Walking through deconstruction
A year ago, someone sent me a meme picturing Phil Vischer’s VeggieTales characters Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. If you weren’t born in the 90s, Bob and Larry were instrumental to my generation’s faith formation, and so I eagerly read on. When my eyes shifted to the other side of the meme I read, “This is what happens when you deconstruct your faith,” and found myself looking at a tomato-cucumber salad.
The first thing I did was laugh. It was funny. But then it brought up other emotions like heartache. And not because my beloved childhood teachers of Bible stories and good morals had been chopped up into a salad, but because of the friends brought to mind who have deconstructed their childhood faith and then disposed of it.
The trendy word for this today is deconstruction. And there seems to be an increase lately of Christians who are deconstructing their faith and moving on from it. In fact, some reports say that 60 percent of people born in the church deconstruct and lose their faith after high school. Clearly, this is no laughing matter.
But I’m not convinced deconstruction needs to end up there. I’ve come to learn that deconstruction plays a necessary role in all our faith journeys. And when walked through in a healthy way, it can lead a person to deeper love and faithfulness to Christ.
Let’s talk about deconstruction
In his book, After Doubt, A. J. Swoboda defines deconstruction as “the dismantling of anything that’s been constructed.” In other words, deconstruction is construction in reverse: instead of putting something together you are now taking it apart.
I like that definition because it doesn’t make deconstruction inherently negative. Sometimes a person who deconstructs their faith ends up destroying it; and we have words for this like apostasy or falling away. But it’s unfortunate that those are the only stories we hear, because just as often people walk through deconstruction and emerge on the other side. It seems, then, that there are better ways to deconstruct than others.
What I’ve found to be helpful in thinking about deconstruction is to first discern its place and the role it was designed to play in our faith journeys. What I’ve come to learn is that deconstruction is a necessary middle step in a process of maturing.
Faith construction
Faith deconstruction
Faith reconstruction
Faith construction
All our faith stories begin with construction. They begin with us pre-critically accepting what others, usually our parents, tell us to believe. These beliefs then become the building blocks from which we initially construct our faith. And because we’re often young when this happens, our faith is simplistic and black and white.
All our faith stories begin with us pre-critically accepting what others tell us to believe. These beliefs then become the building blocks from which we initially construct our faith.
What inevitably happens is that we uncritically accept most of the beliefs of our parents. However, we live in a broken world and are all raised by broken parents. Which means, that alongside believing life-changing truths about Jesus, we come to believe some less-than-Christlike ideas.
Faith deconstruction
This is why all of us need a season of deconstruction. As we grow in faith, we naturally start questioning the things we pre-critically accepted. This is especially so when we begin to see the wrong or harmful ideas we picked up along the way for what they are.
When the deconstruction impulse isn’t properly channelled, it can turn a faith renovation into a faith demolition.
This is why I’d go as far as to say that, when rightly channelled, the deconstruction impulse is a godly one. You find it in the OT prophets, in the ministry of Jesus, and at multiple times in church history (reformata et semper reformanda, “reformed and always reforming” in Latin). God seems to use deconstruction-like seasons to continually call his people back to greater faithfulness.
(iStock)
This, however, is a highly delicate stage. When the deconstruction impulse isn’t properly channelled, it can turn a faith renovation into a faith demolition. This is where we need to be discerning. Are we dealing with potentially fatal unbelief here, or with the necessary deconstruction of harmful beliefs?
This is something we do well to help people in this season discern, or else some Christians will lose battles they never needed to fight. For example, if someone is tempted to discard their faith because they were given an inherently racist one, they need to be encouraged to deconstruct the racism, but not to throw out the entire faith.
Faith reconstruction
Deconstruction, however, is never a phase to stay in. The goal is to walk through it into faith reconstruction—or what the Bible calls returning to our first love.
Those who walk through the fires of deconstruction and emerge in this stage have a deep faith in Jesus. It’s a faith that is childlike without being childish, one that’s full of compassion without loss of conviction, and one that has a large capacity for paradox.
I’m not sure deconstruction can be understood or appreciated apart from a framework like this. It is a necessary middle step in a process of maturing—including the maturing of our faith. And because of this, the tendencies of progressive Christians who deify deconstruction and make it a sign of maturity, and conservative Christians who demonize deconstruction and leave no room for questioning, both miss the mark.
Walking through deconstruction
How then should we deconstruct, if there are better ways to do it that protect us from destroying our faith? And how should we respond to those who come asking for help?
I want to offer seven practices, which I have picked up along the way, that I believe play a part in helping one follow Jesus through the deconstruction seasons of life.
1. Go to church
Being told to go to church might be the last thing anyone wants to hear if they are deconstructing; especially as it’s often wounds from the church that push people into deconstruction. But church is God’s idea and most people who stop going to church end up losing their faith. Because of that correlation we give ourselves the best chance of following Jesus through the deconstruction season when we do it with others.
