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The Assembly NC
North Carolina's digital magazine on place and power
Note: This article mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 9-8-8.
Jared Smith remembers peering over the edge of his eighth-story apartment in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and wondering why he wanted to jump off.
Smith’s mental health had taken a nosedive since he arrived for a Pentecostal ministry internship—something Smith describes as both “culty” and “a joke”—in his early 20s. The school, a satellite of the main campus Smith attended in North Carolina, was situated in a trailer in a pastor’s yard, with only six students watching classes livestreamed from the United States. But the level of control the school exerted over students far overshadowed its size.
When they weren’t in lecture, Smith and his classmates would preach on streets and protest at abortion clinics. At one point, the pastor encouraged Smith to stop listening to Christian metal music because it was “clearly what’s causing this depression.” He deleted his entire iTunes library.
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“That was the kind of insane austerity of these people, and it was miserable, but I thought it was the correct way to do things,” Smith told The Assembly. “I thought, ‘Man, I’m so grateful and lucky to be among the few people who are actually living as though this shit is real.’”
That was the last time his faith was vibrant, Smith said. He felt pity for those going to hell and compelled to help strangers atone for their sins. But looking back, that period was also the start of his eventual departure from faith, a choice which has set him on an alternate course.
Smith, a 30-year-old Raleigh resident with a day job in video production, has been an atheist for seven years. His candor about his struggle with faith can be disarming. But it’s also what makes him a compelling voice to those fighting similar battles—and why he’s helping change the way religion is discussed online.
“My whole thing is personal,” Smith said. “There’s nothing that’s not on the table.”
Known on YouTube as Heliocentric, Smith is perhaps the only atheist YouTuber who unironically “loves religion.” His channel, now nearly 80,000 subscribers strong, has grown rapidly since he started posting consistently in January 2024. His videos, uploaded every couple weeks, range in length from 10 minutes to an hour and run a gamut of religious subjects, each geared at better understanding a faith group he had little previous exposure to.
His “atheist church audits,” his most frequent and popular series, are what has set him apart. Two or three times each month, Smith attends services of various faiths, talks to adherents, partakes in the customs, and offers his take for his online audience to digest. One week he read the Book of Mormon cover to cover. For another audit, he simulated the process of disfellowshipment from Jehovah’s Witness communities. He attended a nondenominational Black church, and spoke from the pulpit about his faith journey.
With little more on screen than his face, a blurred backdrop, and the occasional phone capture from his outings, the candid and intimate videos feel less like a lecture and more like a diary. While his critiques can be barbed, he’s careful to limit his jabs toward things he believes to be “batshit harmful” to the well-being of believers—usually bits of doctrine or customs—and never to believers themselves.
It’s a noble, if unorthodox, mission. Rather than trying to prove people’s religious beliefs wrong, Smith is encouraging them to entertain the possibility they might be. He’s not hoping to undermine faith; he’s trying to help others understand that there is more than one way to practice it. In the process, he’s trying to build empathy and inspire more nuanced conversations about religion.
“I don’t really see any of this as doing the right thing or the good thing,” Smith said. “I just really like humans, and I like it when they’re well.”
Smith, who was raised a “suburban evangelical” in Greensboro and Salisbury, says his fascination with faith is a product of a decade-long spiritual construction and deconstruction. That journey started at 13 years old in December 2007, when his older brother pulled him aside at a Christmas party.
“You know the Christianity stuff is bullshit, right?”
Smith says something in him snapped that day. Hyperventilating, he interrupted his brother mid-sentence, sprinted out to his mom’s van, and threw open the door. He gripped his cross necklace and frantically began to pray, begging for God to be real.
“Whereas some people get caught up in the emotions or the bliss or the beauty or the fear of hell,” Smith said, “[my belief] was being terrified that it wasn’t true.”
