Deconstructing or Reconstructing Faith?
Phil Miglioratti @ The Remagine.Network
“Most pastors have heard of deconstruction and some say they’ve seen it in their pews,
but no one knows exactly what faith deconstruction means.
Just because someone is re-evaluating what they believe,
doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve quit believing entirely.” Lizzy Haselstine
#ItSeemsToMe…some evangelicals are deconstructing but many of us are reconstructing. Inviting a Spirit-led, Scripture-fed review and, as necessary, revision of the containers we have designed to carry, the templates we have constructed to codify, our beliefs and perspectives. A faith journey to assess where true faith has been contaminated or compromised by traditions and/or cultural biases we have begun to think of as correct - faultless - universal expressions of Holy Scripture.
“Many have been influenced by culture instead of by the church” (LH) ... but reconstruction recognizes that norms and standards of culture have also influenced the church. Identifying customs-traditions-values that steer or dilute Scripture is essential to both personal discipleship and corporate culture.
“People rely on their circumstances to create their worldviews” (LH) ... but so does our theologizing. Our creedal statements remain foundational but our interpretations and applications need constant, thoughtful reflection to identify perspectives that are based upon or shaped byour tribal/temporal context.
“Before we self-righteously point fingers at someone questioning God, take time to consider what that person may have gone through or be facing and pray for them. When someone is deconstructing their faith, it is not a time to criticize or be skeptical of them but to love them well” (LH) ... and to listen. They may have wisdom from the Spirit that applies to us as well. Failure to listen and learn will only result in more deconstruction (unbelief) than reconstruction (renewed belief).
Keep unLearning
- Scroll through the additional content/commentary below I've curated from others thoight-leaders>>>
- Spend some time considering "My Plea to Rethink How Your Worldview Impacts Your Christianity
Comments
I HAVE DECIDED
Scot McKnight
Jeff Mikels, a former pastor in Indiana and the author of an interesting book, is owning up to complicity and failure to disciple his church in a theopolitical discipleship that conforms to the kingdom vision of Jesus, that is, to the gospel. I don’t know Jeff Mikels, but his book will prove to be light for many pastors staring out at an abundance and majority of Christian nationalists, or at least semi-Christian nationalists, and wondering what has happened and what can be done. Mikels’ book is called Evangelical Idolatry: How Pastors Like Me Have Failed the People of God. I had a heart-felt conversation with such a pastor this week – pastors are all but overwhelmed by the challenge to preach and teach a kingdom vision, a gospel vision, to a congregation that has swallowed what Mikels calls “idolatry.”
These are some telling quotations from Mikels:
“I no longer found any alignment between the Jesus I followed and the practices of the Christians in my evangelical subculture.” (all in italics in original)
“So I spoke up, but when I did, I sounded like one of the voices that many in my own church had already decided to reject. So, they left. A full 80% of our church left, including every elder except one, who lasted one more year before also leaving. Some went to other churches. Some quit church altogether. I felt rejected, and that sealed my disillusionment.”
“I didn't adequately prepare people for the turmoil of 2020. Specifically, I didn't adequately cultivate an allegiance to Jesus, his life, and his words that surpassed other traditional and cultural allegiances.” (all italics in original)
“At the heart of it all was a simple but obvious logical conclusion: If, after seventeen years of being under my ministry, their hearts resonated more with Fox News then with Jesus, I had failed to accurately portray Jesus as our example, authority, and only King.”
He writes, “Afer much consideration, I’m convinced that I am complicit.”
Now read this:
“My approach to preaching, teaching, and discipleship not only kept the door open to conspiratorial conservativism, but it also helped people usher it right into their hearts. And it's not just my approach that was at fault. I have since come to realize that some bedrock principles of Evangelicalism are fundamentally tied to conservative cultural idols, but I never saw them or expose them.”
