Unlearning/Deconstruction

this is what faith does and has always done

I was a churchgoer long before I started following Jesus.

And when I started following Jesus, it was largely a journey of unlearning.

Unlearning is built into being followers of Jesus. People who follow Jesus are holding a belief (among many beliefs) that the reality you see with your eyes is not the reality described by the Bible or by Christian tradition. In the gospels, Jesus can be overheard saying some version of, “You have heard that it was said…but I tell you…”. That’s a clear invitation to unlearn some things. The Protestant tradition and its Latin appeal to semper reformanda demands unlearning to faithfully follow Jesus. Religious education in the Church not only offers to teach us a narrative but it intends, by design, to correct the mistaken narratives we have accumulated by osmosis and by instruction.

When I read and listen to those who are critical of deconstruction, they tend to fall into two groups. First are those who are all for deconstruction if you are not already on the same page they are on. They say in other writing and speaking, sort out your mistaken beliefs and replace them with orthodox beliefs. But, and this is the tricky bit, don’t deconstruct so far that you’re no longer on the same page that I/we are on.

The second group, the group for whom I feel the greatest sympathy, are those who have watched people they love go through a deconstruction that has left them with a peeled onion, a pile of discarded layers but no core. Often these are people who they have loved, been close to and have probably gone to their church or to church with them and the relationship has become a casualty of their deconstruction along with the faith practices they once followed.

It has been well documented that an ongoing problem with ‘deconstruction’ is that there isn’t a definition that people on both sides of that word can agree on.

Back in the “olden days” when I first became a follower of Jesus and ran off to Bible College, we used the expression, “backslidden” or the personal, “backslider.” These expressions were meant to designate a person who, having started following Jesus, had returned to their previous way of living without Jesus. You could be “sliding,” in which case we might still be able to intervene and save you from your slippery slope, or you might be “slidden” which generally meant you were the kind of person we needed to avoid so we didn’t get infected ourselves. Deconstruction, on the other hand, can mean a person, once having been taught things about Christian theology and the Bible, through their own study, education and interaction with other followers of Jesus, has set aside things they once believed to be true and adopted a new set of “alternative facts.”

Complicating the conversation is the ever-growing awareness that abuse, exploitation and trafficking has happened throughout church history but especially and perhaps exponentially, in this present moment of the Church in North America. When a person has been sexually abused and exploited by a leader in the Church and then that same person is betrayed by the Church working harder to cover up the abuse than seeking justice for the survivor, we’ve given them a legitimate reason to not only deconstruct but to set fire to the whole system.

Or as Jesus said it, “But if you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

When I meet someone new out in the wild and they find out what I do, I always feel the need to explain to people now that while I am a Christian, I’m not THAT kind of Christian. Rather than use the word “Christian” to describe myself (of course many would say I’m not qualified anyway), I prefer to tell people I try to follow Jesus because it’s become very common to confuse “Christian” with “Christian Nationalist,” especially with examples of Christian leaders proudly calling themselves Christian Nationalists.

Recently I heard someone talking about the increase of young people, especially young men, attending evangelical churches for the first time. Their observation was that these young men had come to hold popular political, social and nationalist beliefs and were joining churches for the first time because they found their beliefs being espoused by these religious institutions.

Our present reality is that in North America, political powers have become so enmeshed with our evangelical religious institutions that people who have been raised on the values of Jesus feel like deconstruction is the only faithful way forward. They are not trying to justify a sin or exit life together, but they’ve come to believe that the abuse of power, the kleptocracies of high-profile pastors, and nationalistic tendencies create toxic environments that threaten human flourishing.

My preference for labeling all of this is, “unlearning.”

When I first started following Jesus, it was in a context of unlearning all the things I knew about Jesus. I had a friend in high school who followed Jesus. I thought I was following Jesus too. But comparing our lives side by side, one of us had clearly missed the plot. So I sat down and read the four gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - to prove she was missing the point. You can guess what I discovered.

The whole rest of my life, over four decades now, has been spent unlearning and learning and unlearning and learning and unlearning and…you get my point.

I spent the first five years after Bible college reading scholarly books by evangelical authors outside of the church bubble I had come to reside in. I had time to explore the differences between the beliefs people held in the church movement I was a part of and those in other evangelical churches, evangelical writers and theologians. I read more church history and took time to learn more than I needed to pass a test. I sat and listened, over coffee and around tables, to the stories of other people following Jesus and noted the diversity in our stories, our beliefs and our practices – as well as their examples of faithfulness.

One of the things that probably messed me up was that I started following Jesus as part of a movement that started deconstruction back in the early 1800s. Tired of the division within the Church in their day, they sought to create a unity movement by believing and living what the Bible said and only what the Bible said. They deconstructed the faith and practices of their day.

Early on, they talked about the sacrament of baptism and what to do about infant baptism when the Bible “clearly” taught adult baptism by immersion. One of the men gathered to form this new movement considered this a step too far. “I never thought I would see the day,” he said, “when we would neglect the neglect the scripture that says, “suffer the little children to come unto me.” And he walked out of their meeting and their movement. One of the other leaders asked those still in the room, “Who will volunteer to go and explain to our brother that that passage has nothing to do with baptism?”

It was a movement of churches that was entirely based on deconstruction.

On unlearning.

On setting aside notions and ideas for a more Jesusy reading or understanding was presented to them.

The sad reality is that this “unity movement” couldn’t keep from dividing and dividing and dividing as various factions sought to be more doctrinally pure. Any attempt to create unity out of doctrinal purity is bound to go this way. We never live by what the Bible says, we always live by the interpretation of the Bible held by the most powerful person or group of people among us. Once you see that, unlearning and deconstruction become inevitable. Even if the Bible were infallible and inerrant, what we live with and live by are the interpretations of the text by men and sometimes women who are all more or less (but mostly more) imperfect in their reason and interpretation.

So let’s come back to this. We all deconstruct. We just prefer you not deconstruct beyond the boundaries we who have power to set boundaries prefer you not deconstruct. Unlearn but don’t question the things we’ve placed in the pile of certain things over here. Be academically rigorous as long as your conclusions agree with our convictions.

A little bit of church history might be helpful in exposing us to the hundreds and hundreds of years in which “orthodox” didn’t look like us or sound like us or do things the way we do things. A little church history might help us recognize the countless ways in which we are where we are today become individuals and groups were willing to unlearn, to deconstruct and follow Jesus in a way that the institutional Church of their time and place called “heretical” and sought to punish or discipline those who led or followed them down their “slippery slope.”