Deconstruction is having a moment.
There are podcasts and books galore about the process of deconstructing (usually damaging or negative) religious belief. Take one step back from deconstruction and you have the phenomenon of doubt in modern Christian writing. At some point in the last ten years, doubt began to be the prerequisite for an “authentic” Christian life.
Charles Taylor wrote about this in his 2007 book, A Secular Age. In this seminal work, Taylor argues that authenticity is the hallmark of the secular age, which is why doubt is in. Authentic doubt or disbelief is better than inauthentic faith or belief, at least in the secular age.
Deconstruction is the fruit of this seed of doubt. For Taylor, the secular age has not eliminated belief but it has made belief itself unbelievable. This explains why deconstruction is so popular.
Our zeitgeist is marked by deep cynicism and the question, “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
Our superheroes are now dark and gritty. Our politicians are no longer paragons of virtue and civic responsibility (or they aren’t pretending to be). In my own life, I am suspicious of anyone who is too nice or just a bit too earnest.
Which brings me back to deconstruction.
The goal of deconstruction is to eliminate things that are false or inauthentic — to drill down to the root, the true.
The problem with the rise of deconstruction, at least in the mainline denominations in which I live and move, is that there is nothing to deconstruct. As a millennial, I am part of a generation that came of age in the early days of deconstruction. The Episcopal Church of my youth was a haven for people who grew up in conservative or fundamentalist denominations. It was a place where you could believe and use your rationality. I’ve heard many Episcopalians say that you “don’t have to check your brain at the door” in our church. (We’ll set aside the elitism and fetishization of rationality for another time.)
Christian formation became teaching stories that may or may not be true, doctrines that may or may not be important, a creed that may or may not be authoritative.
Fast forward to today and we have a generation of Episcopalians (and others in mainline denominations) that may or may not believe what may or may not be called “orthodox Christianity.”
Deconstructionism has served as the nail in the coffin of a dying church.
My first reaction to deconstructionism was to jump right in. I was attracted to the rationality and academic-mindedness of the practice. It seemed like something smart people did, and God knows I want to be seen as smart.
What I quickly realized was that I had nothing to deconstruct. I had no damaging religious beliefs. This was, in part, because my religious beliefs growing up were seldom deep enough to do damage (or to be transformative).
What I have found in my work with youth and young adults in the Episcopal Church today is that we have failed at the first stage, construction. We too often jump right to deconstruction before we even build the foundation of Christian belief.
We have become so wary of proclaiming a damaging religion that we end up proclaiming no religion at all. Instead, we proclaim the new social movement to join up with or the cause celebre on which to take a stand. We declare that Jesus wants to cosign our political positions and make us good citizens.
We reject the demands of the Christian faith without having ever given in to them. We deconstruct the Christian life without ever having lived it.
Charles Baudelaire wrote that “the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.” The loveliest trick of the Devil might actually be to convince an entire society that belief itself is unbelievable and that deconstruction is the path of freedom.
But you cannot deconstruct an unconstructed faith, just like you can’t give away something you haven’t got.
The work of the church is not deconstruction. The work of the church is not even formation alone. The work of the church is the proclamation of the Gospel, over and over again.
There is some necessary deconstruction, sure, and the Christian life can be full of doubt. This is why we gather each week to hear the Good News again, because the truth is that the work of deconstruction will be done for us in this life. There will be an endless supply of heartbreaks and tragedies and life situations that make the Gospel hard to believe. Not to mention the endless evidence produced by our own unique failings, screw-ups, and manifold sins.
The Christian life is about fighting the good fight and persevering to believe the Gospel. It is about repenting, then repenting again. It is about being born again, again.
Martin Luther wrote in his Introduction to Galatians, “Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know [the Gospel] well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.”
The myth of deconstruction is that life is static and that once you find the truth everything is settled. The problem is that the Truth is a person who was and is and is to come, especially when your life has been deconstructed.
Derek Webb, who is in the midst of his own deconstruction, wrote about this from the perspective of Jesus in the song, “Closer Than You Think”:
What do you think you know about me,
Something you read or overheard?
Why your fists up, you wanna fight me?
You haven’t even heard a single word
From my mouth, yet you doubt what I’m saying now:
That we’re closer than you think.
Jesus is okay with our deconstruction just like he is okay with all of our self-important efforts at sanctification. That doesn’t stop him from reaching out and drawing us home. With the father who petitions Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, we cry out from the place of our deconstruction, “I believe; help my unbelief!”
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38 responses to “Closer Than You Think (The Trouble With Deconstruction)”
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To quote my friend Sean: ????????????????????????????????
Golly this is fantastic, Connor. It’s getting harder and harder to stop the eyeballs from hitting the back of my skull at the mention of the d-word these days, so enamored are with it (for its own sake).
This is just flat-out insightful. Thanks for your thoughts and sharing.