Many, of course, have been calling attention to these idols, and have been doing so for more than one generation. But silos are silos, and what is heard and tolerable to the ears in one silo may not be heard or tolerated in another silo. As I read this book, I had a hard time resonating with his context because my context has been so different for three decades. But I know his context is substantial in the United States right now. And I know that pastors are struggling. I want this sub stack to become a tool for those pastors and those churches.
Mikels wants to reframe the gospel of his evangelicalism and this is his conclusion after some lengthy explorations of texts and ideas:
“Jesus, Son of God, Lord and King, came into the world to demonstrate the Kingdom life, to sacrifice himself that we might be eternally reconciled to the Father, and to invite us to follow him. We received that reconciliation and lived that Kingdom life through repentance, faithfulness, obedience, and joining Jesus in his work of reconciliation.”
There is much here that I want to agree with period I also think that earlier discussions in his book framed the gospel a little bit more in a Jesus-centric way. Mikels pins a problem on Luther for framing the gospel as a doctrine to be believed. So Mikels offer a summons: “It’s a call for my fellow evangelicals to embrace a gospel that is more than doctrine alone, a gospel that combines right thinking, personal holiness, and even social action; a gospel that changes us inside and out; a gospel that brings the good news of the kingdom into present-day living.” His progress from Jesus to the above definition of gospel takes these crucial steps:
“The good news for Jesus is tied to the now-and-future kingdom of God. It offers many benefits but also demands surrender and transformation.” (all italics in original)
“The good news includes the message of universal condemnation for sin, the sacrificial love of God, and eternal salvation available exclusively through Jesus.” (all italics in original)
“So, what does it mean to believe in the kingdom? It means to live like a subject of that King abiding by the ways of that kingdom.”
“The calling of the gospel is to follow Jesus, doing the work of Jesus, heeding the words of Jesus, expressing sacrificial love like Jesus, and reproducing others who also identify with Christ and obey his words.”
Mikels thinks Paul’s gospel was about Jesus. (Amen.) Here’s how he frames Paul’s gospel: “The gospel is the message that Jesus is Lord, through whom God graciously gives righteousness and salvation to any person who receives it with life-changing faith.” (all italics in original)
“Paul's explanations are certainly more complicated and detailed than anything we saw in the words of Jesus, but his point is clear. The gospel is a doctrine about how Jesus's death and resurrection prove his lordship, a promise that those who belong to him are given the righteousness of God, and a calling to respond in faithful obedience.”
“This is what the New Testament writers mean by ‘gospel.’ It is the entirety of the story of Jesus – who he is, what he is taught, and what he has done for us, what it means to join him, and what's ahead for the faithful.”
So, “It's time that we embrace an understanding of the gospel that isn't satisfied with the extremes of doctrinal accuracy or social progressivism but that embraces the same integration of faith in life that Jesus did.”
Jeff Mikels is to be commended for articulating a reality in some circles of evangelicalism. He confesses: “I'm ashamed to admit that I had to realize that, but once I realized that Paul and Jesus were talking about the same thing, that Paul was merely contextualizing the good news of Jesus for new audiences, I gave myself permission to let the words of Jesus shape and define my understanding of the good news.” He can sing this now: “I have decided to live and breathe a gospel that fully embraces the teaching of Jesus, the example of Jesus, and the didactic instructions from Paul and the other New Testament writers.”
That confession opens a window on far too many today who seem to have little place for Jesus other than as the agent of redemption in a systematic theology based on a Reformation reading of Romans.
Quotes explaining "deconstruction" from an article by Cheyenne McNeill in The Guardian US
The term deconstruction has risen in popularity in recent years, particularly in evangelical Christian circles. It describes a process in which people strip back and challenge the core of their religious beliefs, often because their values are in conflict with those of their church. Those who deconstruct – sometimes called “exvangelicals”
Deconstruction is not quick or easy. Because religion can be ingrained and habitual, the interfaith minister the Rev Karla Kamstra calls it a “spiritual untangling”. “The main part of that is really learning to understand what it means to let go and release and heal from the things that no longer serve your highest good,” said Kamstra, author of the new book Deconstructing: Leaving Church, Finding Faith.
