Deliverance

Little Sammy has three loves. Bumble bees, the Bible and boys. Raised by preachers, he’s kept one of these secret, but Deliverance Day is on the way. A very big thank you to Dr. Sammy Ramsey and Pastor Roosevelt Ramsey for sharing their story! You can learn more about Sammy and his work with bees here https://www.drsammy.online/. Big love and thanks to Lulu Miller as well. Sammy and Lulu work together to make a kids podcast for Radiolab, it’s called Terrestrials https://radiolab.org/radiolab-kids?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20986778840&gbraid=0AAAAAD9J8hHDQdavMg_3w5xp-kfQnSMwd&gclid=CjwKCAjw6MPRBhBTEiwAd-7Mr4rfvRUQFT-Mf5hWZb2LV33gKbjiSoA-BJ40vvjAtK7lYGa9fWVDBxoCEtEQAvD_BwE and they just dropped an episode all about dads in the animal world... How they’re different than what you’ve been taught. It’s called “The DADventure.” It’s a very fun romp, beautifully sound designed and full of great stories. Go listen to Terrestrials https://radiolab.org/radiolab-kids?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20986778840&gbraid=0AAAAAD9J8hHDQdavMg_3w5xp-kfQnSMwd&gclid=CjwKCAjw6MPRBhBTEiwAd-7Mr4rfvRUQFT-Mf5hWZb2LV33gKbjiSoA-BJ40vvjAtK7lYGa9fWVDBxoCEtEQAvD_BwE on any podcast platform! Produced by Lulu Miller and Nancy López, original score by Nicholas Marks. Season 17 - Episode 28 Join Snap+ https://snap.supercast.com/if you aren't already a member! Get bonus eps, an ad-free stream and more. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 1:21Speaker 01

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• 1:52Glynn Washington?

  Okay, so today's story has a very strange providence. So imagine I'm minding my business, you know, I get a note from one of my heroes, Lulu Miller, co-host of Radiolab, author of books, all-around cool person, and Lulu says that she has a story. She lays it out, and I'm thinking, this is gonna be a very strange Radiolab piece. And she says, no, no, no, no, it's kind of more in the Snap lane. What? Lulu, do you mean, are you suggesting, could it be a Radiolab Snap Judgment Co-Production situation? Yes.

• 2:36Glynn Washington?

  Snap Nation, today on Radiosnap, Snap Lab, we proudly present Deliverance. And today's mashup episode begins with always curious Lulu Miller, the host of Radiolab. It's about her friend slash fellow nerd, Sammy Ramsey. Sami's a rock star etymologist.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Got you. I didn't choose the bug life, the bug life chose me.

• 3:01Glynn Washington?

  Now a bug correspondent for Radiolab's kids' show, Terrestrials.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst, we are the...

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Bestrials.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Bestrials. Yeah.

• 3:14Glynn Washington?

  And one afternoon last year, Sammy took Lulu and her wife to his favorite tea house in Boulder, Colorado, and ended up sharing a part of his scientific origin story.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  And we just suddenly, like, found ourselves in this really deep and surprising and intimate story, and I'd never heard anything like it.

• 3:35Glynn Washington?

  Now Sammy had never spoken about this in public. Later, Lulu asked him if he'd ever want to tell it again in a studio to share with the world.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  There was some level of nervousness about it because I'm like, how, how could this impact me? Especially in the very polarized context that we exist in now?

• 3:55Glynn Washington?

  So he thought about it, and he realized.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Authenticity is very important for me not to lose myself. And I just have to lean in.

• 4:07Glynn Washington?

  So yes, this is a sciency story. You get a little bit about beetles and bees and other cool sciency things. But the heart of this, this is about love. Radio Snap, take it away, Lulu Miller.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Sammy grew up outside of DC and one of his favorite fashion choices was to wear his pet millipede around his neck to school.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  I've always been quirky, you know, just that little kid with his elbows on the ground and his fists on his chin staring into different books about insects and superhero comics. And I just really enjoyed that in so many of these books, there was just a world out there that was so vibrant and full of adventure. And no matter what, people always accepted the strange quirky people in the end. They always found their place.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Which wasn't exactly how things went for Sammy when he got to middle school.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  I immediately didn't fit. Day one, it was just very, very, very clear that something was really different about me. People treated me like I was this very odd thing.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  But instead of shrinking away.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  When people would say things about me and to me that were rude, I would jump back in with a rebuttal. I would point out that they were being problematic and rude. I would point.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  It bothered them enough that they stopped doing it.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  So this is what age? This is like 12?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Uh, 12.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Okay. That's such a hard age.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Where did that strength, like, where do you think you got that? Where did that come from?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Faith.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  See, Sammy's not just the son of a preacher. He's the son of-

