Jason Kirk: The Only G.O.T.H.S. Interview
“If you didn't grow up in this world, you're gonna learn a lot about Switchfoot.”
You can order Hell is a World Without You and find more information about it here.
Jason Kirk’s new novel, Hell is a World Without You, is so good that I had to get up and walk around a bunch of times while reading it. It is a truly excellent piece of writing, one that had me laughing riotously and feeling absolutely devastated at different points in the story. The book is available now pretty much anywhere you would order a book, and you should order it now, because all of the money the book makes before 2/12 will be donated to The Trevor Project, and also because the book rules.
Not that this is a surprise, I'm a big fan of Jason Kirk's work overall. He describes himself as “a comedy podcaster who tweets about sports,” but he’s a senior editor at The Athletic and former managing editor at SB Nation, and you may have also seen his work in This American Life, Slate, Hazlitt Magazine, USA Today, Vox, and some other places. He also has his own Substack which I highly recommend. With his friends, he co-hosts Shutdown Fullcast, a podcast about college football that is laugh-out-loud funny and absolute appointment listening, even if you do not pay any attention to college football1. With his wife Emily, he co-hosts Vacation Bible School, a podcast about reading the Bible from start to finish and revisiting its strange stories and even stranger histories, and doing so with a remarkable theological maturity.
And Jason knows his Bible, certainly way better than I do. He grew up Southern Baptist and spent his teenage years soaked in early-2000s Evangelical Christian culture. His novel follows Isaac, a high school student growing up in that culture and starting to ask some hard questions about his faith and his assumptions, all while burning Five Iron Frenzy mixes and playing Diablo II.
Jason is a hilarious and passionate writer, one who has thought seriously about Christianity, what it does to people as an institution, and what it really demands of us. I am a jackass with a niche blog, so I was very nervous when I sent him an email offering to interview him and let him plug his book to my audience of “jaded religious studies professors or people who work in Catholic media”. Not only did he say yes, but we had a really fun time talking about topics including the book’s surprise theology, Julien Baker, the golden age of Christian pop culture, and the definitive Biblical Wife Guy rankings.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity and to remove a tangent where I talked about the slowcore band Low.
TONY GINOCCHIO: I’ve got readers that may not be familiar with your work, so: What is the book? Why did you want to write it?
JASON KIRK: The book is an exploration of an Evangelical adolescence; it's the kind of story that ultimately, I wrote because I couldn't find very many examples of it out there. Everybody wants to be seen in a story and, with some exceptions, it felt like people who grew up like me, we only get either the vision that is depicted in Evangelical propaganda - you know, we get God's Not Dead or we get Left Behind, something where the point of it is pushing Evangelicalism - or we get a caricature from the other side, we get Ned Flanders’s kids, who, to be clear, are great characters. It's those two extremes and it's very, very rare that we get something in the middle, that's a little bit of both.
The project came about by way of me talking with my wife, some friends, some podcast co-hosts, stories emerging over the years of “oh yeah this weird thing happened at church”. And I started to notice that every time I said that, people just looked at me like I said the craziest thing they had ever heard. And to me, it was just “ah, that’’s what happens in the suburbs, it's normal,” and eventually thinking “oh, that wasn't normal.” So then I started writing down memories, and eventually they took on their own life, and in that process I realized that the average reader, the average story consumer, just does not know a whole lot about the way tens of millions of us grew up. Although it certainly wasn't exactly the same for everyone, everyone had their own bits and their own versions of it, but the more I talked about these things, like the comfort with scaring young people - with Hell, with Rapture panic, with purity culture - and this ingrained right wing, at times barely veiled racism and homophobia, the more I talked about these experiences, the more I realized how universal they were, including some incredibly specific stuff.
Ultimately, the story that launched this was: I was talking to my wife about a night at Wednesday night church, when these grown men came in and were waving guns around as sort of End Times Theater: “we're going to scare you and see if you would be the kind of cowardly Christian who deny Christ!” And I started talking publicly about this, and I heard from people in Alabama and Pennsylvania and California - Blue states! “Safe spaces”! - from people who had those experiences all over the country, and I realized that so much of this stuff is universal and we never talk about it. So not only do we not have that support system, but everyone who didn't grow up in our bubble has no idea. Ultimately it was the end result of “hey, it's probably cool to talk about things that are real, and things that happened.”
