how evangelicalism wore a generation out

beyond belief : part 2

Oh hey friends.

As I’ve opened up more about my own faith unraveling and rebuilding (my deconstruction and reconstruction, if you will), it’s opened up a lot of conversations here, on social media, and in my private life. One thing that I am continuously reminded of and am so grateful to have people who feel comfortable enough reminding me of these things - is that my experience doesn’t make up the sum of all of Christendom. So first and before anything else - I want to acknowledge that.

To take that even further, the denomination that I grew up in is tiny and it is insular. My entire world up until I was 31 years old was this denomination and the people in it. My community, my entire nuclear and extended family, my schooling, my marriage, it all existed within this bubble. When we left full time ministry, we left our denomination, and the world of Christendom opened up to me.¹ The longer I’ve been out of that world, the more clearly I see how small my world actually was.

This post is only to point out the connection between evangelicalism’s specific expression of faith and its connection to deconstruction, de-conversion, and another group of people we haven’t talked about yet - the “dones.”²

In the seven (almost eight) years I’ve been closely working with or walking through the pain and grief of spiritual abuse and deconstruction with other people, there is, unfortunately, a predictable pattern. I think it’s important to look at patterns and see what we can learn for them - and that’s what I’m hoping to do here.

CAVEAT TIME - this is my perspective shaped by my experience. The experience of this process and its patterns vary from community to community. I’m not writing an exhaustive study on deconstruction in this post, but simply offering a piece to an ongoing conversation. Think of posts like this in the context of a conversation. You’d say, “I think it’s this…” and I’d say, “Interesting. I think it’s this.” And we’d talk about it, find the common threads, agree and disagree, and refill our coffee until we move on to talking about something else.

The reasons people leave the church or the faith can be widely different from one person to the next, but there is one common thread that I’ve noticed and it’s this :

Evangelicalism wore. us. out.

A lot of people you see talking about personal deconstruction will point to some sort of spiritual wound as to the cause of their deconstruction, but usually these events are only the catalysts. They aren’t the cause of the deconstruction, they’re just the last thing that happened before a person says, “I’ve had enough.”

A lot of people, maybe even most people, who leave Christianity or the church but not Jesus, have left because they got tired. Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically. What each person grew tired of changes, but the common thread is an overall exhaustion and inability to continue to live out faith honestly in that expression.

Jesus said his yoke was easy and light, but the church added on a lot of things that made following Jesus heavy and hard.

The Evangelical Church raised two generations of kids (not coincidentally - the age group that largely represents the deconstruction landscape : millennials and gen-x) in a tradition that taught an imbalanced theology of sin and hell and hyper-fixated on the end times as a mode of creating converts. Pastors and evangelists used shock tactics, heightened emotional environments, moralism, and fear to create converts and it worked, but it didn’t necessarily stick.

If you were a teenager in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, your faith was formed by stories of martyrs, both overseas and in high school classrooms. We called ourselves Jesus Freaks and fantasized about what we’d do when we were asked the inevitable question with a knife to our throats, Do you believe in God? We read The Left Behind series and it became our doctrine. We looked to the skies and lived our lives expecting Jesus to show up in any moment. We feared he’d reject us from heaven forever if he came back when we were sinning so we gave up our music, our entertainment, our fun, lest one little gray area decision lead to our eternal damnation.

We lived with shame and called it conviction.

We watched Christian hysteria happen around famous Christian celebrities who stepped out of line.³ We heard the conversations the adults around us were having and the things they were preaching and we absorbed legalism, judgement, gossip, and criticism as behavioral norms for “real” Christians.

We believed that having sex would create a “soul tie”⁴ to our partner so we signed purity pledges and wore rings to symbolize our oaths. We believed that having sex would be like cheating on our future spouses. When we met the people we’d marry, we apologized to them and asked their forgiveness for things we did before we met them as if the greatest thing we owed them was our pure bodies.

As girls, we believed it was our responsibility to keep the boys from lusting after us so we covered our shoulders and our bellies and apologized to them if we tempted them. Boys were told to restrain all their impulses until marriage and they believed if they did, they’d be rewarded with wives who never said no. Girls believed if we ever said no, our husbands would satisfy their urges somewhere else. So we gave of our bodies, not out of love or intimacy, but out of fear that our husbands would leave us. We believed it was biblical.

We worked, raised our families, and were expected to have healthy marriages, tithe 10% regardless of income, participate in enough church activities to not be considered “pew warmers”, have our kids in all the programs, and evangelize and disciple our friends and family and coworkers. We also needed to not just not sin, but to avoid even looking like we were sinning. 

The social pressure and expectations were (are) extra-biblical but even so, we submitted and we adapted to survive. We pasted fake smiles, hid our pain, disguised our sin and struggles, and pretended we were anything but human.

