Deconstructing Your Faith – The Lyrical Realist

When Loving God Means Leaving the Church

Are You Wrestling With Aspects of Your Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian Tradition?

Are you a church worker who feels like you’re on an endless merry-go-round of purposeless church activity? Does it seem that all this activity fails to yield the positive transformation it promises you or the world?

Have you wondered why the Church seems to eat its own, devouring leaders and faithful laypeople with endless work and criticism, shame and fear?

Do you feel dishonest trying to convince nonbelievers that your religion has all the answers to set the world right—when you know its people are just as messed up as anyone else and its institutions just as greedy and corrupt?

Are you a devout believer who can’t help wondering why the Church of Jesus, who was a friend to “the least of these,” has stood complicit in genocide, slavery, misogyny, and racism throughout history? Why it often courts the grossly wealthy and blames the poor?

Are you tired of your faith being reduced to a few hot-button political issues, like opposing abortion and the LGBTQ+ community, which Jesus never spoke against? In fact, do you wonder why Christ-ians are more concerned with what Paul and Moses taught than with what Christ taught?

Let’s go deeper.

Maybe your struggle isn’t just with church but with the whole framework of your beliefs, and you wonder . . .

Why you’re supposed to forgive, but God gets to hold a grudge for eternity—against everyone—over a piece of fruit?
Why God only forgives those who confess and repent, but you’re supposed to forgive those who harm you and are unrepentant about it?
Why God slaughtered entire Old Testament villages and then told you to be gentle, long-suffering, and self-controlled?
How we even got the Bible in the first place? Who got to decide what was in it? And why do we have to take their word for it?
Similarly, how did God control the Biblical authors so that no trace of their human bias or ignorance entered our ‘inerrant’ texts?
- Did he turn them into zombies?
- What about freewill? Many of our churches preach that freewill is so sacred that all humanity has to suffer and die, and potentially be tortured for eternity just so freewill can exist.
  - So . . . God won’t suspend freewill to prevent a six-year-old girl from being sex trafficked, but God will suspend it so that, for instance, Samuel can write infallibly about the exploits of David’s “mighty men”?
Did God similarly suspend the free will of all Bible interpreters and translators over millennia . . . so that no trace of their human fallibility entered the sacred text, either?

Why we’re letting our understanding of history and science be dictated by ancient men with far less information than we have now.?
Have you ever thought maybe the supernatural events and historical factuality of Scripture emphasized in your church isn’t the point . . .
- and that when we emphasize those, we are missing some wonderful spiritual truths and moral teachings that could really help our world?

Asking Questions is Scary Business

When you’ve been indoctrinated to believe any deviation from church consensus is punishable by eternal hell, it can be incredibly scary to begin asking questions. On the other hand, you may sense, as I did, that our intellect and integrity will die if we don’t reckon with these issues.

I am Elizabeth, a deconstructing Christian dedicated to keeping the faith. I write because I’ve wrestled with questions like the ones above. I know there’s a lot on the line there.

If you wrestle through those questions with an open mind, do you end up losing heaven? Do you lose your morals?
Do you lose identity? How about hope? Does that go, too?
What about connection? It’s likely if you were all-in on the faith, veering from the herd may means you risk losing your entire community.
And what about purpose? You’ve been raised to believe you have a great purpose in the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. What’s your place in the universe now?

I’ve been there. I am there. I write to come alongside you on your path.

A Guide? How About a Companion?

I call this blog “A Deconstructionist Guide to Keeping the Faith” only because it’s catchy. I don’t consider myself to have reached some plane from which I’m entitled to “guide” anybody. Unlike my former Evangelical self, I won’t claim authority or promise certainty. But I give only what is mine to give, and that is my witness.

So, moving forward, I will be posting once a week, typically on Saturday mornings, to share my journey with you. We will be exploring . . .

Some of the questions listed above, and more.
Perspectives on scripture and doctrine that you may not have considered before.
Authors, musicians, and content creators who can help us along the journey.
Discussion on what’s next. How do we build meaningful spirituality post-deconstruction?
Current events and how to respond to them in light of Jesus’ teachings.
Observations, epiphanies, meditations, and prayers
And finally, a healthy dose of the Lyrical as we deal with the Real.
- Let us reclaim some of the wonder we have lost to disillusionment. Faith has branches in the gritty ‘real world,’ but it is rooted in profound mystery.

When Loving God Meant Leaving the Church

I used to preach and teach in the grand old tradition of quasi-fundamentalist Evangelicalism. For years, I led worship, sang, and played keyboards. I hosted prayer meetings, taught Sunday School, and led youth. I believed I was called. I pursued ministry education and fulfilled the requirements for credentialing in my denomination, the Assemblies of God.

