October 7, 2021
Deconstruction has splashed onto the scene and is here to stay.
What was once a fear-filled, silent questioning has become a larger movement and community—primarily online—than anyone could have predicted. Now, people who may not have otherwise found the courage to question their beliefs—and actually leave the Church—are finding a plethora of support and resources like never before.
And the Evangelical Church is really, really not happy about that.
Since the church is a business, the church absolutely needs asses in chairs on Sunday morning gleefully chucking money into the offering basket. But the more people who deconstruct, the less of those asses they’re seeing in seats on Sunday. The effect is exponential too; people who deconstruct now are not going to raise their children in the church like what was done to them. The “indoctrinate them when they’re young” technique won’t help the Church now.
Further accelerating the deconstruction movement are high profile, prominent celebrity pastors and musicians who are deconstructing and very publicly leaving the faith—while sharing all of it with their hundreds of thousands of followers and fans.
It seems the avalanche has started and there’s very little the Evangelical Church can do to stop this boulder rolling ever faster downhill.
But since the Evangelical Church is filled with Type-A, overly righteous pastors and leaders who aren’t accustomed to being ignored, they are fighting back.
Still-believing pastors have entered the discussion on deconstruction and have been met with a lot of ire and derision. It’s easy to see why—these pastors are trying to control the conversation.
They’re trying to say that deconstruction is fine just as long as you reconstruct afterward. Specifically, that you reconstruct back into being a Christian. This actually sounds like what I thought I was doing all those years ago when I started my own faith deconstruction. I’d always been told that I needed to “make my faith my own” and not just ride along with the faith I’d gotten when I was kid. So I did. I finally sat down and read the entire Bible to learn about the book that was the basis of my entire religion. I determined that it didn’t make any damn sense and left Christianity altogether.
But according to these pastors who are weighing in, that was wrong. To them, deconstruction shouldn’t be an honest, open-ended journey that’s meant to lead wherever it may. No, it needs to be a big circle that brings you right back to where you started—your ass in the pew on Sunday morning stuffing ten percent of you paycheck into the offering basket.
The Gospel Coalition recently released a book addressing the deconstruction movement called Before You Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing in the Church. In it, they cobbled together a lineup of “prominent writers” (their interpretation of prominent, of course) to tackle this tricky subject to help people who are doubting to continue to get their answers from the Church.
I guess because, according to them, when you’re questioning all the things you’ve learned from the Church then the best place to get answers is from the Church itself. After a lifetime spent in the Church, you already know what the Church has to say about everything. Now it’s time to see what other sources outside of the Church have to say and see what makes the most sense. The writers of Before You Lose Your Faith are freaking out because when grown, mature, intellectually-honest adults really start to investigate, they more often than not find that the Church’s answers to life and reality come up greatly lacking.
From an article on The Gospel Coalition website about their book Before You Lose Your Faith:
“Because Christianity—to be more specific, Jesus—can help, whatever your questions. Whatever your struggle, it gets better with more—not less—Christianity. It might be tempting to leave the church in order to find the answers. But we want you to reconsider the church as the best place to deal with your doubts and deconstruction.”
Yes, we know. We’ve heard that our entire lives—life is best with Jesus and Christianity. But it gets to the point where just saying that over and over again loses its magic. We need to know it, experience it, feel it, and have it demonstrated. And that just never seems to happen.
And I haven’t even mentioned yet what a slap in the face this attitude is toward people who’ve been harmed by the Church. A healthy portion of the deconstruction community are people who have been sexually abused, emotionally abused, worked to the bone with little or no pay, or married off at a young age to men twice as old, just to name a few off the top of my head. To even begin to suggest that the best thing for these people is to reconstruct back into the same exact situation that harmed them is just… I don’t know. I don’t have words for it.
It’s nonsensical. It’s tone deaf. It’s ridiculous. It lacks empathy. It reeks of desperation. All of these qualities that once pushed people out of the Church are now returning in full force as these pastors attempt to weigh in on the idea of faith deconstruction.
I know there are some pastors out there who are decent people who will be able to have honest and productive conversations with people who are deconstructing. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, the more prominent pastors speaking up amidst this burgeoning deconstruction community are ones who are severely lacking the tact to be taken seriously.
This is a great opportunity for these pastors to look inward and closely examine the harm that their religious institutions have caused. But I know that’s not going to happen. These guys have been in positions of power for a very long time and they just don’t really seem to have the capacity to examine where they may have messed up.
The deconstruction community will only grow bigger and more widespread in the future. Books like Before You Lose Your Faith and its authors will be resoundingly ignored. The Evangelical Church will continue to shrink further and further into obscurity as time goes on and as their relevance in modern society evaporates. Meanwhile the Christians that jump ship will find better and freer lives than they ever did “in the arms of Jesus” and will be much happier for it as well.