What Are They Deconstructing?

Many use the term “deconstruction” for their experience. They are not always using the term as the philosophers used it. Instead, they use it for their experience of hitting a wall in their church life, a crisis in their faith, a realization that what they believed doesn’t stand up to their own mental satisfaction, or a general malaise about the claims of church folks not matching up with real life.

Photo by Josh Olalde on Unsplash

What Tommy Preson Phillips and I have been asked often, especially now that we look forward to the soon-release of our book Invisible Jesus, is Why are people deconstructing? Most of you know that I love the church, but most of you now realize, too, that I’m not afraid to speak realistically about church life. I don’t find criticism of the church enjoyable, but Tommy and I believe the voice of the deconstructors is valuable for the church to hear. So, our book can be taken as the exit interviews the churches never gave the deconstructors.

Back to the question: Why do they deconstruct? I’d like to reshape that question from a Why to a What. That is, What are they deconstructing? These are my Top Ten list of what the deconstructors are shedding and leaving behind:

The tie of evangelicalism to political partisanship. It’s not hard today to find insightful studies of Christian nationalism (Andrew Whitehead, Philip Gorski, Samule Perry, Drew Strait, ad others), but this stuff runs deeper than this newest craze. That recent essay by Matthew Avery Sutton (here) contends this has been part of evangelicalism ever since the so-called break with fundamentalism. In other words, since the days of Carl F.H. Henry and the founding of Christianity Today. To top it off, Ryan Burge has presented evidence that many “evangelicals” choose their church on the basis of their politics and that politics has a stronger influence on them than their beliefs! Some define “evangelical” as GOP. This the deconstructors we studied are shedding, and most (if not all) are probing the politics of Jesus.

The all-too-common examples of hypocrisy – hidden secrets – of megachurch pastors, Southern Baptist pastors/leaders, and Roman Catholic priests. Deconstructors have witnessed firsthand both power abuse and sexual abuse by Christian leaders. Pastors who bully people out of the inner circle after confiding in them, or letting them in on what was going on, only to learn that disagreement means “you’re out.” My daughter, Laura Barringer, and I have two books about this very issue: A Church called Tov and Pivot.

The lack of compassion and genuine experience with persons who are struggling with sexual identity. This discussion has recently flared up again with the publication of Richard and Christopher Hays’s new book, but the conversation is, for the deconstructors, not limited to a “To accept or not to accept.” The issue for so many is their brother or sister or their best friend, or themselves. Today’s “social imaginary” and their cultural imaginary has made it harder and harder for some to stand with a traditional view of sexuality. Many are looking for an alternative approach.

The distancing of evangelicalism from social justice issues like wages, housing, ecology, and especially racism’s invisible systemic presence. The deconstructors Tommy and I have discussed have no time for a claim to be Christian tied to a lack of concern for poverty, for full-time workers making part-time wages, for the incredible disparities between the suburbs and the cities and the wealthy and the poor, and for the numbness and muteness of a local church on systemic racism that impacts the entirety of the USA.

The in-or-out backdrop of so much of evangelicalism’s gospel preaching, buttressed far too often not by love but by a threat of eternal consciousness in a hell of fire. There is a sense among many that such a view implies a view of God they can’t square with the God of Jesus, the God of mercy and compassion and love and grace. Speaking of grace, of a God of grace who forms a system in which some humans utterly are exempted by divine initiative, for ever and ever, from that God of grace.

The doctrine of a rigid, unthinking inerrancy that leads to “my interpretation or you don’t believe in the Bible.” It’s one thing to think complementarianism is right; it’s another to think that anyone who denies has turned her or his back on the Bible. It’s one thing to turn all discussions into one’s view of Scripture and one’s prolegomena in theology. It’s one thing to believe in the Rapture, but it’s another to think anyone who has an alternative future eschatology is a heretic or close. Speaking of which…

The widespread eschatology of dispensationalism that wants to think it can explain everything going on in the Middle East and the future of the world, a doctrine that has been giving the same (mistaken) answers to tensions there for seventy years. My book with Cody Matchett, Revelation for the Rest of Us, led me deep into some past proposals about Who is doing What in Revelation, and Who today just might be the Antichrist, and what one has to face over and over is that everyone of them has been wrong. Without ever apologizing or admitting the error. Without ever thinking that may the entire approach – it’s all prediction – gets off the tracks very early in the game. Put simply, many today will not give their unqualified support to the State of Israel, and those same many think Palestinians have been abused. What does 1948 have to do with the Bible?, anyway.

The presence of too many conspiracy theories that suggest evangelicalism’s pockets can become cult-like or sect-like. No, Harry Potter was not a danger (and remember, some said the same of The Chronicles of Narnia). I was not part of any culture that thought Harry Potter was off limits for Christian youth, but more than I can count students and others have told me they heard it. The response to that one is, “C’mon, man.”

The historic doctrine of original sin that covers humanity in a cloak of moral turpitude while many have experienced undiluted goodness at the hands of those not in the fold. Original sin, and here I’m not talking about the best treatments of it, but of those that seem to delight in magnifying human perversity and propensity and fail to recognize the glory of the formal belief by Christians that all humans, every last one of them, are designed by God to be the image of God. Some framings of original sin deconstruct image of God. Demonizing humans is an affront to God.

The vortex swirling beliefs about creation science and Noah’s ark – and the thick wall between the Christian faith and science in general. This one goes round and round. I have met too many who know the universe is ancient beyond days and that those discoveries in South Africa in the deep caves reveal early forms of what we now know as humans, that Denisovans and Neanderthals are not myths, and that the genome project deserves confidence. I wrote on this with Dennis Venema in a book called Adam and the Genome. Or, I should say, Dennis wrote about this. I wrote about what the Bible and ancient Judaism said about Adam (and Eve).

What we are seeing in the deconstructors at the heart of our study is not that they left the faith or left the church altogether, but that they left that church to find Jesus move clearly in another place, or church. What they did was not deconstruct the faith. They are shedding beliefs that have “barnacled” themselves to evangelicalism in a way that makes them central and necessary. The deconstructors went through pain, turmoil, and the realization that they might lose friends and their stabilizing community in order to maintain their integrity about what it means to follow Jesus. There are too many for whom “deconstruction” means shedding elements of cultural evangelicalism. Let’s listen to them.