Holy Kool Aid

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is June 30, 2026, and today we have a bona fide YouTube celebrity on Mormon Stories Podcast. He's known as Holy Kool Aid on YouTube. His actual name is Thomas Westbrook, and he was raised evangelical and eventually started a YouTube channel that's focused on, I don't know, secularism, skepticism, and that sort of thing. And last month he released an episode about my lawsuit, or the Mormon Church's lawsuit against me. He was kind enough to cover that. It's almost at 100,000 views, but so many of my viewers and listeners were just so super excited because there's overlap in viewership between me and Holy Kool Aid. So, without any further ado, Thomas Westbrook, welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast.

Thomas Westbrook [00:01:01] Hey, thanks for having me on. It's good to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:03] Yeah. How do you identify yourself? Just as an elevator pitch to those totally out of the know.

Thomas Westbrook [00:01:11] Yeah. So. So my channel is very broad, but it all fund falls under the umbrella of promoting scientific skepticism and critical thinking. I want to figure out how the world works, so I like to dive in and take a really interesting topic and explore it. Usually I stick to things related to the supernatural, the paranormal, the religious. And I ask if the vast majority of experts, the scientific consensus on a particular issue does not match with the religious perspective, why is that the case? Because I don't really care for someone telling me all of these people say that it's true. I think that's an argumentum ad populum fallacy. But I am interested in why is it that the people who've spent 20 years of their life, 30 years of their life, deeply researching this topic all kind of coalesce on a particular consensus. And if I can understand that information and then break that down and translate to everyone else what I've just learned over the last couple of months, talking to experts and reading, you know, various scientific publications, then I can pass that on to people and say, here's why psychic abilities probably don't exist, or here's why the faith healer who's asking for money to fund their private jet and tells you that your cancer's cured, why, you might want to be a little bit skeptical of that. So I just take a lot of big ideas and I. I want to know how the world works and why.

John Dehlin [00:02:36] So the obvious next question is, when did you first read Carl Sagan's A Demon Hunted World? That's the very next question.

Thomas Westbrook [00:02:43] Entirely too late. In the process, I, I became so, so I started questioning my faith back in 2014 was kind of when I was, I was shifting out. I mean, I had some questions before that, but that was when I was, I had my I'm done moment. I started creating content in 2015, went full time 2016, and it wasn't until, I want to say, maybe 2018, 2019, after I'd already been doing the channel full time for a few years, that I was, I kept hearing about this book and I had seen a lot of Carl Sagan's work online and I just, I felt like it was about time to, to dive in and read it. And there's, there's a lot of great stuff in there, but I, I feel like I have very big shoes to fill.

John Dehlin [00:03:28] Yeah, well, I, I love what you do. I, I, I'm also have to admit that I did a little background reading on you and discovered that you're an Aggie. Not a Utah State Aggie, but a Texas A and M Aggie. One of my closest friends, Jason Moore, is a die hard Aggie. So I guess I have to say gigam. I guess I have to say that.

Thomas Westbrook [00:03:51] Yeah. Giggle. Yeah, I went to A and M. I studied political science and international studies with a double major in Russian. And I, you know, I had a great experience there. I think A and M is, it's an interesting, it's an interesting segue from the religious education of my upbringing into secularism because there are a lot of people who go to A and M who come out just as religious or more religious than they were when they went in because it's right in the buckle of the Bible belt. It is. There's, there's giant groups that will get together and fill out entire basketball stadiums with worship services and preaching and things like that. So it's, if you come from a background of being a missionary kid, that's sort of a, an easier sell. If your parents are saying, you know, you want to go to a public university, why not a private school? I actually went to a private university first up in Longview called Letourneau University. I was there for a year and then wound up transferring down to A M. And, you know, going from private Christian university to public public university, but still very Christian, but feeling like I'm, I'm. At the time I was thinking I'm, I'm stepping into the lion's den. I'm going out into the secular world. But in reality, almost everyone there was Christian. But, but you did actually start getting exposure to some different ideas. There were professors who tried to stay neutral on ideas and, and kind of both sides. It. And then I did have friends who were atheists or who were from other religious backgrounds. And that kind of exposure and wrestling with their, their perspectives and kind of arguing with them, debating them, it helps me to, to see the other side and not be entirely in an echo chamber in the same way that I would be if I went to, say, Oral Roberts University up in Tulsa.

John Dehlin [00:05:44] Right. Well, that'll be a good teaser for, for the arc of your narrative, but let's, let's go ahead. If it's all right, and back up. I want to hear kind of how your parents met, how Christian they were, and what it was like being brought into that, that family and what, what your early religious life was like.

My Parents Met in a Cult-like Organization

Thomas Westbrook [00:06:09] Yeah. So my parents met in a religious missionary organization called ywam. They had both been. They separately, independently arrived at the conclusion that God wanted them to be missionaries. And my mom did some missionary work down in Argentina, I believe in Mexico as well. Went to a DTS in Hawaii. My dad, maybe it was. No, maybe it was my dad that didn't want. In Mexico. I'm getting the details mixed up, but I know that my dad did missions work as well. And then they, they ended up meeting at a mission base in Tyler, Texas. And were your parents Texan?

John Dehlin [00:06:50] Did they both go to high school in Texas?

Thomas Westbrook [00:06:53] No, my mom was from Missouri. Okay, so my mom was from Missouri. I believe she went to Oral Roberts actually for her undergrad. My dad went to a M. Okay. So I'm. I'm actually a fourth generation Aggie.

John Dehlin [00:07:03] Oh.

Thomas Westbrook [00:07:03] Believe it or not.

John Dehlin [00:07:04] All right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So your dad said your dad's a Texan?

Thomas Westbrook [00:07:09] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:07:09] Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [00:07:09] Yes. My dad's from, from a small town in, in central Texas. My mom was from Missouri. Then they met up in Tyler, Texas.

John Dehlin [00:07:16] What faith, what faith would they have identified as prior to meeting? And around what year do you think they met? Approximately?

Thomas Westbrook [00:07:29] So it's tricky because all growing up, if whenever it came to questions of denomination, my parents sort of, they didn't really like to be lumped into a category. So Youth with a Mission is an offshoot of Assemblies of God. Assemblies of God is a very charismatic evangelical. Biblical literalism, young earth creationism. Miracles are real. The earth is 6,000 years old. It was created it in seven days. It's. It's a speaking in tongues, dance around crazy kind of denomination. But Assemblies of God still has some checks on it in that it has governing bodies. You can be, in a way, I believe most of the pastors and Assemblies of God could still be defrocked, so they could be excommunicated or lose their, their pastoral roles. A lot of evangelical, specifically Pentecostal churches around the 1940s started going independent. And one of the reasons why they did that is they realized that they could still get tax exempt status, they could still grow a religious following, but they wouldn't necessarily have the oversight of any kind of governing body. So there's. Governing bodies kind of have pros and cons. They can end up very cult like, but they can also provide checks on some overly enthusiastic charismatic pastor who wants to take control and, and narcissistically control everything themselves.

John Dehlin [00:08:53] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [00:08:54] Ywam was an interesting offshoot because it sort of fell in that category. It was founded by a guy named Lauren Cunningham, and he painted it as, you know, we don't really care about the differences. We all just, we care that, you know, you follow Jesus and, and you love God while at the same time retaining most of the ideology of the Assemblies of God Church.

John Dehlin [00:09:15] Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [00:09:16] So started this organization rapidly became one of the largest. I believe now it is the largest or the fastest growing youth missions organization in the world. And.

John Dehlin [00:09:27] And that stands for Youth with a Mission.

Thomas Westbrook [00:09:30] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:09:30] Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [00:09:31] Yes. Although they're not, they're not all youth anymore, but they do like to, to get them while they're young. They like to target people fresh out of high school who, you know, they're, they're looking for something to do. They want to do something positive with their life. They'll rope you in. And I actually have a couple videos that I filmed. I haven't released them yet, but just exploring my background in Youth with a Mission and realizing that it really does check the boxes of whether or not it's a cult. So if you're familiar with the work of the psychologist Stephen Hassan and others, they'll, they'll break down various models in order to determine whether. Whether or not something is a cult. Yeah, and many of the things that go on behind closed doors with Youth with a Mission would qualify. So they have these very rigorous discipleship training schools where they, they separate you from your friends and your family. You pay ahead of time. You know, you don't want to go home and go home early and be seen as a failure. And then while you're there, they, they force you to go through these confession ceremonies. They have really rigorous, incredibly you could say, kind of emotionally traumatizing, trying to break you down all the way to rock Bottom and then build you up according to their, their idea of what you should be as a Christian. And you're not really allowed to question the authority.

John Dehlin [00:10:54] Now it even has, it has a serve with the ship sort of thing, which is giving a little bit of Scientology vibes, actually.

Thomas Westbrook [00:11:04] Yeah. So, ywams, here's where it gets tricky, right. Because I have. Growing up in youth with a mission, there's so many things that if I say them out loud to people, they'll say that's not normal or that's very cult like, or that's crazy. And yet to me, it felt so normal. It felt everything around me was, well, doesn't everyone do that? Isn't that you defend things in a way that to other people on the outside looks. Looks nuts. And I think that that's, that's the power of cults is that you don't really realize how off something is when you have been just swimming in that ocean for so long. So even though I've been out for 10 years, I still have this gut reaction to want to defend it, to say like, well, okay, mercy ships, it's. Yeah, it's kind of like Scientology, but they also, they go and they do medical work and they help people in need and stuff like that. It's not as bad. But then at the same time it's, you know, it's still an offshoot of this organization where their primary goal is to spread their ideology. So they're finding people who are vulnerable. And yes, they, they're providing medical care. That's great. But why do you. Why can't you just provide the medical care? Why do you have to couple it with the proselytizing, with the evangelizing with the, the kind of strings attached? Yeah, we'll, we'll give food, but then you have to stay and listen to the sermon.

YWAM and the Mission

John Dehlin [00:12:31] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [00:12:32] And there's elements of it that just really rubbed me the wrong way.

John Dehlin [00:12:36] We'll get into this later. But I'll just say that I actually think that religion's the best thing humans so far have been able to come up with to kind of order and structure society. So I don't even see mission religious groups or even missionary work as pernicious per se. I will say that in Mormonism, the leaders all know that the missionary service is much more about converting the missionary than it is converting the converts.

Thomas Westbrook [00:13:05] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, I think there's a huge chunk of that in Ywam, where when you're taken away from your friends and your family and broken down and put in these, these environments where oftentimes the leaders themselves are only a couple years older than the students or even younger than some of the students.

John Dehlin [00:13:23] Oh wow.

Thomas Westbrook [00:13:24] And so you have students who are coming in who, they'll have signed forms that their parents have to sign. Know we understand that our, our son or daughter could wind up dying on the mission field and we will have to pay the cost of flying their body back to the States and the parents will have to sign that if the, if the kid is under 18 in order to do a DTS and, and then they'll send them out into these remote parts of the world and oftentimes they're under equipped and under trained and not really ready for this and they have no language and yet they're just, they're going for several weeks or several months into, into the wild to convert souls to, for Jesus. And it's. When you go through that kind of an experience, you feel like you have this strong connection with the other missionaries. This, this bond where in a way it's trauma bonding. You're in a difficult situation and you're bonding, but it's, I don't want to over paint it in a way that I think oftentimes we paint some things as trauma when in actuality it's like. No, it's just, it's a difficult experience. You know, you're growing through this, you're surrounded by other people. I have the same experience when I travel and I meet other travelers and yeah, we're navigating a different culture, a different country. We're trying to go through the visa process. Things are sometimes chaotic, sometimes there's corruption in the government and bureaucracy. And as you're going through that you tend to form stronger bonds with other expats who are experiencing a similar thing in the country that you're in. So I don't want to just of course overly paint it with a bad, like a negative brush totally, but it does, it does create an environment where yeah, if, if you're going as a missionary you can be extra vulnerable and depending on the leadership group and that the mission school that you're in. There are some nightmare stories that come out of it now. Some of them, some of them people say I had a great experience, it was the best thing in my life and I, I grew as a person and other people have, have nightmare stories. But I think the, the mechanisms for cult like control are absolutely there.

John Dehlin [00:15:25] Yeah. So your parents met as ywam, like missionaries.

How My Parents Met as Missionaries

Thomas Westbrook [00:15:31] Yeah. So they had both done their, their Discipleship training school, which is the. The initial training that every Ywammer has to go through. And then after they. They went through that, they wound up working at a mission space in Tyler. That's where they met. And then they. They got married. And around what year? Oh, gosh. Okay. So my oldest sister want to say. My parents were 35. Six. 1953. 80. I want to say, like 1983.

John Dehlin [00:16:08] Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [00:16:09] Maybe.

John Dehlin [00:16:10] Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [00:16:10] Something like that.

John Dehlin [00:16:11] Just trying to. I like to have a time.

Thomas Westbrook [00:16:13] One 1982, because early 80s, early 80s, I believe maybe 79 at the earliest.

John Dehlin [00:16:21] It just helps me to have a time kind of a time, a rough timeline in my brain of when this stuff's.

Thomas Westbrook [00:16:26] Yeah, no, no, I'm. I'm surprised I. I don't kind of have that off the top of my head. But I. My. My oldest sister was born in 1983, so my parents. And my parents were married a little bit before then. So it would have been like early 80s, late 70s. Yeah, perfect.

John Dehlin [00:16:42] Okay, so. So they're married as missionaries. And do they just continue being missionaries while they're having their young family?

Thomas Westbrook [00:16:52] So they. I think they. I don't know exactly if they still retained membership within YWAM or what, but I know that my dad stepped away from the. The mission space in order to pursue a master's degree. We went out to California. I. That's where I was born. And. And then in like an mdiv, like an M. Div.

John Dehlin [00:17:16] Master of Divinity kind of thing or.

Thomas Westbrook [00:17:18] No, actually doing esl.

John Dehlin [00:17:21] Oh.

Thomas Westbrook [00:17:21] Learning English as a second language, linguistics, because it was a good way to. To get a visa. Got it overseas.

John Dehlin [00:17:28] Oh, okay.

Thomas Westbrook [00:17:29] And then in. In 1993, we moved to Azerbaijan, which is a former Soviet Muslim country, barely former Soviet. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, literally just collapsed. And we came in in 1993. There was still turmoil and coups and infighting and war with Armenia and stuff kind of going back and forth. And so it was very. A very turbulent country to move to. And yet my parents saw this as the Iron Curtain is. Is being lifted. And we have this shot, this opportunity to spread the gospel. This is what God is calling us to do. And so they took their four kids, one of them, me being 3 years old at the time, over to. To Azerbaijan, which in a way, to me that was. That was a very strong confirmation that my parents genuinely believe this, that they weren't faking this, that you don't take your four young kids into basically a war zone.

John Dehlin [00:18:31] Yeah, Think.

Thomas Westbrook [00:18:32] Thinking that, you know. Well, we don't actually believe that, that this is true. You have to be pretty convinced in order to do that. And then they wound up staying there for, for several decades. And yeah, they were missionaries long after I, I moved out.

John Dehlin [00:18:49] How did they learn the language to, to be able to proselyte?

Thomas Westbrook [00:18:56] That's actually something that ywamers are very good at to their credit. I think that when you look at other people, so, so the expat community there was predominantly either missionaries or oil company workers or diplomats. There was some, you know, military, which kind of overlaps with diplomats. You know, one of my, my friends, his dad was like the attache to the ambassador and stuff. But because those are kind of the three main categories and there's a few business owners here and there as well, usually oil related in, in Azerbaijan. But the, the diplomats and the oil workers almost across the board were much worse with, with languages than the missionaries. And I think the reasoning for that or the reason for that is that if you're a missionary and your sole goal is to go and, you know, win people over to Jesus and convert people, then it really is imperative that you pick up the language as quickly as possible and that you, you know, it as fluently as possible that you're able to lead Bible studies in the language. And, and, and I think the same is true for Mormons as well where oftentimes Mormon missionaries will really go out of their way to, to master a language and they, they can be extraordinarily good at, at languages. And yet if you're doing business in a language, in another language, you really just kind of need to know the basics. So as long as you, and you can potentially have a translator, you can go in and you know, you, you learn enough to get by. And then English is also often often the language of business and so you don't necessarily have to be that great in the language. So for my parents, they, they got there, they found some, some language tutors, some people who spoke some English who are, you know, willing to do some language classes, you know, quickly picked up little bits here and there. And then I remember my dad had a, a tape recorder and he would record lessons and then he'd play them back over and over and like repeat stuff and like be practicing and working on it. But yeah, it was in a way that the language acquisition was part of the full time job.

Growing Up a Christian Missionary in Azerbaijan

John Dehlin [00:21:03] I mean, so I obviously think of Mormons, Latter Day Saints as very intensely religious and committed and devoted and I think, you know, they're a high demand religion for sure. But Growing up the kid of Christian missionaries to Azerbaijan where they're doing missionary work full time. And I don't know, planting a church like that's next level even compared to a high demand religion like Mormonism. So I'm curious to know, how did they make ends meet? Your parents, did they start like a congregation? What was your dad a pastor? And what was it like as a family to try and make ends meet and just to live day to day? Did you have a benefactor? I'm just dying to know how that all worked.

