Author: Stephen Bradford Long

Stephen Bradford Long is a writer, yoga teacher, and Satanist living and working in North Carolina. His work focuses on religion, sexuality, culture, and other subjects that strike his fancy.

I Didn’t Leave Christianity Because I Was Hurt

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 6 Comments

A few days ago, I realized that the intense feeling of religious and spiritual homelessness I’d felt for so long was gone. Since the beginning of my deconstruction, I’d begun to feel myself forced out of my Christianity, like a child being forced out of a womb. This left me with a profound feeling of existential homelessness — drifting away from my religious identity and family, and with little to cling onto as a home.

But, a few days ago, I realized that I no longer felt that homelessness — my home is now The Satanic Temple, my spiritual and religious identity is Satanist. (Does this surprise you? I recommend reading my articles on Satanism.)

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On Reading David Bentley Hart: What Even Is God, Anyway?

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 9 Comments

David Bentley Hart’s ponderous tome The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss has been regularly touted to me as the book every nontheist must read. I’m happy to oblige, and I’m about 30% of the way through (including footnotes.) While I find Hart pompous, bloviating, and even an occasional bully, I’m also enjoying his erudition and mastery of the English language. As he makes clear again and again, he is not so much trying to defend God, but rather to describe the classical view of God, which he feels modern atheists have sorely missed. 

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Vaush the Nazi Fighter

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 1 Comment

In this episode of Sacred Tension, I talk to controversial online leftist provocateur, edgelord, and de-radicalizer Vaush. We discuss his methods of argumentation with the far right, why he does what he does, and how the Left often fails in responding to our critics. We also address his recent sexual misconduct allegations.

Content warning: this episode does address sexual abuse.

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When People Tell You You’re Deceived, Damned, or Sinful

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 22 Comments

If there is a God, he set me up for failure in the Christian world when he deemed it suitable that I be gay. Struggling with my sexuality in the church resulted in many well-intentioned people saying awful things to me. Now, I’ve left Christian belief behind and I’m a proud member of The Satanic Temple. Unsurprisingly, the comments haven’t stopped. I get called deceived, evil, damned, and much more on a regular basis.

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What Satanists Wish Other People Understood About Satanism

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 5 Comments

Few religious groups are as misunderstood as Satanists. While I’ve done a great deal of explaining and pontificating about my own Satanism, I haven’t featured many other Satanic voices on this blog. I thought I would reach out to a few prominent Satanists and ask them what they wish non-Satanists understood about their religion. I found their answers enlightening and lovely.

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#Metoo and Confronting Evangelical Abuse

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 1 Comment

In this episode of Sacred Tension, environmental scientist Melissa Wilson returns to the show to tell us a harrowing story of abuse at a small Christian college in Appalachia. Instead of assuming this incident is an anomaly, or a tempest in a teacup, it is best to see it as a microcosm of the abuse and crisis sweeping all of evangelical Christian culture. 

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I Am Now An Outsider to the Christian LGBT Community I Helped Build, And That Hurts

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 4 Comments

Several days ago, an ugly battle over the resurrection of Christ exploded on theological twitter. It started when two prominent theologians started tweeting about a non-literal perspective of the resurrection, and the conversation quickly devolved into a morass of ugliness and bitterness. The details of the debate are immaterial to this post, so I won’t get into them. What stands out to me, though, is that many of the people defending the literal view of the resurrection were my fellow LGBT progressives. As I read through these tweets, and absorbed a toxic dose of twitter radiation, I had a painful realization, and I suddenly understood why my departure from credal Christian faith has hurt so much. I realized that, over the course of years, I slowly became an outsider to the very LGBT communities I helped build.

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