Losing Our Religion: Deconstruction and the Loss of Faith
Photo by Haley Hamilton on Unsplash
“The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” tells a tragic story. In fact, it tells more than one tragic story, and it weaves them together into a larger narrative meant to shine a light on common deficiencies in the evangelical movement. Much of this narrative focuses on Mark Driscoll and his associates at Mars Hill Church. The podcast takes a detour, however, to discuss Josh Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, former pastor of Covenant Life Church, and erstwhile evangelical wunderkind. Harris’s story parallels Driscoll’s in that both were young and gifted pastors whose churches experienced considerable growth under their leadership. Both experienced success in publishing. Both were held up as models for success in parts of the evangelical world. But the differences between the two are as great as the similarities, and whereas Driscoll would regroup and start a new church in Arizona, Harris gave up the faith entirely. His story is also a tragedy, and a cautionary tale of a different sort.
Deconstruction
The loss of faith that Harris went through is sometimes described as “deconstruction,” and it is common among those who identify as “exvangelicals.” The term “deconstruction” derives from 20th-century French philosophy, and in that context it described a process of dissecting and examining language and texts to identify presuppositions and power structures. As the term is often used today, “deconstruction” is something different. It is a process whereby a Christian (usually an evangelical) gives up the set of traditional beliefs that he or she once held. At times the deconstructees describe their former beliefs as untenable or unethical. Some become progressive Christians, some agnostics or atheists. Harris offered a course for $275 to help others in their process of deconstruction. A short time later he withdrew the course under heavy criticism.
As noted in the podcast, after his deconversion Harris remained an evangelist of sorts, attempting to lead people not into faith in Christ, but away from it. As is so often the case with evangelicals and fundamentalists who give up their faith, the content of their belief changes, but their habits of mind remain the same. The exvangelical propagates the “good news” of secularism with the enthusiasm of a religious zealot. The Christian fundamentalist becomes a fundamentalist of religious denigration. Old habits die hard.
As he describes it in the podcast, Harris’s loss of faith was not a piece-by-piece intellectual process whereby the core claims of Christianity simply became untenable. It was more like a wrecking ball demolished the set of ideas according to which the world made sense to him. People he trusted proved untrustworthy. He became aware of instances in which Christians were covering up abuse. He began to hear that his book had caused harm to others. Christainity was not proving to be what he had supposed it was. His life was not turning out the way he had thought it would. His advice about sex and marriage, once wildly popular among evangelicals, had unanticipated consequences. Where he once was adored, he began to be reviled. The framework of his faith was unable to withstand this assault on multiple fronts, and it collapsed.
As the podcast ended, I found myself praying for him—that he will find his way back to Christ and that God will heal the hurt and disappointment he experienced. I pray for those hurt in the wake of his loss of faith. I also pray for others like him. Harris is not alone. He is a famous example of an increasingly common phenomenon. Particularly through social media, lively communities have formed around deconstruction and the rejection of evangelicalism. The proliferation of deconstruction poses a serious challenge for the church today, and particularly for traditional believers.
Plausibility Structures
Let’s drill down a bit more deeply. I submit that what we normally call “deconstruction” is actually a breakdown of “plausibility structures,” a term coined by sociologist of religion Peter Berger. When we talk about plausibility structures, we normally mean socially embedded systems of beliefs and practices that allow us to make sense of the world. They also allow us to form other beliefs. We all rely upon plausibility structures, almost always unconsciously. Without them the world would seem utterly chaotic. Perhaps this is why the deconstruction of one’s faith is often so painful. It is not simply a belief system that one is losing, but a way of making sense of the world.
Christian plausibility structures can break down in several different ways. I will describe two of them. First, imagine a young woman raised in a conservative evangelical home. She has been taught that the Bible is an inerrant record of events, including a six-day creation. At eighteen she goes off to college and learns about evolutionary biology. She learns that the world is much older than she had been led to believe. She takes a Bible-as-literature class and learns about the differences between the canonical gospels. She even learns that many scholars believe that Paul only wrote seven of the thirteen letters ascribed to him.
An important part of her plausibility structure is her understanding of the nature and function of Scripture. If Scripture is not entirely true in every way, she reasons, then it is untrustworthy. If it is untrustworthy, then she cannot be sure about the truth of her faith. She can’t trust that she is a created being. She can’t trust that her sins are forgiven in Christ, or even that “sin” is a helpful category. She can’t trust that when she dies she will receive eternal life. Her worldview is so closely tied to her doctrine of Scripture that when she ceases to believe that doctrine, she loses the epistemological foundation of the belief system by which the world made sense to her. Against her will, her faith has been deconstructed. No doubt this process is exceedingly painful and frightening.
A second scenario is less cognitive in nature, and more emotional and intuitive. Imagine a young man who has been brought up in the church. He is part of a vibrant, growing congregation that is involved in the life of the surrounding community. This young man has been raised to believe that the church is a force for good. By and large, he has adopted the morals and worldview handed on to him by his parents, pastors, and youth leaders. He is even considering pastoral ministry as a vocational path. He looks to his own pastor as a model of what he might someday become. Moreover, his pastor has identified him as someone of special potential, one like himself whom he could mentor. Then it comes to light that this pastor—a father and husband–has been sexually harrassing young women in the youth group for some time. In fact, he has had sexual relationships with a few of them. To make matters worse, several of the elders of the church have known about this and covered it up. There have been attempts to curb the pastor’s behavior, but always under the veil of secrecy. After all, for this information to get out would harm the church, and thus harm the witness to Christ in the world. The ends justify the means. The image of this particular church is inextricably bound to that of the pastor. Imagine the disillusionment people would feel upon hearing that the man of God has been involved in ongoing sexual sin. Nevertheless, the pattern of harassment continued until one of the girls told her parents, who brought the issue to light. Now the world can see not only the extent of the pastor’s sin, but the complicity of many others who knew but did not take appropriate action.
