Understanding Neurodiversity in the Church: A Dialogue with Jon Machnee

TJ Blackwell: 00:00:24

Second Corinthians 13, 11, 13 in the Christian Standard Bible say, finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice, become mature, be encouraged, be of the same mind, be at peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints send you greetings.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. So just before this prick view of Scripture, the writer had discussed the power we find in our own weaknesses.

The writer warns the church at Corinth to test themselves and be sure that their faith is pure. After this, the author ends his letter with the above.

Jonathan Mahney, why do you believe after telling people to test themselves, that the author thought it most appropriate to end the letter by admonishing the church to love one another and to be of one mind?

Jon Machnee: 00:01:15

Yeah, great question.

I'm not sure I have an amazing answer for this, but I, I think the, the basic reason why you do that is, is testing each other and testing yourself is quite, quite stressing and has a lot of potential to have impact on your community and cause fractures where fractures aren't, aren't necessary.

And so there in, in most community and most social dynamics, you're always going to have pressure to expand and pressure to test and then pressure to contract. And it's always good to, to hold these things in tension, not let one overpower the other.

I think in that same way, testing each other and loving each other are, are two parts of, of opposing dynamics that you need to keep in balance. And it's very easy to remember to test other people, but not necessarily as easy to remember to love them.

So, so I think that's probably, probably what's going through his head, if I had to guess.

Joshua Noel: 00:02:12

Yeah. Yeah, makes sense to me. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Whole Church Podcast, possibly your favorite church unity podcast. If not, though, that's cool.

We don't hold a grudge because that'd be kind of counterintuitive a little bit. I am Joshua Noel. I, I am the announcer.

Jon Machnee: 00:02:37

I'm.

Joshua Noel: 00:02:37

That's all I am. I'm just here to announce other people, particularly of course the, the co host that means the most to everyone. Yeah.

Even if your first time listening, you don't know who I'm talking about. He means more to you than anyone else. The one and only TJ Tapiros from Blackwell. How's it going, tj?

Jon Machnee: 00:02:53

Good.

Joshua Noel: 00:02:53

Yeah. And of course also here with. I'm a great guest. I'm really actually quite Excited for this topic today we're going to be talking with Jonathan Macnie.

I think I pronounced that correct. Is that right?

Jon Machnee: 00:03:08

You did, yeah. You got it right first time.

Joshua Noel: 00:03:11

He is an Anglican researcher working to collect data from people on the spectrum and how the church can best be equipped to better include those on the spectrum with what we're doing in our churches. So excited to get into this. It's a kind of fun surprise. We haven't covered this yet, actually. A little bit of diversity unity stuff.

It's gonna be a fun talk. Very whole churchy.

TJ Blackwell: 00:03:33

Yeah, yeah. That's the vibe we like to have on the show.

Joshua Noel: 00:03:36

Whole church.

TJ Blackwell: 00:03:36

Whole churchy. Yeah, yeah. So if you're listening here, you might want to check out the Onazow podcast network website.

The link is below for shows like ours and shows that aren't like ours, that we like to like. And if you're already listening, if you're on the YouTube channel, hit like and subscribe, please.

Joshua Noel: 00:03:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:03:54

Sometimes running out.

Joshua Noel: 00:03:56

What do you mean? Time running out? They have limited time to like and subscribe on YouTube.

TJ Blackwell: 00:04:03

Yeah, everyone does.

Joshua Noel: 00:04:05

Well, I mean, I guess that's, yeah, technically true. All right.

And with that, you guys know I love starting our show off with a holy sacrament of unity, because you can't be in disagreement when you're as silly as I like to be. Yes, of course.

As always, we are starting our conversation off with a silly question in today's what might be the most inconvenient thing about being a ghost? I. I really want to hear TJ's answer first, actually.

TJ Blackwell: 00:04:35

Yeah, it's got to be intangibility if you're not like a poltergeist. Specifically not being able to pick stuff up. That's gotta suck.

Joshua Noel: 00:04:42

Just like, in general. Yeah, I. I feel like this might just show that I have a. Have an unhealthy relationship with food.

But I'm thinking like, just the ability, inability to eat things because, like, I like a good meal, I like culinary arts, all that kind of stuff. Wouldn't be able to experience it. And more importantly, if I'm just thinking about inconvenience when I get bored, I just like to munch things.

It'll be so inconvenient if I just couldn't munch. I'm just existing. I can't even take a nap just there. That seems pretty inconvenient. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, John, what's the most inconvenient thing about being a ghost?

Jon Machnee: 00:05:19

Yeah, great question. I'm not really sure because ghost Means so many different things.

And immediately what comes to my mind is like, okay, what are the parameters that we're dealing with? Or are we dealing with, like, you know, the one of those situations where you can't.

You're geo restricted, like, you can't leave a certain area because, like, you died in that area and now you're haunting that. Or I feel like that'd be pretty inconvenient. But also like, are. Are you there in a state of.

Of mourning because something happened to your body and you're just in a perpetual state of grief? I feel like that'd be pretty bad. But like, without knowing the specifics, it's really hard to comment on that.

I think most things about being a ghost would be bad, to be quite frank. Like, I don't really. I think it'd be harder to list the upsides than it would the downsides.

TJ Blackwell: 00:06:10

Yeah, I agree.

Joshua Noel: 00:06:11

Yeah. See, I think most of, like, the bad sides I think of, though, aren't really a thing of inconvenience.

It's more of like a, wow, that's just a torn eternal torment.

Jon Machnee: 00:06:19

But, like, I think eternal torments. Inconvenient.

Joshua Noel: 00:06:22

Yeah. Yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:06:23

At least a little bit.

Joshua Noel: 00:06:25

Yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:06:25

At least a little bit.

Joshua Noel: 00:06:27

All right.

Jon Machnee: 00:06:27

I guess generally speaking, not recommended.

