A response to Kaela Kaiser & Across My Heart Ministries
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When writing online about complex and sensitive subjects, one will inevitably see their words be taken out of context. Like most writers, I don’t respond to every single criticism, especially disingenuous ones. Over the past year, I have responded to quite a few good-faith critiques and found those conversations to be helpful, even if we disagreed in the end.
Several readers have sent me a blogpost written by Kaela Kaiser with Across My Heart Ministries, a Michigan-based evangelical group working with young women. A piece I wrote in March on deconstruction is quoted and, disappointingly, was misused to promote some unhealthy and misleading claims. Before continuing here, you can see my original piece and Kaela’s here.
I reached out a few times seeking a dialogue and only received a reply as I was wrapping this response up. Kaela’s blogpost exhibits much of what is wrong with the conversations on deconstruction happening inside of white American evangelicalism right now, so I’ve decided to go ahead and post this. Before beginning, I want to clarify two things.
First, I don’t believe Kaela or this organization is being malicious. I do think there’s quite a bit of honest ignorance here. We’ll get to that, but I want to say on the front end that I don’t believe Kaela or her colleagues are bad people.
Second, I do not speak for every single Christian who is struggling right now. As you’ll see throughout this response, the deconstruction phenomenon is just that: a phenomenon. No one person can explain where it is heading or where its exact borders begin and end. I imagine that even some people who are deconstructing will find disagreement with some of what I write here.
Please keep those two things in the back of your mind. Now, I want to break down four buckets of issues in Kaela’s piece that I find especially problematic. Let’s get started with the obvious one.
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1. Deconstruction ≠ demolition or deconversion
Kaela opens with a story about someone who left the Christian faith because of a crumbled life and seeing hypocrisy in other Christians. She writes “So I told him that whatever he experienced, it is antithetical to what Jesus died for.”
Amen. We often see a difference between the Jesus of the Gospels and the people who claim his name. It’s a gap that we should always be trying to close by becoming more Christlike.
However, Kaela then goes on to explicitly blur the lines between deconstruction and demolition and implicitly do the same between deconstruction and deconversion, both of which are several steps too far. To be sure, some people have left the Christian faith just as others have been doing for centuries. But many people haven’t. After quoting me, she writes:
Deconstructionism calls for the pulling apart of faith for examination. At first glance, this sounds beneficial. We should know what we believe and why we believe it (1 Peter 3:15). However, the deconstructionist is rooted in doubt, not in faith. We are encouraged to doubt everything that we have ever known. Doubt, not faith, is encouraged and praised.
Deconstructionists often begin their journey based upon past experiences. Like Hackett states, many times it is because of the cultural climate in the church. Throughout the duration of his blog, he resorts to finger-pointing at the white evangelical church.
Pulling apart our faith to examine what we believe and comparing those beliefs to our environment doesn’t just sound beneficial, it is beneficial. Doing so helps us see shortcomings in ourselves and problems that need to be addressed in our faith communities. In some ways, we all do this at a near subconscious level every day as we move through the world and make value judgements, albeit with less intention than someone who is deconstructing.
Kaela cites 1 Peter 3:15, but she should have continued. The next words are so, so relevant to those who are deconstructing:
but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil.
It’s not hard to understand why those who are forced into deconstruction find such hope in these words. Choosing Christ and the life-long pursuit of truth over a subcultural identity will inevitably lead to being maligned and abused, but knowing that you are suffering for good, for truth, for others, for Jesus, can make it more bearable.
I also take great issue with Kaela’s unsubstantiated claim that doubt is “encouraged and praised” over faith. For starters, I say no such thing in my original piece. In fact, I wrote the opposite:
“If this just sounds like a fun intellectual exercise, it definitely is not. Faith deconstruction is confronting hard questions and grievous experiences that a believer has suppressed for years, forcing them to finally deal with the doubts and concerns that have always been there, lurking in the shadows.
