EP: 469 Rat Temples, Mormon Gods, and a Death Cult on the Ganges with Jeremy Jenkins

September 29, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

EP: 469 Rat Temples, Mormon Gods, and a Death Cult on the Ganges with Jeremy Jenkins

Jeremy Jenkins has spent the last decade traveling to the front lines of the world's religions—not as a tourist, but as a pastor and theologian trying to understand what people actually believe and why. His entry point was a single Hindu student he wanted to share the gospel with, and he quickly discovered he had no framework for the conversation. That realization sent him down a path that eventually led to cremation ghats in Varanasi, conversations with LDS missionaries over napkin diagrams, and a sustained argument that the Western church has lost the ability to account for what other religions actually deliver: real spiritual power.

The Problem of the Excluded Middle

Jenkins draws on missiologist Paul Hiebert's concept of the "excluded middle" to explain why modern Christians struggle to make sense of other faiths. Hiebert argued that Western Christianity, shaped by the Enlightenment, divided reality into two realms: a "high" realm of God, angels, and demons that feels distant and abstract, and a "low" realm of the physical world that can be seen, tested, and measured. What got squeezed out was the middle—the zone where the spiritual and material actually intersect in daily life.

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What you'll learn

1 EP: 469 Rat Temples, Mormon Gods, and a Death Cult on the Ganges with Jeremy Jenkins
2 (01:30) **Varanasi and the Death Cult on the Ganges** - Jeremy describes witnessing bodies being cremated 24 hours a day on the Ganges River in Hinduism's holiest city
3 (03:40) **Introducing Jeremy Jenkins** - The founder of All Things All People and contributor to Stranger Theology joins the show as a world religions expert
4 (07:58) **The Unseen Realm and the Blurry Realm** - Why Jeremy moved from dismissing the paranormal to taking Bigfoot, aliens, and the supernatural seriously
5 (10:39) **Are They Talking to Real Deities?** - The central diagnostic question: do practitioners of other religions actually connect with something supernatural?
6 (13:46) **A Spiritual Warfare Experience in India** - Jeremy recounts the worst supernatural attack he's ever faced while traveling in South India
7 (19:55) **The Flaw of the Excluded Middle** - Paul Hebert's insight that Western Christianity removed the intersection between the spiritual and natural realms

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Here is the uncomfortable thing nobody in church wants to say out loud. The spells work. The witch doctor heals. The rituals deliver. Jeremy Jenkins has spent years studying the world's religions and standing inside their holiest places, and he is done pretending the power is not real. A world religions expert, pastor, and professor, he sits down with Luke and Nate to explain why everything that works is not good, and why that single idea changes how you read every faith on earth.
From the Hindu death cult of Varanasi, where bodies burn on the Ganges around the clock, to the rat temples, to what Mormons truly believe about a man becoming a god, Jeremy traces the same pattern through all of it. Every system runs on a transaction, a treadmill of works and offerings to something on the other side that wants to be worshiped. He ties it to the divine council, the principalities and powers, and a night in India when something holds him down and chants over him until he calls on Jesus. If you have ever wondered what the church is actually fighting, this is the map.

Jeremy Jenkins is a regular contributor to Stranger Theology, the theological project from Blurry Creatures and Dr. Joel Muddamalle that digs into the deep end of the Bible the church tends to avoid. If this conversation scratched an itch, that is where the itch gets scratched every week. Subscribe to the Stranger Theology Substack for essays, deeper dives, and more from voices like Jeremy, and join the community thinking seriously about the supernatural world Scripture actually describes.

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