Penn Badgley and Nava Kavelin Talk Baha’i Faith and High School on ‘Podcrushed’

(RNS) — When listeners turn on “Podcrushed,” they might hear that pop star Ariana Grande threw a birthday party for Jim Carey as a child, that rapper Saweetie loved author Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series, or that actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus cringes when she remembers doing something with her Kotex pad at a high school dance.

It may take some time to realize that the three co-hosts who lead the candid conversations on the podcast are members of the Baha’i Faith, a religion that emphasizes unity and believes that God sent the founders of different faiths to educate humanity, each of them “another chapter of the one religion from God.”

Penn Badgley, an actor best known for his role as Dan Humphrey in the teen opera series “Gossip Girl”, and Joe Goldberg, a serial killer and the main character of the thriller “You”, join former high school teachers Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari to talk about the stars’ high school adventures, romantic breakups and teenage fears.

Before they began thinking about creating a podcast, Kavelin, Ansari, and Badgley met in Baha’i circles. Kavelin, who Badgley credits with coming up with the podcast idea, has a long history of working in Baha’i institutions, most recently as a senior researcher at the United Nations office of the Baha’i International Community.

Badgley and Kavelin told RNS they hope “Podcrushed” will uplift listeners and shine a light on the brighter side of human nature. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nava, you grew up in the Baha’i Faith. What were your high school years like?

Cavelin: I was born into a Baha’i family, and my family moved to Puerto Rico from the United States, partly to help the Baha’i community grow in Puerto Rico. So I always felt like my religion was a really big part of my identity and the reason I was where I was. And even though it was my parents’ decision, I always felt like I was really a part of it. So religion was front and center in my thoughts.

It was also present as a factor of otherness. I lived on an island where I was not the same nationality as the people. I didn’t eat the food that the people ate and I didn’t have the religion that the people had, in a place where people really strongly identified with Christianity. It was something that I was proud of, but also something that I was ashamed of, to be honest, in terms of everything about me being different, including my religion. And that seemed to be the biggest thing that I couldn’t share with other people, so I always thought about religion as a high school student.

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Penn, you didn’t grow up religious. So what was your faith and spirituality like as a high school student?

Thief: I didn’t have any. I moved to Hollywood at 12, literally Hollywood, not just a state of mind but an actual place, and started acting professionally. So I was introduced or indoctrinated into the kind of default religion of our culture, which is, you could say, quite capitalistic in some ways. It felt meaningless, purposeless, in some ways slightly nihilistic.

And so it was during these years that I began to experience a very widely known and distinct form of malaise that comes from not being certain that existence can have a purpose. Religion is the framework in which this is explained, explored, and experienced by the religious person, and I grew up next to almost no one who was also religious, and that seemed like a very, very distant prospect or question.

If anything, I adopted a Marxist perspective that religion is the opium of the masses. The older I got and the more open I became, the more I would condemn religion.

Do you remember when you first heard about the Baha’i Faith and when it became clear to you that this would be your spiritual path?

Thief: I was 24 when I was first introduced to this, albeit indirectly, by a man who later became my friend. I was in the rainforest in Colombia, hanging out with an indigenous tribe there, the Kogi, and I met a Baha’i.

Later I professed my faith as a Baha’i and formally joined the community when I was 28. So it was a period of four years, but I would say that it was only during one of those years that I consciously explored and investigated my faith.

What attracted you to the Bahá’í Faith?

Thief: I believe this is the most important decision after marriage, and the two go hand in hand because they influenced each other on so many factors.

The Writings of Baha’u’llah first took root in my heart when I was 24 years old, and over time they began to grow.

There is a document written in 1985 called The Promise of World Peace, which was written to all the nations of the world by the Universal House of Justice (the governing body of the Baha’is). What I experienced then, and probably still think, is simply the most far-reaching, comprehensive, profound, and soul-stirring analysis of the state of the world and the crises it faces, pointing to the source of the problem, and also being able to prescribe a remedy, in accordance with this set of community-building plans that the Baha’is are engaging in with all the nations of the world.

For me, it became a conscious decision, along the arc from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. I was very involved in the protests and thinking a lot about political change, social change, the transformation of society and how and what an individual has to play in that. I was able to connect my personal transformation with the transformation of the world around me.

Nava, how has your faith changed since you were in high school?

Cavelin: I feel like every relationship has its ups and downs. So you have periods where it’s more intense and periods where it’s not as intense or not as front and center. Luckily, I haven’t had a period in my life where I’ve really had serious doubts and wanted to give up on my faith, but I feel like it’s been more challenged.

