What Was Your Catalyst for Faith Deconstruction?
Plus a link to a guest post I got to do this week!
This past week I got to do something exciting: I wrote a guest post for D.L. Mayfield’s fantastic newsletter, God is My Special Interest. It came out on Tuesday and if you aren’t already familiar with her newsletter, you should definitely check it out! Reading her newsletter the past several months has been incredibly impactful, both for how I understand many of my clients and for how I understand myself. Here’s the link to the post I wrote:
A conversation I’d love to explore this week (especially from my newcomers - my regular readers know I LOVE the comment section) is about faith deconstruction. If you’re reading a newsletter related to religious trauma, it’s probably fairly safe to assume you have done some amount of faith deconstruction. So I’m curious: do you recall what were some of the first things that started to shift in your faith to make you change your mind on what you had believed?
I’ll share some of my story first. I grew up in a very conservative evangelical setting. I’m in my mid-thirties so I was a young adult in the late 00s and 2010s. My faith deconstruction began in college and continued throughout my twenties. About the time I was in college the “emergent church” was a thing, which has a lot of parallels to what we call faith deconstruction today (please shout out in the comments if you were also involved with the emergent church!). Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Doug Pagitt, etc.
One of the early shifts was that I’d known people of other faiths since being a teen (Jews, Mormons) but once I got to college, I had a Muslim friend. I grew up hearing Muslims be referred to as “Islamists” and generally be portrayed as having a terrible, dangerous faith (ughhh I’m so sorry). Also, I was 13 when 9/11 happened, so it was unfortunately the country as a whole demonizing Muslims, not just evangelicals. But my Muslim friend was so kind, so sweet, and so NOT what my faith experience had made Muslims out to be. I couldn’t fathom a world in which an incredibly faithful, kind Muslim would be sent to hell, per my belief system. So I began to fathom a different world.
A second shift was that I actually started reading the Bible avidly - like not just mind-numblingly over 6:00am breakfast, but with curiosity and intellect. “Read your Bible every day!” they said. “It’s how you maintain a strong relationship with God!” Well, as many of us formerly-extremely-committed evangelicals know, we were SO good at reading the Bible that we began to notice the little contradictions and difficult passages that lacked good explanation. Plus I slowly was becoming a little more liberal at college. Put those two together and I started to realize there was a lot about the Bible that my Evangelical Republican background seemed to be missing. Hmm.
And the third thing was that I could no longer hold the same beliefs that “homosexuality” (as we evangelicals always called it) was a sin. I realized that feelings of romantic and sexual attraction weren’t something you could just control or turn off, and as an empathetic, must-be-fair type of human, I believed it was unfair to have gay people either be celibate or be in a relationship that didn’t reflect their actual desires. I began diving into other ways to read the so-called “clobber passages” used to clobber LGBTQ folks. I began understanding the queer community firsthand instead of through the very biased filter my evangelical upbringing provided me with.
This third reason was my most dramatic and important reason for deconstructing, and I think many people share this story. And once you realize the church was wrong on that… it’s like the scales fall off your eyes and you began to see that maybe the church seems more hellbent on control and rigid, narrow-minded, judgmental thinking than about really loving people. That “hate the sin love the sinner” in no way makes the so-called “sinner” feel good when the “sin” is an integral part of their identity. And that the church has a very bad habit of supporting its social, political views with selected verses from an ancient book while quite blatantly ignoring entire themes and chapters that don’t suit their political / social aims so well.
Just saying.
So please, drop me a comment and tell me a story! I would love to have a better understanding of where my readers are coming from. And even if you don’t have a story of faith deconstruction, I’d love to hear your faith (or lack thereof) background and how it has or hasn’t served you!
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Long time listener, first time caller here! I was in a conservative non-denom church at the time, secretly queer, and just trying to love others well. I was sitting out at a restaurant with a few friends, when I asked what I thought was a benign question to get some fun conversation going and hopefully lead to some interesting thoughts (because it had been rolling around in my head and heart). It was, “what if there isn’t a literal Adam and Eve?”
Oh boy, my [former] long time friend shut me down so quickly and so hard. “The question you’re asking goes against the orthodoxy of the church present and in history and there is no reason to go down this road!”
Phew. Well I hate conflict, but I’m also a rebel. So I agreed at the time, changed the topic, dropped my belief in literal creation, and subsequently left the church and started down a wildly different path. I’m much happier these days.
My faith deconstruction happened while in college (doesn't everyone's?) I had been raised Catholic all the way, grammer school, High School, Mass every week, until.... Vatican III, 1963. The wise men in Rome decided to do away with a lot of religious detritus that had been accumulating since the Middle Ages. Looking back, it was a fabulously brave thing to do, bringing the Church into the 20th century. But at the time, it turned my world upside down. If it was no longer a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday, touch the communion host with your teeth, or miss Sunday Mass once in a while, what did that say about the rest of Christianity's rules and regs? It was all downhill from there.