May 23, 2022
I would describe my personal faith deconstruction journey as happening over a looooong period of time. In fact, I probably took the longest possible route to get there.
For me, little things fell away one at a time. I feel like I deconstructed little parts of the Church and Christian culture one at a time in isolation, foolishly thinking I could consider each part in isolation. Unfortunately, since everything is ultimately connected, I did not realize at the time that what I was doing would eventually cause my entire religion to fall away.
Here are the things I separated out and deconstructed on their own. I’ve listed them in order as best as I can remember because the order was definitely important for me. I took first the small things I felt Christian culture or a Christian lifestyle could survive without and whittled it all down from there.
Until there was ultimately nothing left…
Popular Christian Culture
The first thing that I deconstructed and was quite happy to toss away was Christian culture.
Even when I was in the thick of it all, at my most devoted to God, I still hated certain aspects of Christian culture.
I hated most “Christianese” terms and never used them myself. I refused to say things like “have a heart for” and “do life together” and call unspecified blocks of time a “season.” No.
- I thought side hugs were stupid. If you were going to hug someone, just do it.
- I thought single people saying, “I’m just dating Jesus for now” was stupid and borderline gross.
- I thought people who got married super young were likely making a big mistake, even if they felt God was telling them to do it.
- I did not like going places just to “fellowship.”
- I did not go to events that were specifically designed to be long-ass prayer sessions or worship marathons.
To me, those things put a cheesy layer on top of what should have been a very serious religion and lifestyle. I also sensed that it gave non-believers something to criticize us about, since it all seemed so ridiculous.
I was very much in favor of avoiding these lifestyle elements in order to be “taken more seriously” as a Christian and not appear like I only existed in some small church bubble.
Worship Music
This was definitely one thing I stopped liking long before I actually left religion.
One Sunday, I actually started listening to the songs and the lyrics. They were just… not good. Each song used the same chords, same structures, and the lyrics were so vague as to be near meaningless. As I got older, I’d heard more and more secular songs that were very deep and impactful with lyrics that actually made you contemplate. I couldn’t help but think that if Christianity was the be-all-end-all and God had created the entire universe, then it was fertile ground in which to write some deep, compelling, highly artistic worship songs. But no. All I seemed to get in church was a reheated helping of the most recent thing vomited up from Chris Tomlin or Matt Redman.
I used to draw gasps and ire when I said worship music wasn’t good. My friends thought worship music was automatically good simply because it was about God. I attempted to explain what I meant regarding the quality of the lyrics, but no one was listening anymore. They thought I’d committed some kind of blasphemy.
Missions
I didn’t go on my first mission trip until after college when all of my friends had already done multiple throughout their college careers. I always knew it was something I should do, but put it off because school kept me busy. I finally bit the bullet and signed up for one. I’ve written a little about this trip both here and here.
That trip required local interpreters to speak with the population in the rural villages. The interpreters were locals involved with churches that spent a lot of time outreaching to the rural populations that we were currently among. At one point, I just stopped and thought to myself, “What the hell are we doing here? These local people are way more effective at doing this work than we are. We don’t even speak the language!”
I even asked one interpreter what he thought was the point of us being there. He just kind of laughed it off nervously and said the locals enjoy seeing foreigners visit their towns.
But his response didn’t quite do it for me. I thought about the amount of money it took to fly all us Americans there and how it could’ve been put to better use by just giving it to the local churches.
Another thing that bugged me about that trip was that we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a tent next to the local village. Chefs that came along with us prepared the food. The rationale was to protect our stomachs from potential problems with the local food.
I didn’t quite have the words for it yet, but I knew deep down this was wrong. I figured if we were serious about doing the work to lead these people to Christ, the very least we could do was eat with them and support their local restaurants. But no.
Shortly after that trip, I would go on to deconstruct mission trips within the context of Christianity. I took the Perspectives class, which offered a different (and more challenging) perspective on mission work that made a lot more sense to me. In short, they taught that short-term mission trips are pointless and that if you’re going to go, you should be prepared to go for multiple years at a time.
That class very nearly saved my faith. I wrote more about experience with it here.
Prayer
As things progressed and I got more and more comfortable shedding stuff away from my overall Christian experience, I even surprised myself when I started to wonder about prayer.
What was the point? If God had predetermined everything, then what was the point of imploring him to do things? If prayer came true, then it was a blessing, but if it didn’t, then it was God knowing better than me what I needed. There was no way to explain it, question it, or challenge it.
