How do you start deconstructing your faith?

Recently, the Naked Pastor David Hayward did a great Instagram series of answering questions about deconstruction. One of the questions was “how to you start deconstructing your faith?” and I loved his answer. “YOU don’t.” As Thomas Merton explains, “It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God who chooses to awaken us.”

Most of the people I’ve come across who have gone through this experience agree that they didn’t choose it. It felt more like something that happened to them rather than anything they eagerly sought out. Especially if you’re coming from an evangelical background with fierce roots, you’re more likely to fight the doubts and questions for decades than turn and give them the time of day. Confronting your beliefs is terrifying. And if your physical security and safety or income or family are all tied up with a community of faith, leaving can invite disruption of epic proportions. It might feel like you’re not just losing your faith but you are losing everything. Since discovering others in this deconstructing community, I’ve seen people talk about being called into this chaos in the middle of their ministry, in seminary, as a pastor, as a preacher’s kid, as a youth group leader… Jen Hatmaker was famously called out while involved in a huge women’s ministry… Glennon Doyle experienced it after having massive popularity as a christian author… Rob Bell eventually broke his silence and the response from conservative christian leaders nearly broke the internet. I was in the middle of writing a christian-living book about finding freedom from the shame of abortion when I felt the shove into deconstruction.

Deconstruction seems to happen in the same manner that Jesus called the first disciples. There they are, on the shore, minding their own business, just doing their thing, living their life, earning money, being decent people, showing up, following their religion, and then Jesus comes on the scene.

“Hey you!”

“uh, yeah?”

“Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men!”

Sorry… WHAT?

What are you talking about? Why should I follow you? What are you doing? What about my nets? What about our boat? What about our families who are relying on us to bring them food every day? What about the fact that I wanted to be a fisherman my whole life?! Why would I leave this comfortable, normal job, that I’ve been doing for years, to go hang out with you and do… what – fish for MEN??? What is your problem, Jesus? Why are you bothering us? Just let me live my life.

“At once they left their nets and followed Him.”

Well. That certainly didn’t go the way I thought it would. Ha! But that seems to sort of be the way deconstruction starts. You sense the call and then curiosity or anger or fear or discontentment or trauma or an urgent need for a new experience (or simply the non-negotiable command) overwhelms you and you turn into the storm and say “ok, let’s do this.”

Last year, I was finally doing the thing I had been wanting to do for years – writing a book. I finally felt I had something to say. I was aligned with my God-given gifts and purpose {or so I thought} and I could see a new path laid out before me as I fought to get the thoughts of my heart onto the page. And then this voice said, “Is everything you’re writing true?” And, to be honest, I thought it was Satan. I thought that it was spiritual warfare. The question asked seemed to zero-in on every doubt I’d had over the last decade. The words spoke into being the fears inside of me. Is everything I was believing, all this God and Jesus stuff, and redemption and resurrection and salvation… was it true?

*I* thought it was Satan. I had never experienced such instant spiritual turmoil in my life. Immediately, my identity felt flipped on its head. I was a wreck. Christmas was approaching and I didn’t care. I had no joy. I cried a lot. I yelled at my kids. I was seething with anger and confusion and grief. I tried to explain to my atheist husband that the person I had been for the past thirty years had died overnight. I was fiercely afraid of myself, of the person I would be without the niceties of religion to keep me in check. Could I still be a good mom without my faith telling me how to live? Could I still be a good wife if I tossed the Biblical commands out the window? Would I still have any friends if I no longer believed the same way they did? Would the God I’d been worshipping for over half my life turn his back on me? (Even though I no longer believed he existed.) Was I now one of those back-sliders or false teachers I’d been warned against for so long? Who would I be if I wasn’t a christian?

No one is ever prepared for deconstruction and there is no formula for this. Some people might even wish that deconstruction had never happened to them. This experience, for me, so far, has been incredibly lonely and hard. At this point, nearly a year into it, I am thankful to finally be at peace with most of my doubts and to have found a safe place to ask my questions. But I still look at other friends who remain content and happy in their faith and I am jealous. I wanted it to be that easy for me. For so long, I thought I’d be part of that community – one of those moms who took her kids to VBS and led bible studies and knew all the pastors and was a key player in the life of the church. As I was working on my book, I dreamed about a ministry where I spoke hope and life into the hearts of other women who had chosen abortion in the past. This place of deconstruction doesn’t lend itself to those things very easily. When you’re not sure what you believe, it’s hard to talk about it. When you don’t know what to call “God” anymore, it’s hard to wax poetic about salvation. There are a lot of people, though, who seem to be on the other side of deconstruction who are forging a path through the wilderness. That’s why I’m reading all these books and trying to find new blogs and Instagram accounts to follow. I want to know how they did it. I want to know how they finally got their feet on solid ground again. But I know that they’ll tell me it wasn’t their doing. That you just sort of have to keep stumbling through the dark until one day, a door opens and you are blinded by the light and things start to make sense without making any sense at all, and you lean into it and accept that the light is there but it means you really can’t see anything else. All I keep reading about is getting comfortable being uncomfortable, and knowing with certainty that you won’t feel certain about anything. Sounds great.

I will say this, though. I do feel better here in this strange in-between place than I did when I was fighting against my doubts and swallowing my questions. I am more free, more relaxed, more peaceful in this not-knowing than I ever was when I sat in bible studies and church pews wondering whether I was the only one burning up with questions.

Deconstruction is a weird thing because it can take you decades or days to go through it. A friend told me that the average length of deconstruction was something like 5 years. And that’s AFTER you become aware of the process. The more you ignore what’s going on, the longer it takes. But I think for those of us who found our identity in our faith, you really really really don’t want to let that go. I mean, at the same time that I was doubting the historical Jesus, I was lifting my hands in prayer during small group. At the same time I was searching the truth of Old Testament stories, I was singing and crying and praying out loud at a Hillsong concert. At the same time I was cringing as I read the Bible to my kids, I was writing on this blog about God’s love and the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. I was fighting and fighting my doubts. Stuffing them down, hopeful that no one would look too close, no one would notice, not even me. Maybe if I stopped giving them attention they would just go away. They didn’t, of course, but I thought I had successfully buried them so deep no one could get to them. Ha. Don’t make the same mistake I did. If you are feeling those nudges in your soul, feeling those doubts poking around and asking hard questions, don’t ignore it. Lean into them, get curious. Don’t be afraid. What you think is Satan may actually be God (how scary a thought is that!?) What you see as being a curse may actually be an invitation.