Religion Unplugged

Religion is everywhere across the horror genre, but religious people continue to have varying views on the value of these stories. Just last week, prominent conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey argued that Christians should not be fans of horror—emphasizing that christians should avoid making themselves scared unnecessarily. She received significant pushback online from fellow Christians who urged her to see all the ways horror movies with demonic elements often demonstrate God’s power over the devil.Whether or not the films are healthy, they are often revelatory, just as fiction always has been.The ghost stories and villains of any era can tell us much about what a past society feared.From the Ancient Greek myths which depicted the sea as strange and full of terrors, to the work of Edgar Allen Poe whose stories featured debilitating illness, to the Dark Knight trilogy, which presents The Joker and Bane as domestic terrorists, the things that make us feel unsafe in our real lives, wriggle their way into our fiction.When fiction shows our fears it also tends to reveal what we think is best at fighting those fears—and what we think is not. And often an era rejects the solutions of its past—with regard to faith in particular. So just as religion is the best weapon against evil in “The Exorcist,” it is the weapon of evil-doers in The “Handmaid’s Tale.”So how will this upcoming generation reveal its fears and faiths through story?In 2026, Gen Z has finally grown up enough to make their own movies. This year’s biggest horror films were both spearheaded by Gen Z directors, with Curry Barker and Kane Parsons making “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” respectively.This week, Religion Unplugged’s culture writers Joseph Holmes and Jillian Cheney sat down together to explore how Gen Z thinking is changing the horror genre.

This fall, countless early-elementary American schoolchildren will hear the tale of Johnny Appleseed.Often portrayed as a lanky young man who wore a tin pot on his head as a cap, Appleseed got his name from planting apple trees all across the northeastern and midwestern portions of the United States. Legend has it that his love for nature expanded to animals and that, once, he freed a wolf from a trap, befriended it and the two were inseparable forever after. Coming into manhood just after the revolution, he is seen as a frontier hero, a mythic representation of cultivating the land as a celebration of the indomitable American spirit and the vast freedoms it had won. But many writers have criticized this portrayal of Johnny Appleseed as a whitewashed spin on a less child-friendly character. The claim is that Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman, was actually a businessman intent on growing apples in order to brew alcoholic cider. No longer the cheery, baby-faced naturalist found in children’s books, this understanding of Chapman reveals an opportunistic, booze-fueled entrepreneur.To complicate things further, along with a tin hat and a bag of seeds, Chapman is often portrayed holding a bible. Among all that is debated, it is well agreed upon that Chapman followed the teachings of a new sect of Christianity called Swedenborgianism, which among other beliefs, deviates from historical christianity in its denial of the trinity. Chapman is often seen as having been a missionary for the cause, spreading his faith as wide as his appleseeds.
But even this is complicated by skeptics who wonder if, perhaps it was not Chapman’s Swedenborgian love for nature that drove him, but his desire to build his business, using the missionary identity as more of a means to getting his foot in the door with potential buyers.In any case, the roving wildness of Chapman’s legend has inspired many Americans for generations. But, perhaps none so radically as writer Isaac Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald decided to retrace the steps of Chapman’s journey, 200 years after it took place. Isaac wrote about his year-long experience in his new book, “American Rambler.” For this week’s show, I spoke with Fitzgerald in order to separate fact from fiction in the tale of Johnny Appleseed, and to understand how Fitzgerald’s path, like Chapman’s, led to a connection with nature, an openness towards faith and a few legends of his own.

