know, we're made fun of. Mormons are made fun of by evangelicals for believing that eventually if you're super righteous, you become a God and rule over your own planet. That that is still Mormon theology, even though Mormons want to downplay or dismiss that now because it is cringy or viewed as heretical to mainstream Christians. And we're trying to build bridges with mainstream Christians now because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And so we've become bedfellows with Catholics and evangelicals a bit, which I never thought would happen. But I digress.

John Dehlin [01:09:42] The main thing I'm asking is what was heaven going to be like? And I never understood, you know, as much as my evangelical friends wanted to make fun of the God makers idea, like sitting in heaven, playing harps and singing and praising a narcissistic God that just wanted you to sit at his feet and sing his praises for eternity. Like, never made sense to me. So what was heaven like? And I don't mean to be mocking of people's beliefs because I'm sure there's all sorts of different beliefs around that.

Todd Phillips [01:10:10] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:10:11] But what was your belief about the eternities as an evangelical Christian?

Todd Phillips [01:10:16] Yeah, ultimately there would be a new heaven and a new earth, a perfected new. A new heaven, new earth. So this earth only perfected, a new heaven. Basically, God comes down here and we live out eternity in this new heaven which is here on the new earth. And the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven and is physically present on this perfected earth. Basically the Garden of Eden again, but

John Dehlin [01:10:43] for the whole globe, where would all the people fit?

Todd Phillips [01:10:45] Listen, these are the problems that I had. Right. So when I would just. I remember saying this in servants, you know, I don't know how this happens, but Scripture makes it plain. That's what I would say all the time.

John Dehlin [01:11:00] Scripture would come down.

Todd Phillips [01:11:02] Yeah. I mean, if God. Listen, if God can, if, if God can speak the universe into existence, he can do anything he wants with a new Jerusalem or a perfected world or anything. He literally can take the Gulf of

John Dehlin [01:11:13] Mexico where it was going to land.

Todd Phillips [01:11:14] I didn't know. I didn't know.

John Dehlin [01:11:16] I believe that. We believe that the city of Enoch was literally translated meaning brought up to heaven. And I believed as a Texan that maybe it's the Gulf of Mexico. That was where the city of Enoch was. And then it was lifted up.

Todd Phillips [01:11:30] Interesting.

John Dehlin [01:11:32] Come on, Galveston. Corpus Christi.

Todd Phillips [01:11:34] Come on. Of course, it makes all sorts of sense now. I might still be a Christian today if I only knew that. No I didn't spend a lot of time on end times theology other than to know that heaven was a place of eternal bliss. No more tears, no more pain, no suffering, no sin. And somehow that made sense to me.

Todd Phillips [01:11:55] I think one of the biggest questions I had about heaven as I've gone through this, I actually did a video on Instagram and TikTok recently where I said, if heaven is either eternal worship of God forever and ever and ever for trillions and trillions of years, and that's only a day, like forever, and it never stops, I'll take non existence.

Todd Phillips [01:12:14] And I did a whole short video on that because I just, I don't. Not only I don't find it plausible, but I don't find it something that I would aspire to any longer. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me. And this narcissistic God that you speak of, that's. That's exactly the way I view it now. Yeah, the way it's. The way it's expressed as. As far as we can tell, in Scripture.

John Dehlin [01:12:37] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:12:38] In the New Testament, specifically.

John Dehlin [01:12:41] Okay, okay. So turning back now because again, we're treading on sacred ground for believing Christians and. And Mormons, really. And at the same time, I think we both have a soft place in our heart for the way that these theologies can transform lives that are metaphorically or literally in the gutter into something quite healthier and more beautiful or more functional. And that also they're just tender beliefs for people. So I just want to acknowledge that while we're talking intellectually now and being critical, I think we both still maintain a reverence for the way that these types of theologies can also do good in the world. And so can you talk about, as you're becoming a pastor and giving your life to Christ into the ministry, what types of good things, good fruits you're seeing in your life and in the lives of the Christians and in the congregations that you work in.

Life as a Megachurch Pastor and Nonprofit Work

Todd Phillips [01:13:45] Yeah. So to say it transformed my life is an understatement. It was profound. Every area of my life, my entire life and lifestyle, all the choices I made, the words I spoke, the decisions, the actions I took, everything was driven around the centrality, I would say this phrase, centrality of Jesus and who he was and what he wanted me to do. Not because I was afraid of him, but because I loved him so much. And I really felt this. I loved Jesus so much that I wanted to do these things as an act of worship and an expression of love to this God that saved me from My own depravity, I mean, that's really the way I viewed the world.

Todd Phillips [01:14:23] It got me to the point, in fact, I was involved from 2008 to 2020. I started a nonprofit when I was still at McLean Bible Church in D.C. i started a nonprofit called the Last well. And at the time I was primarily pastoring these 4000 or so 20 somethings. And these were all very high output, type A mensa level, genius young people that were coming in from all over the world to work on the hill and change the world. And for these Christians, I saw, man, we have 4,000 young Christians who at the time reminded me of me when I got saved at the age of 24.

Todd Phillips [01:15:02] So I was very passionate about 20 somethings specifically. And I started an organization called the Last well. And it was working with these young adults to try to change the world. I believe, man, we have more influence and power and opportunity with these 4,000 young adults than we possibly imagine under the authority of God, so we could do something amazing. So I started a nonprofit called the Last well. And it was an effort to bring clean water and the Christian message to an entire developing country. Border to border for the first time in history.

Todd Phillips [01:15:36] So it was Liberia in West Africa. So it started in 2009. At the time, Liberia was the second poorest country in the world. It was the most corrupt country in the world according to the CIA.

John Dehlin [01:15:47] Where was IDI Amin from?

Todd Phillips [01:15:48] Was that wasn't Liberia. Yeah, but we found the worst place we could go to to bring the gospel in clean water and to do it for the first time in history. And it was driven around the idea that God can do anything.

Todd Phillips [01:16:08] So the Last well wouldn't have existed but for, you know, at least in part, but for my passion for God and my belief in his today power, I used to use that phrase quite often. And so we started this organization in 2009 to bring clean water, border to border, to every single man, woman and child, every village, every community, every hut in Liberia, West Africa. And we crossed the finish line on November 12th of 2020, 12 years later, and brought basic access to clean water according to the UN guidelines to every single community in Liberia and did it. And that was the first time in history a developing country had ever been reached with clean water.

Todd Phillips [01:16:50] And it was accomplished. Why? Because we believe God could do great things. That was the underpinning mechanism by which that happened. We did it. But our belief in the God that could push through any wall, any political barrier, any corruption was the reason it happened so amazingly good Things happen because of. At least in my own life, because of my faith in this God. And it transformed my life, my life and literally every area, you know, and so. But for belief in God, 3.4 million people would not have received clean water in that 12 year timeline. But for my belief in God, 150,000 people, by UN estimates, would not have seen their next birthday because of lack of clean water.

Todd Phillips [01:17:41] And half of those 150,000, 75,000 were children under five. So 75,000 kids were seeing their next birthday because of a passion I had for God. And the fact that I believe God could use young adults to do great

John Dehlin [01:17:54] things, that almost makes belief trivial. Like, my wife has coined the phrase beliefs aren't that important, which can be interpreted as a way to devalue religion. But there's another angle. You can look at it like if your faith, your beliefs, led you to save the lives of 75,000 kids, historical criticism and multiple voices in the Bible don't matter compared to the fact that religion. This is kind of, I think, the Yuval, Noah Harare, Sapiens kind of argument.

Todd Phillips [01:18:32] Oh, sure.

John Dehlin [01:18:32] That religion provides people with a common myth, a common set of heroes, a level of trust that they wouldn't normally have with each other. To allow a lot of people to work together to accomplish great things.

Todd Phillips [01:18:44] We need a unifying story.

John Dehlin [01:18:46] Yeah, yeah. And framework for trust and cooperation like that. What you just described to me is an argument for Christianity, not against.

Todd Phillips [01:18:58] Oh, no. And that's what I'm saying. I mean, many good things happen because of it. Many horrific things happen as well. Right. But that same faith, that same Bible causes genocide. And that same faith and that same Bible causes us to go reach an entire country with clean water.

John Dehlin [01:19:13] Man, it's so complicated. Same Bible, so complicated.

Todd Phillips [01:19:15] Same Bible, yes.

John Dehlin [01:19:16] So complicated. Wow, that's beautiful. What a cool story. So how do you know this is out of the blue, but, like, what was the highest annual budget that nonprofit reached at its zenith?

Todd Phillips [01:19:28] Yeah, we raised $31 million over that 12 years. And. Whoa, there's a lot. It's a $31 million project. And. But in the last four years, we raised over half of that.

John Dehlin [01:19:44] Were you the CEO?

Todd Phillips [01:19:45] Yeah, I was the founder and CEO of that for 12 years.

John Dehlin [01:19:47] Oh, my goodness. While you were a pastor?

Todd Phillips [01:19:49] Yeah, I did it on a volunteer basis from 2009 to 2013. And when I left Lake Point Church in 2013, I went full time. So the board of directors. I was a volunteer at the time. The board of directors came to me and said, why don't you take it over? We'll pay you, we'll fund it. And so I actually got nine guys. It was all men, and they actually covered 100% of the operational costs of the organization, including my salary. And then all 31 million went directly to the project.

John Dehlin [01:20:20] Just because I run a nonprofit. I'm dying to know what your peak salary was at that nonprofit, if you remember. And I can't remember.

Todd Phillips [01:20:27] I honestly can't remember. Six figures at the end.

John Dehlin [01:20:31] Yeah, yeah. I think nonprofit leaders, if they do

Todd Phillips [01:20:34] it, probably hit that at the end.

John Dehlin [01:20:35] Yeah, but. But around six figures, not like two.

Todd Phillips [01:20:38] Yeah. I mean, I honestly can't remember. I'm really terrible. But I. But I will say this, that the, the guys that were. The guys that were supporting it understood where I was coming out of.

John Dehlin [01:20:49] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:20:50] Kind of that megachurch environment and what I was making. I did take a hit to do what I did, but then eventually kind of got back to parody with where I was, so. And those were the choices they made, not me.

John Dehlin [01:21:00] Sure, yeah, yeah. You don't set your own.

Todd Phillips [01:21:02] Yeah, they.

John Dehlin [01:21:03] People don't understand it.

Todd Phillips [01:21:05] I would come to them at different times and go, hey, maybe we should.

John Dehlin [01:21:08] Yeah, but just for the record, people who run non profits don't choose their own salary.

Todd Phillips [01:21:14] No, they don't choose their own salary. And certainly not. You don't do it to make money, that's for sure.

John Dehlin [01:21:18] Yeah, exactly. Although sometimes you can have a decent living or good living running a non profit. Okay, so that's a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing. What an inspiring story and what beautiful fruits of Christianity at its best. Right?

Todd Phillips [01:21:34] Yeah. I would say that probably is the greatest, without a doubt, the greatest expression of my own personal faith and active faith in Jesus as it related to both my personal life and leadership.

John Dehlin [01:21:47] Yeah, without a doubt. Okay, going back a little bit. Just because we both grew up in Texas around the same time. I grew up with the names Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, kind of in the zeitgeist. And it was like, mega pastors are corrupt. They're having secret sex, they're driving Cadillacs, they're flying around in jet planes. They may be gay, secretly, they may even not believe. But they're kooky, scammy, wealthy people, kind of like righteous gemstones tries to portray them. So as you're becoming a pastor and I'm assuming you were paying attention when all that megachurch scandal was happening or not somewhat. I mean, not a lot.

Todd Phillips [01:22:42] Not really.

John Dehlin [01:22:43] Oh, okay.

Todd Phillips [01:22:43] Yeah, I wasn't I just, I wasn't caught up in a lot of that. Yeah. But I will say that a lot of people, when I say mega church pastor, I mean my Persona online, you know, the deconstructed pastor. And I mean, I'm introduced as a megachurch pastor. I think, I think it is relevant, right? It's different pastoring a 200 person church in a neighborhood versus a 15,000 person church. It's a, it's a corporation. It's. You know, we had a. We had a $25 million budget. It's just a lot of money annual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so. And so. But I will say this, and on behalf of both the church that I went to that I pastored in D.C.

Todd Phillips [01:23:21] was McLean Bible Church and then Lake Point Church in Dallas, I will say this about both of them. Can't say this for every megachurch. I have problems with some mega churches that I see today for lots of different reasons, but at the time, both, even though it was a business, you can't have 300 staff in a $20 million, $25 million budget.

Todd Phillips [01:23:45] Seven services on the weekend, 40 people running the stage to make the deal happen every Sunday or Saturday or all the different services. We had, we had an Internet campus. I mean, it's a massive organization. But I will say for.

Todd Phillips [01:24:02] And we can talk about all the shortcomings of megachurches, but I will say for those two churches, they were run by people, myself included, who really did believe the stuff that we were saying. I mean, we just did. We were constrained by this love that we had for Jesus. And we believe that the number of people showing up was a validator by God himself. For that, we're doing the right thing. Right. God wouldn't let this happen because God's real. He's all powerful, and he would not let someone bring a crowd like this. Now, I failed to apply the same critique to the obvious megachurches that were being like the ones you're mentioning that were being sued or people going to prison and corruption and all the things that happened, which all those things could

John Dehlin [01:24:47] be a modern example, you know, about him.

Todd Phillips [01:24:49] Mark and I knew each other.

John Dehlin [01:24:50] Oh, you knew Mark?

Todd Phillips [01:24:51] Yeah. Whoa.

John Dehlin [01:24:52] I want to hear all about Mark Driscoll. I don't want to.

Todd Phillips [01:24:54] I know.

John Dehlin [01:24:54] Okay, okay, that's fine.

Todd Phillips [01:24:55] It's. He. He and I, he and I were connected to a Gen X conference back in the mid to late 90s and traveled to. We crossed path quite often at conferences.

John Dehlin [01:25:12] And this is just. Most people don't know who Mark Driscoll is. I just. I found that podcast on Mars Hill, one of the coolest podcasts I've ever listened to, just to hear the rise of it was called Mars Hill right in Seattle with Mark Driscoll. And he's had a sort of a maga reemergence as kind of a maga.

Todd Phillips [01:25:29] Yeah, it's very strange to watch. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:31] I'm curious just because I'm a nerd in a way. When you and Mark were running in similar circles, would you have characterized your worldviews, your Christian worldviews then, as being the Venn diagram, pretty overlapped or quite different?

Todd Phillips [01:25:50] It's a bit more complicated than that, I think.

John Dehlin [01:25:52] Back then, I mean.

Todd Phillips [01:25:53] Yeah, back then, what we had in common was we were both interested in young people in this Gen X movement that we saw during that time, and we were invited by people in authority in those conferences to come and speak.

Todd Phillips [01:26:07] And there was a collection of us. Mark was one of them, I was one of them, and there were probably a dozen 15 others that were kind of popularized by those conferences. And so we all saw each other in the same theological vein at the time.

Todd Phillips [01:26:28] But I can't tell you just how amazed and distraught I am by. And I really don't want to go further with it other than to say this, that kind of the MAGA evangelical movement and the way evangelical churches have been kind of conscripted into this kind of political ideology, Christian nationalism, it's very disconcerting. And when I say I'm an evangelical, former evangelical pastor, many people who are maybe in their 20s right now only identify evangelicalism with conservative politics, with conservative politics and white nationalism. And it couldn't have been more different. I mean, it might as well be called two different things at this point, from my perspective. But back then, yeah, I think we had some similarities.

John Dehlin [01:27:21] Yeah. And I'll just give the disclaimer I give every time. I'm not anti Republican. I'm not anti conservative.

Todd Phillips [01:27:27] Me too.

John Dehlin [01:27:27] Yeah. I love you. If you voted for whoever, I love you. But you can't talk about history, religion. Yes.

Todd Phillips [01:27:38] It's just part of the process.

John Dehlin [01:27:39] The current events, politics and religion, they run the world.

Todd Phillips [01:27:44] Yeah. And by definition, I mean, especially if you're talking about evangelical Christianity, just because of its political connection to a certain political ideology, it has changed. Changed. And so someone may make an assumption about a certain person's ideology or theology, for that matter, and it'd be incorrect.

John Dehlin [01:28:00] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'd love to come back to talking about Christian nationalism, maybe in Part two, just because I'm curious. I have a lot of things I want to talk about in part two, but let's go back to your story. So talk about why aren't you. Why aren't you presiding over a 20,000 or 50,000 megachurch now? It seems like you were on the path to Joel Osteen land. What happened? Yeah, and go slow. You don't have to rush it.

Todd Phillips [01:28:36] Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. So about, let's see, in 2004, I got to McLean Bible Church, and that was the first really, really big mega church. The other churches were like Hyde Park, 2, 3, 4,000 people up to that point. And then you get to McLean, there's 10, 12, 14, whatever they had.

Todd Phillips [01:28:56] And when I got there, it was interesting. I was actually living in San Antonio at the time, and my friend was the pastor of Frontline, which was a young adult ministry that I would take over at McLean Bible Church. And he actually brought me there to serve in ministry with him, but not be the main stage guy. I was actually looking for a break. I had spoken to 400 times the year prior, and I just got burnt out. And so he said, hey, come up here, hang out for the next year and a half, two years, and just help me with this place. And you can preach when you want to, but, you know, let us love on you a little bit and just get you out of the burnout phase.

