Inside purity culture and Christian nationalism with Monte Mader

What happens when you're raised to be a militant Christian nationalist Supreme Court justice, but you decide to actually study church history instead? This week, we are thrilled to welcome social media powerhouse, educator, and musician Monte Mader to the show! You probably know her from her viral videos expertly dismantling Christian nationalist talking points, but her story starts far from the internet spotlight. Monte shares her harrowing and fascinating journey of growing up on a remote cattle ranch in Wyoming, steeped in extreme patriarchal theology, purity culture, and doomsday rhetoric. What was it like being trained in apologetics from childhood, only to realize the history of the church didn't match the dogma she was force-fed? We dive into the terrifying realities of purity culture, the weaponization of biblical texts against women, and the intense backlash Monte faces online for refusing to submit or be silent. But it's not all doom and gloom! Amidst the doxxing and the hate mail, Monte shares why right now—as the mask of Christian nationalism slips completely off—is actually a time for profound, irrational hope. _____________________________________________ Want to see more of Monte? Follow her various socials at the following links: Her Website: https://montemader.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/montemader?igsh=bGUyY29lamtlNGhi Threads: https://www.threads.com/@montemader TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@montemader?_r=1&_t=ZP-971v8VHMsPv YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@UCMfoN9bDN77VAd83ZFvwShA Substack: https://substack.com/@UCMfoN9bDN77VAd83ZFvwShA ______________________________________________ For early access to an ad-free version of every episode of Data Over Dogma, exclusive content, and the opportunity to support our work, please consider becoming a monthly patron at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on the various social media places: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/data_over_dogma https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod/ Have you ordered Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Bible Says So⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ yet??? Buy at this link: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:10Speaker 02

  I believe that, you know, the arc of progress, the arc of justice, it bends the way you bend it. Hope is where your hands are. So the world that we want to have is possible if we build it.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  This is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Things are fantastic, in part because someone much smarter than me is here to come on the show and we get to hear her thoughts and things.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Her musings about the world and that is always a delight. So Dan, why don't you introduce our guest?

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we are very excited and honored to be joined today by Monty Mader, another social media superstar and also rock and roller. Thank you so much for being with us today on the show, Monty.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you for your work. I was very, very excited to get this invitation.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Well, I was, we had, I had thought about it many times in the past. Like, I gotta reach out to Monty. She, I think she would make a lovely guest on the, on the show. And then finally it was like, maybe I ought to do it, actually.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Maybe stop thinking about it, Dan, and start actually taking some action. That's not a bad idea.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  I'm working on it. I'm working on it. So, so yeah, we're ecstatic to be able to talk to you today. And here, lots of things are going on in your life, lots of changes. And, and that's great. But we want to start off by just, if you don't mind, letting our audience, I'm sure there are an awful lot of people in our audience who already know more about you than Dan and I combined. But would you mind talking a little bit about how you got to be where you are? Because we talked earlier about the fact that it was almost a year ago today that we first met in DC at one of the-

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Dan, we, what we should be saying is, there's a whole cool conversation about all of us that only our patrons get. And if you want to hear that-

• 3:25Speaker 00

  You always want to bring it back to business. But yes.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, it's not a bad idea to become a patron right now and go and check out our, our conversation with Monty about how we met and everything.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  We talk a lot about that. I was using that as a springboard into-

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  That was only evidently three months after you splashed onto social media.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Became the queen of the internet? Is that what you're trying to say, Dan?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  So can you tell us a little bit about what's happened?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  So yeah, so I mean, I've, I've obviously had social media for a long time. I was not a big user, especially with Instagram. I typically used it to promote music. I wasn't really a regular creator of any kind. And then as 2024 had continued to happen, there were certain topics that kept coming up, certain talking points that I felt uniquely qualified to have a discussion on with my background, but it wasn't a big thing. But in December of 2024, I made a video, kind of cheekily saying, why are we trying to put the Bible in schools when it's not working in churches? And many people were not a fan. And I'm also someone that I

• 4:38Speaker 02

  don't read the comments very often. Part of it's just time. I'm so busy. I don't have time, but also mental health as well, because for their, you know, good comments, and there's a lot of also really vitriolic ones. But for whatever reason, one day in February of last year, a notification on that video popped up and it was from this guy named Derek, who's like, when have you been to church? I'm guessing never. For whatever reason.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Which is a constant, any one of us who have posted a thing that could even be considered anti-Christian, you're gonna get, well, you've never read the Bible, you've never been to church, you don't know anything about it.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And for whatever reason, that particular day, and again, as someone who did not-