But the deeper I embedded myself in faith, study, and ministry, the more glaring appeared the holes in our theological system. The more obvious the inconsistencies in our doctrines and the discrepancies between our stated beliefs and lived priorities. As I kept working in the church, I grew increasingly disillusioned with the fact that we just seemed to be amusing ourselves with insular church activities. I grieved our stubborn insistence on what I considered religious nonessentials:

Think . . .

Styles of worship
Debates about creation/evolution, miracles, and the rapture
Biblical literalism/inerrancy
Purity culture and gender roles
Doctrinal statements, and
Political loyalty tests.

I argued that our Christian community’s misplaced priorities ensured that we could not connect with spiritually hungry people in a modern, democratized world. It seemed that for every silly churchism we made essential, we were obscuring the real, hope-giving, and life-changing stuff of the Gospel.

At last, I could not reconcile common church attitudes and practices with the Christ around whom, supposedly, our faith revolved. What? Shame the victim and coddle the abuser? Give the best seat to wealthy church members, then overwork and criticize the poor ones? If the Church, with all its grand claims, could do no better than the rest of the dog-eat-dog world, what was the point in adhering to it?

A free ticket to heaven? A social club? Was that what this was really all about?

Why I Am Keeping the Faith

But I am here because I believe there is a point to keeping the teachings of Jesus, and I believe the core of those teachings is as beautiful and life-giving as ever. I just had to peel back the layers of Churchism to get at that beauty.

Like many, as I deconstructed my faith, I found my problem was not with God or with spirituality, but simply that my faith was outgrowing the container I used for these things. The container of fundamentalist Evangelicalism was beginning to limit and confine my connection with God, though it had once facilitated it.

As a good friend of mine says, “Even the term Christian has become too fraught.” It brings up connotations of prudes and bigots, televangelist grifters, and comfortable, white retirees crying “Persecution! Reverse-Racism!” every time a white Christian doesn’t receive favoritism. Cringe.

I prefer the term Jesus-follower, for it denotes a measurable goal to follow the teacher of great tenets like:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31 NRSV).
“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matt 7:12 NIV).
“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant . . . just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matt 20:25a-26, 28 NRSV).
“‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ . . . Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me’” (Matt 25:40b, 45b NIV)

Jesus modeled inclusion of the outcast and downtrodden. He offered tangible care for the poor and sick, because he saw the value in everyone. He didn’t settle for the mundane pursuit of comfort, wealth, and power; he pointed us to something higher.

Spiritual Deconstruction Does Not Equal Spiritual Destruction

If you are wrestling with questions you can neither shake nor answer according to your religious framework, the discomfort might just be growing pains. I have heard a bit of outcry from the Fundy-Evangelical segment complaining that deconstruction is demonically inspired to destroy the church in the last days. They equate spiritual deconstruction with a full departure from faith in God. Of course, it is true that for many, faith deconstruction has been an off-ramp from theism.

But allow me to posit another way to think of faith deconstruction.

Maybe it’s about maturing. And spiritual maturing is a choice. The path is there, but no one’s going to make you take it. Are you ready to shed the manmade baggage and take a conscientious look to determine what about your faith is “true . . . noble . . .right . . . pure . . . [and] lovely” (Phillipians 4:8 NIV)?

If you are worried your struggles mean you are losing a cherished relationship with God. I remind you that your commitment to spiritual integrity does not signal that there is nothing where your faith used to be! Instead, it indicates that a lot of chaff is about to get blown away!

Stuff just got Real.

I want to close by telling you the one thing I most needed to hear when I feared my faith was unraveling:

Deconstruction does not have to mean destruction.

Spiritual deconstruction can mean honing, rather than disowning, your faith!

Moving away from organized Christianity has meant that I now interact in faith, rather than in certainty, with a God whose shape I no longer try to define or control. I find God more mysterious, sure, but also more loving, creative, and expansive than I did before. I found that it’s more important to trust in the goodness and constancy of God than in the infallibility of human institutions. If one of these is eroding my trust in God, I’ll leave the institution and keep God.

I also have a greater focus on what we can and should do to better the lives of our fellow humans. And I have a greater sense of purpose to interact humbly and justly with this earth and all its creatures.

So, I finish with encouragement that faith deconstruction need not be a dead end where you drop off who you used to be.

It is also an open door to who you are becoming.

Welcome, dear Community! I look forward to growing with you!

Next week:     Why I Kissed Churching Goodbye, Pt.2—A deep dive into what faith deconstruction means and how it’s reshaping the Church for the better.