Thomas Westbrook [00:21:51] Yeah. So with ywam, all of the missionaries are required to raise their own support. So people will go and they'll, they'll visit their church, their local churches, they'll send out letters to family members and they'll say, hey, I'm going out to do the Lord's work. Would you consider supporting me? Each month, you know, send 100 bucks, send 50 bucks, and whatever God asks that we give 10% of our income. So, like, this is part of your tithe. Send it to the, the missions work. So there were times where we would come back to the States and my parents would, you know, take us around to different churches and they would, they would, my dad would lead a sermon, and as part of the sermon, he would give updates on what was happening in Azerbaijan. So in a way, it's, it's similar to a meeting with shareholders for a business where, you know, you say, hey, here's our quarterly returns, here's what things look like, except instead of measuring dollars, they're measuring souls. One and the, the depth of impact that you've been able to have in someone's life. And, and then at the end of that, sometimes people would come forward and say, you know, we really want to support your work. We feel like bot is calling us to, to give monthly to you. And so my parents would raise money that way. And then while we were overseas, in order to get a visa, you couldn't just show up on a missionary visa. So they would set up a business on the side and then. But the, the bulk of their money was coming from raising support in the States. And then they would have church groups, private church groups, because Azerbaijan's interesting in that it technically has freedom of religion on paper. And yet they've seen what has happened in other countries like Iran and Iraq and, and all throughout the Middle east where you'll have these extremist factions that will pop up. And all of a sudden now the government has a problem that they're dealing with, with, say, the Muslim Brotherhood or of other radical groups. And they really don't want that because while everyone in, in Azerbaijan for the most part, identifies as Muslim, they're very nominal because it's a former Soviet country. It was, was kind of atheistic for so long that your average Azeri will wear, you know, bikinis on the beach or will eat pork and drink vodka. And they're not wearing the full, you know, hijab or niqab. They're not wearing any kind of head covering. Even now, the, the amount of people that you'll see wearing shorts or women wearing mini skirts and stuff in the capital has, has become very European. And the government doesn't like, even though the country's Muslim, they don't like extremist clerics coming in from, you know, coming up from Iran and trying to proselytize. They. So they'll crack down on that, but then they'll also crack down on fundamentalist missionaries. So there are some churches that operated above, like, kind of above ground where, you know, you would have the, the local Orthodox church or the, the local Catholic church. You'd have the different mosques. I think there was, there was a, a Swedish pastor there who was a word of faith, I believe. And yet even those churches, sometimes you would have locals show up like, like local police officers show up and just sit through and monitor the service to make sure that nothing was being said that was like critical of the government or something, for example. And so my parents, they, because their, their position was more radical in the sense that, you know, they're evangelicals, they're fundamentalists, they're, you know, but for them, it was all about, in a way, it's, you know, yeah, God. God's law is above man's law. So even that in and of itself is kind of counter, counter government, counter political, while still acknowledging we're living in the world, we're in the world, but not of the world. Give to Caesar. What's Caesar's. Pay your taxes. Just, you know, live and let live. But at the same time, God and religion is the most important thing. So my parents set up these, these private home churches and every once in a while you would hear these stories of the, the police would, would catch word of a particular home church and they would raid it. And sometimes people would get arrested and then they, they'd interrogate them. What are you doing? What do you believe? And, and usually it, usually it was just the locals that would kind of get screwed over by this. Like, I don't know that I heard too many Times where there were foreigners who were there when the churches got raided. But you could. You did risk, you know, getting kicked out of the country, losing your visa and stuff like that.

John Dehlin [00:26:35] So was it illegal for you to be there or to be doing Christian missionary work there or not illegal, or was it just fuzzy?

Thomas Westbrook [00:26:43] I mean, for me, I was just a kid.

John Dehlin [00:26:47] Yeah, No, I mean, for your parents really have any.

Thomas Westbrook [00:26:49] Any say in the matter? And nor was I really involved. I. You know, growing up, at least, I just meant for.

John Dehlin [00:26:57] For adults to do that.

Thomas Westbrook [00:26:59] Was it shabby? Was it illegal? It was a gray area.

John Dehlin [00:27:04] Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [00:27:05] It's.

John Dehlin [00:27:05] That's.

Thomas Westbrook [00:27:05] I thought, like, technically all churches had to register, so by not registering, yes, they. That would be breaking the law.

John Dehlin [00:27:14] Okay, got it. So what was it like to be the boy of Azerbaijan? By. By Christian evangelical missionaries in Azerbaijan. Like, did you have a normal upbringing? Totally abnormal, you know, did you have friends? Did you go to school? Was it like homeschooling? You know, prepper stuff? Like, what was it?

What Was It Like to Be the Boy of Azerbaijan?

Thomas Westbrook [00:27:37] Yeah, it was so largely homeschooling. But then I did some stuff with the international school, and there were times when I'd come back to the States and kind of be involved in. And some stuff back home for. For short windows. Like, I. I had a year where we came back to the States, but I did things with the. The international school. Like, I was on their sports teams. We would do field trips to between Azerbaijan and Georgia. There was a sister school that we would play basketball tournaments with. So in a lot of ways, it was just a kid being a kid and, you know, trying to have as normal of an upbringing while realizing that that's entirely impossible when you're. You're. L. You're, you know, you don't quite fit in with your home culture back home, but you also don't quite fit in with the culture that you're living in. There's a word for it that you'll hear expats refer to as. It's called a third culture, kid. Your first culture is your culture at home. The second culture is the culture you're living in. But then there's kind of this entire subset of people who. They're. They're living away from their home. They don't quite fit in with the culture that they're in. And so it's sort of this third identity.

John Dehlin [00:28:45] Got it.

Thomas Westbrook [00:28:46] And I found, growing up, third culture kids were oftentimes the easiest ones to make friends with, to get along with, because you're traveling half the time. I would make friends with a particular group. And then the next year they would all move off and leave. And sometimes they were oil company kids, sometimes they were other missionary kids, but there's always this. This fluctuation and this lack of stability in the way that I don't think most kids growing up in the States experience military brats. It's a little bit different because they, they hop around a lot as well. But for your average person who's born and raised in some small town and lives their entire upbringing there with their same core friend group, they don't necessarily have that same level of turbulence. I don't think I would change it for the world. I'm glad that I had the experience. I'm glad that I was exposed to this other culture, that I learned other languages as a kid. You know, I was. I would play with the local kids. I was a part of soccer practice. I would go and play and just, you know, learn as airy and, and fit in with the local kids and stuff. But then I also kind of was straddling the, the, the divide between east and west, where I would then go to international schools and I would, you know, play on their basketball team or I'd. I played guitar and like, their, their talent show and stuff like that. And those kids, like, I felt like I related to a little bit more. Even though most of them weren't Americans. There were kids from everywhere from, you know, Egypt to South Korea to Norway, and yet you all just felt like you were part of this cosmopolitan group where no one really cared where you came from as long as you were a decent person.

John Dehlin [00:30:31] Did you have to. Did. Like, where were y' all socioeconomically? Poor, middle class, upper class? How in the world could you afford those international schools? Are they super expensive or are they not, or did you have scholarships or grants?

Thomas Westbrook [00:30:45] Yeah. So when I say that I did stuff with the international schools, it was. It was like playing on their sports teams because a lot of them were small. They were desperate for more players just to fill out the team. So I didn't have to pay anything for the, you know, for the privilege of playing with these teams.

John Dehlin [00:31:03] Got it.

Thomas Westbrook [00:31:03] And a lot of them also, you know, I'd make friends with the, the students from the international schools because they would, they'd come to the youth group or they'd come to church or I'd see them at different religiously related events. The, Our youth group would sometimes put together retreats where we would all go and, you know, go out somewhere for a weekend and, you know, have cabins and camping and worship songs and. And as kids do, like church camp. Right. And so I'd get to know all of the kids that way. But as far as actually paying for the international schools, the. The schools there were extremely expensive.

John Dehlin [00:31:37] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [00:31:38] Especially the ones for expats. And because I had three other siblings, for my parents, that was just not. Not viable.

John Dehlin [00:31:44] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [00:31:46] And they might have had scholarships, but my parents were very, very, very frugal and not particularly wealthy.

John Dehlin [00:31:55] Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [00:31:56] And I think that's. That's another area where. Now, looking back, I feel like this was more sincere because I look at missionaries, evangelical missionaries in the early, you know, to mid-1900s, like T.L. osborne, and this guy, he's painting himself as so humble and sincere, and yet he's raising millions of dollars and he's exploiting people and he's. It's. You know, let's. Let's get the camera angle just right to show you, you know, this. This poor, starving African child that I'm helping. And it's. It seems very predatory and opportunistic. Whereas with my parents, there was never a point in my life that I don't remember them, you know, washing and reusing Ziploc bags and, you know, penny pinching every little thing and haggling with, you know, the. The people in the. The bazaar, at the grocery store, you know, trying to bring the prices down to, you know, be able to afford it. Yeah, there was. My parents were always very, very, very careful with money. And I think it's largely because there wasn't a whole lot coming in. But they also came from a generation that really focused on saving and living within your means. My mom was a farm girl. My dad was. I mean, his grandpa was a farmer, but then he grew up in a really small town, and there was just a priority on. On making ends meet with what we have. And so I never felt like my parents were just trying to raise as much money as possible and raise support and then, you know, using the. The missionary work in order to try to, like, emotionally prey on their supporters.

Marissa on the Mission

John Dehlin [00:33:40] Yeah. So what. What was your emotional and spiritual life like internally? Were you a true believer? Were you really into it? Were you annoyed? Were you torn? What was your spiritual life like, you know, as a teen and then moving into. Sorry, as a child and then moving into adolescence.

What was your emotional and spiritual life like internally? Were you a

Thomas Westbrook [00:34:04] A little bit of all of the above. So I. I was. I was 100% a true believer. Believed every single bit of it. I. I didn't see how anyone could not believe in God. I understood how some people would interpret God Differently. Why? You know, Muslims might believe their particular way, but I thought that they were deceived. And, you know, Mormons might believe one particular way, but I thought that they were deceived. But it's like we had the true faith. And I was baptized when I was 7 and I was, I was so ready. I wanted to be a part of, of the group. I wanted to be like everyone else. And I think that going through that experience where it's so intense, everyone around you is worshiping and you're, you know, you see your parents are in it, you see all these other missionaries that are in it. And, and John, this wasn't like a, just once a week go to church type of thing. We went to church every single Sunday. But also my parents had, I was supposed to do my own quiet time every single morning. Then we had devotions Monday through Friday, every single day without fail, where we would get together. And usually my mom would play piano and we'd sing some worship songs. And then we'd study the Bible and study the passages we were supposed to have read. On top of that, I was memorizing passages of the Bible and I had these assignments of how much I was supposed to memorize. And then on top of that, we had youth group once a week. We had our, our church service once a week. Sometimes our youth group would have church retreats. My parents, once a month their, their missionary organization would have a, a potluck where all the missionaries would get together and then they would sort of, we, we'd all eat together and then there would be worship and then there'd be some sort of service, some sort of message and then people providing updates on stuff. And I would see people, you know, raising their hands and like in worship and crying and on the ground, kind of just like sprawling out before God and people telling stories about miracles and breakthroughs and all of this stuff. It was just, it was all around me all the time. And then once a year, our, our missionary organization would have a big annual conference. Every four years we'd have a regional conference. So everyone from all these other countries would all kind of get together and share updates on what God was doing. On top of that, sometimes there would be all night prayer meetings my parents would go to, or there'd be prayer meetings that they dragged me along to. They had, you know, private church services and the international church. So I kind of was straddling both worlds. This was, this was everything. And on top of that, I had Christian textbooks, I had homeschool curriculum from Abeka and Bob Jones and I had various forms of entertainment in the form of whether it's movies or audio cassettes, like Focus on the Family, Adventures in Odyssey, various. Everything from Veggie Tales to anything on the Christian book.net calendar or curriculum, like catalog. Yeah. So it was, it was everything. It was, it was all encompassing. And when you have that coming at you from every single angle, it's impossible to, to really doubt in any meaningful way because you're being indoctrinated at an insane level from every angle from the time that you're born. And, you know, when I was born, I have photos of, of myself literally at the front of a church when I'm just a few weeks old with, you know, my parents holding me while, you know, the pastor's like, praying some blessing over me. And you go through this entire process and then when you graduate there's this pressure to, you know, you. I didn't have as much pressure as some people to go to a Christian school. I think my parents saw it as, yeah, you're going to be going out into the world anyways. You get to choose. But we really think it's a better choice to go to a, a private Christian university. And so going through all of that, there was some of me that was a bit reluctant, but more in the sense of, oh my God, I have had this non stop messaging, like I'm, I'm just kind of tired of it. It's, it wasn't because I didn't believe it, but there were, there were points where I'm like, I don't, I just want to sleep in. Do we have to go to church this morning? And the answer was always, yes, of course you have to get up and go to church this morning. But there were times when I was reluctant, but at the same time, like they were, it was more, I want to say, reluctance to get up and do quiet time and devotions and things like that. So I'd sleep in through the quiet time and then go to devotions or something, usually for church or for youth group. I was much eager to get up and go on my own because I was very extroverted growing up. And that was my social lifeline. That was my ability to go out and meet friends and see friends and be around other people. And if I am just at home constantly, I start getting stir crazy.

John Dehlin [00:39:10] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [00:39:12] And when you don't have any other human interaction besides your family members, you're really itching to go out and hang out with your friends and, and be involved in Anything. And so I would try to find. Find any kind of extracurricular thing, and oftentimes that was religious.

John Hawkins on Songs

John Dehlin [00:39:29] Got it. Really quickly you mentioned singing songs with your mom growing up. What are just super quickly. What are a couple of the songs, childhood songs you would sing that you remember being most enjoyable or memorable for you? Do you even remember?

Thomas Westbrook [00:39:48] Most enjoyable or most memorable are two different things. Okay, so I'd say most memorable. I mean, there's songs like Shout to the Lord and stuff like that.

John Dehlin [00:39:57] How do they go for a Mormon? How do they go.

Thomas Westbrook [00:40:01] So the shout to the Lord is like. And I'm horrible at lyrics. It's always been like a weakness of mine. I would read them off, but I think it's like, shout to the Lord all the earth let us sing power and majesty Praise to the king.

John Dehlin [00:40:15] Oh God.

Thomas Westbrook [00:40:15] What's the next line? It's.

John Dehlin [00:40:18] What's the tune?

Thomas Westbrook [00:40:19] Nothing compares to the promise I have in you. Or something like that. Are you actually going to make me sing, John?

John Dehlin [00:40:25] I sing all the time on Mormon Stories. Was music important to you, though? Like, did. Did that help with your faith?

Was music important to you in your faith?

Thomas Westbrook [00:40:34] Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that anytime that you're in a religious setting, when you have music and everyone else is singing, in a way it's. I. I don't know that I necessarily believe in hypnotism in the sense that, like, you lose control, but I do think that there's certain altered states of consciousness where you. You can kind of enter into almost like a soberly induced in form of intoxication where, you know, you're just. You're lost in the. The moment you have all of the emotion. The. The chords that are being strong are, you know, played in these minor keys that evoke this kind of emotional response. And sometimes that's deliberate, especially among larger churches, they'll. They'll literally plan the worship in such a way in order to invoke that kind of a emotional response from people. Yeah. And so when. When everyone around you is just, you know, like, their eyes are closed and their hands are up and all of a sudden the powerful music kicks in all at the same time. Yeah. You know, everyone starts feeling that. So, yeah, we. We had traditional hymns like Amazing Grace and stuff too, you know, or Come Now Found of Every Blessing, which I believe you guys sing in Mormon Church as well. And so we would have those kind of traditional hymns, but then the. That oftentimes felt a little bit stale. So we'd see it as. Yeah. That these are valuable. These are very, like, kind of Doctrinal, you know, traditional. And there was always kind of this, this push and pull between sort of the younger generation that wanted the, the fast paced, upbeat guitar and drums kind of evangelical worship and then the people who are more leaning into the. We need the conservative we, the, the songs and the hymns that have been around for hundreds of years. So you, you'd get a mix. And especially because the, the international church that I went to, you know, I said that my parents did church planting. Oftentimes I would actually go to a different church from my parents. They, they would go. I did both, but most of the time I preferred going to the international church. My parents were okay with it because they saw it as, because it's in English, you're probably going to get more out of it and it's going to boost your faith more. Plus you want to be with your friends, you want to see them. So I would go to the, the international church, which was in English and because there weren't that many expats who were Christians, who are Protestant Christians at least then the, the church service I would go to would have a mix. It was kind of a multi denominational. So they might have one Baptist pastor giving a message. They didn't have one pastor the entire time. Oftentimes, especially early on, they would have one pastor who's, you know, giving a Baptist message. And then the next it might be someone who's Presbyterian or something. And one Sunday we would have a traditional African worship service that would have, you know, the, the bongo drums and, and different stuff. And then the next time you might have a woman just on a piano. And then you might have a full kind of rock band where someone has a drum set and, and a guitar, electric guitar. So you kind of got a mix of everything. Which I think was, I think it was a pretty cool experience to be honest, seeing that kind of variety. It was very, very multicultural, very cosmopolitan, multi denominational. But, but yeah, it was different from your average upbringing. But I very much enjoyed it as a kid. And I think it wasn't until quite a bit later in my life that I actually started having doubts and questioning the veracity of the claims that I was taught.

