Hey, everybody, welcome back to Colts to Consciousness. My name is Shalise Ansela. I'm your host. And today we're bringing back a very important guest, especially with everything going on right now. We wanted to talk about why it is that high control religions or cults or fear-based religions can pre-program you into accepting authoritarian behavior and how you can actually change your mind by

accepting new information because he did it himself as a former pastor. Thank you for coming back,

Brian Rucker. What's going on, Chalise? Thanks for having me back. Yes. So the world is a little

crazy right now, but we wanted to talk more about the structures of why or how people are wired to think a certain way and why it's hard for them to undo that wiring, especially in the midst of big social events or things going on in their lives that make them, I don't know if incapable is the right word, but it makes it harder for them

to really take in any sort of evidence or new information.

And I thought that you would be the perfect person to talk about this because you did

180 flip from growing up very fundamentalist, evangelical, even becoming a pastor, and using new information to change your mind

and your belief system into a more loving, and that's what your book is about, Hellbent,

highly recommend, and we'll talk about that on a minute, but you were able to use that information

to change your mind. And so I thought it would be great to talk about that with you today.

So for people who aren't familiar, which they should be because you're huge on social media,

you have a lot to say.

Everyone should go check you out.

Links in the description.

For those who aren't familiar, let's just give people an idea of your story.

And then they can go watch the extended version that we recorded and released a few days ago.

Yeah, so I, like you said, I grew up in fundamentalism.

My dad is still an independent fundamental Baptist pastor.

And I also grew up in what I would call Christian nationalism as well, a version of Christianity

that really had a very strong embrace of sort of the myth of America as pretty

much always good and a Christian nation.

And so those things were tied together as well, which I think relates a little bit to

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