Opening Pandora's Box

The conversation with my wife that changed everything, and the challenge of leaving fear-based religion behind

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
—Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

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It was one conversation that turned my world upside-down.

It was 2020, and I was on a weekend getaway with my wife just as the COVID pandemic was beginning to recede. I was still an evangelical pastor, and had recently preached a sermon about systemic racism—and the backlash was swift. Wealthy white men in their 70s sent me Candace Owens and John MacArthur videos. I met them for lunch to hear them out, and had to restrain myself from grabbing them by the shoulders and screaming, “WHY ARE YOU SO RACIST?!”

I was tired. After months of Zoom church, we were finally returning to in-person services.
My wife and I had taken a much needed retreat to the mountains of Asheville, NC to find our center, so that we could come back strong. But I didn’t want to go back at all. It became unignorable. I turned to my wife in bed and said, “I think I need to quit. We can’t challenge these people in the way they need. This system is broken. We need to get out.”

These were words that I had long been terrified to say, and once they escaped my lips, there was no taking them back.

That’s the thing about facing a truth you’ve been avoiding—once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Opening Pandora’s box is frightening because there’s no closing it back up. That conversation set us on a trajectory I couldn’t predict or control, with 1,000 painful moments along the way. Deconstruction meant the loss of friendships and my church community. It ultimately led us to divorce.

The Recker Family circa fall 2020

And yet, I wouldn’t change it—because it was honest.
The truth will set you free. And I can say with full integrity that I have never felt more free, more authentic, more myself than I do today.

I want that for you too. I hope to be a companion on this path. Pain is inevitable, but you must know, dear reader—you are not alone. You are seeing what so many of us are seeing.

My book, Hell Bent, comes out tomorrow, and I hope it becomes that moment for some of you—a moment of clarity, of opening the box you know must be opened, despite the cost.

One of the greatest control mechanisms keeping us from opening that box is hell. The fear of punishment has kept so many from embracing an authentic spiritual journey. For many of us, it is in the very foundation of our relationship with God.

I know it was for me.

I learned about hell when I learned about God.
One of my earliest memories is of getting “saved” in my dad’s pastoral office. It’s fuzzy, and it may not have been the first time I got saved—because before memory even began, I was told of my sin that made me worthy of hell, and of a holy God who could not stand to be near sinners.

5 yo Brian, clearly in need of salvation

Over the years, little Brian got “saved” countless more times—just to be sure, because when the stakes were as high as hell, I could never be sure enough. Even if your fear didn’t run as deep as mine, it’s still likely that your mental model for God was also rooted in punishment.

So who did I write this book for? First, for myself—for that five-year-old kid who met God in fear. Even after moving away from that picture of God, I still needed a book like this.
Because it’s one thing to get out of fear-based religion. It’s another to get fear-based religion out of you.

For those of us raised to believe we needed saving from God’s punishment, fear shaped our very understanding of who God was. My journey has been discovering that this was never what spirituality was supposed to be about. And that’s my hope for you as well.

I still call myself a Christian, but my book isn’t about keeping anyone from leaving the faith. If Christianity has wounded you, leaving may be exactly what you need. I want you to step into these decisions with honesty and courage, unhindered by fear.

But fear doesn’t have to have the last word in your relationship to Jesus—not if you don’t want it to. Even if you no longer call yourself a Christian, I wrote my book for you too. “God” and “Jesus” are too big to be owned by fear. I refuse to let the morally vapid religious block that gave us Donald Trump define who Jesus is for me. Not anymore.

Still, my hopes go beyond helping people deconstruct a toxic doctrine. I have a deep love for Christianity. Against my better judgment, I even still love Evangelicalism. These were my people for so long. Watching them get swept into nationalism and cave to their darkest impulses has been painful. I long for them to be better—to get free.

I have faces in mind. Kind people from my past, trapped in the belief that those who are different from them are going to hell.

That superiority is a hell of a prison.

The evangelical gatekeeping machine makes it difficult for a book like this to break through, but I still long for it. I’d love to see American Christianity focus less on saving and converting their neighbors, and more on loving them.

Hell has robbed so much from us—and I’m not okay with it. I’m ready to fight back.
I want my spirituality back. I want Jesus back. The world could certainly use a few billion people deeply imitating Jesus—the one who centered the marginalized, loved the poor and outcast, and made love the center of it all. Instead, we have billions obsessed with being right and dominating others. That’s not the spirituality of Jesus. That’s the spirituality of hell.

We know the phrase, “there’s no hate like Christian love.” That’s really fucking sad, because nobody loved like Jesus. Hell has robbed us of the love that was right there for us. But I believe that love is still right there for us.

At the heart of it all, I hope you come to find your beautiful, beloved self. True spirituality is not the loss of self. When Jesus calls us to “die to ourselves,” it’s the false selves that die—the superiority complexes, fear tactics, and control mechanisms that keep us from discovering who we really are. Those must die, and I want to help you kill them. I want to help you open Pandora’s box. Hell makes it frightening, but authenticity is waiting for us, and I promise you it’s worth it.

Tomorrow, Hell Bent makes its way into the world—and my hope is that it becomes a part of a new conversation that gives us back our voices, our faith, and our beloved selves.

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If you want to go on this journey together, I hope that you will order Hell Bent. I do not take this lightly, and I am honored to be trusted to join you in something as precious as your spiritual journey. But I want to assure you—my goal is not to tell you where to land, or what to believe. My goal is for you to reclaim your spiritual authority, your freedom, your self-trust, and your ability to discern for yourself—apart from fear and control. My goal for us all is love.

PS: Don’t forget to download the free study guide, which is perfect for personal journaling/reflection as well as for group discussion or book clubs!