Brad lays out the case as to why the REvangelical movement coming from The Gospel Coalition and other voices in the Evangelical universe should not be considered deconstruction.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion, Skidmore College, and today I want to do a special episode to talk about deconstruction and this idea of re-evangelical that continues to pop up in various corners of the evangelical universe.
Some of you might have seen me on social media recently.
I was pretty fired up about this stuff the other day.
I promised I'd share some thoughts, so I'm going to do that.
I'm not going to lie.
It is a crazy busy week.
And there's just so much going on.
So I would have loved to have spent a whole day just organizing my thoughts, outlining things and being able to kind of present my case here with an airtight, cogent approach.
But that's not possible, honestly, just because there's a million things going on.
But this is too important to talk about.
So I'm going to do my best and lay out some of my thoughts.
So I want to first start talking about deconstruction.
As many of you know, deconstruction is a very open-ended word, and it refers to the process of one deconstructing their worldview, specifically in the context of a fundamentalist religion, and sort of reconsidering every aspect of their faith, their spirituality, their social commitments, their political commitments, their culture, and so on and so forth.
There are so many great folks who talk about what deconstruction is and how the process works.
And that includes so many people that I've come into contact with who have helped me understand these things.
And those people are Blake Chastain and Chrissy Stroop.
They're Tori Douglas.
They're Mason Meninga.
They're Justin Gentry.
They are Joe Luman.
They are Linda K. Kline.
Laura and the folks working at the Religious Trauma Institute and so on and so forth.
There's just a lot of great voices out there.
Nothing I'm going to say today do I want to indicate that I have some sort of monopoly on what deconstruction is or that I have a definition and that everyone else sort of needs to listen to what I'm saying on the issue.
This is one contribution to an ongoing conversation, one that should never have a kind of definitive end.
Or a zip tied kind of definition.
So I want to put that out there to start.
I do want to say though that I'm going to venture force a thesis about what deconstruction is not.
And I'm open to folks weighing in on this and people maybe expanding or helping me understand some blind spots in this.
But I do I do think this is important.
So let me give you a thesis.
OK.
Deconstruction is not realignment.
Deconstruction is not a Equivalent of renovating your bathroom and kitchen and coming back a week or two weeks later to your home and thinking, oh, look, it's different.
When you renovate your bathroom or your kitchen, you don't think of yourself as having a new home or a new house.
You think of yourself as having updated or realigned your living space.
You might've knocked out a wall and now you have an open concept, right?
You realigned your abode.
You didn't transform it.
You didn't move it.
You didn't break it down in a way that would signify something new in a total or holistic sense.
To me, deconstruction is when you break down the structure to its foundation.
You break it down to the studs and you start over.
And when you rebuild, you reconstruct, you rediscover, You may end up with some of the same elements as you had before, but you arrive at those same elements as a result of a total breakdown or deconstruction of the structure.
And so even when you rebuild and you arrive at some of the same components, the same features, you've done so as a result of a different process.
Okay?
And so, to me, that's a good place to start, and it's a good place to sort of understand what, to me, is at stake with deconstruction.
Now, this leads me to some of the folks who are talking about this idea of revangelical as deconstruction, okay?
And I want to try to explain why I have a problem with that approach.
I came across this the other day on a thread by the Confessing Millennial at ConfessInMill on Twitter.
Confessing Millennial was talking about how they are a re-evangelical who has rediscovered even our Christian orthodoxy and in essence renovated their evangelicalism and that this was the result of their deconstruction.
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