On today's episode, I chat with Sarah Jones. She is the Communications Associate at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and has written for NonProphet Status and Religion News Service, among others. Transcript: Trav: Welcome to the Bi Any Means podcast the place where social justice and humanism meet. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bi Any Means podcast, the podcast companion for the bianymeans.com. I’m Trav Mamone and today’s guest is Sarah. She is the communication associate at Americans United for Separation of Church & State, and has written for NonProphet Status, the New York Times, and Religion News Service among others. Sarah thanks for joining me today.Sarah: Hi, thanks for having me.Trav: First, I want to ask you about your background. According to your blog, you grew up in a fundamentalist household, right.Sarah: That’s correct.Trav: Tell us a little bit about that.Sarah: While my parents they felt, identified as Christian fundamentalists, and from earliest years I was home schooled, and like many kids in the Christian home school movement that meant that I really didn’t have any exposure to the outside world, and my only social interactions occurred at our extremely conservative church. And later I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school, and then finally ended up at a public school for a couple of years, and then went to a very conservative Christian college. You might be sensing a theme there, and college is where I became an atheist.Trav: You also say that for a while you were a feminist member of the emerging church. Tell us about that.Sarah: By the time, I entered Cedarville University, that’s my Alma mater I had quite a few questions. I was very uncomfortable with what I used to call the Republicanization of Christianity because incoming equality, and women’s right, and I wouldn’t necessarily call myself, I hadn’t quite gotten to the point where I was pro-gay rights. But I was very, very uncomfortable with the position … just to leave it at that and TRO, and that’s I really started exploring political questions, and what does feminism really mean, and that meant shifting away from the churches I used to attend, and the emerging church movement has plenty of its own problems. But it offered a smaller, and I suppose less god-like in my view alternative to the churches that I grew up.Trav: Right, I was a actually a part of the emerging church movement for a good couple of years, and first it was really liberating but then I don’t know … some parts of it weren’t just really making sense. Basically, I was deconstructing doctrine so much that eventually I came to deconstructing God, and I deconstructed Him so much that i didn’t really have anything left.Sarah: Right, yeah, that’s kind of what happened to me where I was really exploring a lot of theological questions, and easily breaking down especially the teaching in regards to gender that I’d been raised with. And I don’t think a person necessarily have to leave the Emerging Church but for me that happens to be where it led where I was standing in church one day, and given that I really enjoyed
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