Rev. Benjamin Cremer on Losing His Church and Finding His Calling (Q&A Part 1)

A conversation about spiritual abuse, political power, and speaking out.

I first discovered Rev. Benjamin Cremer on X, where he has amassed over 67K followers. On Instagram, he has more than twice that many. He also leads an engaged community here on Substack. A 2024 profile dubbed him a “digital pastor,” citing his “pithy, quotable and sharable” posts on complex topics like the intersection of Christianity and politics.

Last fall, we spoke about his growing online profile, his background in fundamentalism, and how he knew he needed to speak out publicly against Christian nationalism. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation (part 1).

Ruth Braunstein: Can you tell me a little bit about your background and path to ministry?

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: I was born and raised in rural Idaho and in a very fundamentalist or ultra conservative sect of Christianity. I was homeschooled K-12 and felt the call to ministry at seven, and didn't break with that call until about senior year in high school. I had this existential crisis of “What do I do?”

I didn't have a good church experience, just a lot of spiritual abuse and things like that. Then stumbled on the writings of John Wesley and went to Northwest Nazarene University, which is in the Wesleyan tradition here in Idaho, and pursued the call ever since. And that's how I found myself in ministry.

I moved away for grad school to Kansas City, and then I didn't think I was going to move back because who thinks they're going to move back home? That's just how it worked out. I got called to pastor a church here in 2013, and since then because of writing publicly about certain things, it eventually led to being pushed out of my denomination, to where they used a particular circumstance to withdraw my credentials.

Then the United Methodist Church rescued me. They brought me in and salvaged my credentials, and then that's where I served for the last two years before I started writing more.

Ruth Braunstein: What were you writing that caused the tension there?

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: Being raised and ministering in really conservative spaces like Idaho, I felt like I was not holding onto the integrity of my call as a pastor while watching the evangelical tradition, which is what I've been born and raised into, start to abandon all the teachings of Jesus for the sake of political power. This was gearing up to the 2016 election, and I was just writing vigorously in my journal and I'm like, “Okay, I can't not preach about this. I can't not write about this publicly.”

It was around 2019 that I started really focusing on my public writing. As soon as I started to do that, I saw leadership start to cut off career opportunities. I started being uninvited to certain things. It’s more of that social dynamic of being pushed out, and I was being laughed at at pastor’s events and I could hear talking about me behind my back. It just became really toxic and I started hearing a lot of rumors and gossip.

As any pastor of a small church will tell you, I was being overworked and underpaid, and the opportunity came up to be a pastor at a campus of a United Methodist Church. And in the Church of the Nazarene where I was serving at the time, you can request a special assignment at a Methodist church, [as] theological cousins. Well, that United Methodist Church was affirming of LGBTQ people and the Nazarenes, they're not affirming.

And so they chose that opportunity of me accepting that position to strip me of my credentials simply because this church was LGBTQ affirming. And they have systematically done that to people in high positions of power to low local church pastors because of that issue. It was the most painful experience of my career so far.

Ruth Braunstein: I can imagine. Were you writing at the time explicitly about the need to be LGBTQ affirming or was that just part of the broader picture?

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: I had been writing publicly more about political power and the worship of it. And I wasn't even naming candidates. I was trying to be as pastoral and accommodating as possible while speaking the truth. Including here in Idaho, where there were several pastors who had gone viral on TikTok and online with just pure hate speech towards the LGBTQ community. We had somebody run over by their car because of this hate speech in Boise. And so trying to speak to that need to have compassion towards this issue. That's enough. Just advocating for compassion is enough to put up red flags with leadership.

So the sheer fact that they're doubling on those things while the cases of sexual misconduct and abuse allegations within the church nationwide continue to mount up; the overemphasis on the LGBTQ issue while not looking at our own sins within Christianity at large; it’s just an indescribable amount of hypocrisy.

The unwillingness to address that and then silencing those who want to speak to that just shows that we don't want to change. We don't want to repent. We want everyone else to repent from their sins and not us, which just is a recipe for disaster.

Ruth Braunstein: You described this process of them doubling down, but also you thinking a little bit differently. Which one of you changed? Did you change and move away from the church, or did the church change and become more intolerant? Did both happen?

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: That is such an excellent question. I was trying to get church leadership to understand that I was raised fundamentalist and what I saw invading the Church of the Nazarene, especially my district, was the fundamentalism of my past. The local church and church leadership started to move further and further into Christian fundamentalism. And I'm like, “This is not who we are. This isn't Wesleyan, this is fundamentalism. And I was raised in this.” And yet people kept saying no and saying that I was the divisive one.

Ruth Braunstein: You mentioned the impact Northwest Nazarene University had on you. Were people at the university also concerned about the direction local churches were moving in?

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: Yes, and they still are. Just like we’re seeing in every education sector, education institutions are really being shaped as an enemy within many Christian circles. And that’s just as true within a higher-ed Christian education as well. Those who are advocating for church history and philosophy and ways of opening our thinking, they become marked as… being “woke” and social justice when they haven’t changed what they are teaching. It’s just that the church has moved more and more further to the right.

Ruth Braunstein: You were homeschooled within a fundamentalist community. How did you start thinking critically about that worldview? Was it because of higher education?

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: My parents moved from California to Idaho, and they were pushed out of their churches because homeschooling at the time was seen as an extremist far right movement, which it was. But everybody’s journey is really complex.

My mom is the daughter and granddaughter of a Nazarene pastor, and she grew up with her grandfather literally almost losing his job over desegregating his church. He was the only one of a few pastors in Missouri that wanted to hold a service for Black people when it was so taboo to do so. She was the only white little girl there, playing piano for her granddad, because the church board told him that they couldn't have Black people in the church. And so he said“Fine, I'm going to hold a different service for them because this is wrong.” So that kind of social justice aspect of Wesleyan theology was ingrained in her.

And so then we had been part of a white separatist homeschool co-op here in Idaho that was literally holding workshops called, “What If the South was Right?” and connected with the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho. When the Ruby Ridge standoff happened and all the leadership in this homeschool co-op was like, “We're on the side of the white supremacists,” my mom immediately took a stand and said “This is wrong. We can't be a part of this. I'm not going to raise my children in this.”

So we left that movement and went to a non-denominational church. But to my young eyes, it was virtually indistinguishable. Very similar rhetoric, but it wasn't outwardly white supremacist like the homeschool co-op was. So really it was because my parents planted the seed of saying, “it's okay to stand up and oppose things that you think are wrong and to always be questioning things that damage other people, that harm other people.” So they set that example for me, and then I saw that in the theological tradition of Methodism.

Ruth Braunstein: Did you see Methodism as an extension of the perspective that your mom represented to you?

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: It was really church history that radicalized me [to empathy], that said, “This is actually who we are as the witness to Christ’s gospel, to not want an earthly empire, but to even hold empires accountable to the need of the least of these.” Jesus said, “Whatever you do unto them, you’re doing unto me.” And so after I learned that, there was really no going back as a Christian. The pursuit of power just for ourselves, to hold it over people rather than having power poured from the cross, shared for and with humanity, is just contrary to the gospel of Jesus as I have come to understand it.

Catch Part 2 of our conversation in next week’s newsletter!

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This summer, Democracy is Hard is focusing on longer form essays and interviews with interesting thinkers. We will plan to bring the full newsletter back this Fall. Let us know what you think!