A Christian's Guide to Deconstruction
This idea of deconstruction has been making its rounds throughout the Christian community for as long its history, but social media and our new connected life puts so much of this into focus than ever before. Crises of faith are as old as apostasy, but with social media and the attention that the platform(s) can elicit it certainly seems to have entered some kind of algorithm-driven madness that guarantees engagement. Except here, though. If you find this, perhaps it was providence.
Well, the audience I would hope to reach is a bit different here. I went through my own version of deconstruction over the course of a decade where identifying as a Christian was problematic on a personal level, a political one, and even spiritually. So, the distinction is for the reader who might balk at the label of “Christian” while still maintaining a sense of belief. There was a time where if someone were to ask me if I was a Christian, that my answer would be “I’m a believer, yes.” so that I could avoid being needlessly proselytized and at the same time satisfy my internal conflict by remaining honest.
I came to faith in Jesus at a very young age in 1989. His Gospel having been profoundly clear to me, a moment, a memory that I have never been able to escape. However, the formative years consisted of well-meaning but ultimately bad theology. The joyful clarity of the Gospel was elusive and something I had to achieve through incredible servitude of what I believed was God’s direction for my life. I had short-lived seasons of closeness to God, but even more seasons of feeling separation where doubt was the prominent voice. I believed those were tests of mettle for who could persevere and keep faith, no help from God, just faith in Him, the ever-present bystander. Today, I do not blame my friends that have given up on God, instead I grieve at how much the point was missed by our Christianity. So many dear friends in my life as recently as the present have given up, their faith (could we even call it that?) taken apart by personal tragedies where God was supposed to step in and did not. Moments where faith still resulted in a bad diagnosis, a fervent prayer seemingly unanswered, or seeing injustices faced by those the most comparatively undeserving . Some of them having been deserted spiritually, and therefore relationally by leaders we trusted to have answers to these things. The rational mind pieces together these shortcomings, and then the questions come:
Why did God let this happen?
Why did my Godly relationship fail?
Why did God abandon me?
Why did my loved one, of all people, get sick and die?
Why did I have to go through this pain?
Why did the people who God supposedly entrusted me to, abuse me?
The answers to these questions for believers who had put in the equity of serving God because they believed in Him are disconcerting because they are rational conclusions:
God is not just.
God is not real.
God’s plan. Terrible plan.
God loves me, so He punishes me? This is not a relationship.
These people are right. The Church, or Modern Christianity/Evangelicalism has propagated a message that if they put their faith in Jesus, and start living for God, that they will build divine equity. As one baptized and originally raised Catholic, this is just indulgences re-imagined. We claim an answer to suffering that is earthly rather than spiritual. We propagate a message that God saves us from these things, when in fact, He saves us in spite of these things.
No wonder people deconstruct their Christianity and leave our fellowship.
My deconstruction was not so profound, mainly because my upbringing even as a Christian was not very strict. The rules I had were practical whether or not they were being supported by scriptural interpretation. Biblical sin was not kept as a secret, my parents shared their experiences with abuses, bad relationships, and the consequences these things created some of which the impact to our family remains an area of where God’s grace to this day continually sustains us. Like most humans that learn from people they trust, I took their experiences and their knowledge to help guide my own decisions later. Some might even question why I am a Christian at all, since all this would be possible without the help of Christ. More on this later.
My deconstruction was over the course of 2002 to 2022, with the most earnest years being 2008-2020. As any young adult would, I began to inventory everything from childhood in the 1980s, high school in the 1990s, college and religious ministry throughout the 2000s. I served my church and the people of God with tremendous faithfulness and sacrifice, but where my regrets for some aspects of that would be reasons for falling out of fellowship, instead my regrets caused a retreat. I left the church to find Him, not to get away.
I gave a year of college to my church in a program they participated in called Master’s Commission. Let me be very clear, this was a very formative year for me and while I link to the program I do not intend this as any kind of endorsement. Most participants are autonomous in their affiliations as was the case for mine, so my experience in the program is strictly my own, it is not a reflection of the organization. The term was 2001-2002, so we experienced life as young adults right into 9/11, and navigated that new world that began on 9/12. We were in a larger church, so much of our time was spent traveling to smaller churches and donating our time to serve them with labor and ministry that their location and size often could not afford. It was a noble calling and a time period where the works checkbox was consistently checked off. It was also a time of discipling, which I think me and my friends to this day would argue whether or not that was the actual case. Faith was easy to come by being part of a large church with resources and regional authority. Serving where the sacrifice was mostly time, because our families could afford to send us out was in hindsight a luxury that required little if any faith at all. Our term ended on May 25th, 2002 and the first thing we did afterwards was find an R-rated movie at the latest possible showing and go watch it together. It was not a great movie, but the restrictions we had on us meant we had some pressure to relieve. Fast forward to present day, that pressure for nearly all of us continues to be let out. Most of us went to college, some of us graduated. Some of us found pastoral jobs, others of us found ministry organizations to be a part of, but most of us left the faith altogether. I was one that found my place working for a ministry, and it was from this season where my deconstruction began in earnest.