I lost all desire to offer up any prayer requests at Bible study. Although that short-term mission trip I wrote about earlier was disheartening, one good thing that came from it was that I saw the conditions in which many people lived in the rural areas of other countries. Not great, at least to my western-standard eyes. With these images burned into my head, I felt bad asking God for anything. Compared to these people, I was extremely well off. To want for anything more felt wrong—particularly wanting something that was granted for free by an all-powerful God. I wrote more about this in my article Travel Will Help You Deconvert.
It now annoyed me when the usual prayer requests got floated out—people asking for their car to get fixed on time, people wanting a promotion at work, people praying for healing for their 93-year-old grandfather with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer with mets in the lungs. And worst of all… the unspokens.
People told me they were worried about me because I never had any prayer requests. They believed I thought my life was perfect, and they knew that couldn’t possibly be the case. They thought I was hiding something. But the truth was that it just felt wrong.
Church Camp
I loved church camp when I was in the youth group, but as I got older and started volunteering as a youth leader for kids who went to church camp, I liked it less and less.
There was one particular church camp that my church sent the youth to every summer. The kids universally loved it. They had everything: a lake, boats, swimming pools, sports, and of course, a giant blob on the lake that provided hours upon hours of slow motion footage for the teaser reels. Hell, if you took away the nightly preaching, I’m sure I’d have a great time there even today.
This camp had a bunch of catchy and rhyming “cheers” and “chants” that they said before they ate, before they prayed, before they slept, and most likely before they took a shit, and it created this very cult-like behavior.
During the summer, the youth group kids from affluent families would go off to this church camp while the less fortunate kids continued with our summer program. Once all the kids were united, the kids who’d gone to camp perpetuated the chants and cheers at the Sunday evening program. So half the kids were in on it while the other half didn’t know what the hell was going on.
What made it worse was that many of the youth leaders (who went to the same church camp when they were young and worked there as counselors when they were older) also encouraged the chants and cheers. In my mind, it was creating a division among the kids. I resented that camp that all the other youth leaders loved.
On top of that, now that I was not the one going to church camp, I was better able to observe from the outside how the kids came back with a spiritual high and “rededicated to Christ” but it all cooled off the subsequent weeks in which they returned to baseline and resumed acting more like themselves.
I remembered those same spiritual highs whenever I came home from church camp. I eventually decided that church camp was kinda dumb and that, as a Christian, someone should be able to maintain the same approximate levels of dedication consistently without relying on sudden extreme spikes.
Going to a Physical Church
As I became more and more okay with opening myself up to more thoughtful approaches to Christianity and my faith, I struggled to find a reason why I absolutely had to go to a physical church on Sunday morning. I reasoned that as long as I was “spending time in the word” and regularly attending some kind of small group or Bible study, then I should be good to go, right?
When I pitched this idea, I was always shot down. I was told I needed the community that church on Sunday provides. But as an introvert, I didn’t necessarily feel the need for any community on terms that weren’t mine.
Leaving the physical church was easy for me. My first job out of college had me working every Sunday, so it was a convenient excuse. I tell the full story of how I left my church here.
Biblical Inerrancy
After I finally decided to commit to reading the entire Bible all the way through, it didn’t take me long to start encountering verses that either didn’t make any sense or were downright horrific to attribute to a supposedly loving god.
As a fervent Thinking Christian I couldn’t just “have faith.” I had to dig in and learn the Truth. I explored the work of Markus Borg and his book Reading the Bible Again For the First Time. In it, Borg walks you through the entire Bible and describes which stories are (in his opinion) literal history and which are metaphorical stories. For the metaphorical stories, he gives an application as to why it’s valuable for the practicing Christian.
I allowed myself to start accepting metaphor in my interpretations of the Bible. The problem was that once I got started, I couldn’t stop. Almost everything started to become a metaphor to me.
I told myself it was okay. In my mind, the entire thing could be metaphor and it’d be fine just as long as the Resurrection was absolutely, 100% true. Because without that, nothing else mattered.
Well…
The Resurrection
Jesus’s Resurrection was the very last thing I dug into. I was too afraid of finding evidence that it wasn’t a historical fact. I’d examined pretty much every other Bible story at that point and found evidence that those stories never literally happened, so I began to wonder if the Resurrection was any different.
As you can see… no, it is not. Here I am today.
Conclusion
I do think this “step-by-step” process was the best way forward for me. For example, I wasn’t ready to deconstruct the Resurrection at the very beginning of my faith deconstruction. I had to start small and easy with Christian culture and its absurdities. I followed that nice, neat, stepwise progression all the way to the big final boss at the end, the Resurrection. I climbed the “deconstruction ladder” so to speak, which I described here.
Even though it was hard, I’ll never regret it. As I’ve written before, my life is much better outside of religion than it was within.