I have yet to meet a single person who has enjoyed deconstruction or gone out in search of doubts. It is an experience forced upon you. If anything, one reason that some deconstructions can feel so explosive is the reality that many people repress their need to examine the very real reasons to doubt the American evangelical subculture. When they are finally forced to, it can feel sudden and deeply disruptive to people around such individuals, but even that is but a taste of the turmoil that person is experiencing internally.
So, what’s really going on when that happens? It’s the reality that much of reformed white American evangelicalism preaches and lives out a dangerously flawed Gospel, one that is rooted more deeply in conservative white identity politics and consumer culture than it is in Scripture and Christ-centered discipleship. It’s ideology masquerading as theology.
When someone who is deconstructing realizes this, it is akin to arriving at a fork in the road. They can suppress what they see, or they can repent and go out in search of Jesus and a deeper, more outward-focused faith found in community. The latter is a journey that can be filled with uncertainty, yes, but it’s a far better option than going down the path of self-delusion.
Kaela then goes on to write:
I want to be clear. There are many, many ways that the evangelical church has fallen short and has not followed after Jesus’ example and what is outlined in scripture. No church is perfect. And we should examine whether or not the Christianity we believe is merely cultural, or if it is, indeed, scriptural.
However, I think with that being said, it is also vital to recognize that doubts arising based on negative church experience should not make one decide to go through a season of intentional demolition.”
To Kaela’s credit, she seems to be at least partially aware that something is wrong in American evangelicalism. Most deconstructions I see are people coming to terms with the reality that their reformed white American evangelical church is, in fact, mostly cultural. When an individual finally begins to understand that, often times there is no going back. They often decide to live out a core aspect of the Christian faith: they begin to seek truth. What they find in history tends to be horrifying, and they are often punished when they start asking how the darker roots of American evangelical history have spread into our own time. The gatekeepers protect the brand at the expense of the Church’s witness.
I am living, breathing proof that deconstruction does not equal intentional demolition. As I mentioned in my last piece, I can honestly claim that I love Jesus more today than I did before deconstructing. I entered deconstruction rooted in my faith, because of my faith. It was faith that eventually informed me something wasn’t right in the evangelical subculture I found myself in.
Many others have approached deconstruction from this angle, too. When Kaela writes that the “deconstructionist is rooted in doubt, not in faith,” she is presenting a false binary. She is also twisting my words. I wrote at the time “Doubt is what drives faith deconstruction.” This is an important distinction.
You can be rooted in faith and be driven by doubts and the experiences that led to them simultaneously. You can suffer or face immense difficulty while leaning into faith. I and many others knew enough about the Jesus of the Gospels to lean into him even as we doubted the evangelical subculture around us that the problems of the past five years have made more pronounced. Were there times I questioned my faith? Sure, but looking back, I never became unrooted from it.
With that said, Kaela gives us another false binary here when she claims that “One apparent danger of this is losing sight of Jesus, and instead, looking at imperfect humans who failed to reflect his image well.”
We can keep sight of Jesus and see people who fail to reflect his model well at the same time. That’s an underlying theme in my own journey, even though I’m sure I haven’t always balanced the two perfectly. I’m far from alone in that. I’d even argue that Christians must multi-task right now due to the multiple crises careening out of American evangelicalism into the general public.
To be fair to Kaela, she may have a hard time finding stories like mine because they are often left out of narratives in American evangelical spaces, be they online or in person. There, the vast majority of the stories held up —with a warning sign!— are of those who leave the faith or become more liberal in their politics, thereby implying those people aren’t “real” Christians. Do those stories exist? Yes, but they aren’t the only ones. And there’s plenty in the expression of political liberalism that dovetails nicely with the model of Jesus, the letters to the early churches, and the prophets of old, even though political liberalism is not the Gospel and can not define the Gospel.
In summary, I can love Jesus, hold my Bible tight, and still question what I have been told about God and the subculture around me. I can hold my experiences up to Scripture and ask how does it stack up? I can make decisions about where I go to church, what I’m willing to take a stand for, and more around all of it. This doesn’t mean I’m demolishing my faith, but growing in it. And lots of other people have proven that they are perfectly capable of doing that as well.