TJ Blackwell: 00:06:29

Yeah. So one thing we found that really helps to get to better engender Christian unity is to hear one another's story. So check.

John, would you mind sharing with our listeners a little bit about your faith journey and the community you find yourself plugged into today?

Jon Machnee: 00:06:46

Yeah. So I grew up in rural Saskatchewan in Canada as a Mennonite Brethren. So I don't know.

Are you guys really familiar with Anabaptists and that whole thing?

TJ Blackwell: 00:06:57

Yeah, not on like a show level.

Joshua Noel: 00:06:59

But we know we've had Anabaptist on a couple times.

Jon Machnee: 00:07:02

Yeah. So, I mean, the joke is Mennonite brethren. MB stands for mostly Baptist. So that's like, you know, close enough. And like every.

Every good Mennonite, at age 18, I joined the army. That's. That's funny because Mennonites are pacifists.

TJ Blackwell: 00:07:18

Yeah.

Jon Machnee: 00:07:18

Yeah.

And so joined the army at age 18, went to the Royal Military College of Canada, which is kind of like Canada's West Point, and started training as an army officer. Quickly deconstructed after. After getting to university, left the faith altogether after maybe one or two years at university.

Mostly just started learning lots of new things, digging really deeply into questions of creation and evolution and then finally questions about New Testament critical scholarship and things like that. And just rapidly Deconstructed. And yeah, then, then I still just found religion very interesting.

And I happened to meet at one point a whole group of other people who were also at that time, it was called Asperger syndrome. We were all diagnosed with Asperger's, we met each other and we all had deconverted. And I thought that's kind of weird. How did that happen?

And so I talked to them and we all started realizing most of us had the same deconversion story, most of us went through the same path. And so I just started thinking that's kind of weird. Is this an anomaly, my little microcosm, or is this indicative of broader trends?

So I looked at the peer reviewed literature that exists, did a deep dive into the science of autism and religiosity and found that generally speaking, the peer reviewed literature showed that there was a general trend of negative correlation between autism and religion, meaning if you have autism, you're less likely to be religious. And I thought, okay, cool, but why?

And I found all the why answers they were giving did not accord with my intuitions and, and didn't seem to be right.

Like the, the suggestions were, were things about like autistic mentalizing capacity or theory of mind ability and how that would translate to your ability to relate to a personal God and things like that. And it was like, well this, this wasn't really my issue. And so I thought you to discover the answer myself.

So I, I at the time did not realize I would be interested in this topic for this long. But that was 10 years ago that I, I started doing this.

And so I embarked on what is now one of the largest data mining campaigns to ever exist on autistic Christians. And then I started doing interviews with autistic Christians and ex Christians and I've done over 500 interviews with them.

And anyway, so I was an atheist for most of that time and then I left the military.

And after I left the military I had a lot of thinking to do about my time in the military and I was still like in contact with lots of Christians because my research was mostly about autism and Christianity and this overlap between autism and Christianity. And I just slowly found myself coming back to Christianity through a whole variety of methods.

I spent probably three hours trying to explain that on my podcast, if you want the full long story, but the short story is I left the military, started to think about the context of all the things I was doing in the military and Christianity, and sort of had a change of heart and converted back to Christianity. At the time I was going to Anglican churches as an atheist mostly because I just like the liturgy.

So I thought I'll just keep going to an Anglican church. And that's basically how I ended up where I am.

TJ Blackwell: 00:11:09

That's kind of funny.

Jon Machnee: 00:11:10

Yeah, I went through a period where I really looked at Catholicism and Orthodoxy and other forms of Protestantism.

But eventually I just ended up also being more intellectually convinced by the Anglican case and the sort of holistic Anglican tradition as the one that I would best fit into.

And so, you know, by, by sheer coincidence of having gone to an Anglican church, it turned out I found, I found the church I would eventually end up in. And yeah, that's, that's how I came.

TJ Blackwell: 00:11:45

Or the full story. You go to Christianity on the spectrum. Listen to that.

Jon Machnee: 00:11:48

Yep, that's the short version though.

Joshua Noel: 00:11:54

It's cool.

TJ Blackwell: 00:11:55

Go ahead.

Joshua Noel: 00:11:56

I'll say you talk about data mining a little bit in your story and I'm curious. I think a lot of people kind of know what data mining is.

Maybe not everyone, but as far as like thinking of like autism and Christianity, how do you explain that to just average, ordinary, you know, whoever, whether they're part of the church or not, if they're like asking you what you do, you know, do you have to do much explaining or do most people kind of get where you're coming from? Just from the beginning, most people hear.

Jon Machnee: 00:12:26

Data mining and they assume it's some sort of bulk data collection, which is, I mean, close enough. I like to think it's a little more sophisticated than that.

But essentially, essentially I built a whole bunch of tools, building off of a whole bunch of other tools to scrape social media for people who were calling themselves autistic or identifying themselves as autistic in their bio or involved in autism specific forums and autism specific groups or in contact with those and then basically just pulling all their posts that they had publicly available and reading through them. That's basically what data mining is. Data mining is really useful for, for getting sort of an inch deep, mile wide view of things.

But often it's not enough to go really deep into people's views.

And so that's where I come in with like dropping surveys and then long form interviews and things like that to actually dig underneath what people are saying online.

You know, there's your interactions online and then there's what you would say to someone when you're actually talking to them about, about what they think about Christianity or, or their issues with Christianity.

And so it's, it's sort of data mining combined with Ethnographic research and surveying and a whole bunch of holistic data analysis techniques that you see in lots of sort of longitudinal statistical studies. And. Yeah, so that's sort of what it is. It's my, my background's military intelligence.

And so I often joke that I, I use, use my, my skills from a past life to, to answer questions that, that interest me. And the questions that interest me specifically are questions about autism and Christianity, mostly because I am autistic.