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Two preachers.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  Two preachers.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Preacher man and preacher woman. I mean, when we were little kids, just learning our alphabet, my parents taught us a scripture for every letter-

• 6:13Speaker 04

  No way.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  I'm so serious. Like, we were literally like, A, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, Romans 3:23. B, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. C, like, all the way through to Z.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  My God. Do you still know it in your head?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  D, do unto others as you would have them do to you. E, encourage one another and build each other up. F, for I know the plans that I have for you, and they are plans of good and not evil.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Wow. Wow. And so you're saying that, like, that just scripture was- was as basic as, like, refrigerator magnets for everyone else?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  And they, they also provide you with this scaffolding that feels so objective. Do things this way, do things that way. I could recall all these scriptures to mind that would make it very clear to me how to behave in any particular situation.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Like, say, should your classmates be teasing you for being different? There was a scripture for that.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Romans 12:2. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove that which is good and acceptable and the perfect will of God. Church was a refuge.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Literally. Sammy's parents held church services in their living room.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Sure did.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  And it was in that living room where one hot Sunday morning, little Sammy witnessed his dad, Pastor Roosevelt Ramsey, do something that would change everything for him.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  My dad would always say, "All right, everybody. We're opening the doors of the church." And he'd extend his hands, and my mom would sing, and people would come down to the altar, and they would pray, and they would get prayed for.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  And that morning?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  This individual walks up, and kind of with this look of- reluctance isn't quite the word, nervousness. My dad puts his hand on the man's head, and he starts praying for him very loudly.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  Sammy knew his dad to be pretty soft spoken, but suddenly he heard this shift in his voice.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  He starts speaking directly to the evil spirit.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  He says, "In the name of Jesus, you will loose your hold on this man. Loose your hold."

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Sammy says he can't be sure, but he believes the man had been struggling with drug abuse.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  The man starts to shake and scream. And then, you know, the man is like crying, sobbing, kind of like yelling. There's no real words from him. And he even vomits, which was frightening.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  And my dad keeps praying and, you know, it seems like he is almost spurred on by the fact that this man starts to vomit. When you see something like that, it doesn't feel like it's something that you're imagining it. This person is vomiting in response to prayer.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Wow. And is what's going on there similar to my concept as an outsider of an exorcism?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so it totally is. Deliverance is this quirky word that we use in the Christian vernacular of, there is a problem going on in your life. Through the deliverance of God, you can change that pattern of behavior. And so, for all intents and purposes, it serves the same purpose and is the same thing. It's the idea of the expunging of a demon from a person. So, I'm a little kid sitting here next to my older brother, my older sister. It's hot. We are sitting in these green folding chairs. It's clear that there's a struggle here, and my dad is winning.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And so, he says, "In the name of Jesus, I bind your works and your tactics against this man's life. You have no place here, you wicked and evil spirit. I cast you to the pit."

