Deconstruction: When your faith falls apart

Last year, when I faced my fears and doubts head-on, it felt like my faith was falling apart. There were many nights I stayed up late, searching Google with phrases like

“christian losing faith”

“afraid I’m losing my faith”

“christian doesn’t believe anymore”

“my faith is falling apart”

“I don’t believe in God anymore”

and, in all of my searching for someone else who would understand, I came across the word

DECONSTRUCTION.

After I read more about it, I felt like I was arriving at the party a decade too late. Apparently, this idea of a faith “deconstruction” has been around for a while. It refers to the process of re-evaluating and discarding some or all of the beliefs, concepts, indoctrinations, systems, etc. that have under-girded your spiritual life. For many people, this act feels more like utter destruction than simply taking something apart. Essentially, it means you question everything.

Sometimes this process occurs over a period of years. Maybe you begin with the question of women being allowed to be pastors and you change to a more progressive church. A year later, you start questioning whether the Bible is true… and then whether Jesus actually existed… and then whether someone is a heretic if they pray to God as a “she…” And on and on it goes until you have questioned and examined all of the things you once held as truth.

Other times, this process can occur nearly instantly. Maybe you are listening to your pastor talk about matters of social justice and you see their perspective as being utterly and completely against everything Jesus stood for. You decide, in a moment, that you don’t want to be in a religion that views the world this way. Right then and there, you let go of everything that your church considers “the truth” and spend the next few months (or years) as an atheist, wondering how religion – and its effects on you – could be so f*’d up. You aren’t sure whether you can even believe in a “God” again.

And, of course, there are a million variations of this story. Faith Deconstruction has become known as the process of discovering how you have been influenced and affected by all the things you’ve been taught to believe, and then holding them up to the light to see whether you want to keep believing them.

Kathy Escobar called her experience of this process “Jenga faith” – where you remove beliefs one by one and see how long you can keep doing that before your faith totally collapses. Others have described it as an unraveling.

I had been circling around the idea long before I heard the term “deconstruction.” It started way back in the mid-2000’s when my dad died from pancreatic cancer when I was 24. Before he died, I had a clear life plan. I’d been saving myself for marriage, waiting and praying for that one special guy to complete me. I also knew what I wanted for a career: after law school, I would get a job at a big law firm, and work 100 hours a week for a few years so I could pay off my student loans. Things weren’t necessarily happening in my ideal time-frame, but, I knew God was in control. Then my dad got sick and I started to wonder what I was waiting for. My dad had put his life on hold so many times and for what? So he could die at 58?!?!?! I was so angry. I promptly got back at God by losing my virginity, running away from my family, experiencing an unplanned pregnancy, getting an abortion, and half-assing law school.

A few years later, I began to struggle with the problem of evil and I questioned how I could believe in a God who wouldn’t always keep me safe. Then, when I had kids, I tried reading Bible stories to them and could hardly keep my face straight. Noah’s Ark? Jonah and the whale? Adam and Eve? For some reason, I could swallow those stories myself, but regurgitating them to my kids, who were trusting me?? I just couldn’t do it. I switched to reading the gospels, but as I started to wonder about the reality of a historical Jesus, I found I couldn’t read the Bible to them at all.

I’ll save more of my story for another post, but all this has made me realize that I’ve been slowly deconstructing since 2002. While most of that time was a more gentle examination of beliefs I was stubbornly and fearfully trying to hold onto, these last few months have felt like a shedding of epic proportions. It’s like I can’t throw beliefs off fast enough. Almost overnight, it seems, I felt the weight and burden of my faith, and it felt more like suffocation than freedom.

I write all of this so you can know that what you’re going through is OK. Your questions, your doubts, your fears surrounding your faith are OK. You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to sit in constant compromise and dis-ease between what you think and what you believe. You don’t have to feel like a “bad” christian because you disagree with what your church teaches. You don’t have to “hold everything in tension” in a way that leaves you feeling uncomfortable and hypocritical and confused, even if only to yourself. You do not have to sacrifice yourself on the altar of what you believe, while being full of fear and doubt and anger and resentment and bitterness.

You can take it apart, let it go, set it aside, and still be OK.

But, I will warn you – it feels like death.

Because it is.

And I am just now beginning to see what appears to be a light in the dark. I do not have any answers yet and I am trying to accept that I may never have any answers. I feel like a baby that has survived the intense pressure of contractions but is still being squeezed through the birth canal: I have endured the initial radical awakening from my cozy comfort zone and suffered the loss of the substance that sustained me for so long, and now I am in the dark inching my way towards the unknown.

I want to know what is on the other side. I am trying really, really hard to figure it out and get there, but, like in childbirth, I must accept that this is a team effort and I am not the one in control. So, I am struggling to be content in the darkness, this strange empty space neither here nor there. But, I am not afraid, not anymore. So, I sit here – waiting for you, sharing with you so you don’t have to be afraid of all the rumblings and roilings inside of YOUR soul. If you feel the foundation of faith pulled out from beneath you, and it seems like your world is falling apart, fear not. Hang in there and meet me here on this narrow path and we can sit in this weird, deep silence, utterly alone and, achingly, together.