John Dehlin [00:44:04] So that would make me, when I, growing up in Katy, Texas, I had a lot of evangelical friends, Baptist friends, etc, and they were all coming at me with like the God makers and you know, your church is a cult kind of stuff. And then I would bear my testimony and say, yeah, but the Holy Ghost bore witness to me that my church was true. And then they would say, well, the Holy Ghost bore witness to me that my church was true. Which led to some early doubts for me. Even though I was a true believer, the wheels started turning in my mind that everyone seemed to think that they were the one true church. And how did I know that my Holy Ghost was real, whereas their Holy Ghost was satanic? I imagine with, with such a international, multi denominational upbringing that some of those wheels might have turned in your mind, but you're saying they did or didn't.

Thomas Westbrook [00:45:02] I don't think that they did as much. There was, there was definitely a feeling of, you know, man, I must be incredibly lucky to have picked the right parents in the right country, in the right denomination. Yeah, but I, I think it was more of a, I, I was less, I, I drew the, the, the lines and put up walls probably much broader than most Christians in the States did. So while my own perspective on the Bible was it's very literal. Evolution is a lie. You know, the earth is 6,000 years old. I didn't necessarily say that. Oh, just because you believe in evolution and that Genesis is metaphorical, you're not a real Christian. To me, the main thing was the fundamentals of do you believe in Jesus? Do you love Jesus? Do you follow Jesus and do you have faith that his death paid for your sins? And if you, if you believe that Jesus died and he sacrificed himself for your sins and you accept that and you, you know, want him to live in your heart, you're a Christian. So for me, on that basis, I saw Catholics as Christians, I saw, you know, orthodox believers as Christians, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, you name it. It was just a big, big welcoming umbrella. I didn't necessarily think that they were, you know, outside of the gates and they're not going to make it into heaven. I thought that there were doctrinal differences where the Catholics might have some stuff wrong, they might be confused, but overall they're, they're pursuing God and they, they want to, you know, they want a place in the kingdom of Heaven and they're, you know, overall they're on the right path.

John Dehlin [00:46:47] So kind of as far as Unitarian or Universalist or something, not quite.

Thomas Westbrook [00:46:53] I don't think, I don't think I was quite as open to Mormonism. I didn't know as much about it, but to me it felt like it was an entire additional similar to how Muhammad came along and said, yeah, yeah, yeah, the stuff in the Bible is true, but here's this book that kind of supersedes it. And so I saw that as, okay, Muslims aren't, aren't there. They don't, they don't believe that Jesus was God. They don't believe that Jesus lived a perfect life and sacrificed himself for your sins. And so it was like Islam was not, it was not part of the club. But then Mormonism also, I saw it as like Joseph Smith was a false prophet, that the Book of Mormon was deceptive and was, was not true. And so these people are deceived. Now I don't think that I necessarily knew much about Mormonism as a kid. I didn't necessarily know how much of the Bible you guys accepted or whether or not you believed in Jesus or believed that he died for your sins. So you know, in retrospect, I, I think I probably would not have classified Mormons as Christians.

John Dehlin [00:48:02] That makes sense. That makes sense.

Thomas Westbrook [00:48:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:06] There's a couple doctrinal questions I have. One is was sexual shame used as a way to kind of part of a secret formula to strengthen members devotion to the faith out of feeling worthless and guilty and shameful? Or was sexual guilt and shame not part of the formula of your devotion?

Thomas Westbrook [00:48:32] It was huge. It was huge. And it still is huge within ywam. So one of the things that they make you confess when, when you go through a DTS is any kind of sexual dts.

DTS for Christians: What is it?

John Dehlin [00:48:45] What is that DTS again?

Thomas Westbrook [00:48:47] It's the discipleship training school. Okay, got it. What wine wormers go through now just to, to clarify, I didn't actually do a dts, so two of my sisters did go through a DTS and then I had loads of friends as well who grew up in the mission field as missionary kids. And then they went off and they did their discipleship training school where you know, you spend, I think it's like six to eight months of your life where you go on a ywam base with a group of other students. You do a lot of, you know, prayer and worship and confession and, and training and lessons and, and stuff. And then they send you out into the mission field for a while to, to go and work on the mission field. And then once you complete a dts then you can become an actual member of Y and you can actually go out to different countries and become a full time missionary.

John Dehlin [00:49:37] Oh, that's a big rite of passage for you guys then?

Thomas Westbrook [00:49:40] Yeah. Okay, so I, for me, I, I chose the college route. I was, I was this close to doing a dts. Yeah, I actually went to a YWAM base when I was up in, in Colorado and there's, there's a huge YWAM base up in Colorado Springs. I also went to. To one in California. I went to, you know, Y1 bases all over the place. And like, it was a community that I, in many ways, I felt very comfortable around. And yet I. I just decided that I really wanted to go the college education route. And I think that the reason why I chose college, if I were to. To psychoanalyze myself, you know, post hoc, would be that I graduated high school a year early. And I think that my science education was really lacking. And I knew it, and I really wanted to fill the, the gaps in my understanding. I really wanted to. To figure out how the world works, but I also was just itching and eager to get started with life and to. I didn't want to be behind because as, as the youngest child, you always feel perpetually like you're a little bit behind, which in the long run is. Is very beneficial because it gets you to. You work harder, you hustle more, you read more, you try to get ahead. And so, like, now I compare how far I've come to my siblings, and I'm like, I still feel like I'm behind even though I may have done more.

John Dehlin [00:51:07] Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if this will hit you in any particular way, but today is the first day of my life, 56, that I think I've ever heard of. YWAM. Is that weird to you that I don't think I've ever heard of it before? Like, that's. I don't know. That would be weird.

Thomas Westbrook [00:51:25] It's a bit surprising to me given your line of work with the, the podcast.

John Dehlin [00:51:28] I know. Well, it's, it's a reflection of me, obviously, but I, I. Yeah, I've never heard of it before, so this is so cool. You were talking about sexual shame as it related to YWAM training. I'm sorry I took you off of that track.

Sexual Shame in YWAM Training

Thomas Westbrook [00:51:42] Yeah. So within, within YWAM as part of the discipleship training school, there is a. There, there's. There's a period where they make you do confession and you're supposed to come forward and, and basically, if you have anything, whether it's, you know, I had, you know, masturbated earlier this week, or, you know, maybe you had gay thoughts or you, you know, you want to be saved from, or liberated from homosexual temptations or, you know, you had sex with your girlfriend last year, a lot of that has been brought forward, and there's so much just like, this is wrong. You are dirty, you're A sinner. This is awful. And, but you can be clean if you just confess. And so it's, it's, it's a very powerful tool to be able to use against people. But for me, it started very, very young. And I would say it created a lot of baggage because from the time I was like, I didn't learn what sex was until I was about 10. And I was told in a very kind of clinical way, you know, it was like when a man and a woman love each other very much, you know, it's like, it's not storks.

John Dehlin [00:53:00] And

Thomas Westbrook [00:53:03] I didn't know what homosexuality was. I didn't know what safe sex was or what condoms were or how to prevent pregnancy or prevent disease. I basically had no, no sex ed whatsoever. At least not evidence based. And when I did start hearing words, you know, I'd hear people say that something's gay. And I'd ask my dad, like, what does it mean? Like, what is, what is that word? And he'd be like, well, it goes against God's will and, and his desire for humans. And you know, he, he painted as this, this horrible kind of. It's, it's an abomination. And I can't believe anyone would do that. And, and then I would. I remember asking him what a condom was because I, I read it in a, the, the word condom in a Frank Peretti book and he was like, where did you hear that? He was kind of upset. But my, my sex education was my dad saying that sometimes people will have sex outside of marriage and it goes against God's will. And it's this horrible, sad, shameful thing and you need to run from it and keep yourself clean no matter what, at all costs. And if you're walking, you know, past a row of magazines and there's scantily clad women on it, walk on the other side of the thing and look away and just guard your eyes. And pornography is evil, and anything that is, you know, sex positive is evil. And so I think that I developed a very unhealthy relationship with sex where you go through puberty and you have hormones and you have, you start noticing, you know, the cute girl in your youth group and you want to, you want to start having dates, you want to start meeting people, you want to, you know, ask a girl out. And yet my parents were so strict on it that their goal, their idea was you have no business dating until you're ready to get married. And then it should be this formal courtship kind of within the church, in a Healthy setting. And then you should go from, you know, the courting process to the marriage process kind of as smoothly and quickly as possible so that you can get married and have kids. And it really created a. An unhealthy level of repression where you're, you know, you're. You're being conflicted and torn, where you're. You're having these. These hormones and these feelings and these emotions and you're noticing people and, and all of your friends are kind of going on dates and, and, and making out and things like that. And, and you feel like you have to kind of fight against that. That evil, sinful nature within you. And then by the time you actually leave home and you go off to college and now you're kind of thrown to the wolves. You're so unprepared for relationships. So you don't know what a healthy relationship looks like. You don't know what. There was no conversation surrounding consent. There was no conversation surrounding, you know, what. What is and isn't okay. And how do you. How do you tell. Because it was just. It was all wrong. All of it's wrong. So even. Even having a loving, consensual, sexual relationship was evil. So it's kind of like, well, what's the difference between that and, you know, sleeping with someone before marriage and raping someone? We're all basically, like, on this. The same footing within this. This kind of environment.

John Dehlin [00:56:33] Right?

Thomas Westbrook [00:56:33] And, you know, I, I think I, I navigated the situation that, you know, the best I could. I don't think that. I think even when you're going through high school, people, you know, are. There's a lot of confusion. Even if you have great parents, for sure, it's a very difficult period. But I think that that kind of an environment, it's. It's incredibly unhealthy. And it's. It doesn't create a. It doesn't create kids who are willing to have conversations with their parents. Because if. If I had gone to my parents and said, hey, I like this girl and, you know, she thinks I'm cute, and I'm thinking of asking her out, you know, instead of my parents kind of sitting down and going, okay, let's. Let's talk about it, like, you want to have her over? We'd love to meet her. You know, we're. We're kind of supportive. Just take it slow. You're just a kid. But, like, no pressure. And like, let's. Let's kind of talk about, you know, safe sex and about, you know, like, where are you at emotionally as a kid? Like, do you even want this? Like, is she. Is she abusive? Is she controlling? Is. You know, so instead of having a situation like that where you can have a healthy conversation with your parents, my, my parents were. They made it so difficult. And I knew exactly what they were going to say. They were going to say, you have no business dating a girl right now. And there was, there was one point where I got a text message from a girl at. When I was 13, and this, this girl was. I had kind of had my first date with a different girl. I had a. My first date with this one girl. And like, we held hands for the first time. And I was so, so nervous. My hands were clammy and shaky and. And it was actually at like, my dad's office was. Was doing a showing of one of the Lord of the Rings movies on the projector. And because there were. There weren't English movie theaters there, we all kind of went to, to my dad's office. It's kind of dark and I'm sitting in the back and. And I thought that my parents weren't going to show up and my sister wasn't going to show up. It was just going to be me and this girl and one of her friends and her brother, who was one of my close friends. And so I'm sitting there super nervous, and I get up the courage and kind of, you know, offer my hand, and she's, she's nervous and she kind of says no. And we kind of shyly look away. And then like, I don't know, I get up the courage about 10 minutes later, and I'm like, are you sure? And I kind of like do the whole, like, maybe now thing. And this time she agrees. And she, she. She clasped my hand and I, you know, was just like, heart palpitating. And then I look up just a few minutes later, I'm. I'm simultaneously nerve more nervous than I've ever been in my entire childhood life. And at the same time, I'm absolutely on cloud nine. Like, this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. And suddenly I look up and my dad and my sister who said that they weren't going to come, suddenly walk in, they change their minds. And I dropped this girl's hand so quickly, and I went from like, over the moon excited but nervous to terrified that maybe my dad saw me innocently holding a girl's hand. And so I was, you know, nervous about this whole situation. And then I basically, I decided, like, maybe we should Just be friends. So me and this girl, you know, decided to just be friends. And then a little bit later like I was kind of texting with and I, I guess I, I didn't really realize I was flirting but I was like I was flirting with this girl around the same time and this girl was like she wasn't good news. She was, she was very much a tease. Very much like just kind of toying with boys hearts in the way that very cruel junior high girls do. And she led me on and led me on and led me on and then like over the phone basically like was like haha, all my friends are here listening to you after you just said that you have feelings for me. And you know, it was a very kind of cruel, you know.

What I Wish I Knew About Holding A Girl's Hand

John Dehlin [01:00:38] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:00:39] Thing in the way that junior high kids do. And when you're, when you're my age at the time, you know, 13, you're just devastated. You just feel like the, now everyone is making fun of you and you've just gotten up the courage to tell a girl that you like her and now the rug is pulled out from under you. And then she would kind of be hot and cold so she'd be like, you know, actually you know, I really do have feelings for you. And then haha, got you again. And so I get a text message from this girl and it was, it was late at night, maybe 11 or 12 at night and my, we were staying up a bit late to finish my, my mom was reading one of the, the Charles Dickens novels to me and my sister and I think it was Tale of Two Cities. And all of a sudden my phone text message ringtone goes off and my mom looks up at me and says who's texting you at this hour of night? And my gut reaction is I can't lie. Like I can't lie and like I, and that's something that's so like kind of baked into me now. Like even as an adult like I, I struggle to not be honest and transparent. Like it's, it's still a value that I hold and at the time as a kid is like I could have just been like Spencer and she probably wouldn't have cared but instead she's like who is it? And I was like nobody. And the next follow up question was is it a girl? And I just stayed silent and, and of course in my mom's mind she's probably thinking it's the worst case scenario. This, this, you know, my 13 year old son is having sex and you know he's gonna get this girl pregnant and, but instead of actually saying it's okay, you can talk to me, she basically took me downstairs. Now it sounds worse than it is. Took me into the basement, but my, my parents bedroom was downstairs. So she took me downstairs and basically interrogated me for, for two hours trying to get this information out of me. And, and, but I knew that like she wouldn't understand and I knew that I was just gonna get this strong like lecture on sex and relationships and there would be so much shame surrounding it and like, why are you going after this girl? Like, there would be no, no understanding, no compassion. It was just like, you have let us down because you are, you are interested in girls at 13. So by the time.

John Dehlin [01:03:11] Yeah, I'll keep going. Sorry.

Thomas Westbrook [01:03:13] That stuck with me. That stuck with me all the way through, through high school, even into college. It was, I mean it's something that I think even, even now as an adult, there's still deconstructing and reconstructing and therapy. Just, just trying to understand like, what do healthy relationships look like? And, and how can I do better? And it's like, and I've, I've grown a lot over the years for sure, and I, I think I have a much, much healthier relationship to, you know, to, to, to sex and relationships and stuff. And you know, I'm, I've, I'm in a fairly serious relationship at the moment and, and it's great, but I've, I've definitely had some bumps just trying to kind of navigate and like, emotionally I, I ended up in some very abusive relationships and didn't see the warning signs because I, I didn't have, I didn't have any kind of anyone to lean on or any, any helpful advice or coaching or something from, from a parent or guardian who's, who's like, look, when a girl treats you like this, like, she's not good news, she doesn't want, she doesn't have your best interests in mind, she's using you. And, and so I think that as, as I emerged into adulthood, I did rush into some relationships that wound up being extremely emotionally abusive. And then I dated an alcoholic for a while. And it's, you know, you find yourself in these situations where, you know, in a way I feel like it was the result of not knowing what healthy relationships look like and not having having any experience in healthy relationships or in, in kind of in a lower risk environment like in high school where, you know, you're not necessarily in a super serious setting.

John Dehlin [01:05:07] Yeah, that's fascinating. So Your, Your upbringing was such that you could actually make it to college a virgin then, Is that what you're saying?

"I Was A Virgin Until I Got To College"

Thomas Westbrook [01:05:15] I was, I was. When? By the time I got to college, I was still a virgin. I was, I was a virgin until, I want to say, until I was 21.

John Dehlin [01:05:23] Oh, wow. Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [01:05:24] So, yeah, very cool.

Marissa on Growing Up a Mormon

John Dehlin [01:05:27] All right, so you decided not to do, I forget the acronym, the missionary training thing. Dts. You decided to go to college, and you went to a religious college first, but then you transferred to Texas A and M, is that right?

Thomas Westbrook [01:05:45] Yes, yes. And I did one year, one year at letourneau University. Okay. And, and, and it was. I don't think it was nearly as strict as something like Pensacola Christian School or Bob Jones University, but we did have chapel every single, every single school day. And you had to check in with your, your little badger, your type in your number or whatever it was at the terminals. And, and they would look at how many chapels you skipped over the course of that semester. And if you skipped too many of them, you know, then you'd potentially risk. Either you'd have to do makeup, some, some kind of makeup session, or you would have to. I think if you missed too many, you might actually potentially get some form of detention or get evicted or something. Yeah, yeah. It was interesting.

John Dehlin [01:06:38] I relate to a lot of your upbringing in the sense that I definitely deeply religious. I was a virgin when I went to college for sure. Uh, I, I was a virgin until I got married at 24.

