Joe Rogan sat down with linguist Daniel Everett on The Joe Rogan Experience for a conversation that traced one of the strangest journeys in modern anthropology: a man who set out to bring Christianity to a remote Amazonian tribe and ended up losing his own faith in the process.
Everett explained that he was not raised religious. He described standing outside a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968 trying to sell LSD when he met the woman who would become his wife, the daughter of a missionary who had spent 20 years in Brazil. Her father’s stories about jungle life captivated him, and Everett became a committed Christian, eventually training as a Bible translator and missionary.
In 1977, Everett was sent to live among the Piraha, an isolated tribe along the Maici River in the Amazon whose language had never been decoded because it bears no relation to any other known living language. His task was to translate the New Testament and convert the tribe. He ended up spending roughly eight years living among them across four decades of visits, learning their tonal language from scratch by pointing at objects and recording sounds.
What Rogan found most compelling was how that mission unraveled. Everett told him the Piraha simply were not interested in his message about Jesus.
“In decades, they weren’t interested,” Everett said. “They were so totally… my claims did not meet their standard of evidence. They have a high standard of evidence and I didn’t meet that standard.”
When he told them a story about Jesus, one villager later claimed Jesus had visited his village that night, appearing n*ked and pursuing the women, a rejection dressed up as folklore.
Everett described how his doubts grew over years of immersion. He came to see the Piraha as some of the most content, well adjusted people he had ever encountered, better adjusted, he said, than most Christians he knew, including missionaries.
Their day to day existence, built on roughly 15 to 20 hours of hunting a week, fish, laughter and communal life, left him questioning the moral framework he had assumed only religion could provide.
By 2001, angered partly by rhetoric describing soldiers in Iraq as “blessed peacemakers of the gospel,” Everett told his wife he no longer believed. She left him almost immediately, and he lost his income as a missionary in the process.