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2. The “Six Pillars With No Foundation” shouldn’t be applied to everyone who is deconstructing
Let’s move on to another section that is deeply problematic. Kaela writes:
When someone decides to go through deconstruction, they typically question six pillars: the Bible, eternal torment, penal substitutionary atonement, suffering in the world, end times, the church.
By first questioning scriptures, many deconstructionists deny that Scripture is faultless in its teaching and sufficient for instruction. With that starting point, once you move on to all the other pillars mentioned, it is quite easy to pick and choose which ones are desirable to be held onto, and which ones can be discarded…
Deconstructionists often “reconstruct” their faith to morph into the image of something that looks a little more like secular culture. And interpretation of scriptures often becomes not what the author’s original intention was, but rather what cultural and social conditions informed the author’s bias, thus making certain scriptures irrelevant for the current cultural moment.
Have I seen people question these things while they deconstruct? Sure. Have I seen everyone, or even most people, question all of these things? No, I have not. Most importantly, does everyone question these things in the way Kaela suggests that they do?
Absolutely not.
Tackling each of these subjects and how they play out in the deconstruction experience requires books of their own because they are so complex, and books have been written on them. But let’s choose the one to talk about that Kaela seems to be most interested in: the Bible. More specifically, let’s talk about how Kaela’s framing here is flawed.
People who are deconstructing often face two connected issues when they get to the part of their journey of examining the Bible or, more specifically, what they have been told about the Bible.
First, many people quickly discover that they aren’t questioning Scripture, but the reformed white American evangelical approach to and interpretation of Scripture. These are two very different things that many American evangelicals have a difficult time separating out. Additionally, many people who are deconstructing are examining the real-world consequences of both.
It’s important to ask two questions here. What is the difference? and Why do American evangelicals have a hard time separating the two?
The difference is found in the reality that we all approach Scripture with cultural contexts, beliefs, and allegiances. None of us are capable of approaching Scripture with a completely blank cultural slate. Being able to would be a denial of a core teaching of the Bible itself: we are all fallen and need a gracious Savior (Romans 3:21–26). There is what the Bible says, what we all interpret from it, and grace to cover the shortcomings that inevitably stem from our limited ability to interpret (2 Peter 3:14–18).
This is why so many American evangelicals have a difficult time understanding how people can question reformed white American evangelical theology, ideology, and approach to Scripture without questioning the Bible. In the evangelical mind, they are believed to be one and the same, even though, in reality, they are not. The Bible stands on its own as the cultures and people groups in it are long gone or radically different today. When we claim either explicitly or implicitly that our interpretation is the only legitimate one, we inevitably rewrite the Bible in our own image (1 Corinthians 2:9–13).
Second, people who are deconstructing also must confront the widely-held American evangelical belief that the Bible is all Christians need. Sufficiency of Scripture is evangelicalese for this concept.
Look, the Bible is fantastic, and I really do believe that it should be one of the core resources at the center of every Christian’s life. But the Bible doesn’t hold all the answers, even though I believe it does hold all the approaches that one will need in life. And those approaches, even when followed to perfection, have led good Christians to wildly different actions and answers based on the broader culture and moment in history that they find themselves in.
To be direct, I am saying that the Bible is not enough. If anyone reading this finds that statement offensive, I’d remind you that even American evangelicals’ favorite Bible translators, biblical scholars, and pastors frequently tell people who are looking to go deeper in their faith to get a good study Bible, one that includes additional information about the cultures, governments, and societies of the time certain books were written. Even they know that the Bible on its own is not enough and have tried to create more resources around it. There are literally Christian publishers, bookstores, and media outlets — an entire American evangelical consumer culture — overflowing with books because the Bible is not enough, even though this subculture says it is. And a lot of those resources come up short.
Kaela also writes in this section:
“One deconstructionist stated, ‘Reconstruction is not building a new perfect doctrine in the place of the old deconstructed one. Rather, it is equipping us for an adventurous journey — one filled with risk and danger. This journey has no guaranteed destination. For as we follow the pioneer of our faith, we discover that true faith shows itself most clearly, not in the certainty of how right we are, but in the midst of difficult … impossible situations.’
