(This is a guest post by Maria Francesca French, who will have her own blog here on Patheos in the very near future. She will blog under her full name, so make sure to look out for it.)
I know many of you reading this have experienced transitions in your faith and/or are currently experiencing transitions. Sometimes it can feel like a great adventure and sometimes it can feel like utter devastation. Most of the time it feels like both. You move forward leaving the artifacts of your former life of faith behind because you can’t possibly take them with you. You can remember them for what they taught you, thankful for how you experienced them perhaps. But they have no place in your new home that you will inhabit until you move on to inhabit a new place once more. You’re in a bit of an empty room with no illusion of comfort or the familiar. All that is thousands of miles away. Just you and the empty space.
Faith deconstruction can feel so much like this. You’ve seen through so much of what you thought was certain, watched it fall like a house of cards and while you are free from the construct that doesn’t change the fact that the home you thought you had built is not standing, but toppled under your feet and there is nothing that can be done to change that.
For those of you unfamiliar with this idea of faith deconstruction it has become the popular and most common way for people to speak about their journeys out of conservative Christianity, most of the time, of a fundamental or Evangelical variety. Doing what I do, of course, I am around these conversations a lot. Although as of late I have seen the deconstruction conversation spread and open up in an unprecedented way. Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, memes and reels and TikToks, Facebook groups being overrun with comments, Youtube videos going viral, book after book being published-all having to do with stories of deconstruction, religious trauma and abuse, and a general venting and sharing of the unraveling of toxic theology and faith.
The deconstruction crowd has been abused and traumatized to the point of deep anger, woundedness and rage. And anyone who has gone through one inch of abuse and trauma at the hands of the church (mostly, all of us) has a massive right to be angry forever if they want to. And Western Christianity MUST be held accountable for its constant use and abuse of its followers. Those who were victims of the use and abuse almost always need serious therapy to work some of healing and the narrative out. But I find those living in the deconstruction crowd at a pop culture level don’t go on to get the help they need and end up arriving to the category of certainty they just deconstructed only now they are playing for the other team, which usually looks something like Christian Atheism. So, the certainty now then becomes I am a Christian even though I know God doesn’t exist. But I get it. A new community is needed hence the aforementioned. And, finally, some of these things that have always lived in the dark are being brought to life, churches, leaders and theologies are being exposed and held accountable and strong community is forming around those who need to heal and have someone bear witness to their story.
There is so much to unpack when it comes to deconstructing faith because not only is one dealing with the trauma of church and theological abuse, but also the trauma of losing their faith home, their faith community, the beliefs in which their identities were rooted and anything they thought made them, them. This is the most heartbreaking thing in the world. In most strands of fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, one is taught to love God above all else. Above your parents, your spouse, your children, your friends and, of course, yourself. So, when that God starts to be poked and prodded and, right before your eyes, starts to disintegrate, and this construct of a God you have placed all your bets on decides it’s not going to hold up, what does one do? Well, a lot of things. Not least of which be sent spinning into a massive identity crisis filled with grief, loss, confusion, depression, shame, I could go on but you get the idea.
All of the things we had surrounded ourselves with that offered us comfort, that offered us a place to hang our hat, we find, start to very quickly melt away when held up to any kind of a flame.
I speak with people all the time who are in the throws and woes of deconstruction through my work, H&Co and on my Patreon. They want me to talk to them about why heaven and hell, the way they had been sold them, aren’t actually real. They want me to do this because they are scared they might be wrong and that they might actually be sent to the hell they don’t believe in anymore. They want me to explain away all of their existential fears and angst by countering toxic and harmful narratives that haunt them. They want to find a new way of being a Christian, and a faithful one, in ways that matter and that have nothing to do with signing off on a list of propositional statements of what we think we know about God. Sometimes I have even had people come to me and ask me to help them become an Atheist because they so badly want to be free of God. For someone who wants to be an Atheist so badly, who cannot on their own…well, this speaks to the level of trauma and abuse they have endured at the hands of the church and Christians and it is absolutely tragic to me.
On a 1:1 call recently I had someone say something to me like, ‘Maria, there is nothing I like about God or the Bible or Jesus or church. I just want to be done. I just want to be an Atheist and leave it all behind. Just please tell me that God and hell isn’t real.’ I said to them, ‘If that is how you feel and there is nothing compelling you any longer about Jesus and the New Testament narratives then you should definitely not be a Christian. Of course, you can go on and be an Atheist and it sounds like you should. And I can talk you through hell and God from an ontological perspective. We can talk about the being and object and agency of God and why there may be more helpful ways of talking about god than this, but I can’t tie this in a nice bow for you. I can tell you that the kind of god you believed in doesn’t exist. But I cannot trade you one empirical certainty for another. First off, I don’t think empirical realities matter as much as theological ones and, Secondly, I don’t have enough faith to tell you to be an Atheist, as defined by the non-existence of god.’
These things are so complicated. They are layered with ambiguity and nuance and all of our subjectivity. Navigating faith and faith in the 21st century is not easy. And it is NEVER as simple as “I used to believe and now I don’t.” This is about a shift in values and a shift in perspective. It is about learning the difference between toxic theology that keeps us bound and a way of looking at theology and life that keeps us dynamic and free.