Todd Phillips [01:29:31] So I did. And a month after I got there, he sat me down at a Starbucks in Tyson's Corner and he said, I'm moving back to California and the church wants you to take over Frontline. And it was like the last thing I wanted to hear. But again, you do what God tells you to do. So I took over that role and became a main teaching pastor both at McLean and Frontline within that same organizational structure, and was very passionate about it. And that was the seeds of the last, well, the work that we did in West Africa. I mean, a lot of great things came out of the seven years that I was at McLean Bible Church.

Todd Phillips [01:30:10] In fact, I would say it was seven of some of the best years of my life. It was remarkable, like nothing but smiles. It was a wonderful, wonderful time in my life. It really was. And at the same time, I was kind of. I kind of re emerged. I was traveling full time doing conferences, got burned out, didn't want to do that anymore. Now I'm pastoring this big church that I never planned on doing. So it was just the last thing that I was going to do.

John Dehlin [01:30:38] And because you're talking about travel and working so hard, and I'm not going to, I'm not asking anything more detailed than, did you get remarried? Did you have kids? Did you have a family? If you want to share. If you want to share.

Todd Phillips [01:30:51] Yeah. So in 1994, when I got saved, when I became a Christian, just two years after that, I was married. She was a wonderful woman. We're no longer married. We were married for about 24 years and got a divorce in 2020. Incredible woman. She's an incredible mom to our three kids, and we've got three incredible children. So it was a wonderful. And we have a good relationship now, but we met and got married right into Christianity, wanted to be married, wanted to live a fulfilling life and a life as a Christian. And she was wonderful. And we did fall in love and it just, it didn't work out long term. But our three kids, our marriage and our three kids grew up in the glass house of the megachurch. I mean, that's all my kids knew. So from birth they were PK's. Right.

John Dehlin [01:31:48] Now, what does that mean? PK?

Todd Phillips [01:31:50] Preachers kids, pastor's kids. Yeah, PKs. And. But I think we both did very well parenting in that glass house. And all three of our kids are very well adjusted today. My third one just got out of college. All three of them are out of college now. Have great jobs, love their lives, love their mom, love their dad. You know, I think as little shrapnel as could have happened through a divorce happened in our situation.

John Dehlin [01:32:19] Nice.

Todd Phillips [01:32:19] So, yeah. So I've got three wonderful kids and thankful for the marriage that I had.

John Dehlin [01:32:25] Beautiful. Okay, so you were saying now in parallel to the amazing things happening at McLean. What?

Todd Phillips [01:32:33] Yeah, at McLean. What was interesting is I was at that point, I am swimming in the deep and I've got two tanks on my back and I am deep in evangelical mega church world. And just a few years after this, I'm going to start the last. Well, you know, we grew from about 12, 1300 people when I took it over in 2004 to 18 months later. We had 4000, 4500 people coming. We had 10 campuses. We opened across the D.C. we called it a spiritual beltway around Washington, D.C. we had an Internet campus. We simulcasted all of the sermons live to the other campuses.

Todd Phillips [01:33:16] I mean, it was a deal and we were saving lots of young people. And that's what I was all about. At the same time, I decided to go. I got accepted to a doctoral cohort at Princeton and Princeton is a very liberal seminary theologically.

Todd Phillips [01:33:34] And I was told by most people, because I had got my master's at Southwestern Seminary or Southern Baptist Seminary, told by most people in my world, don't go to Princeton, it's just going to mess you up. You know, what in the world are you doing that for anyway? Is it for prestige? I don't understand. Why are you doing it? I actually went to Princeton to try to better understand liberal theology because I was doing a lot of missionary work and needed to get along with people from different theological perspectives and thought Princeton would be the perfect place to do that.

Todd Phillips [01:34:09] And so, ironically, somewhat looking back in my life right now, it was during the height of my passionate engagement in evangelical Christianity that I went to Princeton. And Princeton sowed the seeds of my deconstruction eventually. So it was Princeton that opened me to a different way of thinking about my theology, and ultimately, I would say, was the beginning of my deconstruction and my deconversion from Christianity.

John Dehlin [01:34:43] And I joked with you, I did interview Bart Ehrman several years ago and recently. And it was my memory that that's where Bart Ehrman also lost his faith, learning about the Bible. And so let's slow walk that. How did your faith start to come unraveled at Princeton?

Studying at Princeton and Encountering Liberal Theology

Todd Phillips [01:35:01] Yeah. So at Princeton, it was interesting. I was invited. I got accepted to this cohort of 10 individuals, and it was all men. So myself and nine others, and they were from all over the world, so several of them from the States, but really, I think six, five, six of them at least were from outside the US And I remember the first meeting we had, it was a three year doctoral program cohort, three year fellowship. And I remember the first time I met these guys.

Todd Phillips [01:35:32] And up until that point, John, I really thought I could handle myself in any room. I mean, I had enough confidence in my own intellectual prowess to kind of manage any situation, or so I thought it was until I got to Princeton and sat down within, I would say minutes, not even hours, but minutes of having discussions with some of the guys in my cohort that I realized, you know what? I may be the 10th smartest guy in this room. I mean, these nine guys are much more intelligent, just brilliant at many levels. And what was more disconcerting for me was they didn't necessarily believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus.

Todd Phillips [01:36:13] They didn't necessarily believe in the virgin birth of the miracles, much more social gospel oriented and coming from more mainline denominations. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, I am not the smartest guy in this room. There are nine guys that are smarter than me in this room. That's humbling in itself. I had a real problem with, took some emotional toll on me. I was like, how small of a pond have I been swimming in? Even though I was in a megachurch, what is the world I've been living in? And so that got me thinking differently. In addition to that, I realized very soon that I just really had very little to contribute to the conversation, that these guys were just talking at a level that I had not been a part of up until that point.

Todd Phillips [01:36:55] So my three years at Princeton, I just shut up, I just took notes, I observed. It was a challenging time for me. And the other challenging component of that was, okay, I'm the only one that's still a conservative Christian, theologically speaking, I'm the only one in here that really sees the Bible as an inerrant word of God. They see God differently. They don't necessarily care about the miracles, and yet they still call themselves Christians. And in addition to that, the entire three year cohort was built around what was called a habit of mind. So Princeton's goal was to teach you this habit of mind. It was critical thinking.

Todd Phillips [01:37:36] That's a basic understanding of it. It was critical thinking. It was a habit of mind, a way to think and perceive and critique the message in Scripture and how to perceive it. And it was very different than I'd ever been taught. And I started realizing then that Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was an indoctrination school.

Todd Phillips [01:37:53] It was a school of higher learning. But they weren't teaching you how to think, they weren't teaching you how to critique the Bible. They would probably tell you even today they are, but they're not. It's an indoctrination school. It's an apologetics master's program.

Todd Phillips [01:38:06] It really is. And it wasn't until I got to Princeton that I realized that, okay, Princeton doesn't care what I think about the Word, about the passage, about the Bible. They're not trying to get me to think a certain way. They're teaching me how to think about how I think a certain way.

Todd Phillips [01:38:23] And that was one step back. And that changed things for me. And so it got me to think differently. It introduced me to guys like Douglas John hall, who's a Canadian theologian that wrote a 4,500 page systematic theology, three part book series, just massive. And I got 4,500 pages of this guy that I read during that time. And he was a liberal theologian. And he made more sense to me than most of the Conservative theologians that I was introduced to in my indoctrination program at Southwestern.

John Dehlin [01:38:58] And for those who just have no idea what you're talking about, which is most Mormons give five or whatever examples of what liberal Christian theology would be versus. And you've already touched on it, but just summarize.

Todd Phillips [01:39:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:39:11] Maybe the pillars of. Of liberal Christian theology.

Todd Phillips [01:39:14] Yeah. So conservative theology is everything I've described at this point. Right. So it's the biblical literalism, it's the inerrancy, the infallibility of scripture. Liberal theology or mainline theology is much less concerned with that kind of brutal, uncompromising perspective on Scripture. Many liberal theologians buy into more of a social gospel. So they look at the 2,000 passages, for example, in the Old and New Testament about clothing the needy and the homeless and feeding the poor and providing for those who are in need. And so those 2,000 passages drive a social perspective on the gospel that has more to do with a today theology than an afterlife theology. And again, liberal theologians will probably listen to this and just cringe because I'm not giving them their due. Right. But in general terms, it's a very different perspective on Scripture.

John Dehlin [01:40:10] Hey, you're giving your take.

Todd Phillips [01:40:12] Yeah, this is my take. Yeah, yeah. And how I see it as compared to my own theology at the time, so very much about the life of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, what that means, and how we live our lives today and how we serve others. That's a much more liberal theological perspective on Jesus. Whether he had a bodily resurrection or was born of a virgin is a secondary or even unimportant side note to the reality of the life and actions of Jesus and how we might be able to live according to that. So Christianity is seen and moral liberal theological paradigms as a way of living, as a way of following the teachings of a person who claimed maybe to be God, but again, secondary.

Todd Phillips [01:40:52] Now the primary thing is what did he say and do and how can I live that way? My primary thing was afterlife, heaven, forgiveness, eternity, you know, hell. Avoiding that, you know, getting to the truth and that there is no. There are no contradictions in Scripture. Everything it says is true. That's a much more conservative fundamentalist perspective on the Bible. Hope that makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:41:17] Yeah. So just to drive it home, liberal Christianity probably does not believe in an inerrant Bible. True.

Todd Phillips [01:41:25] By and large, I would say that's accurate.

John Dehlin [01:41:28] And there's probably a lot of them that this idea of Christ being the only way, they could probably look at that symbolically or metaphorically and find room for Buddhists or Muslims or Jews to.

Todd Phillips [01:41:42] It would depend on how liberal. But, yes, I think they would lean. Definitely. Everything you're saying would apply to certain liberal theological frameworks. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:41:53] Or that Jesus's resurrection maybe wasn't necessarily temporal or corporeal.

Todd Phillips [01:41:59] Yeah. It could have been spiritual, could have been a metaphor for forgiveness. You know, it doesn't have to have happened the way the Bible says it happened.

John Dehlin [01:42:07] And could it even be that Jesus. And I'm sure this is. There's a spectrum, that Jesus wasn't really literally the Son of God and wasn't really a God, but he taught really good principles. And in that sense, he taught teachings that are true, but he wasn't necessarily literally a God.

Todd Phillips [01:42:27] Yeah. Christology is a very core component of the difference between liberal and conservative theology. Yeah. Conservative theology takes very literally what it perceives to be the truth of Christ and his purpose for both being born, living, dying, resurrecting, and ascending. Right. All those things are core in liberal theological paradigms. I think you stated it very well.

John Dehlin [01:42:49] Okay.

Todd Phillips [01:42:50] Yeah. He's an example.

John Dehlin [01:42:55] So I'm curious. Mormonism has sort of a antidote to higher learning, you know, and I'm sure lots of fundamentalist religions do. There's a saying that, like, the learned think themselves to be wise, but they hearken not unto the Spirit, you know, or there are ways to basically say you want to lose your faith, get educated, go to Princeton, go to Harvard.

John Dehlin [01:43:29] You know, that's just not what you do, because the learned are prideful and ultimately secular and wicked. And so by devaluing higher learning or certain types of higher learning, law degrees are okay because you can become a lawyer and pay a lot of tithing or get an MBA's fine or an accountant's fine or an engineer, because you're narrow. But the liberal arts are pretty evil. History's pretty evil.

John Dehlin [01:44:03] And certainly liberal theology is like what Mormons would call the philosophies of men mingled with scripture. Mormonism's got a lot of antidotes to keep you from in your Mormon theological worldview bubble. And to never allow yourself to read books or hear ideas that are outside of the orthodox mindset because they're dangerous to faith.

John Dehlin [01:44:30] How did you allow yourself at Princeton? You would have had lots of reasons as a megachurch pastor to not allow your bubble to be permeated, to not entertain or take seriously any of the things discussed, even if you perceive them to be of higher IQ than you, the other fellow attendees at your Princeton seminary, you could still have your shields or your defenses up to say, that's evil, that's wicked, that's antithetical to the true Christianity. So I may sit in the same room as these people's mouths move and they make mouth sounds, as Britt Hartley likes to say, but I'm never going to actually allow myself to consider whether this heretical, evil, worldly, secular version of Christianity is ever actually true. What was allowing you as a megachurch pastor to actually entertain and take seriously the things they were discussing?

Todd Phillips [01:45:38] Well, this is an important caveat to all this, so let me back up a bit and say this. By the time I got done with my three years there, I was still convinced that I was right. I was still convinced that probably all nine of the other people in my cohort were not going to heaven. None of that changed. Okay. It was just the seeds. I started thinking differently, but I was going back every weekend and preaching inside the church. And so I didn't have time to spend months or years reflecting on different theological precepts. The seeds of my deconstruction started there. But I didn't call myself agnostic until

John Dehlin [01:46:17] 2022, which is four years ago.

Todd Phillips [01:46:20] Yeah. So, I mean, this is, I mean, 2005 to 2022.

John Dehlin [01:46:25] So you.

Todd Phillips [01:46:26] So I leave. So, so I leave Princeton at 2000.

John Dehlin [01:46:29] In 2005.

Todd Phillips [01:46:30] Yeah, in 05.

John Dehlin [01:46:31] Okay.

Todd Phillips [01:46:31] I leave there. I'm still. I'm still at McLean Bible Church. I'm still preaching. I'm full on in. The only reason I bring up Princeton is because it started me thinking differently. So that when I was ready to ask questions in 2013, 2014, 2015, 10 years later, all that stuff stuck with me. I still had Douglas John hall in my library. I still had the books from Princeton. I still had the habit of mind. All those things were still there. And when I was ready to ask those questions, I had a structure, a habit of mind, a framework from which to think about those things more critically.

John Dehlin [01:47:04] And I'm sure the metaphor we use in Mormonism is putting things on the shelf. You learn and you hear, oh, maybe Joseph Smith was a polygamist. What? I didn't. I wasn't taught that. I'll put it on the shelf and keep believing. Oh, what, the peep stone in a hat translation? That can't be true. I'll put it on the shelf.

Todd Phillips [01:47:22] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:47:23] But we also have the metaphor that, like, the shelf starts building up and cracks start developing and eventually it caves in. So is that, you know, the seeds 100% accurate?

Todd Phillips [01:47:34] Yeah. I put everything back on the Shelf, I didn't have time to think critically about anything. I had to go back to preaching every weekend. And I was passionate about what I was doing. Like there was nothing getting me out of that. It was this thing in the back of my head. It was on the shelf. And then it wasn't until 2013 when my contract at Lake Point Church ended. So I was at McLean Bible Church for seven years from 2004 to 2011, during which time I had gone to Princeton. 2011 to 2013 was my time at Lake Point. And then at the point of 2013 when I took over last, well, full time, to do missionary work, that was the first time in my Christian experience I was allowed to spend some time thinking.

Beginning of Deconstruction and What Comes Next

John Dehlin [01:48:15] So you had been a pastor up until then, you had been a pastor responsible for the faith and the practice of thousands and thousands of people.

Todd Phillips [01:48:24] Tens of thousands.

John Dehlin [01:48:24] Sure, tens of thousands. And then all of a sudden you're leading a non profit and no longer carrying the responsibility of tens of thousands of people's beliefs.

Todd Phillips [01:48:34] Exactly right. So I no longer had to be certain every Sunday. And I had spent 20 years being certain every Sunday and preparing myself to be certain every Sunday. Now all of a sudden, I'm not preaching every weekend.

Todd Phillips [01:48:48] I don't have to be certain every week. I don't have to sit down in counseling sessions and with couples and with youth groups and be certain every day. I didn't carry the burden and the agenda of saving every person I sat with. Now I had time to think.

Todd Phillips [01:49:04] And in 2013, I was still a passionate Christian, but was taking over this nonprofit. And now I could spend weeks or months or what turned out to be years and for some topics, a decade, asking questions that I did not have to have an answer to anymore.

Todd Phillips [01:49:22] The issue of hell bothered me. The issue of biblical inerrancy was bothersome. And now all of a sudden, I didn't have to get up and say the Bible was inerrant, I believed it, but it was bothersome to me. And from 2013 to 2022, for nine years, that was my, I would call it my active deconstruction phase. And for those nine years up until 2022, I was still a Christian. I spent nine years from 2013-22 being a Christian, trying to come to terms with things that bothered me and come to terms with the doctrine of hell, come to terms with substitutionary atonement, question, inerrancy. When I found contradictions, and now I could honestly ask the question, are there contradictions?

Todd Phillips [01:50:05] And it takes about 12 minutes to just consciously deal with the fact that there are. But they could be harmonized away inside the church.

John Dehlin [01:50:15] So there's a quote that comes to mind. I read the book the Jungle by Upton Sinclair in high school about the meat packing plants in the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. The book was about how owners of the meat factory plants could justify all the harm that was being done to the factory workers. They were getting wealthy, but the people were the carnage. And there's a quote that has stuck with me since then. It's difficult to get a man to see a point of view when his livelihood depends on not seeing it.

Todd Phillips [01:50:50] Absolutely. I mean, my entire career, my reputation, I spent 20 years building a career and becoming a megachurch pastor. I had four books published. I had DVD series and Bible studies that were out there. I was still traveling full time and speaking, and I loved it.

John Dehlin [01:51:07] And to be fair, not to be cynical, it Saved your life 100%. Pulled you out of the gutter, right?

Todd Phillips [01:51:14] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:51:15] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:51:16] And I wouldn't change that. I mean, I'm in a different place today, but I wouldn't change what happened to me at the age of 23. Three. Absolutely not.