So I, I should also specify, when I say autism, I'm talking about what's now called ASD1. So autism, if you look in the DSM, it's called autism spectrum disorder.

So the DSM is like the big book of psychiatric disorders that people diagnose other people with. And within the DSM there's autism spectrum disorder. And autism spectrum disorder has three levels to it. It is ASD1, 2 and 3.

So ASD1 is where I am and it's where the vast majority of the people that I research are. So I, I say Christianity and autism. It's really Christianity and ASD1 that, that I study, but particularly.

So there used to be three diagnoses, so high functioning autism, Asperger syndrome, and PPD nos, or sorry, PDD nos, which is pervasive development disorder, not otherwise specified. And so you take those three diagnoses and now they're all labeled under one, which is, which is ASD1.

And, and so, yeah, it's just something that I find really fascinating. And so I read research papers, I keep, keep up to date with all that.

And then I just lurk on the Internet and listen to what autistic Christians are saying and ex Christians and figuring out what that means about Christianity and about autism and how those things interact. That's basically all I do.

Joshua Noel: 00:15:54

Yeah, super interesting.

TJ Blackwell: 00:15:55

Do you feel like that's a, that's a thing where you might reach an end point eventually where you're like, okay, I figured it out or is it just kind of.

Jon Machnee: 00:16:02

No, unfortunately it's one of those perpetual changing things, because Christianity is a perpetual changing thing and autism is also a perpetual changing thing. And the way that we think about autism has wildly shifted.

So when I got diagnosed in: 2009

If you said you were autistic, the only real touch point for that was probably like people with, with profound autism or like a significant intellectual disability that you'd think about them. However, nowadays people have a much better understanding of what autism Is.

But then that adds in additional complications and, and there are a whole, whole lot of things. So I, I think this is sort of going to be a ever shifting target and moving target that really never ends.

So I say, I say I'm going to do this until I get bored. And that, that doesn't seem like it's on the horizon anytime soon.

TJ Blackwell: 00:17:00

Yeah, see, at least you do have an end point. You're going to stop when you get bored. Us, we have a goal. It's just constantly moving.

Joshua Noel: 00:17:12

So when the entire church is in complete unison, we'll stop. Yeah, well, then we'll just turn it to a celebratory podcast probably. Actually.

TJ Blackwell: 00:17:20

Yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:17:21

Do a full season of just celebrations and it'll be just as long as this season.

TJ Blackwell: 00:17:25

Yeah. Which is so far.

Jon Machnee: 00:17:27

Six.

TJ Blackwell: 00:17:27

Six years. So there is one thing that we like to do to help our audience and us to get to know you better and we call that our speed round segment.

So we're going to ask you a series of questions about what you believe and ask that you try to answer them all in a single sentence or you can skip them. And we're not allowed to ask you any follow up questions at all. Are you ready? Can you handle it?

Jon Machnee: 00:17:49

Yep.

TJ Blackwell: 00:17:50

All right, Perfect.

Jon Machnee: 00:17:51

So.

TJ Blackwell: 00:17:53

Who or what is God?

Jon Machnee: 00:17:56

The triune God as specified by the Nicene Creed.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:00

What is salvation?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:02

Salvation is deliverance from sin.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:05

What is the significance of baptism in the Eucharist?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:09

These are sacraments.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:10

What authority does scripture have?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:13

Lots.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:14

What authority does tradition have?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:16

Also lots, but in a different way from Scripture.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:19

Do you believe in a continuation of the gifts of the Spirit?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:23

That really depends on what you mean. Generally I find myself being quite skeptical. However, I'm open to be corrected.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:29

Alright. Can God change?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:32

Depends what you mean by change.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:35

What do you love about the Bible?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:37

I find it interesting.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:39

What do you love about the church?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:44

Good question.

TJ Blackwell: 00:18:47

Which, if any of the seven sacraments do you follow?

Jon Machnee: 00:18:52

Baptism, Eucharists, confirmation, penance, anointing of the sick, marriage and holy orders.

TJ Blackwell: 00:19:01

Cool.

Jon Machnee: 00:19:01

All right, Cool.

TJ Blackwell: 00:19:02

Great job. Yeah. That's it. That's the speedrun.

Joshua Noel: 00:19:05

That was one of the speediest speed rounds.

TJ Blackwell: 00:19:07

Yeah. A lot of people overthink it. We just need the answer.

Joshua Noel: 00:19:11

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that's a correct answer.

Jon Machnee: 00:19:14

You said short answer, single sentences.

TJ Blackwell: 00:19:16

Yeah. You nailed it. You nailed it.

Joshua Noel: 00:19:18

That's perfect.

TJ Blackwell: 00:19:19

Perfect understanding of the task.

Jon Machnee: 00:19:22

Yes. The thing with autistic people is we tend to hyper literally interpret what other people say.

TJ Blackwell: 00:19:28

Yeah. Thank God.

Jon Machnee: 00:19:29

Yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:19:30

Just need more.

Jon Machnee: 00:19:31

I got a Bit of that in me.

Joshua Noel: 00:19:32

Speed round speed.

Jon Machnee: 00:19:34

Exactly.

Joshua Noel: 00:19:35

There we go. Yeah. All right. So one thing we really talk about on our show is kind of the work of the Spirit in unity amongst diversity.

So, like, how the Holy Spirit is working all of us towards unity, even with our diversities of thoughts. Neurodiversity, biodiversity, all that kind of stuff is working in that.

I was curious, what do you think your work collecting data and stuff could do to help the Church concerning how we better include those who are on the spectrum or maybe others who are just neurodivergent in some way?

Jon Machnee: 00:20:11

Yeah.

So the biggest thing right now, at least at this point, is most people have no idea what autism is, have no idea how it manifests, have no idea how it interacts with Christianity. And as the saying goes, knowing's half the battle.