• 5:20Speaker 01

  You had time.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I had time and I was not having it. I was not having it. So I set up my phone really quick. Again, I had never shot this style of video in this way before. And I laid out my background and I pulled my Bible into frame and I read him for filth for 90 seconds straight. And I don't even think I breathed at any point. And I put the phone down, I posted it, put the phone down. I went to the gym, I went to work, I was running a personal training business at the time, and I was also a full-time performer. And I came back three or four hours later, and it had 15 million views.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  And I was like, what? And then it actually, it got deleted off Instagram, because when someone deletes their comment, it removes the video. And so I ended up having to It does. So I ended up having to repost it and it still got millions of views. And so I went from having 24,000 followers in February of last year to I'm almost at 2.6 now, 2.6 million.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  And that was, that was the beginning of it. And then it just opened the door for me to talk about all of these topics, especially around Christian nationalism and the Bible with how I grew up. And that was, that was the match that lit it. And I was shocked and I got, got into March and April and I'm, you know, sitting at 450,000, 500,000 people. And I'm like, oh, well, that's where it'll plateau. That's really cool. I would never, I never thought that that would happen to something like me and it just did not stop and it just kept going. And then in by November, I had already been planning on stepping away from the cover band music. I had been doing it for four years. It was four hour shows, multiple times a week, really aggressive performances.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Who were you covering?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  We did all pop, rock and hip hop. I refuse to do country. I won't do it.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  But we also do a lot of metal, a lot of the emo and metal. And so those shows get really exhausting. And I mean, four hours, no breaks, no, no set breaks, anything like that.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  No breaks? That's insane.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we would, at our peak, the band and I were doing five to six shows a week.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  And so typically we'd start the show with a lot of classic rock, some really fun pop that everybody likes. And then there would, there would always be a moment during the show and I was pretty good at picking when the moment happened that we would do Enter Sandman and we did a medley into one with Enter Sandman. And that is when the show would change. And I'm like, okay, cracks, knuckles. Now we're going somewhere else. And we would end up in, you know, Linkin Park, Iron Maiden, Avenged Sevenfold. It would get really rowdy sometimes, but we also had a 13 minute 90s hip hop medley.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Uh huh. There you go.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  You know, variety is the spice of life. I had been planning on stepping back for that for a while. So it was a good opportunity last fall to, for me to step back, give my voice and my body a recovery. And then I closed my business that I had been running for 15 years in November and did this. And now I do this full time.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and you do it astounding well. I, I, I will give a ringing endorsement to your, to your Instagram slash Tik Tok slash wherever you are feed because it is. It is something that it is something to behold. You're a powerhouse for sure.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  And but we need to get into what we're here to talk about because a lot of your content, as you say, you know, your first big, big thing is you just tearing into the Bible. So I would like you to give us just a bit of a rundown as to your background because you have been to church. And so talk to us about about sort of your background, your raising, and sort of what your life looked like as as young Monty.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  So baby Monty was born and raised on a cattle ranch in Wyoming and grew up very, very remote, very rural. And I grew up in a very, very Christian nationalist environment that skewed very militant. And I will say to my family's credit, which is something that still shocks me so much with what's going on now. If my father had ever seen someone fly a swastika, he would have throat punched them.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  So not not in that space, but very much we had a stockpiles of arms across the property. We were trained with weapons at a very young age. There was a lot of rhetoric around the Democrats are going to hold you at gunpoint. The government might come for us. It's your obligation to die for your faith. That escalated a lot after Columbine.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  I was about to say, when when would Columbine happen?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  I was I was a kid when Columbine happened. And that's really where I remember that uptick. And it was very much directed at us children, more so than hearing it in conversation in the room.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Interesting. So they're specifically going going to the children and giving these messages.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I remember journaling at night and fantasizing about martyrdom, like fantasizing about being killed like Cassie and fantasizing about would I be strong enough to say yes for my faith. And I knew I was part of a Christian group that would go to public schools and they would host these like anti-drug rallies and then invite kids out to a pizza party type thing on a different night where they would share the gospel and and Cassie Bernal's grandparents were. Part of that I knew them personally. Um, and I didn't find out until my twenties that that never happened. Like Cassie's story and she said, yes, isn't real.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know her. I don't know.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  One of the victims of the, the Columbine shooting.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Where, where he, yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Sorry, you go ahead. The story was originally, she was, she was one of the victims in the library and she was hiding under a table. And the story was that he came over to her and asked her, do you believe in God? She said, yes. And he kills her and it didn't happen that way. He, he, he just shot her and it, it, it happened to someone else. It was just a totally, it was falsified and they knew very early that it was falsified, but the book was still published. It became this huge part of the youth movement, movement in evangelicalism and Christian nationalism with acquire the fire youth groups. But for how I grew up with this militant background already, it really, really escalated this sense of urgency, this sense of persecution. I was used to this idea of you

• 11:37Speaker 02

  need to have weapons to defend your faith, kind of ideology. And I also, I was, my mom left when I was young and left all six of us kids with my dad. And I very much grew up in a patriarchal household, my way or the highway. And I grew up in both a church and a home environment where, well, you're a woman, your only purpose is to get married, have as many kids as possible. You don't get a say in anything. You have to submit, you have, you know, all of those things. I actually got kicked out of Sunday school the first time, uh, when I was nine, because the teacher, I was wearing the sundress that came just above my knees, like nothing immodest at all. Also, I'm nine. And she reprimands me and says, you know, I need to be careful to not make

• 12:20Speaker 02

  a man stumble. And I don't remember how I phrased the question, but I asked the equivalent of, how can we trust men to be leaders if they can't lead themselves?

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  And I was asked to leave. I was never allowed back in her class after that. She didn't let me come back. Um, and then two weeks later, I went to church. I hear my first wife submit to your husband's sermon. So they were really leaning into it, you know?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  I don't want to distract from the story. I am curious though, Matthew Shepard was killed in Wyoming.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Very shortly after Columbine happened. I was at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley when Matthew Shepard was killed. I'm just curious if that came across the radar. I don't know if you were in Western Wyoming or Eastern Wyoming or.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  We were in Eastern.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  For those of our listeners who don't remember, Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay in Wyoming.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  And he was brutally, brutally, brutally beaten and tied to a fence and left out in the cold in the winter. It was horrific. And, and that was never addressed to us directly. The most I remember anyone saying about it was, there was this kind of sentiment of he deserved it because he was gay.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Which, which is a stark contrast to, you're gonna have to die for your faith versus, well, he deserved to get beaten to death. That's, that's pretty heinous.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  It's so interesting to hear your, you know, hear the messaging come to you that the Democrats are going to come to you with gun, at gunpoint. Have they met a Democrat? It feels like they haven't.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  I mean, allegedly.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Because it just seems like the ones who are coming with the violence seem to be on their side of the fence.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  And statistically, yeah, a lot more often. But it was, you know, I don't remember ever meeting someone who did not have this very stringent sense of like ultra conservatism, ultra Christian nationalism ever in my childhood. I mean, my, my dad and my grandfather were friends with Dick Cheney. I met Dick Cheney when I was 10. Of course, I had no idea who this person is, never saw him again. And then realized, I'm like, wait a minute, is that, is the new vice president, the guy that, oh. Like, I had no idea. I wasn't given context for this larger conversation. But my, my family was also involved in local Republican politics. My cousin was the county commissioner. My uncle was a state senator. My dad would

