Deconstruction

             Maybe you’ve heard this word recently – deconstruction. What does it mean? It’s a difficult concept filled with so much emotion for many people. Many, many people would say they have experienced religious deconstruction to some extent over the past several years. Maybe it sounds like a bad word to someone who has not experienced it. Deconstruction sounds like tearing down your faith. But those who have experienced it will usually tell you that they didn’t tear down their faith – they tore down their religion. A lot of people think of faith and religion as being the same thing, but they are not. Faith is a belief in something. Religion is a set of constructs and rules. One can abandon their religion without losing their faith. And honestly, one can abandon their faith and hold onto their religion.

               To someone who is still nestled firmly in the religion they have held to for a long time, it may be difficult to understand those who are deconstructing. So, I want to say a little here about what that experience is like. I can only truly speak from my own experience, so I will do that here. I grew up firmly in the church. For 38 years of my life, I was the person who was at church every time the doors were open (unless myself or one of my children had a certifiable illness - ok and occasionally for trips). But the point is that my life largely revolved around church. I started attending as a newborn, was heavily involved in my youth group, hung out with the all the other Christians at the University Christian Student Center in college, got married in the church, took all of my children to church as soon as they were old enough to be in public (can’t say I heard much of those sermons while bouncing a gassy newborn and trying to recover from birth), volunteered in multiple ministries, taught Sunday school and led women’s Bible studies, taught preschool in the church and then became an on-staff children’s minister. To say that I was committed is an understatement. Fast-forward to today. I am 40  years old, and with the exception of one, every church I have walked into in the past two years has caused me to have a trauma response – an actual physical reaction to the place.

This happened over the course of several years for me. It started when I began taking graduate-level seminary courses. It only took me one semester to realize that much of the religion I had adhered to my entire life was manmade. I realized how many cracks there were in the theology I had been handed. And once you realize this, you cannot unknow it. You can either pretend that everything is fine, or you can dig deeper and search harder. And even though this enneagram nine is very good at pretending everything is fine, I had reached a point in my life where that no longer felt an option. Any more pretending felt like certain death. So, I had to ask the hard questions. Meanwhile, I was also finally admitting to myself that there were some very big problems in my own life. These problems were very intricately tied to the religion I had practiced my entire life. And while one cannot blame all their problems on external factors, it became more and more clear to me that the terrible situation I found myself in was linked heavily to the doctrine and theology with which I had aligned myself. I had suffered for a very long time due to the demands of my religion. And what I found when I started exploring was that there were SO MANY other people who had similar experiences, people who had been broken by the rules and constructs of their religion or the religion of the people they loved. So, I had to admit that for all the good things my church experiences had given me, they had also given me some poison. It is difficult to hold all of the beauty in one hand and all of the poison in the other and understand how both could come from the same place. But that is often the nature of things. However, if you are eating food that has health benefits, but is also laced with poison – you stop eating the food. No amount of good taste or vitamins can cancel out the fact that you are being poisoned. Poison is poison. And when you are aware that a food contains poison, you will react negatively to it. You will recoil at it. And this is what my body does now in most churches.

For those of you that think deconstruction is an easy way out or some kind of rebellion against God, let me challenge you. The deconstruction process is one of the most difficult and painful things I have ever experienced. In many, many ways, it is incredibly freeing and liberating. But it is also incredibly hard. I sat in church this past Sunday (the one where I feel pretty safe) and thought to myself, “Is this just over for me? This thing that has been a driving force and huge part of my life – is it over?” And I sat in my therapist’s office this week (yes, most therapists have their own therapist!) and cried and talked about the heavy grief and wondered aloud was I grieving what I feel like I’ve lost from not being an active part of a church community anymore or what I feel like was taken from me during all the years I was dedicated to it. And it is an ache. It’s not a loss of faith in a good and loving God or even a lack of God’s presence. It’s a loss of a community. It’s a loss of faith in human ability to create institutions that truly honor God. It’s a grieving of what might have been if I hadn’t had such limiting beliefs. It’s a realization that religion built on hierarchy and elitism and the maintenance of power is incredibly harmful and unloving. It’s a pain in your soul for the divorced people, the LGBTQ people, the people of different colors and ethnicities, the women – all who haven’t felt welcome at the table or were allowed to sit down but told to keep quiet. This is the pain of deconstruction. It isn’t a loud, angry rebellion. It is a deep, pounding ache in your soul. It is a sadness that things aren’t different and a determination to help them become different. But the large numbers of people who are leaving the church are doing so often because they feel the ache and don’t see the change. They finally realize that they can really only be responsible for themselves and their choices, so at some point, after begging to be at the table or to be allowed to share the ache for so long – they do what they can do. They leave. And then they aren’t sure what to do except to love their neighbors, be kind to their families, help the hurting, cling to God, and be okay with not having answers to all their questions or a specific set of rules to live by. And when they do this – they actually look a whole lot like the early Christians. Maybe that’s something to consider.