The number of Americans who identify as Christian is shrinking. According to Pew Research Center, about 28% of US adults now fit the category of religious nones – a group that identifies as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – while the number of adults who identify as Christian has steadily declined since 2007. A third of US adults in their 30s who were raised Christian no longer identify as such.
In today’s changing religious landscape, deconstructing Christians are thoughtfully, deliberately asking themselves: “Can I remain in the church, or will I have to leave the faith altogether?” Discovering the answer can be an emotionally wrenching process.
Deconstruction creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, according to Daryl Van Tongeren, professor of psychology at Hope College, and there are two ways to deal with it: “You either get the world to fit according to your views, or you need to change your views to fit the world.”
Religious mentors like Robinson help some navigate these diverging paths. Others find support in online communities. Kamstra, who was raised Southern Baptist, runs a TikTok account with more than 700,000 followers, where she posts about Bible study, prayer and the politics of the Christian right. The massively popular YouTube duo Rhett and Link have posted and podcasted about their “long, grueling, painful” journeys from Christian evangelicalism, becoming something of online figureheads for deconstruction (they say they’re in a “good spot” now). Across comment sections, subreddits and tweet threads, individuals going through deconstruction share frustrating experiences, ask for advice and seek solace.
After deconstructing, some leave the faith entirely. Perhaps that’s why certain Christian leaders see deconstruction as a threat. Matt Chandler, a baptist pastor based in Texas, preached a sermon in 2021 condemning it as a “sexy thing to do” and suggesting that those who deconstructed never had a true faith. Tim Barnett, a Christian speaker, thought it could be healthy but now says it is “antithetical to the Christian worldview”.
Other leaders are more open to it. Before his death in 2023, Dr Tim Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian church in New York City, wrote that deconstruction was a chance for Christians to “emerge stronger” if done “constructively”. Some have spoken out about it as a healthy renewal of one’s faith that signals where American Christianity is heading.
Deconstruction is fraught with social consequences, said Terry Shoemaker, an associate teaching professor at the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Because religion is closely linked to family and friendships, one risks a loss of community and estrangement from loved ones.
“It interweaves things so tightly that if you pull on one thread, that braid really starts to unravel. All other forms of identity start to come into question, because if this one thing doesn’t match up, well then, maybe other things don’t match up,” Shoemaker said.
It’s more of a sociopolitical term or moniker than it is a religious one, and so some people leave religion because they don’t like the label,” Van Tongeren said.
Those who land outside of religion after deconstruction have “de-identified”, according to Van Tongeren. But religion is sticky. “We call [it] religious residue, the idea that one’s religious past lingers or continues to have an effect on them long after they’ve de-identified,” he said. This residue can manifest in values, politics, beliefs about God and spending habits. Those who de-identify might seek spiritual meaning outside of organized religion. “So even though people have walked away from religion, religion continues to exert an effect on them.”
GUEST-POST:Scot McKnight
Why Evangelicals Are Pursuing Deconstruction
{ HINT: It ain't because we no longer beleive the core components of Christianity }
Samuel Perry, Religion for Realists
Scot McKnight. 10/21/2024
In my career one of the most formative books I read was by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. It was stunning in both is freshness (to me; I read it about 25 years after publication) and its impact. Ever since I have been attuned, not an expert though, to sociology and social scientific studies. Reading on these themes are a hobby.
Which is why Samuel Perry’s newest book, Religion for Realists, grabbed my attention when I saw it advertised. It’s subtitle tosses some shade in two directions: Why We All Need [he means both religion folks and professional sociologists, academies] the Scientific Study of Religion, which of course means we need to look at the evidence.
Instead of thinking of doctrines (and theology), worldviews, individualistic senses of agency, etc., he says, “I also want you to start thinking more in terms of unconscious bias and group loyalties than self-conscious beliefs; more about fertility rates, cohorts, and immigration than doctrines; and at least as much about social structures as about human agency.”
