The Light in Our Eyes

The Light in Our Eyes

1

Disillusionment, Deconstruction, and the Great Dechurching

To make our way forward is to go back in history. To recover past trauma is to awaken to the pain, and we cannot heal until we see the narratives of the past renewed by faith and hope. We cannot move forward by ignoring the past.

—Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty

Can faith be bought
in supermarkets
Like canned soup
lined up in a row?

If it is defective
may I return it?
As it is two sizes
too small.

—E R Skulmoski, “Both the Wicked and the Righteous Have a Midlife Crisis”

You probably know this by now, and if you don’t, it’s time: The American evangelical church is facing the largest mass exodus ever recorded. It would not be an exaggeration to say that tens of millions of people have left the church over the past decade. You might be one of them.

In their book The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham observe,

More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined. Adding to the alarm is the fact that this phenomenon has rapidly increased since the mid-1990s.

Those who’ve dechurched often call their experience “deconstruction.” The term has grown in popularity thanks to trending exvangelical social media influencers like Joshua Harris, Abraham Piper, and Rhett and Link. But deconstruction is often a slippery term to define. Is everyone who has dechurched also deconstructed? Is everyone who is deconstructing also dechurching? Is there such a thing as “good deconstruction”? Hip-hop artist Lecrae has suggested that, yes, deconstruction can be a good thing:

Many don’t realize there have been healthy Deconstructions throughout history. . . . There are generations of believers who have been thru this and we can learn from them versus destroying our life and faith trying to figure it out alone. . . . Many movements from the reformation to the civil rights movement involved deconstruction using scripture and then reconstruction. I offer this as an encouragement to those struggling. My faith is stronger than ever. I’ve been there and healing is possible.

Others like Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett have taken issue with this, saying, “Faith deconstruction is a postmodern process of rethinking your faith without regarding Scripture as a standard,” so faithful Christians should not use this term to describe healthy spiritual growth. But is the characterization of deconstruction as a full-throated rejection of Scripture fair or accurate? That may be true of the loudest online voices of the deconstruction movement. But Davis and Graham observe that, on the whole, the dechurched tend not to be critical of orthodoxy:

Dechurched evangelicals are still largely orthodox in their faith. When it comes to our primary doctrines, 68 percent of those we surveyed still believe in the Trinity, 64 percent believe in the divinity of Jesus, 65 percent believe Jesus’ death on the cross paid the penalty for the sins of those who believe in him, 67 percent believe in the resurrection, 62 percent believe that Jesus is the only way to God, and 61 percent believe the Bible is a reliable document for all matters of faith and practice.

This would strongly suggest that the term deconstruction is not a one-size-fits-all description. In my experience, folks mean at least four separate—but related—things when they use the term deconstructing to describe themselves. That’s why a better approach would be to see deconstruction as a spectrum of postures.