Smith began to spend hours each day in his room praying, reading books, and watching YouTube videos about Christian theology. He grew up religious enough, but soon after that watershed day he became more devout than his parents. When he returned to his Christian high school after three years of homeschool, he quickly assumed a role as a “spiritual pillar,” singing for the school’s praise and worship band and working as a chaplain his senior year.
But Smith was an outlier among his fellow teenage congregants in two important ways, the remnants of which can be seen in his current work: how strictly he held to his religious principles, and the type of theological questions he pursued.
He said, for example, that he was the only member of his youth group who didn’t get pregnant or get someone pregnant out of wedlock, and that he received unsatisfactory answers from his pastors to questions about doctrines such as Arianism and Oneness Pentecostalism. These moral and intellectual inconsistencies made Smith feel increasingly let down by his faith and how the people around him practiced it.
For years, Smith held himself to a strict vow of celibacy, refraining from even hugging or holding hands with girls out of a fear of being salacious, which left him sexually frustrated. The aggressive preaching tactics of his classmates during his three years at Fellowship of International Revival and Evangelism (FIRE) School of Ministry, a Pentecostal seminary program based in Concord, grated him. He found them insincere and overbearing, which led him to tone back his own “charismania.”
FIRE did not respond to The Assembly’s request for comment.
“I don’t really see any of this as doing the right thing or the good thing. I just really like humans, and I like it when they’re well.”
Smith’s internship at FIRE Europe left him depressed, spiritually underwhelmed, culturally stunted, and at times suicidal. Two years later, between his sophomore and junior years as an undergrad at Wheaton College, the mental turmoil nearly compelled him to yank his car off the highway with his family inside. He decided to “pump the brakes on all of this” and abandon his faith altogether.
“It’s partly the loneliness. It’s partly the austerity of it. It’s partly living in a world in which you believe that everyone is going to hell, and then it’s something deeper than that,” Smith said. “You feel spiritually raped in some weird way.”
Smith understands what it means to grapple with one’s faith and the consequences of doing so. Auditing churches and talking about religion online has become a way for him to process the trauma of his own spiritual deconstruction. That experience is also why he’s so quick to celebrate things he feels churches do well, and call out things he believes they don’t.
“While it’s important to critique bad practices in religion, [and] it’s important to critique unhealthy things in religion, the way that it’s done really matters,” said Douglas Stilgoe, a British YouTuber known as Nemo The Mormon, who has challenged Smith’s assessments of Mormon theology. “Because otherwise you get the backfire effect. People tend to retrench rather than change their mind.”
Many conversations about religion can quickly devolve into sparring over which faith system is objectively “right” and which are subjectively “wrong.” Those conversations often ignore the more universal reasons—community, purpose, transcendence—for why people believe.
“People do believe in something. They believe differently, but it’s, for me, more about a way of life,” said Rev. Luke Powery, dean of the Duke University Chapel and longtime professor. “It’s almost a habit that you wear, a way of being in the world, more so than a kind of believing. They’re intertwined, your action and belief, but there’s this peace, this way of life, this ethic.”
Building empathy between faiths—or between nonbelievers and believers—begins by pulling back the veil of stereotypes and trying to understand what’s underneath. Smith’s way of doing that is by trying to step under the veil himself and encourage viewers to join him.
Smith wears his shirts loosely buttoned and his heart on his sleeve. His deep-set eyes and effusive brows are at once intimidating and inviting, piercing as they scan and wide open as they observe.
When he attends a service, he goes alone, largely to force him to engage. He strikes up conversations with congregants, takes part in the services, and takes note of what he sees and feels. He records video sparsely. When people ask about him and why he’s there, he doesn’t usually say that he’s an atheist or that he operates a YouTube channel. He just tells them that he’s “searching.”
For the most part, those who have interacted with Smith or watched his videos believe he’s doing so in good faith.
“It didn’t seem like he was looking for something to critique,” said Ali Zelmat, director of outreach at the Islamic Association of Raleigh, a mosque Smith attended earlier this year. “There may have been a few things that due to a lack of knowledge he might have misstated, but not deliberately.”