I remember you've written about the fake active shooter scenario in your church before, and you bring a version of that into the book, and that scene really stood out for me. And a lot of stuff that happens in the book is very heavy. Isaac is terrified of going to Hell; every time looks at a woman, he gets scared that he's damned himself forever. The internal conflict gets very dark, but this is also one of the funniest books I have read in a while. There were multiple moments where I was laughing my ass off. When you were this age, what was your sense of humor like, and how did it help you navigate your relationship to your faith?
I probably always have had sort of a gallows humor, a dry humor. I mean, you have to. I definitely recall, as a younger person, having this kind of humor, you know, saying “oh shit, guess I'm going to hell!” Like that kind of thing, where people say that, everybody says that kind of thing, but we meant it and that's the punchline.
We knew sort of how insane it was. Like, we made jokes about Rapture movie tropes that we were literally scared of. We made jokes about these cringey songs we had to sing, that we then sang with all our hearts because we thought we had to. So the humor was definitely always there, even if, I guess, it felt a lot naughtier as a younger person. But yeah, church has always been funny, no matter how bad it was. And obviously there's a degree of privilege there, because the very very worst abuse I didn't face on a personal level. So there are a lot of people who certainly wouldn't be able to laugh at any of this culture. But to some extent we were aware of the absurdity…even if we didn't know we were aware of the absurdity.
As dark as the book got, with that sense of humor, it still felt very hopeful, right? The purpose of this book is clearly not “let’s shit on organized religion”. The people in this book do find wonderful things in their church: they find friends that they love dearly, they find people who care about them, they find their place in the community. So when you were growing up in this tradition, what did you hold on to that was good? What, if anything, are you still holding on to now?
Isaac - the narrator - and I, we're different in a lot of ways, but I think the main thing is very much the same in terms of what we held on to: people. I have lifelong friends, sibling-type-friends, that I met in church in second grade, eighth grade, whatever. My wife, we met via Christian music, like Cornerstone Festival-type bands. Those relationships are lifelong and have never gone away. Not only would I have literally not met those people, we wouldn't have had the kind of relationship that we had. Because evangelicalism, borderline charismatic church? It's very intense. It's very lovey-dovey, very huggy, you're talking a lot about your feelings and your thoughts - not all of your feelings and your thoughts - but you're doing a lot of as-heartfelt-as-you-can sharing. It's funny: a few years ago, I made a new friend who, we'd grown up very similar, and within eight minutes, it was like “oh, we're like lifelong friends now!” It's that level of open-heartedness that we were pushed to have. So people would be the main thing.
I guess theologically…I spent a long time, to use a term, in the wilderness. I probably considered myself an agnostic for all of college and then was just very apathetic for many years after college, until I started talking about this stuff, and then it was like, I don't have a term for whatever I am. Like, I can't say I actually doubt that there's a divinity throughout the Universe. I can't say I doubt that. And really, all along, whenever I've even thought about the Gospel, it's like, “no, that's still my hero”. And his mother as well. She's also a hero-
[Interrupts] You're just throwing that in because this, you know, is a Catholic-
[Laughs] Yes, not the kind of thing we talk about in Protestant church. But I think the thing might be, what Mary says in Luke chapter 1, that might be the reason why my megachurch didn't talk about Mary all that much. It's funny - when I started writing this novel, I just wanted to talk about how funny my friends were in this bleak, bizarre world. And so the first draft of the novel was just borderline “If Jackass happened in Left Behind.” It's just Cahoots and Shenanigans and Hijinks, with all the preachers saying weird stuff…and then I started digging. I started listening to too much Julien Baker and it was like, “no, this novel's doing some real digging”. So that's when it evolved into “we're gonna try and do both. We're gonna try and be funny and way too honest.”
But in those early drafts, it is fascinating to go back and read me as, at the time, completely irreligious, writing this character who's apologizing for being irreligious and it's like, “I thought I was over this stuff!” But I go back and I read the draft from three years ago, and I'm like, “oh buddy, you got a way to go. You are having a narrator apologize for who you are!” So then I just kept digging and eventually got to a point where it's like, “hey, I don't need me and the narrator to end up in the same place.”