Notice the idea that the deconstructionist is ‘building a new doctrine,’ and this doctrine does not include honoring and glorifying God. It has no destination, no finish line. What a sad faith, one that is unstable and has no ultimate purpose.”
First, I’m assuming that the writer of this quote was referencing Jesus when they said “For as we follow the pioneer of our faith…” I can’t think of anything more honoring and glorifying to God than, well, following Jesus. Jesus even said the two greatest commandments were to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbors like ourselves (Matthew 22:37–40). While correct beliefs are certainly important, Jesus was more than clear that how those beliefs are expressed in love matters even more.
Second, I find the bit about “destinations” and “finish lines” really confusing, even when looking at it through the lens of reformed evangelical theology. Sanctification is a process that is supposed to last throughout our lives (Philippians 1:6 & 1 Peter 1:13–16). Addressing doubts and the cognitive dissonance generated by the vast differences between the teachings of Christ and what we experience in the local American evangelical church is undoubtedly part of that process. This side of eternity, there isn’t supposed to be a finish line. Are there markers and checkpoints we can look for? I think so (Hebrews 12:1–13), but there is no destination to arrive at in this world.
Can this style of faith be sad sometimes, as Kaela suggests? Absolutely, but not in the way she thinks. I’d rather be emotionally sad sometimes with a faith that is real and deepening than happy with a faith that is shallow and unchallenged. I want to be as human as I can be, not a robot. And if sanctification isn’t full of purpose, then all of us Christians, including evangelicals, have even more to deconstruct than any of us realized!
Interestingly, Kaela’s insinuation that a good faith must be a stable one is instructive to where she is coming from. Even kinder evangelicals that I know who are mature in their faith know this isn’t true, because their faith was unstable at various points in their life as they worked through hard experiences. Instability is a core feature of the human experience. Even Jesus flipped some of the teachings of his day on their heads. It was destabilizing in every way imaginable, but I’m not going to dare suggest Jesus lacked purpose.
3. Rejecting false or over-emphasized teachings that lead to bad experiences in the local church is not the same thing as losing your faith, or rejecting God
I’ve been keeping things pretty broad so far. This seems like a good time to get specific. When it comes to exploring false and over-emphasized teachings in reformed white American evangelicalism and the negative consequences that inevitably tag along, navigating this problem can be tricky. One specific teaching I’m going to touch on, complementarianism, is akin to a nuclear bomb for many conservative evangelicals.
But examine these realities we must. Kaela writes:
“We must not allow an experience in the church, whether that is abusive church leaders, a faith giant who abandoned their faith, or hypocrisy, to taint our perception of Jesus.”
I agree that we shouldn’t let these experiences taint our perception of Jesus, but Kaela is assuming here that we already have a clear view of Jesus. In reformed white American evangelicalism, that has often not been the case.
Many people who are deconstructing begin to see early on that the version of Jesus they were taught about is severely flawed at best and outright false at worst. There’s a reason that so many current and former American evangelicals are latching on to Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s phenomenal history book Jesus & John Wayne. When I spoke to Kristin over the summer, even she still seemed a bit surprised at the number of conservative evangelicals who were showing appreciation for the truth in her book.
Jesus & John Wayne covers a lot, but the central historical narrative shows how many American evangelical gatekeepers have turned the Jesus of the Gospels, the sacrificial lamb, into a rugged warrior who wants his followers, specifically white men, to dominate others. As someone who was inside the American evangelical subculture for three decades, I personally can attest to the reality that such teachings exist and are widespread at the grassroots level. To be sure, there is some variation in these teachings; however, they are either false at worst or, at best, severely over-emphasize certain parts of the accounts of Jesus’ life at the expense of others. It’s why we shouldn’t be surprised that so many American evangelicals went for Trump.
So, while I agree with Kaela that we shouldn’t let bad experiences in the Church taint our perception of Jesus, I’d also argue that the version of Jesus that is often held up in the American evangelical subculture is already tainted. This is the main problem lurking behind all these other problems. This militarized version of Jesus is a false depiction of the Savior at the heart of the Christian faith and, unsurprisingly, has rotted out much of this subculture.