Stilgoe said that when some people leave religious communities, they struggle to remember what it was like to belong. “But it seems to me that Jared remembers what it was like to be part of one,” he said, “and then uses that to inform a certain level of empathy when he’s dealing with people who still believe.”
“People do believe in something. They believe differently, but it’s, for me, more about a way of life.”
Father David Winn, a pastor at Raleigh’s All Saints’ Orthodox Church, has grown close with Smith after he audited the church last December and agrees with Stilgoe’s assessment.
“There’s a kind of charity that I think he had, and that he has, generally speaking, that allows him to engage with perception that wouldn’t be common among those who are nonreligious, not interested in religion, or atheists generally,” Winn said. “Perhaps he has a heart that allows him to perceive things that wouldn’t be common in his guild of folks.”
He may not find the Book of Mormon compelling, but Smith appreciates Mormons’ devotion to their faith. He marvels at the diversity of the Islamic Association of Raleigh’s Friday prayer, where more than 90 countries are represented. He loved Winn’s church for its thoughtful art and architecture, its music and grounded sermons. Like each of them, he sees immense potential for good in religion and mourns when that potential is used to exclude and suppress.
“I don’t always think it’s the belief that’s the problem, I think it’s the heart,” Smith said. “I don’t really care if you believe that I’m going to hell. I care if it breaks your heart.”
The delicately lit, therapist’s-office-esque backdrop of Smith’s videos is disorientingly less manicured in person. His set is nothing more than a tall office chair set awkwardly between two leather loungers in the living room of a house he shares with a roommate. His camera is positioned a few yards away on a tripod blocking his front door.
But Smith’s music studio, a short walk upstairs, is a different story. Listening to and producing metal music about faith has been an outlet for Smith’s creativity and spiritual processing far longer than YouTube has, and the room reflects that. The electric guitars he uses on self-made albums are suspended carefully over a futon. Color-changing LEDs underlay a wall of artificial shrubbery behind two enormous monitors and a mixing keyboard. A hulking pair of subwoofers rattle either side of his desk, with religious texts and knickknacks from his travels packed onto nearby shelves.
“[I]t seems to me that Jared remembers what it was like to be part of one, and then uses that to inform a certain level of empathy when he’s dealing with people who still believe.”
For all their differences, both spaces embody Smith at this point in life: the living room of a single man in his early 30s stuck in the awkwardness between budding internet fame and a full-time job, and the studio of his exuberant, wistfully faithful, “black sheep” metalhead core.
If he’s making videos about Jesus downstairs, he’s singing about the connection he used to have with Him upstairs. Before he became an atheist and started auditing churches, he used Heliocentric to promote the Christian metal music he made.
He still tears up when he talks about his relationship with God—the “most intimate thing” he’s ever had—and mourns that he now believes “it’s all bullshit.”
Smith has spent a long time wrestling with that thought. He’s forced to battle it again in each video he makes, each church he visits, each believer he talks to. He’s forced to encounter all the ways faith is taken for granted, exploited, and used to exclude, and to reconcile how he may have done the same in the past. But he’s also reminded about all the wonders of faith, from the community bonds it creates to the intense sense of purpose many derive from it.
“To this day I feel a deep animosity toward people who pretend like it’s true when it’s personally advantageous, and then they totally disregard it when it’s not,” Smith said. “And I still have such a love and admiration and respect for the people who put their money where their mouth is, even when it costs them everything.”
He never wants to undermine that, let alone take it away. He doesn’t want the reason he abandoned his faith to compel others to do so. That’s why, for all the places he visits, doctrines he challenges, people he meets, and opinions he shares, there’s one question he has no intention of answering.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the one he’s asked most often: “Why are you an atheist?”
“I think that there are a thousand arguments against Christianity,” Smith said. “I think there’s only one against God.”
When pressed what that is, Smith cracked a wry smile.
That’s for him to know. And him alone.
Andrew Long, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee, has written for The Assembly, The (Duke) Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and the Tampa Bay Times.
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