• 14:38Speaker 02

  later on become a state rep. It was, you know, it was very, and, and I, no point in my growing up years were politics and religion ever separated. They were married together. You could not be a Christian and vote Democrat. You could not be a Christian and pro reproductive rights. And all of the, kind of the dogma and the messaging and the misinformation that we're seeing now was exactly the same for me growing up. And I went to all Christian nationalist schools. So I was only ever taught creation. There's still a very big gap in my knowledge about evolution and natural history. I have a huge gap of knowledge that I'm working on now. Always had a Bible class, always had PragerU style American history. And then I was

• 15:22Speaker 01

  That's the good stuff.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  That's the meat and potatoes right there. It was, it's, it's wild now to think about what I was taught as a kid, knowing what I know now. But outside of school, I mean, we were in church whenever the doors were open. I was privately trained in Christian apologetics by my dad for five years. Privately trained, again, in this very narrow viewing of theology for 10 years before I went to college. And then I was forced to go to Liberty University.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  As one does.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  I didn't know they let girls in Liberty.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Right? Weird. It's weird. We got to wear pants and stuff, too.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  And in, I did not go to school for theology. I have to clarify that quite a few times with people. It's like, no, no, no, no. I, my dad, I was pre-law originally. Because when I was 10 years old, I started school when I was four, because I could read books. And then I skipped sixth grade. And so in order to be able to skip the sixth grade, they took me into a room full of computers at one point. And they did a bunch of tests on me, reading tests, IQ tests, like all these different things. And I did really, really well. I had a senior in college reading level at 10. And my dad gets this piece of paper and he realizes, oh, she's smart, smart. And so the, there's this huge pivot. And it was so distinct because I saw how my older sisters were raised and treated.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  And there was a huge pivot with me where he's like, yes, you still have to get married. You're still going to have to have kids one day. But first, and this is a direct quote, we're going to get you into law school and on the Supreme Court so that you can help us overturn Roe.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  That is, that is a

• 16:57Speaker 01

  You had a path mapped out.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  And so I You got scooped by Coney Barrett. That's not fair.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  She took my destiny. How dosh, no, I'm kidding.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  But so I went to school originally for pre-law and eventually ended up changing and going into the medical sciences was where I thought I was going to be because I wanted to help. I was already starting to have some conflicts with the calling and the mission. And Liberty, as conservative as it was, it was my first time meeting people of color. It was my first time meeting People from different areas. It was my first time seeing different forms of Christianity. But at Liberty, you still have to take theology courses, even if that's not your degree. You're required a certain number, which for me, I was like, I've been doing this for a decade. This is, this is cake for me. But I was able to, I took them as an intensive in Israel. And it was after a previous Gaza incident. So I'm going in there fully as a Christian nationalist.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  And now I recognize as a Zionist. I didn't know what that belief system was at the time. But it would, it ended up being a big breakthrough moment for me. When we were in Jerusalem, we were outside, we couldn't access Bethlehem because there had been a strike at the West Bank. But we, we were outside the Dome of the Rock and visiting it. And of course they're demonizing it. And it's all this disgusting vitriol about Islam and, you know, which I've heard my whole life, growing up how I did. But I'm watching these families from all over the world come to worship. And some of them are crying and there, you can see they have so much joy and reverence. And in my head, I, I couldn't reconcile it.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  I said, this is the same, that's how I feel, being at a lot of these sites, you know, being where they think the Sermon on the Mount was given. And being in this holy place, like I feel the same way. And I just on a gut level could not reconcile the hatred and the animosity for people who were worshiping very much how I felt I was worshiping. And I realized in that moment that I didn't know that much about church history. I knew a lot about, you know, theology. I had read the Bible nine times. I was, I would memorize entire passages. Growing up, my dad would have us memorize a front and back page of verses every week. And if you didn't memorize your verses, you got beat. And every Sunday you had to write a Christian essay and submit it to dad. Like this was a regimented thing in my life.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And I realized I didn't know anything about, how did we get here? And that was, those were the first questions I started asking at that time.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  What kind of resources did you have available?

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Um, the library was my biggest one, but I started, I started just with, uh, obviously most of them still very conservative leaning, but I just started with books on church history. Uh, then I started reading Augustine and then I started, you know, and it just led to one source to one source to one source. And, uh, then I encountered Bart Ehrman was another big name.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  He's the, yeah, he's the gateway drug for so many folks.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Bart Ehrman, I loved John Barton's work, um, especially around how we got the Bible. And so I started like all these sources and it was so much information and so many things I'd never heard of. And I started to internalize that and try to understand and, and just realizing that the church, you know, didn't get it right all the time. Right?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  I grew up in this, I grew up in this side.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Right?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  How dare you?

• 20:19Speaker 02

  They've not been perfect all the time, but I, I grew up in, in kind of a hybrid of these Christian nationalist movements. So very much under the Bill Gothard umbrella without attending like his seminars. So I grew up in this environment that your father's the head of the household, the pastor's the head of him. And if you question, question either of them, you are directly questioning God.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  And its defiance. I hadn't, I had, I can look back now at my childhood and realize there were things I couldn't reconcile then, but I wrote it off as my own pride. It's you're being sinful. You're this, you squash it and you squash it and you push it back down.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. You were primed for that from birth that like, these are moments that are going to happen and they're your problem, not our, it's never our problem. It's always going to be your problem.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yes. And, and you have the added layer of as a woman, you're more sinful. You have to be controlled. You're not smart enough. All of these other ideologies are stacked on top of that. So you already believe that, you know, well, I'm a woman, so apparently my brain's broken. I don't know as much as men do. Um, I've obviously strongly changed my opinion on that.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. As well you should. There, yeah. I think, I think that that's a reasonable thing to change your opinion on.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  So Dan, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that we've got construction going on at the house.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, you heard the construction too. We're finishing our basement. We're actually adding on to the house. We're doing some stuff in the backyard. And I was thinking the other day about how nice it was to be able to do this because I wanted to get a new car and I wanted to do these improvements to the house, but we had to pay off our old car and that took actual planning, which you know I hate. And so I really had to shift my thinking quite a bit when it came to my finances. And we had to set dates and we had to create a budget. And it was so satisfying to actually make a plan.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and were able to pay off a car. I got a brand new car and it feels so relieving to know that if we actually set these goals and plan for them and stick to them, it goes from, oh, this will never end, actually feeling like you have control over stuff. And that has made a huge difference to me and to my family.