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Wow. And Sammy felt proud.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  That's my father, standing there, who is also serving as this incredibly powerful spiritual leader who has the ability to drag demonic forces out of a person, kicking and screaming.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  Now, what was happening on the inside to the person being delivered? That was always a little murkier.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  People are pretty quiet about it. And you just, for people that you already know, most people in the church have an idea of what that person is going up there for. Nobody had an idea of what I would be going up there for.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Hmm. Did you go up?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Hmm, not for my dad. No, no, no, no, no. That was not, uh, that was not a conversation that I was going to have with my dad. Not in that context, no. I went up at another church in another town so that my family would never hear about it.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Huh, but you did go up.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. A brother needed prayer.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Sammy first noticed something was up when he was playing one of his favorite video games. This one martial arts one.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Google Hua Rong. H W A O R A N G.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  W A, okay, I'm getting there. Okay, here we go. Hua Rong. Oh, okay. Please describe for me this slice of pixelated meat.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Lulu, you're killing me. It's him and his taekwondo regalia. You know, he's got the taekwondo pants and just the tiniest little shirt thing. It covers nothing. And I just, I, as a little, like, I don't know, like 12-year-old kid or whatever, playing this game, I was very, I was very aware there is something about this gentleman and his costumes that, um, I like this.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  I was terrified that I was being oppressed by an evil spirit. I was terrified that, that this wasn't just me being a quote unquote "late bloomer" or any of the other things that I told myself.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  But as terrifying as it was to consider that an evil spirit may have truly entered his mind.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  That, in some ways, helped me not like crumble and be overwhelmed by, by all of this. Because to my mind, if it was external, it could be fixed. And so, in quite a bit of desperation and desire to make sure that I could continue living in a way that was quote unquote "right", I decided to get delivered myself.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why not go to your dad? He's like the, he's your dad and he's the best. He's, he's, he's great at it.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Lou. Like, first of all, it's your dad. Like, as much approval as I had from my family, I still didn't feel like I was what my dad wanted me to be. Somebody who watched football with him and fixed cars with him and so on. I mean, he had told me actually on multiple occasions that, you know, "this is how a man behaves," by juxtaposition with the way that I was behaving. So I went to a church that had a youth revival.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  This was a big event at a megachurch in a different state with a different pastor. And best of all, his parents did not come. And after a bunch of music and friendly hellos, the pastor stood up and welcomed anyone who wanted to get prayed for to step forward. And that was when Sammy took a deep breath and stepped forward to get delivered.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Like, what did that walk feel like?

• 14:39Speaker 02

  It was a looong walk.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I just, I was so afraid, so afraid. And so I kept walking even though I wanted to stop, even though I was scared that somebody might see me or recognize me or figure something out. And when I got up front and had the opportunity to actually speak to the pastor himself, I could only whisper it. And I hated the fact, hated with a capital H, no, all caps, hated the fact that he told the other people around him who were praying for me, what they were praying for me about.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  This young man is struggling with homosexuality. I'm like, no!

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Then down came the pastor's hand.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  The giant hand on the forehead and then other people like holding on to me or touching me and like my shoulders and stuff. Most of the individuals praying for me were women, aside from the pastor. And it was just very, very, very loud. And I cried. I cried a lot. I broke down. I like, I fell to my knees. And I just wanted so badly to believe that it had worked.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Did it?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  So, um, story time!

• 16:19Speaker 04

  I can't wait. Got the popcorn?

• 16:23Speaker 04

  It's now years later. Sammy has landed at Cornell University. He joins the campus ministry, Crusade for Christ.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  I loved that campus ministry. It was full of the most touchy, feely, emotionally vulnerable, sweet guys that I've ever met in my life.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  In his junior year, he is hanging out with one of those guys from his ministry in his dorm room, playing video games.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  And he was a looker, just a tall, dashing gentleman with like the cutest amount of facial hair on his chin.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  These eyes that had like three different colors in them and there's like this orange oranginess in there. It's just, it was, it was

• 17:04Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Look.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Orange tie dye eyes with a like little scruff? I can't. Okay.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  So we're, you know, playing video games and he starts goofing around with the controller, like hitting buttons. And I was like, hey, you are not helping.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  He grabs me and picks me up and puts me like between his legs.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  So I was like still in a little bit of a sense of denial. I was like, oh, okay, Sammy, don't panic. I'm sure this is something that straight guys do all the time and you just didn't hang out with enough straight guys in high school to know that, you know?

• 17:47Speaker 04

  To know they prefer playing video games like in each other's laps.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Precisely. That's totally a normal thing. I was like, you are no longer helping. And he said, well, maybe I want your attention to be on something else. He leans forward, very forward gentleman, and just brings these lips together. I was like,

• 18:14Speaker 02

  So that whole experience forced me to consider something that I was not ready to consider. But maybe there wasn't actually something wrong with me. Maybe this wasn't actually a demon. Maybe this was something innate that couldn't be prayed out of me because it's a part of who I am.

• 18:56Glynn Washington?

  For as long as he can remember, faith has been Sammy's guide for doing the right thing. But what does he do now? Stay tuned.