Thomas Westbrook [01:06:50] Nothing with Drew Barrymore. Huh?

John Dehlin [01:06:52] Rene Zellager.

Thomas Westbrook [01:06:54] Or was it Renee Zellweger?

John Dehlin [01:06:55] No, no, no, we kissed. We did. We did kiss. But no, we didn't you kiss.

Thomas Westbrook [01:07:00] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:07:00] Yeah, but, but yeah, I, I, and I did go to a religious university. And by the way, I absolutely believed in a 6,000 year Earth in evolution being evil, in a literal Adam and Eve, in a literal global flood, like all that, all that was definitely part of my upbringing. One thing that I'm curious about, Mormons are taught from a very young age that the Bible was translated incorrectly. And so the Book of Mormon is the most correct scripture on earth. And that allowed me to open my mind to the problems in the Bible, like noticing that the sign above Jesus's head was different across the four gospels. They all said something different, or that that Judas dies in two different ways. And so the wheels were turning in my mind as to biblical errancy, I guess might be the term when I was even in high school, because my theology allowed for the Bible to be flawed. Did you ever Allow your mind to consider that the Bible had flaws. Kind of like a Bart Ehrman kind of awareness to the Bible being flawed as a teen or even young adult.

Thomas Westbrook [01:08:18] That's such an interesting question because I. And my exposure to Mormonism is actually somewhat limited. But the fact that you were able to do that. Did I want to ask you.

John Dehlin [01:08:32] Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:08:34] If. Or maybe now and then we'll come back to this question. But did that. Was that a thing that. If you had encountered contradictions within the Book of Mormon itself, where he says one thing in one place and then something else in a different place, or where there's historical inaccuracies or scientific errors in the Book of Mormon, would that have then shattered your faith even if you thought that the Bible was incorrectly translated?

John Dehlin [01:09:03] No, no, no, no. I found all sorts of things that didn't make sense. Like. Like the Book of Mormon. And I don't want to take, take derail from your story, but like when Joseph Smith created the Book of Mormon in 1829 or whatever, he believed in a trinitarian God. He believed the God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost were one. And so the Book of Mormon talks about God and Jesus as if they're the same thing. Later in Joseph Smith's evolution, he comes to believe that God and Jesus are literally separate beings. So he becomes polytheist, and he believes that humans can become gods too. And that's the theology that you're raised with as a Mormon. So then when you read the Book of Mormon, you're like, huh? Like, it says the Lord, and it's just God, God the Father, God the son, I, my father are one kind of stuff, but you just kind of wave it away because in Mormon theology, you're never allowed to doubt it. So, yes, I would have doubted the King James Bible because I felt like I was allowed to, but never could ever doubt Mormonism without feeling guilty or bad or having kind of the Jedi mind trick where they're like, these are not the droids you're looking for. And I would shake my head and continue believing.

Thomas Westbrook [01:10:23] That's quite fascinating because they're. Whenever I talk to people who are raised in a non literalist biblical upbringing, where they're cultural Christians, but they believe that the earth is actually old and maybe God was the first spark, or they have a more deistic leaning interpretation, their faith is very rarely as fragile in the sense that they can question these instances in the Bible where there are contradictions.

Contradictions in the Bible

John Dehlin [01:10:56] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:10:57] Where you have different conflicting stories of Jesus birth.

John Dehlin [01:11:01] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:11:02] Or you have different, conflicting. For me, actually, the ones that were the hardest to wrap my head around were the ones where you would have these, these tiny, tiny little errors where you might have, in one, one book of the Bible in, like, Kings versus in Samuel, you might have a, a list of. Or you might have a list of different kings. And then it'll say, and then this king became king when he was 14 years old. And then another one says he became king when he was eight years old. It couldn't be both. It's very clearly that this is a mistake. One of them got it wrong.

John Dehlin [01:11:40] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [01:11:41] And it's, it's clearly the same king. It's clearly the same time period. He, he loses his throne and then he goes off into exile or whatever.

John Dehlin [01:11:49] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [01:11:50] And so those kind of contradictions, I think I just, I didn't really realize that they were there until later because I was just told that they weren't.

John Dehlin [01:11:59] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:12:00] And oftentimes, if you read the niv is, is one of the most popular, if not the most popular translation in the US and because the niv, it doesn't have the goal of being accurate to the oldest manuscript manuscripts, it has the goal of trying to interpret from an evangelical standpoint. So when you look at passages like that, sometimes the, the authors will just change the text outright in one of them in order to match the other.

John Dehlin [01:12:31] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [01:12:31] And. And you see this transition all throughout. So if, if you look at, you know, our oldest copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls and you compare it with the Masoretic text and you compare it against the Septuagint and you know how old each one is, and you kind of see that the, the transitions, you'll see places where certain texts will be altered in order to make a text more palatable to the beliefs at the time or to try to make it synchronous with other passages in other parts of the Bible.

John Dehlin [01:13:01] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:13:02] And so by the time you get to the niv, a lot of this stuff has kind of been worked out of the text. And you really need to have text critical scholars who will point out, actually, in the originals, it doesn't say this, or in the, you know, we have two different, two different Dead Sea Scrolls that have two different things that they're saying here that conflict with each other and they're able to read, you know, ancient Hebrew or Ancient Greek. But then even if you go to a translation of the Bible into English that tries to be more accurate to the originals, like the NRSV or the NRSV Updated Edition, they really try to be as accurate as they can. And then they'll put in footnotes and stuff if there's like conflicting versions and things like that. You go to versions like that and you absolutely will see contradictions all throughout if you know where to look. And if you're. You're comparing the passages and you're, you're trying to, to really understand and you're not going in from a univocal mindset.

John Dehlin [01:14:08] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [01:14:08] And by univocal mindset, it's, it's. If you come to the appro. If you approach the text from the standpoint of everything in the text was written by one author or inspired by one author, and there's no contradictions and it's just one voice all throughout with one unified message, then you're absolutely going to be able to elevate certain passages and look at other passages and kind of push them to the side and dismiss them or say, well, we just don't understand quite what they're saying. Or, you know, there, there's some way to work it out and to, to bend over backwards to make it make sense. If you approach the, the text from that standpoint, you're not going to find contradictions. There's no possibility for there to be contradictions. But then if you, if you see one that you, you have a hard time justifying, or it's just so in your face and blatant and obvious, then. And suddenly you're, you're. It's like getting cold water thrown in your face. You can't deny the fact that this passage has been changed over time, then that can be so damaging to the faith of someone who is a literalist, someone who believes that everything in the Bible is perfect and it's the inherent, the inerrant word of God himself. Then when you stumble across passages that have obviously changed, and I'll give you a really good example in just a second. But when that happens, your faith is devastated because all of a sudden that fundamental principle is demon. Demonstrably wrong.

John Dehlin [01:15:34] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [01:15:35] And then the dominoes start to fall. Yeah, for me, I didn't quite hit that as. As hard as. As I did. I, I sort of slowly transitioned out. I had a youth pastor who told me when I was still in high school that he, he said, when you go off to college and you realize that there's an overwhelming amount of. Of evidence for evolution, it's okay to accept that. And you can still be a Christian. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater because he was an Old earth creationist. He's like, you know, the evolution is just the method that God used. The stories in Genesis, they're. They're metaphorical. And I struggled with that. I struggled with that. And me and several other other people in the youth group actually, you know, kind of made fun of him for believing in evolution because all of our textbooks were, you know, planted the seed in our mind that, you know, these scientists, they're just so dumb. They just want to live a life of sin. And so they ignore all this, the evidence, and, you know, Satan's just trying to, to fool them. And the world is just, you know, fallen prey to all of this misinformation from the devil. And so the, the, the possibility that this youth pastor who I respected, who loved God, who worshiped God, who believed in the Bible, who taught Bible studies, could believe in evolution, it was kind of a shock to me. But then when I went off to college, I was like, okay, okay, maybe I'm, you know, I'll, I'll. I'll explore where the evidence is. I don't have to give up my faith. And then I started meeting, you know, other Christians who are saying things, you know, like, truth withstand scrutiny. It's okay. Like, if you want to go where the truth leads, you shouldn't be afraid to scrutinize it. You shouldn't be afraid to look underneath every rock and to try to, to test it and look for evidence. Because if you find out that your belief system isn't true, do you really want to believe a lie? Do you really want to live life with a. Just this discrepancy between what you know is true and what you're. You're doing? Or can you, can you actually carry that weight of cognitive dissonance? So having encountered Christians who I respected who had these ideas that were very contrary to this notion of just don't doubt. Doubt is evil. It's. It's wrong to know if, if God is actually true and the Bible is true and all of this stuff is, Is legit. We shouldn't be afraid to question it. There's, there's even a verse that is like, kind of taste and see that the Lord is good, go out and test it, you know, which is conflicting. That's. That's a contradiction between that and thou shalt not test the Lord thy God, you know, but you're able to, depending on what point in your life you are, elevate certain commands and certain ideas. And so I think that.

John Dehlin [01:18:22] Do you want to hear a fun quote? We have in Mormonism.

Thomas Westbrook [01:18:25] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:18:26] One of our leaders once said, if we have the truth, we cannot be harmed. If we have not the truth, we should be harmed.

Thomas Westbrook [01:18:36] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:18:38] Yeah. Which. That doesn't end well. That's why the church doesn't promote that quote very broadly. But it's there. It's there in our archives.

Bill Nye on His Evolutionist Views

Thomas Westbrook [01:18:49] Yeah. Well, I believed that if God created a brain, he'd want us to use it.

John Dehlin [01:18:53] Right? Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:18:55] So I wasn't really afraid of digging, but I thought that the digging would lead me to the Bible. I thought it would confirm my faith. And instead what I found was time after time, there was evidence that this, this universe is actually much, much older than the Bible says it is. And so I, I started, you know, taking classes both in university and outside. I, I would, you know, I was very sponge, like in my inquisitiveness, in my curiosity. And so I, even after I graduated, watched a massive amount of college lectures online. I. Back when, I don't know if EDX and Coursera are still a thing, but they were these, they called them. I think it was moots or moocs. It was like mooc. I think it was a massive open online course. And it was free courses that you could take that were put out by universities, by Yale and Harvard and Cambridge and Berkeley and all these other places. And you could go take a course online in something that was not what you studied or not what your degree focus was, but you could take a course on physics, on astronomy, on robotics, on. On various topics. And so I took a lot of those. I, I watched a lot of college lectures on YouTube. I watched a ton of TED talks and educational podcasts. I read a lot of books. And as I was going through that process, I started realizing that many of the pieces of the puzzle, of how life came from non life, of how evolution works, of, you know, just the fact that there is evidence for evolution, that the Earth is older than we thought. I started realizing that so many of these pieces of the puzzle are already there. And when you have, you know, let's say you have 800 pieces of a puzzle, you don't need the other 200 to know that the picture is not, it's not a picture of, you know, a bowl of porridge. If, if you have all of these, these pieces where you can tell it's a cat or you can tell it's a mountain, you know, and, and I think that's where we are with, with evolution, where we, you know, every single field of science is confirming evolution now. Okay, how do we get to the point where we could evolve? How did the, the, the initial chemical evolution process kick off and, and how did abiogenesis take place? I think most people are surprised when they realize just how many of those pieces of the puzzle have been solved too. And I'm actually working on a series right now that's walking through and showing each step of that process. But as I started to fill in those gaps in my own lack of understanding, I started to realize that this actually makes a lot more sense. And then I started kind of approaching the Bible more from a standpoint of is this actually true? I'm going to read it not from the standpoint of everything in it is true, no matter what. And I have to like, pray that the Holy Spirit guide me and that I lean not on my own understanding, but instead I'm going to approach the Bible a bit more skeptically. I'm going to look for contradictions. I'm going to see if something doesn't make sense. I'm going to try to read this thing cover to cover and see if it holds up. And I think I made it about to, like Deuteronomy before, I was just like, I had page after page after page of notes of here's a contradiction, Here's a contradiction. This doesn't make sense. This is scientifically inaccurate. There's historical problems with this. It was just, just filling up this, this document. And around the same time, I was watching loads of debates online and I was watching content from people who are more critical of creationism. And I watched a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham. Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis. It's a creationist organization that has an entire museum dedicated to convincing you that the earth is 6,000 years old and that humans lived with dinosaurs. And he's, he's also a guy who, he recreated Noah's ark in a parking lot in order to try to show people that this story is actually real. And Ken Ham was debating Bill Nye. And one of the, the audience members asked a question. And the question was, what, if anything, would ever change your mind? And Bill Nye responded, you know, give us one piece of evidence, one fossil that's out of place, like one, you know, just, just show us something and I'll re. Examine. I. We don't necessarily throw it all out, but we'll try to figure it out and try to change our beliefs based off of the new, new information. And Ken Ham was asked the same question, and his response was, nothing is ever going to convince me that The Bible's not the inerrant word of God. And it was just this like this level of inyour face close mindedness. And I think for me that right there, that was my I'm done moment. I was actually, I was, I was in my office and I was like, I would work on stuff I was writing a lot of like SQL queries and doing because I worked in it after I graduated. And a lot of times it was really boring work. And so I just have podcasts in the background. I'm doing my work and I remember listening to that and at that point I just. Can I swear on your show?

John Dehlin [01:24:24] Yeah, yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:24:26] My exact words were this on out.

John Dehlin [01:24:28] Oh wow.

Thomas Westbrook [01:24:30] And I, the reason that it was such a strong in your face thing, like there was so much mounting evidence that I had already encountered. I was already on the fence. And then suddenly I realized so blatantly in that moment that these creationist organizations, these multi million dollar creationist organizations that have built this entire system to try to show you that the Bible is true, have painted themselves as we're going where the evidence leads. We love the truth. You know, all of these scientists, they're lying to you. The devil is deceptive. And you know, they're lying because they, they just want to live a life of sin. And they're, you know, it's so much misinformation. And then all of a sudden here's this blatant contrast between one person on the one hand saying I would in a heartbeat change my mind. I would become a Christian tomorrow if I felt like that's where the evidence pointed and the other person on the other side going, nothing is ever going to convince me that I'm wrong. And it was that moment where this organization that my parents loved, that they, you know, they used to send me links and answers in Genesis. If I had questions about something, they'd be like, well here's, here's the evidence. And I suddenly realized just how deceptive it was, how dishonest it was, how incredibly intellectually dishonest and disingenuous that organization, or at least its, its leader was. And, and what I started seeing again and again and again after that is just case after case after case where creationists would be doing the same thing. Doesn't mean that every single creationist is dishonest. I've met a lot of very sincere, salt of the earth people. I've met pastors, I've met, you know, people in all walks of life who genuinely believe what they're, what they're saying. But what I've also found time and time and time again is that the organizations that run massive organization that, that put out a massive amount of information that are, are creating these high budget productions that have catalogs, that have mega churches, sometimes the pastors flying around in private jets, they know what they're doing and there's, there is a lot of nefarious misinformation that's going on. And sometimes they, they believe in God and they believe in the Bible and they just think that the ends justify the means. And other times it's just how can we get ahead and how can we grow and expand our power and our reach and our influence? And I've seen that more and more and more. As I started dissecting the faith healing movement, as I started diving into characters like Benny Hinn, Oral Roberts, Kenneth Copeland, and countless other faith healers, I started seeing the same exact grift again and again and again and again. And, and I think that's why I, I felt a need to start speaking up and speaking out and exposing it and showing people that, you know, a lot of these people, they don't have your best interests in mind and they're preying on your religious belief in order to pull the wool over your eyes.

Come Out to Your Parents

John Dehlin [01:27:43] Around what year, what age were you when you had this moment or whatever you call it?

Thomas Westbrook [01:27:52] 24. So it would have been about 2014.

John Dehlin [01:27:56] Okay, so about 12 years ago.

Thomas Westbrook [01:27:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:28:00] And tell me, obviously you came from a family very committed in Mormonism. That's the idea of disappointing your parents, of confronting them after they've raised you. In such an orthodox faith, the fear of being marginalized or even kicked out of the family is real. And even just disappointing your parents or making your mom sad is kind of terrifying. So how did you cope with, did you have those feelings of fear, of terror, of sadness? And then what was that like? How did you deal with that with your parents?

Thomas Westbrook [01:28:42] Initially, I was terrified to come out to friends, family, co workers, because, because you have to realize too, and when you're, when you're living and working in the Bible belt and all of your co workers are religious, there is a potential cost to your, your ability to put bread on the table. You know, if, if you, you're vying for a promotion and then, you know, you come out as this, this atheist who's, you know, criticizing religion, your boss might not take too kindly to that. Your co workers might not take too kindly to that. So I was very reluctant to come out to them. I wanted to Kind of keep peace within the workplace. But I also, I wanted to be able to share some videos with my parents, to kind of share the things I was struggling with without being interrupted and my thought process, because as the youngest child, there are so many times when I would have an idea and I would get cut off immediately or just ignored by family because they wouldn't necessarily see it as something valuable. And I thought if I were to make these short laser focused videos taking these ideas that I am struggling with, one of them was, you know, is, is God just? If, if a God is willing to send people to hell for all eternity for some finite crime, that's not justice. You cannot call that a good, loving, kind God or even a just God. To have such a disproportional punishment for such a finite small life of sin or crime, like even someone as horrific and awful as Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot, you cannot look at their lives and say, okay, this person deserves eternity of suffering. You could say, this person deserves to be tortured and, you know, killed over and over again 5 million times. Or like proportional to the amount of suffering that they cause. That would be an example of justice. Right. You could even say, okay, now, you know, we potentially need to do a multiple of that, you know, so you've, you've, you've done this and taken away their one shot at life and now, you know, they can't get that back. So you have to experience it five times or something. But eternity is forever.

