What Happened to My Deconstruction?

In my last post I started with the observation that, while much of my personal "faith journey" maps well onto a common faith deconstruction narrative, I haven't actually experienced a deconstruction—at least not it the way that experience is usually discussed. I offered (got sidetracked by) a short analysis of the difference between a modernist and a premodern approach to understanding reality and indicated that my tendency towards premodernism might account for my lack of a typical deconstruction experience.

In this post I want to pick up that thread and give a few more reflections on how my tendency towards a premodern understanding of reality let to my having a different experience with regard to deconstruction. The really short version is that I never had a deconstruction because I am always deconstructing and always reconstructing. But explaining what I mean by that might take a few more paragraphs.

I have mentioned that I was raised in a fairly typically conservative US Evangelical household. My parents helped to found a non-denominational Protestant church, I spent time both being home-schooled (using a really conservative curriculum) and at a private Christian school. But there is one, really important way in which my experience growing up was non-typical for conservative US Evangelicalism of the late 20th century and it has everything to do with my parents.

My parents are politically heterogeneous as people. Where my Dad has a generally conservative approach to life; my Mom is has a pretty liberal* approach. Further, I would say that both of them are bad fits for those terms. My Dad's conservatism is nuanced by deep wells of reflection and a phenomenal appreciation for the stories of other people. Where the typically conservative response to unfamiliar stories is one of fear, anger, or rejection, Dad has always responded to new stories and data with interest, excitement and attempts to generate new models and theories about the world. In a parallel way, my Mom's liberalism is nuanced by razor sharp critical thinking and a strong empathy for those who found beauty and security in tradition and the past. At least—and this is what determined my experience—that is how I thought about them growing up. I should note that while these general tendencies did map onto their respective politics and theology to a significant degree I am speaking more here of their approaches to life in general than to any particular policies or beliefs they espoused.

I don't think, though, that simple constitutional heterogeneity accounts for everything that I ascribe to the way I was raised. My parents didn't only have different approaches to life, politics, and theology, they were cheerfully open about them. My home was one where finding the right answers was important but so was thinking about the question. Until I was in Bible College, I assumed that every church going family spent time after church discussing the sermon—disagreeing with some parts and agreeing with others. I always knew that my parents had different politics; and while I was somewhat more inclined towards my Dad's, I understood that these things were debatable and that there was value in having the debate.

On top of this, I grew up as a third-culture kid. My family moved to Turkey when I was seven and I stayed there through the end of high school. Due to the many cultural differences between Turkey and

Turkey photo by Samuel Giacomelli at Unsplash

the US, and thanks to my parents' and Grandmother's deep enjoyment of cultural diversity and exploration, I ended up with a pretty well developed understanding of the fact that the world is a complicated place, that lots of people have strengths and some weaknesses in the way they do things and the way they go about understanding the reality of their world, and that it is unlikely that anybody has things "just right". The conservative part of my makeup had (and still has) me convinced that it is almost always worth supporting the model of truth I found most compelling at a given point, while the liberal part of my makeup (one which was the weakest in me while I was in high school) reminded me that that I still had plenty to explore and learn.

The net effect of all of this was that when I went off to Bible college seeking to find all of the final answers to all of my questions, I went with a really robust understanding of what that would entail and a still (somewhat) flexible understanding of what reality might turn out to consist in. That said, I went to Bible college with the full expectation that I would find proofs and demonstrations which would allow me to concretize a final model of the world. I genuinely believed that the answers (and logically unassailable proofs of those answers) to all my questions were going to be found during my time in undergrad. And it seems likely to me that, were I going to have a deconstruction experience, mine would have started there. What I realized slowly over four years as an undergraduate was that, we still don't have final answers to "life the universe and everything"—we are still building our models of reality even while we are living in the world.

There were other factors too. I have been a fan of fantasy, fairy tales, and mythology since I have been reading and, in many ways, those genre are themselves an immersion into a pre-modern approach to the world. I also discovered philosophy during my last year of high school and focused heavily on that subject in college as a part of my attempt to finally "get the True answers". Most vitally I had a series of experiences which began to center my experience of Christianity more on a relationship with the person of Jesus and less on the lists of things people believe about Jesus. (I have written about that aspect of my thinking HERE)

None of that is to say that I "abandoned my faith" or even made a particularly significant change in the tenets of my belief structures while I was in college—I didn't. What I do think happened though is a sort of final shift in my overall approach to understanding reality. The experience of finding more questions than answers in college shifted me, or maybe just finally determined my psychological development, away from a modernist approach to a pre-modern approach to understanding reality. On a strictly historical level, it was over the ten or so years most directly after Bible college that my theological shift from functionally conservative white Evangelical to functionally progressive Christianity took place. But I am pretty convinced that it was the experiences which I have outlined hear which allowed that theological transition to happen in the way that it did—that is to say, that prevented me from experiencing a deconstruction in the way that it seems to typically occur.

By the time I really began taking out and examining or questioning those tenets of my faith and of reality itself, my understanding of reality had shifted from the strong-yet-brittle modernist "wall" to the more complex, less easily defined, and less thoroughly interdependent pre-modern symphony or dance. If a piece (a tenet) was discarded (as my original beliefs in gender complimentarity, LGBTQ+ exclusion, young earth creationism, Biblical literalism and others were) the total edifice did not shatter. It was affected, certainly. Each piece I removed had played a role in constructing the whole, each piece resonated with many other pieces. The whole, therefore went through a process of "re-tuning and re-orientation" each time something was removed. The ideas, beliefs, facts, convictions, and tenets I replaced them then necessitate further re-tuning—both of the idea itself, and of the edifice as a whole. But far from experiencing this as a crisis, I find great fun and even joy in it. When I discover that I now think a new thing to be true, I am thereby promised the opportunity to work through the rest of my beliefs, ideas, opinions, etc... and to find out how they are influenced by this new idea, and how they influence it in turn. Sometimes I will try ideas out, just to see what impact they will have on the edifice and what impact it will have on them.

I wish that I could end this with a recommendation for how one could choose to experience deconstruction in a modernist or premodern way—I suspect that mine has been slower than the modern one but that it has also been far gentler—but I don't have any certain prescription for how that might be accomplished. Modernist Christianity has gone to great lengths to wall out the whole philosophical tradition (postmodernism) which was built as a critique of modernism and as a result, most Evangelicals will probably experience a softening towards postmodern critiques of modernism as a de facto deconstruction in any case. There may be a back-door if an Evangelical were to start reading as much as they can of the Christian mystics, of the Inklings (try Lewis' essays, Tolkiens Silmarilion and On Fairy Stories, Barfield's Poetic Diction, Sayers' Mind of the Maker, Willaim's The Descent of the Dove) Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and MacDonalds At the Back of the North Wind and other premodern thinkers with an open mind and without merely trying to mine them form apologetics or for aids in evangelism, but I am not entirely sure whether that will work. The simultaneous strength and brittleness of Modernism require both great power and great gentleness to undo it without shattering it. I suspect that in most cases the shattering may well be inevitable. And maybe that is another reason that community is needed. We need to be there to help pick up one another's pieces—maybe even to keep a few safe for a time while our friends are rebuilding their world. If it is a good piece they will find a place for it in due time.

Footnotes:

*I use the terms liberal and conservative throughout this piece in a horrendously oversimplified way but I haven't worked out a way to get around that in a blog post. Maybe someday I can write a book and luxuriate in the nuance and complexity that medium affords. In the meantime, by liberal here I am using the loose political definition of "an outlook which tends to welcome change and improvement" whereas conservative "indicates an appreciation for tradition and stability with an attendant skepticism towards change".