Walking Through Deconstruction

1
Defining
Deconstruction

"I'M DECONSTRUCTING MY FAITH." Perhaps someone has said this to you recently. A friend, child, spouse, parent, coworker, or congregant. You don't really know what they mean, but it doesn't sound good. Just from the name, you can tell they are taking something apart. If it's their faith they're deconstructing, then they must be taking their faith apart. But why?

As you start asking questions, you quickly realize you've gotten yourself in over your head. They might start asking questions about the Bible, God, or the church that you've never thought about before. Or maybe you have thought about them, but they felt so big that you simply pushed them out of your mind and forgot about them. Maybe it's something you haven't thought about since seminary (if you went). They might start talking about large cultural and political issues that seem like they came out of nowhere. They begin accusing the church of doing this or not doing that. "Where is this coming from?" you wonder.

The questions and the accusations that you hear from them put you on edge. You start to feel anxiety well up inside of you. You think of the other popular deconstruction stories that you've heard of-Michael Gungor, Joshua Harris, Audrey Assad, and more, none of whom are Christians anymore. Your mind starts racing a hundred miles per hour. "Are they losing their faith?" "I thought they loved Jesus!" "I wonder if they're in some kind of sin." "I'm overwhelmed by all of these questions." And it all comes down to this one word to describe it: deconstruction.

The word deconstruction goes back to the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who used it in a technical way to describe the process of "critically reevaluat[ing] the fundamental arrangement and operations of any and all forms of analysis."1 If that sounds confusing, that's because it is. Deconstruction, by its nature, is difficult to describe because it's a process that deconstructs the very words needed to describe it. But it's insufficient to say that deconstruction is simply a process of analysis or critique.

Here's the primary difference: in other forms of analysis or critique, there is typically a method that is followed in order to reach a predetermined outcome. Think of the scientific method. After observing a phenomenon, you ask questions about it and research existing answers or solutions. If you don't find any satisfactory answers, you pose a hypothesis, perform a set of experiments to test your hypothesis, and draw conclusions from your experiments about whether your hypothesis has been proven right or wrong.

Deconstruction isn't like this. There is no set process and no predetermined conclusion to deconstruction. It's not a process you decide to undertake to investigate a problem. It's something you encounter and enter into. The only thing you can do in deconstruction is allow the process to unfold and follow it where it goes.2 The difference between Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction and how faith deconstruction is thought about today is that it doesn't have to last forever. Not only that, but there is precedent for what we now call deconstruction that predates Derrida. More on that later.

It's only in the last thirty years or so that deconstruction really began to describe a particular phenomenon within popular-level evangelical Christianity. Christians started to use the word to describe the process of reexamining their faith to reveal the contradictions in it and produce something better-at least as they perceived it to be. This became the hallmark of what would eventually be called the Emergent Church.

The Emergent Church was a movement in the early 2000s that was led by pastors and writers such as Doug Pagitt, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Peter Rollins, Donald Miller, Mark Driscoll, Richard Rohr, and many more. The Emergent Church started out as an ecclesial project that was searching for ways to reinvent the forms of the church for a postmodern world. But the ecclesial project morphed into a doctrinal project. Instead of simply deconstructing the current ways of doing church, they began deconstructing the core beliefs of the Christian faith. Many (not all) of the names associated with the Emergent movement have either left the faith altogether or redefined it in ways that are beyond recognition.3

But something different is happening today. It's related to Derrida's ideas of deconstruction, and it's certainly related to the Emergent Church movement, but there seems to be more going on under this wave of deconstruction than what either of those other two waves were attempting to get at. This latest wave of deconstruction is what this book is attempting to make sense of. What is it? What causes it? What is the experience like? And how can we-as believers who walk with those who are experiencing it, and as believers leading our churches-help them?

WHAT DECONSTRUCTION ISN'T

There are many narratives surrounding what this wave of deconstruction is and isn't. Most of these narratives are getting at parts of what is going on but miss other aspects that are crucial to it. If we want to understand what deconstruction is, then we might want to start by understanding what it isn't.

Asking questions. One popular narrative is that deconstruction is simply asking questions about your faith. One time, I was getting coffee with a new friend and shared parts of my story with him. I briefly mentioned how I went through deconstruction. After a while, he came back to it and said, "I want to talk about that. I sometimes have questions about my faith, and I was wondering: Am I deconstructing?" The idea that deconstruction is simply asking questions about your faith raises all kinds of other questions.

What about that time when the disciples were physically present at Jesus' ascension? Matthew records it by saying, "When they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted" (Matthew 28:17). The eleven disciples had already witnessed three years of Jesus' ministry, his death, his burial, his miraculous, world-changing, paradigm-shifting resurrection. They had spent forty days with Jesus after his resurrection and were now watching him ascend into heaven, to the right hand of the Father, with their own eyes-and they still somehow doubted. Is that deconstruction?

If deconstruction is nothing more than having questions about your faith, you might as well put this book down, because every Christian has done that. If that's true, then there's no conversation to be had. We're all deconstructing. End of story. We might as well stop using the word entirely.

There is more going on than that. When we talk to those we know who are deconstructing or we hear the stories of people in our churches, our communities, or online who are deconstructing, we can tell that it's more than mere questions, but we may not completely grasp what is actually going on.

Deconstruction certainly isn't less than asking questions, but it's much more than that. If we stop there, then we won't have an adequate understanding of what it is and the experience of going through it. We'll fail to have a grasp of it and won't be able to minister to those who are going through it. We'll fail to create environments that lessen the intensity of people's deconstruction and fail to aid in their faith flourishing into confident trust in the risen Christ.

One step toward apostasy. The opposite extreme of the asking questions narrative is thinking deconstruction is nothing more than a brief stop on the way to apostasy. Usually, the people who think of deconstruction in this way have one goal in mind: defending the faith. They want to defend orthodox doctrine, the Bible, and the purity of the church. All of these are good things worth defending. The problem is not in these people's desire to defend the faith but in their posture. They see anyone who questions the faith at all as, at best, problems to be fixed or, at worst, enemies in need of defeat.

They're armed with the weapons of modernist apologetics and are ready to give you rational proofs for intelligent design, the reliability of the Bible, and the bodily resurrection. It's good to know why you believe these things and be able to articulate them. But when they are used as weapons against an enemy instead of "a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15), they become instruments of division instead of testaments to God's glory. By misunderstanding the experience of deconstruction in this way, they turn sincere seekers into formidable foes to be fought in a spiritual war.

Consider this definition of deconstruction by Stand to Reason, a conservative apologetics organization. They define deconstruction this way: "The process of pulling apart undesirable aspects of your Christian faith to make them align with culture or your own personal beliefs."4 Defining deconstruction like this assumes a lot about the motives of the person deconstructing. The reality is that everyone's motives are mixed and messy. It's natural to find aspects of the Christian faith undesirable on the surface because they grind against our sinful natures and cultural norms. We're being transformed through the renewing of our minds, and that process inevitably includes some growing pains. This is true for all of us who are pursuing Christ with all our hearts, not just those...