Detoxified, Not Deconstructed

There's been a recent wave of former Evangelicals (aka Exvangelicals) who have been falling into a movement typified as deconstruction. TikTok and YouTube are replete with case examples. I have known some who have followed suit and some who still vacillate. I might have considered myself in this camp even a year ago, but reevaluating my trajectory, I see that I differed significantly.

Deconstructionism is largely rooted in post-modernism and especially the philosophy of the same name by Jacques Derrida. For former Evangelical Protestants, the structures of Western Christianity have been shaken by the data-driven truths of science and certain social realities. Oddly, this is objectivity influencing subjectivity, if we think about the truth claims being adopted by what is otherwise a very relativistic philosophy. That's a blog for another day. Nonetheless, Christian deconstruction is spurred by a sense of cognitive dissonance with people who have retreated from what they feel has been a propagandized, skewed, myopic, and toxic faith system. I get this and I largely agree. This is my story.

___

I began my faith journey in the Fall of 1996. I had previously been a neo-pagan and self-proclaimed arch-Druid of an independent "grove" (think coven) of like-minded late-teens and early twenty-somethings. In 1996, when I began to transition into Christianity, I was nineteen almost twenty. When I was eighteen, I was really into Druidry, but I abruptly stopped my spell-casting . In December of 1994, I was practicing something called "sky-clad" magic, which is basically naked spell casting. Without the inhibitions of unnatural clothing, magic was supposed to be more potent. Unfortunately, I could not practice this outside in winter, nor could I in a condominium complex with a common yard. So, I did my ceremony in my garage.

Now, I had never seen anything remotely supernatural during my time as a Druid. Heck, I did it more as a way to authenticate my Celtic ancestry than because I believed in the efficacy of Druidry. This night was different. As I opened my pentagram adorned circle to the cardinal directions, I began to invoke the various Celtic deities. Then, I began to see things like waves of heat rising from the asphalt on a hot day. I saw what appeared to be figures moving within the air. I freaked out and immediately closed my circle.

Was this psychosomatic? I had been practicing this stuff for a few years, so this was a first. I chose not to explain it or assign it malevolence. Instead, I just sort of left Druidry on the back-burner. I didn't denounce it; I just chose not to indulge until I felt stronger, spiritually. 

By the Fall of 1996, I had lost a lot of weight. I had been preparing to join the military, but for a few reasons, that dream was dashed. So, I chose a career in law enforcement. I was motivated by all these choices to get in shape. I started out 1995 weighing around 350 lbs., and by the Fall of 1996, I weighed 189. In September of 1996, I was losing weight so fast, that my work uniforms (I was a security guard at this juncture) were starting to look baggy on me. The company tailored their own uniforms, but week after week of turning them in for dry cleaning and tailoring, they only came back cleaned. The uniforms stayed the same size as I became smaller. It looked like I was wearing a circus tent. 

After three weeks of unaltered uniforms, I refused to work, feeling super self-conscious of my three sizes too big uniforms. Because of this, the guard I was relieving would have to work a double shift and he and I physically fought over my decision to not work. Rather than reprimand either of us, our boss chose to give my co-worker and I a week off and paid vacation to cool down. He believed that our company-wide stresses were more to blame than anything. It had been a busy season. 

For weeks prior to this event, my mother had been inviting me to church. Up until the time when I was five, my folks were Pentecostals, attending both trinitarian and unitarian variant churches. When we moved from Los Angeles to a small desert town, my folks stopped attending church, though I was enrolled at a Foursquare Church school across the street from my house. That lasted until I was seven. I didn't discover religion again until I was around fifteen, as I investigated Druidry in honor of my Scottish and Irish heritage. I began to practice a year later. I thought I had all the religion I needed. 

Now, with a week off of work, I lost my usual excuse that I worked Sundays and felt I had to heed my mom's invite. I went to her church to placate her. She had returned to an Assemblies of God church for the sake of my younger brother, who interestingly has deconstructed since then. He was starting to hang out with some questionable kids and my mom wanted a good example set for him. She became very involved in the church and helped direct the church's youth drama team. Her invite this week was for one of her dramas, which incidentally starred my brother and my now wife.

Something happened to me that night. I can't remember what the pastor spoke on, and the play was not really relevant to my own worldly struggles, but there was something moving about the people. There was a genuine family like warmth and love that was palpable in that place. It was that feeling that made me want to return, so I did. I rearranged my work schedule to accommodate church attendance.