• 22:55Speaker 01

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• 23:40Speaker 01

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• 24:13Speaker 00

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• 24:28Speaker 01

  I do want to hear you talk a bit more about being a girl growing up in this environment and sort of like how, what the messaging was for a girl and a young woman growing up in this totally patriarchal, you know, sort of absolutism patriarchy and this idea that, that you are sort of inherently and, and by divine nature, by divine decree, less than.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  And, and you also didn't have the benefit of an adult female figure in your household. It doesn't sound like who could be there to kind of tamp things down or maybe give you a way to digest it that, that lessens some of the impact. It sounds like you didn't have any kind of filter available to you. So you were getting the full brunt of, of this patriarchal system.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and I also, my older sisters are quite a bit older than me and they went to boarding school. So they weren't even around.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  But I remember when I was very, very little, it was the type of thing where I would come into the living room and my dad was, had all three daughters sitting in front of him, showing them how to tie a tie because they needed to do it for their husband. Like that's it's this kind of that was my life and

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  You know what I will say my one of my earliest memories of like feelings is I remember feeling like I was in a cage. I remember feeling so trapped as a kid and I didn't have the vocabulary to explain what I was feeling. I just remember all the time fantasizing about running away and feeling like my life was over and feeling like I was in this cage. I can look back on it now and realize, well, yeah, you were told that your body isn't yours. You were told you you can't give consent. Yes. When you're a kid or when you're a young adult, but you can't say no when you're married. Your body doesn't belong to you. Your body is already property of a man you've never met.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  And purity culture, I think, is obviously the dominant messaging that I grew up with. But it starts with what I what I mentioned before, when I was nine and kicked out of Sunday school. And then I get my first wives submit to your husband sermon. And I remember sitting by my dad and I've got my Bible open. And my Bible then was like it is now. It was highlighted and marked and notated. I loved that book to literal pieces. Like it was my favorite thing. And I'm looking at this and I'm listening and I remember starting to get mad. I could just feel like this heat rising up to my face and I was trying not to cue dad that I was pissed off. Because I'm I'm listening to the preacher and I noticed he skipped the verse ahead of it that says, submit to one another in love. He dives right into the wives.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  And it just so happened that he ran out of sermon time to get to where the husbands are supposed to love their wives, the way that

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a shame. I'm sure he meant to.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  No, I'm sure he meant to get to it. And even then I remember thinking, well, how convenient to be a man. Like I remember as a nine year old being like, this is perilously convenient that you have to do nothing while another person has to submit to you. And again, I didn't have the vocabulary for it, but I remember the rage. I didn't say a word driving home. I went down to my room and I took my Bible and I threw it across the room and against the wall. And I made a decision. I was like, okay, I don't want to piss God off. I don't want to sin. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just never gonna have sex and I'm not gonna get married.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  That was my solution because I was like, I'm not doing that. I'm not going to submit to some guy. And I had seen how other women were treated in the church. I noticed at a very young age. I was like, no, loophole. I'm just not going to get married. I apparently.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  I'm going to go with Paul's advice in 1 Corinthians seven. Instead of, instead of pseudo Paul's advice in Ephesians five.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Although I did see, I did see a thing, a meme recently that was pointing out that if you don't have, if you never get married, you can't have premarital sex. So you can have all the sex you want. Loopholes all the way around.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's extramarital, but not premarital.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  But not premarital, so there you go.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  And apparently, as, as of this juncture in my life, I took the no marriage thing very seriously. With a lot more commitment than I had planned at the time. But I, I, that, that was kind of my first segue into this language because I was now brought to adult church. So I started to get a lot of this messaging, probably younger than a lot of other kids did because I got kicked out of that Sunday school class.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  How old were you?

