This special episode of Cultivated is brought to you by CT Creative Studio in partnership with American Awakening,

an ambitious, multi-platform effort that embodies a campaign for the soul of America in an effort to slay the giants of death and despair in this American moment.

Go to Americanawakening.us to learn more.

John Kingston is a social entrepreneur and the founder of American Awakening.

He spent many years as a corporate lawyer, but he's also had an interest in arts, culture,

and political movements along the way.

He grew up in rural Connecticut, part of a family with deep ties to a fundamentalist Christian church,

but it was an experience with deep contradictions.

Faith played a very, very influential role as part of that fundamentalist tradition we were

part of.

It was a tradition in which you went to church, you know, four times a week.

You know, you didn't dance and you didn't listen to music and, you know, one of the major

things, and again, I explore this a bit in my book just as in terms of like unpacking

worldview and, you know, getting a sense of who you are and how you think about things.

And one of the most complicated dimensions this was that, of course, in the

fundamentalist church, you don't drink alcohol, but my dad was an alcoholic, and he was drinking

every day of my upbringing. And so, so it really gave rise to real reckoning for me at

age 17 when I kind of put all the pieces together and figured it out.

And I said, I'm not going to carry on directly out of high school and onto college.

I'd gotten into an Ivy League school.

But I was just like, okay, I can't, I don't have this figured out right now.

So I, I, I, before their gap years, this is the early 80s, anybody had this

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