My guest this week is Jon Steingard, the lead singer and guitarist for Hawk Nelson. In late spring of 2020, Jon posted a gut-wrenching confession on Instagram that he no longer believed in God. He is one of the more prominent recent high profile deconverts. Jon risked more than most by publicly acknowledging his lack of faith as his career was tied to the Christian music world. This confession and the public discussion of his loss of faith has and will continue to have reverberations throughout the Christian community for some time. Jon has made himself widely available to honestly and vulnerably tell his story both to the Christian community and to the atheist humanist communities. It is Jon’s honest seeking after truth and his willingness to respectfully engage apologists and other prominent Christians that are having such a large impact. He has become a safe person for others in the Christian world to discuss their doubts. In my conversation with Jon, he describes a major turning point in his life when he saw poverty, starvation, and abandonment of the Batwa children and community in Uganda. This began a quite reasonable time of questioning: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and good, why are the Batwa suffering? In January of 2021, Jon started a podcast and YouTube channel called The Wonder and Mystery of Being. Links Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/jonsteingard/
Confession of his lack of belief
https://www.instagram.com/p/CAbHm10lt7w/ The Wonder and The Mystery of Being podcast
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUjFcPl10_QMxoevHL4jLXg Twitter
https://twitter.com/jonsteingard
Response to Brian Houston
https://twitter.com/jonsteingard/status/1313552919661342725 Interact Full show notes with quotes from the episode
https://gracefulatheist.wordpress.com/2021/01/03/jon-steingard-the-wonder-and-the-mystery-of-being/ Deconversion from Christianity
https://gracefulatheist.wordpress.com/2017/12/03/deconversion-how-to/Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History
https://gracefulatheist.wordpress.com/2019/05/16/jennifer-michael-hecht-doubt-a-history/Clergy Project
https://clergyproject.org/ Make audio snippet quotes of the podcast
Vurbl: https://vurbl.com/station/4hdO0KfiVRV/ Attribution "Waves" track written and produced by Makaih Beats
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Makaih_Beats  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/