Excuse me while I deconstruct... (December 2021)

I've written a few blog posts in recent days, mainly about my religious deconstruction. They're about things I'm learning on my own about the Bible and faith through a lot of reading and research. I'm looking at it now from a lot more angles than just the one I learned growing up. There's a lot to take apart, so I can figure out what parts actually fit for me.

I'm still trying to collect my thoughts, and my written thoughts probably help me more than they might help someone else at the moment. There's a lot of information--historical, anecdotal, and experiential, I'm sifting through. And there's much to take in and much to discard. I'm trying to figure out which of my many experiences were real and which were due to suggestion or part of wanting to belong. 

I'm going through all the biblical stories and personalities I was told were totally real and true, the ones that they teach little kids as the basics of the Christian faith, and studying many different texts and different researchers who have varying viewpoints. I'm looking at the timelines of when the books of the Bible were written and the supposed authors (greatly debated by scholars, by the way). It's hard not to notice that even the Gospels were written as what I heard someone call "a holy game of 'Telephone'"--information passed orally for many decades, then written down, translated, and compiled by various people with their own cultural, personal, and religious biases. (This is one of the many reasons I do not believe in biblical literalism or inerrancy.)

I have issues with the God of the Bible who was, on one hand, okay with rape, genocide, slavery, etc. and, on the other hand called "kind, loving and forgiving." I have issues with the fact that two people could have decided the fate of everyone in the world for millions of years to come. What about those who never hear about God? What happens to them? If God would send them to hell (another concept I now have trouble with), I'm not sure how I feel about that. I am reviewing a lot of questions I never had the courage to address, even though those questions were always in my head and heart. 

People who want to scare you out of deconstructing or really examining your faith closely like to say that you never truly had a Christian experience if you find yourself deeply questioning these things. But that's straight up BS. I was all in. And God, church, and my faith were the center of my life. I'm now trying to figure out where I fit into God and where God fits into me.

A couple of years ago, the realization hit me that almost all of the big decisions I made in my life were centered around acting out my faith and doing the "right" things--the things that looked most like God's will, even if my gut was telling me to think about what I was doing. You might say, "What's wrong with that?" Well, now that I'm taking all of that apart, I don't know that I ever really chose anything myself. I wanted approval from God and from the people around me because I was young, impressionable, and influenced by everyone but myself. That's a hard thing to realize, and it makes me feel bad that I never trusted my gut and the doubts I had along the way. But I didn't. And there's a lot to unpack there. I can't even begin to cover those in this format yet, either.

Though I'm finding myself still in the stage where I don't want to offend anyone or crap on anyone else's faith, I am also finding that I have become more and more offended by some of the beliefs I held on to as truths. (I may get past that fear of offending in my head at some point, who knows?) But some of those "truths" never sat well with me. And I'm finding it increasingly more difficult to accept them, the more I take things apart and examine them. I have found myself getting more and more frustrated inside. 

On top of all of this, I have gotten so incredibly frustrated about some of the things I have observed in white evangelicalism over my lifetime:

• the treatment of women as secondary (including complementarian doctrine)
• the push for white evangelical political power by promoting the fear that we could lose our religious "freedoms" (white, American Christians are the least persecuted people in the world)
• the misogyny and controlling nature behind purity culture, and the sexualizing of young girls
• dismissal of people's very real religious trauma and questions
• opposing viewpoints being seen as rebellion or heresy, even if there's no actual proof behind some of the stories or concepts being examined
• defending the Bible as truth using scriptures from the Bible...that's not how that works
• Mild Christian inconvenience being seen as persecution of Christians and the church (pssst...white, North American evangelicals are among the least persecuted people groups in the entire world)
• fear mongering--and sometimes outright arrogant venom--being spewed about immigrants, liberals, and LGBTQ+ (and that's just to name a few things)
• the false concept of biblical inerrancy 
• the exploitation of people who just want to serve God and their fellow man

I didn't, and still don't, want to be offensive or throw anyone under the bus, but I'm finding it so difficult to handle the frustration I feel rising up in me.

People want to assume that when you are going through a faith deconstruction, you are doing so from inside the confines of whichever religion you are deconstructing--that you will just circle back around to where you were because...well, why wouldn't you? You're inside those confines, why leave them? They're safe and you don't have to risk or begin to think for yourself. 