I am at a point where - I think I've used this term online - I describe myself as a “Christian pantheist”, just because the simplest lesson that Jesus gave, the simplest guidelines were: treat the lowest people in society the way you would treat God, right? Well, let's just take that literally. Let's just take the chance and say “maybe that person's God”. First of all, that changes the way you treat them. And secondly…maybe! I don't know, there's nothing in there that says “Jesus won't come back in the 2020s”, so I better not risk it! Do I literally think every rock is God? I don't know, maybe…but do I think practically we can all do a better job of following the most basic commandments if we just act like everything around us is God? Yes. So for me, I don't know if I'll ever believe that the one and only physical resurrection happened exactly as recorded in the Gospels, but: Jesus is my hero. Jesus is divine because we are all divine. And whether the resurrection has already happened, or is ongoing, or will happen, or it's spiritual or physical or metaphorical like, that stuff…I don't want to say it doesn't matter, because it matters a lot to a lot of people. But how does it affect how I treat the lowest rung of society? Jesus said that's the most important thing. Jesus didn't say whether you believe my resurrection was metaphorical or not was the most important thing. So ultimately, I have come back around to saying, according to my definition, I'm a Christian. It might not be anyone else's definition, and that doesn't really matter to me. There's not a club I'm trying to get into. I very intentionally left the club.
Yeah, speaking as a member of a different branch of that club, it's not all it's cracked up to be. What you're saying certainly speaks to me a lot. I think that the more that I learn about my church - and I don't know why I keep trying to learn more about my church - but the more I learn about it the more I'm like, “I'm gonna narrow my focus a little bit more to just who's the person in front of me, and how am I supposed to treat them?”
Something else from the book that I want to talk about is that I graduated from high school in '05, right? So I'm Isaac’s age. First of all, every fucking band reference in this book hit for me. But I think I was a lot closer to this culture than I assumed. You and I grew up in different parts of Christianity, but I went to a Catholic prep school in the early 2000s. I did a lot of stuff with campus ministry, I was a men's retreat leader, I was in multiple praise brands, I have been on a retreat that ended with hundreds of high schoolers singing a Switchfoot song. That's all happened to me. I owned the Relient K album. I read all the Left Behind books. So my question is: was the early 2000s the peak Christian Pop Culture era? Because this feels like a very high number of crossover hits.
Yes, without question. I mean, just the music alone. You can look at the ascent of the weird Evangelical-specific music market from the 70s - the Jesus Movement taking off - to the 80s - Amy Grant starts having crossovers - to the 90s, it's like Amy Grant, Jars of Clay, Kirk Franklin, DC Talk, Grits is on MTV, Project 86 is on MTV, P.O.D. is the biggest band in the world for like nine minutes, and then it all culminates in fucking Underoath having the biggest albums in the world for two weeks and…it's this insane 11 years stretch where…it worked? The evangelical market worked? It was real, it was everywhere. The Left Behind books, they sold 700 trillion of those things. And all that groundwork is from the 70s: Late Great Planet Earth was one of the biggest selling books of the 70s. So in a sense, it was three or four decades of Evangelicals just hurling money at things to such a degree that normal people heard about them, and now they're like, “let’s not do that. Let's just listen to Hillsong,” and normal people are like “we already have Coldplay so we don't need that.”
It was fascinating looking back on it, because if I set this book a decade earlier or a decade later, all that stuff would be completely different, right? And we would also have this: we would have all those Tooth and Nail Records bands that I grew up on, that Isaac grew up on, they all did their own religious deconstruction journeys. MxPx was the number one christian punk band, the next thing you know, they're on a secular label, and it's this whole “oh no” thing, right? It was this huge controversy around 2000, and a lot of Christian kids are “wait a minute. We're allowed to do that?” And my favorite metal band, Zao, they started as the most Evangelical hardcore band, literally doing altar calls between songs, and within a decade, they have an album called The Funeral of God, and “it's a metaphor” and it's like, okay. All right…
You’re trying to say something, I feel, with that title.
Right, right, and I mean, I look back on Zao's lyrics over the past 25 years and I'm like “yeah, hi, that's me”. Especially because the latest album, is this vague…like a Greek philosophy, reincarnation, the universe, when a star dies it creates a new star, and when we die we don't know what happens but I will find you…anyway, there's so much if of Zao’s latest album in the book. And like their first four or five albums as well, the Evangelical ones. Underoath, they’re on a deconstruction journey as well.
