Before getting started today I want to thank all of you who’ve subscribed and interacted with my posts either on this site or through social media. I’ve been blogging for over 15 years off and on and this time has been so refreshing because of the conversations, messages, and shares the posts have created. Thanks for being here! Now, on to the letter.
My Deconstruction Story
2006 to 2007 were the hardest years of my faith life thus far. It started with a bad break up, my last year of college was filled with constant conflict with leadership and peers, and to top it all off I found out my mentor had been having an affair with my ex. A few weeks after my neighbor was nearly killed in a domestic dispute and I was the primary witness and deposed in her case against her ex. While the case was happening, her abusers were out on bail and had hinted they were going to do something to silence me. They obviously knew where I lived and the only help I got from the police was that I needed to get a gun.
This was a lot to process and I was not doing it well. Now add that I had just started a full-time job, had started my Master's degree, and moved for the first time far away from my family. I sought out counseling with a pastor to help me get spiritual direction but soon after we started it was revealed he was counseling me in the morning and seeing prostitutes at night. I was pretty sure I would never trust anyone - ever - after all of this.
All of this came to head in my second year of seminary in 2007 - I deconstructed most of my faith.
I was a Young Earth Creationist in 2006; in 2007 I was not.
I was a Left Behind defending, rapture sign searching, Pre-Millenial stalwart; in 2007 I was not.
That was just the beginning of the drastic changes for me. I had never heard of deconstruction before then but I definitely did it and got my fair share of heat for it. Later in 2009 I wrote a blog about some of the theological shifts I had gone through and that blog made its way to the upper echelons of Young-Earth Creationism think tanks. I was put on blast by their elites, my district was called to pull the credentials I had just received, and I even lost friends who believed I had abandoned orthodoxy.
When people talk about their own deconstruction process, how they were abandoned, neglected, or shunned I have a momentary time shift back to those exact same feelings, and the moments I felt them, and instantly relate. And while I did not abandon my faith or become an agnostic or atheist, I’d be lying if I did not say that it got close. But even when I came close, I kept coming back to a question Peter asked Jesus:
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
What hope could ever live up to the person of Jesus?
Deconstruction - So Hot Right Now!
Brad Wilcox over on Twitter has a fascinating thread about the rise of the religious “nones” that started in the 1990s in response to the Religious Right. Brad points out that many Christians moved away from more conservative approaches to faith as the excess of the Religious Right grew. Even today, almost a year removed from the Trump presidency, we are seeing a similar “culling” of folks leaving denominations and even the entire faith because of the perceived hypocrisy of supporting President Trump and his re-election. Putnam, Pew, and countless others have done a phenomenal job of documenting this trend of “deconstruction” and if you’re in ministry I’d highly recommend looking up their work. However, that’s not the whole story.
Wilcox goes on to point out that there’s a brewing backlash against what’s been called ‘The Great Awokening’. We hear a lot about how white republicans are identifying their conservative approach to government with faith and about the dangers of “white Christian nationalism”, but there’s more and more evidence of this being a multiracial and ethnically diverse movement (see here for more) not solely a white movement. Wilcox calls this trend a “sacralizing” movement, a sort of reverse of the sacrilege and apostasy from the 90s till now. Faith is the ultimate counterculture, and the excesses and hypocrisy of the “woke” movement make genuine expressions of faith look appealing. Especially faith that embraces justice, loves mercy and seeks to honor God in both word and deed.
Going Nowhere
Sometimes you run into a tweet that just hits on something you’ve been thinking and haven’t been able to put into words. The above Tweet from Lisa did just that. I am sympathetic to those who go through the deconstruction process, even if they go further with it than I did. Mainly this is because I understand the devastation of hypocrisy and hubris. But what I’ve never understood, and what I try to point out when it’s appropriate to do so, is that often the new culture that my brothers and sisters think they are adopting is more often than not just a new form of the culture they rejected.
G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy opens with a story of a man who set sail from England to find new land to claim for her. A storm came and he lost his bearings and eventually shipwrecked on land that he soon claimed for England. The problem? The land was England. Chesterton likened it to his faith. He said it as follows:
I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
So much of what I’ve seen of modern deconstruction is just the rejection of one political culture for another. As an example, let’s say one was raised in a conservative culture but then goes through deconstruction and fully adopts progressive culture. Has anything changed? I mentioned my own story so that I don’t seem like I’m lumping in all deconstruction into this description. I think many go through the process because of legitimate trauma, hurt, and pain. Nothing I’ve said should (I hope) diminish that and deconstruction of culture to reach true expressions of faith is actually a good thing. But I worry for those who seek out new land, self-discovery, and purpose only to be tossed about by the storms and rages of the sea. Could one avoid that shipwreck by simply asking, “Where else would I go? Only you have the words of truth.”