I just read the worst article I’ve read all year.
I found it head-shakingly patronizing, simplistic, and insulting to anyone who has ever had reasonable doubts about their Christian faith — which, let’s be honest, is most people.
It’s an article entitled “4 Causes of Deconstruction” written by a pastor named Joshua Ryan Butler of Redemption Church in Tempe, Arizona. In it, he attempts to explain why people start down the path of faith deconstruction and how to turn them around and get them back onto the straight-and-narrow of orthodox Christian belief.
It made me choke on my coffee.
I wish he would retitle his article to more accurately reflect the content. Perhaps a more appropriate heading could be: “An Introduction to Faith Deconstruction from Someone Who Knows Nothing About Faith Deconstruction.”
What is faith deconstruction?
In her book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, Rachel Held Evans defines faith deconstruction as taking a “massive inventory of your faith, tearing every doctrine from the cupboard and turning each one over in your hand.” The point of faith deconstruction is to break down every idea, practice, belief, and tradition of a religious system into tiny pieces and then examine each fragment one by one to determine the truthfulness and usefulness of each part. In the end, the goal is to piece it all back together minus that which is peripheral, burdensome, and distorted.
The risk, of course, is that one can deconstruct their faith out of existence altogether. Some people do. It is a scary place to go — to lay everything you once held true on the table of reasonableness for testing. However, those who do the journey well usually end up with a much deeper and stronger faith because, well… they’ve actually checked it all out for themselves rather than mindlessly believing everything they’ve been told by some so-called expert who happens to grace the pulpit on a Sunday morning.
Some of those who stand to lose the most from people exercising their own intellect when it comes to Christian faith — certain Christian pastors, for example — are terribly frightened of people deconstructing their faith. After all, if people discover God for themselves, then what is a pastor left to do?
And so, some pastors discourage faith deconstruction. They say it’s dangerous. Toxic. A slippery slope into unbelief. Joshua Ryan Butler is one of those pastors… or so it seems. And that is why he wrote “4 Causes of Deconstruction.”
And it stinks. Let me explain why:
Doubt is an illness
Butler kicks off his article with this:
Deconstruction is a symptom, not the root cause.
A proper diagnosis is important because — to continue the medical analogy — each underlying condition has a different cure.
Notice that straight up, Butler starts by comparing faith deconstruction to a disease. His use of medical terms like “symptom, diagnosis,” and “cure” is no accident. Butler is making it clear that he believes that people with doubts are spiritually unwell.
And by making deconstruction sound like an illness, he is simultaneously using fear as a way to ensure that people suppress their reasonable doubts. After all, you don’t want to get sick, right? Better to never closely examine those questionable doctrines than to get spiritually sick.
And by labeling those with doubts as “sick,” he also demonizes them too. If someone has a virus — say COVID-19, for example — you would stay right away from them. If you had to come near them, you would cover your body with PPE to protect yourself from the possibility of infection.
Personally, I think that a person who lays their religion down on the table, breaks it all into tiny pieces, and then forensically examines each piece to test its truthfulness and usefulness is actually a prudent and wise person. In fact, I think faith cannot be trusted until it has been tested.
But not Butler.
Butler believes that those who pull apart the doctrines and faith tenets that they’ve been taught to believe without questioning are unhealthy. In fact, according to Butler, deconstruction is nothing more than the symptom of a spiritual illness, and guess what?
He has the cure.
I’m an expert
Butler qualifies his right to speak on the topic of deconstruction by saying, “I’ve walked as a pastor with many wrestling with deconstruction. While not exhaustive, these are the four most common root causes I’ve seen.”
In other words, he is saying, “I’ve never experienced this for myself, but trust me. I’m an expert because I know a few people who’ve been through this.”
And then, he lists the four causes of deconstruction. With a breathtaking level of condescension, he makes out those who deconstruct their faith as unforgiving, uneducated, unrepentant sinners who just want to be loved by the world. Here are Butler’s four causes of faith deconstruction and why I think he completely misses the mark.
Image by DedMityay on iStock
Reason 1: Church hurt
Butler says, “Many who deconstruct have been wounded by abusive or manipulative church leaders or generally unhealthy church cultures.”
No kidding.
On this, we can agree.
And when you realize that you have been shamed, manipulated, wounded, and abused by people who are supposed to represent a loving God, it would seem sensible and reasonable to question whether the whole thing is a great big sham. And that questioning may involve separating from the church for a time, or even permanently.
Butler’s solution is somewhat different.
Butler says, “The solution to bad community isn’t abandoning community; it’s good community.”
Here is where my view diverges from Butler’s. Would you encourage a victim of abuse to stick with their abuser and try to work things out, especially if the abuser was laying the blame solely at the victim’s feet? Of course not.
Butler is yet another church leader who fails to recognize the very real emotional, spiritual, and psychological damage that spiritually abusive environments and people can inflict on an unsuspecting victim. It also dismisses the very real systemic issues that are endemic in the church, that enable spiritual abuse to occur.
Butler’s solution to “stick it out” in the church community is simplistic and trite and amounts to nothing more than “Give it all to God.” Butler says, “You don’t need to ignore the church’s problems to protect its reputation. Instead, bring the problems boldly to God.”
But really, if all I ever do is bring the church’s problems to God, isn’t that the same thing as keeping it to myself? And if I only tell God about my hurt at the hands of the church, how will the church ever be brought to account for its actions? It sounds to me like Butler is saying we ought to internalize our pain and deal with it privately for the sake of “peace and harmony” within the church.