These are Perry’s big ideas.
What happens when we begin to think about religion with these deeper or larger or wider patterns of thinking? I remember studying conversion theory some two decades ago when I learned that conversion is what a group says it is. I thought, Hmmmm, that’s interesting. Well, it’s more than interesting. It is reality. Christian nationalism, which is everywhere in the news that I read these days, cannot be reduced to a set of beliefs. It is Groupthink and the ideas legitimate the group. Countering its ideas does not impact the group. It might impact isolated, persuadable individuals.
Perry thinks of American religion as Anglo-Protestant, and that what most mean by religion today is actually something analogous to Anglo-Protestantism. The two essentials are (1) that personal faith drives religious behavior and (2) that individual actors master the direction of life. “Yet dominant Anglo-Protestant assumptions about what motivates human beings (faith), what directs the futures of religious communities and broader societies (ideas or doctrines, often found in sacred texts), and the emphasis they place on individual agency are largely wrong. Not biblically or morally wrong…. But they are empirically wrong.” Again, he comes to the driving ideas of this book:
Hence, “We need a religion for realists.” Not by creating a new secular religion, but by comprehending the complexity of the Anglo-Protestant American sense of religion/s.
What is religion? “The scientific study of religion is the systematic, evidence- based approach to understanding these subjective and objective realities of religion with an eye toward expanding practical knowledge for humankind.”
He sketches three deep themes to his approach:
The domain of cognitive force according to the Anglo-Protestant tradition is about beliefs and personal faith, but the reality is about social identity and norms. The domain of the growth factor in the Anglo-Protestant tradition is about ideas and doctrines but the reality is about population dynamics. And the change agent according to the Anglo-Protestant tradition is individuals and obedience but the reality is a deep influence by social structures.
Here we go:
Join me in reading this important new book.
#Guest-Post
© 2024 Scot McKnight
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
GUEST-POST:Scot McKnight
#RethinkCHURCH…The Challenge of Christian Nationalism
About fifteen years ago someone drew my attention to Christian dominionism in the USA. It was some weird stuff. I admit I thought it was a fad that need not be raised to the level of a serious concern. It is (now) and I was wrong. Christian nationalism (=CN) is a very serious issue. We now have a wonderful new, accessible, practical, and accurate sketch of CN in Drew J. Strait’s book, Strange Worship: Six Steps for Challenging Christian Nationalism.
We can helpfully point at two significant pockets of Christianity in the United States:
Moral therapeutic deism
and Christian Nationalism
CN is not unique to the United States, but the version that appears in America is distinct. As he writes, “Christian complicity and nationalist loyalties that lead to violence is a global problem.” He points at Russia, Brazil, and Ethiopia – each of which has a version of CN.
45% of Americans think the USA ought to be a Christian nation; 60% of adults believe that America’s founders intended to establish a Christian nation. CN folks adhere even more to such beliefs. Dominionism attracted Francis Schaeffer, Loren Cunningham (YWAM), and Bill Bright (Cru). But Lance Wallnau turned the idea of seven spheres of influence for Christians at work in society (with Kuyper-like language) into seven mountains to conquer. Other names would be Matthew Taylor, Che Ahn, Dutch Sheets, and Eric Metaxas. Strait takes us to its most recent version, the New Apostolic Reformation, which “is a loose collection of charismatic churches where dominion theology is growing at alarming rates, and a cabal of prophets and apostles are aligning themselves with right-wing politicians to take dominion over demonic spheres of purported spiritual influence as they anticipate a third great awakening and/or the return of Jesus.” The aim is to take dominion in the USA, not by forcing conversions but by putting non-Christians in their proper place!
