Deconstruction is all the rage. If you’re not familiar with that term, “deconstruction” is the process of disassembling your faith bit-by-bit. The most serious cases result in the deconstructors rejecting their faith altogether. Famous (former) Christians are all over the news because they have made their deconstruction stories public. In fact, if you want to be taken seriously by the culture these days, the best way to ensure you are is to make a public production of your deconstructed and discarded faith. But while it may be trending on Twitter, deconstruction is nothing new. In fact, I would argue that most of the deconstruction stories we hear about are told by people who didn’t really have much to deconstruct. They simply succumbed to good, old-fashioned doubt. And it was an adversary they had never been trained to engage.

A Badge of Honor

Those who glorify the process of deconstruction like to tout the thoughtfulness and authenticity of it all. But that’s not why the culture loves their stories. The culture loves their stories because they end with Christianity in the trash bin. If you doubt me on that, try to find a link to a story about someone whose deconstruction led to a more robust version of their faith. No doubt, there are stories like that. Alisa Childers can tell you hers. But those aren’t the ones that make the news or that you’ll see on your Facebook feed.

The list of those who have “pulled a thread on the sweater of faith until it completely came apart” is growing. Rob Bell was one of the first to become famous from this trend. His “love wins” motto was really the culmination of his own journey of deconstruction. Bart Campolo will tell you about his transformation from “Progressive” Christian to atheist. Lisa and Michael Gungor will tell you how their faith just gradually fell apart. In the summer of 2019, Joshua Harris, best known for authoring I Kissed Dating Goodbye back in the late 90s, apologized for writing the book, separated from his wife, and announced that “by all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian.” Even more recently, the YouTube entertainment duo, “Rhett and Link,” shared parallel accounts of how they have both rejected the Christianity of their youth.

The Big ‘Five’

Not every deconstruction story is the same. But there are five factors that keep popping up in all of them:

1. 1. A desire for sexual autonomy
   2. The Problem of Evil and Suffering
   3. Rejecting the idea of eternal punishment (Hell)
   4. Questions about Scriptural reliability
   5. The hypocrisy and judgmentalism of the church

I think I have put these in order of their popularity. Some folks focus on just one. Others incorporate them all. But the topics themselves are nothing unique. They are simply the latest iterations of the most common categories of doubt. And all of them have been around for thousands of years.

The Power of Doubt

The first time I remember experiencing it was as a twelve-year-old on a visit to the Vatican in Rome. On a trip meant by my mother to fortify my Roman Catholic upbringing, I had just the opposite reaction. I was overwhelmed by the gaudiness and extravagance of the wealth I saw on display there. I wondered (and actually asked my mom) “why they wouldn’t sell all that stuff and feed some poor people?”

I remember standing in an inordinately long line that stretched outside the main entrance to St. Peter’s Basilica. After waiting for well over an hour, I was stunned and perplexed when I reached the destination for which we had all been in the queue — a statue of Mary. The faithful people in front of me were kissing their fingers and touching the feet of the statue. When I reached the front of the line I recoiled when I saw that the tops of Mary’s feet were worn smooth from the thousands (millions?) who had gone before me. I’m not sure I really understood why, but it was the first time I can remember questioning my faith. And it’s a moment I will never forget.

My dedication to Catholicism was never the same after that. Five years later I rejected my Catholic upbringing altogether.

Experience Rules

Most of us have some experiences that have made us question our long-held spiritual beliefs. When we lose loved ones or witness the pain and suffering in the world we are horrified that God would allow such a thing. We have been harmed or humiliated by the hypocrisy or arrogant self-righteousness we have witnessed in the church. Others have been forced to confront scientific arguments and evidence that seems to pull the rug out from under our view of the Creator. But these sparks of doubt always lie in compartments. We rebel against specifics while the big picture remains intact.

It took years of study and reflection for me to realize that my reaction to the smooth feet on a statue of Mary was no justification to doubt Christianity itself. What I was really reacting against was not God, but the specter of idolatry displayed by other humans.

My problem was with my experience, not with the object of my faith.

Contemporary deconstruction is no different. I’ve read or listened to many accounts. And every one that culminated in a rejection of faith was fueled by difficult experiences. So, let’s not pretend the deconstructionists have a monopoly on clear thinking and authenticity. There are plenty of examples of atheists who have turned to faith for the same kinds of reasons. But you never hear about them because their stories aren’t “clickworthy.”

The Divine Solution

This doesn’t mean doubt is easy to deal with. It’s not. And all of us have it. But personal experience is not the antidote to doubt. And we can’t isolate our experiences from the rest of reality. We don’t just need comfort for our pain and disillusionment. We need a holistic explanation for the world. It’s a world that is moral and contingent. And it’s a world with an overwhelming aura of beauty and design. Everything about this world compels us to contemplate life’s origin, meaning, and destiny.

Only a Divine Explanation is big enough to encompass all that. And that’s exactly the kind of God we read about in Scripture.

What’s The Alternative?

In John 6, after some particularly difficult teaching, several of Jesus’ followers gave up on him. They walked away. And when they did, Jesus asked the remaining Twelve, “You do not want to leave too, do you?”

Peter gives a thought-provoking reply. It speaks to anyone who is dealing with doubt. He said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.”

It’s a great question. Where else will you go? What other explanation for reality makes more sense of everything about the world in which we find ourselves? The process of evaluating answers to that question is ongoing and never-ending. You can deconstruct your staggering belief system. But you cannot deconstruct reality itself.

And that’s where the antidote to deconstruction lies.

Holistic Holiness

We need to incorporate a world-encompassing response in our call to be separate from the world. That may sound like an oxymoron but hear me out.

The Bible tells us that holiness is the separation of godly things from worldly things. For the nation of Israel, the wall of separation was The Law. It’s what made the Jewish people different from the nations that surrounded them. But the Jewish Law is not in force today. As Christians, the way we separate ourselves from the culture is by critiquing it from a Biblical point-of-view. That’s where the “deconstructors” get things wrong. They want to critique the Bible from a cultural point-of-view.

There is overwhelming evidence that the God of the Bible is real. It’s on vivid display in the origin and design of the universe and of life, in the common sense boundaries that natural law describes regarding the nature and purpose of human sexuality, and in the moral reality reflected in our interpersonal relationships. So, let’s embrace science that does its best to avoid presuppositions, ethics that acknowledges an objective grounding for morals, and a charitable sense of community that looks for the best in others instead of assuming the worst.

We can’t let our apologetics become a sterile regurgitation of soulless arguments. It’s supposed to be about the heartfelt pursuit of the truth. The deconstruction fad hasn’t changed anything about that. Doubt will always be a part of what it means to be human. But how we deal with it will determine whether we are part of the solution … or part of the problem.