John Dehlin [01:31:14] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:31:14] So to say that eternal suffering and torture and misery is justice and then we're not talking about, just for, you know, someone like Paul Pot. We're, we're talking about, you know, the, the really sweet old man who lives down the street who, you know, is a kind upstanding member of the community, but he's Vietnamese and happens to be Buddhist. So, you know, screw him in particular. We're just going to burn him for all eternity like that, that's not justice.

John Dehlin [01:31:47] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:31:47] In no world is that a just world and, or a just God. And so I, I did a video on that topic and I, I did a couple of other videos on, you know, does religion kill curiosity? You know, is we should be going out and be curious about how the world works. I was just kind of imploring people to, not, to not fall into this, this trap of just, you know, doubt is evil and don't question. And, and so I was creating these videos initially as like a tool to be able to share. But then I was, I was so reluctant and scared to share this with my family. And then after a while I just, I kind of reached a point. I was going through a divorce. It was the one of the relationships I mentioned to you. It was, was very like emotionally traumatizing and abusive. And as I was going through that, I just kind of hit rock bottom. I'm like, screw it, I'm just going to post one of these videos to my, my Facebook. But it was one of my. More. I started doing a bit more abrasive kind of angry atheist content where I would put out these, these cartoons called Animated Bible Myths and they would just completely shred these Bible stories in a rather mocking, tongue in cheek, satirical way.

John Dehlin [01:33:00] How did you. I'm looking at them. I'm looking at them now. How. And I'll, I'll actually, maybe I'll. I'll show them on the screen because it's kind of fun. It's kind of fun to see your early work. I'm guessing that I ran into your early work without even knowing who you were. How did you do the animation for these?

The Animations of Atheists

Thomas Westbrook [01:33:22] So I used a tool initially it was called Goanimate. And then it got, it got bought and changed to vyond. And it was a very basic animation software, but it was all within a browser. And they had templates, they had characters you could customize. You know, they had actions that you could, you could select what action you want them to do. You add different background props and stuff. The software has gotten a lot better. But I think as I've been kind of leaning more into more serious content, I've been shifting away from animation a lot.

John Dehlin [01:33:55] That's fun. You've got Hemet Met on here. The Friendly Atheist. You're talking about James Randi, the Amazing Randy. Like, I'm guessing I actually did an.

Thomas Westbrook [01:34:06] There was actually an interview with Randy on there.

John Dehlin [01:34:08] Oh, very cool. So I'm guessing you were inspired by Hitchens and Dawkins and Harris and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse too?

Thomas Westbrook [01:34:20] To some extent. I watched a lot of Hitchens as I was deconstructing

John Dehlin [01:34:26] evolution. Right. He would have been big on evolution.

Thomas Westbrook [01:34:30] So Hitchens was more. His background was more in politics and news and reporting than he wrote a book called God is Not Great. And he was very critical of religion, but he had a very strong grounding in history and so he was able to give examples from history of how religious teachings caused harm. Dawkins was more the, the evolutionary biologist. And I think that Dawkins debates and argumentation and his takes on politics and, and stuff and social Issues I've never been particularly impressed by. But his. His work on evolution. I read the. The Blind Watchmaker and the Selfish Gene, and that really fleshed out my understanding of how evolution works without it being just this. This strawman caricature that I was raised with as. As a creationist, which actually, if you're a creationist and you're wanting to keep your kids in the fold as creationists, simply teaching them strawman positions of your opponent's arguments is a really bad strategy, because the second that they realize that, oh, your parents actually lied to you about. About what the. The opposite side believes and here's what they actually believe, then it's. It's going to backfire.

John Dehlin [01:35:48] Mm. Yeah. Okay. So I think. I think I'm getting a sense. So you start sharing these videos on YouTube. YouTube. You answered that in the context of trying to navigate or maintain your relationship with your parents. So I'm. I'm inferring that you create some of these early videos to try and have a conversation with your family about your doubts and questions around faith. And I'm just gonna predict. I'm gonna predict that doesn't go very well.

Thomas Westbrook [01:36:19] It was like, the first three were probably a bit more. More. A bit more diplomatic. And then when I started doing the animated Bible myths, that was when I was just like, just burn it all to the ground. Like, I. I was so frustrated. I was so done. I was, like, kind of emotionally at rock bottom in terms of, you know, going through a divorce. And I'm just like, it. It was a way of kind of sticking my middle finger up and just trying to. To ridicule the belief system, which I don't think is the best way to change minds. I don't think it's the most tactful way to go about it, but it certainly was lethargic. I certainly attracted an atheist base of supporters of people that are like, thank you, someone's, you know, pointing out some of these ridiculous things. And. And I think that there. There is a place for humor and mockery. I think comedians have their place. I think, you know, whenever we hold an idea, too, when we elevate an idea too high, where it's like, you can't even criticize it because this is sacred. I think that that's dangerous and humorous, can be a powerful tool to help society see that the emperor has no clothes and it shifts the Overton window. So I do think that there can be a place for that. But I think that if the goal is I want to be a Bit more diplomatic. I want to shift the Overton window by actually making people embrace critical thinking and to not see atheists as these angry, hostile, bitter people. But as it's your next door neighbor, it's someone who has the same values as I do, it's someone who cares about free speech and democracy and enlightenment values, human rights then I don't think that just pointing and laughing is necessarily the most effective tool.

John Dehlin [01:38:05] Right. But I'm mostly, I mean for me, most people who don't leave Mormonism after, after they lose their faith, they're just terrified of disappointing their parents. So they're, they, they just, so they, many people will go on missions, get married in the temple and just quietly disbelieve purely out of a fear or a terror or a sadness around disappointing your parents. So did you, did you just develop too much of an individual spirit to where you didn't care what your parents felt or thought? Was there a big apex conflict? Have they cut you out? Have you been able to remain friends? I'm curious about your emotions related to pleasing your parents and then the fallout of your loss of faith with your relationship with your parents and your siblings, frankly.

Why Did I Leave My Faith?

Thomas Westbrook [01:38:58] Well, I've always been very independent and I've always been a bit strong willed and stubborn and I, I did get some blowback from my parents. There was, there was a period where my mom said, I, I believe I was talking to her about, I was, I was about to go off to Thailand and my mom said something like, well, we still love you. And it was a bit shocking. What do you mean still? I didn't realize that this was conditional, but, but I, I responded with well that's, that's the most important thing. That's, that's more important than what we believe, like our difference of belief, our faith. And she said no, I don't agree with that. Basically my, my, my faith is more important than my love of my own son. And so that, that was hard to hear for sure. I don't think she necessarily realized kind of the depth of what she was saying, but it, I, I, I knew kind of then and there where her priorities lay. And there was another point where my parents tried to use my divorce against me where, when I first was, when I first left my, my ex, I was devastated because I, like, I was very much in love with this person, but I was just, I started realizing all of the things that she was doing to me. The, the levels of, of gaslighting and abuse and constantly picking fights and feeling like you're walking Through a minefield every day where the minds are shifting places and, and, and I started looking at how that was going to affect me long term. And I realized I was slowly becoming a shell of a person and that long term I stood to develop, you know, depression and anxiety and PTSD and hyper vigilance and all of this. And so I realized I couldn't do it. I couldn't stay in this relationship and I wasn't about to bring kids into this relationship. And so I left. And when, when I shared all of the details with my parents, they were initially very supportive and said, you know, we, we love you, we understand, we're so sorry. It's, it's going to be okay. It's not the end of the world. We're here for you. And then right before I was about to leave, because I had, I chose to go full time in holy Kool Aid. But I really didn't have a lot of money. I took out a, like a twenty thousand dollar business loan. I sold everything I owned. I cashed in my retirement and I quit my job because I, I wanted to see if I could make it full time on YouTube because it was taking off. And I'm like, I'm really passionate about this. I think that this is a form of, that is really needed. There was a, there was a kind of a dry spell in terms of like secular content or secular activism on YouTube. It had shifted. It was really, there was a huge wave until about 2012. And then a lot of the content creators got bored of the atheist arguments and they kind of shifted to talking more about social justice and feminism and politics. And I, I wanted to get back to kind of the core fundamentals of like, why did I leave my faith? Because there's billions of other people currently right now that are struggling with the same thing. And I think that my journey can help them and make them realize that they're not alone and that they're not crazy. And I can fight for things like separation of church and state, and I can fight for the normalization of atheism and for, for people to, to realize that we should be basing our policies based off of science and based off of evidence and not based off of one particular group's ideology. So I felt like it was important. I didn't have a lot of money, but I also just, I, I needed to get out of Texas. I needed to heal, I needed to grow, I needed to recover. And I thought, you know, I want to go somewhere where I, where my money stretches further and Right about this time there was a book that Tim Ferriss wrote called the four Hour Work Week which yeah, kind of launched the entire digital nomad campaign community of people who suddenly realize, oh, I could, I could try to work online, I could try to work remotely. I could find a way to have my money stretch further and make ends meet where I'm, I'm, you know, earning in dollars but then, you know, buying things in, in pesos or bought and, and you're able to have a better standard of living. And one of the places that he mentioned in that book that was kind of a big hub was Chiang Mai, which is kind of a small city in the north of Thailand. And there was a site also at the time, I think it was Nomad list. I think now it's like nomads.com which basically ranks cities by, you know, various metrics. So it's like, is there good Internet? Does it have coffee shops? Does it have co working spaces? You know, what's the cost of living? How much does it cost for apartments? You know, it has all of these metrics. And Chiang Mai was literally at the top of that list. And it's where so many nomads kind of got started. And I thought, okay, if I can go, it's, yeah, it's going to cost me a little bit to get over there, but then my money can stretch further. I can really test this experiment to see if YouTube will work. And so if I go and I, I live in Southeast Asia for a little bit, my money will stretch further and I will basically just be working 24 7. So I'll be in coffee shops and co working spaces and all of this. So I was, I was planning to go to Thailand. I was a. Sold all my stuff. I was already like, had my plane ticket and I, I met my parents basically right before I left and they were talking to me about faith. But then they, they tried to weaponize hell against me without realizing that by this point I. It's like threatening someone with Santa Claus, not bringing you gifts. My fear of hell was, was basically gone. I had already gone through multiple stages where I was. Initially I was afraid of demons and demon possession and spiritual warfare. And then I started realizing that experiences that I had had, like sleep paralysis are much better ways of explaining these things that people thought were demons. So for people not familiar, sleep paralysis is where you wake up and when you go to sleep, your, your brain submits, excretes different neurochemicals that cause your muscles to freeze and it protects you from Rolling out of bed and falling out of bed or thrashing around in your sleep. And sometimes when you wake up, usually when you wake up, you're, you're very quickly able to regain control of your limbs and move around. Sometimes you're kind of in, you wake up into a sort of partial awake, partial asleep mode where your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for reasoning and for kind of higher level thinking, it hasn't quite kicked on yet, but the emotional part of your brain, like your amygdala is. And so you're, you're, you're half awake, half asleep. Your muscles are still paralyzed, so you can't move, but you're trying to move. And so your brain has this sense of where your body position is, your sense of proprioception, which is what allows you to like, close your, close your eyes and like touch your fingers together. It's your sense of spatial awareness. It's thrown off because you, you're trying to move your limbs so you think that they're up here, but then they're actually down here because you're, you're paralyzed. So sometimes you get a sense that you're like floating out of your body and your brain is panicking and you, sometimes you'll have these like hypnagogic hallucinations where, where you, you feel like there's like a dark presence in the room. And so you, or you feel like there's pressure on your chest and you're awake enough where you're, you're panicking, but there's nothing you can do about it. And like, I had sleep paralysis multiple times while I was in college because some of the triggers of it are if you have bad sleep hygiene, like if, if you're pulling all nighters, studying for exams, your chance of getting sleep paralysis goes up. If the time, the time that you usually go to sleep is varying and fluctuating wildly. And if you are, I think it varies depending on if you sleep on your side versus if you sleep on your back. There's your, your likelihood of experiencing it goes up or down. And there's, there's other factors as well that play into it. And so for me, when I first had these experiences of sleep paralysis, I thought it was demons and I was, I was crying out to Jesus to save me. Like my eyes were fixating on a cross on the wall and like the, it wasn't doing anything. It was like for the next 30 seconds or a minute, like if it had been, if I had said, you know, in the name of Jesus, you know, be gone, Satan. And this, this demonic presence suddenly immediately left. And I like, you know, was fine and free and felt like this relief from the Holy Spirit. That would have been one thing. But I'm sitting here going, jesus, Jesus, save me. You know, like while I'm at a point in my life when I'd never been closer to God ever, this is when I was maybe like 22 and I'm sitting there just frozen in bed. And I shouldn't have been able to be affected by demons. I should be under the protection of the blood of the lamb. And so then when it eventually, like a minute or so later, it just kind of went away on its own. And then I started actually learning what sleep paralysis was and the neurological basis of it and the mechanism and stuff. And I started also learning that different cultures assign it to different things. So in some cultures they think it's a succubus or an incubus or an old hag or a witch or a demon or there's so many different things, you know, some chupacabra or something. And so if every culture is experiencing this universal human experience, because biologically we're all pretty close to the same, but we're all interpreting it based off of the lens of what we believe supernaturally or some paranormal explanation. To me that that's, that screams that the people in ancient times who were saying that this is a demon were just as confused as the people in, you know, Papua New guinea or wherever who are saying that it's, you know, a succubus or something. And then when I started flipping through the Bible and you get to passages where it says that they brought an epileptic to Jesus and he's having seizures and Jesus commands the demon to come out of him, it's so blatantly obvious that it's, this is a misunderstanding of biology from a time period where neuroscience doesn't exist. We know what seizures are. It's, it's electrical misfirings in the brain. We have medication that can treat it. So if, if you're going to tell me that these things are caused by demons, then it's like, are demons thwarted by sleeping on your side rather than sleeping on your back? Or is, are demons thwarted by anti seizure medication? So by the time that my parents started threatening me with hell, like I no longer believed in demons. And then I had also studied the origins of hell and how Jews, who were the ones that wrote, you know, the, the Torah and, and the Old Testament and it's, it's where all of the, the basis of the Bible comes from. They don't believe in hell. They never have believed in hell, that at most they have, you know, a temporary form of hell like Gehenna. But a lot of the early versions are about, like Shiol. It's just this general underworld that everyone goes down to, including Abraham, including Samuel, including, you know, people who follow God, who are these great prophets. And it's just this universal place where everyone goes, it's just the grave. And so if, if the Jews didn't believe in hell, but then it later evolves into this, this concept that's incredibly useful politically. It's incredibly, an incredibly powerful tool if you're trying to manipulate the masses and you can, you know, instill them with this fear of hell. It's a great way to keep people in line. And so by the time that my parents were using hell to threaten me and they were, they, they did it in such a malicious way too, where at first they said, we understand with your divorce, we get it. We were here for you, we support you. And then I think they felt desperate to try to win me back. And they said, well, you, you're going to burn in hell if you don't come back. And I was just like, what are you talking about? And they're like, you know, you, you know that you're a sinner. You left your wife. And to me, that was just such a, and this is while I was still very much like in the early, early stages of grieving, and that was still a very sore topic, and I was just like, don't you dare go there. And they pushed it and I, I, I quickly kind of cut them off and like, shut it down. I'm, I, I still, they haven't used that since, but it kind of showed me the sort of the, the links that they would go to, to try to manipulate based off of what ammunition they thought could potentially save my soul at all costs. And I, I think, I don't now, I don't really hold it against them because, I mean, if you genuinely believe in hell and you genuinely believe that your, your family member is, is going to go there, you're going to try to do anything you can to save them.

When Sleep paralysis caused demons to come to my mind

John Dehlin [01:53:17] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:53:19] But at the same time, it's, it's messed up that that's so normalized within religion.

John Dehlin [01:53:24] Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Thanks for sharing that. That's, that's sensitive stuff and that's a powerful story. So I'm sorry, but I'm Sorry that happened to you. And also it sounds like it led to an awakening that gave you a strong sense of meaning and purpose and, and I really, I really relate to that. So. So you lose your faith and your YouTube channel has some, you know, is making some progress and at some point you leave. I relate to this too. I was working at Microsoft when I had my faith crisis and I decided to leave Microsoft to try and solve this rising Internet Mormon kind of faith crisis problem that I saw coming around the bend. So you literally this I didn't do you. I kept my retirement. You cashed out your retirement, became a nomad and tried to become a full time YouTuber back in 2015, 2016.

