Faith deconstruction - the intentional examination of one's religious faith and beliefs, leading to a profound change in, or even loss of, that faith - has received increasing attention in the past few years. But, who are the people who deconstruct their faith, what causes them to do so and where does the journey take them? Olivia Jackson's new book (Un)Certain is a collective memoir built on the stories and reflections of over 150 interviewees and nearly 400 survey respondents from all over the world, including the author's own story. These are ordinary people who reached the end of their (predominantly) evangelical road and had the courage to keep walking. It is woven around themes and shared experiences which came up time and again, and reveals a picture of deeply committed believers (including clergy) who reached a breaking point with the certainties and doctrines they spent years or even decades professing.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I'm joined today by writer and author Olivia Jackson, who's just written a brand new book, Uncertain, a collective memoir of deconstructing faith.
So, Olivia, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me here.
I'm really excited to talk to you.
I'm not going to lie.
There are a lot of books out there about topics surrounding ex-evangelicals and deconstruction and things like that.
And it's kind of hard to tell which ones to read and which ones are really going to teach you something and which ones are going to really be important.
When I learned about your book, I was really excited because you interviewed, well, not interviewed, but you sent out a survey and it was responded to by about 400 people.
And then you followed up with interviews with all of those people.
And so when we think about your book, Uncertain, it's not just your story.
It's not just the story of one or two people, but it's really a broad swath of people who have deconstructed their faith.
And you asked them all about like what caused their deconstruction.
What was some of the final straws leading them out of their communities?
And what does life look like after they have left?
And it really provides this wonderful cross-section.
Would you tell us a little bit about your method?
What questions did you ask people on your survey?
Where are the people located?
You're in the United Kingdom.
Are the people who we're talking about here mainly from there, or where are they?
Yeah, so it's a real mixture.
I mean, I kind of bit off more than I could chew.
With the survey, I thought I might get maybe 50 people filling it in and yeah, that ended up with 400.
It was a pretty in-depth survey.
So for that many people to sit through, you know, whatever, I think it was a 20 minute survey.
And then I ended up interviewing 140 of them, again, pretty in-depth, and had just hundreds of hours of data to then go through, which, yeah, was a learning curve, especially with transcription software, which produced some interesting results.
With evangelical jargon, my favorite being someone said something about the search for certainty and the transcription software had that as the search for sex and tea.
Well, that's what some people say that people deconstruct because that's what they want.
So maybe, you know, maybe.
Certainly in the UK, the tea is important.
But yeah, I mean, people were scattered all over.
There were a lot from the UK, but there were a lot from the States.
I had people from Canada, Puerto Rico, New Zealand, Australia, a few from Northern Europe, that kind of thing.
They were overwhelmingly white.
That was a really, that was a really And a clear thing, and I don't know if that was, I think a lot of the online spaces around deconstruction are very white dominated.
And I don't know how much I did kind of have to ask myself, is that the way that I Asked questions, the format in which the survey was done, the kind of places where the survey was put and was shared.
But I think, yeah, I mean, that was a really interesting kind of demographic marker.
But yeah, they were scattered all over.
Obviously, it was in English, so that was a factor as well.
Thank you for pointing that.
I mean, as I was reading in your book, you talked about there being a majority from the UK, about 30% from the United States, and then others from all over the world.
I appreciate you pointing out and noticing the whiteness of the respondents, and it's something I think is an ongoing Kind of point of discussion and deconstruction circles and deconstruction studies.
And so that's important to keep in mind.
This all, you know, if we if we might just stop for a minute and just talk about your story, this all maps on to your life experience.
And you actually have a life experience with evangelicalism that goes far into your adulthood.
Would you just mind giving us some of the main points of your time within the community, the various places that took you and then how you found your way out?
Sure.
So my family background, my family had a pretty mainstream kind of Church of England, Christmas and Easter, the kind of occasional Sundays in between kind of faith.
So what I later thought of as not really saved in my arrogance.