The Christian band deconstruction - I don't know if you would call it, formally, a deconstruction - the one I saw was…when I was in high school. I had a ska phase, right? So I came across Five Iron Frenzy in high school, and then their album from two years ago, Until This Shakes Apart, which is basically them being furious at their church for supporting Trumpism, I was like, “oh shit, I've never heard these guys angry before, they always seem like such happy boys.” I found that, from them, very striking.
But in such a sneaky way. They had a song 20 years ago apologizing for religious homophobia. And one of their songs in their first album is the story of American colonialism. I don't know how they got away with all that stuff, but they've been down since day one.
So with early 2000s Christian Pop Culture, I'm always interested to ask this: what holds up? What bands would you still listen to and still consider good?
So a thing you don't realize that you are taking on, if you begin a four-year process of writing something set in a certain time period, is like, you’ve gotta immerse yourself in music, movies, you’ve got to relearn what all the fashion was, there are old video games, I had to go back and play Diablo II a lot. My Spotify over the past couple years has been like “how old are you? We're so confused, because this is you listening like you're 13, but 13 from before Spotify existed”. So yeah, I've gone back and listened to so much Underoath which, I would say their albums hold up. Their early black metal albums aren't great, but once they figured it out around like ‘02, yeah, that all holds up. Zao’s still my favorite band. I'll listen to any Zao.
In terms of hip hop, I wish a lot more of it held up. Grits is still high quality. But the thing about Christian hip hop is, there's so many words that…if you listen to a Christian punk song, it's like a love song, it could be about anything. A Christian hip-hop song, it is so specific, and there's no doubt who the song is about. There are eighteen Bible verses quoted. There's so many lyrics packed in there. There aren’t really any Christian rap songs that I can go back to, just because it's like, I'm not the audience. Pigeon John, still…if I had to go back and listen to Christian rap? For me, Pigeon John.
Jars of Clay’s still got it. There's a couple of DC Talk songs, “What If I Stumble,” “In the Light.” Kirk Franklin, of course, still good, Amy Grant, still good. Somebody threw a Benjamin Gate reference at me the other day and I was like, yeah let’s go! Let's listen to some Benjamin Gate! That was our Christian Garbage, that was on the band chart list of “if you like this, listen to that instead”.
Do you foresee a day where you're walking down the street and - like, if you were an actor, people would shout out a line from a famous movie at you - but instead they're just gonna yell the names of Christian bands at you?
Let's go! Yeah, I mean it happens online, so in real life, I’m down…throw some VeggieTales at me. Let's do it.
Yeah, I know you’ve talked about VeggieTales before on VBS [the Vacation Bible School Podcast]; I didn't grow up with that as much, but my wife did, and she is also a big fan of the work that they do and she said that they hold up.
Yeah, it's great. Honestly. It's really good and there's nothing about “if you don't believe this you'll be punished forever”. It's just like “Bible stories made funny”. That's it.
I can get behind that.
A couple years ago for a VBS episode, we watched the story of Joseph and his brothers and I was like, “this is great. I have zero problems showing this to my kid.”
We talked about all the Christian culture coming out of that era. But when you look at today - and we touched on Julien Baker briefly, and Five Iron briefly - I feel like there are more stories getting published or getting made into albums or shows or whatever, that do have more of this, if not “deconstruction”, a more critical eye of Christianity specifically, and organized religion more generally. Out of things you've seen, things you've listened to from the current era, have you read anything or listen to anything that has really spoken to you? Like, Julien Baker is singing to God, asking God if He loves her, and that fucking wrecks me, but is there anything else like in that vein that you found recently that really speaks to you?
I mean, Righteous Gemstones isn't one that's often gonna devastate me emotionally, which is nothing against it, great show, but it's also…the reaction that it gets from people who didn't grow up anywhere near that world, and people who did, is fascinating. Because people who didn't grow up in it, they're like, “what a brilliant satire!: and I'm like, “what the fuck about this is satire?!” They're like, “but It's got Bodybuilders for Jesus!” I'm like, “yeah, I saw them when I was seven!” So I guess anything that makes people from outside the bubble realize like, no, this is impossible to parody
I’m trying to think of other musicians from recently. Silent Planet would be another one that grew up, they're still whatever “Christian band” means, I think they would be fine with that, but their latest album is about a UFO abduction and you can take it all sorts of theological ways if you want. But they're very critical of the world, like they have lots of songs about religious bigotry and colonialism, and they do so from a Christian perspective. So Silent Planet, I guess it fits both of your last two questions. Excellent for the deconstruction, and they’re a Christian band that still holds up.
