Bonus Episode: Conversations Around the Campfire

On a quiet night around the campfire during a family camping trip, I sit down with my wife, sister, brother-in-law, and dad for an honest, unfiltered conversation about the podcast—and the personal truths it’s brought to light.

Together, they unpack some of the most surprising revelations from the series, including:

• How Myles’ sister had no idea her parents came from different religious backgrounds
• The family’s reaction to learning Don once preached while intoxicated
• Their mother’s ongoing fear that her children might end up in hell
• Don’s admission that he purposely avoided preaching about homosexuality
• And the troubling teaching methods they all remember from their former church

As the conversation unfolds, it evolves into something bigger—a reflection on how their family has changed, how their faith has shifted, and what it means to question authority and religious certainty.

Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show—it helps others find it. Have a question or guest idea? Reach out to Myles at myles@findingmyreligionpod.com or find us on social by searching “Finding My Religion Podcast.”

Transcript

Introducing the Family Bonus Episode

Speaker 1 0:03

Welcome to Season 3 of Finding my Religion. My name is Myles Phelps. Are you nervous about doing this at all?

Speaker 2 0:13

A big part of what I want to be going into in my next job. A big component of that is willingness to share your story. Growing up, identifying as Christian, I didn't know squat. We're adults, now we're parents. I guess we should be doing the whole church thing, the church fire. I can certainly identify that, the alcoholism that was present. It was full-blown.

Speaker 1 0:31

What would you tell your younger self? Be careful of being tunnel-visioned. Welcome to season three of Finding my Religion. My dad and I are taking a week off from our conversations. However, I wanted to include a bonus episode where I talk with my family about their experiences listening to the podcast.

Speaker 1 0:50

This past weekend, my family and I went camping and I thought it would be interesting to talk to them about what has been their experiences listening to this podcast. So on this camping trip, it was myself, my wife Jordan, my sister Paige, my brother-in-law Jimmy and my dad. The night started out with reading questions from a question book that my wife has, so you'll hear Jimmy say pick a number. And it's real life conversations about what would you do in weird situations. We then started talking about season three and what surprised people, what didn't they know, things like that. The sound quality in this isn't great, since we were sitting around a campfire. You'll hear some music in the background that we had going, but I think it was an interesting conversation. I'll try to jump in if it's hard to hear or if we need some context.

Speaker 3 1:53

Pick a number between 1 and 282.

Speaker 2 1:57

46. 46.

Speaker 3 2:01

I feel like this is a little deep. Would you be happier with more control over what happens in your life or more control over your response to what happens? How could you gain more of such control? I guess my response, because how do you have control over what happens in your life? Life's wild.

Speaker 4 2:21

What if you could.

Speaker 3 2:24

I feel like that would just mean living a more regimented life when I'd rather just want to be reacting better to whatever happens. Yeah, I forgot what it's like. There's like a saying where it's like it's not how. I don't know, I don't't know the way the cookie crumbles.

Speaker 1 2:50

That's the one that is like responding to what happened so my dad here is saying that he's working on his responses to situations. It's something that in recovery he's tried to work a lot on. Part of the reason why he struggled so much was because of the responses that he had in situations, and so in his new found relationship with principles of Buddhism he's been able to control what his reaction has been, and we talked about that in the last episode.

Speaker 4 3:20

I react pretty good to things, and then I've thought about the whole morning and my struggling to cope and all the tears I've been crying over no things at all.

Speaker 1 3:30

That's four months, and oh yeah, my wife is pregnant situation that's made you emotional.

Speaker 3 3:36

All right, this will be just Joe and I.

Speaker 1 3:37

Yeah, don, jimmy didn't like how we were participating.

Speaker 3 3:42

All right. New number 96.

Speaker 5 3:45

Damn.

Speaker 2 3:45

I was going to pick that.

Speaker 5 3:46

Really yeah, 96?. Yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 3 3:51

All right if you knew you could direct medical research funds so as to find a cure for one specific disease within 15 years, but make little progress on any others. Would you target a single disease? If so, which one and why?

Speaker 5 4:06

so you're choosing to actively limit the research for other illnesses in that time period?

Speaker 3 4:13

yeah, but in you know it, at least or maximum 15 years you'll have a cure to the disease, if you're choosing if there's a disease that affected over 50% of the population, I would say yes.