• 19:18Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Lab Judgment. Terrified that an evil spirit was oppressing him, Sammy went to get himself delivered. Then in college, Sammy experienced his first kiss.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  It's at this point in the story that many people might turn away from the church, from the institution that rejects this core part of who they are. But Sammy, he turned toward it.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  My mom has this gigantic study Bible. It is an epic Bible that everybody like who knows her, like they know about this giant Bible that she opens that has multiple translations of scripture side by side. So it's like having four Bibles rolled into one, as big as a Bible normally is. I swiped that Bible. And I took it back with me to school and just was constantly going through it, trying to figure all of this out.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Page after page, night after night.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Reading the Bible, amassing things like commentaries and concordances to help me understand this at as deep a level as I possibly could.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  God, you're just a nerd in your wiring.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh. Such a nerd. It was the most scientific way.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Let me read all the textbooks. Yeah, okay. Got it. Scripture science. Okay, you science the scripture.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  I science the scripture.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  What are you searching for? And what do you find?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  I found so much beauty in the love letter that's written to humanity from God.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  Hmm, what do you mean?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Well, I went in looking for legal text to explain to me what I could and couldn't do as someone who is attracted to men and is a man. And instead, I found something very different. What I kept seeing throughout Scripture was the beauty of diversity. See, and stay with me on this one.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Okay. I'm here.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  So I was already in training to be an entomologist at the time. I was getting my undergraduate degree in entomology. So I started looking at what we know about God from biology. And you see that God absolutely loves diversity.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  How so?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  There's literally nothing that exists that God made one kind of. And it's so interesting for me to think about this. Was it Holding? Who was asked, "What do you know about God from biology?" And his response was, "That God has an inordinate fondness for beetles."

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Huh, because there's so many species?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  So many species. There are more species of beetles than there are birds, fish, and mammals combined together.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  No.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Which is insane to think about. Because I'm not saying there's more insects than them. Just the beetles, that one category.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  That is bonkers.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  So when you think about that bonkersness, I want you to consider what it says about a God who would spend that kind of time caring about that level of diversity. And then thinking about how important diversity is, that it would even be a core value with God, such that it's built into God's character Himself.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  The Bible says that God exists as three beings in one. So even within the existence of God, there is diversity built in.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  So you're saying like the Son, Father, and the Holy Spirit?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. That's diversity, baby.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Wow, wow.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  I've never heard that take. That's a great take.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  This one's a Sammy original.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  God Himself exists as three beings in one, embodying diversity in the very character of God. And the Bible says very clearly that God is love. So what space do we have to even think for a moment that love itself would not be diverse?

• 23:29Speaker 04

  And as Sammy kept reading the Bible and commentaries about familiar stories, he started finding all kinds of new interpretations.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  You see David and Jonathan with a love deeper than the romantic love that he has felt for his more than one wife. And you also see something really beautiful in the story of Ruth and Naomi, where Ruth says, "Please don't ask me to leave you, because wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you sleep, I will always sleep."

• 24:01Speaker 02

  But when I was mulling over these ideas, I remember one of my friends, Justin, saying to me, "Well, maybe the Bible doesn't say anything in favor of what you're looking for, like a loving gay relationship. And it says a lot of things in favor of straight people." I was like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, maybe you're right there." But that didn't really last for very long, because as I read through Scripture, I did see myself represented.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  And he reread the book of Samuel.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  It's in the book? That is my namesake, the person that I'm named after. And God says to Samuel, "Man looks at the outward appearance, but I am God and I look at the heart." And that moment of me recognizing, like so much of that I've thought of myself as quirky and different, those things don't actually matter. What about my heart? What about the core of who I am? What about my character and the seat of my character? And what drives the way that I behave and how I interact with other people? So what reason would I have theologically to distance myself from a context in which I can truly be authentic,

• 25:19Speaker 02

  in which I can truly express the beautiful, diverse love that's embodied in who God is? What reason do I have to push that away? Well, people's disapproval. And am I going to allow other people's disapproval to actually guide the way that I live my life? "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove that which is good and acceptable and the perfect will of God." Romans 12:2. I was finally ready to tell my mom.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  He chose New Year's Eve, 2011. The ball had dropped and the rest of the family had gone to bed.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  She was sitting next to me. I stared straight forward. I tried to manage all of my internal bodily functions because I was burping out of nervousness. I was like, okay, I have to say this. And she looked a bit, what's the word? Concerned? I was not even remotely surprised when she said, "So you're going to be the one to tell your father this?" And I'm like, oh, I know. And so, think about this. It was New Year's Eve when I told my mom. It was November when I told my dad.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Almost a year.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Almost an entire year.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  When I told my dad, everyone was worried. My sister was worried and she was like, Sammy, I don't think you should do this alone. I want to be there. And my mom was like, I want to be there, too. My brother was like, guys, I think you need to let Sammy handle this one by himself. Like, this needs to be a man-to-man kind of thing. And I was like, look, I'll take all the help I can get. Come on, y'all.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  So my sister and my mom and I piled into my parents' bedroom. My dad was on the bed.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Wait, is this sneak attack? Like, he's about to go to bed?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yep. You know, I-

