Religion Unplugged

About Religion Unplugged

Religion explored through candid conversations and original reporting. This podcast is powered by The Media Project, a network of more than 1,000 journalists worldwide. TMP acknowledges that religion is growing and becoming more, not less important in the world.

Publisher

The Media Project

Category

history · news · religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Sept 2018

Latest episode

27 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

260 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Oct 2026

   What Do This Year's Horror Movies Tell Us About Gen Z Spirituality?

   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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&ra=m&v=T6kD-AAHMD8) 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 (https://www.123helpme.com/essay/The-Greeks-Fears-in-The-Odyssey-by-351858) which depicted the sea as strange and full of terrors, to the work of Edgar Allen Poe (https://poemuseum.org/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher/) whose stories featured debilitating illness, to the Dark Knight trilogy (https://kb.osu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/cf4a51be-d01a-57ab-b6e1-500518ac0c48/content), 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 (https://www.ncronline.org/culture/exorcist-film-50-years-look-life-its-catholic-writer),” it is the weapon of evil-doers in The “Handmaid’s Tale (https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-handmaid-s-tale/themes/religion-and-theocracy).” 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 (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10533874/) and Kane Parsons (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10735410/) making “Obsession (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMC8kkwbIQQ)” and “Backrooms (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HjdiohVOik),” 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.

2. 

   20 Oct 2026

   Johnny Appleseed: Retracing The Steps of A Frontier Missionary

   This fall, countless early-elementary American schoolchildren will hear the tale of Johnny Appleseed (https://www.history.com/articles/who-was-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 (https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/the-debaucherous-legacy-of-johnny-appleseed/). 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 (https://americanorchard.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/disneyjohnnybible.jpg)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 (https://swedenborg.org/explore/beliefs/), 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 (https://www.isaacfitzgerald.net/). 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.

3. 

   13 Oct 2026

   The American Psychiatrist Who Tried To Prove Reincarnation

   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 (https://www.occult.wiki/index.php?mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop&title=Reincarnation#Jainism) of the concept are found in the Hindu Upanishads (https://vedicheritage.gov.in/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 (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/) and this, combined with the dominant view that consciousness (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4122207/) doesn’t function outside of the brain, make scientists very unlikely allies of any kind of afterlife But, 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 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1839221/) 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.

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

13 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

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