• 29:05Speaker 02

  I was nine.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Nine, okay.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  When I really started to get this messaging. And then again, I was 10, I was seventh grade, I was 10.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  So they're already, they're already prepping you before you're, you've hit puberty.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Now, this is your role. You are, you are being sexualized, you're being objectified. You, and so that by the time you do hit puberty, you are already in a rut and can't do anything about it.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Yes, and the purity culture messaging got much, much stronger. Cause then shortly, I think, I can't remember the exact year though, the books came out, but I Kiss Dating Goodbye comes out. And what was the other book that came out at the same time or around the same? And people would carry these things around like they were their bibles. So there's this huge cultural resurgence of purity culture. But I remember, you know, all, all the analogies of, you know, if you do have sex before you're married, then you're just used gum. No man wants used gum. You're a used car, all the, and the funny thing, like the, when you take these analogies. And really look at them. Okay, so my options are to be a used car or a new car, but either way, I'm a car, not a person.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  And so then what happens when this man buys me as a new car? And then 15 years, I'm not a new car anymore. Does he get to trade me in for a new car? Cause I'm an old one now.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Spoiler alert, kinda yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Kinda yeah, actually.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Well, and this, and this is, this is really a re inscription of what's in the Bible, where women are commodities. Their, their sexual availability, their procreative capacities are, are commodities. That's what marriage is. It's a transaction where a man is buying that from another man in the form of a woman.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the Bible's allowing of, you know, you could sell your daughter into sexual slavery, if you want to. And if a man rapes her, as long as the dad okay's it and he pays enough, now you have to marry your rapist.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  And of course, they didn't dig into those passages really in depth. And when I would ask questions, because I read the Bible for the first time at nine, cover to cover. And when I would have questions, it would of course, get explained away, or that's not what it means. It was different in this time. But really, the, the idea of purity culture is really just a repackaging of women as property. And it's also why they don't believe in marital rape. And while they inherently don't believe in consent, inherently, because you can't consent, yes, you then can't withdraw consent when you're married. You at no point get sexual agency.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Um, and that's precisely what's, what's in the Bible. And in the Iron Age, in even down in the Greco-Roman period, women had no sexual agency of their own. They were sexual objects. And the man was the only real actual agent in an act of, of sex. And so it's, it's so bizarre that of all the things that, that have been perpetuated from 3,000 years ago, that, that the objectification of women is, is one that, that people just still.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Just kind of blithely and intuitively and subconsciously just keep going along with.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  They do. And go ahead. Sorry, Dan.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  I was just gonna say, and when you call them out on it, boy, do they get mad about it.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Boy, do they get mad.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, they really don't want to accept the reality of the situation.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Well, Dan, I think you're hitting on an interesting point, which is that like so many of these Christian organizations, you know, they say they want to live biblical lives and they want to, you know, craft their lives to be biblically in line. And it's a deep, deep problem. Like, no, don't live your life. Like, we've learned some things since 3,000 years ago. You, you know, we all agree that slavery is not good. So obviously, we can all agree.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Not all of us. There's like Joshua Hames and some others. Yeah, it's making a research.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Come back.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Because they're backing themselves into this corner of, and, and obviously, it's going to start with a bunch of men, white men, who will benefit from everyone reverting to these, these retrograde ideas.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  And that's why they keep the purity culture idea. It is so beneficial. It is the only way that a poor man automatically, de facto, gets a maid, a cook, and a sex slave.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you get to stamp it as godly and biblically ordained, and she can't leave you for any reason. And I mean, there's a whole terrible history with the history of Christian marriage counseling that was really started by a white supremacist eugenicist who was an atheist. But that was the convenient avenue that he could peddle his ideas and he mentored James Dobson. And so, right, it's just the, the web is so intense. But you have like this, this whole thing of, it was very clear that your body is not yours. But also because you have the doctrine of Eve, your body is inherently sinful and it's your job to control the lust of men. Because if something happens to you, well, clearly, it was your fault.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Clearly, you did something. You let him on. You wore something you shouldn't. We see that rhetoric everywhere.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  That's not in the Bible.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Not, no.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  There's not a single, there's not a single point in the Bible where any woman is told you have to cover up in order to protect men from, from lusting after you. And, and we know what Jesus says to say about what you should do if

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and that's, and it's so baffling that like we can, we're reverting to Iron Age ideologies about, about gender politics. It was like even they knew better than, than to lay blame on, on a woman for being sexually assaulted. And the, and the purity culture is just an attempt to rationalize it. It's just trying to build a rhetorical undergirding of, of what at least the Bible is more open about, that a woman is treated as property. It's no, no, no, we're, we're trying to protect her and we're trying to protect the men around her and we're trying to, it's, it's an attempt to try to make it sound like something good. And all the rhetoric that is used, like you, you mentioned the chewed gum and all that one. And in LDS

• 35:16Speaker 00

  culture, you get the licked cupcake. And then there's, but oddly enough, even within LDS culture, they, they try to be so much more sincere about it that it extends to men too. And, and this is a, it's a bizarre thing, but, and, and women get a lot more than men. But there was a, there was an LDS president of the church who during one of the, what they call general conferences from the pulpit, told a story about a kid going away to war. I think it was World War II or something like that. Talking to his mom and saying, I know you would rather I come home in a pine box than unclean. And it was kind of an endorsement of, of this perspective. And I remember distinctly thinking, no parent wants their child.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  No parent wants that.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  To come back in a pine box. Yeah. And, and when you, when you spread that rhetoric, like I, I know the reason that you're generating this rhetoric. You want to try to emphasize how important chastity is and how important this purity culture stuff is. But you get significantly out of, over your rhetorical skis when you convince children that they are better off dead than having lost their, their virginity, their purity, their chastity or whatever. And children have taken their own lives because of that. Like there's a, there's a long history. A lot of corpses have been thrown on to the altar of purity culture and it's disgusting and people don't want to see it.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  It's so harmful.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  And it, you know, it really, and to your point about the pine box comment, I remember, and I, every single person that I know who has walked away from some version of what I grew up in, we, I remember as a preteen and teen consciously thinking about and journaling, I would rather tell my parents I killed someone than I had had sex.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  That is how severe it was. And it was very much, if you do this, you will be worthless for the rest of your life and nobody will want you. It was very harsh, but I also grew up in a lot of physical abuse. I grew up in a very, very, again, the very patriarchal, but very physically abusive and very psychologically abusive, which of course also has implications for your self-worth. I already felt worthless. You couldn't convince me I could be any more worthless than I already felt, you know? I mean, there was a period of time where my younger brother and I had to live in a dark basement for two years. We weren't allowed to be upstairs in the house.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Oh gosh.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  And the only time we were allowed to leave is if we were working outside for dad or going to school. We were not allowed to be physically present upstairs unless we were eating.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Good.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  And so it was, it was all of this messaging at the same time. And for me, I ended up with a big conflict around 12. I have like, pregnancy is in my top three fears. I would rather swim with sharks. It like terrifies me so much and it always has. But there was also this messaging of, you know, you have to remain pure, you have to remain unstained or whatever, which begs the question, because the men were never told that. So who are the men sleeping with on their way to marriage? If all the women are not doing anyways. But I would, I knew in my heart at the time that like, well, you have to have kids, you have to have kids, you have to have kids. But there was also this demonization of any kind of sexual contact. It ruins you. It removes your purity. If you were to get pregnant as a teenager, my dad would have thrown me into the street.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  I would have been a street kid had that happened. So I started having nightmares about pregnancy at 12. I would wake up screaming in a cold sweat, so afraid of if that ever happened to me, what my dad would do to me.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Like it was this palatable, terrifying fear. I had no interest in boys until my senior year in high school because I was so afraid. Of, oh my God, if anything ever happened. And then the, the problem doesn't end when you get out of the house. I moved out of my parents' house when I was 15, but I was assaulted at 18 and still didn't tell my dad because I knew he'd blame me.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  And when I did eventually tell him years later, because it wasn't P and V intercourse, he was like, oh, okay, so it wasn't a big deal then. I forgive him.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Forgive him?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  That's, that was nice of your dad to forgive him.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, nice of him to forgive him.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  On, on your behalf.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  And that, you know, one of the, one of the things I find just baffling about the, the whole chastity idea and, and even sexual assault, the idea that you're no longer chaste, you're no longer pure. Something has been taken from you. I don't know if they use that language about being taken from you. Within LDS culture, there was a time, I don't think they do it much anymore, where girls are told that, that they should fight to the death rather than succumb to.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  We were told that too. That it was better to die than to be raped.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it's taking something from you. And biologically, absolutely.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  The one thing that's the most important thing that you can possess or whatever.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  More important than your, than your life.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Which is ultimately your, uh, the pristiness of your sexuality that is intended for your future husband. And physiologically, biologically, that is meaningless. That is just.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  It's meaningless.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  It's an imaginary thing. There's nothing that changes about a vagina after it has been entered by a penis. That's not like, that's not a thing. It's entirely made up and it, and the idea that anything changes is fundamentally rooted in the notion that a woman is property and that her body is, needs to be in pristine condition because a man is paying for it. And he doesn't want to have had any other man rooting around in his property. And which, which it all, it all comes back down to the objectification of, of a woman's body, which pisses me off to no end.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Well, and it's, you know, the other, the other thing that I bring up with people is if something is ruined after you touch it, the problem is your hands.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Your hands are dirty. If it's ruined after you touch it.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I mean, that, the whole idea of that, that sort of relates to this, to the gouge your eye out thing, right? Like every, all the things that these men are doing are to avoid any mirror shining back on themselves, or to avoid them ever having to examine themselves, who they are, what they've ever done. As you say, the willingness to forgive a man for something is astounding. Like the way that, you know, we're talking about the same, the same men who will scream about what women are doing and how evil women are, are the