Thomas Westbrook [01:54:27] To be fair, it's not like I had a lot of retirement saved up. I was 24 or no, sorry, sorry. I was 26 when I cashed in. But seeing as I graduated from university in 2013 and then I, I worked for, for several years in, in this IT department because I was, I was working actually while I was at A M. Oh, I, I've, I've loved computers my whole life. I've worked with computers my whole life. I've built computers. And so, so I had had jobs before while I was like early on in, in university or pre university where I was working for Best Buy or for Staples and like in their IT departments kind of doing the whole geek squad type thing. And then when I was, I was a student, I got a job as a student tech at A and M and I sort of worked my way up. And then when I graduated they said we want, we want to train you and keep you on. Because I had taken initiative and I had, I'd learned some different tools and software to try to help out other people in the department and basically they liked the hustle and the work ethic. They're like, we'll bring you on and we'll teach you more. And so I wound up actually getting a job. Initially it was very administrative and then it kind of shifted more into actual, you know, various writing reports and doing audits and like IT security type of stuff. But I, it was, it was a good job for right out of, of university, but I, I didn't have that much saved up in retirement. So it's, it wasn't. Yeah, you know, like I cashed in hundreds of thousands of dollars or anything like that.

John Dehlin [01:56:06] Well, still like you're, you're an honors graduate from Texas A and M. You're on an IT track which could lead to six figures pretty quickly. So it's it's just a, it's a big bold move to say I'm going to be, in my opinion, in my experience, to say I'm going to be a content creator and try and make a living out of that when you have no real reason. Well, I don't know. When I started my podcast, I guess something slightly different is in 2005, no one was, no one even knew what a podcast was, so no one was monetizing it. Did you have a sense by 201516 that you could actually make a living off of YouTube? Because that wasn't even in my. The mightem possibility for me.

Thomas Westbrook [01:56:49] Yeah, I definitely knew that you could make a living on YouTube because there were loads of content creators by 2016 who were doing it full time.

John Dehlin [01:56:56] Okay.

Thomas Westbrook [01:56:58] I didn't necessarily think it would be a good living. It wasn't the smartest financial decision. It was more of a passion thing.

John Dehlin [01:57:07] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [01:57:07] It was activism. It was. I really want to see if, if I can even if I can just scrape by enough to be able to do this full time, if I can help people, if I can change the direction that my country is going in. Because I was also very, I was very frustrated with the, the one, the political direction because we had just elected Donald Trump. And on top of that, I saw that people really had neglected across the board in the States. There, there had been a shift and Carl Sagan had warned about this way back in the the 80s of just having this premonition of what society is going to look like when we abandon our scientific education and we deprioritize critical thinking and healthy skepticism and instead make ourselves prey to the first beguiling swindler who comes along. And, and, and I was very, very, very concerned watching as my country is, is able to side off every single Kardashian and rank in terms of drama level every episode of Jersey Shore. And yet they, they can't tell you who their own vice president is or they, they can't tell you, you know, a good chunk of them think that the earth is flat. So I found this incredibly troubling and I saw potential to push back against it and really make a difference as an independent content creator. Because I saw YouTube channels like Crash Course and, you know, Veritasium and Smarter every day and stuff. Who, like, they weren't necessarily atheists, not all of them, or if they were, that's not what their content was about, but it was teaching people about science and engineering and getting people to, to be excited about learning and what we can actually accomplish when we prioritize education. And so that's kind of been a part of the goal of the channel, has been trying to spread science love of science and science communication, but really to show people the method of how can we know, how can we test it? Because it's such an incredibly powerful tool. And if you couple that science with healthy skepticism, with critical thinking, it can save you from a lot of scams and con artists and misinformation. But it's all, it can also show us what actually is true and how does the world actually work and how can we use this to build something incredible? And instead of falling into this kind of chaos of a divided society that's arguing about the efficacy of vaccines, it's like, well, okay, there, there's data that's out there that we can, can explore. That's not, you know, just some, trust me, bro, podcaster. We can actually look at the studies and the methodologies that they're using. We can break down this information. We can see the, the risk levels. We can see, you know, if the, the risk outweighs the reward. We can, can gauge this stuff. We can, can run experiments to see if the earth is actually flat. Will we ever know everything? Probably not. But there's some methods that are far more reliable than others. Let's, let's go there. Let's, you know, let's not just sit kind of blissfully ignorant saying, you know, well, I don't know, I heard this and this on TikTok. Okay, well, what's their source? Where did they get it from? How do they know? Let's explore that. And so, so that's been a big goal of my channel, is to spread that kind of curiosity and, and critical thinking far outside just the religious angle. To me, I, I really couldn't care less if someone says that they're a Christian, but they, if they follow the science where it leads and maybe they're, you know, they don't believe in a, a young earth creationist stance. They're like, this is kind of metaphorical. It gives my life meaning. I'm a cultural Christian. But then they, they still advocate for the same values, they still fight for the same things as me. I see that person as an ally. So the, the, the atheist content, while oftentimes I've kind of been pigeonholed as an atheist YouTuber, I don't really particularly care for the label because all it does is it says one thing that I, I don't believe in. I'm not really convinced about the existence of a God, but I also kind of don't care. You know, maybe we're living in a simulation, maybe we're in the Matrix, maybe we're, you know, there was some super advanced alien civilization that kick started everything. Like I would still want to know where it came from. Is it a God? If it's, if it's not omniscient, if it's not, you know, eternal, if it's not all powerful? I don't know. Yeah, I think they're interesting questions, but to me I'm a little bit like, little bit of an apatheist in that area where I'm or I'm, I'm agnostic towards this, this kind of grand, grander or bigger idea of like a first cause kind of God, a deistic God. I don't know. I, there's, there's genuinely no way for me to prove it. I think it does create more questions of well, if that's the case, where did that God come from? Et cetera, et cetera. And it can be this, this infinite regression, but I just don't really care. I don't really care. And it's not that I don't care about, about knowledge or that I don't care about the answers. I just don't know that we can ever know. I think we can test if there's any evidence that there's interaction, supernatural interaction, you know, like prayer studies. If there's a famous prayer study by the Templeton foundation where they had people who were prayed over who wound up actually faring worse than people who weren't. And like there were, some people knew they were being prayed over, some people didn't know that they were being prayed over. There was various segments of the study and to me, I look at that, I'm like, okay, so here's people who knew that they were being prayed over, who were prayed over and they actually fared worse, possibly because of the pressure of like, oh no, now everyone's like expecting me to get better. I don't know, maybe it's a stressor, who knows? But to me, like I see things like that, I'm like, we should be able to test for some sort of interaction, supernatural interaction or some sort of efficacy level of something like prayer. And if it's not there, if the evidence isn't there, then I don't see a need to believe in something without evidence. Especially something so extraordinary.

Questions atheists have about the supernatural

John Dehlin [02:03:33] Yeah, interesting. Okay, so I'm mindful of the scope you chose because when I, when I started out for me, it was just all about helping Mormons because it's the world I knew. It's, it's the place where I experienced my unraveling of my worldview. And so I thought to help kind of my people first and to be able to help my people, you needed to kind of talk in their language and work from within their paradigm and address their beliefs and ideologies with specificity. So I kind of, you know, as I figured out how do I make a difference in the world? For me, it was narrowing my scope and targeting very specifically my people. It sounds like you decided to widen your scope and not just address evangelical Christians, but Christianity and belief and secularism kind of writ large and also to add politics into the mix. And that's a very different decision in terms of where to target your efforts. I'm curious what that was like, whether you found allies along the way and whether you found that fun and interesting to go broader perspective or challenging. Because I often thought sometimes I would get sick of doing Mormon stuff and I'd be like, there's a big, big world out there. I could go broader. But then I'd be like, well, how can I differentiate myself if I go broad and scoped, is that become so broad that it's hard to get people to really pay attention? And is it hard to get traction if you broaden your scope too much? So I'm curious what that was like as a creator to broaden your scope?

When To Speak Out?

Thomas Westbrook [02:05:40] It's a double edged sword.

John Dehlin [02:05:42] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:05:42] Because on the one hand I think I'm too ADHD to stick with just one super narrow topic. Yeah, there's so many interests, so many, you know, just a broad variety of things that I want to learn about. I'm fascinated by. Like I, I've spent years diving deep into archeology. So I have a whole series called Nothing Fails like Bible History where I dive deep into the archaeological reports and I try to understand how much of the Bible is historical versus not. And, and to me that's, that's something that requires a tremendous amount of expertise and understanding to be able to figure out how to read these reports and make sense of them, make heads or tails of any of it. But then I also have a series that's on abiogenesis and biochemistry and life emerging from non life. And it's, it's such a different thing to, you know, analyze pottery fragments or to, to look at, you know, the, the number of houses per hectare, to try to figure out population figures for a settlement in like the late Bronze to be versus looking at, you know, how can nucleo based pairs automatically form on their own in certain simulations mimicking early Earth like environments? Like these are two very, very different and yet highly technical fields. And I don't for a second claim that I'm an expert in these areas. Like I'm not going to be like oh yeah, I'm the foremost, you know what, I don't have a PhD and yet I'm just so fascinated by these fields. And so I want to know, I want to break it down and try to dive deep and dig in and binge watch through lectures and reach out to experts and interview people and talk to them and try to understand it. Because to me, I don't think that you have to have a PhD to have at least like an aerial perspective of what are all of these fields, what are the perspectives of how the world works of say a paleontologist or an anthropologist or an archaeologist in like the soft sciences versus you know, a chemist and a physicist and a biologist. And you know, where do they overlap in order for you to kind of get the big picture view? And I think that by going more broad, I've really got a, a fun perspective where I'm able to understand the, the deep time that really you only kind of grasp when you start diving into astronomy and you start diving into astrophysics and looking back at, you know, analyzing the cosmic microwave background radiation. But then you see that and, and you're like okay, well what about geology? Does that confirm it? And you start looking at, you know, the geological layers and, and how you can date various layers and how you can use radiometric dating and how long it takes for these layers to form. And then you look at the fossils and you see that, you know, the fossils are all spread out going from, you know, more complex life to simpler as you go further back in time and you start learning all of the different rules of geology and, and then you start looking at genetics and how quickly animals will, you know, have mutations and, and how quickly will diverge and evolve and, and you see how much DNA we have in common with other creatures. And the further back you go in time, you know, you start to see where they meet up and where, how distantly related we are from, from each other and, and that matches up with, you know, comparative morphology and that matches up with, you know, modern day experiments where we're looking at bacteria in a petri dish and seeing the rates of evolution and seeing the rates of change and we're able to witness all of this stuff. And it's like so many of these fields, they overlap in ways that people don't realize. So if you are going to put forth an idea within, say, say, evolution, you say, you know, okay, I, I think that the Earth is super old because this is the amount of time that would be necessary for evolution to take place at the rate that it's happening. And so you say that the Earth has to be old. If you then went to geology and like, let's say that you start trying to perform, you know, radiometric dating and you realize that it's all off, well, you'd have to go back to the drawing board. But then if you, on the other hand, on the flip side, let's say that you, you try one form, because there's, there's various forms of radiometric dating. You know, you, you have potassium argon dating, you have, you know, carbon dating for, for shorter things that are younger. You know, you have all sorts of different, different methods. And if, if you're dating different samples and you're getting results that all match each other and all confirm each other, and then you're able to go and look at other things like ice cores, and you start realizing kind of that, that the Earth is a lot older than 6,000 years because we have layers of ice that are laid down every single year. And you can see exactly where, as you melt the ice onto, you know, like a little plate that then is able to analyze it chemically through, like a mass spectrometer and see, you know, okay, how much lead was there in the atmosphere, how much carbon was there in the atmosphere, how much oxygen, etc. And you know, that in the winter and in the summer, those levels fluctuate in a very consistent pattern. You can see exactly where one year ends and the next year starts, and one year ends and the next year starts. And so you, when you look at, oh, my God, we have ice cores that, you know, we're measuring, you know, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 years back, and then we still have an extra mile to go of ice that we're digging through that permafrost areas. And then you're able to compare that with dendrochronology and tree rings and line up the different trees and like, okay, this tree was literally buried by volcanic ash, and then another forest appeared on top of it, and then that was buried bash and another force. And, and you can trace this back tens of thousands of years, and you can look at the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and it matches the amount of carbon in the atmosphere based off of the ice and based off of, you know, coral reefs that are also retaining carbon levels. And, like, you're able to measure all of this and calibrate it, and all of the evidence from all of these different fields are all converging on the same exact story. That, to me, is, like, overwhelming evidence. And every single piece of that, that puzzle screams contradiction to this young earth creationist narrative. So that's why I think I've benefited so much from, like, just diving into so many different areas where you're just like, oh, my God, like, we're not just looking at, like, one piece of evidence that answers in Genesis might be able to kind of just like, wish away and be like, well, there's some. Some explanation over here. It's like, no, no, they have to account for all of it. And when all of these fields all coalesce on one position and all of the evidence backs up that position, and then there's this other position that's completely contradicted by all of it. To me, that's like, that's probably been the most powerful, like, beneficial thing for me in. In coming at this from such a broad approach.

John Dehlin [02:13:18] Interesting.

Thomas Westbrook [02:13:19] And like I said, I think I'm. I'm too ADHD to just narrow in on one thing, because if I was. If I was just talking about the same thing over and over, I'd go crazy. And I see Tick Tockers do this where, you know, they'll. They'll make a video about the Kalam cosmological argument and they're talking about apologetics, and six months later, the way that the Tick Tock algorithm works, it's not like they have, like, a evergreen resource. It's like they have to keep making the same content again and again for it to still show up in the algorithm and be relevant.

John Dehlin [02:13:47] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:13:48] If I had to make a video on the Kalam cosmological argument in Christian apologetics every six months, I probably would have swallowed a shotgun already.

John Dehlin [02:13:57] Dang. So it sounds like you just love learning and you love learning adjacent to the values you have for society. And so you just try and marry your love of learning lots of different things with the desire to make society better. Is that fair?

Thomas Westbrook [02:14:13] Oh, yeah. I think I have the best job in the world.

John Dehlin [02:14:16] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:14:17] I love being able to monetize my curiosity.

John Dehlin [02:14:21] Yeah, I love it. Okay, so I'm curious now, you mentioned that it was sort of Donald Trump's election the first time around in 2016 that kind of motivated you. And of course, Trump his first term lasted four years. And then Biden takes over, but then Trump gets reelected. And if you, you said you were a political science major, is that right? Or something to that effect. You studied political science. I did, too. Oh, go ahead.

"Christian nationalism" is one of the biggest threats to democracy

Thomas Westbrook [02:14:54] Political science, political science and international studies. But then I had a double major in Russian as well.

John Dehlin [02:14:59] Okay. Yeah. So I was political science major, international relations minor and minor in Spanish, pretty much. And, and would you agree that from the civics lessons and from the political science courses you took, the American political realm is kind of turned upside down? In other words, you've been fighting for better civics, better democracy, a better Republic for what, 10 years now? And you've also been trying to fight probably unhealthy Christianity and probably, I would guess, Christian nationalism. How you doing? How's the battle? How are you feeling with your efforts? And I'm not trying to rub it in.