Maybe you are reading this and you are mourning all the things you have had to leave behind. Maybe you are sitting in that empty space with nothing welcoming or familiar. But maybe that space has big windows, and you can see the sun relentlessly attempting to peer through the haze. Life does that. It is the gift it gives to us. Maybe you are wondering what faith even means. 20th century theologian Schubert Ogdens says that faith is believing that life is worth the living of it. And it is. Life is absolutely worth the living of it! And if you find yourself a part of a faith that says otherwise, well it is time to rethink that faith.
I will never forget the very first time I had a massive existential and spiritual breakdown. It was the spring of my senior year in college. I had been wholly let down by (my construct of) God, and others in my community, after many months (almost a year) of enduring a hold pattern in which I was assured God would intervene. It was finally clear that I had come to the end and what I believed was surely to happen, never ever would. I stepped in the shower. I was a Resident Advisor to a floor of 45 women, so I had my own room and, thankfully, my own bathroom. I leaned into the running water with my head down from the distinctive heaviness of spiritual disorientation and for the first time these words ran through my head, ‘Is God even real?’ I don’t remember any more after that. Our brain does that as trauma defense. We remember in vignettes because the whole memory would be too painful, so it has been blocked.
I had been through a lot in my life in my 22 years on the planet. A lot of pain and heartache, things stolen from me, betrayal, abandonment and other unpleasant things, but I always pulled through. I was resilient, stubborn and strong to a fault. I wish I had taken the time to grieve and feel pain more, especially in my childhood, but I didn’t and that is a regret because it all catches up with you in the end. But my point is, even with all I had gone through I had never questioned the legitimacy, existence and, more importantly, the closeness, of God until that moment. I moved on from that moment and continued on in Evangelicalism for a few more years before things really started to shift for me, in terms of the construct of a personal God. But so many years later I think back on that shower moment, full of compassion and sadness for my 22-year-old self. If I could go back and tell her one thing about that moment and those words that ran through her head I would say, ‘My love, you are asking the wrong question.’
It isn’t a matter of whether God exists or not. It is about what kind of god might exist and what do we want to say and do about it. It is about moving from points that are like a dog chasing its tail (metaphysical/supernatural existence) and moving toward conversations that are centered in what our sacred stories (for most of us this is the narrative of the Judeo-Christian God) might be asking of us, our humanity, and our lives.
In the words of an Italian philosopher I read often, Gianni Vattimo, “There is no experience of truth that is not interpretive.” All things god have been mediated and interpreted by others and then by ourselves. Objective truth is not a matter to speak of. It is impossible. And even if objectivity was something we could access, we could still only chip away at it using our own subjectivity, which would color it anyway.
Four years ago, Time magazine reprised the 1966 cover “Is God Dead” on its 60-year anniversary by asking “Is Truth Dead.” A certain type of truth is dead. Indeed, it is. To speak in terms of metaphysics and supernaturalism will make Atheists of us all. As Vattimo says, “As a finite being, I am born and die at certain points in history. How can I possibly be the bearer of…absoluteness?” And that’s it. That is the truth. That we are finite. That we live and die at a particular time in history and that we aren’t much more than the contexts we find ourselves in. And our contexts teach us life, they teach us about life, and they give us a lens by which to view everything through.
For those of you deep in the trenches of deconstruction, I see you. I’m with you, I’m for you. Please try and take some of the pressure off of yourself to know something one way or the other. While you may have to deconstruct some toxic beliefs, no one expects, requires, nor is it the point, for you to know absolutely or to absolutely know.
Our lives are worth the living of them, well and free. Our faith, in most cases, is worth working through, coming out the other side and, hopefully, leaving that dead god and strangling beliefs in our dust.
Be kind to yourself. Cry, give grace, write, scream and get yourself to a good therapist who specializes in religious trauma, if you need to. Find those who can walk beside you in your process and help you to navigate new ways of engaging your faith, if that is what you choose. Set and keep firm boundaries with those who try and discount your experience and who try to spiritually bypass you (when someone gives you a spiritual answer that makes you inferior to their stated belief, i.e, ‘but the word of god says, but you need to have more faith, well god said this to me…’). Watch out for rhetoric exonerating people, i.e. the church and its leaders, because ‘only God is perfect’ or ‘people will always fail but Jesus never will,’ etc. No. Because those people are acting under the influence of a toxic theology that flows from the toxic God they believe in. SET. BOUNDARIES.
John Caputo, prolific Radical Theologian and Deconstructionist, writes on Vattimo (a favorite of his, as well) and Vattimo’s thoughts on belief, “Once, when Gianni Vattimo…was asked if he still believed, he answered, ‘I believe that I believe.’ That is, with all his doubts and suspicions, he had a certain faith in faith, in a certain faith, or rather an uncertain one, a faith in something…A lot of people in the postmodern condition can say that…that while they do not believe in demons or an Omniscient Superbeing that does not mean there is no remnant of belief left in them.”
This is for you. For all of you that are remnant. Jesus was remnant, too. We are in good company.
Resources Mentioned:
A Farewell to Truth by Gianni Vattimo
Resources Recommended:
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In