And, I mean, I may be biased because my background is sort of military intelligence, knowing things. Yes. And so I tend to think having clear and accurate pictures of battle space is essential in order to be able to conduct any sort of operation.

And so this is sort of within that wheelhouse. Most people don't even know what they don't know about autism.

You know, they'll maybe have some ideas about what it might be from a documentary or from watching Rain man or the Big Bang Theory and being like, oh, it's Sheldon Cooper, and that's sort of the limit of their experience with autism. Or they'll know a family who has an autistic child, and that's basically the limit and the extent of what they know. So the biggest.

The biggest thing that I think my research does is it sort of just says, okay, here are the facts. Here is what the actual state of the ground is. Here is what things typically look like. Here are things that work. Here are things that don't work.

Here are the common complaints they have here. The. The common things that they, like, do with this information. Whatever makes sense in your specific context.

So if you're a Catholic, use this information in the context of Catholicism. If you're a low church evangelical, use this information in that context.

But just, like, get a better picture of what's going on and just understand what it is that you are dealing with so that you can actually address it and properly maneuver and function within this space. One of the things that I say a lot on my podcast is, is there's a really common complaint you see online by. By autistic people who leave the church.

And it is something to the effect of Christianity is a religion by neurotypicals for Neurotypicals and what they're expressing when they say that is the church doesn't think about us. They don't understand we exist. They don't do anything to try to accommodate us. It is as though we don't exist.

And they are, they are practicing the religion as though we're not actually here. And it makes sense. Like, I, I understand what they're saying. However, I really don't think that needs to be the case.

However, the first step to making that not the case is to just know that, that these people exist and, and there are like, problems and what those problems are and how those problems can be alleviated.

So as far as my work and research goes, it's just that it's giving people clear and accurate information, pictures about the space by the sheer power of data science, which is a big thing.

TJ Blackwell: 00:23:13

And I'm pretty sure last year, a couple years ago, Christianity Today really started trying to get information like that out. Not about autistic people specifically, which could be helpful.

Joshua Noel: 00:23:25

But I mean, it's something we've learned on our show too.

And just like talking to people where like, we'll do an interview with like, early on, when we first interviewed, like, some Catholic priests, we had so many people come to us who were like, we didn't think Catholics prayed to Jesus at all. We thought they just prayed to like, Mary. And we're like, no, they like Jesus too.

TJ Blackwell: 00:23:43

Yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:23:44

And it's just like, wow, there's so much misunderstanding. First up to anything, just like, hey, let's actually understand what is, you know, autism? What is church unity? What do people believe?

What are they feeling? What is their life experience? All this stuff, like, if we don't have that knowledge up front, we can't even take any steps at all.

No, just walking blind. Yeah.

Jon Machnee: 00:24:07

Yeah, no, exactly. And another, another thing I always say is, like, learning more about something will never hurt you.

I mean, maybe there are cases in which it will, like, I don't know. But generally speaking, learning more, the worst case scenario is you just waste a bunch of your time. That's sort of the worst thing that can happen.

But the best thing that can happen is you can really learn to think about, about things in a way that is a lot more helpful.

And like, even, even if, like, this, this work is helpful for people specifically who have ASD1, it's, it's also useful for sort of everyone because there are lots of things that you would be.

Do for a church that might help people with, with autism, but also might help people who don't have autism, who would just prefer ways of doing Christianity that are more aligned with us. I know a lot of people who aren't autistic who have.

Have autistic family and friends who've listened to the podcast and thought, actually, you know, this, this way of doing Christianity that you've talked about might actually work better for me as well. And so it isn't just for us, but, you know, there's lots to be learned.

Joshua Noel: 00:25:18

Could you give us an example of like.

Like, what would it look like to do church or have a church activity that's more functioned for those who are, you know, more neurodivergent as opposed to neurotypical? Like, what does that difference look like practically?

Jon Machnee: 00:25:32

So there, there's a phrase that I use called no silver bullets. Basically, there's no one size fits all solution to this.

And autism is a really heterogeneous and broad category that encapsulates a whole bunch of different types of people.

And so you have autistic people who are like me, and in just still within that ASD1 bracket, you will have people who are very, very different from me. And, and the types of church that work for me don't work for the other people.

But generally speaking, the, the ways that, that autistic Christians tend to practice their faith tend to de.

Emphasize a lot of the relational components of Christianity that we often think is core and essential, mostly because forms of autistic cognition don't always prioritize thinking about relationships in the way that most people think about relationships.

TJ Blackwell: 00:26:27

Yeah. And so, yeah, yeah, I feel like it's, it's like most people don't understand how common ASD1 really is.

Jon Machnee: 00:26:36

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's like one in one in three or. Sorry, it's one in 33 people, not one in three. That'd be wild. Yeah, but it's, it's. It's like around 1 in 33 people are. Are on the autism spectrum.

But the majority of those, like 80% are going to be some form of ASD1 or ASD2, which will. Which have a lot of overlap in them. Yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:27:06

So do you, do you believe it would be harder for the church to reach people on the spectrum who are outside of our church communities or to better engage and include people who already are inside.

Jon Machnee: 00:27:18

Yeah. So this is like a constant, persistent challenge for churches to be able to reach and communicate to people like us.

Like, one of the things I'm constantly pointing out is that most of the evangelism materials that we have most of the ideas that we push forward as this is what Christianity is, are often deeply counterintuitive to autistic people in ways that a lot of us don't realize. So one good example of this is teleological reasoning. So autistic people tend to have significantly diminished amounts of teleological reasoning.

And so teleological reasoning is reasoning in terms of meaning and purpose and attributing meaning to events that happen within your life. Autistic people just aren't likely to do that or are significantly less likely to attribute meaning to events than other people.

But you look at ministry tools like Alpha or things like that, and it's all about attributing meaning to events in your life and, you know, seeing God in places. And a lot of autistic people are just genuinely confused by that type of language and don't really understand what people are trying to say. I.

