This week’s Decent Fucking Human is Josh Patterson, host of the (Re)thinking Faith Podcast. Josh sent us an email with the subject “My fucked-up experience as a pastor,” and expressed interest in joining us for an interview. He had my attention, but I’ll admit that I was worried about touching religion. He mentioned the word deconstruction somewhere in our exchanges, and that didn’t do anything to make me feel better. I’ve become quite familiar with the term from what I’ve seen on the Tiktoks, the Youtubes, and the internets in general, and it often ends with a level of animosity toward faith. We can’t have that on the show. There’s a reason our show is called Positively Terrible — and that’s because we like to focus on the positive. This show is for everybody, and we’re not here to bash on anyone or anything. It turns out, neither is Josh.

I should have known. Josh explained that he learned of us from fan favorite Scooter, star of Episode 8: Scooter and the Ghost of Drinking Future. Decent Fucking Humans tend to find each other don’t they? If only there was a way we could mark ourselves to make it easier to find each other — maybe some sort of Decent Fucking Human tattoo or something. Sorry…I’ve gotten off track. All I’m trying to say is, when someone is good with any one of our Positively Terrible alums, they’re good with me. And Josh is definitely good with me.

Okay, so Josh’s story — I’ll let him tell most of it, but it started with his times as a Youth Pastor. Things went relatively well, but then he decided to uproot his life and take a position with a church in Florida. It was the next step of his career and he would no longer have to raise funds to cover his pay like he had to in his old position — sounds great, right? If it was, he wouldn’t have a fucked-up experience to talk to us about. His church was toxic. He took a huge risk for his career, and within months it was starting to crumble. His church leaders were not exactly Christ-like, but they were more than happy to use the name of Jesus to abuse and manipulate employees, as well as their congregation. It’s all pretty disgusting.

Josh decided to leave that church and move back home, and is now pursuing his faith on his own terms on his (Re)thinking Faith Podcast. Please go check it out.