Atheist YouTuber Jared Smith Audits Church: He Felt ‘Spiritually Raped’ By His Faith

It is a chilling image: a young man, barely into his twenties, peering over the edge of an eighth-storey apartment block in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, wondering why he felt compelled to jump. This was the dark climax of what Jared Smith had believed was a sacred mission—a Pentecostal ministry internship that he now, with the distance of seven years, bluntly describes as both ‘culty’ and ‘a joke’.

His mental health had utterly collapsed under the austere demands of the school, a bizarre satellite campus—situated in a trailer on a pastor’s yard with only six students watching classes livestreamed from the United States.

Despite the tiny scale, the level of spiritual and psychological control exerted over the students was vast. Smith and his classmates spent their non-lecture time street preaching and protesting at abortion clinics.

The pressure became so intense that at one point, his pastor suggested he stop listening to Christian metal music because it was ‘clearly what’s causing this depression’—a ridiculous, controlling gesture that led Smith to delete his entire iTunes library.

“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.’”

This period, the last time his faith felt truly vibrant, was defined by a desperate pity for those ‘going to hell’ and a compelled zeal to help strangers atone for their sins.

However, looking back, Smith recognises that this extreme intensity was not a testament to his faith, but the start of his eventual departure—a choice that has set him on a fascinating, alternate course.

A 30-year-old Raleigh resident who holds down a day job in video production, Smith has been an atheist for seven years. His candour about the struggle, the trauma, and the ultimate break is what makes him such a magnetic, disarming voice online, helping to change the often-vitriolic way religion is discussed.

“My whole thing is personal,” Smith said. “There’s nothing that’s not on the table.”

Heliocentric’s Audits: The Empathetic Atheist YouTuber

Known on YouTube as Heliocentric, Smith has carved out a unique space as perhaps the only Atheist YouTuber who unironically ‘loves religion’.

His channel, which has swelled to nearly 80,000 subscribers since he began posting consistently in January 2024, is less about debunking beliefs and more about deeply understanding them.

His intimate, unscripted videos, ranging from 10 minutes to an hour, cover a gamut of religious subjects, aimed at grasping faith groups he previously knew little about.

His most distinctive and popular content is his ‘atheist church audits’. Two or three times each month, Smith attends services of various faiths, talks to adherents, partakes in the customs, and offers his considered take.

For one video, he read the Book of Mormon cover to cover. For another, he simulated the process of disfellowshipment from Jehovah’s Witness communities. He even attended a nondenominational Black church and was invited to speak from the pulpit about his faith journey.

With little more than his face on screen and a casual, diary-like intimacy, his videos feel inherently human. While his critiques can be pointed, he rigorously limits his jabs to things he believes to be ‘batshit harmful’ to the wellbeing of believers—usually specific customs or doctrines—and never to the believers themselves.

His noble, if unorthodox, mission isn’t to undermine faith; it is to build empathy and inspire a more nuanced conversation.

“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.”

From Spiritual Pillar to Critical Atheist YouTuber

Smith was raised a ‘suburban evangelical’ in Greensboro and Salisbury, North Carolina, but his fascination with faith began after a dramatic spiritual rupture.

His decade-long journey of construction and deconstruction started when he was just 13 years old in December 2007. His older brother pulled him aside at a Christmas party and asked a question that shattered his world: “You know the Christianity stuff is bullshit, right?”

Smith claims something snapped inside him that day. Hyperventilating, he fled to his mum’s van, gripped his cross necklace, and frantically began to pray, begging for God to be real.

He admits his belief wasn’t rooted in bliss or beauty, but in terror: “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.”

his fear drove him to become more devout than his parents. After three years of homeschool, he returned to his Christian high school and quickly assumed a role as a ‘spiritual pillar’, becoming a chaplain in his senior year.

The eventual breakdown was intellectual and psychological. During his three years at Fellowship of International Revival and Evangelism (FIRE) School of Ministry, a Pentecostal seminary program in Concord, his hyper-strict approach to religious principles—including holding himself to a vow of celibacy for years—left him sexually frustrated.

The aggressive, performative preaching tactics of his classmates grated on him, leading him to tone back his own ‘charismania’. He also received unsatisfactory answers from his pastors to deep theological questions about doctrines such as Arianism and Oneness Pentecostalism.

These moral and intellectual inconsistencies made him feel increasingly let down by his faith and how others practised it.

This path of intense religious commitment, culminating in the suicidal thoughts during his Europe internship, left him “depressed, spiritually underwhelmed, culturally stunted, and at times suicidal”.

Two years later, between his sophomore and junior years at Wheaton College, the mental turmoil nearly compelled him to yank his car off the highway. It was then he chose to ‘pump the brakes on all of this’ and abandon his faith entirely.

“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.”

That trauma is precisely why his current work is so powerful. As a critique of religion, the Atheist YouTuber genre is often adversarial, but Smith’s experience allows him to appreciate the immense potential for good in faith.

He knows what it’s like to belong. He can marvel at the diversity of the Islamic Association of Raleigh’s Friday prayer, where more than 90 countries are represented, and love All Saints’ Orthodox Church (which he audited last December) for its thoughtful art and architecture.

As one critic, Douglas Stilgoe, noted: “But it 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.”

Smith’s ultimate point is about sincerity, not belief. “I don’t really care if you believe that I’m going to hell. I care if it breaks your heart,” he said. And while he makes videos about Jesus downstairs and sings about the connection he used to have with Him upstairs, his most asked question—‘Why are you an atheist?’—is the one he refuses to answer.

He believes there are a ‘thousand arguments against Christianity,’ but only one against God. And that, he says with a wry smile, is for him to know, and him alone.