But what about over-emphasized teachings? Kaela also writes:
“We must seek to live lives in accordance with Scripture so that we may accurately bear witness to Christ. May our lives be living testimonies of the Gospel.”
I agree with this statement in principle, but I’d be remiss not to point out that part of living in accordance with Scripture is not elevating certain passages to a level of importance they should not have (Titus 3:8–11). And that happens all the time in reformed white American evangelicalism.
Complementarianism may be the best example for this problem. Do I personally agree with complementarian theology? No, I do not. Many today who argue for the Americanized concepts of biblical manhood and womanhood do so exclusively out of the ESV translation of the Bible which, to put it mildly, has more than a few problems. The culture that this theology has both grown out of and into I find even more problematic, as abuse is often downplayed or covered up and even good leaders are incentivized to protect abusers. As someone who was inside of complementarian evangelical institutions for three decades, I’ve come to believe that complementarianism sets everyone up to fail in some of the worst ways possible.
Still, if everyone in a church body, especially women, agrees to live underneath complementarian structures with the full knowledge of what they are theologically and culturally and the dangers that can come with it —and there is real accountability to both prevent and punish the abuse that inevitably becomes more likely when this theology is present— I’m not going to decide arbitrarily that those people aren’t Christians. For starters, Scripture is clear that I don’t get to do that (Ephesians 4:14–16). Second, I’d come across as a jerk and the audience I was trying to persuade wouldn’t listen to me, even if I was right.
Now, do most American evangelicals give that same deference to egalitarians? Absolutely not. For many in this subculture, strict gender roles that are enforced to brutal abandon in local churches have been elevated to a higher level of importance than Jesus himself. In many places, complementarianism is the litmus test on if you are considered a “real” Christian or not.
So, let me say this as directly as I can: American evangelical gatekeepers don’t get to decide where the borders of the Christian faith are when it comes to people who love Jesus and their neighbors.
One of the beautiful things about the Christian faith is the diversity of peoples, thought, and experiences within the Church. At best, the relevancy of the Gospel and the Bible have expressed themselves in countless ways over the centuries. The wealthy and powerful have read the teachings of Jesus and sacrificed wealth and power to lift up the poor and oppressed. And the poor and oppressed have found hope — the kind of hope you feel like a fire in your bones— in the books of Exodus, Amos, and the Gospels. That historical reality in and of itself is a wild, breathtakingly beautiful thing to behold, especially when you consider that some 2,000 years later, people are still being touched and changed in radically different ways.
However, as most of us also know, that isn’t the sole story of the Church. The Crusades, slavery, and colonization are also prominent parts of our history. Far too often, we have failed to reckon with how these bloody legacies bleed over into our times.
And isn’t this representative of a host of issues in a large swath of reformed white American evangelicalism? The severe downplaying of the bad and excessive highlighting of the good. The replacing of leadership with gatekeeping. The false claims that the way things are now are the way they’ve always been, when history and other traditions in the Christian faith say otherwise. The constant submitting of people to ideological, political, and cultural purity and loyalty tests, then crudely slapping the label of “theology” on it. The belief that they are the purest continuation of the Church.
This is not only a level of extreme arrogance that many in American evangelicalism seem to be unaware of, it is also an usurping of the role of Christ in favor of idolatry to self and to culture. Jesus himself warns against this type of religion in Luke 11:42–46:
“‘But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God; it is these you ought to have practiced, without neglecting the others. Woe to you Pharisees! For you love to have the seat of honor in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces. Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without realizing it.’
One of the lawyers answered him, ‘Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us too.’ And he said, ‘Woe also to you lawyers! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them.’”
If anyone gets to decide who is in the bounds of the Christian faith, it is the Savior that the whole enterprise is named after, not a mostly homogenous group of people — united chiefly by white conservative identity politics — who arrived on the scene two thousand years later and have fought all kinds of positive social change for their own benefit.
