So far this series has talked about some pretty extreme experiences, up to and including experiences of abuse and trauma within faith communities. Many people who grew up in such environments come to a breaking point, a moment when they realise they have to get out. This leads to a crisis of faith, a time of spiritual and theological deconstruction and re-formation. That’s what I’ll be writing about today. But that means that today’s post will be a bit more universal than the previous ones. For, at some point, most of us will have a moment of reckoning when we have to ask ourselves what it is we really believe and why, and how that will impact how we live.
We can think of faith deconstruction as weeding a garden. If, as Jesus taught, “‘a tree will be known by its fruit,” we have every reason to try to discern what plants in our spiritual garden are bearing good fruit and which are not. But not all gardens are the same. For some it’s just a matter of pulling a few stray weeds; for others it may be hard to find anything fruitful in the garden they’ve inherited. Where the analogy breaks down is that, unlike with gardening, few of us are taught that spiritual and theological weeding are important — and in fact many people are taught that it’s downright dangerous and evil to do so! So instead of being the matter of a little light weeding, many of us will come to a point where we look at our faith and and realise that it’s a mess and needs some serious work.
While everyone’s garden will be different and so everyone’s experiences of deconstruction will be different, the tie that binds is cognitive dissonance. This is the gap between what we believe and what we experience of the world. We all live with a certain degree of cognitive dissonance, but there are times when it becomes so great that we have to do something about it. (As it happens, this is why so many people who grow up in conservative environments experience big changes in college. It’s never been that colleges are inherently anti-religious, but that simply being surrounded by people from different backgrounds and with different life experiences pops any overly simplistic worldviews.) I’ve had two such seasons in my adult life. The first was when I was at seminary and was struggling with dissonance regarding the evangelical world in which I’d embedded myself: the fact that theology and spirituality seemed totally disconnected from each other, the way the churches operated and marketed themselves, and the shallowness of the spirituality. This deconstruction process led me into the Eastern Orthodox Church. The second experience was the more dramatic, and not only ended my time in the Orthodox Church but also caused me to step away from Christianity entirely for a couple of years, before I could start putting the pieces together again. I’ve written extensively about this already, but the depth and balance of that tradition was very healing for me, but its very success forced me to confront some bigger issues in my life. While it manifested itself first in an inability to pray, looking back I see that this was preceded by lots of small cognitive dissonances that added up over time. I think my heart understood things weren’t working months before my head was willing to accept it, or begin to imagine alternatives. The re-formation process was a lot more difficult this second time around, because I was finally having to confront the big issues in my life, including both my mental health and my sexuality, and doing so in the aftermath of a very spiritually traumatic experience.
Whether dramatic or not, experiences of cognitive dissonance require us to question ho we understand the world: Do we reject the world as it really is in the interest of holding onto our belief system intact, or do we loosen our grip on our worldview and allow it to be changed to better reflect reality? Christian theology makes this more complicated because it understands that the social world we inhabit is fundamentally not as it should be. This makes it particularly easy for Christians to choose the former approach and resist opening up to new information. While outside data can still break through and be the impetus for deconstruction (e.g., I know many people who grew up fundamentalist for whom the overwhelming evidence pointing to evolution was a driver of their own re-formation), for most of us, this is driven by dissonance internal to the faith tradition: contradictions in the Bible for example, or questions of divine justice in the face of suffering, or self-serving behaviour from church leadership, or the persistence of gender identities or sexual orientations outside what is permitted in the tradition in people who are committed to remaining faithful, and so on. When things don’t add up, it’s only natural to take a second look and redo the math. And that is inherently what deconstruction is all about.
From personal experience, I can say that theological and spiritual deconstruction and re-formation is really hard work. Next time we’ll look at the grief and loss that often accompanies it, before ending the series looking at the process of re-formation.
