It's in the Code Ep 134: “You Were Never That Serious About Your Faith”
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What is “faith deconstruction,” and what are some of the ways in which those within the subculture of high-control American Christianity try to counter this movement? In this first episode of a multi-episode series, Dan explores what “deconstruction” is, and looks at the accusation that those who undergo faith deconstruction do so because they were never sincere or serious about their Christian faith. Is this a fair accusation? What exactly does it mean? And why, exactly, do defenders of high-control religion attack those undergoing faith deconstruction in this way? Check out this week’s episode to find out!
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This series is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
And as always, my name is Dan Miller.
That has not changed.
I'm a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you.
And as always, I want to say thank you to everybody who supports us in so many ways, to subscribers, to others, all of you who keep us doing what we're doing.
I want to invite you to reach out.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Always welcome your thoughts, your input, ideas for additional episodes, feedback on existing episodes, continuing to solicit responses for series on things that I was not allowed to ask in church, a series on sort of apologetics arguments that maybe you've a series on sort of apologetics arguments that maybe you've heard from Uncle Ron or whomever about why it is that belief in God is the only rational thing and so forth.
If you want to share those with me, just put those in the header, email them to me or put them in the Discord if you're a subscriber and I'm putting together some episodes on those.
Thank you.
Otherwise, let's just dive in here.
Starting a new series today, and I'm calling the series Who's Afraid of Deconstruction?
And this is a series of episodes coming from, man, a lot of conversations with a lot of you over just years and years.
The work that I do as a coach, helping people process religious trauma.
Just a lot of the things we do, and some of the things that have really become sort of a...
A core component of what we're about is Straight White American Jesus.
So, I had a lot of people ask about, or get my response to, basically, the reaction people have to so-called faith deconstruction.
And specifically looking at some of the common responses and dismissals of faith deconstruction that opponents of that process, let's call it, often throw at those who are going through it.
And I'm going to call this series Who's Afraid of Deconstruction?
Who's Afraid of This?
And what are these responses and what do they tell us?
So today it's the first episode in this series.
And I want to start by introducing the term.
And odds are, right, if you're listening to It's in the Code, if you listen to Straight White American Jesus, You may well be familiar with the idea of so-called faith deconstruction.
In fact, I first became familiar with this term as a result of getting into the podcast years ago.
It was starting this podcast and doing this that I first came into contact with those undergoing what we now call faith deconstruction, as well as related things like exvangelicalism, deconversion, a number of different terms that kind of float around in the same circles.
But for those of us who might be unfamiliar with the term, as well as I think just for making sure that we're on the same page, it's worth taking a few minutes to be clear about what we've got in view here.
Or when I talk about faith deconstruction, what do I mean by this?
What people have come to understand under this nomenclature, under the term faith deconstruction, is the process of, I would say, intentionally...
And explicitly, critically rethinking one's received religious worldview and the commitments that come with it.
And I think it's also, within that, important to recognize where this process tends to take place culturally.
It is primarily a movement within white, conservative, Protestant Christianity in America.
There's no reason one couldn't use the language of faith deconstruction coming out of other traditions.
Certainly, there are people coming out of, say, Catholicism or Mormonism or...
Perhaps the black church tradition or whatever who might use that same language, but it tends to be language that's used within white conservative Protestant Christianity.
And it's primarily understood in these ways a white Protestant phenomenon.
And that's an issue that raises its own important questions.
Those aren't things that we're really going to dive into in this series, but as people continue to explore...
This phenomenon, and to look at it as a dimension of American religion and American religious change and American religiosity, I think important questions are there to be asked about, you know, sort of the demographics and the cultural spaces of so-called faith deconstruction.
But that's what the term refers to, and I think that the language of faith deconstruction, the fact that there's this one term, can mask the fact that this process can go in a lot of different directions for different people, okay?
For some people, this is the end of faith.
This is their move out of Christianity or just completely out of all things religious or spiritual.
They're just done.
They're done.
Okay?
For other people, this is an opportunity to recover a more vibrant, authentic Christian faith.
For some people, they'll talk about, you know, undergoing faith deconstruction, getting rid of what they see as something that was not sort of real Christianity and finding something that they feel is deeper or more substantive.
For other people, and I think this is maybe for most people, it's just really ambiguous and it's not clear where it's leading.
And if you talk to folks at one point in time, they might think it's moving in one direction.
You talk to them, I don't know, six months or a year later, and they've really gone in a different direction.
But what I think is the same for everyone, regardless of what this looks like or where it goes, Is that the language of faith deconstruction captures the sense that individuals' religion as received, right, the religion they've grown up with, and typically these are people who have grown up within these traditions, that the religion and the whole subculture built up around it that they have received is simply no longer tenable for them.