4. Being responsible with suffering matters.
The fourth bucket of especially problematic issues in Kaela’s piece boils down to questions of responsibility. I’ve saved this one for last because, frankly, I think this gets at one of the biggest problems in how the deconstruction experience is being misunderstood and mishandled in American evangelicalism. Some of Kaela’s final words are:
“We must doubt towards God. Like the father of the demon possessed boy in Mark 9, may we cry, ‘Lord I believe; help my unbelief’. When we ask the Lord, he will be faithful. He may not give us the answers we were looking for. Job never understood his suffering. But he saw God. And isn’t that the point?”
With regards to this story in Mark 9, I’ve seen so many people who —when in their darkest night of deconstruction, just like the dark moment this father was facing— cry out to God in this way. For many, their deepest desire is to trust and know God even more, not all these other reformed white American evangelical cultural chains that have strained them to their breaking point. For many, the deconstruction process is one of doubting toward God, a God that breaks our chains and frees us (Acts 12:6–11). Kaela claims that this is the way to doubt, without seeing the truth that this is the way many people are doubting as they deconstruct!
But I am especially grateful that Kaela brings up Job. She says Job never understood his suffering, but saw God. Okay, sure, but she is not helping her own argument here. Why?
Because Job ends up seeing the mysterious God of Scripture (Job 42:3), and Kaela speaks of a version of God found in reformed white American evangelicalism that looks very different from the God who Job sees. Additionally, Job’s suffering is but one important component of a much bigger, exponentially more beautiful story than the individual parts. We’ll get to that in a minute. We need to understand two other components first.
First, the deconstruction process is about a lot of things, some of which we’ve already covered. But deconstruction is also about dealing with loss. Real loss. The kind of loss that turns your world upside down. The loss of a faith community that rejects you. The loss of trust in people we thought were good leaders but who ended up being brutal gatekeepers within a consumer culture instead. The loss of what we were told was a historical reality about American evangelicalism that was neither accurate history nor reality. The loss of so much we once held near and dear.
Throughout this story, Job is also processing the losses themselves, not just trying to understand why they are happening. This is an important distinction. Similarly, for an individual deconstructing, they are not only asking the question of why is this happening?, but also how do I move forward?
Kaela is right that God may not give us the answers we were looking for. At the beginning of the deconstruction journey especially, many of us sought out easy answers that, probably, would have just led us right back into this subculture we were struggling in. But what is easy and what is right aren’t always the same thing. Instead, for many of us, God opened up a different path, one that led toward God and out of the shackles of the reformed white American evangelical subculture. We took the responsibility God gave us and went down the road of repentance, just as Job eventually does in the end (Job 42:1–6).
The second additional component has to do with Job’s friends. At first, they sit with him, they mourn with him, and they don’t say anything (Job 2:11–13). Neither God nor Job nor Elihu seem to have a problem with that. Great.
But then, something really strange happens. It’s only when Job’s friends try to explain his suffering to him, when they try to rationalize it away with dogma tied to the restraints of their own theology and culture, that they are condemned by Elihu (Job 32) and God (Job 42: 7–9). This is where the story of Job becomes relevant for our moment. It’s as instructive as it is paradigm-shattering.
The lesson here is that, as soon as you explain away another human being’s suffering, you are in the wrong.
First of all, you don’t know what the suffering really is and feels like unless you’ve been through the exact same experience. Since we have already established that the deconstruction experience can start, travel through, and end at many different places for many different reasons, the odds are minuscule that one can understand another’s suffering in the deconstruction process. You can listen, you can sit in silence with the person, and you can ask how you can help, but trying to explain something to them that you are not capable of explaining is crossing a line.
Interestingly, in the final chapter of Job, the Lord goes out of the way to not only admonish Job’s friends for muddling with who God is, but the Lord also sets the stage for repentance and reconciliation. From Job 42: 7–9:
“After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done.’ So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord had told them; and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer.”
This is mind-blowing. It is instructive for both our orthodoxy and orthopraxy. So, let’s compare the story of Job with our current moment.