But perhaps the greatest sin of the Evangelical Church is the way the demand for “right” behavior has corrupted the way the body of Christ responds to the deep pain and suffering of its brothers and sisters. Honesty about pain was, and continues to be, often met with trite theological offerings and spiritual bypassing. Just trust God, just have faith, God has a plan, everything has a season, he knows the plans he has for you, God needed an angel, don’t get bitter —- simple solutions to complex pain. All well intentioned, but only serve to rush the person suffering past their pain instead of sitting with them in it. If a theology of suffering insists that a person in pain must recover quickly from it or it exposes some sort of lack of faith in their life, the person whose pain is unrelenting will either hide their pain and not heal from it or look for comfort and healing in other places.

Without empathy, compassion, and presence, detachment happens. When a person in pain detaches from the community that should be providing them with comfort and safety, it’s often difficult for them to separate the people from the people’s God. Occasionally, more often than I wish were true, if someone mistreats you in your pain, you begin to associate that mistreatment as coming from God himself.

For a lot of evangelicals, the burn out was slow. But you can only burn for so long before your wick goes out. You can only fracture yourself so far before the fractures break you completely.

When you’re in a rigid system that denies you your God breathed humanity or heavily polices your expression of it, eventually, you’re going to feel suffocated. When you’re suffocating, flight or fight kicks in. In a rigid, controlling faith system, there’s no where to go except out. Sometimes, yes, kicking and screaming. (but we’ll talk about messy pain management later)

And this is where communities that are post-Christian come in and offer hope and comfort to hurting Christians. I think the biggest frustration people have with deconstruction happens here. We see the trajectory of deconstruction to de-conversion and we assume the person deconstructing simply lost their faith, or wanted to sin, or was a lazy believer, or was never a real believer in the first place. What I think needs to be considered is the community the person left and the community they moved into.

For a lot of people who leave rigidity and wrestle with the frameworks of their faith, the first people to open their arms and say, “it’s ok to be human here.” are people who have also walked away from the church, from the system, or from the faith entirely. When you experience love, acceptance, grace, and empathy in your pain and confusion, you’re going to form unbreakable bonds with that community. Those people become your church. You attach when you feel safe. The evangelical church became an unsafe place for a lot of people and so, they found their homes somewhere else or are still looking to find where they belong.

The community you attach to 1,000% shapes the beliefs that you hold onto.

This is the crux of my work and my heart - to help others actually be the body of Christ to each other. Not just the resurrected, perfected body of Christ, but the broken and betrayed one. If you’re broken, we break with you. If you’re bleeding, we bleed with you. If you’re suffering, we suffer with you. And as we suffer together, we heal together. How much of deconstruction would only be sanctification if we just made eye contact with a person’s pain and doubt and exhaustion and questions and said - I see you, I hear you, and I have time to listen to you.

I can tell you that for me, that’s what saved my faith. Believing the Bible was the word of God didn’t help me because the Bible had been used to abuse me and that changed my relationship with it for a while. Closing my eyes and denying my anger and just blindly having trust in God didn’t save it because at the time, all I could see was red. There was no seeing anything other than my anger. What saved my faith was the gentle, non anxious presence of a community of people that simply held me while I thrashed. I’ll talk more about them in my email on Wednesday.

Deconstruction is so much more than a trend - it’s a pattern of disintegration of faith and we need to look at it honestly, compassionately, and with empathy, even if it costs us our comfort. There’s a reason this is happening — and it isn’t because people want to live in sin, or that they were never Christians in the first place. There is something happening on a soul level. If you care enough to have a strong opinion against it, then I truly believe you care enough to be an active participant in the solution. Maybe you just never knew that you had something to offer. You do! We all do. We have worn each other out and one of the ways forward is to offer each other rest and presence.

If we notice a pattern, we have to pay attention to the pattern. Once we notice the pattern, what’s our responsibility to heal the fractures that pattern represents?

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For further reading, I highly recommend this article : Deconstructing faith: Meet the evangelicals who are questioning everything

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coming up on wednesday — the people who held me

on friday — the things that i miss / *paid subscribers only*

1. before I left our denomination, I knew nothing about the expressions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Wesleyan, Anglican, etc. My world was exclusively pentecostal/charismatic.

2. https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2015/summer-2015/meet-dones.html

3. I think the church’s treatment of Amy Grant is a fascinating look at the control, power structures, and high behavioral demands Christian culture had created. If you look back through modern history, you can see the shift to moralism in the early 1900s, rapidly building until (in my opinion) it hit its peak in the late 90s. Christianity doesn’t look much like this today, thankfully. If you too are fascinated by Amy Grant’s multiple christian cancellations - here are two well researched articles about them :

https://medium.com/p/3f8327c36803

https://medium.com/belover/evangelicals-cancel-amy-grant-again-7cb23243a2ff

4. “soul ties” is a phrase used mainly in Christian circles to describe a spiritual bond that happens between two people when they have sex before they’re married. The Scriptural basis for this is supposedly 1 Corinthians 6:15-20