I am reminded of a quote from Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev, in which the young, budding artist, Asher Lev, a Hasidic Jew, receives art lessons from the world-weary Jacob Kahn. The speech Kahn delivers has become a watchword for me, particularly the phrase in bold (emphasis mine):
Do you understand me, Asher Lev? This is not a toy. This is not a child scrawling on a wall. This is a tradition; it is a religion, Asher Lev. You are entering a religion called painting. It has its fanatics and its rebels. And I will force you to master it. Do you hear me? No one will listen to what you have to say unless they are convinced you have mastered it. Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it. Do you understand me, Asher Lev?”
There seems to be a general trend, and not just in “Christian” circles, among the young away from irony, doubt, and what is here broadly called “deconstruction”. A weariness sets in at some point for those who have known nothing else. There is an understandable desire for a positive good in which to believe that is not under constant, corrosive attack. It is manifested in the earnestness of the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, as well as in the younger libertarians. Strongly held convictions are the order of the day, at least in secular culture, and there is little place for doubt or irony, at least that directed against their own convictions.
While I understand that the criticism of “deconstruction” in this post is not meant to imply that there is no place for doubt or questioning in the Christian life, there is also a positive beauty in the Christian tradition, at least at its best, that makes a place for self-criticism, or deconstruction, if you will. Even within the writings of the New Testament we see this give and take at work, with a tacit understanding that the work God is doing is being done through very flawed instruments, who at best “see through a glass darkly.” This is why some of the most profound Christian writers, from Martin Luther to Moliere have been highly ironic and “deconstructive” in the best sense. This capacity for irony and self-criticism within the Christian faith is why I feel more connected to someone like Michel Houellebecq, who is about as “deconstructive” as it gets, but who can also quote St. Paul with seriousness, than I do with the many very earnest young evangelical preachers who seem much more convinced of “God’s unconditional love” than was Jesus on the cross, when he cried out… questioning and forsaken.
Excellent.
Thought provoking. Thanks.
I loved this article. As a member of a mainline denomination, I was always flabbergasted by the zeal with which some of our clergy wished to deconstruct a Faith that their hapless listeners scarcely understood to begin with.
Mic drop????????
Thank you Connor. In 1985 as a law student at Georgetown, I was sitting in my Constitutional Law I Class when Professor Mark Tushnet (later of Harvard Law School) introduced us the Critical Legal Studies -Deconstructionism in legal academia. It changed my way of thinking about the law. CLS and deconstruction helped me later in seminary. However, the study of theology is different that – “Faith Seeking Understanding” – is one thing. The key is that “faith while seeking understanding” maybe subject to construction/deconstruction, faith is also about belief in the Truth of Jesus – the Logos of God, and this Logos is a person who was, and is and is to come.
Thanks Conor for this. I remember when I first heard the term “deconstruction”. It was 1985, Georgetown Law School it was my Constitutional Law I with Professor Mark Tushnet (now of Harvard Law School). He introduced us to Critical Legal Studies – the Legal academy’s wrestling with deconstructionism. I learned alot from CLS, and it was helpful 12 years later in seminary. Deconstruction helped me in my quest for “faith seeking understanding”. Yet I also learned that faith seeks the truth and that Ultimate Truth – the Logos of God- is also a person, as you noted – who was, and is, and is to come.
The argument works with different terminology. But this post conflates deconstruction with transcendental critique. At the very least, what it describes is a popular misconception about what deconstruction entails, not the quite tightly defined (and not universally applicable) method Derrida actually uses. C.f. the demonstrably false claim that ‘The myth of deconstruction is that life is static and that once you find the truth everything is settled.’ That’s actually one of the myths deconstruction is used to dissolve, but is basically axiomatic in Kantianism.
Deconstruction should be properly described as follows. ‘First, look at whether truth claims are based on the presupposition of a value-laden binary, where one term is necessarily superior to and excludes the other (e.g. Pure and impure, essential and parasitic, white race and black race etc.). *If there is no such binary, stop here.* Second: look to see if it’s possible to argue that the second (denigrated) term can be shown to be the precondition of the first term’s existence, so that it’s actually more ontologically/epistemologically fundamental. Third: use this reformulated relationship of dependence to dissolve the value binary, and so the framework for the truth claims that assume them. Make new truth claims under different presuppositions. Rinse and repeat.’ If it doesn’t look like this, then it’s not deconstruction. (C.f. The intro to Voice and Phenomenon and The Origin of Geometry for thi, in case these claims see too unsubstantiated.)
Of course, this method too might be harmful in certain circumstances—but it is the polar what is described here, what with its being premised upon the idea there can be no ultimately ‘purifying’ of truth or existence, no absolute point of stillness or knowledge from which to build.
Thank you so much for this super helpful reply / critique! What I find happening is that the *word* ‘deconstruction’ is popular (in Christian circles); deconstruction, not so much. I find John Caputo immensely instructive re: deconstruction, especially in a religious context.
Thank you for expressing this idea so perfectly. I’ve tried many times, and failed. I didn’t even know what I was trying to say, exactly, until I read your words. (As you noted above, you can’t give away something you haven’t got.) Incidentally, I’ve been battling deconstruction since it invaded the English department during my grad school education in the late 80s. A formidable foe.