John Dehlin [01:51:24] Yeah. Yeah. Or the good you did with the nonprofit and in people's lives. Right.

Todd Phillips [01:51:29] Yeah. You know, I still have people that email me now that I'm on social media, that I get emails and messages and DMS and stuff, you know, from people that are heartbroken. You know, the pastor that quote, unquote, saved them. You know, I got saved at Frontline. They'll say, and I'm still a lover of Jesus because of what you said in that. I still have that sermon on a dvd. Like. Right. They're completely devastated. And I get that. And that hurts my heart, honestly. I mean, it really. It's a painful thing to go through, but I have to be true to myself and my own journey.

John Dehlin [01:51:59] Sure. Well, this is a natural place to wrap up part one of your story. I've loved every second of this. This is like I'm 22 plus, hundred episodes into Mormon stories, over 4,000 hours of interviews, and I'm loving every minute of this interview.

Todd Phillips [01:52:15] Oh, thanks. Well, that means a lot to me. Yeah, no, I appreciate the invitation more than, you know.

John Dehlin [01:52:21] So really quickly, don't go away. We're going to go ahead and end today's episode, but just to give a couple final plugs, the TikTok and the Instagram, and I assume Facebook and YouTube are rtodphillips. That's the social media handles. He's also known as the deconstructed pastor. How do people support you in your mission now if they want to support you financially?

Todd Phillips [01:52:49] Yeah. So there's a couple different ways. They can go to any of my social media channels and have a link directly to a community. One of the things that I started recently was a deconstruction community primarily for evangelical Christians.

John Dehlin [01:53:03] What's it called?

Todd Phillips [01:53:05] It's called decon recon.

John Dehlin [01:53:07] Okay.

Todd Phillips [01:53:07] So deconstruction and reconstruction. And it's really a safe place for people to. To ask these questions. What I was seeing was thousands of people coming into the comment section and being bold enough to share their own questions and then being just lambasted by religious people or whatever. And I thought, you know, this is. I wish I would have had a space where I could go and get encouragement and support. And there's a paywall behind it. Like they. What I would say if people want to support, they can. They can message me at the email that you provide them in the description or wherever that would be.

John Dehlin [01:53:41] What's your email?

Todd Phillips [01:53:42] It's just toddhphillipsmail.com they can send it to my personal one. That would be preferable. And if they want to support me and discuss different ways, we have scholarship programs for people that are trying to join that don't have the financial ability to do so.

John Dehlin [01:53:55] Nice.

Todd Phillips [01:53:56] So there's lots of different ways they can help.

John Dehlin [01:53:57] All right, well, don't go away because we're going to stay under two hours so that this can be translated audibly to all the languages on the planet. But we're committed to long form. So thanks for joining us. For part one. Come right back for part two. We're going to slow Dr. Todd Phillips, deconstruction as a megachurch pastor, or as a former megachurch pastor at this point, but as a nonprofit Christian nonprofit leader. We're going to talk about how the threads ended up being pulled and unraveling his orthodox Christian beliefs, fundamentalist Christian beliefs. And then we're going to talk about what deconstruction was like for him.

John Dehlin [01:54:37] Was it fun? Was it a joyride? Was it tragic and difficult and tedious and painful and excruciating. And so we're going to talk about that and what it was like having influenced so many people and having been so visible, to go through that deconstruction. And then maybe a low point that he hit in that process and then what reconstruction has meant to him.

John Dehlin [01:55:03] And then we're going to talk about all the other people leaving organized religion or fundamentalist or high demand or orthodox religions, and his decision to pivot to be a social media influencer in the deconstruction and reconstruction space. And we'll talk about that. And also I'd love to get, Todd, your views on the rise of the nones, the rise of people who are no longer affiliating with any religious tradition, how the state of both mainline Christianity and of evangelical Christianity in 2026 and where we're going as a country and as a world, as you know, are things becoming more secular? Are we retrenching in the faith in 2026?

John Dehlin [01:55:51] And what's the new promised land? For those of us who aren't in orthodox religions anymore, or for those of us who aren't orthodox believers, where's the promised land? How do we find something that's better as good or better as a framework for living than orthodox religion? You ready for part two?

Todd Phillips [01:56:14] Oh, I'm excited about part two. It's gonna be good.

John Dehlin [01:56:17] All right, well, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Please check out Dr. Todd Phillips, RTODPhillips and if you value this content and you want to see continue. If you like what we do, you can go to mormonstories.org donate and become a monthly donor. We can only do this because of the generous donations. If you are a donor, thank you for making all of this possible. Again, we're not anti belief, we're not anti Christian. The goal is not to make you deconstruct belief in God or Jesus. We're literally just experiencing the world along right side with you and trying to help everybody on their journey, wherever they are.

John Dehlin [01:56:54] But in no sense is it our agenda to take away your belief in God or in Jesus or in whatever you believe in. And that's not what we're about, but we are in helping everyone find a happy, healthy, meaningful life in or out of faith. Agreed?

Todd Phillips [01:57:08] Agreed. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:57:10] All right, so thanks for joining us. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Come right back for part two of my interview with Dr. Todd Phillips. Thanks, everybody.

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 2191

Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is August 2, 2026, and we're here in part two of the Rise and Fall of a Evangelical Christian megachurch Pastor. We're here with Dr. Todd Phillips. Hey, Todd. Welcome back.

Todd Phillips [00:00:17] Thanks, John.

John Dehlin [00:00:18] Loved part one. Part one, we talked about Todd Phillips. You know, life of sin. I'm just teasing. Life of sin and debauchery before he converts to evangelical Christianity in Austin, Denver back in the 90s. He converts to Christianity around the age 24, 25, eventually becomes a pastor and eventually becomes a megachurch pastor. And this culminates in him going to the Princeton Theological Seminary and getting a doctorate and starting and running a major nonprofit that was a multimillion dollar nonprofit delivering water to. To Africans. It was an amazing part one. So if you haven't watched that yet, pause this episode, go back and watch part one, the rise of a evangelical Christian megachurch pastor, Dr.

John Dehlin [00:01:10] Todd Phillips. That's what part one was. And part two is gonna be about the unraveling, the deconstruction of a evangelical Christian megachurch pastor and what that was like for him to deconstruct, why he deconstructed, how he deconstructed. And then probably the most exciting part for him and for many of you, how did he reconstruct a new life after giving so much for so long to the cause and influencing so many people in the cause?

John Dehlin [00:01:43] How has he reconstructed his life? What made him decide to be a social media influencer in the reconstruction space after evangelical Christianity? And what tips and tricks does he have for reconstruction after evangelical Christianity? A high demand religion. And what's the state of Christianity today, including evangelical Christianity and or white Christian nationalism. That's what's in store. So we're just getting started. But welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast.

Todd Phillips [00:02:18] Dr. Todd Phillips, thank you so much. Really, really enjoyed part one. Excited about part two. We got a lot to cover.

How the Deconstruction Process Began

John Dehlin [00:02:24] So let's start by going back to the story form. You're running this nonprofit. You had been a megachurch pastor. Let's talk about how the deconstruction starts to emerge. I like to think of it as like the Truman show metaphor, where the light falls out of the sky and crashes on the street and Truman's looking around going, wait a minute, what is this? What's going on here? The Matrix moment, You know, what was your Truman Show? How did your Truman Show Matrix moment begin?

Todd Phillips [00:03:00] You know, I think with that metaphor, I would, I would probably say that mine was back in 2005 at Princeton. And it wasn't a. It wasn't a big lamp, you know, light coming off the ceiling. It was a piece of plastic about this small that dropped in front of me. And I didn't know where it came from, but it was very tiny. Right. It was just the seeds, just the beginnings of it, that something was a little off. So that was in 2005. It wasn't until 2013 when I left megachurch work, being a pastor, going to nonprofit work, mission work, with the last, well, full time in 2013, that I started being able to ask questions that I didn't have time or I think, the emotional or spiritual bandwidth to address while I was a full time pastor.

Todd Phillips [00:03:42] And there were many topics that ended up kind of dismantling my faith over a nine year period from 2013 to 2022. But I can speak to several of them. Early on, one of was just the inerrancy of the Bible that I'd been told that God was perfect, all knowing, all loving, all powerful, perfect in every way. And he in his perfection gave us a perfect book that was also perfect in every way. And although I saw discrepancies in the Bible and contradictions, I was shown with great care how to harmonize, for lack of a better term, discrepancies in the Bible that there were none and there could be none.

Todd Phillips [00:04:28] And therefore anything I thought was a discrepancy or a contradiction must be my shortcoming. My lack of information, my lack of knowledge, my lack of critical thinking to be able to reconcile those issues. When I left pastoral work, I actually went back to some of the theologians that I was introduced to at Princeton and went back to this habit of mine that I had been taught for three years at Princeton. Went back to Douglas John Hall, a systematic theologian that I had been introduced to there, and began to ask questions and go to literature in more liberal theological kind of frameworks that allowed me to see those questions differently.

Todd Phillips [00:05:09] And one of the first things to follow was the inerrancy of Scripture. I said this to you before, but I joke a bit. It took about 12 minutes. Once I was just open to the idea that these contradictions existed, to actually see them.

John Dehlin [00:05:24] What were some of the early things that started to occur to you as problematic?

Todd Phillips [00:05:29] For me, I did it in a very systematic fashion. I was like, okay, what's the most important? I thought I could reconcile the issues because if there were some contradictions in unimportant areas, at least they weren't in the important areas. And then I said, well, you know what, what I'm going to do is take a look at the birth accounts of Jesus, the genealogy accounts of Jesus, etc. I'm going to look at the, the crucifixion of Jesus and the different accounts of that. I'm going to look at the accounts of the resurrection and the empty tomb

John Dehlin [00:06:01] between the four Gospels.

Todd Phillips [00:06:03] Between the four gospels and compare how Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I'm going to compare how each of those major narratives, ultimately I argued at that point the birth, death and resurrection of Christ being the core narrative. I mean, at least that story should be correct. If there's a perfect God expressing the most important story, it's going to line up and we're not going to find contradictions there. At least that was my logic.

John Dehlin [00:06:28] So how'd that go?

Todd Phillips [00:06:29] Not very well. Yeah, Those were the 12 minutes I talked about that. It didn't take me long to just do a Bart Ehrman style parallel account. Bart Ehrman does this in his classes where he just says, look, take the crucifixion account or the resurrection account or the birth narrative and just write it down in four columns. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And then just compare them. It's not hard.

John Dehlin [00:06:52] Can you give a couple examples?

Todd Phillips [00:06:53] Yeah. I mean, when was Jesus crucified? In one Gospel it says he's crucified at 9am and another one he's before Pontius Pilate at noon. One is before the Passover, one is after the Passover. I mean, these are very basic.

Todd Phillips [00:07:06] It's either before or after. After the Passover. It cannot be before and after the Passover. It cannot be at 9am and noon. Right. These are the kinds of things that are, I hesitate to say the word comical, but it was so emotionally disturbing to me that I had to laugh at that point.

Todd Phillips [00:07:24] It was like, okay, why did I not allow the critical faculties, the critical faculties that I would give to any other area of my life? Why did I put those on a shelf for 20 years and allow the indoctrinational kind of structure of my seminary at Southwestern really drive my perspective rather than just letting the text say what it said? So let me take you through this. So I'll give you the other four or some additional ones in light of this. So it started with the core story. Birth, death, resurrection. Once I saw that there were discrepancies there at when he died, how he died, etc.

Todd Phillips [00:08:05] That was very, very frustrating to me. Then another area, which is a larger New Testament issue is the Difference between Pauline theology, the theology of Paul, and the theology of Jesus. I harmonized that for 20 years. It's not harmonizable.

Contradictions Between Paul and Jesus's Theology

John Dehlin [00:08:18] What are some examples?

Todd Phillips [00:08:19] Jesus says, very specifically, do not let a jot or tittle of the law fade away. This law is in effect until. Until the end times, until all has come to pass. And Paul says, you no longer are under the law. You're under grace, and you're either under the law or you're no longer under the law. They cannot both be true. It is a fundamental discrepancy and issue theologically at a foundational level between the theology of Jesus himself, as it's shown in the Gospels, and the theology of Paul in the rest of the New Testament. Okay, the law. Are you under grace or are you under the law? Jesus says, you're under the law. And the greatest in heaven will be those that follow the law. And that is the prophets and the law and the prophets. That's all of the Torah. It's all of the prophets.

John Dehlin [00:09:05] Okay, so Jesus meant Judaism.

Todd Phillips [00:09:08] That's the only thing he could speak to. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:09:09] Yeah. Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:09:10] By definition, he speaks. He says, the law and the prophets, you are under that.

John Dehlin [00:09:15] Okay, so that's Torah and Talmud stuff.

Todd Phillips [00:09:17] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:09:17] So Jesus is still saying, follow the Torah and the Talmud.

Todd Phillips [00:09:20] Yeah. In fact, those that will be greatest in heaven will be those that follow it, and those that do not follow it will be found least in the kingdom of heaven.

John Dehlin [00:09:27] Got it.

Todd Phillips [00:09:27] Like, he is emphatic. And Paul says, no, no, no, you're now under grace. The law was to show your sin, and now you are under grace through Christ. That's not what Jesus preached.

John Dehlin [00:09:37] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:09:37] So I went from Gospel narratives of the life and times of Jesus to the reality that Paul and Jesus were teaching two different theologies, and they were fundamentally different. And it angered me, okay, that. That I allowed myself to harmonize or reconcile irreconcilable passages, and I just didn't see it for what it was. And then I started realizing that I was an apologist and not a critical scholar.

John Dehlin [00:10:02] What do you mean by that?

Todd Phillips [00:10:03] An apologist is one who. Who. Who comes to the text with predetermined dogma. God is perfect. The Bible is perfect. And therefore, if anything is imperfect in the Bible, you're actually seeing it wrong. That's apologetics. It comes with a result in mind and works back into the text. Biblical scholarship just takes the text as it is.

Todd Phillips [00:10:22] 11 passage says that he was crucified at 9am The 11 says he's still alive. And in front of Pilate at noon. Those are irreconcilable. They're just different. No problem if you can have problems in the Bible. But if you can't have problems, you've got to do something about that. One says he died before the Passover, one says he dies after. You can't have both. So that's apologetics versus biblical scholarship. In fact, just in the last year OR so, Dan McClellan, who Mormon, who's a tremendous biblical scholar, he's had a lot to do, along with Bart Ehrman, to help give meat on the bones of my deconstructed theology.

Todd Phillips [00:11:06] So those are kind of the beginnings were the contradictions in the Bible that became obviously so. And then the theological implications of Paul and Jesus basically preaching a different gospel. And that accelerated for me. So from 2013, when I started asking these questions, first I was just asking questions about inerrancy. And let me just say that 12 minutes really was several years, right? I mean, it didn't take long for me to see the contradictions, but I addressed those going, I'm still hanging on to Christianity. What I'm trying to do is deal with these things that have been in the back of my mind for a long time, and I'm going to come out the other side.

Todd Phillips [00:11:42] It never was. I'm going to come out not a Christian. That didn't even cross my mind. I was just going through my own existential theological kind of crisis. I was going to come out on the other side with some sort of version of Christianity that addressed these issues, or I was going to ignore them, but I was always going to be a Christian.

Todd Phillips [00:12:00] And one of the things that. So that happened the entire time I was doing the last. Well, until we finished our project in Liberia, in West Africa in 2020, from 2013 to 2020, asking lots of questions, reading lots of liberal scholars trying to come to terms with what kind of a Christian I was or would be. But I was still a Christian. And I knew one thing for certain, that regardless of these problems, I was still an evangelist. I wanted people to get saved. And so my work in Liberia was really primarily to serve people with clean water, to earn the right to share the gospel, the good news of Jesus.

Todd Phillips [00:12:35] And that was the focus of our ministry all the way through 2020. And I was comfortable with that. So in the midst of all these questions, still very focused on evangelism, very focused on Jesus and what I will say that it went from contradictions to the Paul and Jesus theology issue.

Todd Phillips [00:12:55] And then because of Those problems. I said, you know what? I'm going to go back into the Old Testament. I've always had problems with God's character. I've always had problems with some issues back there.

John Dehlin [00:13:05] Like, what were some of the problems?

Todd Phillips [00:13:06] Oh, boy. It was the amount of problems I had with God's character even before I began to read critically and just let the text say what it said. It was always a problem for me. But I was just wrong. I just didn't see God. Like, for example, with the Amalekites, God commands the Israelite army to commit genocide against the Amalekites. He doesn't just say, kill the men, the combatants. He says, kill the women, the children, and the babies, the livestock as well.

Troubling Passages in the Old Testament

Todd Phillips [00:13:46] So God is commanding Moses to send the Israelites to kill babies by the sword. And when you just scrape away all the theology that you're trying to. The Amalekites were horrible, or they were sacrificing children, so the genocide was necessary. It's absurd. It's absolutely absurd on its face that killing babies is an appropriate thing in any condition. In fact, I can safely say, Christian or not, that it is never okay to kill a baby in any way, let alone by the sword. It's never okay to murder a baby. It's never okay. Like, that is a universal. We can all kind of agree to that. And yet God's commanding it and the reason given for committing genocide against the Amalekites is because the Amalekites stood up and.

Todd Phillips [00:14:37] And went to war against Israel 400 years prior. I mean, it just gets more. If it weren't so tragic, comical. Right. So you're killing babies four centuries later in a generation of people who had nothing to do with the issue that you had a problem with, and you're still doing it. These are the kind of absurdities that I started seeing from my perspective in the Bible, when it came to the character of God.