Speaker 1 4:25

If not no I'd probably.

Speaker 3 4:27

Yeah, look at what diseases are causing the most deaths worldwide because, like, here's a nuance, um, like it can't be just like cancer, because there's so many different types of cancer right and there needs to be targeted therapies for each of those, so it would have to be like something specific, right, like Alzheimer's is something specific, whereas dementia is more of like a broader category.

Speaker 1 4:55

Yeah, I feel like 30 years ago, hiv would have been a huge one, but I feel like they've made so much progress yeah on that, and it's not deadly the way it once was maybe like childhood cancer or alzheimer's so we started talking about als, and then my lovely wife started talking about how all men are terrible and we should just get rid of them, and that could be a disease in and of itself, and we found that funny and hurtful.

Speaker 4 5:33

Other dumb shit from dumb asshole men we could just wipe out, men probably what is depression that's?

Speaker 2 5:41

a disease, yeah, like.

Speaker 3 5:42

No we're really trapped in your own body? Wait a sec. Addiction is a disease.

Speaker 4 5:46

I was gonna say yeah, Mental ill Like yeah. And like everything that could fall under that category.

Speaker 5 5:55

I think we'd have to do cancer first. That would have far reaching or Asperger's.

Speaker 1 5:59

I was doing a South Park joke there. It's the episode where they don't know that it's actually called Asperger's. It's Asperger's. It's dumb but it's fun.

Speaker 4 6:12

Asperger's. I don't think they even use that anymore. It's Asperger's gone. Oh, we did it. It's cured, I think.

Speaker 3 6:20

Asperger's is just an outdated term for what is now the broader spectrum of autism.

Speaker 2 6:27

Isn't it.

Speaker 4 6:27

Yeah, I think it's like Asperger's is high-functioning autism.

Speaker 1 6:31

Yeah, you just call them Audis. After I got hired, but before I went so my dad just retired and took up a part-time job doing drug p screening tests. He's trying to make it more humanistic and these people are going through stuff, so he's really engaged with that. But I guess sometimes they use color to determine the outcome of the test and my dad is colorblind. They'd have you do a taste test.

Speaker 3 7:01

You could ask ChatGPT Do these colors match, that they're positive or negative?

Speaker 1 7:06

Do you guys want to talk about the podcast before we run out of battery? No, we don't have to. We can keep doing questions.

Speaker 5 7:12

I thought you were wanting to record this for some reason.

Family Reactions to the Podcast

Speaker 1 7:14

Has everybody listened to the whole season? Yeah, I have Dad, have you.

Speaker 2 7:20

I was there.

Speaker 1 7:21

Paige what's been.

Speaker 2 7:22

Why me?

Speaker 1 7:24

Because you're closest to the situation. Oh God, do you want me to go to Jimmy first? Uh-huh, jimmy, what's been the most surprising?

Speaker 3 7:34

I feel like the fire stuff, hearing about your play-by-play of looking for miles while it was happening. I feel like I vaguely heard about the story. Other than there was one, there was one.

Speaker 4 7:54

The details of it.

Speaker 3 7:56

Yeah, did you find it pretty funny? Funny Not particularly.

Speaker 1 8:03

One thing I love to do with Jimmy is use a lot of sarcasm because he cannot pick up on it, and it's just awesome.

Speaker 4 8:10

My sense of humor is so high. Maybe I didn't tell her program.

Speaker 3 8:14

Jokes go right over my head a lot of the time.

Speaker 1 8:16

Do you know most of it? The fire story yeah, know most of it the fire story yeah, any of it oh.

Speaker 4 8:24

I don't know. I feel like there's this season. You guys are talking in so much more detail about little like personal pieces of it. It's like the zoomed in version is there anything that stands out?

Speaker 4 8:37

I think listening to Don be able to reflect back now and try and put himself in like what his mindset was then Trying to remember what you were thinking and feeling like in the midst of all of this and like not being able to sort that out at the time in a way that felt good or right, but like looking back now, like being able to point stuff out and like yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 9:05

Paige, was it weird.

Speaker 5 9:07

Was it weird.

Speaker 1 9:08

Yeah.

Speaker 5 9:08

Listening.

Speaker 1 9:09

Yeah, no, you were young.

Speaker 5 9:12

So are you asking if it was weird listening because I was young?

Speaker 1 9:14

Mm-hmm, Like you're an adult now.