• 27:28Speaker 04

  He's like in his jammies and you just are like-

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Lulu, these were not the best choices.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  No, hey, no, I'm just trying to get the scene. I'm not judging.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  You know, Dad looked like he was in a good enough mood. So I was like, hey, Dad, I have something to tell you.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  He looked at my mom. He looked at my sister. And he said, no.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  My mom shook her head like, yeah, Roosevelt, he's gay. This look overcame him of like shock and then embarrassment. And then he picked up a pillow and put it over his face.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  He didn't have a lot to say that evening. And my dad didn't accept that at all.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Which made things hard at home, where Sammy was still living at the time.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  We weren't talking very much. And after I'd come out to him, even less than that, because he was so uncomfortable with me. He couldn't even look at me when we would talk. He would just kind of look down or look up or look away.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  There was this stony silence to his father, Sammy said, although every so often he'd break out of it.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  He tried to talk me out of it. He brought up Sodom and Gomorrah. He brought up a few other scriptures. And my mom shook her head like, ooh, don't try that one. I tried that one.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  One time, he gave Sammy a book to read.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  It was a very fiery evangelical book about the evils of homosexuality.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  Another time, he popped into Sammy's room with an idea.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  He said, Sammy, do you think you might need to, you know, experience something with a woman first? And then, you know, that that'll fix things. I was like, are you suggesting that I find a house of ill repute? Pay some money for this experience? He suggested that he would help me find a context. And I was like, OK, Dad, and this is not one of his. This is a moment where he feels like he was very much acting outside of his, his character, but he was panicking because he thought that my immortal soul was in danger. And I was like, Dad, wouldn't you consider that a sin? He said, yeah, but it's a smaller sin than if you go out here and you live a life of sin with another man.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  My sister hit the roof. So that didn't go well.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  And finally, Sammy's dad begged him to try deliverance.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  I'm like, oh, sir, you are several years too late. I've been through that. He wanted me to just try it like Sammy won't. Why won't you just try it, though? And what I had to keep explaining to him was I don't want to be any different than the way that I am now.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  And with that, father and son went back to their separate corners.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  In a lot of ways, I just I'd given up on the idea that we were ever going to be close, that I was going to have a close relationship with my father. I thought that's just how it was going to be. Now, at the time, I still wasn't sure what life looked like as a queer person. I wasn't sure whether I was going to date somebody. I didn't know what queer relationships looked like, families, babies, children, like any of that.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  When Sammy got to graduate school.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  I was 23. And so this was a graduate school in Maryland. I joined an evangelical church in graduate school. I joined pretty quickly and became a part of a little bit of everything and.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  He sang in the choir. He led Bible study and worship. And the more comfortable he grew with the congregation, he came out to two or three people.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  After a while, the group grew to, it was nine people who knew about me. And they were just so supportive and caring. I loved that. They would just spend time with me talking about all of this. And I felt like I was ready to really talk with my pastor about it, too. Even if I wanted to squirm, even if I was scared for different reasons, honesty demanded that I let them know something that potentially would have precluded them allowing me to be in a position of leadership otherwise. So when I did tell my pastor, he thanked me for telling him. He said, Sammy, I know what you're afraid of.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  I know that you're afraid that people are going to leave you, or abandon you, or excise you from Christian community. And he's like, you don't have to worry about that with me or this church. He was like, you know, I love you. This church loves you and cares about you, and that's just clear. That's just evident. I don't have any problem with you continuing to lead, you know, in the different ways that you're leading, which was really nice. And all of us celebrated. We're like, this is amazing. This is great.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  And this is how it went for the next few months. If Sammy wasn't at the lab at school studying tiny honeybee parasites, he was at church with his friends.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  And it literally wasn't until a fateful encounter with the street preacher that things went downhill.

