The church that shaped you came from somewhere. Usually somewhere older, stranger, and more wounded than anyone ever told you.
Freestyle Theology is a podcast about the history of Christianity, and about what that history did to people's bodies, families, and nervous systems. Bradley Melle is a historian of Christianity with a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he studied the entangled history of Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous peoples. Every week he and his guests take one question and walk it back as far as it goes.
When did white people stop dancing? Where did Hell actually come from? How did the church get so good at finding enemies? What did plague do to the western imagination? Why do purity, punishment, and control keep resurfacing in the same places, century after century?
The method here is simple: Approach the dysfunction you see with curiosity. Then go looking for the catastrophe that formed it.
These aren't lectures. They are conversations with people who know things, and love to wonder and wander. That's the freestyle part.
For anyone rethinking faith, anyone deconstructing, anyone who left the church, anyone still in it and quietly wondering, and anyone who just wants to understand how the West turned out like this.
Wondering freely, out loud.
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Jesus told his followers to love their enemies. Western Christianity went on to build one of the most sophisticated systems in history for finding them.
That chasm is what I come back to again and again. So I sat down with Fr. Joash Thomas to talk it out plainly.
We start with a question nobody really asks: Who actually counts as an "enemy?" Because it isn't the neighbour whose dog barks at 7am. It's not the guy who wants to rearrange the pews at church. It's not the commuter who tailgates and flips you the bird. Those hokey, middle-class Christian examples are useless. Those people are your neighbours, not enemies.
Joash brings in Palestinian church leaders who say plainly that the Western church has been their enemy. I bring in the early church, where the enemy was defined by belief instead of territory or ethnicity. That meant the enemy was invisible. Which meant you needed a system for finding them, fueled by suspicion and vigiliance. But that system did not get dismantled after the persecution ended. It just got more sophisticated.
From there it opens up. The Great Commission as a colonial-era invention. "The world" in the New Testament read as "empire" not "society." Marx in Manchester. Haudenosaunee ceremonies that could turn a stranger into kin. Benedictines who had to open the door to anyone who knocked. St. Francis talking to Brother Wolf, and Joash getting scared of bears in Algonquin Provincial Park. Canadian Settlers who hated the forest.
And then something more practical: If loving your enemy is real, it doesn't start with your abuser. Telling a survivor to do that is violent and cruel. Start with the person your culture tells you to fear. Give it time, respect, and gain knowledge. That's how you learn to love a forest, and it's probably how you learn to actually love a neighbour too.
I left this one with a bigger heart. And that's always the goal.
In this episode
[0:24] The chasm between Jesus on enemies and the church's enemies [2:08] Who did we decide our enemies are? Barking dogs, the pews, and Munther Isaac [3:31] Middle-class Christianity and its hokey examples of sin [6:03] "You've been the enemy to us." Palestinian church leaders to the Western church [8:41] Reading the Bible with an empire-informed lens, not just a trauma-informed one [13:04] "The world" as the empire-shaped world [14:22] Two kinds of enemies, and which one you're actually supposed to start with [16:10] Converting your neighbour is treating them like a target [18:10] The Great Commission as a colonial invention [20:30] Love thy trillionaire (!?) and the universalizing move that protects the status quo [24:13] Marx, Manchester, and the opiate of the masses [27:30] Every society has enemies. Not every society builds machinery to find them. [31:22] Why the early church's enemy was invisible, and what happened after Constantine [34:51] St. Francis, Brother Wolf, and Joash's bear [41:10] Settlers and the forest. Time, respect, knowledge. [46:30] Don't start with the abuser [46:59] Celtic ancestors, and decolonization that starts with your own grandmother [55:26] Loving your enemy doesn't mean sparing them the consequences
About Joash
Father Joash Thomas is the author of The Justice of Jesus. He teaches at St. Stephen's University, writes the Masala Chai Theology Substack, and sits on the advisory council of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice.
I have a free course called Ancestral Trauma in the Church. It's the trauma approach to church history that sits underneath most of what I talk about here. Head over to bradleymelle.com/free to gain access.
Let's Talk About: Cursed Objects
Tuesday, August 11, 2026 • Duration 01:29:20
A Christian builder in Texas prays over every house he puts up and stamps John 3:16 into the driveway. A family member rebukes your depression in the name of Jesus. A Congolese aunt tells you not to buy that carving: it's demonic and it can hurt you. Ethnic cleansing in medieval Spain. Ngofeen and I originally sat down to walk from the Black Plague to the eve of the Reformation, and instead we spent an hour on this: what makes an object, a word, a country, or a body tainted, and who gets to decide?