Speaker 5 9:18

You were young then no, it wasn't at all no, I don't think so. I think the thing that surprised me the most was probably hearing that you and mom weren't. I think I always like imagined pre-kids you were the same amount of religious and the same denomination. I think I always just assumed that that was just like your norm.

Speaker 3 9:45

I will tag onto that. It also was very surprising when it was like oh, which one was closest? I was like oh, okay. Yeah, I was like oh okay.

Speaker 1 9:59

Yeah, yeah, it's funny how much ages my life was affected by gas prices after the Carter administration.

Speaker 5 10:09

Like that was genuinely probably the thing I was most surprised, like one of the things I was most surprised by, because it was something I'd assumed for so long. And then it's just, it's like just a very simple thing but was like, oh wow, I just kind of assumed that can you show us your face that you have when you heard it? What? Here's my face, because I was working while I was listening to it here we got a glimpse of page's resting bitch face I have another thing that was surprising you talking about.

Speaker 3 10:36

Uh, if anyone you knew from when you were in school having a conversation about your beliefs now and them being like how you would be like, I would hope they would be genuinely concerned because in their faith they believe that I'm good, internal damnation. Yeah, that was interesting. Yeah, and it made me think, because Heidi one time brought up to me when me were you there too, yeah, um, where she was just like should I be more concerned that you guys aren't believing this? Because I was always told if you don't believe, you're going to hell and I want to go to heaven with my kids.

Speaker 5 11:11

Yeah, once recently genuinely saying to us like I'm just, I'm really worried you're going to hell, like I don't want that to happen.

Speaker 3 11:18

Like she was genuinely like worried about it I got upset when she said that, though like I I don't know why I my visceral reaction.

Speaker 5 11:26

Well, I think that's fair, but then also putting yourself in her shoes yeah, she's been made to believe all her life.

Speaker 1 11:32

Yeah well, I mean, you can get a kind of my dad jumped in here to talk about what we had talked about in one of the previous episodes of what do you stand on? And in this situation, the faith that we grew up in believed that if you didn't believe in God, you were going to hell.

Speaker 2 11:49

What the hell are you believing? Yeah?

Speaker 5 11:53

I have much more respect for somebody who says Don, you're going to hell, buddy, you know.

Speaker 2 11:59

Just talk about it. I mean, I respect that. I don't believe it, but I respect it If committed.

Speaker 5 12:05

I think maybe because mom isn't going as often at all, to my knowledge, these days, like she's now like teetering, and so it's now a little bit more like but are you, maybe you're not? That's what I think. Giant thing, going right in.

Speaker 4 12:24

Oh, it's a daddy long leg and it's so nice and it'll eat mosquitoes, I think Probably. Yep.

Speaker 5 12:28

Absolutely fucking not. Dog, what Dog.

Speaker 1 12:34

Dog is our dog.

Speaker 5 12:35

No, I don't want it to crawl on him. It avoided him.

Speaker 4 12:39

I knew that guy was crawling on my chair.

Speaker 5 12:41

I knew it. That's why I got up.

Speaker 1 12:42

If you can't tell, my sister is not a fan of spiders, so this part of the podcast is all about her relationship with this daddy log legs that was hanging out with us that I started thinking about, um, I don't really remember.

Speaker 4 12:58

I feel like it was around that same conversation, Like do you know where any of your would you call them classmates From then do you know, if any, if they're all still practicing, like what that looks like and it would just be really interesting.

Speaker 1 13:20

I know you did some research on how many people I wonder, if I called them, they probably wouldn't tell me to get fucked, Like if you could tell me the class of what year. Like how many people are still employed.

Speaker 5 13:35

Well, you could probably figure it out online. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 13:38

The spider came back.

Speaker 4 13:40

That was a really funny answer. I would be able well, I couldn't tell if they had faith or not.

Speaker 2 13:45

I could tell if they're still in the ministry, but there's public. I mean I can go online and go line up my classmates and see what they're doing now, but that doesn't tell me they've left the faith or gone to another. They're going to and now, but that doesn't tell me they've left the faith or gone to another, more liberal denomination. There's no way of knowing what's in their head.

Speaker 3 14:04

What was the denomination that you studied? Lutheran Church.

Speaker 2 14:07

Missouri, southern.

Speaker 3 14:08

So, you didn't listen to the podcast. No, I did, but I think you guys started calling it the acronym SEMS.