Going back to the book. This is the real fun part, this is where I want to ask you about the theology of the book. Isaac as the main character, he's terrified of going to hell, that's obviously present in many of the other characters. But a major plot point in this book is when Isaac begins to dig into what I've always heard called “universalism”, the possibility that God is going to save everyone. Isaac reads Origen, he learns about Primitive Calvinism, and this is a big deal for Isaac, who has been driven entirely by fear of going to Hell, and now has a new way to look at the world. This line of theology exists in Catholicism as well, it's something Catholics like to argue about too. Was universalism something you found when you were in high school, or was it something you found later in life? Is it still something that’s part of your faith today?
For me, Hell was sort of a “final boss” of my deconstruction. It was one where it took me years until after I was out of church to where it was like, “okay, I don’t think I believe in that,” and then it was still a decade later before I got to “I don't think it's biblical. Mind you, I don't believe in the Bible but I still need it to be biblical that everyone can be saved.”
I would say there's a lot of things that Isaac speedruns and he has a couple of cheat codes in his favor. One of them: one of his best friends is a massive bookworm and she is really good at creeping innocently to the library and finding things she's not supposed to know. She’s reading a CS Lewis book, The Great Divorce, about - we're talking CS freaking Lewis, like the most Normie guy that we were all told to read, has a book about - how Hell is a choice and you can leave it. We were just handed this by our Sunday School teachers! And it’s like, “have y'all read this? Because he's saying the exact opposite of what you're saying!” And then CS Lewis, maybe that leads you to George MacDonald, and then maybe that leads you on and on and on all the way back to Origen, and then you start reading Paul differently. I didn't do all that stuff until years after leaving church. and man, I wish I'd been able to do it during church. If I'd known someone smart enough to point me in that direction, as Isaac is lucky to…that would have been a massive life changer. Isaac gets a lot of bad stuff thrown at him for a lot of reasons, but he also gets that lifeline of a, hopefully, mutually beneficial series of friendships throughout that sort of guide them to that stuff.
But yeah, the theology being like a big thread…it's really fun to spring that on people who don’t quite know what to expect from the book. They know I'm a comedy podcaster who tweets about sports, and so “it’s probably got lots of jokes about Christian football players and whatever?” It's like “there's a few! Also we're gonna learn about Gregory of Nyssa now! Also that's in the Diablo 2 chapter! Also there’s a makeout scene in that chapter!” But yeah, springing universalism on people, and having it be really really important whether you believe in Hell or not, honestly it was probably the funnest part of writing this whole thing. Because there's a sense when writing this: everybody's gonna learn something from any book they read. One like this: if you didn't grow up in this world, you're gonna learn a lot about Switchfoot, you're gonna learn a lot about what church happens when and whatever. But even if you did grow up in this world, there's still stuff. Most Christians haven't spent a lot of time learning about this specific theological tradition, so I guess I just wanted to share how helpful it has been for me, to say that we have license to hope. We're allowed to hope. It's okay to hope. We don't have to give up on people just because they've died. And finding, I guess, lots of smart people throughout history [who thought the same thing]. It's like, those thoughts you're having when you sit in the back of church and you're like “this is a little bit insane and I'm scared. How could God be this mean?” To realize that a variety of Christians have thought that for, let's say, at least eighteen hundred years, is really really liberating, and I do hope that thread really resonates with someone who has been told that you're not allowed to hope.
That's awesome, and I loved reading that. So kind of related to that: you and I are both from different branches of Christianity. We are both from churches that have used their power to hurt a lot of people at various times in various places, and now you and I are both dads. I have a hard time thinking through what I want to tell my kids about Catholicism. But what do you hope that your kid learns from you about Christianity?
The main thing is to go back to the most basic commandments. Which is a thing that [my daughter] and I have talked about a number of times. “Hey, you're gonna hear, at college, whatever, the rest of your life probably, you'll hear a lot of things about religion. The main thing is the main thing, whether you put this proper noun or that proper noun on it.”