This is the fourth conversation in our series on when white people stopped dancing. Something critical clicked for me this time around. Contamination logic is the hinge. It runs from Pentecostal missionaries in Ghana turning old gods into demons, to Ferdinand and Isabella telling Spanish Muslims and Jews to convert or leave, to a ballet teacher saying keep your hips square, to a man who has to do an elaborate handshake before he's allowed to hug his friend.
In this episode:
-Why we open in 2020, and what the pandemic can and can't tell us about the plague
-Pentecostalism as both the most spiritually aggressive and the most anti-traditional Christianity at once, and Birgit Meyer's Translating the Devil
-Scripture citation as spell-casting, and what apologetics has in common with a curse
-Ngofeen redecorating his bedroom door with raffia and nails, and what his aunties would say
-Paul on meat sacrificed to idols, and whether intention permanently taints an object
-The Reconquista, 1492, and why Spain arrived in the Caribbean already unable to see what was in front of them
-Columbus is the '90s: Luther in 1517 and Columbus in 1492 are the same twenty five years, not two separate histories
-The body as a history book, and reading white evangelical worship gestures as appropriated Black movement
-Ngofeen on the exhaustion of proving you are not a tainted object
-Why congregational singing might be the cry of a person who can't be touched
Mentioned
Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (1999)
If you missed registration for my class "The Body of Christ Keeps the Score" and want to be kept in the loop for the next time it's offered, head to https://bradleymelle.com/course and join the waitlist!New here? Freestyle Theology reads the history of Christianity through trauma and the body. Not just what people believed, but what happened to them, and what it did to how they move.
Let's Talk About: My Origin Story (How I Became a Historian of Christian Dysfunction)
Tuesday, July 28, 2026 • Duration 01:01:33
I've never been able to explain how I became a historian of Christian dysfunction - until I sat down to record this.
This week there's no guest and no lesson plan. It's just me in my office, tracing how church history went from meaning absolutely nothing to me to becoming my life's work, and how I ended up studying the church's dysfunctions instead of its glories.
I go back to being a teenager sitting on a 56k modem in 1999, reading about the origins of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam for hours, while never *once* searching for the history of my own Christian faith. I talk about why evangelicalism gave me nothing but a 2,000-year blur where a story should have been: apostles, then static, then a flicker of Constantine, then static, then Luther. The Christian history I'd absorbed was nothing but decay and deviation from the pure New Testament church. There was nothing worth being curious about, so I wasn't.
You'll hear about the Moravian church I grew up in - gentle, campfire Christianity - and how stadium megachurch evangelicalism came in loud enough to drown everything else out. About purity culture, about being a good kid who desperately wanted to do what was right, and about the anger I still carry from those years.
And I ask the question that I can't get out of my head out loud: how much of what I called "faith" was actually just anxiety, dressed up and given a name, scanning for relief? I describe waking up every morning to pray with my feet ratcheted up tight toward the ceiling, apologizing to God for nothing in particular. I talk about seeing the same anxious energy surfacing in my daughter now, and what's different about the fact that she says it out loud.
Then the turn: my history professor at Redeemer teaching Byzantine and Eastern European history. Christianity suddenly has origins, development,and alternatives. Serbs and Croats, one people split by a line between Orthodox and Catholic. Missiology, contextualization, Andrew Walls decentring Western Christianity. My masters on Africa and colonialism, my doctorate on Indigenous peoples and the church, and not finding the beautiful diversity I went looking for but instead a machine built to re-engineer human beings.
This process left me with two questions that continue to fuel my work. First: how could Christians have done that and called it God's will? And then the one I'm still living inside everyday: "Church, who hurt you, bro?"That question is why I now read church history the way I've learned to read my own body: not as a record of correct and incorrect belief, but as a record of pain, fear, and protection. Where did it start? What is it trying to tell us?If that's the kind of thing you're interested in: my free online seminar, , is tonight, Tuesday, July 28 at 8pm EST. Register at bradleymelle.com/learn. If you can't make it, register anyway and I'll send you the replay!Registration for the next cohort of The Body of Christ Keeps the Score - my four-week course through the church's trauma history - opens this week. Details at the seminar.
