How To Deconstruct Without Losing Your Faith
It’s about one thing in the end
My greatest passion in life is to be more like Christ each day. That will often take me further away from what much of the church says being Christian is all about.
At the funeral of Australian preacher John Smith in 2019, U2 singer Bono recalled in a statement that he said to John once that he was often regarded as a heretic. John apparently looked at Bono, smiled, and said, “You mean like Jesus, mate?”
Moving into the second half of life
Growth in our faith often involves unlearning what we’ve been taught in our earlier years. Richard Rohr says this of the second half of life. The first half of life is when everything is about you. The focus is on success, finding yourself, and winning. The second half of life is almost always entered into via a major crisis, be it a divorce, job loss, or burnout. It’s then that we can choose to see that life doesn’t revolve around us, that it’s about giving to others and finding real meaning. It’s often times like these that our faith also goes through a major upheaval.
I’ve been a committed Christian since the mid-1980s, and I no longer hold to some of the theology I held to way back then. Would the me of 1985 be concerned that the me of today has slid down the slippery slope to liberalism? Probably, and I’m perfectly OK with that, because if I knew back then the Jesus I know today, I would probably be more Christlike today.
Growth, though, isn’t just a matter of what we know. In fact, I don’t think it has much to do with knowledge at all. As St Paul says, knowledge puffs up. Our theology and relationship with Christ is shaped by many things, not least our life experiences. I’ve been through a lot since the mid-’80s, including a divorce, mental health concerns and job losses. Those things, on their own, continue to shape my image of God.
I’ve also been fortunate to have had a number of very good examples and teachers in the faith along the way. John Smith was the most influential through his passion and lifelong, unwavering total commitment to Jesus. Then there have been people like Bono, as well as Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, and a host of others, whether they be public figures or people I’ve known personally.
All of these people and factors have contributed to the person I am today and the person I’m becoming. I’m eternally grateful for them and consider myself extremely fortunate to have come across such wonderful mentors to guide me.
Through all these years, I have deconstructed my faith to the point where, at one point in the mid-2000s, I went through a period of intense doubt, seriously wondering if all this God stuff really is true.
That was a difficult time for me, considering the idea that this life could be all there is. I remember looking up at the sky one day and wondering if there was (spiritually) anything beyond.
Back to basics
Eventually, it came back to faith for me. But it was my own faith, not the faith of any church or other person. It wasn’t conservative, and it wasn’t liberal (I still don’t care for such labels). I found myself living out what Paul said in Philippians 2:12 about working out your faith “with fear and trembling”.
There’s a lot of talk in certain Christian circles about deconstruction. That’s a good thing because it means Christians are thinking for themselves. It also means, though, that many people are leaving the church because they find themselves no longer able to hold to what the church has taught them. Many people then join the growing throng of people who call themselves Christian but don’t attend a church. I wrote about a community for people like this in a review of the Evolving Faith podcast.
But for all the talk of deconstruction, I hear less about the idea of reconstruction. How many of us have deconstructed and come out the other end with our faith intact but just different from what it was? And for those of us who have, how much support have we found, and how many others have we stumbled across who are on the same journey as us?
There’s so much more to growing in our faith than just deconstructing it. If we leave it there, we can sell ourselves short and become more disillusioned than we possibly were when we began our deconstruction process. And, as has been said by someone else, if we are disillusioned, it just means we had illusions to begin with.
A reconstructed faith must be one that centers around the person of Jesus. It shouldn’t even center around the Bible, as important as the Scriptures are (after all, the Bible is not the final authority for Christians). The ultimate purpose of deconstruction and reconstruction is to become more conformed to the image of Christ.
Many people have been so abused by the church that they can no longer go back. It’s tragic. Their deconstruction is not just of their faith but of their very ability to see the God of Jesus.
Richard Rohr makes the point that your image of God creates you. How you see God shapes the person you are becoming. The church has both a good and terrible record in shaping people.
What are we teaching from our pulpits?
One of my biggest concerns about the church has been the appalling lack of biblical literacy in the flock, including among church leaders.
What are we teaching from our pulpits?
While I’ve seen an encouraging shift to a more Christlike faith in the time I’ve been a Christian, I’ve also seen an alarming decrease in biblical literacy. A Lifeway Research study from 2017 showed that
“only 45 percent of those who regularly attend church read the Bible more than once a week. Over 40 percent of the people attending read their Bible occasionally, maybe once or twice a month. Almost 1 in 5 churchgoers say they never read the Bible — essentially the same number who read it every day”.
Spiritual abuse is, unfortunately, alive and well in the church. I don’t blame people who walk away from their faith altogether because they’ve been taught, and more tragically, shown, a God who doesn’t care about them. Jesus had harsh words for these types of abusers; He said it would be better if they had a millstone tied around their neck and they be thrown to the bottom of the sea.
Reconstruction for people who have experienced such abuse is very difficult. Yes, the aim is ideally to become more Christlike, but the irony is that people who experience such difficulty are the very ones who I believe Jesus has a special compassion for.
A Christian leader told me many years ago to respond to the light you’ve got. That’s all any of us can do. If you can, don’t stop at deconstruction. Seek the real Jesus with all you’ve got. In the end, you will find him, and you will be on your road of reconstruction.
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