As I consider these realities in the book of Job while looking out over the reformed white American evangelical cultural landscape, I see many people saying things about God and the Christian faith that are untrue, blown out of proportion, or that undervalue parts of Scripture that are inconvenient to their lifestyle. I see many people behaving like Job’s friends toward the abused and the suffering who have been forced into deconstruction. I see gatekeepers trying to explain away or downplay the real suffering, doubts, and questions of others. I see people who have missed one of the most useful lessons from the book of Job that can be applied in our time for the betterment of all and to God’s glory.
Simply put, I see many American evangelicals who are engaged in such deep idolatry to their own cultural bubble that they don’t even realize they have become Job’s friends. And they seem to be clueless as to why God would find that infuriating.
This is why so many people who are deconstructing have such a visceral reaction to major white evangelical gatekeepers claiming that the deconstruction experience is just a “popular trend” or people trying to participate in the latest “sexy” fad. In part, they are trying to explain away and trivialize a deeply painful and disorienting experience, something that they have no right to do.
To Kaela’s credit, yes, the book of Job ends with a powerful message about seeing God, but the vast majority of the book is about the difficult, painful journey one must often take to get there. It’s also a warning to those who would get in the way of people who are on that journey. And it’s a call to repentance for those who are not heeding the warning.
This begs the question that can’t be ignored: can reformed white American evangelicals who are behaving this way go to those who are deconstructing, repent of and apologize for their folly, their abuse, and their interference, and try to reconcile —not just with the hurting and wounded— but also with God?
That’s a question that is not mine to answer.
Closing Thoughts
As we circle in for a landing, I need to repeat that I do not speak for everyone who is deconstructing. I also want to once again belabor my belief that Kaela and Across My Heart Ministries were not being malicious in any way. With that said, there are two final, bigger-picture issues I want to briefly explore.
Understanding The Relationship Between Elite Harms & Follower Ignorance
I wrote at the beginning of this piece that I think there’s quite a bit of honest ignorance in Kaela’s blogpost. Ignorance, even when honest, can still do a tremendous amount of damage.
While Kaela is not part of the elite class in American evangelicalism, I’d be remiss if I did not point out a severe reality that is emerging in the upper echelons of this subculture. American evangelical elites blurring the lines between deconstruction and deconversion is beginning to look less like ignorance and more like an intentional move to protect their own culture and to avoid hearing and addressing real concerns from real people of real faith (2 Timothy 2:14–17).
This, in turn, provides space for Kaela and other evangelicals like her in the rank and file to do the same without knowing they are working to that end. Whether she realizes it or not, and I don’t think she does realize it, Kaela has fallen into this trap. She writes:
“As I did my research, reading different articles of deconstructionists, I discovered too many beliefs that are contrary to the Bible, such as issues on gender identity, the reality of hell, and the theology of sin. The mission of one blog I read is to ‘apply a 2000 year old religion to 21st century life’. There is a dangerous line crossed when one denies the inerrancy or infallibility of scripture, because it leads to a postmodernist view of relative truth.”
It’s very easy to go find what you want to see online based on what your subculture has told you to see — echo chambers are real! — and not even realize you are doing it. Kaela only mentions having talked directly to that one person who deconstructed their way out of the Christian faith altogether, and even then she emphasized her own response, not his story. She would have done well to find at least a dozen other people who have or are deconstructing and just listen to their stories. Heck, as I mentioned in my last piece, I’ve heard from over 900 people this year alone. I still feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of the broadness and depth of this deconstruction moment.
As I have written about before, we are all impacted by the cultures and institutions we find ourselves in in ways that we do not fully understand or realize. I write those words with the understanding that I can’t escape this reality either. It’s simply part of being human. This is why listening to others, being curious, and protecting the ability to respect and look to other traditions within the Christian faith for answers is so critically important. But doing so with humility and a stance of repentance means American evangelical gatekeepers will need to first dethrone their idols.
Understanding Personal Responsibility Inside Institutions
This is also why we are all responsible for the shortcomings of the institutions we are a part of. An institution having the “Christian” label slapped above its doors doesn’t mean the teachings and culture of that institution are true and healthy.