In 2008, the political world was sort of in disarray. The country felt the fatigue of the global war on terror, the ideological discourse started to mark conservatism and progressivism as staunch opponents rather than cooperative sides of debate to where friendly dinners between political rivals were painted as traitorous collusions, and at this point both sides no longer talked, they fought instead. The Christian world, namely the so-called Evangelicals, were co-opted by conservatism and it is from here that I believe the Gospel really got abandoned in favor of mainstream Christianity. The Church had an opportunity to preach good news, but instead preached a morality that was using Biblical principles as methods of control. This shift having been amplified by social media, put me in a personal spiral because my Christianity was more determined by my political affiliations than it was Jesus. We still see this today. My friends who I shared ministry with, cried tears with, endured loss with, we all felt the need to make an exit of fellowship. I made my exit in 2009, and would never step foot inside of church as a member again until 2023.
I believe very much so that the Church has a divine yet indirect responsibility to participate by way of informing a nation’s politics but I struggle with the idea that the Church should have an authority over it. We see in 2016 and then again in 2024 that the Evangelical wing of Christianity here in the U.S. treats as triumph the prevalence of what has become conservative principles rather than Biblical ones. We somehow expect the world to notice God by who we support to be in power and this not only dilutes the authority of the Church, it conflicts with the purpose of the Gospel. It trades the voice of God, in favor of the king’s ear. While this is not the only reason for my personal deconstruction, the lengths at which I have to dissociate from conservatism’s self-inflicted and unfair presumptions make my decisions at the time seem like good ones.
My wife and I both endured this season of not being part of a local church, yet we maintained our spiritual disciplines to pray, seek the Lord, and turn our hearts toward Him rather than away. This season for me was one of skepticism and eventually a cynicism that became self-righteous and haughty at how good I was being in light of all this. I was able to love people regardless of their affiliations and even their orientations, but where I failed them is that I never showed them the good news of how the Gospel is what sourced my love for them. My tolerance for their sin was never supposed to be affirmation, but was supposed to be that the Gospel is revelatory and personal and bigger than me, not driven by man (me). I hope that those relationships point to Jesus eventually, but I could have been more for them. I showed them how much I loved them and wanted to be in relationship with them with a righteousness that I claimed as my own, and that is not the Gospel.
Even now as I recall this experience, I am indignant at the time I wasted being a so-called Christian.
In 2020, the world experienced COVID, and like many of you I found a lot of downtime for consuming digital entertainment because going out was still considered taboo. I stumbled onto a documentary called American Gospel: Christ Alone that is an inside examination of this country’s prevalent theologies and a very inward look at American Christianity’s permeation of not only the culture, but how the culture has also impacted it. If you needed a condensed look at Church history, this is a good place to start. As I watched this film, my heart became so grieved, angry, and then grieved again. Even now as I recall this experience, I am indignant at the time I feel I wasted being a so-called Christian, not because I was not a Christian, but because I forgot that I was. My experience as I grew up in church was filled with a lot of fluffy theology, clever messaging designed to evoke an emotional experience of God, and using that to manipulate decisions into serving Him. As I watched this movie, it all became so predictable to me, and this is where I became angry at the mainstream church.
My friends, my deconstruction by grace was a reconstruction of my faith, a gift from 1989. While I watched that documentary, they compared and contrasted the works-based Christianity vs. grace-based Christianity, which in the Christian world is hotly debated, but that is not what we are getting into here and not at any real depth. At age 7, the gospel was presented to me by my mother. Up to that point we were a Catholic family, the story of Christ crucified a familiar tale of sacrifice and atonement, but something about that day in April the 18th, the story became my story (for lack of better description). It was a very poignant moment of clarity where the work of the Cross became a spiritually deep realization that this was now where I would find the center of my existence. That moment has stayed with me to this day, it is the moment that all my doubts and struggles return to and find hope, perhaps eternal. However, that moment would eventually lose that impact, and exist more as a north star. I would spend my time serving the Church, working in ministry, in pursuit of that feeling and at times I would find it if for a moment where I felt in the will of God. I hated the fact that I could not keep it, I hated the fact that I needed a personal revival every so often to feel secure. As the gospel was presented in that documentary, the story it told was the story I lived that day in 1989, in all its fullness I recalled that experience and I wept. I wept bitterly at first, and then I became happy without needing to choose it. Later that evening, I lamented through tears and bad language my anger at letting myself forget such an important piece of who I am because of that day. I tearfully apologized that I essentially spent the previous ten years going through the motions, being a Christian on my own steam — robbing her of someone who is gracious, compassionate, humbled by Christ’s work on the cross, rather than prideful at how well I could mimic Him, thinking as though that were the righteous husband she married.
The way this story for me concludes is where my wife’s story begins.
For the next two years I would look at the world through a different lens. I would also look at my conservatism differently and apply the idea that God is not looking for a people that is righteous, but for a people that is to be made righteous through faith, by grace, through Christ alone.
Epiblogue:
My wife and I eventually found a church that we now faithfully attend as members. Our first Sunday, the Gospel was presented again in such a way as to joyfully remind me of 1989. A few Sundays later, as if I needed anymore convincing to remain at this church, the appeal for those who have not yet put their faith in Jesus included a challenge for those who placed their conservatism above Christ, to make an intentional reset and rediscover the importance of Christ’s work on the cross being what defines us as believers.
