Hope, healing, and support for folks struggling with doubt or loss of religious beliefs

The Recovering From Religion podcast is a series of interviews with experts in the field of cult recovery, religious trauma, and relationship issues that often accompany a loss of religious belief. Many high-control religious groups punish people who try to leave. These punishments can range from shunning or shaming to something as dangerous as honor killings. At Recovering From Religion, a 501c3 nonprofit, our goal is to provide hope, healing, and support to people who are going through this difficult time in their lives. These interviews help to provide a roadmap for what life outside these groups can look like, how to maintain relationships with family and friends, and inspiration to keep on keeping on.

The podcast project is staffed entirely by volunteers, from the initial interviewers to the editing and promotion team.

Our host is the prolific Eric Wells. Eric was raised in Southern California Baptist churches and private schools, and finally left his faith in 2012. In 2000 he started the non-profit organization, Volunteers Unite. When in operation, Volunteers Unite built homes for the needy in Mexico and matched hundreds of volunteers to causes they were passionate about. After his family moved to Missouri, he became a humanist and atheist. In Missouri, he volunteered with a local secular group, the Springfield Skeptics, and for whom he served as the Activism Director and the Executive Director. He has organized hundreds of community service events and volunteer activities, as well as the 2017 March For Science rally in Springfield, MO. He was the State Director for the American Atheists and fought to keep church and state separate at the city, county, and state levels.

Cohosting is the remarkably talented Amaia Perez. Amaia Perez was born and raised in Spain, but is currently living and working in the UK. She holds an undergraduate degree in psychology, a masters degree in investigative psychology and is now working for a charity that prevents child abuse.
 

The Recovering From Religion podcast originally began back in 2018. After publishing over a dozen interviews, the podcast sat dormant due to the organization losing several key volunteers. In 2020, as the Covid 19 pandemic caused daily life to come crashing to a hault, the board at Recovering From Religion decided we needed an engaging way to reach folks who are struggling. To fill this need, we started a new tradition. Every monday night, at 7pm Central Time, we host a live "RfRx" event via the online meeting platform Zoom, featuring a leading expert in a field related to cult recovery or religious trauma, with a live audience. Following a presentation, there is a Q&A during which audience members can present questions for our guests. This project began as a sort of stopgap measure. Due to Covid 19, we could no longer hold in-person support groups, so we wanted to help them another way. However, the podcast has seen so much growth in such a short time that we plan to continue doing this for the long haul.
 

The main reason this is possible is teamwork. We spread the responsibilities between several people. Someone schedules guests, someone else conducts the interview, and yet another person edits the video recording into a suitable podcast. As I mentioned before, everyone involved with the project is a volunteer and most hold down a day job as well. Recovering From Religion relies on donations for revenue.
 

At this point, we have not added sponsors to our podcast episodes. The main benefit to our organization, aside from the fact that we are helping people and that feels awesome, is that this grows our reach. More people learn about the other services we provide, services like our online communities, our 24-7 helpline and our therapist database, the Secular Therapy Project.
 

As I explained before, our interviews are recorded from live presentations to an audience on Zoom. The live show is also streamed to a discord server operated by another nonprofit. Once the show has wrapped up, the video recording is edited and uploaded to the Recovering From Religion Youtube channel. We then extract the audio from the recording and insert our podcast intro and outro, before posting the new episode to our podcast's RSS feed.
 

We have adopted a sort of full-court press strategy. Our goal is to be available absolutely everywhere podcasts are consumed. This has led us to seek out a wide variety of international podcast directories and platforms willing to list our podcast. While a majority of our listeners are still from the "English-speaking" world, our listeners are slowly becoming more diverse. In the last seven days, our podcast was downloaded in over 30 countries.
 

I don't know if I'm qualified to be giving advice, but here goes. My advice would be that podcasts are really easy. Editing tools are very intuitive and easy to learn. There is almost no barrier to entry. Details can be ironed out later, and you can just improve as you go.
 

Website: https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/podcast
Live Show: https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/rfrx
Email: podcast@recoveringfromreligion.org