For the young man in this scenario, born to believe that those who raised him up in the faith were people of integrity, these are disorienting circumstances. After all, if those to whom he looked as models were themselves knowingly and unrepentantly involved in the very kinds of sinful actions that the pastor condemned from the pulpit, how could they ever be trusted again? Did any of them actually believe the things they were teaching? And if they didn’t believe them, why should this young man? Their conviction had always been a source of his own. Put differently, he didn’t always know why he believed what he believed, but he knew that they believed it, and they were trustworthy—so he had thought.
The second scenario described above is not entirely dissimilar to the events Harris describes in the podcast. There was too much cognitive dissonance between the content of his faith and his experience of people he believed to be exemplars of it. Add to this the emotional trauma of disillusionment, the public repudiation of ideas he had propagated, and the loss of trust in the community he held dear, and it’s no wonder that his faith collapsed. Harris’s deconstruction seems to have been involuntary. His Christian way of looking at the world simply stopped making sense to him. The plausibility structure failed.
Many believe that deconstruction is a positive development. I do not. I have spent my career in service to the faith once and for all entrusted to the saints. The reason I’ve done this is that I believe this faith gives life. Jesus Christ is abundant life. To know Jesus is to receive new life in the present and eternal life in the age to come. Our doctrinal claims, our holy Scripture, our communal worship, and other means of grace are meant to lead us into the life of God. In the words of 2 Peter, “His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature” (1:3-4, italics mine). We become participants in the divine nature by means of the instruments that God has given us to do so. The church’s historic teaching is one such instrument. To reject this teaching is to reject God’s generous gift.
The Need for Apologetics
There are many ways in which we can address the current trend toward deconstruction. I will highlight two that correspond to the scenarios above. The first is a renewed emphasis on apologetics. Right now the Reformed are much better at this than we Wesleyans are. They have jumped into the deep end. We’re standing on the shore wondering whether the water is too cold. Denominations themselves—not just individual scholars—are going to have to provide teaching materials that can address the ongoing intellectual challenges to Christian faith. We might consider the following topics:
How does belief in God help us to make sense of the world more completely than atheism does?
What does it mean to say that the Bible is trustworthy? How should we approach the Bible as Christians?
Almost all people would say that morality matters, but why?
Why do we believe things about sex and marriage that are different than the beliefs of the surrounding culture? What are the individual and social goods that come from embracing Christian sexual ethics?
How does Christianity relate to science? How do we engage issues such as evolution, gender dysphoria, and modern psychology?
In a time when absolute truth claims are considered dangerous and oppressive by many, why do we insist that absolute truth matters?
An unwillingness to engage these questions and provide compelling answers to them is an abdication of duty on the part of church leaders. Rest assured, both the “churched” and the “unchurched” are being formed by the world around them. Tik Tok, online pornography, cable news, Facebook, and other forms of media are ever-present realities that increasingly shape the hearts and minds of the people we are trying to reach. We are leaving our parishioners, and especially our young people, to their own devices in the face of sophisticated and determined cultured despisers. We are, to borrow a phrase from Wesley, “begetting children for the murderer.”
Accountability and Integrity
I would suggest, however, that more often than not, people fall away from the faith for reasons not based on intellectual argument, but on emotion and intuition. A second area we need to address, then, is a renewed emphasis on accountability and morality among our leaders. When leaders fall, they take others with them. There is no need to recite the grim roll call of prominent Christian leaders who have been involved in scandals, most often involving sexual abuse, or at least impropriety. We know their names, and we know how they behaved. What we don’t often see is the damage that occurs to the people in their congregations. If people cannot trust the messenger, they may surmise that they cannot trust the message. The situation is made worse when it comes out that many others were complicit in the offenses of this leader. They covered for him (and let’s face it, we’re normally talking about a “him”), and in the process, they made things worse.
Being a Christian is supposed to mean something. Christians know this, and so do non-Christians. We are supposed to be people whose lives reflect the saving grace of God. We are supposed to care about right and wrong and stand upon our principles. Of course we won’t do this perfectly all the time, and no one could realistically expect us to. Nevertheless, the integrity of our witness reflects on the plausibility of our witness, and this applies to more than the major scandals that get news coverage. When Christians don’t act like Christians—whether in the home, in the office, or on social media—others will doubt that we mean what we say. Conspicuous sanctity can lead people to Christ. A conspicuous lack of sanctity can drive people away.
As leaders, we need honest accountability partners. We need Nathans who will look us in the eye and tell us we have sinned (2 Sam 12:7). We need structures in our organizations that create transparency. We need processes of accountability, repentance, and, to the extent it is both possible and wise, restoration. If a leader will not submit to these, he or she should not be in leadership. Accountability structures will look differently depending on our forms of church governance (congregational, episcopal, etc.). The safeguards, however, should be systemic. They need to function properly regardless of the popularity or institutional value of the person in question.
People leave the faith for many reasons, and I have highlighted just two. Yet if we could get these two matters generally in hand—the intellectual plausibility of the faith and the moral efficacy of the faith—we would save ourselves and many others considerable heartache. The challenges before us are clear, and the stakes are high. We will need considerable fortitude and courage to rise to the occasion. May God give us both in abundance.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.