The Worst of Christianity in a Meme

Christian pastor mocks people for deconstructing their faith

Imagine for a moment that you had been brought up in an evangelical Christian faith tradition, being taught since the earliest days of your childhood exactly what you should and shouldn’t believe.

When you become an adult, you might, at some point to start to question everything you’ve been taught. In fact, you might consider this normal and natural and even sensible. After all, even the Apostle Paul said, “When we were children, we thought and reasoned as children do. But when we grew up, we quit our childish ways.”

Perhaps the journey from childish faith to adult faith requires some level of questioning — what is commonly referred to as faith deconstruction.

But, according to one pastor, that’s a bad idea.

In fact, in a single meme posted to his Instagram story, said pastor manages to mock, belittle, and insult everyone who is, or has ever been, on the path of faith deconstruction.

As unlikely as it seems, perhaps he thinks that this approach will persuade people to trust the Church’s teaching without ever seeking answers for themselves.

I’d suggest it would have the opposite effect.

What is faith deconstruction?

In her book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, Rachel Held Evans defines faith deconstruction as taking a “massive inventory of your faith, tearing every doctrine from the cupboard and turning each one over in your hand.” The point of faith deconstruction is to break down every idea, practice, belief, and tradition of a religious system into tiny pieces and then examine each fragment one by one to determine the truthfulness and usefulness of each part. In the end, the goal is to piece it all back together minus that which is peripheral, burdensome, and distorted.

The risk, of course, is that one can deconstruct their faith out of existence altogether. Many do. It is a scary place to go — to lay everything you once held true on the table of reasonableness for testing. Yet, I stand by this truth: faith cannot be trusted until it has been tested.

The threat of faith deconstruction for the Church

Some radically insecure Christian leaders find faith deconstruction a frightening prospect. That’s because once a person starts questioning their beliefs, along with the system that has taught them those beliefs, there is a direct threat applied to the level of power and influence that the church system has over that individual.

People may, for example, discover a different expression of Christianity that doesn’t require them to attend a building on Sundays or put tithes in an offering plate to pay pastors. So, you can imagine why some pastors treat faith deconstruction as a threat and an enemy. Such pastors actively discourage their followers from asking tough questions about their faith.

Joel Ramsey is one of these pastors. I’ve written about Joel Ramsey before. In fact, he was the offending author of the Instagram post that formed the basis of the article that would become my most viewed ever: “The Worst of Christianity in One Instagram Post.” Yes, this guy never fails to inspire me to write.

Joel Ramsey is the senior pastor of Citipointe Church in Nashville, Tennessee. A native Australian, Ramsey is about as hardcore about his Christian faith as they come. He is unapologetic in his opinions about abortion, gender identity, and the LGBTQ+ community (you can probably guess what those opinions are).

Of more recent times, he has started targeting those who have ventured into the process of faith deconstruction, labeling “wokeism” as a modern-day heresy. He uses shame and mockery as his primary weapons against those who are on the deconstruction journey. In fact, Ramsey posted this in his Instagram story:

Hey, you might not think it’s that bad. But I reckon this one simple meme reveals so much about Ramsey’s lack of understanding of faith deconstruction and his absolute fear of it. Let me explain:

Deconstruction is a belief

I don’t know if Ramsey found this meme, thought it was witty, and reposted it, or if he made it up himself. Either way, it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding when it says, “Deconstruction is what men believe….”

Let’s be clear: Deconstruction is not a belief but a critical examination of beliefs.

Neither is deconstruction an alternative belief system to Christianity.

Deconstruction is not the opposite of faith. But it is the opposite of blind faith.

But Ramsey pits Christianity and deconstruction as mortal enemies because that suits his purpose. He wants people to think that deconstruction leads people away from the Christian faith. Indeed, some people will give up their Christian faith as a result of deconstruction, but a large portion of others will find a much deeper and more robust Christian faith.

It’s just that their new expression of Christian faith may or may not include the institution of the Church.

And that is a problem for pastors.

Deconstruction is for lazy people

The meme says, “Deconstruction is what men do when they quit their jobs.”

The insinuation is clear. People who deconstruct have too much time on their hands. They are idle or lazy. If they actually put their hand to something constructive, they wouldn’t have time to sit down and question everything.

Maybe that’s the idea.

Maybe that’s why some churches keep their congregation so busy with a steady stream of activity, teaching, praying meetings, ministry opportunities, and social gatherings (given the much more spiritual name: Fellowship). Busy people don’t have time to question anything, right?