• 42:13Speaker 01

  ones who will cover up for in the church, a pedophile, or a, or, you know, a sexual predator, or something, you know?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Or they'll attend the remarriage of their friend who cheated on his wife with his secretary, and now he's marrying the secretary.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Or the, or the reinstatement of a pastor, uh, who had a, had an affair, or engaged in, in some kind of sexual impropriety. There's a, I'm, I'm sure you've read, um, Kristin Kobes de May.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Uh, Jesus and John Wayne. What a, what a phenomenal book. But, um, I was, I didn't know, like, I didn't grow up around religion, at least the, the years I'm conscious of. And so I was really not aware of any of this stuff, that, um, I didn't know how much of a tinderbox Colorado Springs was when I was growing up, uh, in, uh, in Longmont, Colorado, a bit north of there. But, um, yeah, all of the sexual, uh, improprieties that leaders in evangelical community were going through in the nineties is, uh, it must've been a weird time to be, uh, associated with, with those movements. But yeah, they, that's the kind of thing that, you know, you can just get right over and you can forgive

• 43:27Speaker 00

  men and you can excuse them. And, you know, the women are, are no longer valid, they're no longer valuable, they're no longer worthy, uh, who are involved. But, but for the men, uh, it's, and we, you know, it's the same thing as a judge. I think this just recently happened, didn't it? Where a judge, uh,

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Suspended a, somebody's sentence.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  A man's sentence saying, you know, we don't want to ruin this kid's life.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  So there was, there was a couple. There was a couple that happened last year, but the most recent one actually happened in the UK last week. These boys, 13, 14, pinned down and raped these 13 year old girls, filmed it, posted it online, no jail time, no consequences whatsoever because they're young offenders.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  And then last year, there was a, he's an adult, but he did this exact same thing, assaulted someone, filmed it, posted it, no jail time. He was facing 87 years for the number of counts that he was being tried for and didn't serve a day in jail.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  And it's all rooted in these ideologies and I wish people would see that. And when I talk to people about the Bible and, and I, I teach a class bimonthly where we kind of attack some of these big things we were all taught together, or these talking points of Christian nationalism. And, and we go through, and I always tell people, I'm like, I don't want to convert you to anything. That's not my job. What I am going to do is I'm going to give you as much information as I possibly can. We're going to talk about it. We're going to ask questions. You get to decide. You get to decide. And you go to the Bible and you do look at these texts where we have to, you know, we did a whole lesson on slavery, saying, yeah, the Bible does allow this. And yes, it is cruel chattel slavery. Yes, it is sex slavery and we have to wrestle with that.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  We have to let the Bible be messy. What does that say about the author? Do we believe that a good God divinely wrote that? Cause we have to talk about our, our relationship or our belief system around God, if that's the case. Or do we believe that men of a certain era who had really messed up beliefs, wrote this? And we get to ask the question, is there a better way? And, and it is, it's this, it's this wrestling and you have to be, I tell my, the people that attend all the time, I'm like, you have to let it be messy. Let it be messy. Let it be a reflection of its time. It's not a reflection of 2026, America, English speaking.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Listeners, it's something different, but um, you know, the Bible, because it does contain those things and those restrictions, as horrific as they are, gets reused and justified to treat women this way.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And they have to let it be wrong. That's something that there are a lot of people for whom it just doesn't compute.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  When I'd say, you know, this, this is wrong. This person was, was not well informed. They just got it incredibly wrong. And this is incredibly harmful. And, and we know better. That I enjoy that that rubs it off a lot of people the wrong way because.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  It rubs the right people the wrong way.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  There you go. I love that.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  And you're no stranger to that also, Monty. Talk about a little bit about your, you rubbing the right people the wrong way, because I'm sure that your work on in the social media sphere, I mean, I've seen the comment sections. I've been there. I've seen what people say. Talk to me about the response, both good and bad, as you've, as you've sort of put your story and your, your ideas and also your knowledge out there for the world to see.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  So that, I mean, I'm very glad that very early I set the boundary of I don't spend a lot of time in the comments. I'll still read them. I'll find things to respond to, or especially if people have topics or questions. And I'll say for me, because I have done that, and I laid that boundary early, the good far outweighs the bad, because a lot of my encounters with followers are in person. They'll see me at an airport, or they'll see me, and I've had people come up to me with tears in their eyes, saying, I have struggled so much with sexual shame, or I have struggled so much with this, and I didn't understand it, and you gave me the words to understand it. And that right there for me makes it totally worth it across the board. And the people in my class, we held a class yesterday, we're doing a multi-part series on how we got the Bible and what we know