Another, another big thing that comes up a lot is people will say, you can have a personal relationship with Jesus.

And you're saying personal relationship to Jesus, to someone who, like, under the diagnostic category of autism, has, has a label that is like persistent deficits in social communication relationships and social emotional reciprocity. To be autistic is, is to. To fall under that category. And it's like, I, I'm married.

I don't even, like, I often joke, I don't know if I have a personal relationship with my wife. Like, how am I supposed to have one with Jesus? This doesn't really make sense to me.

However, there are all sorts of ways of practicing Christianity in ways that don't. We don't really need to consider a sort of emotive emotional connection or experience.

There are ways of doing and practicing Christianity that don't need to involve these types of mechanisms that work really well for other people.

But for a portion of us whose brains are sort of radically different from other people's in the way that we process these things, these types of thinking just sort of don't penetrate to us. It's. It's like, you know, asking someone to describe a color that, that they've never seen. Oftentimes I often describe myself as doing that.

Like, I'll read Christian books and I'll be like, I know these are all English words, and I know they're all put together in a sentence, and I know these sentences are coherent, but I have no idea what they're trying to say here.

TJ Blackwell: 00:30:10

Yeah, like, there's no clue what that sounds.

Jon Machnee: 00:30:12

Says, yeah, this is fundamentally not an experience that I'VE ever had or one that I relate to in. In any way. And so when you're trying to talk to Christianity to a. A guy like me who. Or like a.

A similar guy to me who was never raised in Christianity, and you start going off about, like, personal relationship with Jesus and seeing meaning and the Holy Spirit moving in your life, it's. To us, it sort of sounds like you're. You've kind of lost it a bit. Right? Like, it's. You're.

You're trying to tell me about this new color, and I'm colorblind. And it's like, well, I'm sure that's great for you, but that does not seem like something I should care about.

TJ Blackwell: 00:30:56

Yeah, I feel like we struggle, especially in, like, Pentecostal churches, because a lot of what we do is very difficult for people to touch. Sensitivity.

Jon Machnee: 00:31:08

Oh, yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:31:08

Which is. Yeah, a lot of the ASD1, you know, micro spectrum. So that it's really hard for us because, you know, lay on hands, washing feet, none of that.

Yeah, that's gonna work.

Jon Machnee: 00:31:23

And, like, specifically. So I did a whole episode on this with an autistic charismatic guy who spent a lot of time in Pentecostal movements. And, yeah, the.

And then I've talked to a lot of people often. They're. They're former charismatics who talk about, like, I just hated being touched. I. I did not understand this.

And then also the sort of expectation of ecstatic emotional experiences. And there. There's this. This story that's described to me and that I read so many times, and.

And it happens almost so frequently that I call it the universal autistic experience of. Of church, which is there's a praise and worship band up at the front. Like, they're. They're giving it right.

Everyone in the crowd is feeling it and moving with it. And the guy up front is like, I can feel the Holy Spirit moving in our midst right now.

And you as the autistic person are standing in the congregation, like, what is going on? What is wrong with everyone else here? Completely disconnected, Completely, completely isolated from everyone and everything else.

Not being able to relate, not being able to understand and not being emotionally moved by these things. And you have to think, okay, is there something wrong with me? Or is there something wrong with everyone else?

And whichever thing you try to answer, it's bad. Right? It's. It's not a particularly good thing to.

To say, oh, actually, there's something, like, deeply broken inside of me, or actually, everyone else has something wrong with them. And this isn't real. It's all. It's all hallucination or whatever, which is the thing I frequently hear. But there's.

There's a secret third option which is the.

The experience of Christianity is still open and available to you, but perhaps not by these means because of some quirk of the way that your brain is. Is built to process and analyze information. And so that's, that's that. But yeah, there are all sorts of. All sorts of issues like that.

TJ Blackwell: 00:33:29

Yeah. And it's.

Thank God there are like, high liturgical churches as, as options for people who don't necessarily want to leave the faith, because I get it.

Jon Machnee: 00:33:38

Yeah. And so I've, I've.

I've demonstrated and analyzed this phenomenon that I call high church drift, which is you can express it in terms of mathematical probability that after the age of 22, as an autistic person gets older, the probability that they will end up in a high church tradition if they don't leave Christianity significantly increases as the years go on. And so most of us do end up. End up in. In high church liturgical traditions. Not all of us, of course.

You know, there's still, still, still bunches of us in. In lower church traditions. But generally speaking, the trend is migration to high church first for a lot of those reasons.

Joshua Noel: 00:34:22

Yeah.

So, you know, a lot of times when we talk to people of different cultural backgrounds, especially if we get in, like, ethnicity, like, we'll have people be like, oh, yeah. One good thing would be for church unity would be like, just play more music from different traditions. You know, that kind of thing.

Like, there's a lot of focus on music. I feel like that probably doesn't correlate as much when we get into these more, you know, analytical kind of focus stuff.

Is liturgy the version of that for, you know, people on the spectrum, like, we, we need more liturgy in our services.

Jon Machnee: 00:34:52

We need more liturgy and sacraments. Is. Is the, the thing that comes up a lot is, is when it, when it comes to these things, the more.

More, more liturgical things, more structure and, and more, more like physical, tangible things that you can touch and feel in terms instead of relying on, like, you can rely on the physical, tangible experiences of the bread and the wine of God's literal presence there. You know, the thing a lot of autistic people will. Will say when, when I ask them questions like, where do you see or find God?

They will say in the Eucharist.

And it's, you know, is that because they've migrated to a high church tradition, and that's the way that they have, they've started to filter the way that they understand these things through like is this a post hoc rationalization or is this something else? I don't know. You know, it's probably, it's probably a little bit of both.

