TCBI #35 - An Atheist in a Christian band - Jared Smith

Disclaimer:
While Jared originally asked me to edit out certain parts of the interview, he changed his mind later and felt it would be best to include the whole thing.
Jared smith is an atheist in a Christian band: • I am an Atheist
Jared and I met on the first day of our first year of Bible college. We went to a small independent charismatic Evangelical school in North Carolina. He's been one of my favorite and most consistently challenging conversation partners since we met. A lot of my most formative young adult conversations were with him, and many of the thoughts journeys I'm still plotting through now began with the 45-minute commute conversations we had together daily when we roomed together for our sophomore year.
Since college Jared has traveled around the world a bit and done a lot of studying to do with his faith, as well as had a lot of first-hand experiences with institutions and small communities practicing Evangelical Christianity, and ultimately he decided to officially end things and "come out" as an atheist, at least privately initially. Another of Jared's biggest passions since I've known him has been creating hardcore metal music, and I've watched him go from cobbling together midi sessions on garage band when we first met to producing some genuinely good music in recent years that's amounted to an impressive level of acclaim in the Christian Metal community. This level of recognition in a community that is primarily defined as "Christian" was part of what made it difficult for Jared to want to "come out" more publically about his atheism. I had been interested in having a longer conversation about his journey to atheism for a while, though, and asked if he'd be open to sharing about it on this project, and he agreed that this would be a fitting place to have that conversation.
I'm excited for you guys to hear it. I think it was a good conversation, and we hit on some really important stuff.
Jared Smith
• HELIOCENTRIC - One Han...
open.spotify.c...
/ heliocentricofficial
/ heliocentric
heliocentric.c...
/ heliocentric
heliocentricba...
Garrett Vandenberg
www.garrettvan...
/ garrettvandenbergmusic
/ garrettjvmusic​​