• 32:47Glynn Washington?

  After the break, Sammy faces off with a street preacher on campus. Stay tuned.

• 33:01Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to a special Snap Judgment Radio Lab Marriage: The Deliverance episode. My name is Glenn Washington. When we last we left, Sammy joined a church with a pastor who gave him the embrace that his father did not. But then he found himself in a moral face-off with a street preacher.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  Sammy was strolling through campus.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  There was a, a street preacher who was heckling students who walked by and using the Bible to do so. If he saw somebody that didn't look like the straight laced version of a Christian that he thought someone should, he would single them out and start throwing scriptures at them and telling them that they need to repent. So I decided to stand next to him. And when he would throw out scriptures that were unloving and uncaring, I would counter with the scripture that affirmed God's love for them. He was not pleased. But then when he realized that I capped it up with a scripture at the end, he was like, well, I guess I can't push back against that.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  But when the street preacher targeted someone passing by that he assumed to be gay.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  And he turned to me and he was like, no, no, no, no, no. That one's gay. And I was like, gay people are loved by God too. And he was like, what are you talking about? Where do you go to church? Who would let you believe that gay people are loved by God as they are? They need to change. I was like, we do not need to change. I am gay and my pastors at church are aware of that. And he was like, who are your pastors? And I'm over here all big and bold and brazen. He think he gonna say something to my pastors that they don't know. And he was like, I've got to call them. I've got to call them. I'll let the whole denomination know.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  So the next day, I get a call from my pastor and he simply tells me that he would like for me to come to his office that day if possible. And so I show up at the church, I walk in, I'm not worried, I'm not bothered. I mean, it's, it's church. This is my space. But when I walk into his office and see the look on his face, I realize there's a problem. And he said, I got this voicemail. And I immediately think, this can't be about the street preacher. Can it be? And then he tells me, Sammy, this has been a problem for a while, and I just haven't wanted to say anything. And I was like, what do you mean? He was like, I've had more than one conversation with people at this church. After I preached my sermon about homosexuality,

• 35:38Speaker 02

  more than one person came to me and said, well, in your sermon, you said that you can't be gay and be a Christian. But Sammy's gay, and he very clearly loves Jesus. So it doesn't really seem like that's true. People know that you're sharper than me. You're getting your PhD. So when you say stuff, people listen to you. And he said, how am I supposed to run a church if people are questioning whether I understand the Bible properly?

• 36:09Speaker 02

  So what would you, how, where will we go from here? And he said, you need to stop talking about homosexuality. And you need to stop telling people that you're a gay person, that you're same-sex attracted, like this entire subject. I'm putting the kibosh to it. You're not talking about this anymore at our church. I was like, are you asking me to go back into the closet? And I was like, you do know that that's an impossible decision, right? And he's like, Sammy, that, or I'm going to need you to leave.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Now, I wanted to tell people about what happened. I wanted to tell people so that they would understand what occurred.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  But Sammy never got the chance to do that.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  So he called all church meeting. And one of my friends, knowing what was about to occur, took me out of town so that I wouldn't be around when it happened.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  But later Sammy gets a text on his phone. It's a video of the pastor at this church meeting.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  He told everybody that I was a danger to Christian community because I had been ensnared in sexual sin.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  And it was really, really tough to hear someone else take the liberty to tell my story, because I was only out to a handful of people at the church at the time. To hear someone take that and declare it to an entire group of hundreds of people. And it really tore me up.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  When do you tell your parents that you've been excommunicated?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Immediately.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  I went home and I cried. And my mom and dad, of course, wanted to understand why, because I was a grown man at, what, 25, crying in their house? And I told them what happened and they were upset.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  His mom comforted him, clearly felt bad that her son was hurting. And his dad, he looked really angry, which Sammy figured was his quiet agreement with that pastor.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  After that, no one from that church continued associating with me. And that's part of how excommunication tends to work. There's like soft excommunication, where you can continue to at least show up, but you don't get to be officially a member at a church. And then there's hard excommunication, where you can't even come to the church itself.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Wait, and which one? Which one?

