January 28, 2021
Religious deconstruction is the process by which someone reevaluates and takes a critical look at their religious beliefs.
This is a very difficult process to go through. It’s often characterized by someone coming to the slow realization that things they’ve believed for their entire lives are, in fact, not true.
This can result in the person flying into a tailspin because their religious beliefs underpinned every aspect of their lives. With that gone, they feel like the rug has been pulled from beneath them. They may feel like their purpose in life has vanished, or feel embarrassed that they believed lies for so long, or have all of their seven life areas completely disrupted.
Given some time, some healing, and perhaps some therapy, most people who go through this process of deconstruction will later say they’re glad they did despite it being difficult. They say that going through that difficult time made them a better and more authentic person, they’re now living a life that feels more true, and they are ultimately better off now that they’ve deconstructed their faith and shed beliefs that were holding them back all along.
Toward the end of my own faith deconstruction, I came to a startling realization:
If you can deconstruct your faith, then you can deconstruct everything else.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this connection made in online faith deconstruction communities—perhaps because religious deconstruction is such a huge task that there’s hardly room for any other topics. Fair enough. But I would be remiss if I didn’t point this out.
When you deconstruct your faith, you’re doing the heavy work of critically evaluating everything you’ve ever been told about what is true and how the world and universe works. This primarily focuses on religious beliefs: the existence (or non existence) of God, where humans came from, and what God’s ultimate plan for the world is.
But since everything in the world and universe is connected in one great tapestry, you can take the process of deconstructing your faith and deconstruct every single other aspect of your life and world.
You can, in fact, deconstruct everything you’ve ever been taught or told about:
- Relationships and the best way to have them.
- Your government.
- Your country’s economy.
- Your culture.
- The chain of command at your job.
- Science and how it’s done.
- World history.
- Your country’s military and police force.
- Money.
- The educational system.
- Politics
That’s an intense list. It contains nearly every single aspect of your life and the world around you.
My knowledge, beliefs, and understanding of everything on that list came to me the same way as my religious beliefs: I was taught them growing up by people who I deemed to be authorities on the matter and trustworthy. I took it all at face value and lived my life in accordance to what I’d been taught and told and my resulting belief system.
After going through my own faith deconstruction, it occurred to me that everything else in my life that I’d been taught or told that I’d simply accepted could very likely not be wholly accurate or downright untrue.
As with faith deconstruction, deconstructing anything on the list above is hard. It requires time. It requires thinking in new ways. It requires researching viewpoints different than the ones you’ve held your entire life. And, hardest of all, it may require you to admit that you were wrong.
If you’ve deconstructed your faith, then you have what it takes to deconstruct other important aspects of your life.
- You already know that you’re capable of putting in the work.
- You already know that you’re intellectually honest enough to change your mind when presented with new evidence or more complete information.
- You already know that you can endure whatever pain the process might bring.
You may say, “It’s not the same thing! God and religion is a bunch of fairy tale stuff, while everything else you mentioned is reality!”
When you believed in God, you were taught that all of the reality-based things on the list above were somehow and in some way created by God, given by God, directed by God, allowed by God, or were a part of God’s plan for the world and humanity. This allowed you to just accept them at face value.
The fact that you can deconstruct your faith and come to the conclusion that God doesn’t exist makes it even more imperative, in my mind, to also deconstruct all the entities, institutions, and norms that you once attributed to the structure of reality that God had supposedly created.
If they weren’t created by God as part of his master plan for humanity, then who did create them? For what purpose? Is it possible there’s a less-than-benevolent motive behind them? Is it possible that their ostensible purpose isn’t their actual, or even intended purpose?
Further, if your government, for example, says something that’s untrue, it can’t be “less untrue” than something God is purported to have done in the Bible simply because the government is real and God is not real. Untrue is untrue.
The process of deconstruction—religious or otherwise—is valuable because it allows you to ask different questions and seek new knowledge. When you acquire new knowledge that you didn’t have before and implement it into your life as corrective action (you make a change), then you are now acting more closely in accordance to what is true. When you act in accordance to what is true, then you’re life is easier, happier, and you will be more free—as I’m sure you now realize after your religious deconstruction.