Hello, and welcome back to flipping tables. This is a little bit different episode today.

As things have changed, first of all, thank you so so so much for your support online.

I opened my phone today and I saw that there's 450,000 people who follow me on Instagram,

which is still incredibly shocking to me. And I'm deeply grateful. And with an influx of new

followers, I've gotten a lot of questions, both on Instagram and on my Patreon, about my own

deconstruction and my own journey. And I have given bits and pieces of it on the podcast and

videos, but I haven't really sat down and really kind of just told you about my life.

I did a little bit in the intro of this podcast, but I'm going to spend today telling you about

my journey, telling you how I started deconstruction, my life in the church and in far right

Christian nationalism, and the things along the way that bothered me, that made me wonder,

I don't know if this is correct. That way I can, you can reference it and hopefully take away some

hope that if I can change, being the person that I was, anyone can change. And I firmly believe

that right now, America has to find common ground with each other in order to heal what's going on around us. So sit back and relax. Today is not information heavy as far as dates and historical context. It's just the story of one person's life that's trying to do better and make a difference. So today is a reintroduction

and kind of the full story of Monty Mater on today's episode of flipping tables.

So before we get started, I just wanted to say thanks again to my Patreon supporters who have been so wonderful about helping me narrow down topics. The financial support is life changing. I may have to move out of my condo very soon because of some issues with the building. So just having that extra envelope of support is so wonderful. And if you do want to support my work, it's $1 a week

for bonus content. I'm in the chats over there. We do live streams. And you can find that in

the show notes or patreon.com forward slash Monty Mater and become an accomplice. And I'm just going to

get started. And I do want to give a soft trigger warning for child abuse,

sexual abuse. Um, we're just within my story. I don't want anyone to be caught by surprise in that.

So I was born in a small town called Gillette Wyoming. And small town relative to most eastern

cities, it was 22,000 people when I was born, which makes

it a very big city in Wyoming. And I was born in Campbell County Hospital. And I was number five of

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