But the sort of God is, is something tangible that you can touch, feel and see and, and that you don't need to be in a certain emotive state. You don't need to conjure up any certain emotions in order to meet him. You don't need to, you don't need to think like other people to meet him.

You can simply meet him because he said he would be. There is something that a lot of autistic people find very useful or meaningful.

So yeah, I would say that's probably the cross cultural meeting point for us.

Joshua Noel: 00:36:29

Yeah, interesting. I'm going to ask you to speculate so you can just tell me to shove it if you want.

But I am a little curious as you know, a lot of the church and stuff that I grew up up in. A lot of people it feels like it's easier for them to think of God as like transcendent, you know, look up when they pray, that kind of thing.

And it's harder when you start focusing on the solid idea of like, hey, actually God's in everything. God, you know, God's around us. You talk about like this focus on like touch and feel. Do you.

Would you think that maybe like more people inspecting would have an easier time with the concept of like God being in all things compared to maybe more neurotypical people?

Jon Machnee: 00:37:05

So not from what I've been able to find, okay, the, the understanding and conceptualization of God and autistic people is sort of wild and all over the place. But generally speaking, the, the sort of joke that, that gets thrown around a lot is, you know, it's the, the common phrase that you hear.

It's, it's not a religion, it's a relationship. A lot of autistic people invert that and say it's not a relationship, it's a religion.

And, and there's also like a joke that, that I recorded one of the guys saying he's like, you know, actually I prefer my, my abstract impersonal relationship with God. Where, and there, there also tends to be a lot more like sensory skepticism about, about these types of things.

And generally speaking I find autistic people to be quite skeptical of things that they cannot immediately physically feel, see and touch. But it's, it's when they, when they say they are encountering God or where they say they encounter God.

It's, it's in the physical signs of, of the, the sacraments. And like a lot of them are very, if, if you, so I follow lots of, of different accounts, especially autistic women.

If you look at autistic women and how they post very heavy Eucharist center in there in their sort of conceptualization of meeting God in a way that you don't really find that same emphasis in people of their same demographics and denominations.

TJ Blackwell: 00:38:40

All right, so like you data, you have to read them all physically, right? You've just read thousands and thousands of tweets and blog posts and that sort of thing.

Jon Machnee: 00:38:49

Oh, is it back? Cool. Yeah, so, so I have read thousands.

Yeah, so, so I've basically just read a lot of, of tweets and blogs and posts and comment sections and forums and a lot of that. With, with the advent of LLMs and like AI and things like that, I've been able to like, I'm a computer engineer.

I, I, I work a lot with these things professionally and so I have been able to build machine learning algorithms to help me better sort and classify these posts.

And I already did a lot of sorting, classifying and tagging and so, you know, I can drop these into buckets and then pick things from buckets and read them. But yeah, it's, it's basically just a lot of reading and summarizing data from, from a wide variety of different sources.

And so I try to get a good representation across the political spectrum, across the denominational spectrum, and across the geographical spectrum.

I'm limited to English, so I speak English and French, but I, I'm not good enough at speaking French to be able to do research in French, so, so I basically just limit it to English, which means it's mostly, mostly Canada, the U.S. uK and parts of Northern Europe.

TJ Blackwell: 00:40:11

Yeah, I still, I think it's so crazy. This is not related that if you're, you're born in Quebec, like, yeah, you're gonna speak French.

Dude, if you never leave Quebec, you might not learn English.

Jon Machnee: 00:40:20

So it is so wild.

TJ Blackwell: 00:40:24

Yeah, that is absolutely nuts. But is there anything else that you think our listeners might want to know about you or your work or just how to engage with those on the spectrum?

Jon Machnee: 00:40:35

Yeah, I mean like, like I've already said, learning is the biggest thing. Most people simply don't know. I, I will say you are going to find a lot of weird stuff.

Like my research has gotten me to learn about things that I never thought I would even need to care about that. I've had to go in, in far more depth than the average person would ever want to.

I have especially been pulled into a lot of discourse around trans and LGBT Q Related issues. For those who aren't aware, autistic people are disproportionately trans and disproportionately lgbtq. And I A or and a.

So asexual and gay, lesbian, bi or trans, just lots of them. A A significant portion of our population when compared to the majority of people. And, and so those are especially hot button issues with the church.

And so I have had to become far more fluent in that, in that data and the emerging research than most people ever have had to to be. And those things are also very complicated.

And I just find the churches is very quick to make judgments on things without proper data informed backing behind what they're saying. And so, yeah, I would just say learn, figure it out. I've. If you're looking for a good place to start, I would recommend my podcast, but Me too.

That's, you know, the first 10 episodes are me laying out my research and then every episode after that is just me answering my audience's questions that they send me. So they asked me to do an episode on why so many autistic people are universalists. So I did that.

And lots of niche topics like that and monks, nuns, lots of autistic people in those populations. I've talked to a lot of them. People want to know what's up with them. So I've got an episode on that.

But yeah, that's the, the biggest, the biggest thing to take away is sort of just understand we're going to be weird, understand we're going to be different. And, and don't try to like, force people to fit your, your expectations of what they should be.

Sort of just meet them where they are, learn about who they are and, and what they are and, and how they interact with, with the world, what works, what doesn't, and then just sort of go from there.

Joshua Noel: 00:43:12

Just because I'm curious. What's the weirdest thing you've heard someone say?

Jon Machnee: 00:43:16

Or like the weirdest thing I've heard someone say. Oh. So I, I have to say my calibration for what weird is is just so wildly out of pace with, with the vast majority of people because I like I.

So I, I attended a. A V. Do you know what VR chat is?

TJ Blackwell: 00:43:36

Yeah.

Jon Machnee: 00:43:37

Yeah. So. So there's a VR chat group for autistic furries. Do you know what furries are?

TJ Blackwell: 00:43:44

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Jon Machnee: 00:43:47

So they do a Latin mass vespers in VR chat. And yeah, I attended that. That's crazy and awesome. Yeah, so. So that's not that. That rate's probably a three on the crazy scale.