John Dehlin [00:15:01] It's like 20 generations later, it's 20 generations.

Todd Phillips [00:15:05] They have nothing to do with anything. And yet that's considered justice. And not only justice, but perfect justice. Right. Because it's God's justice, because it's God. Because might makes right, and God can do anything. And if he's doing it, he has a reason for it. And so even though it looks immoral and unconscionable and just. It's the murdering of babies, even though it looks that way from all angles for 20 years, I said, I must be wrong.

John Dehlin [00:15:31] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:15:32] And those are the kind of things that started to really, really Whittle away at my confidence in the Bible.

John Dehlin [00:15:38] The scripture I was taught was, God's ways are higher than man's ways.

Todd Phillips [00:15:42] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:15:42] Isaiah 55. Okay. Any other thing from the Old Testament you want to highlight?

Todd Phillips [00:15:50] Well, I did a whole video recently on the ten Bible passages that I could no longer defend. And the Amalekites are one of them. But they're. The sad part is that the Bible is replete with it.

John Dehlin [00:16:00] I mean, there's slavery, right?

Todd Phillips [00:16:02] Yeah, I mean, yeah. Exodus 25, Deuteronomy 21, I believe. You know, it, actually.

John Dehlin [00:16:07] What do those say?

Todd Phillips [00:16:07] Yeah, they. They. The God of the Old Testament condones the owning of other human beings as property. It says very specifically, you can purchase slaves from the. From the nations around you. You may own them as property and hand them to your children. Okay, so they are. They are just. They're just like cattle. They are. They are defined as such. They are property. So owning another human being is property. It also says, I believe in Deuteronomy 21, that you can beat your slaves as long as they don't die within the first few days. If they die within the first few days, you can be punished. If they do not die within the first few days, you're not held responsible for anything that you've done. And these are the kind of things that you see. So slavery, rape, genocide, it is great.

John Dehlin [00:16:51] God's okay with rape.

Todd Phillips [00:16:52] Yeah. When you look at David, David and Bathsheba, if listeners know that story, David and Bathsheba, they commit sin by committing. He commits adultery with Bathsheba, sends off Bathsheba's husband to go get killed at the front lines. And the answer for David's actions of committing adultery is first to kill their baby. So any idea of justice, again, requires that the person that does the wrong thing is the person that deals with the consequences of the actions that they took. The idea that from God's perspective, it's okay to kill a baby for David's sin, again, in my opinion, I think, in every human's opinion, ludicrous. And yet that's what he does. And it gets better, though.

John Dehlin [00:17:43] Meaning worse.

Todd Phillips [00:17:45] Meaning worse. He takes 10 of David's concubines and. And has David's son days later, after God says, I will raise up trouble from among you. I will take your wives and give them to another to have sex with them, basically, on top of a building in front of all of Israel to see.

Todd Phillips [00:18:05] Days later, David's son comes in, takes 10 wives, takes them up on a roof and rapes them for all the world to see in public. That is a command of God according to the Old Testament. There's no way around it. And what I find interesting is when I look at, when I do videos on these, the apologist will come out of the woodworks and will say, no, you just don't understand the text. They'll use the term. You don't understand the context. It's always, you don't know what's really going on. And yet these are just a few of literally dozens and dozens of passages that address the, the horrific actions of the God supposedly in the Old Testament treatment of women.

John Dehlin [00:18:50] I want to do a little

Todd Phillips [00:18:53] start with the raping of David's wives. It's unconsensual. They are just chattel. They are property in the argument between God and David. That's it. That's how they're seen. And.

John Dehlin [00:19:07] Or the. What about the. For a Mormon themed question, what about the polygamy of the ancient Old Testament prophets?

Todd Phillips [00:19:12] Oh my gosh. Polygamy in the Old Testament is considered a norm. The idea that Christians today would say that one man, one woman for life is the only way that marriage is shown in the Bible is just. You haven't read the Bible.

John Dehlin [00:19:25] That's a good point.

Todd Phillips [00:19:26] It's just, it's just there's nothing. In fact, many men, many leaders have many wives at the same time. And it's considered normal. It's not called out by God. In fact, it's just within the normal processes of being a child of God in the Old Testament.

John Dehlin [00:19:45] And then the New Testament, you know, also isn't great with women, right?

Todd Phillips [00:19:49] Oh, not at all. I mean, you know, women aren't allowed to preach, they aren't allowed to hold leadership roles. It's a very misogynistic theology both in the Old and the New Testament. And the idea that Jesus came to do away with all that, again, that's not what Jesus said. That's what Paul said.

Todd Phillips [00:20:09] If you follow the life of Jesus and he's the one we're supposed to be following, we're not following Paulianity, we're following Christianity. If you are a Jesus follower, you have to address the issue that Jesus didn't abolish the law, he came to fulfill the law.

Todd Phillips [00:20:23] And he speaks very, very clearly to obey the law of the Torah and the prophets. He's very specific. And so the treatment of women in the Old Testament is validated by the words that are given to Jesus. You can't discount the character of the Old Testament God and say, well, Jesus is different, then you're talking about two different gods at that point. And you may believe that in your own theology, but I believe that Jesus was fully God and fully man. He was Yahweh in the flesh.

John Dehlin [00:20:57] One thing that Joseph Smith really seized on is this idea of the pure blood of Israel and how the Israelites were God's chosen people, which I think is what the Old Testament says. And then when Mormons come of age, they get what's called a patriarchal blessing, where they're told what, what lineage of Israelite they're descendants of. So I'm from the tribe of Ephraim, you know, because of the patriarchal blessing that I got, because Joseph Smith took all that really seriously and believed the Old Testament, which is that God has a favorite lineage and he blesses that chosen favored lineage. And I, for a long time was caught up on kind of the Curse of Cain, dark skin, Book of Mormon, Lamanite racism.

John Dehlin [00:21:49] That is in Mormonism, to not see that just this idea of God has millions or billions of his children, but there's a certain race or a certain lineage that's his chosen one. That's a problem. Have you ever thought about that?

Todd Phillips [00:22:05] Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, riff on that. Look, the God of the Old Testament is a tribal war God, straight up. Like, again, from a scholarly perspective, this is not some strange statement or some outlandish thought by some random former pastor. He's a tribal war God. It's very clear. He chooses Israel. It's his tribe among all the other tribes.

Todd Phillips [00:22:31] And it's clear from this that I used to say this and I've had done videos on it recently. If the Bible was really from God being perfect and outside of time, you would think it wouldn't look like a tribal war God wrote it. And that's exactly what you see. You see a tribal regional God thousands of years ago, picking Israel over other nations and giving them war booty. From beating the other nations into submission and committing genocide. And it's completely fine, by the way, to do that and then to own the captive brides from those other nations as war booty. These are the things that God supposedly says directly to his people.

John Dehlin [00:23:16] And then there's a blame reversal. If they get beat by the other tribes, well, it's because they were wicked, right?

Todd Phillips [00:23:22] Absolutely. Well, there's always a reason around it, right? It just seems, and I don't. I'm careful to use these terms, but I'm going to use them. It is at least the God what I started to do when I was going through my deconstruction. Still being a Christian is. I was like, I'm going to have to let go of. I remember saying this 2018, 2019 around. I said, I know I can't let go of the Old Testament God, but I don't know how I can continue to serve and say that I worship and endorse and condone the actions of the Old Testament God as it's expressed in.

Todd Phillips [00:24:01] In the Old Testament. That's not a God I would want to serve. You know, I think it was Richard Dawkins, you know, said that he had this whole paragraph in the beginning of one of his books. Maybe the God delusion is that, you know, Yahweh is the most capricious, immoral, vindictive. And he goes on with all these words about describing the Old Testament God. I remember hearing that when I was a Christian going, that guy's going to hell.

Todd Phillips [00:24:27] How can you speak out against God that way? I actually went back and critiqued that paragraph when I was going through my deconstruction. I said, asking myself, forget what I think I know. Are any of these words not accurate?

Todd Phillips [00:24:41] And I went through that entire paragraph and said everything. Everything that Dawkins described the Old Testament God as being is accurate based on the text. I have to decide not to buy into the text to disagree with this passage. I mean, this paragraph from Dawkins and that was like a pierce to the heart for me. It was like, what do I do with this? How do I separate Jesus from this Old Testament God? When Jesus validates everything that that God said, how do I do that? And I just had to choose for three or four years to just be a Jesus only Christian. I don't know how to reconcile it.

Todd Phillips [00:25:18] I don't know how to reconcile the Pauline theology. I'm not going to be a Paulite, I'm going to be a Christian. And I can't bind to the Old Testament God any longer. He seems horrible. And so I'm just going to bind to Jesus. But Jesus validated this Old Testament God, so I'm just going to be a red letter Christian. And that lasted from about 2019, maybe 2020 to about 2022, where all I did was just say, I'm a red letter Christian, I just follow Jesus.

New Testament Contradictions and Growing Doubts

Todd Phillips [00:25:42] So all these things happen, right? So we've got the contradictions. We've got Paul and Jesus with a different theology. We've got the Old Testament God, which is a horrific God from my perspective, looks like a Tribal God, acts like a tribal God, speaks like a tribal God, and looks a lot like the other gods of the same time period from other religious ideologies.

Todd Phillips [00:26:02] Then I started looking at how the Gospels were written and realized over months, maybe a year or so, that I couldn't honestly say that the Gospels were eyewitness accounts, because they're not. We have no idea who the authors of the New Testament are. They were written somewhere between 60 and 110 years after the life of Christ.

Todd Phillips [00:26:29] And we have no way of knowing. Dan McClellan famously will say this often we have no way of knowing a single word that was said or a single action taken by this Jesus. We simply don't know. We just have to take it on face value that these are the things that happened.

John Dehlin [00:26:46] Yeah. And tell why. Because until I learned about Bart Ehrman, I didn't understand how the New Testament manuscripts were put together.

Todd Phillips [00:26:54] Yeah, it's quite astonishing, really. The New Testament manuscripts specifically were written by people. We don't have the author. Church tradition, Catholic Church tradition gives us the authors in the second and third century,

John Dehlin [00:27:10] which is happening generations, hundreds of

Todd Phillips [00:27:11] years after the life of Jesus. So if something were to happen today and someone would write something about us in 2226 and say that was the author of that thing that we just found.

John Dehlin [00:27:22] And it was passed down through oral tradition.

Todd Phillips [00:27:24] It was passed down through oral tradition and for decades before it was written and it wasn't written in full form. We have Mark. The synoptic Gospels are Mark, Matthew, Mark and Luke. Okay, Mark and Matthew. Mark was the first Gospel that was written. And Matthew and Luke take about 90, some would argue 95% of their message from Mark. So the fact, the idea that we have three separate accounts is an inaccurate statement to begin with. They are synoptic. They are pulled from each other, Matthew and Luke, from Mark.

John Dehlin [00:27:54] So we know they had Mark as

Todd Phillips [00:27:56] a source, as a source document.

John Dehlin [00:27:58] They're fan fictioning an original source document.

Todd Phillips [00:28:02] Exactly right. And then John is the most developed, theologically developmental gospel where Mark is first. You don't have any post resurrections account in Mark. Matthew and Luke have post resurrection accounts. And all of a sudden in John, he is the Word in the flesh, he is eternal. John is the one that has the most theologically developed view of Christology.

John Dehlin [00:28:27] Which reminds me of like the fish story, right? You catch a fish and it starts out this big and then by the end it's this big.

Todd Phillips [00:28:37] Yeah. And you see that theological development throughout the four Gospels. And so the authors of the Gospels definitely Had an agenda, a theological agenda. In fact, it's John who says that Jesus did this in order to fulfill the scripture here and then he misuses the scripture from the Old Testament.

Todd Phillips [00:28:54] Like, the crazy thing is the New Testament writers, the Gospel writers clearly read from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament. They didn't know original Hebrew because they're misusing and misquoting the Old Testament. And again, if God's perfect, a perfect God is going to make sure that these kinds of mistakes, these very basic mistakes are not happening.

Todd Phillips [00:29:20] At least that would be my logic, right? So I could keep going on with the Bible. But what happened was just this cumulative effect of all these challenges that I've been describing over time from the New to the Old Testament, the development of the Gospels, the fact that we know who wrote them, the fact that they have theological developments that are very plain inside them over time and time will tell. In other words, Mark is early, John is late. The theological developments in the later books, you can see the development, it's just there for all to see that are not seeing with predetermined lenses over their eyes.

Todd Phillips [00:29:59] And I went through a very angry phase around 2019, 2020 was when I was starting to ask some of these questions. And the beginnings of that kind of anger phase started to happen. But I was still in the final throes of the last well, bringing the gospel to the last 10, 15% of Liberia. We were doing it during the pandemic. There was a lot going on, right? So I was trying to finish. December 31st was our end date of 2020. It was built into our mission. Mission to bring the gospel and clean water to all of Liberia by December 31, 2020, it was in the mission.

Todd Phillips [00:30:35] So those last two years, even though I was dealing with some of this anger, I didn't allow it to surface until after the last well was done. It wasn't until 2021, after the last well was completed in November of 2020, that the emotional side of this started to really carry some weight. So I had this intellectual exercise for seven years. I was still a Christian, right? When the last well was finishing, I started asking many of the questions I' about now, I would have said probably around 2019, 2020. I was a red letter Christian, but that was a private decision on my part. I wouldn't have announced that to the world, but I would say that was probably accurate.

Todd Phillips [00:31:10] Again, the timing gets a little fluid. But after the last well was completed in 2020, then I really, you know, my Career, my passion for evangelism. Nothing was tied career wise to this issue. And now it's a free for all. Now I can go wherever I want with this and really spend as much time as I want. And that's when things started getting really dark.

John Dehlin [00:31:35] How so?

Todd Phillips [00:31:40] I was kicking and screaming the whole way of my deconstruction. I never did not want to leave Christianity, not for career reasons, for relationship reasons. This idea that I had a relationship with the God of the universe, that I had been forgiven of my sins, that I was going to heaven to see my family. I woke up every day with what I thought was a God given very specific directive for my life to evangelize the world. Last well was part of that. I woke up knowing that God had given me that and he was empowering me to do it.

Todd Phillips [00:32:15] When the last well was over and I wasn't living day to day under God's mission for the first time really in my entire Christian experience, now I was untethered. Now I was angry. I did not have a mission any longer to get up in the morning for the pandemic had just happened. It was still going on in 2021. I went through a divorce in 2020, separate from my religious beliefs. It was just the end of the marriage.

Todd Phillips [00:32:43] Had gone through two or three years of Christian counseling to try to save the marriage. It ended in 2020. And so I was divorced, had just finished the last well during the pandemic, had moved from Dallas to Austin into an apartment. For the first time, I was living by myself.

John Dehlin [00:33:03] Did you consider, oh, go back and be a megachurch pastor? Things were happy then, never why.

Todd Phillips [00:33:13] I had already wrestled with the fact that I couldn't preach any longer, even if I was going to be some sort of version of Christianity. I just had too many problems with the text. And a preacher is a. You're a preacher of the word. I'm not just a pastor. I'm a preacher. And I have to be 100% confident in preaching. So in 2020, when the last well was done, I was like, man, maybe I'll lead another nonprofit. But what happened was I went through my divorce. I got long Covid. I had a eight month problem with that. I lost my dad in 2020. So theological crisis, divorce, dad dies, eight months of COVID and no career trajectory.

The Dark Night of the Soul

John Dehlin [00:33:59] You're going full job on us, man.

Todd Phillips [00:34:01] I'm going full job. That's exactly right. Don't get me started on job. It was a horribly difficult time. And that was the time where I finally had the chance also to ask the questions and really set with them.

Todd Phillips [00:34:15] And so, yeah, my life unraveled in short order in 21 and 22. And it really was the dark night of the soul for me. And I would, and I would say that lasted until, it lasted until 25. So I started last year, yeah, I would say four, four, four and a half very solid years of depression. I got to a point in 2024. I remember this very well.

Todd Phillips [00:34:54] I called my mother. I had this career and security and my finances were in order and I had my family and I had nothing. I was a single man in Austin going through this theological crisis and career crisis and relational crisis. I remember saying to her on the phone and I was just weeping.

Todd Phillips [00:35:16] I probably was not easily understood through those tears. I remember saying, I don't want to wake up tomorrow. You don't have to worry about me taking my life, but I'm exhausted. I would be fine not waking up. And I remember for months on end getting up in the morning and before I. You know, when you're in that fog, when you first wake up and you don't, you're not capturing where you are in time, you're just waking up from asleep and there's seconds there, maybe 30, where you're stretching and it's just another morning and then the reality of your entire world hits you. And I remember going for months, maybe over a year, every morning going, man, I, I actually have to get up out of this bed and just exist for 14 more waking hours until I can go to bed again.

Todd Phillips [00:36:13] That's how much I was hurting. It was a tremendous amount of depression. And those were the years of my theological dismantling. And I remember thinking, man, I wouldn't it be nice to be back in my useful fiction is the phrase I would use that Christianity was a useful fiction.

Todd Phillips [00:36:40] I mean, it almost brings me to tears right now because it was so painful. It was, You know, I think I'm past this sometimes and it surprises me, you know, it got so challenging for me. In January of 25, Elise was up at my apartment and I put everything I had in storage.

Todd Phillips [00:37:09] And I told a girl that I was actually seeing, had just been seeing for a few months. I said, look, I don't have the emotional bandwidth to be in a relationship and I care about you a great deal.