Speaker 1 14:14

It's the one where Joseph Smith finds the gold tablets.

Speaker 2 14:20

I think it's Mormon.

Speaker 4 14:24

Miles, I think you're wrong about that. You obviously didn't study.

Speaker 1 14:29

What was the most surprising thing that you heard outside of what you just said?

Surprising Revelations About Faith Journeys

Speaker 4 14:35

I didn't like the answer, so do it it again. Can I say something? While she thinks, yeah, um, it's, it feels like had this podcast happened three years ago, four years ago, what a different podcast it would be. I feel like it would look so different like the conversations we've all had in the last couple years, like I don't know. I feel like it's become much more a part of, like, our open conversation, um, and so being more open about it means being able to ask some of those hard questions, means, um, our experience of, like hearing his answers is probably different than had we heard them well, I think you're right, because the first episode that we did was probably about three years ago and at that point there was a lot of I don't know coming from dad.

Speaker 4 15:36

Yep, that long ago. Yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 2 15:41

Huh.

Speaker 1 15:43

Because dad was living with us at that time. Dad was living with you, guys.

Speaker 4 15:46

But that was three years ago. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 15:48

I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 4 15:49

Yeah, time is wild. What about you, miles? What was the most surprising thing? You.

Speaker 1 15:59

I don't think I knew that you would preach drunk from the pulpit, oh yeah, I think that was.

Speaker 5 16:01

I think that was news to me, but I think, like hearing it was like kind of like oh well, I guess that makes sense. Yeah, I don't think.

Speaker 1 16:06

Yeah, I don't think I was surprised, but I was. No, I I think I was surprised. Actually, that was not something I had knew oh, I was actually you know what I was surprised by.

Speaker 5 16:15

I had never thought about like you, like you said you had never preached much or at all about homosexuality. Like, avoid that topic.

Speaker 4 16:25

You avoided it.

Speaker 5 16:26

And I didn't know that, didn't realize that, hadn't really ever thought about it. Yeah, Like oh, that's kind of cool. I mean not cool, but like you didn't go down that road it's cool to know. I guess that, like you were kind of like huh about that even at the time, you know.

Speaker 3 16:41

Anything you talked about, you believed it at the time. So anything that you talked about or preached about. You believed so. The fact that you didn't meant that you had your withholdings.

Reflection on Religious Teaching Methods

Speaker 1 16:53

So here I asked my dad if there was ever a conversation between him and the associate pastor of our church about the rap song that the associate pastor would play during the first year of confirmation. And the entire point of this rap song I say rap in quotes because it's Christian rap was that homosexuality is bad, and one of the choruses was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And I remember walking out of that class kind of thinking it was funny, singing along with classmates that were there, but it had a really long lasting effect, I think, on all of us and with dad not really believing that part of scripture, I just thought it was kind of interesting that you could have two pastors teaching in two completely different ways. But my dad said he had never heard the song, he'd only heard about it, and he also mentioned that he had a completely different approach to confirmation compared to this other pastor.

Speaker 2 17:51

He was trying to pound conservative.

Speaker 1 17:55

Dad says here that the other pastor was trying to pound conservative Christian values, Whereas my dad would try to ingrain the parents into the confirmation process and he actually started making the parents come to classes with the kids.

Speaker 2 18:10

I was after you but I finally went to where I was, like you know, and I think what got me thinking about that was mom going through junior confirmation and then she's an adult. And then I go through as an adult and I'm talking to her and she's like she doesn't know this shit. Well, because she went through the kids. And so parents who are doing nothing but saying, okay, take my kid and teach him, teach him about religion.

Speaker 5 18:34

I don't know shit about it, but you teach my kid.

Speaker 2 18:36

So I made it to be. It was once a month be for like nine till noon, and I had that there was a parent and the youth together and they were basically learning side by side and doing it in groups.

Speaker 1 18:50

God sounds awful but it makes sense like my wife here brings up a really good point and says that it makes people more pot committed. If you're making your kid go through this process, then you should know what they're learning as well. Essentially, practice what you preach. Don't send your kids off to a babysitter bingo. Remember that. The other thing that stuck out that the other pastor taught was about offering, and he had mentioned that he had an accountant and there's been times where the accountant was like look, you're going to fall behind on your mortgage or something like that, and the easiest thing to cut out is the 20% or 10% that you're supposed to give to the church. Tithing, tithing he's like. I always stayed true to that and it always worked out because God will provide and like even as a kid I was like that sounds nuts.