But when I was 14, some friends of mine took me along on a Christian camp, which was really the first time that I had experienced sort of evangelicalism or any kind of charismatic faith.
And I was a profoundly shy and bookish teen.
I was very young for my age and I was pretty unhappy in school.
And suddenly there were all these lovely, shiny people who were kind to me, genuinely.
And it was fun.
And they told me that God loved me.
And I really think it just seemed kind of like, well, if they believe it, I believe it.
And I was pretty caught up in a group of teens who were very much, you know, all out for Jesus kind of thing.
And that was just the culture and everybody else was unsaved and who'd want to be unsaved?
Which also gave me a lot of anxiety over the years about my apparently unsaved family, because I really, I really believed they were going to hell.
And then I think as a teen, being told all this stuff about how we're going to change the world for Jesus and all that kind of dramatic, egotistical stuff that my teenage self just loved.
And I think there was, you know, there was genuinely some other stuff, some more altruistic stuff about justice and poverty and how some of that actually worked itself out.
I think is, I look back and is now problematic, but I do think there was that impetus to actually make the world a better place.
After university, I joined a large youth mission organization and went overseas, which ended up being for 10 years.
And again, I look back on a lot of that and I just cringe and wish I could apologize to people.
But also there's that mixture of, well, we were taught that was the best thing you could possibly do for God, so why wouldn't you if you're really serious about your faith?
And some really great friendships and some experiences, good and bad, which I wouldn't have had outside of that.
And I think some of the first questions I had really were around things like justice and poverty.
I spent time working in community development, and then when I moved within the organisation, there was a lot of talk about justice and poverty and stuff.
But actually, we weren't doing a whole lot at all.
And sort of starting to question, okay, well, who exactly are LGBTQ plus folk actually harming?
Why is this worse than any other sin?
Seeing a friend of mine basically forcibly, publicly outed and just... I think that kind of blew the lid off a bit for me because I just went, well, who were they hurting?
They've done nothing and they had done nothing.
Why is God he?
That kind of stuff.
I was on the receiving end of some pretty rough treatment at the hands of various leaders at various times and I think that kind of shook my belief in What they were telling me about God and who God was and faith and that kind of stuff.
So it started, my deconstruction started as a bunch of smaller things and kind of snowballed from there, especially as I got out of missions into more theologically diverse spaces.
And I did what I had been told not to do, which was to study theology and study some New Testament Greek.
And yeah, I think it just snowballed from there really.
It's a tried and true story.
You study too much and your brain will lead your heart away from God.
And that's not necessarily true, but the idea of studying and thinking often does lead people to question high demand religion.
If we turn now to your book, you have a book that is broken up into three parts.
And the first part is really about things that I think Caught people up in terms of their evangelicalism in terms of things you just discussed.
Hey, here are issues I started to kind of pull at.
Here's a thread that I started to kind of see unravel.
As you look at the survey, as you look at the 140 interviews that you did, what sticks out to you in terms of themes as to why people start to kind of break apart what seems to be an airtight worldview?
Well, I think the phrase that you just used, high demand religion, that is really key.
So I think that whole thing around churches being very controlling, churches being very rigid, leaders really demanding accountability from people and no questions, no deviation from the official theology.
No, you can't ask why this is a sin.
No, you can't say that You know, the church line on X, Y, Z is wrong.
It's that, you know, you just go along with what your leaders believe and teach.
And certainly in the mission organization I was in, there was a lot of emphasis placed on, you know, having a submissive spirit and this kind of thing.
And, you know, I was told a spirit of rebellion, which just makes me laugh because I was such a goody two-shoes, frankly, but I asked why.
The fact that leaders are untouchable, the constant policing of behavior and dress and policing of what you think and the intrusive questions around that.
You could be asked at any time, you know, what sins you committed or whatever.
I think people found the church's attitude to the outside world, particularly seeing people outside the church as evangelism targets.
Not really worth engaging with beyond that.