It just doesn't work.
It just doesn't make sense.
It's not coherent anymore.
However you want to describe that, it just is not a fit.
And I think that this, again, if you were to ask, you know, I don't know, 10 people undergoing faith deconstruction, what precipitated this?
What brought this about?
You might get at least 10 different responses.
One thing to note is it's not just about religion or religious beliefs.
It's often tied in with other dimensions of our shared existence and our identity and different things like this.
It's often tied in with experiences of gender or sexuality.
People have a...
You know, they come to the awareness, for example, that maybe they're queer-identified, and there's just no space for them within the kind of high-control religious context that they're in.
Or, you know, these are women who have grown up in a patriarchal culture who decide that that just doesn't make sense to them anymore.
They want to step away from that and out of that, and that moves them out.
Or men who feel like they don't accept the kind of militant masculinity, to use Kristen Dume's phrase.
The militant masculinity at the heart of high-control American Christianity.
And this is what moves them out of that.
So it can be tied to experiences of gender or sexuality.
People's changing perspectives on issues related to race or social justice.
I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who say, hey, you know what?
It was all of the social justice issues that arose, like sort of during COVID and in that time period and after and the responses to it.
Those were the things that made me have to sort of actively rethink my faith commitments and the tradition I had grown up in and the perspectives that I had inherited there.
Sometimes it's tied in with personal or social shifts, political currents within society, or on the part of one's marriage partner, for example.
If you talk to people undergoing faith deconstruction, if you talk to people within these circles, the recent presidential elections...
And the last two or three presidential election cycles, like, these loom large in their mind.
And sometimes for them, but sometimes they would say, look, I have a partner, had a partner, who really jumped on board the Trump train, and that surprised me, and I just couldn't make sense of it, and that wasn't a place I could be at anymore, and I just could no longer occupy the faith tradition that allowed that to happen.
Or maybe it's, you know, parents or siblings or whatever it is.
Sometimes there are just significant life re-evaluations over time.
People hit middle age and they start re-evaluating things.
Their kids get older and they move out, or their kids get old enough that they start having to talk to them about gender or sexuality, and they realize, for example, that maybe they have female-identified kids and they don't want them growing up in the kind of patriarchal purity culture that they grew up in, and it brings about a radical reassessment and a re-evaluation.
All of these things can contribute to this.
But whatever the kind of acute causes, whatever it is that sort of precipitates this for people, faith deconstruction comes with significant costs to, let's call them the deconstructors, right?
Faith deconstruction doesn't come cheap.
There's a big cost to it.
And I think that this is another aspect that is shared among those who experience this.
It almost surely comes with alienation from and the loss of one's religious community.
This is probably the biggest common issue that I talk to clients about, even clients who are like, you know, I'm done with religion.
I'm glad to be done with religion.
I don't want to be religious.
I'm not looking for that.
But they miss the community that they used to have.
Related to that, it can come with estrangement and separation from family members.
Again, including marriage partners or romantic partners.
It can cause alienation with one's friends, with one's family, with one's parents, siblings, what have you.
So it comes with high costs.
It also comes with a lack of assurance.
One of the things that we have talked about for years and years and years on this podcast is the role that religion and a particular kind of religion and a certain kind of religious answer can provide for people in providing assurance and giving sort of, you know, for lack of a better way of saying it, simple answers to complex questions, right?
Making...
The complex existence that we all experience into something that feels more straightforward and just makes more sense, there's a loss of that.
So there's a high cost to be paid for faith deconstruction, okay?
But all of that gives us a sense of, when I use the language of faith deconstruction, of what I'm talking about.
Again, I know that for a lot of you listening, this is a really common sense.
I also know that some of you are like me.
I went through this process, but I went through this process a long time ago.
There wasn't the language of faith deconstruction then.
It didn't have the sort of sense of shared identity that it does for some people now.
Social media was not back then what it is now, and it wasn't space for that.
So you might be somebody listening that you're like, I've never heard this term, but everything you're describing sounds familiar to me.
That might be why, okay?
So that gives us a sense of what faith deconstruction is.
It's a process with no clear destination.
There's no rulebook to follow.
But if you've gone through the process, okay, and this is what we really want to focus on in this series, this is the corner we want to turn today.
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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash S-W-A. If you've gone through this process or if you are going through this process, you know that the religious people in your life The people who are invested in and committed to the religious subculture you're questioning and leaving behind.
Those people that range from friends and family to church pastors and others who hold spiritual authority.
You know that all of the religious people in your life have a range of defensive responses and mechanisms of control that they use to attempt to rein you back in, to bring you back into the fold, so to speak.
