Freestyle Theology

The church that shaped you came from somewhere. Usually somewhere older, stranger, and more wounded than anyone ever told you.

Freestyle Theology is a podcast about the history of Christianity, and about what that history did to people's bodies, families, and nervous systems. Bradley Melle is a historian of Christianity with a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he studied the entangled history of Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous peoples. Every week he and his guests take one question and walk it back as far as it goes.

When did white people stop dancing? Where did Hell actually come from? How did the church get so good at finding enemies? What did plague do to the western imagination? Why do purity, punishment, and control keep resurfacing in the same places, century after century?

The method here is simple: Approach the dysfunction you see with curiosity. Then go looking for the catastrophe that formed it.

These aren't lectures. They are conversations with people who know things, and love to wonder and wander. That's the freestyle part.

For anyone rethinking faith, anyone deconstructing, anyone who left the church, anyone still in it and quietly wondering, and anyone who just wants to understand how the West turned out like this.

Wondering freely, out loud.