Reason 2: Poor teaching
The second thing that causes Christians to deconstruct their faith, according to Butler, is bad teaching. Yep, apparently, deconstruction only occurs amongst Christians who have been taught the wrong stuff or have been taught the right stuff badly.
If only they’d been taught the truth, they wouldn’t have caught the deconstruction illness.
Butler says, “Some Christians have been led to believe they must choose between faith and science because of poor teaching on Genesis 1. Others have been led to believe God is a vindictive sadist, from a popular caricature of hell.”
In Butler’s world, it certainly couldn’t be that some of the fundamental doctrines of evangelical Christianity actually do make God out to be a vindictive sadist. And it’s not possible that the popular caricature of hell was one of the Christian’s own making?
Could it be that the really poor teaching the church is peddling is the supposed “Good news” the church presents to the world: “You are hopelessly wicked beyond measure but don’t worry; If you believe in Jesus, he will save you from the consequences of not believing in him.”
Under this system, God ends up looking rather petty, needy, narcissistic, and easily offended. Why would anyone trust or love such a God, much less spend eternity with such a being?
I wouldn’t.
Under this system, we end up being more loving, gracious, and compassionate than our supposedly loving God.
Think about it.
Even my friends who are a little bit rough would usually give a guy a break and cut a guy some slack. They would probably overlook plenty of mistakes, and even on their worst day, would not imagine torturing people for all of eternity because those people do not like them, worship them or believe in them.
No matter how you spin that message, it’s not actually good news. Therefore, the problem is not poor teaching. It goes much deeper than that. It’s that many churches actually have poor doctrine or elevate the wrong doctrines to near ‘god-like’ status. The disproportionate focus on hell, judgment, condemnation and eternal damnation is one example.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Reason 3: The desire to sin
This one really made me mad. Yes, Butler has the gall to suggest that one of the main reasons people deconstruct is so that they can justify their own sin.
Butler says: “Deconstruction is poison, not medicine. It supplements the sin that’s killing you rather than healing it. It allows you to save face, to look virtuous in your departure from God (“He’s the problem, not me”) while distracting you from squarely facing your true motivations.”
This is about as condescending as it gets.
It makes out that the deconstructor is not really interested in finding the truth but really just wants an excuse to sin. In Butler’s universe, there’s no way that someone could simply be testing the indoctrination of their childhood. No. They must just want to go off and do something naughty like pre-marital hand-holding, drinking a beer, or enjoying life, for that matter.
Reason 4: Street cred
Finally, Butler suggests that the desire to fit in within the cultural ethos of our day and age is a key reason that people deconstruct their faith. In other words, deconstructing Christians are weak and compromising so they can fit in. They all want to be exvangelical podcasters and TikTok stars and bloggers like me, making their fortune bashing the church.
This statement really shows how much Butler has absolutely no idea what it’s like to go on the journey of deconstructing your faith.
It’s lonely.
It’s terrifying
.
It’s hard.
It’s painful.
It’s certainly not fun. If belonging to a crowd were my main concern, I would have stuck to the belonging system I knew best — the evangelical Church. I learned how to talk the talk and walk the walk in the evangelical system. I had street cred there — so much street cred. I knew the answers; I believed in the right things. I was able to puff out my chest and pat myself on the back, for being such a great Christian. I was respected in that world.
Why would I give it all up?
Maybe because at some point seeking God mattered more, and that led me away from the church system that I once felt I belonged to. To leave it behind involved grief and loss.
Those who deconstruct don’t do it for street cred. They do it because they want to know the truth for themselves and are willing to slog it out to find it.
I wonder if Butler has ever intellectually wrestled with Christianity, or maybe he just believed everything he’d been taught by someone else who never intellectually wrestled with Christianity.
Image by SIphotography on iStock
…
The problem with Butler’s list
Every single one of Butler’s “4 Causes of Deconstruction” lays blame at the feet of the deconstructor. In fact, worse than that — it shames the deconstructor.
Think about it.
Butler correctly lists “Church hurt” as a reason why people deconstruct but then berates those same people for not “sticking it out” with the people and the system that failed them.
Then Butler says bad teaching causes people to deconstruct, which is really another way of saying, “Those who deconstruct just don’t get it, or haven’t heard it correctly.” It couldn’t be that they do get it and have heard it ‘correctly’ and still think it’s complete bullshit.
Next, Butler implies that people deconstruct just so they can engage in guilt-free sin… as opposed to the kind of sin that Christians engage in, which statistics tell us is pretty much no different to the rest of the population but is done rather more privately, and is usually followed by weeping and gnashing of teeth. Yes, deconstructors are just unrepentant sinners.
Finally, Butler says that Christians deconstruct their faith so that they can fit in. In other words, anyone who deconstructs is just a lousy compromiser.
The message is clear. Butler would have us believe that those who deconstruct their faith are spiritually sick… and it’s a sickness of their own making.
But he’s wrong.
Dear Mr. Butler,
I don’t trust any “teacher” who hasn’t pulled their faith apart and examined each piece with a critical eye. And any Christian teacher who has never had serious doubts doesn’t convince me of anything. I do not trust anyone for whom belief is easy. I trust those who have wrestled with their faith and still not let go.
Deconstruction is not an illness.
It’s an invitation.
It’s an invitation to take a long and difficult journey towards a deeper, stronger, and richer faith.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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