And as we'll see as we move along in these episodes, there are also ways of trying to make sure the critiques you have don't actually land on their religious institutions and practices and beliefs themselves.
So there's like a two-fold move here.
One is, if they can, to try to bring you back into the good graces of what you're criticizing, but at the same time to make sure that regardless of what happens to you, whether you come back or you move out, That the criticisms and critiques you level don't actually land.
That they don't impact the high-control religion itself.
And so this is what we're interested in are these responses.
And the first one I want to look at in this episode, and it already comes into view, I think, with the discussion of what faith deconstruction is.
That's why I've decided to look at this first.
It's basically this.
It's the person who says, well, you were never serious about your faith.
Or it can get even more passive-aggressive.
It's the person says, well, you know, I guess you were never really that serious about, you know, church or God or whatever.
Or I guess your faith never really meant that much to you or whatever.
And again, if you're one of those folks, you've heard this.
I have heard this.
Okay?
This is the charge, basically, that in questioning your received religious tradition and all the coercion and the control that come with it, that...
In questioning that, you are making it clear that it never actually mattered to you, that your faith was never that important.
It's an accusation that your faith or your identity as a Christian was inauthentic or shallow.
And your choice to leave it behind or to fundamentally question it is evidence of this.
And folks, I feel this one.
I cannot tell you how many times...
I've had this accusation leveled against me.
I cannot tell you how many times.
And I've read about this in the accounts of others.
I have encountered it.
When I hear from you, when we go to live events and we talk, I've had these discussions.
I hear about it in the emails that you send me.
My clients have experienced this.
I've encountered this countless times.
And I can tell you that this particular accusation stirs up a lot of emotion and complex emotions.
It makes people sad.
It makes them anger.
It causes confusion.
People experience disappointment.
A whole range of emotions.
And regardless of which specific emotion it might provoke in you, the accusation hits hard.
Hard.
And here's why I think it hits hard.
It's because it's absolute and complete bullshit.
It's just gaslighting.
And when somebody says, well, I guess your faith never mattered to you, it's not a sincere sentiment coming from those who make it.
When somebody says this to you, it's not a sincere response.
And I think that that is part of why it hits us as hard as it does.
And here's why I say it's BS, okay?
And here it is.
And I want you to listen to this.
I want you to take this.
I want to hear your thoughts on this.
But this is something I would stand behind.
Only serious Christians.
Only the true believers, only the people who really bought in to the whole edifice of high-control religion, only those people can really undergo so-called faith deconstruction.
Why do I say that?
Because if you're just dipping your toes into the religious subculture, you're somebody who's just checking out the church, or you're the kid who just likes the youth group.
Or you're only going to the church because, you know, your wife's friends invited you guys and, you know, whatever.
You kind of like the music.
I don't know.
Whatever it is, you don't deconstruct your faith when you're done.
You just stop going.
If you're the casual participant, you just stop.
There's no cost to that.
There's nothing there to deconstruct.
The casual churchgoer, the casual participant...
It lacks the depth of belief or experience or commitment to really undergo so-called deconstruction.
Likewise, and I hear this from people all the time, people said that they always harbored serious, significant doubts.
Maybe they never really were sure that God existed, or they were never really sure about the truth of the Bible.
Or they were always uncomfortable with the teachings about sexuality or gender or whatever.
Those who've never really bought in those beliefs, who've always harbored deep doubts about them, they can easily abandon those beliefs.
The language of faith deconstruction is for those who really bought in.
Man, that was me.
I was the true believer in all of it.
And yeah, I can look back and see points of which elements of this began to break down.
I can see places where I didn't just like sort of toe the party line.
But man, I was the true believer.
And I think that this is true of others undergoing faith deconstruction.
I've talked to too many of you to think otherwise.
Those who undergo faith deconstruction, you're like I was.
You're the true believers.
People undergoing faith deconstruction, they're the super Christians.
They're the ones who were all in, who completely embraced the entire subculture.
These are the people who attempted to live out the dictates of purity culture.
Not because somebody told them they had to, but because that's what it meant to be a good Christian and be serious about your faith.
These are the people who were in church every time it was open, soaking up the teachings and giving their time and money to the organization.
These are the people who read their Bibles carefully and constantly because they believed it was the Word of God.
These are the people who sought to understand the deep teachings of their faith tradition and to apply them to their lives because it mattered that much.
The people who experience faith deconstruction are not doing so because they lack faith or they never took it seriously.
They're doing it because they had an abundance of faith.
They're doing it because they no longer believe the claims of the Bible, but the reason they don't believe the claims of the Bible is because they have read it carefully because they took those claims seriously.
These are the people who are deconstructing their faith because they understand conservative Christian theology, and they recognize that it's bad theology.