It is kind of funny, whenever she gets invited to a church function by a more religious cousin or whatever. I'm like “church camp! I know what happens at church camp! You're not going to church camp!” We're not even gonna get to the brainwashing stage, I just know that there are no adults who are actually capable of managing things. So I don't think she would choose to get in trouble. I just know everyone around her is gonna get in trouble and then they're gonna be made to feel like little pieces of shit for it. So “no, you're not going to church camp!” But we've had a lot of really honest conversations about spirituality, and I hope she knows that I'm good with her winding up wherever she believes.
Next question is from me working my way through the back episodes of VBS. I love it, I do not know my Bible very well at all, the stereotype about Catholics is true. My question is: Who is the biggest wife guy in the Bible? Because I always assumed it was Joseph in the New Testament. I think you make a very compelling case for Moses. Could you elaborate?
I think the reason we got to that is because Moses is delivering the commandments shortly after being separated from his first wife. In that light, seeing how many commandments are about divorce, it’s like “bro, you're going through some things aren't you?” Because keep in mind, the way we think of it is “God issued the Ten Commandments.” No, that's not how it's written. God issues the first commandment and then passes the mic to Moses. So somewhere in there, Moses is like “and ANOTHER thing about divorce” and people in the crowd are like “I'm starting to pick up on something a little bit personal here.”
Another ranking wife guy absolutely would be Jacob, who toils for a total of 14 years to win the right to marry. Jacob finally meets his match a fellow schemer, Jacob wants to marry his daughter, and Jacob just decides “well, I can't trick this guy. So I'm just gonna till his fields for 14 years, fine, who cares? I'm in love, whatever, let's do this.” And then it turns out, the daughter is just as devious as Jacob and her father. are like he went through all that and had to marry her sister as well, which he didn't seem happy about, and then they end up in a baby making competition, and at that point, what a wife guy that is. Like a multi-wife guy at that point…
Since I’m interviewing you in December [on 12/21] and probably won’t run this until the first week of January, that allows me to lock in your prediction for the Sun Bowl [on 12/29], which will be Oregon State/Notre Dame. Sam Hartman is not playing, Notre Dame is favored by three and a half. Who ya got? [NOTE: Notre Dame ended up winning this game 40-8 over the Beavers.]
Notre Dame is also without their best offensive lineman. And Oregon State, just this entire season, has had reason to play angry. So, vibes-based analysis, I will at very least take Oregon State, plus those points.
Sun Bowl is, hands down, the weirdest Bowl historically. I don't say that lightly, as someone who's studied all of them and wrote down the weirdest facts about each one. I got to the Sun Bowl and there's twelve things there, it is weirder than any other two bowls combined, probably. So the favorite in that game is a perilous place to be.
Fair enough. One thing left, and it’s a thing you’ve talked about before, but I wanted it to be the last thing people read on this. You’re giving all the proceeds from pre-orders to the Trevor Project. It sounds like that is going to be a decent chunk of money, which is great. Can you talk a little bit about why it was important to give the money from this project to them?
In the act of writing this, I got to a point where it's like: this has benefited me so much that I don't need the money from sales to also benefit me. If the book goes out, and the words are nice, and people feel better about themselves, that's great and cool. But there's also something tangible here, and I don't need it. As someone who like, dabbles in a little bit of liberation theology, and runs my mouth about rich churches and whatever, at some point, it's like “wow, I gotta put my money where my mouth is here.” So, I guess for a long time, I've known that any money this book makes, at least up until February 12th, I'm not keeping that money. And honestly, it was never in question where it was going, because - and this is a thing that sort of emerged for me in the process of writing - I've been pissed off, since I was like 17 years old, about some of the things my gay friends said about themselves when we were in high school. And it's as simple as that. On one level, yes, trans people are under attack in this country, LGBTQ people are under attack in this country, and that's unacceptable. Especially because some of those attacks are coming from people who, I know exactly how they were raised, and I know exactly why they're saying it
On a personal level. I'm just mad about hearing my friends say those things and…what was used for evil? I hope some good comes from it.
Yeah, I think that is a perfectly good place to end.
You can order Hell is a World Without You and find more information about it here.
And of course, who can forget Fullcast: After Dark: For Men, the late Saturday livestreams which used to be on Twitter but moved this year, hilariously, to LinkedIn.