The assumption is that you won't step outside the walls and look at the structure itself. That's what the philosoper, Slavoj Zizek, calls "formal freedom"--when we make choices only within a given system or ideology. But what I'm looking for is "actual freedom." That is the questioning of the structure itself that grants me formal freedom. Questioning and examining undermines the power that the structure itself has over me, and I'm beginning to see that's a good thing.

David Hayward, a former Vineyard pastor, popular deconstructionist writer, and cartoonist, says, "The short leash lets us live with permission to make choices within the system without upsetting it. We think that a longer leash gives us more freedom, but it doesn't. It still keeps us operating under the tolerance of the system and those with power within it...Freedom isn't a longer leash." You have to undermine the power of the structure itself in order to find your own faith, if you find it at all. You don't have to believe everything about the majority-approved religion in order to live in a "godly" way.

Part 2 - What Happened Next (June 2021)

Keeping my history from the previous post in mind, let's fast-forward a decade or so...

I graduated from a fairly strict Christian liberal arts university in the late 90s. Attendance included accepting a curfew, a dress code, required daily chapel, no dancing, and, obviously, no partying. It was a situation where, just as you're supposed to be learning to be an adult, you weren't treated as one. 

As many evangelical kids do, I got married young, about a year after I graduated from college. While I was lucky enough to marry a really good man, I married into a pastoral life. He was already working at a megachurch in another country, and because the chaos and unpredictable nature of ministry was probably familiar and comforting in some way, I didn't think twice about moving there and joining him. I felt I knew what to expect from a life of ministry, even if it wasn't necessarily what I was called to for myself. 

Almost from Day 1, I understood pretty quickly that I didn't fit the mold of a traditional pastor's wife, most especially in a megachurch setting. It became more and more difficult for me to assimilate and pretend to agree with ideas I didn't agree with--or, honestly, even see as biblical. It was harder every day to smile and say I was okay and look like I had it all together. I was dying on the inside because I didn't feel like I could get behind the desire for exponential church growth (why, though?), the prosperity gospel, or the disregard for the mental/emotional health of the staff--the ones who are charged with caring for the hearts of other people, day in and day out.

Because I crave natural quality time and connection, early on in our time there, I tried to get a fun group going. I saw a need for connection amongst the pastoral staff. I planned a couple of nights where we, the pastors, could all just hang out outside of the church setting and get to know each other as real people. That idea lasted one or two times. Most were too busy or didn't see the value in it. Life behind the sparkly, smoke machined, well-lit megachurch curtain was not easy to get used to, especially for someone who loved true connection.

More than once, other people in leadership made remarks to my husband (and even to my parents when they visited the church) about me and how I wasn't fitting into the vision. There were even comments about how my younger brother would be a better choice for the position, like they would have preferred the chance to switch me out and get him. Someone was even assigned to "handle" me, under the guise of mentorship and wanting to know the real me. If it weren't for the handful of people I truly connected with over my time there, and who truly loved me for the me that they saw, I think I would have fully withered on the inside. They are still wonderful friends to this day.

All the while, because I couldn't reconcile some of the things I was seeing with what I felt was what God intended church to be, I slid deeper and deeper into depression. The constantly disgruntled and underappreciated church staff would never have said anything to the head pastors about the issues they saw. We were young adults pastors to a group of young people who had come out of a youth group that had a constant rotation of new youth leaders in and out--they were burned out and didn't trust us. There was a roped-off VIP section at the front of the church during major meetings with security around the guest speakers. There was basically a club for ministers who came to the conferences, and the ones who were generally the biggest in size and donated the most money were considered top tier. There was always the long, drawn-out pre-offering guilt trip reminder that if you give to God (ie. the church), you would get blessings back--also sometimes referred to as "heaven's economy" (aka. prosperity gospel). I also felt there was exploitation of volunteers who came from all over the world to donate their valuable time to the ministry. 

I felt stuck, and I just didn't fit anywhere. I was very lonely. In the middle of all of this, two of my grandparents died. I didn't know the city we lived in very well, so I was nervous to go too many places by myself. I was in another country, so it already didn't feel like home. I was away from my friends and family and all the people I had felt spiritually and emotionally connected to. 9/11 happened and I felt so far away from my home country, even though I was only an hour and a half from the border. When I had my first child, I was quickly in the throes of postpartum depression and anxiety before it started being a regular part of the pregnancy and birth discourse.