Speaker 4 19:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I would imagine again if you believed in God. It's an easy thing when good stuff happens, praise be. When bad stuff happens, there's a reason.

Speaker 1 20:10

It was like a red alert in my head, though, of like this seems like a scam, like I'm being taught how to donate as a fifth, sixth grader, seventh grader.

Speaker 4 20:19

It's like a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme of church fundraising.

Speaker 1 20:33

Remember the way mom would give donations was she kept so they would give you envelopes for every week. She kept her envelope on the dryer, so all the change and everything that she would find from the dryer went in there.

Speaker 2 20:50

That was for the Mites, the LWML group.

Speaker 4 20:54

That was for offering.

Speaker 5 20:56

I got those envelopes for so long? Yeah, that was something different.

Speaker 1 21:00

Yeah, I told I I kept getting those envelopes for offering yeah, and like mom would give them to me and I would just like throw them away or something. Just like throw them away or something. I was like mom, can you tell my? I am like not a member. She's like, well, you have to like call them and I was like I didn't sign up to be a member, like you do it.

Speaker 3 21:25

It's funny To go back to the part I was surprised about where, like the, the previous classmates, that, oh, eternal damnation. And you brought it up like I just can't help but feel like an air of arrogance, like that just turns me off from the whole everything I just like. Why, like I know that you have gone through the teaching and everything else, but how do you know it's right and why do you feel so confident that like you could then make me question and that's why, like it's, it ends up being like an authority which I just any authority gets wrongfully used in today's day and age.

Authority, Belief Systems and Group Mentality

Speaker 3 22:12

So it just makes me like I don't want any authority, just makes my stomach turn a little bit so that I'm turned off completely power is dangerous yes, people don't nailed it. I love an individual person, but when it's groups of people that think they know something, it's never good what's that quote?

Speaker 1 22:36

it's like a person is smart but people are dumb yeah, it's from, that's from men in black, it's uh it's so. That is from men in black yeah, so why?

Speaker 2 22:45

tommy says that yeah, oh, that's right because they're talking about why?

Speaker 3 22:49

the panic yeah, they can't tell people about the aliens. It's like, yeah, they're talking about why they can't the panic? Yeah, they can't tell people about the aliens. It's like, yeah, they're everywhere, but you can handle it because I'm talking to you about it. You can see it. But if we tell everyone, people start screaming and sprinting and killing.

Speaker 4 23:01

Chaos Very naughty. I haven't seen that movie in so long, edgar.

Speaker 3 23:08

It's weird how much weight as a society we put on what other people are doing Like. The reason why chaos would happen like that is because you see other people looting and you're like well, I'm not going to not be part of Like, if there's nothing left, I need to get mine. I need to get mine.

Speaker 4 23:27

I was reading a thing before all the protests a couple weeks ago, seeing all these posts about like bring this, pack this, don't do this, do that, and several posts talking about, if shit does hit the fan, like you gotta stay calm because as soon as you start sprinting, everyone you pass is also sprinting. Nobody knows why, and yeah, you just feed off of the general energy of the group and if it's bad, I hope you're not the one getting trampled. I don't know.

Speaker 3 24:11

Shane Gillis has a podcast episode where they talk about how it was like I think it was like stalin or something like that.

Speaker 3 24:21

I can't even remember what it was, but it was like everyone was supposed to be celebrating this awful leader and a homeless guy or non-housed guy just started like screaming from the back because he was the only person that one was either not mentally there to care about or just didn't care because he had nothing to lose. And then everyone had the courage in that moment to like also speak how they were feeling, but it took one person to do anything.

Speaker 1 24:54

Thank you for listening to this week's bonus episode on Season 3 of Finding my Religion. As a reminder, it really helps out the show and helps other people find the show if you subscribe, rate and review wherever you're listening. We're all over social media, so make sure to check out some of the videos that I'm posting on a weekly basis. They're on TikTok, instagram, facebook just search for finding my religion podcast or go to finding my religion podcom. You can also send me over any suggestions that you have for the show. Maybe you have a question that you want answered or you want to be a guest. Shoot me over an email at miles with a Y at findingmyreligionpodcom.