On November 18th, 1996, I raced my truck up to the top of the Angeles National Forest, to a peak that from one side I could see the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, and from the other the City of Santa Clarita, where I lived. I stood on that peak in an existential crisis, maybe. It was certainly a faith crisis. By this time, I had read much of the Bible and had asked the church's pastors many questions. I was feeling that there was something correct in what I was learning and experiencing, but I wasn't sure how God could become a man, so I toyed with becoming Jewish over a Christian. This was why I went to the mountain, because that's where people in the Bible went to encounter God. I had never really prayed before. This was my crash course in talking with God.

I prayed for about two hours, which really only amounted to me hashing out my options -- shall I worship Jesus or just be a Jew. After a while, I raised my hands to the sky and asked that God tell me what's what. I also asked for a sign. The first thing I could think of a bolt of lightening from a clear sky, which there was. "God, make lightning strike from the clear sky and I will know I am to become a Christian." I waited.

After another two hours of absolute silence and my scanning of a completely empty sky, save a few planes landing at Van Nuys Airport, I figured I was done for the night. But what about my quandary? In my guts, I simply felt that it was true. I couldn't explain it or rationalize it any other way. So, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior on top of the mountain, unsure even of what that fully meant. But I felt elated. I was relieved that I made a decision and felt like an immense weight had been lifted from me. So, I happily got in my 1992 Ford Ranger and started driving down the mountain road, jamming to a CD of a band called Value Pac, which was a Christian punk rock outfit the church's youth pastor introduced me to. 

As I was driving, I came around a bend and as I did so, I looked into the sky, still hopeful for a flash of electricity. And there it was. Not one bolt, but a cascade of lightning flashes from a clear sky, and then it was over. No clouds. No storm. Only two or three seconds of brightness. I about crashed my truck. I immediately pulled off into a dirt shoulder area and got out shaking.  Since then, I can say I only had two potential miracles happen to me, with one I can now write off after some medical insight, and another which was a maybe. To this day, the lightning thing astounds me and I often wonder if I was imagining it. I can't say I was, because it's too potent a memory. What I do know is that I cannot deconstruct from this experience, even where I have in other areas. I know many former Christian friends who have now become atheists. I cannot. But I sympathize with much of what led them to where they arrived. 

Yes, this was my testimony. It's not an apologetic of biblical truth. It's only my experience. For all you know reading this, I could be a liar. I have been a liar in my life. I cannot prove God to you or anyone. But what I can say is that the Christianity we were all introduced to is too shallow to accommodate life's complexities and variances and changing data streams and societal pressures. It is an insecure Christianity, and precisely because it is a democratized Christianity, which is largely an American invention. A democratized Christianity is a insecure because it is loosely tethered to authority greater than the whims of its members. Let me explain. 

Prior to American colonialism, there were signs of splintering within European Protestantism, leading to variants like the  Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Anglicans. There were different camps. This was bound to happen with the faith untethered from higher accountability. It was almost as if the Protestant Reformation opened up a channel of ideological creativity, where everyone could be their own authority. This was exacerbated in America by the time of the Revolutionary War and into the nineteenth century's Second Great Awakening. 

During the eighteenth century, the Great Awakening not only called people toward repentance from their sins, but capitalized on the experience of the individual and wed itself to a movement called Pietism, which began in the prior century within Lutheranism. Pietism's impetus was on personal devotion and introspection. From the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, a secular philosophical framework was also developing, held by both atheists and Christians, called the Enlightenment. This period was heavily marked by a drive for personal liberties. So, undergirding American independence and the philosophical and theological views of the time was a sense of of personal freedom, which was politically guaranteed by democratic representation. 

Now, in many ways, I agree with this. Individuality and the freedom of conscience is vital, but it still needs to be juxtaposed to a whole. A community cannot exist without its individual members, and an individual cannot be so without being defined by a larger group. Still, it is clear that our libertarian roots have also inadvertently contributed to the elevation of personal property and corporate propriety over and above other freedoms, to the point that economic and social disparities have been exacerbated. And, our love of personal freedom has become the filter through which we often look at our perceived rights, leading to imbalanced emphases on certain freedoms over others -- to the detriment of others. For example, the Right has elevated the Second Amendment, yet the proliferation of guns has seemingly increased the potential for misuse. And the Left pushes for abortion rights, to the disregard of the unborn. All political bents have their emphasized rights, elevated to fit their respective side's biases. And it's all rooted in individualism and democratic discourse.

