Two comedians subject themselves to the worst religion-themed content they can find.

Ryan and I are both stand-up comedians who grew up in conservative Christian environments. I worked as an evangelical youth pastor in my earlier days and even got a seminary degree, and I recently started writing about why I left the church.

In this podcast we get to revisit a lot of the movies and TV shows that we watched as children, but we're also watching a lot of faith-based content that neither of us has seen before. We're not limiting ourselves to media with pro-religious views, as there are some shows and movies with anti-religious views that are also hard to sit through. Occasionally a good movie gets in there.

Anyone with a sense of humor can enjoy the podcast, but I'm guessing we will appeal most to people who have also come out of conservative religious environments. Some of our listeners have made specific requests for our watchlist, we try to prioritize those.

Our aim is not to make fun of religion, by the way, or to advocate for any particular view, but really just to enjoy how terrible so much of the content is. Of course, we do like to dissect different religious ideas as they come up and offer critical commentary where necessary, and that will be true regardless of whether we're watching a movie about the rapture or a documentary arguing that religion is evil.
 

Ryan likes a lot of news, comedy, and horror podcasts. Some of his favorites are Knowledge Fight, Morbid, and Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. I tend to like podcasts that do media criticism from a leftist perspective, my favorite is probably Michael and Us but I would also highly recommend Citations Needed. I'll also mention that I have an older comedy podcast that Ryan appeared on a few times called The Dan and Mordecai Show, there aren't very many episodes but I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

I've wanted to do a podcast like this for a long time, because on the one hand, there is an awful lot of faith-based content out there, and most of it is quite bad. On the other hand, it's fascinating to go back to these shows and movies from our childhoods and see how toxic some of them really are. For instance, we both went into our McGee and Me episode assuming that it would basically be harmless, based on our vague memories about it, and it turned out to be so much worse than we could have expected.

Ryan and I have often talked about this kind of stuff in our regular conversations, and early on in the summer we decided it would make a fun podcast. We did a lot of planning over the course of the summer and then spent about a month recording and preparing before we released the first few episodes.
 

We release an episode every week, and have just started releasing short episodes each week as well in which we react to Christian music videos.

We don't spend a ton on the podcast for now, it cost a little money getting the project started since we needed some equipment and I needed to convert a closet in my house into a tiny recording studio. We have a paid account on a website that we use for recording remotely, the quality is pretty decent. For now most of our marketing is through our own social networks but I'll probably put some money into advertising in the near future.
 

We're not sponsored and it's not really a big concern for us. Right now our listener base is small but consistent, and we've gotten strong positive feedback on the work we're doing so far, so we'll keep at it and hopefully we'll be able to get more people to listen. Mainly we're doing the podcast because it's fun and it provides a great cathartic experience to both of us, and hopefully to our listeners. Plus we get to joke around a lot, which is always a good time.
 

Production is not terribly elaborate. We have a huge watchlist featuring hundreds of titles that we eventually want to cover. We pick something about a week in advance, we each make sure to watch it before we record. We take notes and sometimes do a bit of research to bring to the recording. Ryan and I live in different states so we record remotely. We both have day jobs so we usually record on Monday evenings. It usually takes me a couple hours to edit an episode, and then that's pretty much it.
We're planning to have some other comedy friends on the show as guests.
 

Our show is available on all the major platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, and Audible. If you can't find the show on a certain platform let us know and we'll see if we can add it.
 

Don't slack off on editing, but also don't beat yourself up for having a less-than-perfect podcast. Professional-sounding quality is always the ideal but as someone who doesn't know much about audio editing, I think the more important objective should be making something that's genuinely fun or interesting to listen to.
 

You can find Ryan on TikTok @ryanlina2 and Twitter @ryanlinaisfunny. My website is dankapr.com, I'm on Twitter @danhasjokes, and I have some videos on TikTok @dankapr.

We don't have a Patreon or anything but if you want to hear us talk about anything specific on the podcast you can just message us or email badfaithmediapodcast@gmail.com.