How a religion explains death and life after death are often as important to an understanding of the religion as is its explanation of God or morality.The question of how to escape death or how to die well is at the center of nearly all religions.And one of the oldest ideas about how to beat mortality—nearly as old as religion itself—is the idea of reincarnation.Historians don’t have a concrete understanding of when humans started to believe in rebirth. The faith systems that became modern Hinduism and Buddhism were both orally transmitted for centuries before anything was written down.But, the first known written appearances of the concept are found in the Hindu Upanishads, which are nearly 3000 years old. Today the belief is still mainstream in the predominantly Asian communities of Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains.But, perhaps expectedly, it is not at all mainstream among scientists. Roughly half of scientists even believe in a higher power and this, combined with the dominant view that consciousness doesn’t function outside of the brain, make scientists very unlikely allies of any kind of afterlifeBut, defying all the odds, the man who has done arguably the most convincing work in proving the scientific viability of rebirth was a white American psychiatrist who died as recently as 2007.That man’s name was Dr. Ian Stevenson and he dedicated his life to the question of whether the scientific method could be used to explain what happens when we die.This week on the podcast I spoke with Jesse Bering, the author of a new book about the psychiatrist entitled: The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Ian Stevenson.

About a month ago, Netflix released a 3 part documentary series called "Death of The Pastor’s Wife." The series was in Netflix’s top 10 shows for 4 weeks in a row, accumulating 41 million views.The documentary tells the story of a woman named Mica, who, at the age of 13, began attending Solid Rock Church in Myrtle Beach with her family. The church was led by a pastor named John Paul Miller, who officiated Mica’s wedding to a fellow congregant when she was 18. Three years into her marriage, Pastor John Paul began a sexual relationship with her—despite being 15 years older than her—which wrecked both of their marriages. Eventually, Mica married John Paul, which led to a spiral of horrific abuse, stalking, mental illness and trauma—all while John Paul continued to pastor at Solid Rock. The story ends in Mica’s suicide.Pastors who have affairs or sexually abuse their congregants are all too common—Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests already lists over 160 ministry leaders who have been arrested for sex crimes in 2026 alone. And that’s just what we know about—the number is likely much higher, given the fact that 66% of sexual assaults are not reported to the police.As a deep-dive into a case of severe abuse at the hands of a man leading a faith community, will the documentary inspire church congregations to be more vigilant in protecting their vulnerable from preying leaders?Or sandwiched between other disturbing true crime shows on Netflix, has Mica’s story been molded into just another piece of macabre entertainment—a cash grab from a streaming platform that predictably gets millions of watches every time it distributes a story that’s so horrifying we can’t look away?I wanted to understand how the documentary holds up as a piece of abuse education. I also wanted to understand if Mica’s death might have been prevented with more robust accountability structures and why pastoral abuse is so common. So for this week’s episode, I spoke with Julie Roys. Roys is a christian and the founder of the Roys Report, a watchdog news outlet, which covers corruption in churches.

A chunk of flesh floating in a glass of water—this was the discovery made by Fr. Alejandro Pezet on August 26, 1996 when he opened the tabernacle at his church in Buenos Aires, Argentina.A week earlier, Fr. Pezet had, in this same glass of water, placed a damaged piece of sacramental bread, in order to respectfully dissolve the eucharist.But instead of dissolving, the bread had transformed into bloody muscle tissue. 3 years later, the flesh had still not deteriorated. Given the shocking preservation, Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio, who would eventually become Pope Francis, ordered that the specimen be sent away to New York for testing.The scientists, who were not told the origin of the tissue, concluded that it was a fragment of heart muscle from the wall of the left ventricle. They also believed that the heart had undergone great stress—as if its owner had been beaten in the chest—tortured. And, most astonishingly, they found a great deal of white blood cells in the heart, which is significant because white blood cells die outside of a living organism—meaning, that, at the time the sample was taken, the flesh was still alive.The scientists were shocked when they found out the mysterious origins of the fragment, with one of them saying “This will remain an inexplicable mystery to science.”That story is one of many collected in writer and podcaster W. Tyler Allen’s new book “A Catechism of the Strange.” Allen’s book celebrates God’s ability to use the miraculous, the bizarre and even the downright creepy to connect with his people.On this week’s podcast, I spoke with Allen about his book, his faith journey and what it would look like if Christians were more willing to embrace the strangeness of God’s presence.