Thomas Westbrook [02:15:53] I wish I could respond with more good news than bad. Christian nationalism, I think right now is one of the biggest threats to democracy in the states. And I, I actually, I have a T shirt that says keep your theocracy off my, my democracy. And maybe I should have worn that instead of this one today, but. Shameless plug for my merch store, definitely. But I have been, yes, I have been frustrated seeing the encroaching of Christian nationalism into, to the political sphere. And we see this with, you know, Donald Trump's evangelical advisory board praying over him in the White House and nominating him from the pulpit and, and breaching this separation of church and state, this wall, they should absolutely lose their tax exempt status. Every single church that's, you know, not, and not just, just from, it's usually right wing Republican. But I would say the exact same thing. If it was a left wing pastor who was saying, you should go out and vote for this left wing politician or you can't be a Christian and be a Republican, I would absolutely say that they should also get their tax exempt status revoked. Keep your faith out of my, or keep your faith in religion out of, you know, my, my government. But I have seen it almost exclusively coming from the right, and I find it very worrying and problematic, especially when many of these pastors have extreme anti LGBT perspectives. When I see my friends getting hurt by the policies that are being put in place and also oftentimes policies that hurt women or that hurt minority groups. The, the Voting Rights act just basically got gutted. And so it's, you know, and almost immediately afterwards, we see various districts getting gerrymandered out of existence because they are, you know, largely African American districts that tend to lean more, more Democrat. So I, I see these policies getting put into place that are negatively affecting democracy and it's negatively affecting equality and free speech and so many of the values that, that I stand for. And yeah, I am worried by it. But I also think that what we're seeing right now is a resurgence of grassroots activism. We are seeing people come together at a scale that I've never seen before in my lifetime. You look at how big the no Kings protests have been, have gotten that you can't ignore that anymore. You're seeing these grassroots politicians popping up all over the place that, you know, not just local mayoral candidates like Zoran Momdani, but we're seeing various senators and stuff popping up also who are running on a more populist platform. I think that AIPAC is starting to lose a lot of its control over, over American politics because it's. Now they. Let's just say that if, if APAC wants to donate to a candidate, a candidate is much more relaxed to taking APAC money. They're, they're more likely wanting to hide it behind layers, opaque layers of other organizations. But you're seeing more candidates that are criticizing the, the religious marriage between the US and Israel because you have so many pastors who are just itching from the end times, who see Israel as God's chosen country and we have to support them at all costs and we have to get the, the temple rebuilt and in order for Jesus to come back. And so there's almost this apocalyptic bloodlust that, you know, we have to make this happen at all costs. And politicians are willing to court it. They're willing to court their, their evangelical base. That's not the only reason that, you know, that Israel and, and the US have, you know, this, this kind of alliance. But it's like you, you see the religion being weaponized, and I think that people are tired of it. I think people are, are speaking out against it. People are pushing back against it. And also we're watching income inequality reach rates never before seen or at least not seen anytime in, in my lifetime or in the last hundred years. We're seeing billionaires basically be treated like heads of state with seats at the table. You know, the G7, we're seeing, you know, this, the, the shrinking of the middle class. People are struggling to afford rent, housing prices are going up, the cost of food is going up. Inflation's through the roof. And I think we're, as a collective, we're frustrated by this. And so people are starting to come together and realize the power of unions and realize the power of, of getting together as a collective and fighting and pushing back against this. And I do think that what, what the right and the left have both done is they've made it into a culture war while distracting us from a class war. So we're all fighting over, you know, the someone not using pronouns or, you know, some SJW with blue hair who's the cashier at Walmart, and we're not paying attention to the fact that it's the owners of Walmart who are screwing you over. You know, who, who cares about, you know, these social issues if we're all homeless on the streets and you know, can't afford rent because, you know, unemployment is, is skyrocketing past 40%. You know, like, obviously it's not that high right now, but like in the future we, we have to be able to come together and collectively in order to fight for these things without being painted as just, oh, you're just, you know, you're a socialist, you're a communist. It's like, no, no, we're, we are. What we're not in favor of is an oligarch, an oligarchy. We're not in favor of people at the very top running everything and having all of the power. And there's so much wealth and so much potential prosperity in the US and, and in the world as a whole. It doesn't have to be in the pockets of just a handful of, you know, the very few elite. And so I think one of the reasons I've been shifting more into politics is because I think if the end goal is for there to be better education and more critical thinking and less religious extremism, the, the most effective way to get there is not to just be like religious people are dumb. This thing in the Bible is wrong. Here's all of these facts. It's can we unify and get people together to advocate for change, governmental top down change, that then makes it so that it is easier to get access to affordable higher education so that we have quality schools, so that we have a separation of church and state and we don't have these religious charter schools getting tax taxpayer money. You know, if, if we're able to make change by advocating for, you know, things that all of us care for, which is, you know, affordable housing and free or affordable health care, universal health care, social safety nets, affordable child care, time off, not having to work three full time jobs just to make ends meet. If we fight for these things that everyone, regardless of religion, cares about, and we can get everyone together and get them on board. As society improves, typically extremism and religious fundamentalism declines with it. And so I've been kind of shifting a bit my approach and also looking at launching another channel as well in order to go more that angle and kind of lean heavier into the political stuff.

John Dehlin [02:24:10] I usually, my viewers and listeners hate it when I talk politics, but I'll just ask them to just try and open your mind. We're not trying to necessarily advocate for any party or any philosophy even. I am curious, though, with Mondami succeeding, there are some who feel like the Democratic Party is terrified because immediately Trump was saying, see, the Democrats are becoming communist. And you, having lived in a former Soviet bloc country, may have perspective on this. I know with me growing up, I looked at communist China and communist Russia and communist Cuba and communist North Korea, and I grew up feeling for all the problems of capitalism, which I can, can list off and acknowledge communism is not better. And so, you know, this idea of socialism, there's political risk to advocating for that, just because there's a general perception that communism and even socialism, those economies don't end up as, you know, don't, don't end up great. And that as flawed as capitalism is, we haven't come up with anything better. Because, you know, as you would know, the Soviet Union didn't end up with rainbows and lollipops and gumdrops. It was just, it was an oligarchy where the leaders at the top, you know, aggregated, and the people were just kind of equally poor down below. I'm not advocating for one thing or another. I'm curious how you've made sense of all that, having lived in a former Soviet bloc country.

John Oliver on Socialism and the Democrats

Thomas Westbrook [02:26:00] Yeah. I'm certainly no fan of communism, but, John, I feel like it's a false dichotomy, and I feel like this painting of it as you're either communist or capitalist, quite frankly, is. And I'm not saying that that's what you're, you're saying, but that's a narrative that I see pushed.

John Dehlin [02:26:15] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:26:16] All the time.

John Dehlin [02:26:16] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:26:17] And it's, it's like either you have complete, unchecked capitalism with no, no checks and balances on the power of these monopolies that are exploiting people to the max in late stage capitalism and who are lobbying politicians and buying politicians, and you have all of this money in politics. So it's either you have this and it's just like this is the only key to success. Or you have these evil awful communists that are taking away everyone's chance to succeed and completely redistributing it. And there's no incentive whatsoever to work hard because if you succeed, succeed, you're just going to get pulled right back down.

John Dehlin [02:26:54] Right.

Thomas Westbrook [02:26:54] The, the, the, the notion that we're choosing between these extremes and if you're not, you know, 100 sold on the, the capitalist thing, then you're a communist. It's so transparently BS that I think everyone now sort of sees through it, or at least they should.

John Dehlin [02:27:09] Sure.

Thomas Westbrook [02:27:10] The fact that there is this fear of any kind of social safety net whatsoever is, it's socialism. It's, it's, it comes from a lack of understanding, first of all of what socialism is. And also that like everything is a gradient. So you, there's a big difference between communism, socialism, like a democratic socialist or a social democracy. And so when you, when you look at countries that are, you know, like in the, the Nordic states, you know, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, potentially Iceland as well, you look at social safety nets that are in place that allow people to get sick if they, they're unlucky, they, they get cancer, they don't have to sell their house, they don't have to go bankrupt, they don't have to choose between their call their kid going to college and them getting their, their cancer treatment. Right. Society has collectively come together and said, you know what? We care enough about people having access to affordable health care or free health care that we have built a system in place where it catches people before they fall through the net to the bottom. Collectively, as a society, we are better off if our populace is educated. We already do this in the States. We already have a socialized police force. We have a socialized firefighting force. We have socialized K through 12 education that's free. These are all programs that were fought for with blood, sweat and tears for decades by the workers, by, by people, by people coming together and protesting and lobbying and striking and unionizing, trying to fight for rights. The fact that we have, you know, folks, 40 hour work week, the fact that we have overtime pay, the fact that we have child labor laws, the fact that, you know, there's safety in, in the workplace where you, you know, you have things like the FDA or you, you know, we don't have people dying left and right of black lung because, you know, they've been working in the lungs since they were six years old or working in the mines since they were six years old. You know, these Protections have been put in place so that all of us collectively can be better off. You could point to these programs and be like, that's socialism. But these are programs that were implemented in the United States after we saw the Gilded Age and the Great Depression and all of the rampant exploitation by unchecked capitalism. And we said, we need checks and balances in place. And one of those checks against just unfettered capitalism is government oversight. And now that government oversight, it's been dwindling. It's been chipped away at and chipped away at and chipped away at to the point where we have so much money in politics, we have so much, you know, lobbying of politicians and buying of politicians that your vote, you know, you vote for politicians and you, you know, if, if 100% of the populace besides the billionaires, all support a particular policy, that doesn't mean it's going to pass. So it's this, this dichotomy that it drives me crazy because it's like everyone in the States who was especially raised during the Cold War, so, you know, baby boomer, Gen X, they've been instilled with this fear of everything that is a, any kind of a social program is communism. It's like, we're not talking about seizing the means of production. We're not talking about people not having the right to own property. We're not saying that the state is going to take and redistribute everything. All we're saying is like, raise taxes higher, get rid of loopholes that billionaires are exploiting and allow it so that there's social safety nets in place so that people can have affordable education, so that we have universal health care, so that you don't have billionaires at the top who are actually benefiting from socialism. They are benefiting from a redistribution. They're benefiting from governments who are actually subsidizing their companies and giving them all kinds of loopholes and free money. And yet then they're not paying taxes. They're, they're pushing that off on the rest of us. And so, so to me, I look at that, I'm like, it's. So it's communism when it doesn't help you, but then when it does help you, it's capitalism and it's, it's the free market and it's just, it's, it's transparent to anyone who, like, looks beneath the surface. I'm not saying that you haven't, but it's like when I hear these arguments coming from the other side I'm just like, guys, we're are, we're getting our pockets picked and we're on the same side. Like, we should be unifying together in order to, to collectively have more power to fight for our rights.

John Dehlin [02:31:54] Yeah, no, that's good. I appreciate it. And I, I tend to avoid talking politics, but I actually love it. It's, it's one of my passions and I, I really wanted to pick your brain about that and I think that's really reasonable. I do notice, for example, like, my, I don't, I'm not shit talking my mom, but like, my mom is, is super Trump fan, super maga, and she's on a military pension. And I'm like. And she's been on it for decades and decades and decades. And I'm like, and she's got great medical care anytime she has any medical need. So she's super patriotic. Go military, you know, but like, how is that not a form of socialism if all of her medical needs are taken care of until she dies for decades and decades and decades? Who's paying for that? You know what I mean? Like, I just don't. I, I hate the false dichotomy. And that's partly why I wanted to bring it up to discuss it.

Is Medicare a form of socialism?

Thomas Westbrook [02:32:53] You know, she, she probably, you know, paid into it. She, you know, probably served in the military or had a family membership.

John Dehlin [02:32:59] She married into it. She married into it. Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:33:01] Married into it.

John Dehlin [02:33:02] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:33:03] And, and we're saying, okay, yeah, well, we're gonna still pay taxes. You know, you pay Medicare or Medicaid and then you benefit from that program. Why not expand something like that out? Why not have a program that all of us benefit from? And it doesn't help that those at the top are basically paying $0 in taxes and benefiting from these loopholes.

Do You Think Religion Is In Decline?

John Dehlin [02:33:27] So where do you see religion going? Do you see religion on the ropes? Do you see it in decline? And also, what makes, when, when you did a recent video on the. What top 10 weird things about Mormonism or whatever, how do you decide when to target a specific faith tradition like Mormonism?

Thomas Westbrook [02:33:47] Yeah, so I had to answer the first question first. I do think religiosity in the west is declining. I see the trends in the US I see the trends in Europe and it's, it's been a very steep downhill trajectory. Trajectory. There's been some push back where a lot of religious organizations will say, look, the revival is coming back. People are, you know, they were leaving the church and now they're coming back to, to God. But if you actually narrow in on the data and look at what it's saying, people are still leaving religion. People's level of church attendance is down more than ever. People's level of religious literalism is down. A lot of the increase in religiosity among, you know, Gen Z or even millennials in the last few years has been more, oh, well, I believe in something bigger than myself. I believe in, I'm spiritual but not religious. I, I'm a pagan, I'm a Wiccan, I'm a Satanist. And it's like, sure, people want something bigger than themselves. They, they look for some sort of community. Sometimes it's Unitarian Universalists, sometimes it's people going to some sort of organized humanist meetup. But I don't really see that as the same kind of religiosity that we've seen historically in the US where it's just you have one, one religion, which is Christianity, that has this choke hold on society and you can't even become a politician if you don't identify with that one specific group. I think that that is on, it's on the decline now. That doesn't mean that it doesn't still hold a massive amount of power and it doesn't mean that it's not trying to retain its power. We're seeing Christianity in the US really trying to, to maintain its stranglehold and it's fighting tooth and nail to not lose it. But I don't think long term that Christianity is going to have the same level of control that it's always held in the States. I think it's going to be around for many, many years to come. I think that there's, especially in the south, you're going to see still a tremendous amount of religiosity. But I do think that it is, is declining worldwide. I'm not convinced that that's the case. I think that Christianity has increased, Islam has increased. Oftentimes it's, you know, demographics, so it's birth rates. You'll, you'll see countries that have higher birth rates that are also very religious. I think they also are going to start seeing kind of a, the curve is going to get less steep. So across the board, almost every country you look at in terms of birth rates over the last century, they've been declining even in what, what you would consider the developing world. Birth rates now have almost university plummet, universally plummeted, and they're continuing to decline, going sometimes from as high as, you know, seven kids per, per woman down to, you know, two or three or four. And so I, I think that the rate is dropping, but I don't think religion is going away anytime soon. I think that a lot of countries that have had a massive stranglehold of religion, especially with Islam, I think that as AI makes it so that any text, any video, any content online is instantly translatable and is now accessible in people's native language, these arguments, these philosophical discussions, these scientific debates, these debates over the historicity of various texts can suddenly be had in anyone's native tongue and not just largely English content or French content or German content. You're going to see this dispersing of ideas internationally, regardless of the language that people speak. And so in many ways, I think that the Internet is going to help with that, but it also is, it's a bit dangerous because the Internet is also a huge tool for spreading misinformation. And so we have our work cut out for us.

John Dehlin [02:38:20] So you see yourself to some extent as kind of a warrior for truth and social public enlightenment.

Thomas Westbrook [02:38:30] Those are certainly my values. I think that wording it like that sounds a bit pretentious.

John Dehlin [02:38:36] That's why I word it that way.

Thomas Westbrook [02:38:38] We, we never. The, the trick about, about truth is we never know when we're wrong, at least. Yeah, there's times when people can be deliberately deceptive and they know that they're, they're lying. But I think if you're trying to follow the truth, you always have, there's always the possibility that you could be wrong or you think that you know more than you do. And I think all of us, all of us fall prey to the, the Dunning Kruger effect. And so I'm, I'm, I'm cautious to say, like, oh, I'm aware I care. I care deeply about the truth. I care deeply about trying to figure out how the world works. But I don't claim that I have all the answers. I don't pretend to be like everyone has to think exactly like I do. I just want us to use better, more reliable methods in order to try to get there.

John Dehlin [02:39:37] That's fair. I'm curious. It seems like 2018ish you started trying to form some type of co op with other secular YouTube creators. Y' all even held a conference. Having tried to create community and events in kind of the ex Mormon world. I've had my own sets of experiences there. They haven't all been great. So I'm wondering what have been your experiences trying to unify lots of creators in your space and even try and form and build community in kind of the, you know, atheist slash secular science loving spaces.

Ex-Mormon Creators on Unifying

Thomas Westbrook [02:40:25] It's bittersweet. There's, there's a saying that trying to get atheists together is, it's a bit like herding cats.

John Dehlin [02:40:34] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:40:35] Where they're all running in every different direction. And you know, being an atheist, it doesn't really tell you anything about your values. We typically, if you're, if you're within the online atheist activist sphere or secular activist sphere or skeptic community, we try to, we, we like to think that we are being, you know, rational and reasonable and, and you know, skeptical. And so we, we assume that everyone will see everything the same way that we do. And that's not always the case. It can be tricky trying to get everyone together because sometimes you have people who do disagree politically or they disagree about, you know, fiscal disagree about, you know, trans issues or feminist issues. And I think that Christianity has benefited over the last several centuries of being able to divide into increasingly smaller and smaller and narrower and narrower denominations to where by the time you get down to, you know, I am a new independent fundamentalist Baptist, you kind of know what that group believes about most doctrinal issues, about most religious stances, because they have split off from this group that split off from this group that split off from this group oftentimes over very niche, little tiny disputes. And that's why there are thousands of different denominations. I think that within atheism, one, we're not a religion and two, we don't really create denominations. So we don't have that, you know, okay, you split on this, but you still agree on this. So you're in this category. We don't have those boxes. And I think also we, we haven't really been that active and that vocal for that long. And so we, in a way, if we want to be effective, we kind of have to be able to swallow our pride and accept that, you know what, I might have a different stance than you on this issue or that issue, but what are we trying to change right now? What change are we trying to affect? And can we put our differences aside long enough to come together to fight for this one thing? And when I organized the Faithless Forum conference, it was me and several other content creators. Initially, the goal was to find, okay, what can we all unite on? And we all care about the separation of church and state. We all believe that you can be good without God. And we are tired of being denigrated for being non religious or being ostracized or shunned for leaving a faith. And we also all believe that policy should be based off of evidence and not superstition or belief. And so kind of these three core tenets we unified around where like, can we get other content creators together? And even if you don't agree on everything, we can at least unify and try to do collaborations and foster connections between people and inspire the audience as well to maybe learn from and be inspired by and get out and get their voice out there. So we did workshops teaching about things like marketing and teaching about things like, you know, graphic design and editing and things like that, but also talked about our experience and what is it like being a content creator in this space and, and how do you deal with negative comments and criticism and you know, feedback from family and stuff like that or, or threats of violence? You know, how do you handle those kind of situations? So we, we did the conference for two years and then covet hit. We, I had a third one that was scheduled and we had to delay it twice. And then we did a third conference as things started to die down. And I've thought about bringing it back many times. I think I would probably rebrand it and go a slightly different angle if I were to bring it back. I've thought about doing multiple conferences, doing one that's more the science and skepticism one, maybe that's more political and one that's more secular activism and atheism. It takes a lot of time and resources and energy for sure. And I think I would want to build up more of a team because it was, it was mostly just volunteers and kind of a labor of love. And I think if I were to do it bigger, I'd want to scale it up and actually have the funding to, to launch this thing with a full time paid team doing it because otherwise it's just, it's, it's a lot, it's a lot to manage. But I, I did overwhelmingly have a positive experience. I, I met a lot of incredible people. People was able to fly people out from all over the world. Got to meet some content creators who I've been friends with online and then you meet them in person and you're like, oh my God. We, you know, it feels like you know, this person and also just being able to connect with the community and stuff was, is really magical as well and getting to hear people's stories and, and how your content has meant a lot to them and stuff. But yeah, mostly positive. There's, there's always drama and there's, there's, there's always, you know, little things that happen and stuff, but for the most part it's been positive.