Let's Talk About: The Civilizing Mission (feat. Ngofeen Mputubwele)
What does a civilization do after everything fails? Between 1350 and 1500, the West lived through a genuine polycrisis. The Black Plague, a church with two and then three popes, peasant revolts, the fall of Constantinople, and gunpowder rendering every castle wall obsolete. In this episode, journalist, playwright, and opera singer Ngofeen Mputubwele and I finally name the thing this series has been circling: the civilizing mission. Most commonly associated with colonization, “civilizing” actually began as a massive project of “tidying up” that emerged from the wreckage of the late Middle Ages. Censuses, surnames, etiquette manuals, official languages, manicured lawns, and mandatory daily dance lessons where a sagging elbow was corrected like a moral failure. Along the way: how the Vatican held the official contract for colonial education in the Belgian Congo (Ngofeen's own family story), the man who invented "social studies" as a tool of colonial control on two continents, why the canonical Cinderella was written at Louis XIV's court (and what its actual moral is) and how the Puritan's journal of relentless self-examination is ballet performed on the soul. A traumatized civilization reaching for control in order to feel safe. Sound familiar?
Topics discussed in this episode:
· Semester recap: from Constantine to the fall of Rome to the medieval world [4:26]
· Islam, the Reconquista, and why 1492 sent Columbus [6:14]
· The Jesuits: the church's "shock troops" who became its most radical cultural translators including De Nobili in India, Ricci's Confucian Christianity, the Wendat missions [8:11]
· Ngofeen's family story: born on a Jesuit mission, how the Vatican held the contract for education in Belgian Congo, and the fifth-grade ceiling unless you entered the priesthood [11:45]
· Thomas Jesse Jones: the one man behind colonial education curricula in both Africa and Indigenous America and the invention of "social studies" [14:12]
Let's Talk About: Is Christianity Good?
Tuesday, July 14, 2026 • Duration 01:02:56
Let’s Talk About: Is Christianity Good?
What happens when you stop being able to balance Christianity’s ledger? When “But the church built hospitals” no longer cancels out the crime of residential schools, the crusades, or the doctrine of discovery? In this episode I sit down with my good friend Danielle Steenwyk-Rowaan, who leads Open Homes Hamilton, a multi-church network that welcomes refugee claimants into spare rooms in family homes. We talk honestly about deconstruction, the moment Danielle realized that domination isn’t an aberration in Christian history but a pattern, and why she stopped trying to decide whether Christianity is “net good or net bad.” We get into the ethos of domination, the thing that white Western Christians swim in without noticing, the crusader fantasy behind the “Deus Vult” tattoo, why Canadians don’t get to feel superior to Americans, and the question that won’t leave me alone: Christians have always emphasized Jesus’ identity – but what was his actual method for change? Danielle’s answer runs through radical hospitality: eating with the wrong people, bringing the margins to the centre, and welcoming the stranger into your own house. If you’re carrying the weight of church history and wondering what’s left to hold onto, this conversation is something of a life raft.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Why I'm done trying to balance the ledger of church history. No more finding a good deed to neutralize every atrocity
Danielle's story: doing denominational justice work, and how everything hit a wall during Trump’s 2016 election
Aberrations or a pattern? Residential schools, colonization, and the thread that runs all the way back
The birth of Open Homes Hamilton: Haitian refugee claimants at the border and a coffee-shop idea that became a life raft for a meaningful faith
The Christian penchant for "making the other like us": conversion, crusade, and the doctrine of discovery as one project
And why are white people so lame? Cringe, aloofness, and what domination does to a culture
Deus Vult: the crusader tattoo and white Christian masculinity's knight fantasy
The Canadian “Angel Complex”: America might be in chaos, but Canadians don't get off easy
Domination's fragility: why the powerful are so easily triggered
Let's Talk About: The Disastrous 1300s
Wednesday, July 8, 2026 • Duration 01:01:59
Let’s Talk About: The Disastrous 1300s
What happens to a civilization's relationship with the body when a third of it perishes in a few short years? In part two of my ongoing conversation with journalist, playwright, and opera singer Ngofeen Mputubwele, we enter the catastrophic 1300s: the Avignon Papacy, the Western Schism, and - of course - the Black Plague. I argue that the plague marks one of the great unacknowledged turning points in church history: the moment Western Christianity's understanding of suffering shifted from purgative (cleansing, reparative) to punitive (the raw rage of God poured out on human flesh). Along the way, Ngofeen brings his remarkable personal stew - Congolese Catholicism, the historic Black church, white Reformed evangelicalism, opera, and ballet - to bear on Western Christianity’s suspicion of emotion, movement, and the body itself. We talk Carnival, Calvin's Geneva, the Danse Macabre, rotting tomb sculptures, La Traviata, Hillsong-era worship anxieties, and why there would have been no Reformation without the Plague.