Todd Phillips [00:37:24] But I'm going to make a decision right now to get physically away from everything because things are not going well in my life. And so I put everything in storage and I took a one way ticket to Vietnam.

Todd Phillips [00:37:38] And I went on a solo backpacking trip. And I was gone from January, early February of 25, this is recent, until July of 25. I was in Vietnam for many months. I was in Cambodia for a while. I went and visited a friend of mine who had a bungalow in Florida. Stayed there for a few months and just got.

Todd Phillips [00:38:02] I haven't shared this publicly. I needed physical and emotional distance from everything. It was either going to be the worst decision of my life to kind of pack everything in storage and go to Vietnam, or the best it really wasn't going to be.

Todd Phillips [00:38:19] There was no middle ground there. It turned out to be the best decision I could have made. It gave me enough physical distance from all my challenges to realize that letting go of my faith, going through this crisis, existing in a depressive time frame where I didn't want to wake up each morning, that I valued this life and had some incredible chapters in it. And many of those chapters were driven by a belief in God. And I just didn't realize how devastating the loss of God would be.

Todd Phillips [00:38:58] And I. And when I came back from that, basically six months backpacking, I came back to Austin. And this was in summer of last year, a year ago. My gosh, so recent. I came back. I was doing some AI consulting work at the time.

Todd Phillips [00:39:20] And in Christmas, I sat down with my daughter, my youngest, Rainey is her name, and I said, rainy. I got back from my trip. It was very helpful. I'm kind of buoyed by the process. I'm not kind of mired in that depression any longer. But I have lost my faith.

Todd Phillips [00:39:40] You know, it's in the rearview mirror by some time now. And I really think I'm agnostic. I may even be an atheist. And I'm spending so much time struggling with the fact that I was a megachurch pastor and tens of thousands of people knew me in a certain way. I think I'm just going to spend the rest of my life in this horrible solitude because I don't feel comfortable telling anybody now where I am.

Todd Phillips [00:40:05] And maybe I shouldn't. Maybe that's just the price I pay. I don't want to damage anybody else's faith, certainly the people that I shared Jesus with. And she said, I remember this really well. She said, dad, she goes, you should download the TikTok app. This was at Christmas of last year.

Todd Phillips [00:40:26] I said, why would I want to download the TikTok app? She goes, look, just download it. Trust me on this. She goes, you can't find anybody that will talk to you. For hours about theology and philosophy in Austin. You tell me your friends in Austin are great, but they're. They're much more kind of football and, you know, everything else. And you're just stuck in this zone. And she goes, the algorithm will find a half a dozen Johns that you can get on Zoom calls with and talk theology and philosophy and kind of work through this stuff. She goes, right now, you're stuck in your head.

Todd Phillips [00:40:55] So I remember this. January 12th of 2026, about three weeks later, I downloaded the TikTok app and I pushed the little button. It's the first video on my TikTok channel. And I just said, hey, I'm a former megachurch pastor. Some of you might know me.

Going Public on TikTok and Finding Community

Todd Phillips [00:41:11] I'm just looking for people to talk with and to kind of walk through this journey with. And if that's where you are, let me know. I'm going to be posting. My daughter suggested I post for, like, the next month just to let the algorithm work. So I'm hoping to find some people I can talk with. And that was my first video.

Todd Phillips [00:41:27] I wasn't trying to start a movement or get followers. I was trying to find half a dozen guys that would have a whiskey with me over Zoom. That was it. And now it's eight months later, and it's a very different world.

John Dehlin [00:41:42] So what happened? Who reached out? How did they reach out? What relationship? What videos did the algorithm feed back to you? And what types of relationships or friendships or following did you tap into?

Todd Phillips [00:41:56] Yeah, so it was really quite amazing, and I didn't realize how much I needed to get out of my head until I was able to put it on camera and just talk for two or three minutes at a pop.

Todd Phillips [00:42:10] What I didn't realize was how good the algorithm was. You know, I really. Two things was I had lost my sense of self confidence, my sense of self worth, my sense of self esteem. And although I was kind of coming out of a very depressive episode, I just didn't have a lot of direction in that area. And the videos allowed me to start putting to words the things that I'd been thinking. The videos allowed me to speak into the ether, some of my thoughts and share my journey and make it okay that if somebody who was a Christian, who used to be at my churches, and they found out about it, which invariably probably would happen, I thought, that's okay.

Todd Phillips [00:42:54] We're all on our own journey, and I'm just going to stop worrying about everybody else and I'm going to live my life. And right now, the Healthiest thing for me to do is to express myself. And so I did. And the algorithm very quickly connected me with Brett Hartley. Soon after that, Dan McClellan.

John Dehlin [00:43:13] Meaning it was feeding you their videos. Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:43:16] Feeding me their videos. Yeah. Sorry.

John Dehlin [00:43:18] No, no, no, no, no, don't.

Todd Phillips [00:43:19] Yeah, the algorithm was feeding me videos from Brit and from Dan McClellan.

John Dehlin [00:43:23] So slow talk, that a bit. Like what? So you see, Brit, like what? What messages that Brit and then Dan were sharing were interesting to you? These are ex Mormons or liberal Mormons. How did they speak to an ex evangelical megachurch pastor?

Todd Phillips [00:43:39] Well, a couple things, right. I had not been on social media since 2020 when the nonprofit ended, so I've been off it for six years. And so in January, eight months ago, when I started this, Brit shows up, Dan shows up, and I'm just amazed at some level at the level of discourse that's happening on two and three minute videos.

John Dehlin [00:44:02] Right.

Todd Phillips [00:44:03] And how effective Dan was at. You know, I used to say a sermon was hard because you only had 30 minutes. I remember that because I could talk for an hour or two hours. The. The superpower was getting it in 30 minutes. The superpower is definitely getting it in two to three minutes. Right. And Dan and Britt were both very effective at that. And clearly they'd been doing it for a while, for several years by the time I saw them, and were certainly in their own zone. And each of them have, like, I don't know, 7, 800, 900,000 followers on TikTok alone. And then they've got other channels, Right.

Todd Phillips [00:44:32] So more than a million people watching these two. What they did was they gave a level of validity to my process. They allowed me to say, okay, there are other people that are out here speaking to this. What I had not seen up to that point was someone like myself who was a mega church pastor.

Todd Phillips [00:44:55] And I knew a lot of them, and none of them, I knew, had gone through deconstruction. Most of them were still in their pastoral roles. So there was a uniqueness to the story that I thought I was bringing to the table at some level. But I. I was very impressed with the depth and the critical study necessary to produce the videos that Britt and Dan were producing.

John Dehlin [00:45:23] Let me ask you, I can get why Dan's would have resonated with you because you went to Princeton and you were knee deep in biblical criticism. So I could see that as a natural fit, even though, ironically, he's still a believing attending Christian. But Brit Hartley, what was it about some of her videos or her messages. She's more of a secular person. She's ex Mormon. How did her stuff resonate with you as an ex evangelical?

Todd Phillips [00:45:49] You know, it's really hard to put my finger on it, honestly. I just like her. I think I'm probably a student of oration and I love people that can speak publicly. And again, the idea that you can stuff the amount of knowledge in a two or three minute video, I was taken by Britt's ability to do that.

Todd Phillips [00:46:13] She speaks on a variety of subjects and does so with seeming intellectual curiosity and some level of, I would say, a great level of intellectual prowess that she brings to the table. And she just expresses it in such a way that it impressed me.

Todd Phillips [00:46:31] And I found her subjects to be certainly parallel to mine. So from, from that perspective, I was very, I was, I was very engaged with her videos. And then also what started happening is, is other deconstruction voices were in contact with me. Like, what was weird about the whole thing was I, again, I didn't know If I'd have 10, you know, followers. I was trying to find five, right? And for the audience, this is not to, to, to say anything, but just to understand, like over eight months, like there's 150,000 or so followers on my social media channels, right?

John Dehlin [00:47:03] That

Todd Phillips [00:47:07] what it's allowed me to do is I buried years ago, the Pastor Todd, never to be resurrected, so to speak. And now I find myself using the skill sets that I have a passion to use again. And I thought they would never be used again. So now I get to teach again, I get to share my journey again. I get to have. I get to be on a podcast with you, John. This was not in the cards eight months ago.

Todd Phillips [00:47:38] I have a sense of purpose again. I had lost a sense of purpose in 2020 when Lastwell was done. I lost a sense of mission when I let go of Christianity in 2022, 2023, and for the first time in over half a decade, I get up in the morning and I am very excited about the 14 hours I get to live, very excited about the next day beyond that and the weeks beyond that and the months beyond that,

John Dehlin [00:48:11] you

Todd Phillips [00:48:11] know, and crazy notes because of TikTok. I did not start this to get following or to create a career. It is becoming that almost by necessity, but also by passion. I have a sense of responsibility for other people. I don't want people to go through the years of depression that I went through. I don't want them to wake up in the morning and feel like they don't Want to live that day.

Todd Phillips [00:48:45] I want to shorten. I say this quite often. My goal now through my videos and the community that I built and other projects that I'm working on now, is to shorten the pain curve for those going through deconstruction. I have no agenda.

Todd Phillips [00:49:00] If deconstructing and having a critical phase in their own Christian faith takes them back to Christianity, I'm very happy for them if it takes them to a more liberal form of that Christianity. If they're evangelicals right now, I'm also happy. If it takes them where I am today, I'm equally as happy because they will have gone through the process of questioning the things that have been handed to them. And I think that's a good thing.

John Dehlin [00:49:23] This is a thought that I haven't shared with ex evangelical. You may end up doing this or liking the idea. So I started doing workshops and retreats for Mormons in faith crisis in the 2000s, 2007s, 2008s. But I really went hard at that after finishing my Ph.D. 2014, 2015, and I developed a whole weekend retreat concept on Navig Mormon faith crisis, healing and growth and mental health and marriages and sexuality and all that meaning and purpose. But one of the metaphors that I pulled out of it was to take Jesus's idea of being born again and applying it to what Richard Rohr calls the first half of life and the second half of life. And I've never described to an evangelical the idea or articulated to them the idea that, that, hey, brother, you've just been born again. Yeah, well, this is what Jesus meant when he said born again.

Todd Phillips [00:50:30] Well, there's no question. I mean, to come a bit full circle, the hilltop experience I had that we talked about in part one, when I came to faith, when I became a Christian, when I had that radical transformative experience in 1994, you know, in some ways, and certainly in slower fashion, but posting that video on January 12th of 2026 was the birth of a new, certainly a new chapter of my life was a rebirth of a very exhausted and depressed and in many ways lonely person.

Todd Phillips [00:51:20] And I have community again and building new relationships with people like yourself. That, and I do mean this because we've just met, I hope continues. Much of what the church provided in community and connection and belonging was stripped away from my life.

Todd Phillips [00:51:44] And I didn't understand how costly it would be. I just didn't. No way of knowing. And some people go through it in a much more casual fashion. They just over time just decide they don't believe anymore. I think it was because I was so steeped in really was every, it was everything to me.

John Dehlin [00:52:05] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:52:07] Everything. Everything.

John Dehlin [00:52:09] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:52:11] So coming out of that's been difficult.

John Dehlin [00:52:13] Mormons get that. That's one thing Mormons get is the religion being everything and then nothing, you know.

Todd Phillips [00:52:20] Yeah. And it's. And, and I, I think for me when I, when I, when I talk to people in this new community that I launched, you know, like, oh my gosh, you know, I've, I've had to brave the comment section on TikTok to say something and then I get attacked. Right. And now they've got this place where it's kind of, it's behind a, behind a wall and you've got to fill out the little questions and we moderate the place. I don't know what it'll become. It's brand new. It's like it's weeks old.

John Dehlin [00:52:41] Oh, cool.

Todd Phillips [00:52:42] Yeah. And, and what platform I'm using? Skool.com. oh s k O O L O. It's kind of like circle. Yeah, I guess. Same, same kind of deal. But I just found it first. But one of the things I'm finding is that I also didn't realize even on social media this community is something different for me selfishly, you know, it allows me to, I don't have to navigate the shark infested waters of social media comments to get to people. Right. These are people that have kind of self selected into this and that's been very encouraging for me as well. You know, the idea that I was looking for four or five johns to just have some discussions with at the beginning of this in January. Now there's this community of people that I'm engaged with daily.

John Dehlin [00:53:35] I love it.

Todd Phillips [00:53:36] It's wonderful.

John Dehlin [00:53:37] Let me ask you to go back to. You put out that first TikTok video in January. How did people start reaching out to you and how did you start connecting with viewers and commenters and followers and then how did that start coming into your real life if you're willing to share?

Todd Phillips [00:53:57] Sure, yeah. I mean the last eight months has been really interesting to say the least. What happened was I again, and I mentioned this before, I just looking for a few people. So very, very quickly, I think. And again TikTok I guess does this for lots of people. But you know, I had two or three thousand followers in a week or two. Right. And I started realizing that my videos were at least being partially watched by more people than I ever preached to in any of the largest churches I was in. It's wild. It is. It's a strange deal, right? I'm like, wow, this is unexpected. Yeah, I just didn't have anything to go by.

John Dehlin [00:54:28] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:54:29] And so then I started getting emails and DMs, I guess more. More direct messages from people like yourself who were saying, hey, come on my podcast, or, I haven't heard your story before. And. And I. And I said no to everything because that wasn't the goal. I was like, I.

Todd Phillips [00:54:46] This is a crazy enough decision to get on social media to find some people to talk to. This isn't my career, podcast or not. I mean, you know, I'm still dealing with the fact that I'm gonna eventually be found out by Christians who used to go to my church. It's a bit of a challenge.

Todd Phillips [00:55:03] But I did get in touch with some people in the deconstruction space. John Cohen was one of them. He's a great guy. You should have him on. Of course, he won't fit this. He's always been an atheist, so it doesn't work, but John's a great guy. He's always been an atheist.

John Dehlin [00:55:15] Wait, I've had atheists on the podcast

Todd Phillips [00:55:16] that I've always been atheist, sure. Yeah. Okay. I thought you were mostly going through the. John's a great guy.

John Dehlin [00:55:21] Anyone who's got. Got a good story to tell, I want to hear the story.

Todd Phillips [00:55:23] Yeah, he's in the uk, really good guy. He's got a debate channel, basically talks to Christians about their beliefs. It's a very. It can get very confrontational, but he does it very well.

John Dehlin [00:55:32] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:55:34] But anyway, John reached out to me and asked me to be on one of his TikTok lives. So it was just 10 minutes real quick, and it was my brave move into the live space. And this was like, in late February. And then John and I became fast friends. So he and I, in fact, we just did a video that I posted yesterday, as a matter of fact, and it's. It's. I haven't told you this. So John is the lifelong atheist.

John Dehlin [00:55:55] What's his name again? John Thomas Cohen.

Todd Phillips [00:55:57] C O H E M. Oh, John Cohen. John Cohen.

John Dehlin [00:56:01] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:56:02] And you can find him on YouTube, TikTok, all that stuff. But his YouTube channel is the main one. But anyway, John is the lifetime atheist. I have an evangelical Christian, Jason, a friend of mine that I. That I was on his podcast in Florida a few weeks ago, a month ago, and then myself. And what we're doing is we're critiquing my old sermons. So young Todd is on The. On the screen.

John Dehlin [00:56:21] Because your sermons are still on YouTube.

Todd Phillips [00:56:24] Yeah, I have, I have, I have. I have a. I've. I've got a Todd Phillips archives channel now because I've had so many people ask for the old stuff.

John Dehlin [00:56:31] Yeah, that's.

Todd Phillips [00:56:33] So we took one of my favorite evangelistic messages and we Critiqued it for 2 hours and 40 minutes.

John Dehlin [00:56:38] Oh, my gosh. I want to see.

Todd Phillips [00:56:39] Yeah, I'll send you the link, but I just. I literally posted it yesterday before I got on the flight.

John Dehlin [00:56:44] We'll put it in the show notes.

Todd Phillips [00:56:45] Yeah, yeah. So all that to say is what's happened over the last eight months is I get to write again, I get to teach again. I'm addressing all my fears by critiquing my old sermons. So a lot of it's come full circle. And what I found when I was on the video, just as a side note, I was on the video with John and Jason.

Todd Phillips [00:57:08] I found. I also got. I don't know, maybe I'm just having an emotional few days, but I went through this whole process of looking at my sermon 10, 12, 15 years later, whatever it is, and really having compassion for the guy on the stage, really having a lot of compassion for young Todd or younger Todd. And it was a really healthy process for me to go through, to just start putting words to. I still like what I said there. That story was still profound. This was still very helpful. This is what I disagree with. This is what I'm embarrassed by now.

Todd Phillips [00:57:45] And really allowing. It's a bit of a catharsis to go through that process. So social media has. It's turned out to be the doorway into new relationships, new opportunities, new conversations, new places to share my story, new opportunities to write, new opportunities to build community. And all of that came from a video on January 12th.

John Dehlin [00:58:11] So how did it bleed over into personal relationships or has it yet, like friendships or like lunches or dinners or like, have you done meetups yet, any of that stuff?

Todd Phillips [00:58:22] Yeah, I haven't done meetups in Austin from social media.

John Dehlin [00:58:25] You have or have not?

Todd Phillips [00:58:25] I have not.

John Dehlin [00:58:26] Okay.

Todd Phillips [00:58:27] I have not done that yet. But what I'm finding is in this community that I'm building on, this decon recon community, there's a map. And so as more people are joining, you know, it turns out three or four of these people are within like 45 minutes of Austin.

