During a conversation on a recent JRE episode with Michael Shellenberger, host Joe Rogan revealed that he has been attending church regularly for the past three to four years.
The admission came after Rogan delivered a lengthy defense of Christian teachings and their value in everyday life. When Shellenberger asked him directly, “Are you Christian?” Rogan replied: “Well, I go to church and I have been for quite a while. I’ve been doing it for the last three or four years.”
Shellenberger pushed back, noting that attending church is “not really an answer to the question.”
Rogan responded openly about his uncertainty: “Well, because I don’t know. I think it’s very interesting and I do believe that if you follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will live a better life. I really do believe that.”
Rogan then described what he has observed among the congregation he attends: “One of the things I talk about is like the people that I go to church with are the most polite people I’ve ever met in my life. They’re so kind and so nice and everybody lets you out of the parking lot. Everybody’s like, ‘You go, you go.’ It works.”
He continued: “Like if people are trying to find an idea, does that mean I believe people came back from the d*ad? Does that mean I believe Moses parted the Red Sea? Not really, no. It seems like that’s most likely a story where people are telling it generation after generation after generation, but there was probably something happening.”
On what draws him to attending services, Rogan said: “When I go to church and I listen to them talk about various passages in the Bible, my mindset is always like, what was the real experience? Like what are we missing out of these tales? What are we missing out of these recounting of these experiences? I don’t think it was nothing. I think there’s something real to it.”
Rogan also reflected on the appeal of Christian teachings as a framework for living: “And it again, it works. That’s the main one for me. It’s like you want to live a better life. Like if you live as a Christian, you’ll have a better life. You’ll have a more love-filled, more wonderful life. That’s real.”
He added that dismissing Christian teachings as mere fairy tales misses the point entirely: “This idea that it’s fairy tales… if it’s a method for life that gives you a more rich and loving and peaceful life, isn’t that better for everybody? Isn’t that a real thing? There’s no way you can know whether or not any of the stories in the Bible happened exactly as described… So you have to have this leap of faith.”