It's not that they don't understand it, it's that they understand it too well.
They're doing it because they know their tradition's teachings on race or gender or sexuality, and they recognize how damaging these are.
Again, not because they don't take them seriously, but because they have always taken them seriously.
And this is why, for those experiencing it, the cost of faith deconstruction is so high and why it's so painful for those who go down that path.
They are questioning and walking away from what is often the core of their identity.
There's a Bible passage in one of the Gospels where Jesus says that anybody who would follow Him must count the cost of doing so.
These people know the cost.
And they're willing to pay it anyway.
Folks, that's commitment.
And again, so many of you, you know what this feels like.
You're on the inside of this, or maybe you've gone to the other side of it, but you know what that's like.
So the accusation when somebody makes it that, well, you were never serious about your faith, it's just off base.
It's just not accurate.
It just doesn't make sense.
And of course, as you know I'm going to say, because you've listened to this series a lot, when it doesn't make sense, it raises the question of why the accusation still comes up.
And I said that it was a form of gaslighting.
And I said it because it's not offered in good faith, and here's why.
Those who make the accusation, those who say, well, you're never serious about your faith, they also know.
That the deconstructors are coming from the ranks of the most committed believers.
Don't you believe for a second that they think these are people who weren't committed to their faith?
They know full damn well that those who are experiencing this are the people who are their most committed believers.
They know that these are the people who kept the church running.
They know that these are the people who were always there.
They know that these are the people who taught Sunday school and Bible study classes.
The Bible says, I don't know why I'm citing the Bible today, but I am, that you can recognize true Christians by the fruit of the Spirit, or the fruit that they produce, right?
The fruit in their lives.
This is a common metaphor within these Christian subcultures.
They've seen the fruits of the faith in these individuals' lives.
They have seen this for years, for decades.
They know that by every measure that they have, these people are the real Christians, the committed Christians.
So the reason that they make this accusation and say, well, I guess your faith never really mattered to you.
The reason they make this accusation is that they know that the deconstructors are the real Christians, and that scares the hell out of them.
It challenges their faith to the core.
Because if these Christians, the true believers, can question the whole thing, then the fear is that the whole thing is actually worth.
If you're most committed, most ardent, smartest, best trained people are willing to blow the whole thing up and rethink everything, it raises the question that there's really something there.
They know, the people making this accusation, they know.
Better yet, I think that they feel, often in a sense they couldn't consciously put into words, they feel that those people deconstructing their faith represent an existential threat to the entire structure of conservative, high-control American Christianity.
They're an existential threat because these are the people who can show it for what it is.
These are the people who can lead others to the same view.
So don't believe for an instant, again, that they're acting in good faith when they say, ah, you never took it that seriously.
They know who you are.
They know the significance of you.
They know that if they acknowledge the seriousness of deconstructors' concerns, the only way to do that is to open oneself up to questioning the foundations on which this high-control articulation of religion is built.
And they can't do that.
They won't do that.
So when they say this, when they level this charge, It is simply an attempt to dismiss and trivialize those who raise the questions.
That's what's really going on.
They're dismissing and trivializing because they know that it's a serious threat to high-control religion.
So the reason why accusations that the faith deconstructor's faith was never sincere, that it was always shallow, The reason why I think it provokes such a visceral reaction from those of us who undertake this journey, the reason it hits so hard, the reason why the emotional reactions are so strong, I think, is because we know it's gaslighting.
When people who have seen us for decades have seen our commitment and our belief and the sacrifices we make, and then they have the nerve to turn around and say, well, I guess you never took it seriously.
We can feel it for the gaslighting that it is, and I think that's why it lands so hard.
So in conclusion, I would say this.
If we're decoding the accusation that, well, I guess you just never took your faith that seriously, that dismissal, that accusation, that claim, the dismissal of faith deconstruction as a sign of a shallower, insincere faith, is actually one of the surest signs of its seriousness.
And its significance.
If faith deconstruction and those experiencing it was actually as shallow or insignificant as they want you to think that it is, it wouldn't provoke the reaction from opponents that it does.
That's why I think, again, when somebody says to you, you were never that serious about your faith, they know that you were.
They know it's significant.
And it's a statement that's made out of fear.
It's a defensive statement.
It's a statement that is made to try to maintain high-control religion by gaslighting the people making those claims.
Need to wrap this up.
As I say, a first foray into this.
We're going to have several episodes looking at different kinds of responses that critics make of faith deconstruction.
Would love to hear your feedback.
Daniel Miller Swadj, Daniel Miller SWAJ. I've got a list of these responses, but I am sure that you will have heard ones that I've overlooked or are not aware of.
Let me know.
Let me hear those.
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