John Dehlin [00:58:41] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [00:58:41] So eventually we're going to meet up. But what I have found is, like with John and yourself and others, I've got a lot of zoom, friends like people that I just get on the. You know, I've really have become fast friends, you know, that I'll text, they're available for me, they understand the challenges that I've been through. I've shared my story with them like I'm sharing with you. And they're just magnanimous and open and caring and. I just cannot tell you how isolated I was.

John Dehlin [00:59:13] Yeah, yeah, I get it.

Todd Phillips [00:59:15] And how it was a very bad place. Well, and it's not anymore.

John Dehlin [00:59:20] Yeah. I mean, yeah, I went through my faith crisis in 2001, before the social media and in Mormonism. You can imagine what that felt like. I did that for three or four years. Went through the years of depression, hopelessness.

Todd Phillips [00:59:35] Well, we have a very similar story then.

John Dehlin [00:59:37] Yeah. And then I left Microsoft in 2004. Learned about blogs and podcasts before YouTube, before Facebook, before TikTok, Instagram. And so I started an audio only podcast in 2005. Just wondering, I don't know what's gonna happen here, but let me just record something and put it out and see what happen. And so I'm just 20 by, whatever, 20 years ahead of you that way. But I started in a very, very similar way.

Todd Phillips [01:00:08] Well, I gotta tell you, we'll say more of this offline, but I'm obviously intrigued by your story and for someone that's down the path further, certainly in this kind of public setting. Cause this wasn't the plan. But it is the plan now.

John Dehlin [01:00:22] Yeah. And it's fascinating because you just have no idea what's gonna happen. And yeah, you make friends and you have relationships and you make mistakes and you hurt people, but you just keep doing your thing. I was curious.

John Dehlin [01:00:42] Years ago, I actually named my nonprofit. So I did this for five years, an audio only podcast. And then in 2009, 2010, I started the nonprofit. And I literally didn't call it the Mormon Stories foundation, even though I could have. I called it the Open Stories Foundation. And I did that because I really thought the model had viability.

John Dehlin [01:01:05] And I thought there should be a Catholic Mormon. There should be a Catholic Stories and an Evangelical Stories and a Jewish Stories and a Scientology Stories and Jehovah Witnesses stories. Not just in English, but there should be a John Dehlink in every religious ex religious tradition and in every major world language. Like, because this idea of just long form storytelling is clearly transformative. Like the Mormon Church is on its knees for a couple centuries worth of deceiving people, harming people, lying to people. In addition, all the good that it's done. Because I also think the church has done a lot of good. It's done a ton of lying, a ton of racism, a ton of misogyny, a ton of homophobia, a ton of anti science and anti intellectual rhetoric.

John Dehlin [01:01:56] Lots of bad things, lots of good things, but it's on its knees. That's why, in my opinion, that's why it's suing me, because I'm part of this broader community of Britt Hartley's and Dan McClelland's and Radio Free Mormons and Nemo, the Mormons and all these ex Mormon and liberal Mormon creators that have just blown open the lock that the Mormon Church had on people's brains, on their families, on their marriages, on their lives, on their souls, on their spirits.

John Dehlin [01:02:30] And so what I'm trying to say, I'm being long winded, but what I'm trying to say is like this model has worked and it's why you encountered ex Mormons or liberal Mormons influenced by ex Mormonism, frankly, it's why you encountered them. Because we Mormons got so early to the social media game. We were there first in podcasting, first in Facebook, first in YouTube, first in TikTok. We were very early and very heavy. So I'm proud of that as a community.

Todd Phillips [01:03:04] You should be, but.

John Dehlin [01:03:05] Well, I, and I mean it as a community, not personal.

Todd Phillips [01:03:09] I understand.

The Ex-Evangelical Online Landscape

John Dehlin [01:03:10] But what I was wondering is when you got into the ex evangelical scene, were there a ton of John Dehlins and Britt Hartley's and Dan McClelland's or not? And if not, why? Why aren't evangelicals, ex evangelicals, ex Jews, ex Scientologists, ex Jehovah's Witnesses more prevalent is kind of what creators? Why aren't they more prevalent? Or are they.

Todd Phillips [01:03:35] Yeah, I can't speak to the other religious perspective, other religions, but I can say exvangelicals is the term I see a lot on social media. It's quite prominent.

John Dehlin [01:03:47] Okay, it is pretty.

Todd Phillips [01:03:48] Yeah. And it's. It may not be as large as, and I don't know this for a fact, it may not be as large as the number of Mormon influencers out there, ex Mormon influencers on social media, but it's quite large. That's one of the things that was most impressive to me is, is just seeing the numbers. I just thought there were none. Right. Other than kind of the new atheist movement in the 2000s with Dawkins and Hitchens and Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, those kind of guys. That's really where I got, where I started watching YouTube was with what they called the four horsemen, the four atheists of the new atheist movement back in the 2000s.

John Dehlin [01:04:30] Yeah. And yeah, you're really early. So you even haven't started really having the in person relationships that you're probably going to.

Todd Phillips [01:04:37] Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I'm starting to see the seeds of that and that's something I'm very encouraged by. I just had my birthday last week and I had a couple of. Thanks. A couple of friends of mine that I've met since January I actually invited to a birthday. One of them flew in from Florida and another guy all that I've met basically connected to because of this whole deconstruction.

John Dehlin [01:04:57] Wait, When's your birthday?

Todd Phillips [01:04:58] August 26th.

John Dehlin [01:04:59] You were born in 1969? Yeah, I was born August 20th, 1969.

Todd Phillips [01:05:04] And we're six days apart.

John Dehlin [01:05:05] We were born in the same week.

Todd Phillips [01:05:06] Look at that.

John Dehlin [01:05:07] That's awesome. That's fun.

Todd Phillips [01:05:09] That's why we relate.

John Dehlin [01:05:10] And we're both Texans.

Todd Phillips [01:05:11] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:05:13] Okay, so really quickly, and I'm a nerd. During that 2020-2026 time period, what did you do for work?

Todd Phillips [01:05:23] I did coaching a lot. I had a, I had done a lot of coaching when I was still in the church, meaning just kind of executive coaching, life coaching, things like that. And I, for a couple of years I did a kind of a mindset mastery. I was trying to just try to still do coaching because I was interested in it, but really, I just, really was trying to find myself. So that paid the bills.

Todd Phillips [01:05:48] And then in the last year and a half I've done, I kind of shifted my consulting work into AI. So I've been working because I've always been interested in the topic. So before January, when I started the social media channels, I was working mostly with solopreneurs and small entrepreneurs, small businesses under like 10 employees. Because AI can be leveraged to a far greater degree, in my opinion, with smaller companies. And so they could see a much better return on investment. So I've been helping small companies do that because it's an interest of mine, but it's not a passion of mine.

John Dehlin [01:06:21] Is that like a company?

Todd Phillips [01:06:22] Like, do you have a. Yeah, it's just a consulting.

John Dehlin [01:06:24] Okay.

Todd Phillips [01:06:25] Just, just.

John Dehlin [01:06:25] Oh, cool.

Todd Phillips [01:06:26] It's just me.

John Dehlin [01:06:27] So you know AI pretty pretty well?

Todd Phillips [01:06:28] I, I, I like to think so, but it changes very quickly. It's very difficult to keep up for anybody. But I, I have a good outsourced team that I, I use to kind of build out the contracts that I do. However, since it's funny, because I. And you'll appreciate this, I didn't know that TikTok paid for videos. I didn't know that YouTube paid for videos. I had. I had no idea there was a financial side to any of this. Right.

Todd Phillips [01:06:53] So when I started getting pretty good viewership and a certain number of followers on TikTok, they started paying. They just pay you as a creator for the. The volume of videos that are viewed. And then YouTube I just launched a few months ago, and now it's starting to pay a little bit. So what I'm. What I'm doing right now is trying to build that because ultimately what I'd like to do for the next chapter of my life is I'd like to help people this way.

Todd Phillips [01:07:18] I help people with AI, but I don't want to say, but I help people with AI, period. And although I like doing that, I really, I don't like. I love this. This is where I want to spend my time. And so if I can pay bills and develop a career from this so that I can spend more time helping people, this is what I'd like to be doing.

John Dehlin [01:07:42] So your goal is to do this full time and to try and find sustainable ways to support ex evangelicals in their deconstruction and reconstruction, Is that right?

Todd Phillips [01:07:57] Yeah, I would say that's my newfound passion.

John Dehlin [01:07:59] Love it.

Todd Phillips [01:07:59] Yeah. I didn't. Again, didn't plan on it.

John Dehlin [01:08:01] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:08:01] But I think what happened was in the comments section on TikTok and then Instagram. When I launched Instagram a few about a month later, it wasn't dozens. And I'm sure you've seen this in your own situation. You know, thousands of comments.

John Dehlin [01:08:14] Yeah, yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:08:15] And. And a very good, you know, a good number of them. You know, I'm struggling. I feel lonely. I have nowhere to go. I can't talk to anybody. I'm in the Bible Belt, so I. You know, everyone goes to church here, and I can't be an insurance sales rep in Tennessee and not go to church. You know, so they just. These kind of crisis moments.

John Dehlin [01:08:37] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:08:38] And I relate.

John Dehlin [01:08:39] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:08:39] You know, and I. And I. I guess it's my pastor's hat.

John Dehlin [01:08:42] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:08:43] Right. For lack of a better term, I did that for so long, and I want to help people, and I did it through Jesus for a while, through that Christian lens, but now it's just through the lens of kind of humanity.

Todd Phillips [01:08:56] And I just went through so much pain that when I see the comments, when I see the DMs, I feel, I feel at a deep level what they're going through. And I'm just looking for ways again to shorten that pain curve and to give people a place where they don't feel alone and they don't struggle the way that I did. And at least if they are currently struggling the way that I was struggling, that we can lessen the duration of that sense of loss and isolation and emotional upheaval. Yeah, it was very damaging for me. And I don't, I, I, I, if, and I, I remember thinking this, I've said this recently. If, if I help one person,

John Dehlin [01:09:46] I,

Todd Phillips [01:09:47] I think I'm like, I'm happy right now. If nothing, like, I'd be disappointed, but I would be happy right now. Just knowing the last eight months has helped me and helped lots of other people not feel alone. And that's just such a game changer for me. It really, really is.

John Dehlin [01:10:09] Preach. Preach.

Todd Phillips [01:10:11] But I'm serious. Like, it gets me excited. It, like, puts a smile on my face. It enlivens me.

Wrestling With Core Christian Doctrines

John Dehlin [01:10:19] Welcome to my past 20.

Todd Phillips [01:10:21] Yeah, no, that's, I see it. And I told you that's why you're on my list of most influential people.

John Dehlin [01:10:26] No, no, no, I'm just saying I've been doing you it for, for 22 years. Isn't that wild? I love it. It's beautiful. And I'm saying preach because, like, I'm, I'm still a believer.

Todd Phillips [01:10:35] Yeah, yeah, yeah. 22 weeks in, I'm feeling the same way.

John Dehlin [01:10:40] So let me ask you, you, you put a bunch of. I, I want to get to reconstruction.

Todd Phillips [01:10:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:10:47] And, but I also want to talk about your personal deconstruction a tiny bit. But first I want to talk about, let's do kind of a lightning round where I'm going to list some of the elements of deconstruction that we've touched on. But I want you to give a, you know, a 30 second spiel on each one. Is that okay?

Todd Phillips [01:11:05] Yeah, let's go for it.

John Dehlin [01:11:06] So we don't need to go over, you know, contradictions, contradictions in the Bible. We've covered that plenty, I think, in your story. And also the Bible's not speaking with one voice. I think we've covered that plenty. But, and we, we talked about apologetics and critical scholarship enough. But I'm going to ask you about a couple others. So, Hell. Do your riff on hell.

Todd Phillips [01:11:30] Yeah. I think one of the most difficult concepts in Christianity is the concept of hell, regardless of how you view it, whether it's ultimate. Annihilation or it's just separation from God. I can't tell you the number of euphemisms in ways that hell has been explained away. But then you have to ignore more than a dozen passages speaking from supposedly the words of Jesus himself, speaking about eternal hellfire, damnation.

Todd Phillips [01:11:58] It goes on and on and on and never ends. And so the concept of hell, when I originally understood it as a new Christian, I just didn't think too much about it. That's really, to be honest with myself, I just didn't think too much about it. And I just hid behind the grandeur of God and the perfection of God and that in his ultimate plan this makes sense and the people that end up there deserve to be there.

Todd Phillips [01:12:24] And yet when I started to ask the questions about hell, it wasn't as though hell existed. And God found a way through Jesus to get us out of it. He created it in the first place. He created the conditions by which our default destination as humans is hell. We're born defaulting to hell. Let me say that again. We're born with a default destination to hell. Whatever horrible place that is, and however you might describe it and whatever passages you choose to use, it's still a bad place. And it seems to go on forever.

Todd Phillips [01:13:00] And ultimately it just made no sense to me that the idea that an all loving God would have to create that in the first place. And I find it also interesting when you couple that with Adam and Eve, that if you actually buy into the Adam and Eve story, that, you know, these two humans that could not know that being disobedient was evil because they didn't have the knowledge of good and evil. So just the story itself makes no sense in the beginning. But they eat this fruit that somehow is in, you know, embodies this fruit embodies the knowledge of good and evil. And they eat it and they fall.

Todd Phillips [01:13:39] And God literally could have done anything else. He could have said that the consequences for original sin is being tickled by a feather, literally. He's an all power. If he is an all powerful God, he could just choose, for example to forgive. And yet there's this convoluted story that comes out of the Adam and Eve in the original sin theology and the fall of man, that somehow those two people's decision to eat a fruit has affected all of us. And it's just, I think it's absurd on its own, on its face. But when I believed it, I didn't think too much about it. You know, this is the story.

Todd Phillips [01:14:15] God in his Perfection has chosen to give us. He could have given us any other story, so there must be something valuable in it because he's a perfect God. And so ultimately hell is an immoral act of a God if it in fact exists. Because you could just choose to. Not just the people that believe in God could go to heaven and then you could have another planet for people that don't believe in God. Or you could say, listen, if you go with me, it's going to be eternal bliss and you can worship me all the time or just go do your own thing.

Todd Phillips [01:14:45] He could do literally anything other than the worst possible eternal torture, Anything. Of all the things he chose, he chose the worst possible thing he could possibly do to people. And that doesn't seem like a loving God.

John Dehlin [01:14:58] And that's the whole theodicy thing. If God's all powerful, all loving, he could have.

Todd Phillips [01:15:05] He wouldn't do this.

John Dehlin [01:15:06] Yeah, he wouldn't do it. Yeah. And there are liberal Christians that don't really. What they do is they just redefine words so that they don't mean what they actually mean, so that then they don't have. They can be Christian and not have a hell. Why not that option?

Todd Phillips [01:15:24] Yeah, well, there's a lot of people that think there's just annihilation and they go to Paul's theology for that, which.

John Dehlin [01:15:29] Or just. It's metaphor.

Todd Phillips [01:15:31] Yeah, sure. And all those things, Listen, all those things are ways to explain away the horrific reality of hell. That's what it is. It's an explanation to hand wave away the reality of what scripture actually tends to teach in the New Testament about this horrible place and that God's the one that created it in the first place.

John Dehlin [01:15:51] All right, divine hiddenness, go.

Todd Phillips [01:15:53] Yeah, that was a huge one for me.

John Dehlin [01:15:55] What is it?

Todd Phillips [01:15:56] Divine hiddenness is the idea that God could reveal himself to everyone, every individual human in the perfect way. If he's an all perfect God, he knows exactly what John would need and what Todd would need to be able to understand that he actually exists. And then we could make a decision whether to follow him or not.

John Dehlin [01:16:13] But then it wouldn't be a test.

Todd Phillips [01:16:14] But then it wouldn't be a test or it would somehow damage your free will. That's another one. So it gets in the way of free will. I hear free will hundreds of times in the comments. And that's. And I don't believe that that argument holds up at any level. I just don't. Because. Because the idea that in the New Testament there are many places where God shows Up in the Old Testament reveals himself. Pillars of fire by day or smoke. Fire, the parting of the Red Sea, Turning staffs into serpents. The talking donkey, the burning bush. Jesus performs miracles all the time. Doubting Thomas.

John Dehlin [01:16:48] How about resurrecting?

Todd Phillips [01:16:49] Yeah, doubting Thomas. Thomas comes in and says, look, I'm not going to buy until Jesus shows up and I get to touch his hands in his side. Well, that had nothing to do. It did nothing to push against their free will. And Thomas is the perfect example. Jesus didn't seem to have any problem with the guy doubting and him going, look, it's me. Here's the holes, here's the side. Are you good? And Thomas was like, yeah, sure, I'm all over that. God could do that with anybody at any time. And now that we have video cameras and phones and the ability to record everything at all times, there are no miracles.

John Dehlin [01:17:27] Miracles.

Todd Phillips [01:17:28] Nothing's happening. They're a little less frequent, they're a little smaller. They tend to be like, I had a headache and he took it from me and things like that. Right. And I don't mean to make too much light of it, but divine hiddenness, the arguments for God staying hidden, in my opinion, are, again, I use the word very liberally here, absurd.

John Dehlin [01:17:48] In Mormonism, it's the plan of salvation is a test. We're being tested. You don't like that? You don't like that?

Todd Phillips [01:17:54] No, I don't. No, I don't like it at all. Again, if he actually is a tri omni God, if he's all loving, all powerful and all knowing, if he truly is a tri omni God, then it doesn't fit. If he's not all powerful, maybe if he's not all loving, if he's less of one of those things, then some of these things make sense. If he is this traditional view of this all powerful, all loving, all knowing God, then it doesn't make sense.