You write:
“There are podcasts and books galore about the process of deconstructing (usually damaging or negative) religious belief.”
“Authentic doubt or disbelief is better than inauthentic faith or belief, at least in the secular age.”
“We reject the demands of the Christian faith without having ever given in to them.”
Are you equating religious belief and faith?
Or is there a difference? Does one need deconstructing and the other not? Just curious.
“Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
Thank you for this enlightening and thought provoking submission. Food for thought …..
I wouldn’t define deconstruction in the way you describe it here. In my experience, the idea is that it’s our language and symbols are unstable, not the underlying truth. Theologically, real deconstruction opens a wide space for mystery and grace beyond our limited capability to articulate them. To insist that mainline faith isn’t rigorous enough to “deserve” deconstruction misunderstands the concept, and obscures the experience of marginalized groups in church who are very much in need of the wider perspective deconstruction offers.
Agreed. While I agree with the authors main point. That when we are young we need a solid foundation to start from. I don’t think he fully understands deconstruction the way I and many of the people I interact with understand it.
We reject the demands of the Christian faith without having ever given in to them. We deconstruct the Christian life without ever having lived it.
This reminds me of the famous G.K Chesterton quote that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
And then there are those of us who tried it faithfully for 30 years, and then found it wanting.
Sara, I agree with you, but “deconstruction” in this post seems to be used very generally as a term for what is being portrayed as an overly critical cynicism. Which is of course not really deconstruction in any formal sense. Perhaps we should invite the author to deconstruct its binaries ????
In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”
Your argument is based on the belief in Jesus dying to justify me before God. If one has struggled their whole life to believe this and still doesn’t believe this, but still believes Jesus was the Christ, where does one go?
Matt – I’m not the author of this piece, but I believe that I’m on firm ground when I say that we don’t trust or believe in our belief, but in Jesus alone.
Excellent piece. I grew up as an evangelical. When I was about 8 I came home from an AoG summer camp: dark night, pouring rain, nobody home. I was sure the rapture had happened and I got “left behind.”
Talk about toxic religion needing to be deconstructed! Yet I have always somehow been aware that the deconstructed faith of mainline “churches” was missing something important.
Fast forward several decades, and I’ve deconstructed my faith, and reconstructed it based on a realization that consciousness is primary.
The first thing that needs to be deconstructed is our notion of reality as having some kind of objective existence. It doesn’t. We’re in a “collective dream,” and all our attempts to come to a realization of “truth” must take that “fact” into consideration.
The second thing that needs to be deconstructed is the notion that some particular institution represents the “church,” It doesn’t; in fact, by definition, it cannot. Over time, any institution that attempts to define itself as “the church” will eventually become anti-Christ.
Given these two assumptions, the pieces all fall into place.
The situation is far too complex to allow for simple answers, but it boils down to this: the Christian narrative is a construct which we use to guide our development as a species. Asking whether that narrative is “true” in its particulars is as meaningless as asking whether you can “really” fly in your dreams. It is irrelevant everywhere except in the dream itself, and even in that context we recognize that it is symbolic in nature.
There are lots of pieces to this puzzle: Jung’s collective subconscious, Teilhard de Chardin’s omega point, evolution, Kegan’s “Self-Transforming mind,” etc. This is the “meat” that, as humans in the 20th century, we need to partake of.
We need to recognize that we bear responsibility for the creation of the reality we are experiencing, and in that context, adopt and integrate the narrative of Christ. Not blindly, in a literalist, sense, but recognizing that we are beings that exist on many different levels, and we need to allow the story to imbue our consciousness.
For myself, my faith is now much stronger than it has ever been.
When anyone other than people of faith, repeatedly recite mantras, & repeatedly listen to the same “truths”, most would call it brainwashing, at best. I wondered, after a sturdy Evangelical childhood, teen years, & young adulthood that carried me to being of faith into my late 20s, “why must we work so hard to believe something, if it’s true? Why must we obsess over it, sing about it, consume it constantly in many ways, & only surround ourselves with other people who believe it, lest we get other ideas(!), if it’s true? Once I let go of tirelessly trying to convince myself & manage my doubts, I felt a huge relief. And it took a long time, no thanks to my family, but I’m finally, mostly, at peace with my relationship with God, even if I don’t know what to do about Jesus (if I indeed, need to do something).
“Deconstruction (aka post-modern learning to “not do) is necessary but it”s not something we can do. Instead, we let it do it”s thing while we watch. The ego hates it. It”s like being pulled apart but that”s just “part of the process. Remaining still while this is going on, that”s the trick. But again, it”s not something we “do. It”s more like “let there be light.
[…] pessimistic as Gray but a lot more hopeful as well”. If only some of those enamored with the deconstruction-mania that’s sweeping the post-Evangelical landscape would read either of these guys. Too bad they […]
So instead of deconstruction we just want to really really believe Christianity and a book that has been in the hands of the “enemy” for centuries? What am I missing? And my idea of belief, when I accept something is when it is proven to me to be benevolent, not before based on a book.
Evils are more attractive and a way to deconstruction is easy so do not let yourself just go with flow.