05/29/2026
"Recovery circles have a way of reintroducing you to reality, and to what actually matters most."
Evangelical culture has become so insulated that it now exposes how massively detached from reality it really is.
From Al Mohler arguing that a female church staff member discussing a sermon on a podcast is “functioning as a pastor” and therefore “unbiblical,” to a Ligonier conference panel spending extended time discussing whether a Calvinist should marry a non-Calvinist (I’m not kidding!), the sheer energy poured into this kind of microscopic insider minutiae reveals just how badly much of church culture has lost the plot.
And this isn’t just harmless theological nerdiness anymore. It’s blindness. It’s pompous self-indulgence. It’s tribal obsession masquerading as faithfulness. They sit on their stages or behind their microphones discussing issues they insist are of vital importance, while remaining untouched by the everyday reality and actual lives of real people in real trenches. It’s the luxury of people so cocooned inside a religious subculture that they’ve forgotten how devastated and desperate most actual human beings are. And they don’t care. To them, that’s just background noise beneath their doctrinal and moral performances.
And I say that as someone who used to live inside, and participate in, that world. I lived behind the curtain.
Until my scandal got me thrown out.
Honestly, getting pushed outside the bubble exposed how profoundly out of touch the bubble really was. While church people obsessed over niche doctrinal turf wars, celebrity pastor drama, and endless theological boundary-policing, people outside the bubble were drowning in addiction, shame, anxiety, loneliness, depression, fractured families, fear, and despair.
Eleven years after my crash—the fallout, the humiliation, the bloodbath I caused, the long road of amend making and recovery—I can honestly say this: getting canceled by the Christian subculture was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
My darkest exile became my brightest grace.
In the wreckage, I found freedom. I found people who bleed out loud. People who tell the truth about themselves even when it’s ugly. Outside the sanitized bubble of Christian culture, I found addicts, failures, misfits, and doubters. And they were real—raw, honest, self-aware, unimpressed by religious performance and allergic to pious platitudes.
It’s obvious what some of these guys need to do: spend meaningful time with people outside their religious, sub-cultural echo chambers. Sit with struggling people. Listen to stories that aren’t sanitized or polished. Put their hands in the real dirt. Go to recovery meetings and just listen for a while—not to fix, but to learn. Recovery circles have a way of reintroducing you to reality, and to what actually matters most.
Those are my people now.
And I’m never going back.
I may have lost my place in the system…but I found my heart and soul.