John Dehlin [01:18:24] Yeah, yeah. And the basic explanation is that, I mean, in Mormonism you're here to develop faith. And even Jesus would say it's better to believe without seeing than to be compelled to believe through seeing. So what's wrong with the theology that somehow the development of faith is really valuable?

Todd Phillips [01:18:50] Yeah. I don't see faith, now that I've gone through deconstruction as a valuable thing. Faith is believing something on insufficient evidence. And I mean this. Right. I really thought a lot about this. Faith is believing things on insufficient evidence. And if even by the theology that faith is better, so it was better for those disciples that believed and didn't see Jesus. And for us that believe and don't see Jesus, but still Thomas was there, There are still Thomases. So it might be better. But if God desires that all should be saved and that none should perish, what about the billions of Thomases show up, bring the holes in your side, the holes in your side, and the holes in your hand and show it. Because even though it might be better, you might think more highly of the person that believed without seeing. There are many of us that need to see.

John Dehlin [01:19:40] Yeah. In Mormonism, it's almost one level more pernicious because it's not God or Jesus show up. It's, oh, well, God spoke to Joseph Smith or God spoke to Brigham Young, or God speaks to a Mormon prophet today, and that dude is telling us whether it's evil to be gay or how much money we should give to the church or what a real family is or isn't, or what we have to do to make it back to heaven or not.

John Dehlin [01:20:13] And so it's abstracted an extra layer. And I just concluded, man, if God wants to talk to me, come talk to me. But I'm not gonna have some intermediary who's got his own bank account that's secret and his own private behaviors that we can't see and his own motivations telling me what he says God wants for me. It's not that pride. It's not pride. It's just like, why Joseph Smith?

John Dehlin [01:20:42] He was freaking. I mean, you could argue he's a sexual predator. I think I'm at least that worthy. So why would you go talk to Joseph and not me? That's how it is for me.

Todd Phillips [01:20:52] Yeah. And I do think on the faith thing too. One more thing about this is that, and I'll ask it in a form of a question. Is there anything that you cannot believe on faith? In other words, because you can believe anything on faith, you can believe anything. You can believe there's dragons on faith, flying spaghetti moss. You can believe on anything on faith. So faith cannot be, by definition a reliable pathway to truth. Of course it cannot be.

John Dehlin [01:21:15] Neither can emotion. Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:21:16] It just cannot be. And so if faith and emotion tend to be the cornerstones of Christian belief systems, Right. And they are not a reliable source

John Dehlin [01:21:28] for truth, so what sense do you make? What meaning do you now make of your theophany? That spiritual experience you had in Denver that that changed your life for the better?

Reexamining a Personal Religious Experience

Todd Phillips [01:21:37] Yeah. So I've done a lot of study actually, with on Brit. This is where Britt Hartley Comes in. I've watched a lot and read a lot on the psychology of religious belief. Primarily, the starting point of that was videos from Britt. And so I understand more about the psychology of religious belief.

John Dehlin [01:21:52] Elevated emotion.

Todd Phillips [01:21:53] Yeah. I understand how the brain works in relation to those moments. I understand they've done tests and many, many studies on people who pray and experience the presence of God in the room. That is something that the brain does. I just understand. And it's almost. I don't want to call it boring, but I can't think of a better word. It's almost boring how obvious those kinds of experiences are and those ecstatic utterances and the ways that we experience and the way our brain works in those kinds of environments. And it's just been tested over and over. And I understand it now. So, although I don't discount the experience. So people have very powerful experiences, like I did in the car that night. But I just was told who to point it toward. I was told by my Christian friend that that was the Christian God who made me feel that way.

John Dehlin [01:22:42] There's always an interpreter telling me.

Todd Phillips [01:22:43] There's an interpreter telling me what that experience means.

John Dehlin [01:22:46] Right.

Todd Phillips [01:22:47] So if I would have been told that day to go and talk to the Buddha, I would have then been told by my Buddhist friend that that was the Buddha. Right. There's an interpreter for my experience. I just no longer interpret it the same way.

Reasons for Leaving Christianity Behind

John Dehlin [01:23:01] So what about the idea that there are many ways up Mount Fuji and that it doesn't matter if it's Buddha or Allah or Jesus or Jehovah or freaking Woo? But the spirituality is beautiful and legitimate and real and just all those paths are pointing to some sort of divine something. And humans are just imperfect at really describing or knowing what it ends up being. But it's still spirituality and divinity and it's all good. And it doesn't matter which way you follow it, even if it's nature. It's all the same thing, but it's not cheapened, reduced to chemicals, reduced into neurosynapses and reduced to secularism. All the paths of spirituality are spirituality. And they all point you to something good. We just don't totally know what it is.

Todd Phillips [01:24:03] Yeah, it could be. What's wrong with that?

John Dehlin [01:24:06] Why don't you go there?

Todd Phillips [01:24:08] I'm open to that conceptually.

John Dehlin [01:24:09] Okay.

Todd Phillips [01:24:13] I think I would call it a problem right now. So I'm still very active in codifying and putting words to and expressing my own deconstruction. The reasons I knew, the reasons I did believe and Now I'm coming to terms with the reasons that I don't believe certain things. Right. So that deconstruction is an active, ongoing part, the idea of something else replacing that. In other words, maybe. I think what I'm in the middle of doing right now, and I've done videos on this, is I'm not trying to replace Christianity with another spirituality. I've already done that once, and maybe I will do it again. Maybe there will be something that replaces it. But I'm actually okay and learning to celebrate my uncertainty. And so I am no longer emotionally attached to replacing Christianity with something else that must be true. I am fine no longer having Christianity

John Dehlin [01:25:11] or a belief system, or a belief

Todd Phillips [01:25:12] system, for that matter. And I never thought I would get there. But I'm pretty comfortable right now. I'm pretty comfortable in my uncertainty. I'm pretty comfortable without a belief system to follow. I'm okay with that.

John Dehlin [01:25:24] Devil's advocate. What if somebody says you're trading down? You went from having this theophany that inspired you, that organized your life, gave you meaning and purpose, and that was beautiful and felt eternal. And now Brit Hartley has made it so you view it all as chemicals and synapses and it's all secular. And now instead of having certainty and confidence and meaning and purpose, you're just like a. A rudderless boat being tossed about the ocean. What's your response to someone that says, brother, you've traded down in every aspect?

Todd Phillips [01:26:00] Yeah. And I've been told that. Right, so you're not the first one. Right. This is certainly a common theme.

John Dehlin [01:26:07] I'm not telling you that.

Todd Phillips [01:26:08] No, no, I understand.

John Dehlin [01:26:09] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:26:09] But I mean that positing that is an option. Right. And what I would say to that, and this is a guy's a work in progress. And I often say this phrase. As of today in this conversation, I will tell you that I value. I value truth more than community or comfort. Not saying that I found that truth, but I value the pursuit of that truth more than I value community and comfort and tribal certainty. And I've determined that.

John Dehlin [01:26:47] And warm fuzzies.

Todd Phillips [01:26:49] And I value it more than that. So my pursuit of whatever that truth might be and living in that uncertainty is more authentic for me as a human than for others who require the religious certainty and the community. There have been a lot of studies done on this that there's an argument to be had, and certainly I think a strong one, that some people require religion.

John Dehlin [01:27:13] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:27:13] I think they do not live well with uncertainty. I think it's most People and I would argue it was me, and maybe it still is me. Maybe I'll find myself incapable of just living rudderless, as one might say, without a belief system. But for right now, I found a tremendous amount of solace in where I am as of today.

John Dehlin [01:27:39] So you don't feel like you traded down?

Todd Phillips [01:27:42] No, I feel like I went through a tremendous crisis. I do miss the certainty, but I could never go back to that. Let me be careful when I say that I could be plausibly convinced Christianity is still real.

Todd Phillips [01:27:58] So maybe there's another denomination or another theological paradigm or maybe orthodox Christianity might reach me and ultimately Jesus reenters my life. But it would not be, it would not be the evangelical Christian version of that faith any longer. I am very confident of that.

Todd Phillips [01:28:19] I think Christianity certainly on the table. I haven't thrown that baby out. What I am no longer convinced of is the evangelical Christian version. And I do question the existence of a God. Now. I'm not convinced there is a God, but I am very open to that when I say I'm a non resistant, non believer. I'm very open to the concept of a God. I've just not been shown the evidence that would cause me to be convinced that there is one.

John Dehlin [01:28:46] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:28:47] And I actually but very happy for there to be one.

John Dehlin [01:28:51] I'm of the belief, and I use that term intentionally, that everyone's agnostic, even though they won't use the label. Nobody knows. I've never met anyone who really knows.

Todd Phillips [01:29:02] No one does.

John Dehlin [01:29:03] They say they know. They think they know, but I thought I knew. I said I knew. And I've never met anyone who like, if you scratch and ask and like, wait, how do you know? And they say, oh, I feel it. And I'm like, oh, well, you don't know. And then if they say, oh, I saw God, I'm like, but how do you know that was a real versus a dream versus a vision versus mushrooms versus what your brain does.

Todd Phillips [01:29:28] I am utterly unimpressed with testimony now. Yeah, I am. Whenever someone starts to tell me their story, I had one, I felt it right. And that's not to invalidate them. I could be wrong. I could be misinterpreting things now. So I don't. But I don't find them convincing really quickly.

John Dehlin [01:29:46] Geography of belief. What's that?

Todd Phillips [01:29:48] Yeah, I heard this actually from probably Alex o' Connor a couple years back. I had dealt with it, but he certainly put it to words very well that if you live in Iran, 90% chance you're a Muslim. If you live in the United States, 70% chance you're a Christian. If you live in Norway, 85% chance you're an atheist. Our religious beliefs. The single most determining factor of our religious beliefs are our geography. That's not suggesting that I'm arguing for something to be true or not true because of geography. What I'm saying is that one would expect, like for example, from a Christian perspective, if God truly does desire that all should be saved and that none should perish, it is shocking to the senses, at least from my perspective, that geography plays that significant of a role in our belief systems. And I just really couldn't unsee it once I saw it.

John Dehlin [01:30:51] Believe it or not, I did that math in high school.

Todd Phillips [01:30:54] Yeah, Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:30:55] I was like, it didn't make sense here.

Todd Phillips [01:30:56] So, geography of belief, divine hiddenness. We've talked about resurrection.

John Dehlin [01:31:01] What's wrong with the Resurrection?

Todd Phillips [01:31:02] With the Resurrection, yeah. It's remarkable to me when I look at just how readily I accepted such a claim and the recording we have of that resurrection and the post resurrection accounts are, in my opinion, dubious documents that cannot be relied upon to guide us into an accurate account of what actually happened. Not to mention all of our scientific understanding of how people die and that they don't come back has been billions of examples and not one example of a resurrection. And if in fact resurrection were more commonplace and we had some sort of scientific understanding, or if the account of Jesus resurrection was attested to by more reliable sources, that would be different for me, I think it was Dale.

Todd Phillips [01:31:54] It's Dale Allison, maybe is his name on the Resurrection probably the best book I've read on it. He just has a very balanced approach. He happens to be a believer, but his approach is you just can't determine one way or the other based on the information that's been provided, period. And I just don't see that rising to the occasion of believability. And then that's a pretty major claim to just kind of accept on the accounts that we have.

Finding Meaning and Purpose After Faith

John Dehlin [01:32:20] Can you have a sense of peace and meaning and purpose without certainty?

Todd Phillips [01:32:29] I would say an emphatic yes. I was worried that that was not the case because I had relied on my religious belief to provide me purpose and meaning. And now I'm finding, I would say almost ironically for me, the level of meaning that my life has now that there's no afterlife, and I'm sure you've heard this a million times, it's relatively new for me, but now that this is it, that this may very well be it, Maybe it just goes dark at the age of 65 or 80 or 102. Whatever it is, it's a very short time, in relative terms, that's made this life and being present in each moment of this life matter so much more.

Todd Phillips [01:33:22] And so my sense of purpose and the sense of import I give to each moment is far greater than the evangelical Christian perspective where really what matters is the afterlife. This 80 years is but a vapor, a puff of wind right against eternity. And so you're preparing yourself for what really matters after this life. Well, now I realize this may be all we get, and it makes it matter more to me.

John Dehlin [01:33:51] Yeah, I agree.

Todd Phillips [01:33:52] And being able to be fully present, like, even in this moment. I live so much of my life with an agenda. As a pastor, every person I sat down with had to get saved. If they weren't saved, the conversation needed to turn toward getting them saved. Every sermon, every conversation, every leadership role I had was all driven around this eternal destiny issue. And it created a tremendous burden. And I was always thinking about that instead of just being fully present in the moment solely for the purpose of the relational dynamic of that moment. So, yeah, there may be a lot of people that see this down the road when you post it, but what's important to me now is my engagement with you and being fully present within that engagement and really sucking the marrow out of every moment because it matters. And that's a different way of thinking than I used to have.

John Dehlin [01:34:45] Love it. And what about alcohol and sex and drugs and just integrity and a moral framework now?

Todd Phillips [01:35:04] I'm a moral subjectivist now. And for those listening, I don't think there's objective morals. I don't think there's a universe out there, either from God or just the universe in any. Any way that provides something out there that is good or bad. I think those are preferences or the ways that we build our society. When we say good or bad, evil or just or whatever, those are choices that we make.

Todd Phillips [01:35:24] And because of that, that was a hard thing for me to come to terms with. And I'm still open to there being objective morals without a God. I think there's a philosophical argument for that. I'm currently a moral subjectivist. And so meaning and purpose and a sense of right and wrong come from our own interactions with one another. And that's sufficient for me. In fact, I would argue that we default to moral subjectivism because we all make laws and we govern our societies in a subjective way, subject to the minds of the humans that are engaged. And until Someone can show me there's objective morals.

Todd Phillips [01:35:57] We're stuck with subjective morality. And it's really all we have. Whether we like we can say boo, subjective morals, but it's all we have. It's the practical ramifications of our society and the way we relate to one another.

John Dehlin [01:36:10] Yeah. In Mormonism there are prior prophets that contradict subsequent prophets and we can't even get it right within a closed system.

Todd Phillips [01:36:19] Well, there are 40,000 Christian denominations. Christianity can't get it right either of any stripe.

John Dehlin [01:36:26] When somebody say, are you just angry, angry at God? What do you say about anger?

Todd Phillips [01:36:31] Oh, I'm no more. I'm sure you've heard this too. But I'm no more angry at God than I am of Santa or of a non existent Satan. I can't be angry at something I don't believe exists. There's nothing to be angry at.

John Dehlin [01:36:45] Are you angry that you, and these are just air quotes, wasted decades of your life or gave decades of your life to something that turned out to be untrue, made all these crucial life decisions and invested and influenced so many people only to then learn in your 50s that it was all wrong?

Todd Phillips [01:37:10] I was angry at that. Yeah. And I did feel for a time that I'd wasted decades of my life. I no longer feel that way.

John Dehlin [01:37:20] Really?

Todd Phillips [01:37:21] Yeah. And I'm still working through those emotions and the, the ramifications of thinking differently about it. But I can say as of today that if this life is the only thing we get and there is no divine guidance that we're receiving from above, we're just going with this the best we can, then I, as an individual, within that framework, have done the best I can with what I've been given. At the time I was on my Christian journey. I believe that was the right journey to be on. And I believe the things that I was sharing was the best thing to share with other people and the best way in which they should live their life.

Todd Phillips [01:37:59] So as a human being, I was doing the best I could with the information I had. And now I find myself being able to have conversations like this precisely because I lived that life for a while. And so I'm helping people on the other side of that coin.

John Dehlin [01:38:15] I was going to say relationships got way better after I lost my orthodox brother faith. And they did. Yeah. Deeper, more meaningful, more personal, more vulnerable. My marriage is way better because there's

Todd Phillips [01:38:27] no agenda attached to it and no expectation and no judgment. And I find that to be one of the most surprising things about this process is the Depth and the genuine nature of the relationships that I possess now.

John Dehlin [01:38:44] Yeah, Amen.

Todd Phillips [01:38:45] You're so right about that.

John Dehlin [01:38:46] How did you, having raised your kids Christian, what were those conversations like?

Todd Phillips [01:38:52] Yeah, that took a while. So in around, I would say around that 2019, 2020 time frame when I was still trying to be a Christian, I still felt responsible to tell my kids, hey, dad feels differently about some things. I'm no longer a pastor. I'm not going to go back to be a pastor. I'm doing mission work right now in Liberia, but that's going to be over in 2020. And I always felt, and my ex wife was the same way, that we should be very open with them about where we are on our journey.

Todd Phillips [01:39:20] And so I had very, very, very healthy, meaningful, deep, honest conversations about, with all three of my children, about my eventual deconstruction to the point where I think they would say this, although I don't want to speak for them, I believe they would say something akin to, you know, I'm glad my dad talked to me about these things when he was going through it rather than just telling me after it was all done with. I think the process and allowing them to be involved with it was a very healthy thing for me to do and I think they appreciated that. And I think because of it, they were able to process it over a longer period of time and ask me difficult questions in the midst of my own moments of crisis. And they were allowed to be present for me in that crisis and they

John Dehlin [01:40:13] were kind of turns the tables a

Todd Phillips [01:40:16] little bit to a great degree.

