Deconstruction: Why I’m Not Against It
For years now there’s been a lot of concern raised all over the internet about how people are “deconstructing” their religious faith. The tenets of church life all over the American landscape have come under new scrutiny, and there’s a noticeable decline in Christian traditions among Gen Z alone, without talking about Gen X or Millennials. Great Opportunity research claims that roughly 1 million Gen Zers are leaving church life behind every year.
This figure represents people leaving church life, not growing up unchurched.
There is a long list of evangelical influencers and figures who point to “deconstruction” as the driving factor in why this is happening. People like John Cooper, Alisa Childers, Tim Barnett, Natasha Crane, Christopher Yuan, Mark Driscoll, and others (none of whom I mention to criticize, by the way) believe that “faith deconstruction” is when young individuals piece-meal their faith together and create a freaky chimera religion made up of whatever they like, discarding what they don’t like, and ultimately worshiping themselves in the process. They center their faith around their wants and desires (To be fair, I’m not quoting any of them here. This is how I choose to summarize their position, and I believe you can scour the internet and find that my assessment fairly represents their perspective on deconstruction).
I find it perfectly valid that younger generations have had their brains altered by the prevalence of social media and modern tech to where they are used to curating their own world experiences based on likes and dislikes. Is this happening with people who grow up in church and don’t continue walking in their faith? Probably for some.
But I have major reservations about blaming deconstruction on this, and I have greater reservations about those who condemn faith deconstruction as a whole. This is my brief attempt to explain why.
“Faith Deconstruction” is commonly defined as
the taking apart of an idea, practice, tradition, belief, or system of beliefs into smaller components to examine their foundation, truthfulness, usefulness, and impact on one’s life and society.
If we’re completely honest, most Western churches (we’re talking America here), especially Protestant ones, developed core faith practices and positions in an attempt to survive, protecting their beliefs amid major cultural shifts. Fundamentalist movements that defended young earth creationism aimed to preserve the validity of scripture against German theologians who made everything a metaphor. Hard language on the atonement through Jesus’ death on the cross was revised in the 19th century to combat the New Thought Movement and its weird offshoots like Christian Science and The Unity Church (everything is spirit, reality is illusion, etc). Language regarding the rapture and the end times was a means to bring urgency to people in Western Europe and America about the gospel of Jesus because everyone thought the world was truly ending. The Civil War made Americans want to escape Earth’s painful chaos, and old hymns like Al Brumely’s “This World Is Not My Home” were written so Christians could look forward to being rescued from the evil around them, claiming the planet would only get progressively worse until Jesus returned to make things right. There was a hyper craze that relied on fear as the leading motivator for following Jesus, and a person’s eternal destination became more important than intimacy with Jesus in the present because of this strong belief that people were running out of time. Christian Zionism (the belief that geopolitical Israel must be established as a nation for Jesus to return and save everyone) was the result of generations of genocide against those with Jewish heritage. Early Christianity was not waiting for anything to happen to Israel for God to save the physical world.
Many of these “core” doctrines were a pendulum that overreacted to frightening world occurrences to the point where they swung so hard the other way that they often abandoned the heart of scripture as much as the position they railed against.
In this case, as culture continues to shift again, it becomes perfectly normal to reevaluate some of our core positions and ask ourselves if we are truly preserving an ancient, biblical belief, or if our views were formed in an attempt to combat a temporal movement whose threat is long past and now that core position is hindering the gospel, not helping. The act of reevaluating our faith and the language surrounding it can be considered “deconstruction” and it does not insult or throw away biblical belief or faith tradition, but rather pays homage to thousands of years of biblical Christianity by reconsidering our language and belief alongside the very first Christians and how they considered their faith implications in the world around them.
The doctrine of hell was widely diverse In the first 3 centuries of the Church. Eternal torment, annihilation (where you are annihilated in hell), and universal salvation were all considered when Christianity was getting off the ground. It wasn’t until after Augustine in the 5th century that the eternal torment view became the dominant view in the Western world. In the East, other views continued to be discussed. Is it considered “abandoning the faith,” then, if someone who grew up believing in an eternal, tormenting hell is reconsidering that view? It shouldn’t. If anything, that person is diving into a world of deeper critical thinking about what the Bible actually says and what God actually wants us to know.
generations ago, your church denomination’s view on the bible was often the only view you’d come into contact with. In the age of social media and the constant exchange of ideas, this is simply not the case anymore. But that isn’t a bad thing. Now people who grew up in the Western hemisphere and believe in Jesus can discover in real time how the Christian faith has persevered in the East, and how biblical traditions and convictions have been upheld and shaped over time. The first Christians who were saved at Peter’s teaching in Acts chapter 2 have passed down incredible faith traditions that many churches in the Western world would consider heresy. Deconstruction helps young Western people take a different approach, bridge denominations, rediscover Christian viewpoints from millennia ago, and find a more robust, biblical, meaningful relationship with Jesus. God can handle our punches, and He’s not afraid of our questions. You know who refuses their members to ask hard questions? Cults. Cults do that.
While personal experience isn’t the strongest argument, I can tell you that I’ve gone through my own form of deconstruction when it comes to my faith in Jesus Christ, and it led to a greater, deeper, more vibrant, committed, passionate, and purposeful relationship with Him. I love God. I love His church: His global, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural, kingdom-bearing-on-earth body of believers. I love God’s good creation. I love His ways and believe they are perfect. I love faith traditions and orthodoxy and how they have sought to preserve the faith of the saints. I love how the gospel has also transcended time and language barriers and become relevant through the lens of culture, even as culture consistently shifts and changes. I love the Bible.
Deconstruction didn’t hurt me. It helped me. I don’t disparage the faith positions I once held, either. I’m grateful for them. I now see that there have been millions of Christians for thousands of years who have walked out and defined some aspects of biblical faith differently, and I’ve come to appreciate that mosaic and cherish it rather than fear it and hunt it down as a false teacher.