That goes all the way up to 10 of things. So, you know, recently had had someone explain to me their. Their conceptuality of.

Of cosmology with respect to the Bride of Christ, and they themselves were trans, and they had this idea that actually trans women were much better eschatologically prepared for the reality of becoming the Bride of Christ because they were quite literally becoming it through. Through exogenous hormonal intervention. And. And they said that.

And that didn't even register to me as weird because I had heard that about 20 other times, and I only hear that from autistic people. And so, like, that is. That is like a window into. Into the. The level of things that I'm used to hearing or like. So there's a.

There's a theory about autism that autism is sort of the extreme of the male brain. It's very controversial theory within autism research. Like, just be aware of that. But. But a lot of people have been like, I think this is.

They sort of say it jokingly, but sort of not. They're like, I think this is probably grounds for allowing women's ordination, but only if she has autism. And things like that. Just the.

Some of the most insane takes that you've. You've ever heard in Christianity have probably been generated by one of the fine people in my research. In my research cohort. Yeah.

You name an insane thing, it has probably been said by one of us.

Joshua Noel: 00:45:37

Nice. So what I'm hearing, if nothing else, they will hear some really interesting things if they go listen to your podcast.

Jon Machnee: 00:45:48

There are many tidbits of knowledge you might be unaware of.

Joshua Noel: 00:45:55

I mean, that sounds really helpful because that's not stuff that I think I would just generate sitting by myself thinking, like, what could this be like, you know?

Jon Machnee: 00:46:03

Yeah. Yeah, it is a wild ride. And yeah, that's. That's sort of just. Just skimming the surface of. Of the types of takes I'm used to seeing and reading.

TJ Blackwell: 00:46:16

Man, I just kind of want to set up a whole church. Vrchat Latin Mass now. See, yeah, turnout would be.

Jon Machnee: 00:46:23

Yeah, you could be furries too, or. Yeah, you need to. Everyone needs to be in fursonas, though. That's. That's what makes the Latin Mass in VR chat. The Latin Mass of VR chat. Yes, it is.

TJ Blackwell: 00:46:34

It's the cheapest way to Be a furry on VRChat.

Jon Machnee: 00:46:37

They had vestments. They had like digital vestments.

TJ Blackwell: 00:46:41

That's so funny over there.

Joshua Noel: 00:46:43

That's great.

Jon Machnee: 00:46:44

Fursonas. It was anyway.

TJ Blackwell: 00:46:47

It's pretty good.

Jon Machnee: 00:46:47

Yeah, it was, it was, it was a thing.

TJ Blackwell: 00:46:50

At least they were serious, you know.

Jon Machnee: 00:46:52

Yeah, no, they were very serious, very reverent. They, they, they took it very seriously. And, and yeah, I sort of just sat there.

I don't have VR so I just logged in with my desktop app and just sort of hung out there and participated with them. But yeah, they're, they were an interesting group of people.

TJ Blackwell: 00:47:13

That's really cool.

Joshua Noel: 00:47:15

Yeah, well, and that's where I think so I love all the interesting and like unique takes and everything.

But that is where I think it's important to stress like if people are going to try to taught and you can either back this up or tell me I'm stupid, if you're going to be there for more people on the spectrum in your community to appreciate that they are still being serious about this. Like, like the thing that they were doing with the mask there that like that was actually really meaningful and cool.

Even if you find it really weird and it kind of makes you want to giggle, it's like, okay, but like what they're doing is serious and it's important.

Jon Machnee: 00:47:48

I, I have a, I have a joke chart with like an X and a Y axis and the Y axis is, is, is sincerity and irony on each pole and the, the other polls are reasonable and unhinged. And, and in that, in that cross section of sincere and unhinged is what I like to call the autism zone.

Because that's where, that's where you find a lot of us and very, very serious about it and very earnest about it. But also we tend to have some takes that, that people might, might not initially understand that.

That being said, it is the, the, the people who still practice Christianity who are autistic are very sincere in, in their practice of Christianity and they are probably some of the most serious Christians that you will meet.

Some of the most well read, some of the most theologically literate and some of the most like intellectualized Christians that you will ever meet in, in terms of the types of people who, who know about the differences between or who know about things like the Council of Chalcedon and what was decided at the Council of Calcedon is wildly overrepresented in, in people that I study or just people who have memorized thousands of Bible verses. People like if, if the primary method by which Autistic people engage with Christianity is intellectualization and. And intellectual analysis of.

Of Christianity. And so that is like, pretty much you. You are going to.

You are going to find some very weird stuff, but also it is very sincere and very intellectually rigorous in a way that you might not be prepared for.

TJ Blackwell: 00:49:47

Yeah. When the, when the hyper fixation needle gets pointed at theology.

Jon Machnee: 00:49:51

Oh, yeah, Many, many such cases.

Joshua Noel: 00:49:57

I hope people sitting at home have, like, have that same XY axis chart. I hope they put our podcast on that. Like, serious yet unhinged, you know, that'd be great.

Jon Machnee: 00:50:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:50:10

But. So one thing we.

We do like to do near the end of all of our shows is just to ask people if you had a practical action, just something that would help the church better engender unity in our own times. What's something that people could stop and do right now that would better help us have more unity, even with our diversity?

TJ Blackwell: 00:50:29

The church?

Jon Machnee: 00:50:31

I mean, the. The boring answer that I've said many times is just learn, you know, get. Get a better understanding of things. Get more information.

Joshua Noel: 00:50:39

Read a book.

Jon Machnee: 00:50:40

Read a book.

Joshua Noel: 00:50:42

Yeah.

Jon Machnee: 00:50:43

Yep, that's. That's basically it.

TJ Blackwell: 00:50:46

Yeah. The real answers go to VR Chat, Latin mass.