John Dehlin [01:40:18] Yeah, the patriarchal kind of authority that Christianity gives us kind of gets subverted and we're kind of on the same

Todd Phillips [01:40:26] level as our kids sometimes fellow humans. And you know, Rainey was the one that told me to get on TikTok Parker was one my oldest. He was the one that told me in Christmas last year to just find an outlet for the way that I needed to communicate and that I was harming myself for not allowing myself those relationships. My middle daughter was the one that was more liberally minded. So when I had discussions with her, she was very matter of fact and appreciative and had her own perspectives about things. I am very proud of the three of them and very thankful that they were not only open to having the conversations, but were engaged in those conversations.

John Dehlin [01:41:08] That's beautiful.

What to Say to Those Still Deconstructing

Todd Phillips [01:41:08] And yeah.

John Dehlin [01:41:10] What have you said when people. And you've alluded to this in our interviews today, what have you said to people when they've come to you and Said my faith was based on you. You converted me. How far you've fallen. I used to look up to you. How dare you? You betrayed me. You've betrayed your faith. What do you say to people who are still believers, who you influenced?

Todd Phillips [01:41:35] Yeah. So the ones that have come to me, it depends on how they approach it. Right. There have been some times where I think it's been appropriate for me to say, look, you're responsible as an adult for your own journey. I'm responsible for mine. And I'm responsible for the things that have come out of my mouth and the actions that I've taken. But at the time, I thought, as you still do, that I was speaking the truth. And now my decision to leave that faith is a decision I'm making for myself as an adult.

Todd Phillips [01:42:01] And you can think that I'm betraying you or betraying God or betraying the church, and you have a right to think that. I don't believe that to be the case. I appreciate that you have your opinion, but I don't take responsibility or own that opinion. That's yours.

Todd Phillips [01:42:15] For those that are more distraught and saddened and will email me with tears or message me or try to communicate with me, I was trying to reach more of them, but now it's gotten to be impossible. I just.

Todd Phillips [01:42:31] There's just too many of them. And so I try to be more overt in some of my videos about just describing where I've come from, why I'm where I am right now, so that hopefully my videos will help them. But I do feel very. And maybe I'm wrong about this. I'm still in process, but I do feel very comfortable right now in the fact that every single human being is on their own journey and they literally are truly doing hopefully the best with what information they have have at the time. And right now, I no longer am convinced that Christianity is true, and therefore I can't pretend to believe something I don't believe.

Todd Phillips [01:43:05] And I therefore wake up unconvinced. And because I'm unconvinced of Christianity, I have to live another way until I become convinced of something else.

John Dehlin [01:43:15] And you've already addressed this, but if somebody says, yeah, believe or not believe, whatever you want to believe or not believe, but why do you have to go spoil everyone? Like Christianity pulled you out of the gutter, why are you now going to spoil other people's Christianity and risk them falling into the gutter? Because you contributed to stealing their faith from them by speaking vocally about historical criticism or problems with the Bible or whatever.

Todd Phillips [01:43:40] Yeah. I tell them that I'm not here to deconvert anybody. I'm not speaking out against anything people may view that I'm speaking out against it in this video. I don't believe that's the case. I believe what I am doing is being critical of a version of Christianity that I no longer believe and that I espoused. And I feel, as I was responsible for speaking those things from stage, I'm also equally responsible for saying what I believe now that I was wrong. And if I truly feel that I'm wrong, I think that's the responsible thing to do,

John Dehlin [01:44:08] not to stay quiet. Huh?

Todd Phillips [01:44:12] Yeah. And people certainly vehemently disagree with me on that.

John Dehlin [01:44:16] That there's the. You know, I've been using this metaphor of like Truman show, the Matrix, the Village Tangled, the Wizard of Oz. There's so many instances, it's Plato's cave, this metaphor, that there are these wise elders that realize that humans won't be good without myth and a fake God and morals tied to eternal punishment.

John Dehlin [01:44:42] And the idea of prophets that talk to God and you do what the prophets say and by the way, pay 10% and don't masturbate. That's how civilization has come to where it is. And there are some who may not even be believers, but they're like, shh, this is the best way. This is how society. People need this and don't mess it up. It's the way we have orders and laws and family and raise kids and don't mess with that. Because there's always going to be a Thomas Jefferson or a deist or a whoever who can't believe it anymore. But don't spoil it for the rest of us and.

John Dehlin [01:45:30] Or for the better of society, because overall the contribution of religion is more positive than negative. And if the world all of a sudden became secular, it might not be a better place than as flawed as the world is with religion.

John Dehlin [01:45:49] There could be more loneliness, more murder, more chaos, less civil order without that organizing structure. So, shh. Don't. Don't spoil it for humanity. What would you say to that?

Todd Phillips [01:46:03] Well, that could be correct. I don't think it is.

John Dehlin [01:46:06] Why not?

Todd Phillips [01:46:08] For a couple of reasons.

John Dehlin [01:46:09] Look at how good it was for you.

Todd Phillips [01:46:11] No question. Listen, I think any individual story could speak to that. But you're moving from Todd's individual story to cultural dynamics. I don't think those two necessarily meet. I think a useful fiction can be helpful for a person and not be good for society.

Todd Phillips [01:46:33] I think those are two different questions. Or different things to ponder. I would also say that I would argue and again this is where I'm going to, this is new for me but I'm going to throw it out there just for the comments or whatever, just for the dialogue.

Todd Phillips [01:46:52] I think when you look at the Nordic countries, I don't think we have to look very far, we don't have to look to another planet to wonder what it would be like without religion. I think we seem to have functioning, very healthy, functioning societies, entire nations of people that are a majority non religious.

Todd Phillips [01:47:16] And there have been quite a number of studies done on Nordic countries for example, how healthy they are and how happy they are and how how their societies function and how altruistic they are and giving and caring and selfless. So I don't think it's for those that think that it may be a foregone conclusion that without religion we would fall into chaos. I don't believe they have very strong standing for that only because we have examples of something different.

John Dehlin [01:47:49] Yeah, I'm still trying to weigh through that because I do think there's a non trivial percentage of brains that are just going to be healthier and happier on religion and I don't know whether that's 20% or 40% or 60% or 80%. But if there's one thing I can just share with you not as truth but just as something that keeps me up at night is I've spent enough time with the secular world and the post religious world to know that there's minefields everywhere just like in the religious world and a lot of people lose their way, enough people lose their way and enough people end up lonely or with challenges and that's not everyone, but enough do where I'm like man, some of you would have been better off staying in the church.

Todd Phillips [01:48:46] I, I think that's absolutely. Sorry I interrupted. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. So again, back to individuals. I think there's numerous examples of people that have left religion and for their personalities, their own proclivities would have been better inside that religious construct or what I now call a useful fiction. It was a useful, helpful, healthy fiction to live under.

Todd Phillips [01:49:11] I do wonder what society would be like without it. It I'm not willing to certainly fall on that sword. I tend to see other countries that are majority non religious functioning very well and I tend to see currently on the global stage those countries that are most religious are the most problematic.

Todd Phillips [01:49:32] When you look at southern states that are the most religious Bible belt, they're the ones the most divorced, the most premarital sex, the most violence, they're tied directly to high control religious environments. And the more secular states, northeast, west, they have less of those statistical issues. So it's a quagmire. It really is. And you can find documentation that supports either perspective.

John Dehlin [01:49:59] A lot of the countries are very white, they're not very diverse, no question. And they rely a lot on, weirdly the national defense of like the United States to protect them.

Todd Phillips [01:50:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:12] So they don't spend a lot on their military budgets, so they could afford social, socialized medicine and social programs. And they keep immigrants out or the weather keeps them out and they're small. Yeah, easier to manage. So I, I, I, I know about all that and I see it and I don't want to over interpret what they might mean.

Todd Phillips [01:50:36] Listen, I take that, I receive that, that's what I was saying at the beginning is this is a new discussion for me, but I do find it, it's an interesting intellectual exercise to walk through. Right. And I also do think the last thing I'll say on that, who could possibly know? Because we've never had it. Right. We've never had a non religious society. So it does seem that from an evolutionary perspective or a societal perspective, it's, it's just kind of baked into our system. And there could ultimately be a God that orchestrated this.

John Dehlin [01:51:08] Right.

Todd Phillips [01:51:09] It could be the version of a, could be the version of a God that's, that's not like the gods that we understand of our current religions. It could be, we could be sitting in a simulation, you know, And I do believe that's possible.

John Dehlin [01:51:20] God could be a jerk and that's just the way God is.

Todd Phillips [01:51:22] God could be evil. You know, one of the things I found a question, I'm sure you've heard this before, but it's not been new to me. But I've been pondering it. How could, when I was a Christian, how could I have ever known if God wasn't good? How can you know if God's evil? How can you.

John Dehlin [01:51:36] It's axiomatic. It's axiomatic.

Todd Phillips [01:51:38] He must be good.

John Dehlin [01:51:39] If God did it, it's good.

Todd Phillips [01:51:40] Yeah. And if he's not good, if he's

John Dehlin [01:51:42] genocide and God did it, God had his reasons.

Todd Phillips [01:51:43] But if he's not good, how could you know?

John Dehlin [01:51:45] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:51:45] You couldn't, you can't.

John Dehlin [01:51:46] No, it's definitional.

Todd Phillips [01:51:47] It's just quite problematic. Right. So I worshiped what I called a good God and I would, I would have and could have never Known if he was not good. And that was another one of the dominoes to fall for me.

Todd Phillips's Closing Thoughts and Farewell

John Dehlin [01:52:03] Well, Dr. Todd Phillips, you got to get to the airport and we've bumped up on our second two hours. I do want to give you a chance to close. For evangelicals or others out there going through their dark night of the soul, what are some final tips or suggestions do's and don'ts you have for them up?

Todd Phillips [01:52:21] Yeah, so I, I, I mentioned this all. It'll sound a little too simple probably for some people, but, you know, time does heal wounds, at least some of them. It does take time to walk through the process of deconstruction, regardless of where you end up. Second thing is, if you're going through it right now, don't go through it alone. Whether it's coming to the decon recon community or finding online connection through a Facebook page or something like that. Regardless of where that is, find a place to connect.

John Dehlin [01:52:43] You don't have a website right now.

Todd Phillips [01:52:45] It's just it, you just go to, to, you just go to the, the, the school. The, the link is.

John Dehlin [01:52:49] Say it. Skol.

Todd Phillips [01:52:51] I don't even know. I don't even know the address. I'm sorry.

John Dehlin [01:52:53] It's school. Okay.

Todd Phillips [01:52:55] You can just go to school.com and look up decon recon.

John Dehlin [01:52:58] Okay. And we'll provide a link.

Todd Phillips [01:52:59] Yeah, I'll have the link for you. Okay. Sorry. Thank you. No, that's fine. It's all new to me. No, it's good, but, but the community is just a few weeks old and, and I would say find that community. We have a scholar, we have scholarships available for people if it's, what's the affordability? $29 a month.

John Dehlin [01:53:12] Okay. A month. Okay.

Todd Phillips [01:53:13] Yeah. And then you just stay as long as you want to and don't have to. 65, 70, something like that, man.

John Dehlin [01:53:20] Love it. I hope you can make six figures in a short amount of time.

Todd Phillips [01:53:23] Well, who knows? I mean, it's.

John Dehlin [01:53:24] Holy work. It is.

Todd Phillips [01:53:26] There you go. Yeah, I don't, you know, it may be less in a week or two. Like, I don't, like, I'm just. There's a paywall there to try to keep. Because I already have a free channel. You can go hang out with another 150,000 people on social media and leave the comments. This is something different, right?

John Dehlin [01:53:44] You're meaning your TikTok channel or.

Todd Phillips [01:53:46] Yeah, TikTok, Instagram. Yeah, stuff like that. So there's plenty of free places to go. This is, this does cost money, but it provides Something that's very different.

John Dehlin [01:53:53] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:53:53] And so that was number two. Number three, I would. I would strongly tell people counseling is a good thing. I wish I would have gone to counseling and gotten help earlier. It would have saved me probably months, if not multiple years of pain and suffering.

John Dehlin [01:54:10] I think a lot of creators have also been an important part of your journey. Right.

Todd Phillips [01:54:14] Big time.

John Dehlin [01:54:14] Like you mentioned, Dan McClellan.

Todd Phillips [01:54:16] Yeah. Dan McClellan, Britt Hartley. You, John Cohen, Jason At. I mean, I'm sorry. Justin at Deconstruction Zone.

John Dehlin [01:54:29] Alex o'. Connor.

Todd Phillips [01:54:30] Alex o'. Connor. Richard Dawkins. Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett. Alex o' Connor's a major player, too.

John Dehlin [01:54:40] Yeah, he's great.

Todd Phillips [01:54:40] Yeah. I'd love to meet him someday, but, yeah. So, yeah, if anybody needs Community, we're one way to do that through the decon recon. You can give them the link in the description. I'd love to see them there. You can come in, hang out for a week, just see what you like about it. But that's really where my focus is right now, is that Community.

John Dehlin [01:54:56] Beautiful.

Todd Phillips [01:54:57] Yeah. Can I mention one more thing?

John Dehlin [01:55:00] Yeah, yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:55:01] So I wrote recently a deconstruction guide. It's basically just 20, 20 questions.

John Dehlin [01:55:07] Yeah.

Todd Phillips [01:55:08] And it's for sale. And then also. But. But what I'd like to do for your audience, so that. That's something I offer out in the marketplace. There's also a you don't need to Fear Hell Anymore is another PDF that I wrote.

John Dehlin [01:55:19] Oh, nice.

Todd Phillips [01:55:20] And what I'd like to do for your audience, if you'll let me, is I'll provide both those for free. And so I'll just give you a link for just Mormon stories, and you can put it in the description or whatever. And for anybody listening right now, if you want to get those for free, 30, $40, but for free, I'd love to do that for your audience. So I'll put that together and make sure that you guys have a link.

John Dehlin [01:55:39] I'll accept that if you'll also provide a paid version, because I think we should pay for things that we get value from. And I would like you to give people the option of buying your stuff so that they can support you.

Todd Phillips [01:55:53] Yeah, fair enough.

John Dehlin [01:55:54] And do you have a Venmo or a Zelle or a Patreon? Cause, brother, you need one.

Todd Phillips [01:56:01] Yeah, I don't have any of that right now.

John Dehlin [01:56:02] All right, so by the time this airs, Dr. Todd Phillips, I would challenge you to have a PayPal and a Venmo and a Zelle. And if you'll provide us with those links. I'm asking everybody that wants to support someone like me. Or pick your favorite ex religious or secular or transitional creator. I think Dr. Todd Phillips deserves your support. So if you value him, go to the show notes, find his Venmo, PayPal or Zelle link or whatever Patreon, whatever he ends up doing, throw in some money and let's get this guy financially self sustaining so he can make a bigger difference in his world.

Todd Phillips [01:56:43] That means the world to me. Thank you. Did not expect that.

John Dehlin [01:56:45] Of course. Yeah, yeah, that. You know, I do have a few things I feel passionately about. And one is that the laborer is worthy. What is it of his?

Todd Phillips [01:56:55] Is this laborer is worthy of his wages.

John Dehlin [01:56:58] Yeah, like if we can't be sustained, then the work dies.

Todd Phillips [01:57:04] That's true. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out a way to sustain this.

John Dehlin [01:57:06] So don't have any, I would say a little bit of wisdom. Don't quit. That's my superpower, is not quitting, but also make it sustainable. And don't be embarrassed to ask for money and to find a way to make it financially sustainable. Because a healthy you, a healthy, financially supported Dr. Todd Phillips is someone that can help a lot more people than a Dr. Todd Phillips. That's licking the bowl, as we used to say.

Todd Phillips [01:57:36] So true. Thank you so much, John. I appreciate that.

John Dehlin [01:57:39] Okay, so it's rtodphillips on TikTok and Instagram, it's the deconstructed pastor on Facebook and YouTube and there's also a Stan store, drtodphillips. What can people get there?

Todd Phillips [01:57:55] Yeah, you know what, that'll be what we'll do with that. That'll be the link where they can get the deconstruction guide, et cetera. It'll be that link and then I'll add a Patreon or something by the time this posts. All right, so that'll be the one we'll use.

John Dehlin [01:58:09] Well, Todd Phillips, what a pleasure. I loved your entire story. You're gonna do great things and please reach out and I. And we wanna support you in your ministry, in your new ministry.

Todd Phillips [01:58:22] Thanks, John. I mean, thank you very much for inviting me out. This was an incredible pleasure for me. And to be able to come out and join you in person instead of over zoom or something like that was really an encouragement to me. So thanks again.

John Dehlin [01:58:34] Our pleasure. All right, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Support Todd Phillips and thank you. If you're a donor to Mormon Stories and the Yehova Stories Foundation. We couldn't do it without your support. Support if you do value this content and you want to see it continue, you can like and subscribe, you can comment, you can share it with others, and you can donate@mormonstories.org donate if you want to support our legal fund because we're being sued by the Mormon Church, we believe because we're so effective at helping people figure out their lives and find truth and heal and grow, you can Support us@mormonstories.org legal as well.

John Dehlin [01:59:11] Most importantly, we just want you to find value in this content and we hope it's been helpful. So thanks for joining us today. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. You can email us@mormonstoriesmail.com if you have a good story, if you're a good storyteller or you have a good story, or both, all you gotta do is apply. Mormonstories.org apply and you can apply to be on the show where every week we're evaluating new storytellers. So please apply to be on the show and we'd love to have you. That's it for today. Thanks for joining us. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. We'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care of.

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