The church is thinking on social justice or climate change that came up, particularly for people, I guess, people under about 30.
That was really clear stuff around.
Racial justice in particular.
And for a lot of Americans, to be honest, I think many of them brought up the church's support of Trump, the church's drift to the far right.
And that was over a number of decades as well, not just recently.
And particularly stuff around Black Lives Matter, that came up as a big thing.
And so that whole kind of church culture, The sort of celebrity culture in churches, I think, is a big issue for people.
And I think we're really seeing that starting to crack at the edges now with various abuse allegations, that kind of thing.
Then there were some sort of bigger themes around particularly purity culture.
That one was huge, especially for people who were socialized as girls.
The shaming and blaming of girls and women, seeing girls and women as gatekeepers, as stumbling blocks, as responsible for other people's behavior, even when that behavior is predatory or unwelcome.
I called that chapter Chewed Gum because that analogy, that object lesson just seemed to be Everywhere, no matter where you grew up, you were given this object lesson that anybody who had sex before marriage was like a piece of gum that had been chewed, was like an apple that's been bitten or a glass of water that's been spat in.
But it really plays on this kind of psychology of disgust and this concept of People, particularly girls and women, as damaged goods, you know, there's irreparable damage.
And it was one of the first things I learned.
Jesus loves you.
If you have sex before marriage, nobody will want to marry you.
Those were like the core.
That was the core of my theology basically.
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to laugh.
I mean, that was the core of my theology too, so it's just, it's a story that traverses cultures and locale apparently, but yeah.
It's sad but true.
I'm wondering if you can, there's a chapter under the heading Stumbling Blocks called He-Him-God, and you mentioned this in passing earlier, but I'm wondering if you could talk about it a little more.
What do folks say here about gender, about God being masculine, about God being maybe an authoritarian father figure?
What came up, you know, in response to your questions on this issue?
I think for a lot of people it was starting to, or really feeling uncomfortable with the gender roles which were imposed upon them initially, and how that then led them to question, you know, is God he?
Is God always Male, masculine, with these kind of vague allusions to feminine qualities.
Or can we, you know, can we think bigger than that?
And particularly for folk who were non-binary.
Because there's almost a total erasure of anybody who doesn't fit into gender binaries within the church.
I think society more broadly until quite recently, but particularly within the church, there's just no space for that.
And so having this male image of God, I remember a quote I came across, I think it's Mary Daly, who said, if God is male, male is God.
And that really, I think one of the first blocks of my deconstruction was when somebody gave me a copy of Sue Monk Kidd's book, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, and just realizing just how Masculine in a very cultured way, so much of the faith I had was.
And subtle, in a lot of ways, that's subtle.
There are still things that I am unpicking.
It's interesting just realizing that sometimes you have an intuition about What is important to people and then you know someone like you does a survey when you get 400 results or 400 folks who take it you do 140 follow-ups and they really do sort of speak about the things that feel to you like they're important.
I mean I know for me and on this show we talk all the time about gender, about purity culture, about race and authoritarianism and these are all things that just come into play in the reports back from people in this book over and over and over again.
I'm wondering, I want to get to what life has looked like for people after they leave, because I think that's something we don't talk about enough, but real quick, I've been contending for a long time that we are going to learn about the effect of COVID on religion in the coming years.
And what we're going to learn is that COVID and the ways that it was politicized led some people to leave because it disgusted them.
And then in a way that's related, but I think a little bit different, a lot of people were able to quiet quit.
Because church was online and they, you know, yeah, mom.
Yes, friends.
Yes, colleagues.
Of course.
I was at church on Sunday.
Yeah, we had the zoom on and we watched it on zoom and the first week I was very into it.
And then by week five, I was like kind of on my phone a little.
You know, just looking at the phone.
Like, no, no big deal.
And then by week seven, yeah, we had it on in the background, but I was doing another thing on my iPad and I was also listening to another thing on my iPhone and blah, blah, blah.