For those who’ve been hurt by the church, there’s a choice between being an outside critic or an inside prophet. Like an immune system works within the body, an inside prophet can call the church to greater faithfulness. You don’t have to abandon the church or the faith to critique its abuses.
2. Feel rightly
Awareness of our feelings is key to healthy spirituality. But if we don’t know the role of our emotions, they can destroy our faith. It’s common, for example, that someone will throw out everything they were raised to believe because they want to get back at their parents. Feeling rightly includes validating the negative emotions that we should feel because of sin, but it also includes not allowing our emotions to dictate everything.
Here, the wisdom of our faith tradition is seen in the bringing together of right belief (orthodoxy), right living (orthopraxy), and right feeling (orthopathy). We need all three, informing each other along the way, to walk through the difficult seasons of our faith.
3. Play the long game
Our culture has traded the wise for the quick. And we see the results of this within the current deconstructionist fad, where people are willing to walk away from a 2,000-year-old faith tradition after listening to one podcast. But are cynical podcasters really our best guides for working through questions like the problem of evil or OT violence?
Timothy Keller saved me from a lot of foolishness in my 20s when I heard him say, “Read one book and you’re an expert; read five books and you’re confused; read 100 books and now you know what you’re talking about.” We need to regain the value of sticking with something for a while; of accepting that wisdom isn’t acquired quickly. Could you be okay waiting on God in prayer for over a decade? Or wrestling with a theological question for a lifetime instead of throwing the whole thing out after a semester of study?
4. Practice being wrong
No one thinks they’re wrong. Yet when we look back on our lives, we know we’ve been wrong on many occasions. Living with humility means accepting the fact that we’re probably wrong about something right now.
It’s not uncommon for people who are deconstructing to come across as arrogant, because they’ve “seen the light.” But if the goal is nothing but the truth, then one must be willing to turn that same critical lens inwards. The unspoken assumption often is that if I’m deconstructing, then I must be right. But healthy deconstruction includes being so committed to the truth that you’re willing to suspend even your new beliefs.
Living with humility means accepting the fact that we’re probably wrong about something right now.
Some choose not to believe anything because the last time they did they got burned. For those who find unbelief safer than being wrong again, we need to share the gospel: that we are eternally loved even though we don’t have answers to all our questions.
5. Learn discernment
We live in an age glutted with information. I wish ideas came with warning labels: “this idea may cause serious injury or death,” or “this idea is known to cause cancer in the state of California,” because there are a lot of ideas that bring about spiritual death.
People who are deconstructing need to recognize they’re susceptible to bad ideas, and prone to listen only to people who will affirm what they want to hear. We need to be discerning, and surround ourselves with trusted mentors, so that during the faith-saving surgery of deconstruction we don’t end up killing our faith.
6. Prioritize the kingdom of God
I think it was Lesslie Newbigin who said that as the Western world secularizes, politics will take the place of religion. He was right. Add to that the increasing polarization of our politics, and you find another stumbling block to faith. I’ve heard it more than once: if being a Christian means I must vote for so and so then I want nothing to do with it.
It’s unfortunate that the church, meant to offer an alternative politic in this world, tends toward syncretism with earthly kings and kingdoms. Christians shouldn’t fit within any of our current political parties; they all challenge our loyalty to Christ at some point. When people leave the faith because it was equated with an earthly ideology, the church is responsible for having offered something other than Christ and his kingdom.
7. Abide in the vine
At the end of John’s gospel, Jesus invites his disciples to make a regular practice of abiding in his love and words (John 15:1–11). Only a few verses later, he adds: “I have said these things to you to keep you from falling away” (16:1 NRSVUE, emphasis added).
There is no substitute in the Christian faith for firsthand experience of God and his love.
There is no substitute in the Christian faith for firsthand experience of God and his love. And while it’s fashionable for some to belittle devotions and the other spiritual disciplines, it is these practices of abiding that have sustained the faith of Christians for two millennia, and by which they have come to know the love of Jesus for themselves.
Those who learn to abide in Christ remain in the faith not because they’re superhuman or because their doubts and questions are less severe. They remain in the faith because, like Peter, when asked by Jesus if he’d rather go elsewhere, they respond with: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life”
(John 6:68).
What do you want most?
This may seem like an odd way to end, but it’s important we ask ourselves: what do I want? The simplicity of the question belies its significance. The truth is, we often get (and God often gives us) exactly what we want—even in our deconstructing seasons.
People deconstruct their faith for a hundred different reasons and with many (sometimes ulterior) motives. But I’m convinced for those people who want God above all else—for those who want God despite all the reasons they have for deconstructing—those who want God more than anything else they might want, that they end up with him.
Your deconstruction doesn’t have to end in destruction. In fact, it might even be the pathway that God intends to use, to bring you back to him and your first love.