Topics discussed in this episode:
What’s the West’s deal with emotion? How a high school music course planted a new question
Amazing Grace in white church vs. Black church, and Hillsong-era suspicion of embodied worship
Calvin's Geneva: the theocratic city-state that explicitly outlawed dancing
How the Carnival festival survived: preserved by Black communities in the colonized Americas but not by Europeans
Ngofeen's family history: a Jesuit mission in Congo, Gregorian chant and rumba in one household, and the discovery that "the rules of the body are not universal"
Emotion as “movement outward”: why cultures of correct doctrine fear what arises without consent
The medieval church as a sin-management system and why Hell felt farther away for a medieval peasant than for a Protestant
Carnival, inversion, and mockery: what the church tolerated and why
The traumatic 1300s: the Avignon Papacy, three rival popes, the Black Plague and Catherine of Siena's prophetic confrontation
The Black Death as theological rupture: from purgative suffering to divine punishment
Why there would have been no Reformation without the Plague
The Danse Macabre: the dance with Death that no one - rich, poor, or pope - could refuse
Let's Talk About: The Medieval Body
Wednesday, June 3, 2026 • Duration 01:02:10
Playwright, journalist, and podcaster Ngofeen Mputubwele is writing a play about a deceptively simple question: when did white people stop dancing? What began as a conversation about medieval bodies quickly became something much large: a history of how Western Christianity came to distrust its own flesh, and how that distrust got exported around the world.
In this first conversation, Ngofeen and I trace the origins of the Western church's conflicted relationship with the body: the fall of Rome as a civilizational 9/11, Augustine's personal war with his own desire becoming the theological architecture of an entire tradition, and the earthy, embodied fusion of Augustinian theology with the "indigenous" place-based spirituality of ancient Europe that gave medieval Christianity its sensory richness (the relics, pilgrimage, a whole cabinet full of ways to do something with your shame)
Then the Reformation arrives and strips it all bare. What's left when you take away the rituals? You turn inward, which has huge implications for the body.
Let's Talk About: Other Religions
Monday, April 13, 2026 • Duration 56:24
Dr. Bradley Melle sits down again with Fr. Joash Thomas - priest, author of The Justice of Jesus, and descendant of the ancient St. Thomas Christians of Kerala, India - for a conversation that reframes everything Western Christians think they know about neighbours of other faiths and the afterlife.
Why Western Christianity's fear-driven posture toward other religions is historically contingent (it didn’t have to be that way!) and what the 2000-year-old Indian church reveals about a different way
The Synod of Diamper (1599): how the Portuguese Empire burned the ancient documents of the St. Thomas Christians and declared their form of Christian universalism heresy, because it wasn't Christian supremacist enough to serve colonial interests
The "Law of St. Thomas" a form of Christian universalist eschatology that predates modern universalist theology by over a millennium, and what its suppression tells us about whose theology gets to count as orthodox
What happened to Western Christian theology when Columbus encountered the Americas after 1492 and why the discovery of hundreds of millions of "unevangelized" souls created a psychological and theological crisis that Western Christianity still hasn't fully processed
The Reformed tradition's version of Christian supremacy - more sophisticated, less loud, but structurally the same problem
A 15-year-old Brad in suburban Edmonton, a Qigong class, and the moment genuine curiosity about other traditions got shut down, and what that cost
Kerala, India: the first Indian state to eliminate extreme poverty, with near-100% literacy and what centuries of interfaith minority Christian witness had to do with it
This isn't really a conversation about tolerance. It's a conversation about what Christianity looks like when it was never the dominant power, and what the West might learn from that.
For anyone who has ever wondered whether there's a Christianity that doesn't require fear of its neighbours (or fear for them...!) to function.
Let's Talk About: Threat & Theology
Wednesday, March 25, 2026 • Duration 46:03
Brad is back down the rabbit hole, and this time, Augustine is the way in.
Why Augustine of Hippo is arguably the real founder of Western Christianity, and what that means for everything you think you know about Paul, original sin, and the gospel
The difference between the historical Paul and Augustine's Paul and why most Western Christians have been reading one through the filter of the other without knowing it
Theology as historically contingent: what it means that Augustine's system was shaped by his ambition, his mother, his psychology, and his North African Roman world, not just by scripture
The meadow vs. the perfume bottle: why extracting doctrine from the gospels might be missing the point entirely
Why the gospels function more like cinema than philosophy and what it would mean to encounter them that way again, in community, without needing a final word
Why the threat response to historical theology is worth examining and what it's actually protecting
This isn't a tidy episode. It's Brad thinking out loud about Augustine, interpretation, and what it might mean to do theology honestly in 2026.