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Oh, I got hard excommunication.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And so overnight, that entire community of people stopped speaking to me. So I just didn't have social connection anymore, didn't know how I would reestablish social connection and just felt really sad and depressed. So I threw myself into my graduate school work. I was at the university all day, every day, sometimes doing 18-hour days, where at the end of the day, like, there was nothing to do but sleep.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  All this time, Sammy had been working on a theory for his doctorate thesis.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  I was trying to figure out what was leading to these massive die-offs in honeybee colonies.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Colony collapse disorder, maybe you remember this. It was a big mystery over a decade ago. And people had come up with all kinds of conspiracy theories about why bees were dying off. Maybe it was secret government activities or cell phones. But Sammy, along with many other scientists, believed that at least one of the culprits was a parasite, a little parasitic mite that was somehow infecting the bees.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  In addition to that, in order to test that theory, I had to find a way to raise those parasites in the lab, which is something that people haven't been able to do. We had an old rickety incubator that sometimes would go down and you had to be there in case it did to reset it, or all of your mites would die. And it was something that took constant trial and error over and over and over of me trying different things and babysitting these mites, constantly being there.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  And not only did he manage to keep these little critters alive.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  But I was able to get them to reproduce in the lab. I was able to get them to survive in this context that I made of an in vitro rearing system for them.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  This was a really big breakthrough. Sammy was actually one of the people to crack the case for why so many bees were dying.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  It was my research on these parasites that showed that they're actually liquefying the bee's liver and sucking that out of their body. And I was able to achieve something.

• 41:07Speaker 04

  You're like an unparalleled scientist and human and science communicator, and it's a rare career. And it's, it's sort of like, to picture some of that, starting out of that loneliness and that, that exile is really, that's, it's hard.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  It's a big chunk of the origin story.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  I look back on that constantly and think, man, that experience at church hurt me in such a way where it caused me to do something that was really great, but I can't look at what I achieved there and not feel a little bit conflicted about it, because that project came out of a lot of hurt.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  And somewhere along the way, as he was focusing on all these little bugs, his phone lights up with a text message from his dad saying,

• 42:04Speaker 02

  I need to talk to you.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  My dad and I weren't having a lot of conversation. We weren't talking very much. So I wasn't expecting anything good when he sent me that text message. He said, come on, let's go to the Olive Garden,

• 42:21Speaker 02

  is his favorite restaurant in the world. We got to the Olive Garden and he told me that he'd been doing some thinking. And then he was really, really upset about what had happened to me at that church.

• 42:37Speaker 05

  I was kind of, you know, feeling your pain, what you were going through and so forth. You know, you can feel that, you know, coming from another person that they're going through a certain order, whatever in life.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  This, of course, is Sammy's dad, Pastor Roosevelt Ramsey.

• 42:53Speaker 05

  You have a tendency to feel the pain, and especially somebody, someone close to you, like a son. I was hurt too, you know, that they would do this thing to you.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  And he told me that he was really upset with my pastor for the ways that he had talked about me being a gay man.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  Well, my thoughts about him is that he just really didn't go to the Lord and, you know, ask God what's going on here.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  And I was kind of confused at this point. I was like, Dad, this is, he used the exact same language that you use. When I did come out to you, you came in my room, you, you asked me to consider, you know, changing. You asked me to consider getting prayed for, getting delivered. You asked me to consider, like, all of these ways of not being gay. And it made me feel pretty distant from you.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  At that time and point, you know, um, my feelings, my emotions, all that stuff was all out there, you know? So when this hit me, man, it was like a meteor or something coming out of space and boom, you know?

• 44:11Speaker 05

  But that's why I had to pray and ask God, you know, to help me in this situation. And what happened after that, you know, then I began to feel different about it, you know?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  I think it just really, really got to him to see me so sad. And he explained that that forced him into introspection. It forced him to recognize the same way that that pastor was treating you, I've been treating you. And so I couldn't be mad at him without being mad at myself.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  And then unbeknownst to Sammy at the time, Pastor Ramsey did the same thing that Sammy had done. He went to the Bible, searching for guidance.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  The Bible, if you look into the Bible, it's all a great big love story.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Amen to that.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, how God loved us. And that's how we are supposed to love each other. You know, and because you came out and said that you was a gay man and so on and so forth, you know, that's no reason for me not to love you anymore. If anything, it's for me to love you even more.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  This idea that it is about love, that man looks at the outward appearance, man looks at how these things appear, but God actually sees the heart of it. The fact that my dad and I were resonating on that same wavelength, it was really beautiful to me. Like, it hit me really hard.