What are we to do when there is abuse in a church and leaders refuse to protect the abused? What do we do when we see obvious problems with obvious solutions, but are told its not our place to do anything about them, much less say anything about them, as no one else does anything about them? What are we to do when core American evangelical teachings, such as complementarianism, are placed in higher importance than Jesus himself?
These questions represent some of the defining experiences that can be felt deeply in American evangelicalism today. There are answers, but none of them are easy or pleasurable, which is why we so rarely see accountability, change, or moderation in this subculture. It’s why so many choose the path of quiet, desperate deconstruction over asking questions in the community they struggle in. It’s why Bible-believing Christians leave evangelical spaces for other Christian traditions, or remain outside of the local church’s walls. Because they aren’t dealing with the abuse, the problems, or the false and over-emphasized teachings, American evangelicals have become the primary driver of the very deconstruction phenomenon they claim they want to stop.
In response to the stories of abuse and communal self-destruction pouring out of their own institutions, I see many, many American evangelicals following the same line of thinking: “Yes, these things aren’t great, but…” Kaela does this implicitly throughout her piece.
Enough. No more buts. It’s past time to reckon with the bad and deal with it as fully as humanly possible. American evangelicals —from the elites all the way down to the ordinary congregation member— need to start taking responsibility for this mess, this disaster, that has been in the works for decades now. They need to stop pushing false binaries about what the deconstruction experience is and isn’t. They need to end their posturing and begin the painful journey of historical discovery and repentance. They need to stop talking about those who are deconstructing and start listening to them.
Until some of these things change on a large enough scale, the reformed white American evangelical subculture will increasingly be treated as the growing aberration it is by the rest of the global Church, including many evangelicals outside the United States. Check out Australian evangelical theologian and New Testament scholar Michael Bird’s writings here and here for just a glimpse into what I’m talking about.
Rather than seeing this treatment as the call to repentance that it is, the gatekeepers of American evangelicalism will likely continue pushing their followers into more insularity, more idolatry to their own subculture, and more purity and loyalty tests that will only force more Bible-believing Christians into deconstruction.
Or, as Karen Swallow Prior recently wrote so eloquently for Religion News Service, “With this much rot, there’s no choice but to deconstruct.”
My goal here wasn’t to pummel Kaela or Across My Heart Ministries, but to show that deconstruction is way more complex than Kaela’s piece allows room for and some of the reasons why. Even this response and my previous writings come up short. It’s just the nature of the beast.
For me, this has served as a reminder that we all ultimately build theology based on what we care about. If we really care about something, we will go to Scripture and find a justification to continue caring. If we don’t care, we’re going to create and justify a theology or ideology that allows us not to care. I’m just as guilty of that as everyone else is.
In a way, this ongoing confusion on what deconstruction even is boils down to us looking into a mirror and asking this question: what do we care about?
For a lot of deconstructing people, pursuing truth, searching for accurate history, and trying to love God and our neighbors better —all while dealing with difficult cultural realities and abuse in our pasts— seems to be at the heart of what we care about. We’re not perfect and we don’t have all of the answers. A lot of us are still really beaten up and have been denied closure by the places that broke us. But we’re trying.
For many of the white American evangelical gatekeepers, protecting their subculture, using fear to stop people from leaving and to shirk accountability, and preventing any and all change —including good change that many in the rank-and-file say they want— seems to be what is most cared about. I know, not every single American evangelical leader thinks and behaves this way, but a lot of them do. And it’s exhausting.
Maybe this is where the answer we are all seeking begins. Maybe if more ordinary people — like Kaela, like me, like you — started looking into the mirror and asking, as objectively as possible, what we really care about when all the chips are down, maybe we would all discover that we aren’t thrilled with some of the answers we find. About ourselves. About our leaders. About our institutions. About the last five or six years.
I know I wasn’t thrilled by some of what I saw in the mirror. Deconstructing helped me cast some of those things aside. It put me on the journey of repentance. It brought me closer to King Jesus. And if that means I deconverted from an unhealthy subculture along the way, then hallelujah! indeed.
I explore faith and American church culture from Memphis, TN. Never miss an article by signing up for my free newsletter or becoming a member. You can also subscribe to my podcast.