For the historically curious, the theologically restless, and anyone who has ever felt vaguely crazy for asking hard questions about what the gospel actually means.
Let's Talk About: Where Am I?
Thursday, March 19, 2026 • Duration 51:44
Brad is back, and this episode is an honest account of where he's been.
After months of silence, Brad returns to the mic to share what's kept him away: the death of his mother in late October, a brutal flare of his ulcerative colitis, and his daughter's unexpected health issues, all compressed into the same brutal stretch of months
He reflects on grief that is "clean but massive." The ache of losing someone you genuinely liked, not just loved
Why he couldn't bring himself to theologize at his own mother's funeral, and what that revealed about Christianity's complicated relationship with sitting in pain
The slow thaw from creative hibernation: the precipitation cycle that froze, and what it feels like as it starts again
A shift in posture: from authoritative teacher to honest processor, and why he no longer needs to cap every thought with hope
This one isn't a history episode. But it is human. And it might be what you need to hear if you've also been somewhere dark and quiet lately.
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The Traumatized Church: How Christianity's Painful Past Still Haunts and Harms
· The polycrisis of 1350-1500: plague, labor collapse, peasant revolts, the printing press as the first internet [23:27]
· The Ottoman ascent, the fall of Constantinople, and the terror of the Christian nervous system [~28:00]
· The "threshold of visibility": why the medieval church tolerated carnival, festival, and local religiosity and why that world ended [~32:00]
· Why the church's system failed during the Black Plague and how the plague birthed individualism [38:03]
· Avignon, three popes, and Jan Hus burned at the stake after a promise of safe passage [40:39]
· "Make Rome Magnificent Again": the beautification of Rome, the Renaissance as post-catastrophe hope and a surprising 2026 New York analogy [44:54]
· Indulgences as "the premium package": exploiting a traumatized population, and what Luther crashed into [49:33]
· The Renaissance as golden-age nostalgia, not a turn away from God [52:02]
· How civilizing colonized everyday life: the royal court, the prestige shift, and the etiquette explosion [55:51]
· Louis XIV's system: Versailles, official French, and the academies that standardized everything including dance [58:57]
· "Your dancing master is the most important man in Europe": Lord Chesterfield's letter to his nephew [1:01:19]
· Walking turned out, walking like a rustic and why orthopedics was invented to fix noble children [~1:06:00]
· Cinderella, written at Louis XIV's court: the real moral is grace [1:08:45]
· Rustic, grace, affectation: the chart that sorted humanity [1:10:41]
· Is Calvin's grace the same word as the court's grace? An open question we're now chasing [1:11:00]
· The medieval body vs. the Reformation body: when going through the motions became illegitimate [1:12:50]
· The Puritan journal and the ballet correction: self-examination at the granular scale [1:16:59]
· Coming next week: the Reformation and a forecast of dance's death by French Revolution [1:19:26]
Resources mentioned in this episode:
· The Traumatized Church: my free live seminar, Tuesday, July 28th at 8pm EST on Zoom. Register at bradleymelle.com/learn. Replay sent to everyone who registers
· When Did White People Stop Dancing? Ngofeen Mputubwele's play-in-progress, the origin of this series
· Becoming a French Aristocrat: the primary-source study of aristocratic child-rearing Ngofeen references [58:57]
· Lord Chesterfield's letters to his nephew (1768) [1:01:19]
· Register free for The Traumatized Church: Tuesday, July 28th, 8pm EST: bradleymelle.com/learn. Live Q&A included; can't make it live? Register anyway and get the replay
· New to the series? Start with Part 1 (Augustine and the medieval body) and Part 2 (the Black Plague and the Danse Macabre)
· Follow Freestyle Theology on Instagram: @freestyletheology
· Send me a message directly through the link at the top of this episode description
Proximity as our teacher: what nine months in West Africa revealed to Danielle about the iceberg under every culture
"The way of Jesus" vs. Christianity-the-system
Jesus’s method for change
Eating with the wrong people: Matthew 25 and hospitality as Jesus’s other way of flipping tables
Glimpses of God as gift, not threat: a Sudanese Muslim friend's experience of the divine