And I just think by the end of the pandemic, a lot of people had just like, I actually don't go to church anymore because I don't sign on and no one really knows and no one can yell at me about it.
And it's a nice way to exit.
So Wondering about those two things, leaving because of COVID politics and leaving because COVID allowed for a quiet quitting.
Yeah, I think both are true.
The politics, I think, was Less so outside of the States as a massive generalisation.
I mean, I think certainly here in the UK, the churches by and large kind of knuckled down and just locked their doors and that was it.
In the States, it became much more politicised and for some people that was a real kind of, you know, this is disgusting and I'm not, I don't want to be part of this.
And that very often, as I said, kind of linked in with Black Lives Matter as well and stuff that was happening at the same time.
So, I think that was a factor in the States.
In terms of quiet quitting, there were quite a few people who said either, yeah, you know, that basically gave me the excuse I needed to leave or that they attended online for a while and or didn't and then just discovered that they didn't really miss it.
And actually for some people, you know, there were people saying, well, you know, I actually discovered that I felt a lot happier when I wasn't going to church.
I felt a lot less self-loathing and I realized that church was the factor that was, you know, that was also gone from my life and I just didn't go back.
So one of the things I've talked a lot about with people in the deconstruction space is that leaving is really hard and you really have to start your life over.
You leave a total institution, as you call it, and you end up having to reconstruct your social life, your political life, your oftentimes financial life and work life, much less your romantic life.
What are some things that stick out to you as people discussed this whole very difficult, harrowing process of starting life over again?
Yeah, I think it is that thing of it being a total institution, particularly where people have been employed by the church or have worked in missions.
You know, we grow up in this very cohesive world which offers us community and it offers a framework for living and you don't really have to make any big decisions because here are the rules.
And then you think about leaving and it's kind of like the bottom drops out of your world because you don't know anybody outside of church necessarily.
And often you're being told, well, people outside of church are miserable and their lives lack meaning, this kind of thing.
And you think, well, where am I going to find friends?
There were a few people who were actively ostracized or whose relationships, even with family members, became pretty rocky.
Others just found that they were kind of ghosted, really, which was sad, from churches where they had been very involved for many years.
So I think that was really hard, losing that community.
Other people found, you know, they got out of churches, they'd grown up in purity culture, they just didn't know how to do relationships and they've had to completely learn from scratch, like most people do when they're teens.
Others who maybe had children already found they had to reassess their parenting.
That was a big thing.
Or that their marriages were under huge strain because, you know, one partner is deconstructing and the other isn't.
That was really hard to hear about.
So those were some of the things which I think people found the hardest.
This is the part that I think we don't talk about enough and that I think we should finish on, and that is, you know, the last chapter is called Bittersweet Hope.
What are the things that excite people now that they're out?
What are the things that, yes, life is not easy.
Yes, I've had to reconstruct a whole way of life, a whole understanding of how I parent.
My marriage is looking very different now, or maybe my marriage is over.
Who knows?
But I have hope.
I have joy.
I have things that I'm excited about.
What are some of those things that people discussed?
I think there is, yeah, there's that real sense of thriving, flourishing, reconnecting with a sense of self, reconnecting with embodiment, and people were finding all kinds of ways to do that.
People were finding new friendships and relationships which had real depth and meaning with people who they never would have really interacted with in the past, and just discovering, I have some people, a lot of people leave church.
Some people stay in more mainstream, more progressive open churches.
Some people are just kind of going, hey, I have Sunday morning to spend with my partner.
I have Sunday morning to go to a farmer's market, whatever.
I have my life back.
But I think just finding new ways of thriving and flourishing really.
There was definitely a sense of that.
There was, yeah.
I'm wondering if folks talked about the ways that even as they found those new ways to flourish, that no matter how long they've been away, the experiences, perhaps the trauma has stuck with them and it's something that on a daily basis haunts their everyday movement, their everyday embodiment, their understanding of who they are.