• 47:54Speaker 02

  historically about the origin of each book. And there were 500 people that attended, locked in. I mean, this was an hour and a half. It was so much information. They locked in. My biggest class, I did a two-part series on around purity, purity culture and women in the church and the history of all of this. There was 3,000 attendees. And the classes I always do for free. Those are my, I always, I wanted something that remains a gift. I don't want everything behind a paywall. So for me, the classes are my gift. And, um, but yeah, there's a lot of, I get called trans a lot by men that don't have a strong jawline. Um, but I, I mean, I get a lot of, a lot of rape and death threats, hundreds

• 48:37Speaker 02

  a day. Um, I've had to filter my request inbox, of course, from somebody who's typically married, with children, has a Bible verse in their profile. Um, and of course, like you're also, your generic insults of, I'm a demon. Uh, they are obviously clearly very upset that I have a nose ring and more than one color in my hair. Um, it's, it's all kinds of things. It's, I was like, listen dude, like you can also get a nose ring if you like them that much. You can do that. Um, but I, this typically too, the same, the guys that get really vitriolic, uh, and of course I'm old, fat and ugly because when they don't have anything else to say to a woman, they attack those things. It's so boring. They should really get more treated. But then they'll show up in my DMs and this happens a lot. I'll have someone be really vitriolic in my comments

• 49:20Speaker 02

  and then send me a message asking me if I'll dom them.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Right, of course.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Like, and to which I, I don't typically respond, but if I did, I would be like, I guarantee that if that was my line of work, you couldn't afford me. I promise you, I would be outside of your price range.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  I get asked a lot, what kind of hate mail I get. And it's like, eh, I, I kind of get the generic stuff, the, the heretic and stuff like that. The gendered attacks don't work on me. And I was, my dissertation supervisor, Francesca Stavroka Pulu, I got just a little taste of-

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Her book, The Anatomy of God?

• 49:58Speaker 00

  God and Anatomy? Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. I just, sorry, let's flip that around. But I just got it. I'm so excited to start it.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Phenomenal book. I, I did a lot of the drawings that are in there.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Oh, cool.

• 50:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. But, um, I've seen just a handful of the emails that she gets every single day. And it, it, you know, the, this is a, a male dominated space and particularly if you're on like YouTube and, um, it's, I have- To say when people ask me about that, it's it's nothing compared to what a woman doing this kind of work is is going to get exposed to because it's not just the the propositions coming after a hateful comment, but it's the threats and you know, and they're so much more common than, you know, I've I've I can probably count on one hand, the number of times I've gotten an actual physical threats in a DM or an email or in a comment or something like that.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think a lot of that, Dan, is because you threaten people's ideas of, you know, and their their theologies with your with your, you know, your knowledge and what and and your content. But Monty, I think that there's something about you that like you threaten them just by being a woman who's smarter than they are, just by being a woman.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  And I am, in fact, smarter than they are.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Of course you are. And well, and and you're and you're better informed than they are. And but like, being better informed and smarter is fine if you're Dan. And it's not fine if you're Monty. And that is, that is, it what you're doing, Monty, is an especially heinous threat to their way of thinking, to their way of being.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Well, I disrupt the very foundation of how they believe women can and should exist in the world. And they use the Bible against me all the time, as far as like, Paul told you to be quiet. And I'm like, no, he didn't. He didn't write the Timothy. But they there. But there's this idea, and it's interesting, the violence is intrinsically tied to their belief about what the Bible says, because there's so much rhetoric around because I will not submit, because I will not be silent, and I will not. I deserve to be raped. I deserve violence enacted against me to force me to submit.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what God does in the Bible.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Obviously. Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  And it is, it is. In Jeremiah and in Revelation. Yeah, God will do sexual violence against the personified Israel for her infidelity. And so it is, it's. Very internalized, this notion that sexual violence and violence in general is valid if the person deserves it. And men see themselves occupying the position of God, obviously, in those relationships. So.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  And I will say that the last fall, the hate mail did take a dangerous turn for me after Charlie Kirk's murder. And I had only ever made one video responding to a comment of his or a video. And my whole thing was after, you know, when he died, I was like, listen, that's terrible. I'm not like, I'm not going to celebrate that it happened. I also not going to cry. Like, I'm not, I didn't say that. But I very much approached it that way. And so I was added to a list that was released online of Charlie Kirk's murderers. And then I was publicly doxxed in multiple forums, Christian nationalists, white supremacist groups, who there were people waiting outside my apartment building for me. And the only

• 53:39Speaker 02

  reason I caught on, one of my assistants caught the release of the address. And I didn't use the front door of my building. I always went out through the garage. And so I ended up having to leave where I lived for several days and leave town because of there was like, an imminent threat on my life, because I didn't align myself with Charlie Kirk's teachings.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Good grief.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  There's some platforms that have really like, interacted with a lot of his content. I hadn't, I had done one video disagreeing with something. But I do think there's this level of.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  I've interacted with a lot more.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Yes, you have. I've seen it. You've interacted with quite a bit. I haven't. But that's, that's just kind of the tone that it changes, you know. And I, and I also think that a lot of these people threatening me don't realize that I'm five foot 10. And I think if they actually saw me, the tone would change a little bit.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, that did strike me when we met you, because I think you were in heels as well. And surprisingly tall, which yeah, for for someone who is who's very upset at you, that might be that might be pretty threatening.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  A bit of a deterrent.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  These are, yeah, these are, these are small minded men anyway, so they're cowards too, so.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  I, I would like to, you know, we're, we're, we're gonna have to be winding down in a bit, and I would love to close us out on an optimistic front. So I would like to ask you, Monty, to maybe talk a little bit about what you see that's, because like, right now, you focus a lot on some very, very frightening things that are happening in the conservative Christian world. You, you are very politically minded, and things are not going great on that front in these United States. Are there things that you're seeing that are going well? Are you seeing signs, reasons for hope? What, what, what are you seeing out there in the world?