John Dehlin [02:45:53] So it was positive, but it wasn't sustainable as kind of a volunteer effort just because it takes so much work. And it's.

Thomas Westbrook [02:46:02] Yeah, I was doing my channel full time and then at the same time, while running the channel full time, I was basically doing another full time job with the conference and organizing and, and there's so much work that goes into conferences to anyone who's never run an event that scale. It's like you have to, you have to get the contracts with the, you know, with the event. You have to organize, you know, the foods and the food and the VIP dinners and how many people are vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or dietary restrictions. You know, you have to figure out if you're going to have like different tables that sponsors will, will buy or you know, if, if. Do you charge for those? Are they free? Do you, which organizations do you invite? You have to vet speakers, you have to try to find, you know, a diverse array of speakers. You're sending out emails and contacting and creating all of the different, the panels and the events and the topics that they're going to be talking on and following up and like quality control and, and then you have to market all the tickets and sell all the stuff. There's just a million things on top of like security and making sure that, you know, we have off duty cops that are on site that are paid and stuff. And so, so there's so much that you're doing as a full time job in addition to your full time job. And I just found that I was kind of by the end of it wearing most of the hats and so many of the other board members had kind of stepped away.

John Dehlin [02:47:22] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:47:22] And so I'm like, if I'm going to be running this full time.

John Dehlin [02:47:26] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:47:27] One, I want, I want it to be worth my time financially. I want it to be something that's profitable and two, that I don't have to run entirely myself, that I have conference organizers who I can pay to basically run it. And, and I think there's an appetite. I think people really want community. People are dying and thirsting for like in person connection.

John Dehlin [02:47:47] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:47:47] In an increasingly online world. So I think the appetite's there. I think people really want it. But I, I want it to be accessible and affordable but at the same time be able to like cover all of the costs. And it's so hard in order for that to happen. I kind of put it on the back burner for a little bit. One, I was. I was dealing with my own kind of post Covid mental health struggles and stuff. I had a motorcycle accident. I went through kind of a rough breakup and I was like, okay, like I. I need to focus on my own recovery first. And then when I'm in a better place mentally, then I can think about bringing the conference back.

The Future of the Faith

John Dehlin [02:48:22] Okay, and what was it, what was it called again?

Thomas Westbrook [02:48:25] The conference was the Faithless Forum.

John Dehlin [02:48:27] Faithless Forum at its peak. What was the highest attendance, kind of in person attendance, just so I can get a sense for it. Do you remember?

Thomas Westbrook [02:48:36] Yeah. So I think the last conference we did, it wasn't massive. It was like 150 people plus speakers, so maybe 170.

John Dehlin [02:48:44] Okay, okay. That gives you.

Thomas Westbrook [02:48:46] No, no, no, no, no. We had. I think we had more than that. I think we were close to 200 on the last one. But we also kind of had our hands tied. Because of COVID Yeah, because one, everyone was kind of reluctant to. It was right as things were opening back up and, you know, we were basically. The vaccine had been out there and, you know, people had, you know, vaccines and masks and all of that. But we were. There was still kind of sort of a. A negative way that people were looking at, like, you're going to a big event with a lot of people and you're not social distancing, like, how dare you. And we were just at the cusp of, okay, it's all right to go back out there into the world and have big events and meetups and things like that. But because. Because that was sort of the optics. We were really reluctant to be like, sharing out massive marketing things, being like, hey, come and get together and you know, with like, pack out this thing with a thousand people. So it was. We. We had. We had sold a bunch of tickets right before COVID happened, and then we had to postpone and postpone. And then when we finally were like, okay, we're running the event. We're like, let's just kind of get this over with and make our ends meet.

John Dehlin [02:50:03] No, it makes sense. Community's so hard. So I'm just, I'm just. I had to ask what it was. Like, is there an online version, like an online community for that group?

Thomas Westbrook [02:50:17] Not for the Faithless Forum there. I mean, there's lots of online communities and discord groups and, and stuff for, for people who are looking for online secular spaces. And there, There are other conferences. You know, American Atheist does. Does one. The Freedom from Religion foundation. There's the American Humanists here in the uk. I just went to the UK Humanist Festival of Humanism. I was one of the speakers there.

John Dehlin [02:50:42] Oh, fun.

Thomas Westbrook [02:50:43] But yeah, there's, there's events around. If you look for, for conferences, you can find stuff. It, it just depends on, you know, where you're located and how big the conference is and, and they're different spaces. Right. So like scicon does. It's like a csicon. They do one every year, usually in Vegas. I think it's in New York this year. But it's, it's all about promoting science and skepticism. And it's, it's an offshoot of tam, which was by James Randy and it was, it's put on by the organization that was founded by Carl Sagan and James Randy and I think Paul Kurtz and Ray Hyman and others promoting science over pseudoscience. And so their organization is not necessarily just an atheist meetup, but there's, there's a lot of overlap and then there's some that they're more humanists. And so it's more about like values, social issues and values and less about, you know, just separation of church and state. Or you can be a humanist and can believe in psychics if you want to. Whereas, like, if you're going to be involved in more of the science and skepticism community, you're going to have a harder time fitting in there.

John Dehlin [02:51:53] Got it. Who are the. For those of us who have been very insular in the Mormon world, who are the biggest influencers or your colleagues or your comrades that in addition to Holy Kool Aid, we should check out as trying to spread, spread the secular gospel, so to speak.

The New Atheists: Meet the Community

Thomas Westbrook [02:52:13] Yeah. So in terms of sheer size, I think right now Alex o' Connor or cosmic Skeptic, is pretty huge here in, in this office. I'm actually in Steve's studio. It's a Rationality rules. Stephen Woodford has gotten quite big. He's shifted into kind of analyzing and breaking down debates and like debate tactics and shifting more into filling the sho shoes of someone like Christopher Hitchens. State side. I know Christy Burke has gotten really big and she does a lot of activism related stuff. Promise her Eve was Framed is really active in the States as well.

John Dehlin [02:53:01] I do love the idea of, of all of these types of creators that you list getting together, speaking at a big conference and all of them inviting their audience to come and to socialize and get to know each other. That could be so powerful if, if some sort of co op could, could make that happen or maybe that type of thing already exists and I just don't.

Thomas Westbrook [02:53:26] I think one of the reasons that we launched the Faithless Forum in the first place is that content creators, we have a built in audience to market to. Yeah, it's very easy to get to sell tickets if we want to. I think that in the early days, so when we first launched Faithless forum, it was 2018 and then we did 2019 and I mean that was seven years ago. Our channels were tiny. Tiny by comparison.

John Dehlin [02:53:54] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [02:53:55] And then, and then Covid hit and kind of hamstrung our marketing abilities. I think if we were to do it now. So many of these channels now have hundreds of thousands of followers.

John Dehlin [02:54:05] Exactly.

Thomas Westbrook [02:54:06] Forest Valky is another great channel. Professor Dave explains in the States he's, he's more of a scientist, but he pushes back against creationism.

John Dehlin [02:54:15] Love that guy. My son loves him.

Thomas Westbrook [02:54:17] Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of great content creators and I think there's. And not just in the atheist sphere, there's, there's people who. Some of my favorite channels are like mini Minuteman Milo. He does breaks down pseudoarchaeology and pseudo history. So people will claim, make these claims about Atlantis and like aliens building the pyramids and giants, you know, biblical giants in, you know, South America and stuff like that. And he basically just completely shreds these, these ideas as an actual archaeologist, as someone who can, can tear it apart. There's another one I think is World of Antiquity also does the same. But like I would love to get all of these guys together and just like, hey, let's, let's work together and push back against misinformation. The, the audience is certainly there for it. I think people are itching for in person meetups and gatherings and I think most content creators, when we first started doing it, we had no budget. It was the first Faithless forum was supposed to be just a meetup with fans that then slowly evolved into a conference. And it was mostly just that. We as content creators, we wanted to meet each other. We wanted an opportunity to, to network in person. And we didn't have that because we were all over the States and Canada and different parts of the world and we had communicated online through Twitter or we had done collabs or we had interviewed each other or things for, for our shows, but we hadn't met up. We didn't actually know each other. And I think that when you actually meet up and you're, you sit across from someone, have some, have dinner with them and you, you get to know someone in person, it's very humanizing and it's very, it's, it builds community in a much faster way. It's harder to just like, cancel someone over some small difference when you actually, you're actually there physically with them in person realizing, like, oh, this person's not a bad person. We might disagree on a few things, they might have some mistaken stances, but let's talk about it. Let's, let's, you know, debate with each other over a beer or something. And I think we've lost that a lot as a community, as, you know, not just within the secular community, but just at large. Society is missing a lot of that. But we all flew out on our own dime. We all, you know, basically lost money on the first couple faithless forums, but we were just passionate about making it happen. We just really wanted to get together and meet up and get to know each other and then also inspire fans and get them to come as well. But then I think now if I were to do it, those, those same, those same drives would be there. I've thought about organizing content creators just in some kind of small retreat where we don't necessarily have to worry about all of the logistics of, you know, creating all of this content and stuff for fans, but just having a retreat. Whereas you've been working full time in this space, you need to get, just get away for the weekend. We've got this retreat center or, you know, just cabins to go and like, have a cookout and just hang out and get to know each other and you know, spend a weekend doing collaborations and kind of recovering and having a vacation. I've thought about organizing something like that. It'd be much easier, much like lower logistics. But I, I don't know. I think there's something very valuable to actually having a conference and something bigger.

John Dehlin [02:57:44] Totally. Well, I'm always, I, I actually feel a lot of gratitude for, and we probably talked about this in my interview with you and my upbringing as a Mormon. And I, I think community is one of the essential components of human thriving. And I don't mean online community, I mean face to face community in your own geography. And I still feel like secularism needs to innovate on how to create local communities that are as sustainable and as impactful as religious communities have been for humans over the past millennia, several millennia. So I'm, I'm always asking this question of, like, how do we make people less lonely? How does secular secularism provide the meaning and purpose and spirituality and hope and, and community and friendships that the religion traditionally has, and I know everybody says join a bowling league or whatever, but I think humans to let go of dogmatism and organized religion, I believe personally they're going to need something better than bowling leagues and hiking clubs. But I've spent over a decade trying to come up with that and create it. I had my own organization called Thrive, which was literally for secular Mormons and we had over 1700 people at one of our events. But even then I just felt like it was a drop in the bucket. You know,

Questions for Secularism

Thomas Westbrook [02:59:21] it is, but it isn't. I think if you're comparing it to the number of views that you get on your channel, you're not going to be able to get anywhere near that in person. Yeah, if you're comparing it to the number of, of Mormons in the world, you're not going to come close. But I, I do think that there's a powerful domino effect that can be kickstarted by just having these kind of groups in person showing up. And like 1,700 is huge. So you know, if you're able to get that many people to, to fly across the country to spend hundreds of dollars on hotels and, and airplane tickets and food and everything because they're that passionate to show up and find like minded people, that's massive. That's massive. And that those are 1,700 people who, they're, they're potential activists, they're potential volunteers, they're potential donors, they're potential content creators. And if you look at how much impact you've been able to have just over the last, you know, two decades, and then you, you look at people who, you may have inspired, people who, you know, now are getting out there and creating content and they, they look at your channel and say, he's what got me to, to get out and start talking about this. And, and you never know, you might have, at your next conference, you might have the next Alyssa Grenfeld or someone who is, you know, doing incredible work and it's the spark that they needed was to see all of these people in this community and be like, I want to do that. I want to be a part of that. I want to make content like that.

John Dehlin [03:01:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely, I definitely know it makes a difference. I think there's a part of me that wants to compete with religion and fill the gap with something better. You know what I mean? Figure out a way to, to fill the gap. The hole that religion is, the secularism is creating with something better.

Ex-Mormons hold event in Utah

Thomas Westbrook [03:01:25] When, when you did your, your event Was it content creators or was it. Was it just you? Was it.

John Dehlin [03:01:33] Well, I've done several. I've done several over the years. We did one just in St. George in February, and we had about 800 people, but it's. Yeah, we have like a couple dozen content creators. They, they speak primarily the speakers and the keynoters are influencers and. Yeah, and then it's just listeners and viewers and other content creators that all come together. Usually they're ex Mormons. You know, usually we're in St. George, but. But we've done it in Salt Lake. We had like the lead guitarist for Imagine Dragons, Wayne Sermon. He came and spoke. We've had Alyssa Grenfell in the past, you know. Yeah, it's just like a big old ex religious secular community in Utah of all, all of our collective followers and listeners and viewers and supporters. And we can. It's. It's easy to get a thousand people to get together. It feels deeply meaningful. But I'm always pushing myself to try and do more and to try and figure out what humanity needs, not just what, you know, ex Mormons need, if that makes sense. Because I'm concerned about our country. Right. I'm. I am also concerned about our country and I'm concerned about humanity. And so I'm always thinking about how do we scale?

Thomas Westbrook [03:02:51] Yeah, yeah, for sure.

John Dehlin [03:02:52] Yeah.

Mormon Stories: Thank You, Thomas Westbrook

Thomas Westbrook [03:02:52] Anyway, well, if I, If I bring back the conference, then would you be interested in potentially coming?

John Dehlin [03:03:00] Of course. I'll bring. I'll bring a million. I'll bring a gazillion ex Mormons to your conference.

Thomas Westbrook [03:03:05] Hell, yeah.

John Dehlin [03:03:06] Well, you've been really generous with your time, Thomas. The, the YouTube channel is holy Kool Aid. It's. It's bigger than Mormon stories. So viewers and listeners, if you want a really cool channel that's talking about science and secularism and reason and all sorts of cool things, make sure and check out Holy Kool Aid. How can people, other than your merch, other than buying some really cool shirts or hoodies or hats, how can people follow and support you, Thomas?

Thomas Westbrook [03:03:37] Yeah, so, I mean, the biggest financial way would be through Patreon. Holy cool. It's patreon.com Holy Kool Aid. But if they, you know, are not necessarily wanting to, to dive in that much right away and commit, then just go and hit subscribe, turn the notifications on and just stick around, watch some content, see if it's, if it's up your alley. And.

John Dehlin [03:04:01] Yeah, and if you had to summarize what. Again, just to summarize what your channel's about you would say what?

Thomas Westbrook [03:04:08] Spreading science and critical thinking, breaking down misinformation of all stripes, cons, scams, paranormal, all sorts of stuff. I want to know what's true, and I want to create a world where people are protected and inoculated against misinformation.

John Dehlin [03:04:27] I love it. Well, I think our, our. Your video of me just passed 100,000. And, yeah, I really, really appreciate. Wait, go ahead and do that again. We didn't get to see it. Yeah, no, I appreciate that it was long form and you were kind enough to showcase my lawsuit, and it made a big difference to me because those are big numbers for me. So I just want to thank you for that. And then I just wanted to introduce you to my audience in case they could benefit from the good work you're doing. So, Thomas Westbrook, thanks so much. Yeah, go ahead.

Thomas Westbrook [03:05:05] So I, I don't want to leave your audience hanging on one thing. My, my ADHD brain does this a lot. But there was one point earlier in our conversation where I said I would give them an example of the how the Bible has changed over time. And rather than do that here, I'll just point them to my channel. There's, there's a video that it's. You look at. I believe it's called how the Bible has changed. Or like 10 times the Bible has changed. There's two different videos in there and, and one of them talks about a change that happened to Matthew 5. So go, go check that out if you're curious.

John Dehlin [03:05:42] All right. Yeah. In that series, I was scrolling through your, your past videos, and that series has done very, very well. So clearly people love it.

Thomas Westbrook [03:05:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:05:53] Yeah.

Thomas Westbrook [03:05:53] John, thank you so much for having me on.

John Dehlin [03:05:56] Yeah. Well, thanks for spending three hours with us, Thomas. Thanks for your good work on Holy Kool Aid. Don't be a stranger. Stay in touch and keep up the great work you're doing.

Thomas Westbrook [03:06:05] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [03:06:06] All right. Thanks, Thomas. Thanks. Ever join us today on Mormon Stories, please like and subscribe and do all the things thanks to donors that make what we do possible. If you don't donate and you want to see us continue, just go to mormonstories.org donate Become a monthly donor. We have a legal fund@mormonstories.org legal if you want to donate to the church's lawsuit to sue us. And if you want to apply to be on Mormon Stories, just go to MormonStories.org apply, fill out the form, and we would love to consider you for the podcast. Also, check out Holy Kool Aid when you can. It's great stuff and email us@mormonstoriesmail.com with any feedback. And we love your comments. If you don't like what Thomas said, politically, if you disagree, if you've got other points of view, don't unsubscribe or cancel or run away. Engage in the comments and share your thoughts and feelings. And come on the podcast and share with us your point of view. Because I'm certainly not partisan. I want to hear all points of view politically, economically, socially, historically, religiously, spiritually, etc. Anyway, be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Thanks for joining us today, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care, everybody.