I’m with Strait: “the only Christian nation in the world is what the New Testament calls the ekklesia (or, ‘church’) and it is multicultural, borderless, weaponless, and the primary context for bearing witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The problem is the challenge CN offers: it’s not just an option; it’s what some think Christianity is. Many, like Strait, were discipled into versions of evangelicalism that ended up in the larger circle of Americanism. That is, “God was [during Iraq War] on America's side.” Drew pulled away from Americanistic evangelicalism in those days and found his home among the Mennonites. He learned in those days that “Christian nationalism -- and its soft and hard cultural versions -- is deadly.” Some 200,000 thousand Iraqis died in that war; many Christians saw it as a God’s war against evil.
Long ago Strait wrote a review on this Substack about the important book by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, called Taking America Back for God. That book “does not contain the latest musings on what a scholar thinks is happening; rather, it comprises a scientific, real-time analysis of what Americans believe in this moment.” For Whitehead and Perry, CN is “a cultural framework -- a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems -- that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.” Strait will define this with nuance and concreteness (below). Factors appearing in CN, according to Whitehead and Perry, include “nativism, White supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. It is as ethnic and political as it is religious.” True Americans for CN are Christians, and true (American) Christians are CN types. About 50% of Americans lean CN, in various forms, but only 16% of the most ardent of the CN crowd live in cities. CN’s ethics concern power and social hierarchy, which takes us straight into White supremacy, which Strait also discusses (relying wisely on Gorski and Perry). Religion, too, factors in and Strait records this alarming statement: “many churches in the US remain incubators for Christian nationalism.” Not that long ago Kris and I attended a church, and in the prayers for the people the echoes of CN were more than obvious. One person after another chimed in with such a worldview.
Here is Drew Strait’s helpful definition, and I know Strait has been working for a long time on this, so I take this definition seriously:
A movement where one's God-given theological imagination is hijacked by political power.
One’s identity becomes ethno-racial; the context for Christian living is politicized, but in a militarized framework; the ethic perverts the peace ethic and stance of Jesus.
Thus, CN is “strange worship” because it has a “diseased theological imagination that has been hijacked by political power.” I’m glad he brings in sin vs. Sin, with the latter as an agent, a “superorganism” and he cites Matthew Croasmun’s brilliant study, The Emergence of Sin. Strait connects Sin to CN. He’s right. Paul was doing much the same in the 1st Century with “principalities and powers.” Jemar Tisby sees CN as “an ethnocultural ideology that uses Christian symbolism to create a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control.”
This is where CN, again, becomes strange religion. In biblical terms, it becomes idolatry. In light of the recent book I wrote with Cody Matchett (Revelation for the Rest of Us), we call it “Babylon.” And, while I’m at it I might as well add to that book the recent book I wrote with Tommy Preson Phillips, Invisible Jesus. A very significant element at work in current deconstructors is the unease and rejection of CN, while attempting to form the Christian faith on a more Jesus-centered foundation.
In brief, then, Strait is making this claim: “It has transformed the nonviolent, enemy and neighbor loving, crucified Jesus into a violent white-Rambo-like god who pacifies human difference through coercion to maintain white power and privilege over marginalized persons” (33). [Over the years I learned not to put page numbers in my constant quotations from books I'm reading for this Substack because I began to see people swiping quotations from me, and that meant they were not looking up the original sources themselves. But I put this page number in so you can quote it anywhere you want.]
Buy this book in lots of a dozen and give them to those who need to read it.
#ItSeemsToMe...
The cultural sensibilities, corporate systems, and mimnistry structures of many congregations are rooted in an 18th century, Industrail age, worldview.
Which centuries later is producing local churches that are
We need visionaries who can place the worship-fellowship-discipleship-stewardship-leadership components of the Body of Christ into a non-toxic technological social context.
For the ancient-truth Gospel to flourish, we need to be ready with Spirit-led, Scripture-fed changes that relate to our society without diminishing or deconstructing the life-message-ministry of Jesus.
Phil Miglioratti
Reimagine.Network
A VERY important distinction Salvatore!
Phil