Jon Machnee: 00:50:49

Hell, yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:50:51

Yeah, clearly.

But if everyone, you know, start doing little bit of research and learned something about, you know, how to unify the church, what would that look like, do you think?

Jon Machnee: 00:51:03

I have no idea.

TJ Blackwell: 00:51:06

Yeah, conceptualize.

Jon Machnee: 00:51:08

Yeah, so. So I. I would. I would say know how to win friends and influence people, maybe.

TJ Blackwell: 00:51:16

Yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:51:17

Good reference.

TJ Blackwell: 00:51:19

Before we wrap up, we do like to ask everyone to share a moment where they saw God recently. We call it our God moment. And it can be whatever. It can be a blessing, a moment of challenge, worship, anything.

I always make Josh go first to give us enough time to think about our most recent God moment. So, Josh, do you have a God moment for us this week?

Joshua Noel: 00:51:41

Yeah, I didn't think you're gonna let me go first.

I had a good friend that came and visited me just yesterday just to watch a movie, and I feel like I haven't seen him in a little bit, so it was kind of cool. Like. Oh, man. Yeah. You know, just get to have that presence with friends and enjoy big dinosaurs on screen because. Dinosaurs. Cool. Yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:51:59

Yeah. I drove to almost 200 miles to watch a movie.

Joshua Noel: 00:52:04

Yeah, I had a really good friend do the exact same thing for me just like yesterday.

TJ Blackwell: 00:52:08

That's so odd.

Joshua Noel: 00:52:09

It was you.

TJ Blackwell: 00:52:10

One of the chances. Yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:52:12

It's wild.

TJ Blackwell: 00:52:13

So for me, my God moment is probably gonna be my sister. Recently I'm kind of getting forced to go on vacation. So the other day, my sister takes a link to an Airbnb for October. No, September something.

I'm like, what is this? And she's like, oh, we're getting this Airbnb, and we're going to a NASCAR race in Tennessee. And I paid for your part, so you're going.

I was like, okay, cool. And, you know, at least she thinks about me. That means a lot because I'm not capable of planning my own vacation. It's not possible. I cannot do it.

Joshua Noel: 00:52:53

Yeah. The only plans I make for your vacations are to go to podcast places.

TJ Blackwell: 00:52:58

Yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:52:58

I don't think you like that as much.

TJ Blackwell: 00:53:00

Yeah. So that's what happens.

That is how I get a vacation is either Josh plans for us to go to a conference or my sister plans for us to go to a NASCAR race.

Joshua Noel: 00:53:10

Yeah. Your sister's way cooler than me.

TJ Blackwell: 00:53:11

Praise God.

Joshua Noel: 00:53:12

Yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:53:14

Yeah. Usually.

Joshua Noel: 00:53:15

Yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:53:17

Comes with. Comes part of the family.

Joshua Noel: 00:53:19

Yeah. Or not being me.

TJ Blackwell: 00:53:22

John, do you have a God moment for us this week? And it can be literally anything.

Jon Machnee: 00:53:26

Yeah.

So I'm gonna just self report that I'm one of those autistic people who has very low amounts of teleological reasoning and is intensely skeptical and doesn't really attribute events to. To God. So I will. I will say yes this Sunday when I had the Eucharist.

TJ Blackwell: 00:53:47

Hey, that's a great answer.

Jon Machnee: 00:53:49

That is where I. I had a God moment, because he had. He had promised to be there, and I had faith. He was when. When I took it.

TJ Blackwell: 00:53:59

Yeah. See, the difference between our God moment and yours is that you can prove it.

Jon Machnee: 00:54:04

Yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:54:05

You prove you were right. So if you like this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend. Share with you an enemy? Share with your cousins.

Three of those options are equal in sincerity. Get the merch. Check it out.

Joshua Noel: 00:54:20

Cousins are more important, though, right?

TJ Blackwell: 00:54:22

Of course. Your cousins are the most important thing. So check the merch out. It's on Captivate. It's comfy. It's cozy. It looks decent. It's understated. It's.

You know, it's there, and we're there for you.

Joshua Noel: 00:54:33

Yeah. I don't know if we're as comfy as the shirt, though. We're probably not. Although TJ's voice could be comfort for your ears, perhaps.

TJ Blackwell: 00:54:41

I've not heard that ever. Not once.

Joshua Noel: 00:54:43

Well, write us in and let us know if you find his voice comforting.

Also, if you want to hear more of his comforting voice, you can go to Systematic Geekology he's doing a lot over there this week and I think he might be upset at me because of it. I'm not sure. Try to think where else you are. He's on the episode of Kung Fu Pizza Party. So yeah. Also check out Brandon Knight's Kung Fu Pizza Party.

All of these shows are also on the same podcast Next podcast network as this one, the Amazon Podcast Network. So check it out. You'll hear More of TJ, more of me, but more importantly, TJ's comforting voice.

Jon Machnee: 00:55:15

Yeah.

TJ Blackwell: 00:55:16

And thank you so much, John, for your time today and thank you audience for listening to us and John, and we hope you enjoyed it. Next week we're going to be talking with Dr. Edward Gravely and Dr. Peter Link about their book, Bible 101.

Then we're going to have another roundtable discussion.

This time it's going to be going over how churches can best disciple people in a time where church members spend more time with news and media than they do in our churches. And that is, I think, the record for the longest title of one of our episodes ever.

Then we're going to be speaking with Dr. Jeanette Auk about her contribution to the New Testament and Color a multi ethnic Bible commentary. And of course, at the end of season one, Francis Chan will be on the show.

Joshua Noel: 00:55:57

Yeah. He doesn't know though, so someone does have to tell him, maybe force him.

TJ Blackwell: 00:56:02

Yeah. We need our people, which is you guys, to reach out.

Joshua Noel: 00:56:06

Yeah.