Deconstructed Faith and the Comeuppance of Americanized Christianity
How spiritual bedrock is corrosive to organized religion
Atheism isn’t the only movement that went through a mass media fad, known as “new atheism,” a fad that eventually imploded because of atheists’ political divisions. White Evangelical Christianity, too, is conducting a rebranding exercise known as “deconstructing your faith.”
The problem for White Evangelicals is that most of them were taught a whopping amount of archaic, loathsome religious nonsense when they were young, which discredits them in liberal secular society. Thus, their parents and priests have set them up for a rude awakening. These indoctrinated Christians face the choice of accepting the Americanized cult that conservative Christianity has become in the US or searching for some viable alternative.
The Christian notion of “deconstruction” derives from none other than the postmodern overcomplications of Jacques Derrida, so naturally this Christian fad’s allusion to the term is only superficial. The deconstructed Christian’s aim is just to recognize that the authoritarian, patriarchal, xenophobic, hyper-capitalistic, warmongering Republican version of Christianity is a mere social construct that can be stripped away.
Once that American ideology is removed, though, what exactly remains of the Christian religion for Americans? When you deconstruct a house, what’s left but the empty lot? Is there, then, a core of Christianity which isn’t just a social construct? A set of miracles perhaps or a mission that’s still relevant to the twenty-first century, which withstands scrutiny?
Or is “deconstructing your Christian faith” a euphemism for “gradually succumbing to modernization by appreciating the soundness of atheism and the attractiveness of secular lifestyles”?
The thin reeds of Christian miracles
The supposed founding miracles of Christianity are long gone, as God has evidently refused to show himself to the rest of us in a Second Coming, contrary to his assurances to those early Christians. Was Jesus God in human form? Did he heal the sick, feed the needy, walk on water, and rise from the dead?
The case is hardly as strong as it might have been before the revolutions of modernity, when theism was taken for granted along with the relative smallness of the universe. Now the default collective mindset, which is to say the empowered ideology in developed societies is scientific skepticism and even late-modern cynicism.
Consequently, Christians must exercise faith in their founding narratives, which is another way of saying they must choose to believe them because the evidence itself isn’t compelling. And you could choose to believe the gospel only if you could choose instead to reject it. Religious faith in such an anachronistic creed, therefore, is a thin reed on which to stand.
Granted, Christians speak of the ongoing miracle of the resurrected Jesus’s presence in their life. But that’s an experience which is subject to interpretation. Socially constructed, overtly politicized Christianity trains its members to think certain thoughts and to identify those patterns with the Lord’s presence. You’re trained to credit God with everything good in your life, and to blame everything bad that happens to you on your sinful nature and on the devil. You’re trained to speak to God through prayer, as though the universe’s source were a dear friend always willing to lend an ear.
Dogs, seals, and ponies, too, can be trained to perform tricks. The fact that such thought control and behavioural training are effective doesn’t mean the only way to explain them is to proclaim that the Christian experience has a divine origin. That would be like psyching yourself up to enjoy the taste of broccoli, force-feeding yourself that vegetable every day for a year, and calling your newfound taste for it a miracle — after you’ve forgotten all that training you had to undergo to acquire that preference.
Moreover, science has no need for the God hypothesis to explain the myriad patterns in nature, and where scientific explanations end, we can confess our ignorance rather than leaping to a convenient conclusion.
The historical contexts of the Christian message
What about the Christian mission? Does Christianity still serve some crucial purpose? What is Christian faith for, two thousand years after the religion’s founding? Why bother with the creed, the rituals, and the church, unless the point were to maintain social cohesion with such an institution? Obviously, the Christian religion is a society, or rather a set of affiliated societies, each with its culture, canon, authorities, and sacred places. What’s not so obvious is whether Christianity is or has ever been anything other than a human social construct (or a competition between duelling constructs)?
Apart from the benefits of belonging to a certain community or club, why bother being a Christian in the twenty-first century? What is Christianity’s relevance to the globalized, neoliberal, technoscientifically dynamic Anthropocene? What’s Christianity’s abiding message that isn’t just one more created content flowing by in an endless stream of such contents — composed by billions of online humans and algorithms alike? Doesn’t the gospel, too, flow by in a trivialized form, reduced to its sociological formulas and historical contexts, deconstructed from a late-modern, oversaturated, jaded standpoint?
If anything, Christianity is about spiritual rebirth, an awakening to a divine purpose or reality, as dramatized by Jesus’s sacrifice of his old self — his renunciation of godless customs and material possessions, his challenging of Rome, and his death on the cross — followed by his transformation into a higher state of being, into his resurrected self or “spiritual body.”
But from a historical perspective, that means Christianity began as just another Greco-Roman mystery cult, albeit a Judaized one. The calling for spiritual, moralistic rebirth was the theme of the whole Axial Age which swept across Persia, India, China, the Southern Levant, and the Mediterranean just a few centuries before Christianity.
Various cultures reckoned with the existential possibility of spiritual awakening or enlightenment, and indeed the mystery cults dramatized the idea with tales of suffering or dying and rising savior deities or demigods (heroes). Moreover, these cults proved the idea’s merit by devising ritual ingestions of psychoactive drugs that would tap into the initiate’s unconscious doubts and longings, thereby transforming the person by a kind of religious therapy.
Christianity’s no longer needed to teach that message, that you can grow out of profane preoccupations into a wiser headspace.
The fad of Christian deconstruction
Where, then, does the conscientious Christian end the deconstruction of her childish, inauthentic religious commitment? Once you realize that White Evangelical Christianity especially is an appalling betrayal of the meaning of Jesus’s counterculture, what’s the essence of Christianity you latch onto that’s not just one more fallible, doomed social construct? After all, as Shelley says in “Ozymandias,” nothing beside even the mightiest monument to human hubris remains forever.
Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The cultist, idolater Christians despise this deconstructive movement as they would sneer at any obstacle in the way of their Machiavellian pursuit of earthly dominance. Says one, not only does the deconstruction produce a form of Christianity that doesn’t resemble the one you learned at your parent’s knee, but it “rarely retains any vestiges of actual Christianity.”
“Actual Christianity,” for the naïve, exoteric literalist is just the politicized, egregiously anti-Jesus creed, the kind of “spiritual rebirth” that’s consistent with worshipping Donald Trump as a golden calf. The fact that the new atheist’s strident denunciations are no longer needed, that the crudest target has absorbed the atheist’s message so that these White Evangelicals are turning into their own antibodies and immunizing themselves against the “virus” is telling. Still, that an organization could betray its calling so obscenely for so long and still sell itself as a panacea is a testament to human gullibility.
The calling of Christianity, then, is paradoxically anti-Christian, if “Christianity” refers to an organized religion, an earthly institution that’s at best a way of facilitating the crucial realignment of perspectives, but that more often than not is corrupted. Evangelicals insist, on the contrary, that they have no counterproductive institutional commitments (such as to the Republican Party or to runaway capitalism) and that their Christianity is all about forming a personal relationship with Jesus.
But that’s like the sales pitch for forming a parasocial relationship with any brand’s mascot, such as Ronald MacDonald, Mickey Mouse, or Mr. Peanut. The exoteric message for naïve initiates is the winsome one that operates as propaganda; meanwhile, the message rationalizes the institution’s hoarding of wealth which contradicts its stated principles. The ideological superstructure covers for the injustices found in the society’s material base.
Why, then, is this internal deconstruction likely a fad? Because Christianity’s weathered far worse storms, and judging from this example, what survives the deconstruction is evidently a halfway house of liberal Christianity that rebrands secular humanism with Christian trappings.