Yeah, I think there was definitely that too.
There was definitely a sense of people Whether it was the old patterns of thinking, being very black and white and having to get away from that, being very harsh on oneself, or whether it was things like going to a grocery store and being triggered by the fact they were playing worship music.
You know, if you come out of that world, you can spot worship music a mile off.
And just being around people talking, I guess, in a I suppose what in some ways I would call a cult-adjacent way.
That kind of mode of thinking I think can be very triggering to be around if you've grown up in it and been traumatized by it.
Authoritarian leadership, that kind of stuff.
And I think people really have had to unpick, seriously unpick trauma and properly clinically diagnosed PTSD, that kind of stuff.
It's not just people being oversensitive.
It's serious.
There's a former vicar in the last chapter who talks about being away from ministry for 15 years and still kind of almost on a weekly basis having to kind of have a talk with himself, talk with themself about how they're reacting to a certain situation and you're no longer in church, you don't That hit me hard because it's been about 15 years since I left.
Yeah.
A little bit more actually.
And I was in ministry and there's still things on a weekly basis where I'm like, why are you reacting this way?
Why do you feel like you're pushed into a corner?
Why do you feel guilty?
Why do you feel ashamed?
And that's even as if, as I've built my life back, uh, you know, over the last two decades or so.
So anyway, what are some, just in terms of final takeaways, you conducted so many interviews, you've sorted through so much data.
What would you want to tell someone about deconstruction in terms of a takeaway if you only had a 30 second elevator ride?
Well, I think really that it is hard.
Well, not for everyone, but for most people, it is hard, but it is so worth it.
And actually, most of the things which you were promised inside evangelicalism, you will find when you leave.
One more and I just just want to ask this most of the people that you you talk to I think fall into a category that I call the duns and those are people who it wasn't like we went to youth group we got invited to the church camp like you did and thought it was fun and we hung around for a second and you know and then it got hardcore and we said oh I'm I'm out of here because I actually want to not be part of period culture and I want to do teenage stuff and
The people you interviewed are the ones that feel like you were as an evangelical and me too, which is I gave everything and it all started to fall apart in my hands and that's why I left.
There's a lot of ministers, mega church pastors out there that'll be like, no, no, no, no.
The people that are deconstructing, they were never really in it.
They were never really part of it.
They didn't care enough.
They were never really Christian or saved.
How does that strike you after doing all of this research and all of this work?
I can think of some pretty choice language about that, but I would just simply say it is an absolute lie.
It is a lie.
And I think if they bothered to scratch beneath the surface, they would discover that, you know, we were the ones who were really committed.
We were the ones who were in ministry.
We were the ones who, I mean, I, on a number of occasions, quite literally risked my life when I was in missions.
We were the ones who sweated our guts out five, six, seven days a week volunteering at church.
We didn't just decide we couldn't be bothered and we wanted to sin.
We really thought this one through.
There were people who struggled for decades.
I spoke to people in their seventies who had served churches as ministers for literally decades and decades and then deconstructed.
It is a lie.
I feel like we could talk for three hours about how infuriating it is when people say that, and I'll just leave it there for now because I don't want to get going.
But I will ask you, Olivia, what are ways people can link up with you as you discuss the book, as they get their hands on the book and maybe want to follow up with things you're up to, what's the best way to connect?
Probably the best way is Instagram.
I'm on there as at Deconstructing Writer.
I have a website, which is OliviaJacksonWriter.com and I am on Twitter.
I think I'm oJacksonWriter on Twitter, but I'm pretty rubbish at Twitter.
Instagram is the way to go, at Deconstructing Writer.
Instagram it is.
Yeah, there's a lot of reasons to be wary of Twitter at the moment.
So, Instagram it is.
As always, friends, find us at Straight White JC on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
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We have a lot coming up, a lot of big announcements to make, but for now I'll just say look for it's in the code later this week and for the weekly roundup and for now we'll say thanks for listening.