The reality is that the path of faith deconstruction is not where you’ll find lazy or idle people. It’s a hard road. It’s a road where you find people who read, research, study and arrive at their own conclusions. But, in the evangelical Christian world, it’s much easier to be swept along in the doctrinal tide that everyone else seems to be swimming in. Asking tough questions is not easy or generally well-received. It is not a path that lazy people take.

Deconstruction is for uneducated people

The meme says, “Deconstruction is for people who spend too much time on the internet.”

In other words, Ramsey is insinuating that those who deconstruct their faith obviously get their information from dubious sources — sources other than the Bible or their church leader who has never had a ‘real job’ and holds a Diploma of Ministry that he acquired from an online course.

The Internet is a threat to the insecure pastor because it allows people to fact-check what the pastor says. In fact, according to Christianity Today, over 40% of Millenials do fact-checking while listening to sermons in Church. Gone are the days when the pastor could count on people to believe everything he said. No wonder some pastors try to dissuade people from using the Internet.

The reality is that blindly accepting everything you are told is what uneducated people do. Indoctrination happens when people do not question things and research for themselves. As American physicist Richard P. Feynman once said, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

The hypocrisy is real

Try to appreciate the irony of Joel Ramsey having a dig at people who research matters of faith on the Internet. This comes from a Pastor who has nearly 15,000 followers on Instagram and posts multiple times each day. Almost all of his posts promote either his Church, his personal brand, or his version of evangelical Christianity. He clearly has no problem with people coming to the Internet to look at the perspectives that he is offering.

And there’s a very simple reason for that.

He believes that the perspectives he is offering are unequivocally true. Anyone who offers a different view is wrong, by his reckoning. He is a safe online source. Anyone who disagrees with him is an unsafe source. There is a real lack of humility in this position.

Don’t miss the misogynistic overtones

I don’t know if it was done intentionally or not, but everything about this meme harkens back to a time when men were the breadwinners for their families, and women belonged in the kitchen. According to the meme, deconstruction is for men who quit their jobs. But what about women? Don’t they have jobs? Or is it that men decide what their wives and families will believe?

Deconstruction is spiritual growth

In 1981, James Fowler, a Professor of Theology and Human Development, published a work called Stages of Faith, where he built on the work of renowned thinkers like Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, to give a framework for understanding how faith and our own quest for meaning, develop in us over the course of our lifetime.

Fowler asserts that the person experiencing a “faith crisis” may actually be further advanced in their faith development than the person who has never done so. According to Fowler, doubt, disillusionment, and deconstruction are, in fact, a sign of spiritual growth rather than spiritual decline. To me, this makes complete sense. How can faith be proven genuine unless it is genuinely tested?

People who never question their faith, placing their confidence and trust in the individuals or groups that represent one’s beliefs — pastors, for example — never grow into spiritually mature adults as they are constantly sucking on the teat of their spiritual overseers. Deconstruction forces one to arrive at conclusions for themselves rather than outsourcing their faith to others.

So, why is the Church so frightened of people questioning their religion and the religious systems set up to perpetuate it? Shouldn’t Joel Ramsey and other pastors of his ilk welcome the faith crisis as a necessary step toward spiritual maturity?

Yes, they should.

But they won’t, and there is an excellent reason for it. As American author Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Putting it all back together

Maybe it’s a bit cynical to suggest that certain pastors are just trying to protect their income, so I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Deconstruction without reconstruction leads to destruction. I supposed that’s what Ramsey is worried about. So, don’t hate on Joel. He is concerned that if people start to ask tough questions, they won’t find satisfactory answers and might walk away from the faith altogether.

And, to be honest, some people will.

But that’s not my story.

I have been on a journey of faith deconstruction for several years now. It’s not much fun. In fact, it’s hard work. And it is a lonely road. But the further I travel down, the richer my faith becomes, and the more comfortable I become with mystery.

And it makes me angry when pastors like Ramsey mock people like me, who do not mindlessly accept everything they hear from a pulpit but are testing it all for themselves.

Dan Foster is the author of “Leaving Church, Finding God: Discovering Faith Beyond Organized Religion.”

The Backyard Church is not just a blog. It’s a real online community for people who have faith but can’t, don’t, or won’t go to church. Join today.

For more articles on life, faith, and spirituality, Sign-up for my newsletter. Also, feel free to send questions and story ideas to [email protected]