• 55:35Speaker 02

  I actually, especially lately, have had an almost irrational sense of hope, that by the measures of what I'm seeing in the world and in the environment, I shouldn't be that hopeful, but I am. One of the things I truly believe that things had to get this bad. We had to see Christian nationalism for what it is. We had to see how poisonous these ideas are. And they needed to be transparent and out in the front and gross to shake and shatter people out of their apathy, and to get them to challenge these ideals that many of them have been raised with since they were small children. And so I think that we're seeing that. And I have a lot of people that come to my community, who are like, oh

• 56:20Speaker 02

  my God, the scales just fell off my eyes, and I don't, I don't know what to do with all this new information. I see people showing up to protests who are, they have never done anything like that in their entire life. And they're there, and they care because of how bad it got. I'm also seeing a lot of bridge building within Communities because people are starting to realize, especially like around like with AI data centers and all of this exploitation of communities and the environment, people are starting to realize, oh, you're not my enemy. These people are like this is a top and bottom issue, not a right and left issue. So I'm seeing a lot of bridges start to be built. I'm seeing people start to show up. And so I have this hope because I think it had to get this bad.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  And because this especially Christian nationalism, it took the mask off too quickly. It got power drunk too quickly. And it's exposed now, all the things they denied being for so long. They're like, yeah, yeah, I'm racist. Yeah, I'm this. Yeah, I'm they, they, they played, they laid down their hand too quickly because they didn't think it was possible that someone could have a better hand. And so I have a lot of hope because I'm watching people change in real time. I have a lot of hope because this movement is very blatant. It is very clear. And ultimately, I and I believe that, you know, the arc of progress, the arc of justice, it bends the way you bend it.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Hope is where your hands are. So the world that we want to have is possible if we build it. And so I and I'm watching people get their hands in the dirt and that brings me a lot of hope. And I also know that from a historical standpoint, these type of systems are not sustainable. They're consuming. They have no regard for conservation or restraint. And so they consume themselves.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  And, you know, I think it's going to get bumpier before it gets better. I think that we're going to have fallout to fix. I think we have systems that completely need to change top to bottom. But I think for the first time, it's happening in the open. And we get a chance to look at the world and decide what it is that we want to live in.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Well, I, I agree with you. I love, I love that idea that, that it needed to come out of the basements of Wyoming and get out into the, you know, front and center in the world before we, before something could really address it.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  So I think that that's amazing. And I'm glad that you are there on the front lines, doing the work that you're doing and, and being the lightning rod and the, and the powerful voice that you're being. So thank you so much for being out there. And, and thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate having you.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you both for, I love the podcast. So I listen regularly. And Dan, thank you for just your knowledge. You really opened a doorway for a lot of people to have access to information that they didn't even know was there available for them. I have people that meet me all the time publicly, who mention you specifically as a key part of helping them get freer and more healed in their lives. And so I want to refer those compliments to you.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  Well, I'm touched. I appreciate it. Thank you very, very much. And, and I'm honored that, that I get to participate in this, the same journey that, that you're taking in. And, and maybe one day we'll see a little more parody in, in the reactions from, from the folks who are on the other side. But I don't think, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Not soon, but it will happen.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  But I, you, you mentioned that you, you hear from folks who, where your work has been very healing for them. And that's been one of the most unexpected, but the most valued feedback that I've gotten along the, this, this journey as well. I never anticipated that was what this work would do for folks, but it's really changed things for me. And, and I see this work in a, in a much different light as a result of meeting people who have had experiences very similar to yours and have, have needed to be, feel like they have permission to think about these things and research these things and ask questions and, and, and take seriously the, the doubts and the intuitions that they have.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  And one of the first messages I ever got when my, when my page first started exploding, and I screenshot, I have a screenshot of really powerful messages and comments that I save in a folder when I'm questioning myself in life. But this one I sat with for a long time. It was a 14 year old trans student. Who reached out to me and said, "Thank you so much for teaching me that I'm not an abomination like my parents say I am. I've been contemplating that my only choices were to live a lie or end my life. And you've taught me I don't have to do that." And I would never have anticipated a comment like that. And that's one I think about a lot.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's important work. And I'm glad that you were able to get yourself out of that headspace and that mindset when you were. So you could be such a powerful voice for critical thought and a bit more humanity in the world. Yeah, we appreciate you very much.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  It's a high bar, but you're hitting it pretty good. Where, if, for those, for those, you know, 12 of our listeners who don't already follow you wherever you are, where can they go? We'll try to get some links in the in the show notes as well, but tell people where to go to find you.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  So Instagram's my big baby. It's M-O-N-T-E-M-A-D-E-R. And that's everywhere, YouTube, the TikTok, everywhere, everywhere that you consume content, I'm there. And I do those classes twice a month. You can find that information on my website as well, monti mater.com. We publish those and those are always free. And then I have new music coming out this summer, too. Finally been able to get some music and some art done for my own reprieve, but that'll all be under the same name.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Love it. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate having you. If you, friends, would like to become a part of making this show continue to happen, you can always go and be one of our patrons, go and listen to the after-party that we recorded with Monty. You'll, I promise you'll dig it. That's just patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Thanks so much to Roger Gaudy for editing the show, and we will talk to you all again next time.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  Hi, everybody.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

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