Deconstructing My Deconstruction
Often people deconstruct what never should have been constructed in the first place, and that is not a bad thing.
*Note: This is a previously published article, but I’m posting it again because there are new readers here and because I want to write a lot on this topic in the coming months.
“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Psalm 13:1-2)
Look at all those questions! While in the New Testament, we find more propositional statements, in the Psalms we find many questions and displays of uncertainty. It is a restrained uncertainty that retains its core of faith, but it is uncertainty nonetheless.
Deconstruction Stories
For many years I have been a student of deconstruction stories. Deconstruction in a religious context is the taking apart and examining of one’s faith, sometimes then reconstructing it but often not. This has become quite a mainstream phenomenon in our day.
At its heart, deconstruction is taking apart your existing engine, inspecting the components, cleaning up or replacing the parts that are worn out or not working, and then putting the engine back together again. It’s like taking apart an elaborate Lego structure that has been built up in pieces and sections over years, laying all the pieces on the table, and then putting all the parts back together, getting rid of some and adding others, into a more coherent structure.
Some decide the entire engine or Lego structure is a sham and they need to start from scratch. In some cases, that’s not a bad idea; in others, a lot of good components are needlessly discarded.
Are My Questions Welcome?
It saddens me that what is often mentioned in stories of deconstruction as the fuel for the journey is some version of being raised in a church where questions were not allowed. Questions were dangerous and needed to be put on a shelf. In reality, based on my experience, this was often the advice of Christians and church leaders who have not themselves contemplated many of the deeper aspects of their faith.
In conversing with atheists, initially around 2007 (when I was making my way through “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins) I discovered that there’s a bit of an unofficial test applied among atheists where within 4-5 questions they can stump and scare off most Christians. It’s a bit of a game and according to my atheist interlocutors, a game they most often win. These were fairly rudimentary questions about the Christian faith, the answers to which did not require even an undergraduate degree in philosophy.
Set Up to Fail
As with many other reasons people deconstruct and don’t come back, I am appalled at this one. But what did we expect to happen to a generation raised on shallow entertainment-based Christianity that often encouraged idolatrous and unholy alliances with politicians and their parties? What did we expect to happen to people who were given pools of theology to wade into that didn’t even rise to their ankles?
They asked hard questions of their churches and received a tsk-tsk, a finger-wag, and a “Don’t do that again!” in response. Many were not even given the courtesy of a reply they couldn’t agree with. They turned elsewhere and received more information than they could consume - and off they went, often never to return. Sadly, they learned that there is precious little time for important theological questions when the bulk of your time is dedicated to winning a culture war.
And all of this has led to as much nominalism as it has apostasy. Well, maybe apostasy is not always the right word. Often people deconstruct what never should have been constructed in the first place, and that is not a bad thing. But often in their confusion and disillusionment, they end up throwing out what was good along with the bad.
Deconstructing my Deconstruction
I had my own experience of deconstruction around 2005-2007. My journey was unlike those of many today. Rather than leading me out of the church, mine led me deeper into the church, but I was really out there for a while. I had all the pieces on the table. I took some pieces off the table and left them there and others I later put back on. It was a difficult time for me and my family, so if you’re on the same journey, I understand what it’s like!
In the end, I seemed to be mostly cured of my pervasive cynicism about Christianity. To be more accurate, I ceased to feel guilty about applying a cynical eye to the many intentionally shallow, bogus manifestations of Christianity that are commonplace today. This allowed me to see and embrace the more genuine and serious expressions of the faith that have been tested by time and found to produce disciples of Jesus who look like Jesus.
My confidence in Christ and his church grew - not because I looked at church history and refused to believe all the bad things that had been done in the name of Christ. Not at all. It was by taking an honest look and processing what I saw that my faith was nursed back to strength.
The End of the Middle of the Story
In the end, after years of hard struggle and deep contemplation, I was able to reconstruct the basic framework of my faith almost completely with the pieces I had been given by my parents. But now no longer was I living in my parents’ house; the house was now my own.
The point is that all of this came about because I asked questions. I was never told that it was wrong to ask questions; I was encouraged to ask, to jump into the deep end and learn to swim.
As a result, I became a strong swimmer - which is a good thing because I find that I still encounter deep waters and dark waves.
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Deconstructing My Deconstruction
Although some of this resonated with me in positive ways, I think it needs to be pointed out that it’s really easy to work with the milk fed exChristian portrait, but this topic should get much more difficult once you focus on the character who went far beyond being the milquetoast believer; one who went in deep and came out affirming that evangelicalism and possibly even the Bible itself ultimately can’t be harmonized with reality in a way that gives Christianity trustworthy merit.
In my multifaceted journey to exvangelical/exChristian status (I’ll use those terms even though I kind of loathe them) I did eventually land on one particular counter anchor in opposition to the anchor of Christ that left me having to finally drop the thin layer of cognitive dissonance causing me to bite my tongue which had been covered in myriad of doubts.
This counter anchor is of course the current darling of atheists known as 1 Samuel 15. For well over a decade I dealt with this passage and others like it in significant depth; always coming so close, but continually leaving a layer of cognitive dissonance and unfulfilled accounting for the god given command to kill children and infants.
Finally, through the force of life circumstances I’ve reached a place where I’m not afraid to look at an account such as the command to murder the Amalekite babies and say that if “you shall not kill” is inapplicable to the same god who supposedly revealed himself in Jesus, then that god sees the killing of the most innocent of humans as a relative thing and exposes that particular god depicted in the Bible as relative and inconsistent in character with the prince of peace the Bible tells us that Jesus is.