If you've left the church, this made-in-London, Ont., podcast may be for you

It took Josiah Mahon of London, Ont., a long time to finally leave the church.

Mahon, now 32, first began questioning his evangelical Christian belief system after he moved to London long after he attended a Baptist church in northern Ontario, where his father was the minister. 

"I realized that a lot of my own beliefs were just regurgitated from what I had been taught by the community, and I didn't actually have any support for them," said Mahon, who was homeschooled throughout his childhood.

"I wasn't allowed to listen to music with drums, for example," he said. "I was told that drums originated — and this is absolutely racist and wrong — but that they originated in African tribes and used for sexual rituals,and that the beats start awakening people sexually and you should flee from that kind of sin."

When Mahon was 10, his family moved to Sarnia in southwestern Ontario where his father led a congregation at a much bigger evangelical church.

Both church communities were demanding, controlling and insular, said Mahon, and questioning your faith or anything else within the church meant you were ostracized.

During those years, Mahon was a firm believer in creationism and that the world was 6,000 years old, so when he went on to study biology through correspondence at Athabasca University, he had ulterior motives.

"I went to university to get a degree in biology to infiltrate the evolutionists from the inside, learn their ways and come back and be kind of like a great teacher of creationism, using their own methods against them," he said.

"It it didn't quite pan out that way."

When Mahon was in his 20s, he abruptly left a Baptist church in London where he'd become a member, after he pointed to evidence the minister's sermons were plagiarized. That, he said, was the motivation he needed to start questioning everything he knew.

Today, he calls himself an agnostic atheist and in his new podcast, Slow Train to Heck, he talks to people who share similar stories about leaving what he calls 'toxic religious groups.'

"There is a real systemic problem here in Canada," Mahon said. "People are trapped in these isolated, insular systems thinking that they are alone because they don't have any interaction with people outside of those community."

He is still in touch with his family; they just don't talk about his new beliefs.

"They know I'm doing the podcast. I don't think they're happy about it, but these systems are causing real damage to people, and if I can be a voice that help people know that they're not alone, I think it's worth me taking a little bit of heat."