• 45:49Speaker 05

  Awesome. God don't operate like that. God is about love, you know?

• 46:01Speaker 02

  He had told me that he was, I guess at this point you could call it coming around. But I feel like I've come around.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 46:16Speaker 02

  it took me years to accept myself. And I gave my dad, what, a few months before I gave up on him? I sat there with my dad with my eyes welling up and I said to my dad, I,

• 46:33Speaker 02

  I didn't, I wasn't prepared for you coming around. And he said, a set of words I will never forget. With a son like you, how could I not?

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  And I fell apart. I was done. And

• 46:55Speaker 02

  I mean, smash cut to a few months ago. You know, I've gotten on to the dating apps because everybody says this is, this is how people find people now. And I'm like, this is weird. I don't know that I like this.

• 47:06Speaker 06

  Like Grindr, Graph, all those?

• 47:09Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:10Speaker 06

  No, I don't know. Okay. What? Like eHarmony, Christian gay?

• 47:14Speaker 02

  No, no, no, not that either. Not, we've gone too far in either direction.

• 47:17Speaker 06

  Okay, okay.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  I'm sitting down with my family at dinner and start talking with them about it. And so they asked me about this guy that I was like, oh, well, you know, he seemed.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  Wait, they're looking at your Tinder? You're like swiping?

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Well, they asked me about this guy and I was like, well, and so I, I opened up Tinder and they, you know, there's this flurry of excitement as they start talking about like, oh, but this guy, I don't know about him. He seems a little, my mom says, he seems a little, I don't know, frisky.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  My sister was like, no, no, no, mom thirsty. Thirsty is the word that we're using now. And then my dad chimes in and he was like, well, that one, you said that he's a school teacher. Now, you know, school teachers always broke. I don't know that you want to end up

• 48:04Speaker 02

  a school teacher. And my sister says, but, but mom's a school teacher. And she says, Ashley, Ashley, he's right. He is right. We are broke all the time. We never have any money.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  And just that moment of realization that my entire family is comfortable enough with this subject that they treated me the exact same way that they did with my older brother.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Something about that was just incredible.

• 48:45Glynn Washington?

  A very, very big thank you to Sammy Ramsey and Pastor Roosevelt Ramsey for sharing their story. A fun fact is that Sammy turned his father onto bees.

• 48:56Speaker 05

  Oh, let me interject something right here. And because of my beautiful and wonderful son here, Samuel, I am now what I call an American beekeeper. I'm going into my fourth year, and I think I'm doing it pretty good with the guidance of my son here, Samuel Ramsey. So I thank God for that, you know, and we have a relationship like never before.

• 49:25Glynn Washington?

  To learn more about him and his work with bees in particular, on his website. You can find the link to that in our show notes. And you should know, Sammy and Lulu, like a kids podcast for Radiolab, it's called Terrestrials. And they just dropped an episode, The Dad Venture, all about dads in the animal world. It's a super fun romp. Terrestrials, wherever you get your podcasts. Original score was by Nicholas Marks, was produced by Lulu Miller from Radiolab, and Snap Judgment's own Nancy Lopez.

• 50:07Glynn Washington?

  If you missed even a moment, know that an entire world of Snap storytelling awaits. KQD in San Francisco is Snap Judgment's Orbiting Hall of Justice and big news at long last. If you dig Snap storytelling, Snap Plus is now available. Subscribe for bonus Snap episodes, a Snap newsletter, special Snap meetup, Snap stuff, and more. Snap Plus, snapjudgment.org. On Team Snap, the union representative producers, artists, editors, and engineers, I'm members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51, robots. Please note that no Snap series content may be used for

• 50:49Glynn Washington?

  Testing or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission, Snap is brought to you by the team that refuses to cast demons out of the Uber Blue Sir Mr. Mark Ristich, no matter how much he begs. And there's Nancy Lopez, Pat McSweeney Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Goryo, John Facile, Shayla Shealy, Taylor Decott, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge. And this is not the news. No way is this the news. In fact, you could quote Ezekiel 25:17, "I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. My vengeance be upon thee." Yes.

• 51:30Glynn Washington?

  You could quote it as if it were a real Bible verse and not just something made up for the movie Pulp Fiction, and you would still, still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.