🎙️ Jonathan Merritt on the Complicated Intersection of Faith and Culture

I'm more interested in religion as I grow older, but I'm a non-church person. Renowned writer Jonathan Merritt explains everything to me including evangelicalism.

Substack is the new home for my regular newsletter. I offer behind-the-scenes commentary on the latest episodes of the [B]OLDER podcast. I also write in more depth about the land of the old: the positives, the negatives, and the surprises. - Debbie

---

🎙️ Listen now

Faith and culture writer Jonathan Merritt is notably articulate on complicated issues. If you’re not a regular church-goer and you’ve wondered what that might offer — no matter what your belief in God is — 🎙️ listen to this episode of the [B]OLDER podcast.

I met Jonathan Merritt in the hot tub in Baja Mexico, but don’t get the wrong idea.

We were both in Baja to attend a weeklong workshop organized by Modern Elder Academy. And as you’ll hear in this episode of [B]OLDER, change and transformation were very much on the agenda for the week.

You may have heard me talk about Modern Elder Academy. It’s billed as a midlife wisdom school whose core mission is to shift our negative mindset about aging. Far from signaling the beginning of the end, midlife (defined as anywhere between your 30s and your 60s) is an opportunity for growth and reinvention.

MEA (as it’s called) is a little bit of paradise. The campus, bursting with pink bougainvillea, sits on a wide, surf-pounded beach near Todos Santos, MX, just north of Cabo. There are a hot tub and several pools, an organic garden, delicious locally-sourced food, a devoted local staff, yoga, meditation and more. It’s the brainchild of New York Times bestselling author and hospitality entrepreneur Chip Conley.

We were a group of about 20 in an April 2023 workshop, pondering how to use sensory experience to map out our futures. I was intrigued with Jonathan’s thoughtful comments and I was drawn to his Atlanta accent which I couldn’t quite place at first but which I recognized. I have a bunch of Georgia cousins.

In the hot tub, Jonathan revealed a bit about why he had flown from New York to spend a week at MEA. I wanted to find out more.

🎙️ Jonathan is best known as a writer on the complicated intersection of faith and culture — as it applies to LGBTQ intolerance and evangelicalism — and much more. Listen to my conversation with him on the [B]OLDER podcast.

The son of an evangelical leader and a former pastor himself, he is a prolific and award-winning contributor to The Atlantic, a senior columnist for Religion News Service; is the author of several books including the critically-acclaimed How to Speak God From Scratch; has been interviewed on ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR and PBS; has ghostwritten or collaborated on more than 50 books (with several titles landing on the NYTimes, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists); is a literary agent; speaks and teaches at colleges, conferences and churches; has just finished writing his first children’s book; and is writing a TV series about religion and popular culture.

Oh, and he just turned 40.

Despite — or perhaps because of — his achievements, Jonathan is working on a transformation, his own “what’s next.” He’s an old soul, he tells me, so he’s approaching transformation with intentionality; his week at MEA was just one step.

On the podcast we talk about:

• The urge to embrace spirituality (and religion) as you get older.

• Why Sunday services at Yale’s Battell Chapel felt like a safe place for me to weep after my mother died recently — even though I am not a church-person.

• What evangelicalism means.

• The connection between evangelicalism and fundamentalism and far right conservative ideologies and how that harms everyone.

• The Rev. Tim Keller and his untimely death in May 2023 at age 72 (in his obituary, the NYT dubbed him Manhattan’s Pioneering Evangelist).

• Jonathan’s personal story of being outed as gay just days before his 30th birthday, and then moving from Atlanta to NYC.

• Appreciative inquiry and the art of asking ourselves the right questions (this was an exercise we all engaged in during our MEA week).

• Jonathan’s adaptation of The Ignation Examen as part of his daily intentional practice.

• And, despite his notable success as a journalist, speaker, literary agent, creative and more, why he’s feeling the need to transform himself at age 40.

Above, a whiteboard summary of one of our MEA discussions about Appreciative Inquiry.

As I tell Jonathan on the podcast, I could listen to him explain things all day — especially as they relate to religion, church, community, identity, aging and growing older, and more. I loved this conversation. And I hope you will too.

Do leave a comment or pose a question. Religion and faith and culture and intolerance and identity and how they interrelate are big topics worth discussing.

Listen now

🎙️ [B]OLDER Season 5 - Episode 19: Jonathan Merritt on Religion, the Harm of Fundamentalism, and Personal Transformation