April 22, 2021
Story time.
I was in math class in eighth grade. The teacher was writing problems on the whiteboard and showing us how to solve them. Since it was eighth grade, we were probably learning some kind of advanced Algebra.
One kid raised his hand and when the teacher called on him, he asked, “When are we ever going to have to use this stuff?”
A dark look crossed the teacher’s face. “You just asked the one question that’ll get you thrown out of any classroom on Earth,” he said. He was pissed.
The kid backed off. He explained that he wasn’t trying to be a smart ass and understood how he possibly came across that way, but he just wanted an example of a real-world application to what we were learning.
Instead of giving him an answer, the teacher just continued telling him off.
The reason the teacher never gave the kid an answer was because he didn’t have one. The teacher, a middle-aged man who’d experienced a lot of life in the real world, knew good and well that 99% of the kids in his class would never use the specific information he was teaching that day.
I was a good little boy in eighth grade. I’d learned a long time before then to never question authority. However, a part of me admired the kid for having the balls to question the authority in the classroom. Because until he did, I’d never even considered the fact that much of the stuff I was learning in school might not be useful to me when I grew up. Now that I’ve grown up, I can look back and confirm that my classmate had been right—and that him being right was the reason the teacher was so angered by the question.
What does this have to do with the Church and religion?
In my experience, pastors were a different breed of authority figures in that they actively encouraged people to ask them questions. This intrigued me because no authority figure in my life had ever invited someone to do such a thing.
I realize now that there is a difference between asking someone questions and questioning someone. It’s kind of a fine line, but it does exist.
Asking someone questions is submissive. I used to ask my pastors a lot of questions and they were fine with this. It was an opportunity for them to talk at me and fill me with their information. In their minds, I would then go on and live my life according to what they’d told me.
But when you question someone, it’s not submissive. You’re on the offensive. You’re challenging someone to defend their position as an authority, even if you’re doing so nicely. If they can respond convincingly to the questioning, then they maintain their status as a leader. If they can’t, they’re outed as a fraud.
Keep in mind this dynamic applies to an authority figure’s followers—people who have already accepted someone as an authority over them.
For instance, I’m happy to question Joel Osteen all day long. He doesn’t care because I’m not a follower of his. Questioning only becomes a problem for Joel Osteen when his congregation starts to do it. Once enough of them realize he’s a fraud, then it’s game over.
We saw this play out semi-recently with Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill church. He was an authority figure at his church and presented himself as an energetic, down-to-earth guy. But it came to light later that when people questioned him, Driscoll got really reactive and pissed off. Sometimes he fired people for their questioning. Over time, after enough of the congregation began to question Driscoll, he lost all power as an authority. He left Mars Hill and the church eventually crumbled.
After deconstructing my faith and finally deconverting, it shocked me how pretty much all the things that I held as an authority over my life (God, Jesus, the Bible, pastors) fell apart after only a moderate amount of intelligent and persistent questioning.
And I eventually learned that the people who need to be questioned the most and questioned the hardest are the ones who don’t want to be questioned at all.
Since you can question and deconstruct pretty much anything in your life, not only religion, I would encourage you to identify other points of authority in your life. They can crop up in the most unsuspecting places:
- Your boss at your job.
- An overbearing wife.
- A demanding family member.
Maybe it’s time you question them as well?