When I was younger, at least for me, a lot of my faith was also modeled by my parents’ strong faith and their involvement in the community, and I would go to classes with them. I didn’t resist. I wanted to be part of the community. But now everything I do is of my own free will.

Did your faith influence the choice of the “Podcrushed” format?

Cavelin: You probably can’t separate being a Bahá’í from how I think and move through the world, and the same goes for Penn and Sophie, so that’s probably true. But I think what informed it was the subject matter. In the Bahá’í Faith, there’s a really strong emphasis on education and different entry points into education. And in particular, the education of teenagers, like 12 to 15, which is such a formative time in life that it shouldn’t be skipped over and it’s skipped over too often.

And what happens to us at this age is so significant that as a global community we are trying to learn more about what pillars are necessary for a young person when their brain is really crystallizing in a way that can’t be reversed, what needs to happen, who needs to be part of our community, who is the mentor, how do we grow artistically, athletically, service-mindedly, and intellectually.

So I feel like as a global community, we think about that period, maybe more than any other community that I know of. That definitely shaped “Podcrushed” thinking about that period and wanting to learn more about people of that age. So I would say that’s a direct influence of the Bahá’í Faith on the moral and educational development of our youth.

Thief: Yes, I definitely agree that the biggest influence was the subject matter and our behavior in that regard. Not that we’re perfect. For example, at some point we thought, “Should we swear?” Because interestingly, for a long time after I became a Bahá’í, I naturally stopped swearing. I got back into it when I started doing a lot of work in the belly of the beast again. It’s just a little too deeply ingrained in me for me to lose it before I get older.

In choosing the topic, the conference where I met Sophie (Ansari) was specifically aimed at people who have just finished that period of life, from 12 to 15 years old, that we call the early adolescence. In that period, one needs and desires, on a spiritual level, a special phase of empowerment, which is essentially spiritual.

At age 15, you have entered the age of spiritual maturity. And one of the first things you do at that stage is to think about how you can turn around and help strengthen those people who are just entering the period that you just went through.

We call the people who do this animators because they are not so much involved in mentoring, teaching or tutoring, but rather in animating the potential of these young people, the qualities of God that they already have within them.

So this concept and all the material in the Bahá’í writings about this, it was kind of like I became a Bahá’í for the second time, and I felt so fired up and so inspired because I was receiving at the age of 12 to 15, the profound opposite. Now, in my maturity, I can look back and say that those were absolutely the darkest years of my life, 12 to 20 years really.

In my first few years of becoming a Bahá’í, the spiritual empowerment materials and the program itself were such an important part of figuring out how to apply the Bahá’í teachings in a way that felt so meaningful. When Nava came up with the idea for the podcast, I thought it just made sense to reflect on that time of life.

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Have you ever talked about how much to talk about faith on the podcast?

Thief: We always talk about this.

Cavelin: We didn’t start with those conversations. We just talked about our faith. Initially, we asked the guests standard questions, and one of the standard questions was to tell us about their childhood experiences with religion or if they practiced their faith. And we kept that for two seasons and then we dropped it this season. I don’t even think it was a conscious choice. It just happened.

We have to be honest, transparent. We’ve had clear conversations about this where we’ve really delved into something and then we’ve had a producer who feels like it’s too much. This is not a religious audience.

And so we had to talk about, “Do we agree? Do we disagree? What are the rules?” And there aren’t that many Baha’is in the media. So it’s also a show that offers representation to a community that’s barely represented, so that’s a factor for us that might not be a factor for the producer. So that comes up, but it wasn’t planned from the beginning, like we were going to talk or not talk about our religion. It was like, no, like we were going to talk about our lives. If our religion is part of the story, we’re going to tell it.

Thief: Certainly for the three of us, we can’t separate that, as Nava said earlier, from any part of our lives. If I’m going to tell the true story of how I came to the decision to play Joe Goldberg, the clearest, most transparent version of that story involves a lot of my relationship with the writings of Baha’u’llah.

If we are talking about Nava’s deceased mother, how she grieved then and how she feels about it now, the most authentic, most direct and simple way to discuss this topic is to consider her attitude towards the teachings of Baha’u’llah.

The best thing is if we treat what we do, if we do it well, just like talking to friends. We think of the audience as friends, and any friend who knows you well eventually learns that about you, you know?