A Growing Trend
Last year, Kevin Max, a former member of DC Talk caused a bit of a stir on social media when he announced that he was an “Exvangelical” and had undergone a process of theological deconstruction. It seems that hardly a week goes by in which news doesn’t break concerning another high profile Christian who has shed the trappings of their evangelical upbringing or left behind the Christian faith altogether. Often, the coverage of this veers between apocalyptic and gleeful depending on which branch of the left/right spectrum you occupy. But it’s not just Christian celebrities who are questioning the faith they’ve inherited, in the last month I’ve had numerous conversations with people who have friends, family, and children who are walking through a similar process. Several years ago, I even walked through my own experience with deconstruction, which I shared on Alisa Childer’s podcast. Clearly, this isn’t an issue that’s going anywhere, and Christians need to be ready to walk with those who are struggling through this process.
So, where does deconstruction come from, and how do we care for our friends and family who are in the midst of a season of deconstruction. I certainly don’t claim to offer the last word, but as someone who has known a number of people over the years who’ve gone through a season of doubt, I’ve noticed a few commonalities that contributed to their struggle.
A Three-Fold Problem
1.) An Overly Narrow View of Orthodoxy: I still remember the scandal that arose when Rob Bell published his controversial book, “Love Wins.” In it, Bell raised questions about the traditional view of hell as eternal conscious torment. This wasn’t his first encounter with controversy, in a previous book, “Velvet Elvis” he has raised questions about the virgin birth. As I was discussing Bell with some friends, I declared with confidence, “He’s a heretic, because he doesn’t believe in the virgin birth.” To my credit, a rejection of the Virgin Birth of Jesus actually is heresy, it violates a fundamental article of our faith as it’s been preserved in the ecumenical (accepted across denominations) creeds. But I didn’t know any of that at the time. In my early 20’s heresy was a word I used to describe any opinion about the Bible I disagreed with.
I’d venture to say that’s how the term is used most frequently in evangelical circles. But this falls into what I call, the princess bride trap, “You keep using that word but I do not think it means what you think it means.” Historically, Christians have recognized that not all theological errors are equally serious, and not every bad take on the Bible rises to the level of heresy. Theologian Justin Holcomb notes that the reformed tradition recognizes three categories of error: errors directed against a fundamental article of the faith, errors around a fundamental article of the faith, and errors beyond a fundamental article of the faith. Ideas which fall into the first category are considered heresy, while errors in the second and third category are important issues but being wrong in these areas doesn’t put anyone’s salvation in jeopardy.
A common thread I’ve noticed among those struggling with deconstruction is that their upbringing has left them with only two categories: heresy and orthodoxy. This approach stretches the meaning of the word, “Orthodoxy” beyond the essentials of the faith to include things like a particular view of the age of the earth, or the end times, or who can be ordained as a pastor. The minute they begin to question any piece of the faith they’ve been taught, they are immediately placed in the category of being heretics and the downward spiral begins. Several years back theologian Derek Rishmawy offered some helpful reflections on this:
“I’ve often wondered how much the conservative (over)reaction adds to the advanced radicalization of questioners. Opening with “Hey, heretic, you’re the worst” probably isn’t a good way to draw someone back. How much of the theological drift by questioners, notable figures included, is fueled by a sense of rejection from the conservative theological community?”
I can tell you from experience that a number of those that I’ve met going through deconstruction have been hastened down that road by being called a heretic prematurely, over non-essential issues. It's as if they say to themselves “If I’m already a heretic, I might as well keep going.”
2.) A Church Community Where Doubt is Demonized: This brings me to the next common thread I’ve noticed among those who are deconstructing. Many of them (though certainly not all!) have grown up in communities where doubt was demonized. Perhaps they saw how others who expressed their own doubts were treated, or maybe they were met with hostility when they asked questions about a central Christian belief. This produced a culture of fear, which led them to keep their questions to themselves until they festered into a crisis. By the time they let their community know that they're doubting anything, they'd already begun to doubt everything. One significant danger in a church culture like this is that it communicates to doubters that Christians are afraid of questions, and many come to believe that's because church leaders don't actually have answers. When we react to doubters and their questions with fear, it may be a reflection that we are more filled with doubt than we’d like to admit.
Over and against this, Jude 1:22 encourages us to have mercy on those who doubt. What might mercy look like? For starters, it looks like taking doubters' questions seriously. More often than not the questions that prompt the deconstruction process are valid and could easily become a doorway into a deeper faith rather than the beginning of a journey out of orthodoxy. How can a loving God send people to hell? How do we reconcile the opening chapters of genesis with the modern scientific consensus? What do we do with the apparent contradictions in the pages of scripture? There are good answers to these questions if churches are willing to embrace the doubter and work to disciple them into a more robust understanding of the faith. But that requires us to be a source of quiet confidence, we have to be convinced that there are answers and respond to doubt with curiosity rather than condemnation.
3.) A Lack of Exposure To Different Perspectives: The first time I heard someone tell me that Moses probably didn’t write the Pentateuch, it was a religious studies professor in college. He had been clear upfront that he valued the Bible as a work of literature, but that he himself was a comfortable agnostic. At 20 years old learning religion from a mostly agnostic faculty, it was easy to dismiss, “He just believes that because he doesn’t know Jesus.” But at 25 I encountered my first Evangelical Old Testament commentary that said the same thing. In the coming months, I found out that Christianity was a much bigger tent than I had originally believed. There was a wide variety of different perspectives held among people who all considered themselves believers. For what it’s worth, I do think that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but encountering well educated Christians who didn’t share that conviction rattled me.
Far too often evangelicals have relied caricatures of those they disagree with, uttering disparaging comments like “Catholics don’t read their Bibles” or, “Egalitarians are more influenced by culture than by God’s word” or, “Old Earth creationists trust science over scripture.” While those sort of pithy jabs might make us feel better in our insulated bubbles, they’re objectively false. What’s more, in an internet era it’s easier than ever for people to realize how simplistic those sort of statements actually are. A google search can lead you to Roman Catholic theologians with a rich understanding of the Bible, Evangelical Egalitarians that believe in inerrancy, or believers who came to their convictions about an old earth because of their engagement with scripture. That’s not to say that they’re correct, all of these perspectives could be wrong, they might be unbiblical, but when someone has been raised believing that everyone who disagrees with them is foolish, and that their opponents would absolutely agree with them if they could just be bothered to read their bibles, it’s a recipe for disaster. There are intelligent people across the theological spectrum, that doesn’t make them all right, but nobody is helped by pretending that this isn't true. We have to do a better job of engaging the best arguments of those we disagree with, and showing our congregation how to do the same. In the long run, exposing people to a wide variety of ideas, and explaining why we don't accept certain understandings of scripture can actually contribute to a stronger faith because Christians will have a better sense of why they believe.
A Doorway To Deeper Faith
There’s certainly more that could be said here, and many people are beginning to recognize the need to address growing the trend towards deconstruction. But it’s important to recognize that at the heart of this trend are people who are struggling to make sense of what is true. Each story is unique, and the pressures that lead people to doubt are complex. But for some, their struggles are the result of churches failing to form them into disciples that are resilient in the face of the modern world. On this front, we can and must do better. As we practice the call of scripture to show mercy to those who doubt, we might find that deconstruction isn’t always the first sign of the end of someone’s faith. Instead, it might become a doorway into a deeper faith, one that has been tested and tried only to emerge refined and committed to the good news of the gospel of Jesus