Faith has also become democratized. This is why the vast majority of world Christian denominations and Christian cults have origins in America. We are a people who despise compulsion (unless it's our side exerting favoritism over the other sides). We want which flavor of faith fits our ideological dispositions best. If you think speaking in tongues is bonkers, you don't have to attend a Pentecostal church. If you think baptizing infants is a wrong, you can avoid traditional liturgical churches. And if you think liturgy itself is too distracting from the essence of Christian morality, you can reject that too. You can have faith anyway you like it, like building a sandwich at Subway. Or, you can reject subs altogether and head for the border at Taco Bell. 

Yet, with democratized existence, there has also come factionalism. In Federalist Paper #10, James Madison anticipated this. Politically, he welcomed a plethora of sociopolitical factions, because the more factions there are, it tempers the potential of majoritarian tyrannies. He also anticipated coalitions of minority factions joining together at junctures to quell minority tyrannies. Much of the friction with deconstructing Christians has to do with the fact that a coalition of Evangelical Christian voices have become hyper-politicized to the detriment of other voices, religious and non-religious. 

From a political stance, I have no problem with Evangelicals exerting their influence, nor do I have any issue with other groups pushing their agendas. I concur with Madison that we need many voices. The problem is gravity. What should have been occasional coalitions have gravitationally pulled disparate voices into their respective atmospheres, Left or Right, creating polarized sociopolitical entities we call our modern political parties. With this, each camp has polished their ideologies and for the Right, it has become difficult to separate Evangelicalism from political conservatism. So, when the Evangelical Right posits its truth claims, it is often wedded to politics in an inseparable way, which, like it or not, suppresses opposing views. For many deconstructing Christians, this seems pushy and is a disregard to religious liberty, which includes the right to not be religious. 

Additionally, the theology of modern Evangelicalism seems to have an apologetic that maintains a nationalist narrative and political propriety. This is also off-putting. I think this has made Evangelical theology shallow. A certain superstructure has been made to define the common ground Evangelicals can have, which became the focal points for all Evangelical thought. Nuances are largely ignored anymore, including denominational distinctives. When I was an Assemblies of God pastor, I would say more than half of the people in the churches I attended or helped lead were not really knowledgeable of the Pentecostal beliefs of their churches. Yet, they would latch onto Evangelical commonalities, even if they disagreed with Pentecostal elements. I would say there's a limit to what Evangelicals believe they need to know and that there's rarely a need to dive deeper.

I see this in Christian collegiate work as a chief example. Most theology programs in the few Christian colleges I have been associated with (Vanguard University, Colorado Christian University, Azusa Pacific University, and Global University) only peripherally touch on Church history prior to the Reformation. I suspect that this is largely to dissuade Christians from what seems too Roman Catholic. Is this a form of gatekeeping? I think this creates a neutered theological framework, which lives in its own insulated bubble, that when popped by data or other truth claims, is too weak to counter. Even Evangelical apologetics presents a skewed narrative too weak to maintain Evangelical membership, because it tends to start with presuppositions and defends them in spite of external data, rather than evaluating external data for what it's worth. It's the cart before the horse. 

So, I see that with Evangelicals facing such cognitive dissonances, the only logical recourse is deconstruction, and that's fine within a democratized setting. It also allows room for theological and philosophical hangups to fit into a new schema of permissibility. The tough points that have been wrongly politicized by Evangelicalism, such as LGBTQ+ concerns, abortion, and so forth are allowed new interpretive avenues, and the deconstructor either embraces a liberalized or progressive theology, or they reject theology altogether. 

I could have easily done this too. Yet, I became a historian, and in that, I also looked at historical theology. I have concluded that the points of friction deconstructors have are legitimate, but I have found different ways to approach dealing with a wide array of issues that have historical antecedents that Evangelicalism and Protestantism as a whole does not consider. Plus, I have found that in earlier Christian motifs, there is room for the unknown, mystery, and even disagreement without being disagreeable or disunited. I have removed many toxic traits of a hyper-politicized Christianity, but I have not deconstructed into further democratized faith, for I need a standard to be accountable to that is outside of my whims. I have instead, simply detoxified. Really, I am still detoxing from what I knew before. I have not abandoned my faith, but have found a more tempered, ancient, and patient form of it within its historical roots. This is why I have become Eastern Orthodox. 

Perhaps at another time I will address the differences in theological frameworks, but suffice it to say, I have become more Christian leaving Evangelicalism. At the same time, I have also become more convicted in my shortcomings and I wrestle to apply Christ better in my life. What I do for the faith now is not out of blind allegiance, but a sincere hope to grow. I am still one step forward and two behind on a daily basis in my faith, but I dare say that I at least see the road now, where before it was many intertwined paths that lacked cohesion, except for the Evangelical superstructure.