A Helpful Guide to Deconstruct Your Faith

For whatever reason, there seems to be a growing trend among Christians of all flavors to engage in the act of “deconstructing” their faith.  From famous YouTubers to (once?) Christian musicians, we are seeing public proclamations that all that they once held dear is actually false and they are now making it known that they no longer believe as they once did.  Now, we are told, it is necessary to “deconstruct” their faith by either rejecting it entirely or only holding to certain teachings that align with what the person now sees as acceptable from this new enlightenment.

From what I understand, those who believe that they have reached a point where deconstruction has become necessary have simply outgrown the faith of their younger life and must find a means of living their faith (or lack of it) in a way that can meet the demands of their present circumstances.  Life can get messy as we get older and have more experiences.  We can experience the ugliness of divorce, the death of someone we have come to deeply know and care about, or even have to face the day to day challenges of living in a culture that is no longer rooted in a shared Christian ethos.  

I could see great value in deconstructing one’s faith if done within the right context.  Unfortunately, the examples I have seen and heard about are not usually done in a very healthy way.  Rather than recognizing that there is only one reality, many fall victim to the all-to-common idea that we can either make up our own reality or that each person determines what is ultimately true.  It is no surprise then, that we find examples of those who deconstruct their faith doing so within the context of New Age spiritualities or an embrace of moral relativism.  

Maturing is important as it helps us distance ourselves from childish behaviors that limit our human flourishing.  Deconstructing one’s faith may be presented under the guise of maturation, but I think that it typically reveals a flawed or distorted understanding of what someone had come to believe was really the faith.  In reality, it has been rooted in a hollow shell of emotionalism or a “blind faith” that relies on a fundamental lack of experience of what is True, Good, and Beautiful.  

In light of all of this, I thought that it may be helpful to offer a guide to actually deconstructing your faith.  Let’s deconstruct everything that is not rooted in reality and is actually keeping us from thriving as persons.  

Faith is not an intellectual exercise

One of the easiest mistakes that I see Parish Schools of Religion, parochial schools, and even those preaching make is that the faith is reduced to a set of intellectual propositions that can either be accepted or rejected.  While the Church has a tremendously rich intellectual history that ought to be taught and used to defend her from aggressive secular philosophies, our faith can not be reduced to simply a set of lofty ideas.  

Many have falsely come to believe that “transmitting the faith” simply means memorizing information about Jesus, the Church, or other theological facts.  Sadly, too many (now) former Catholics have been formed within this environment and when confronted with opposing intellectual ideas, are not equipped to respond well or are not convinced by the Church’s arguments and embrace whatever seems reasonable at the moment.  

If we are only seeing our faith through an intellectual lens we are doing it wrong.  I often think of St. Thomas Aquinas - perhaps one of the greatest minds of Western civilization.  Some may try to reduce Aquinas and his work to only logical proofs or a structure of thinking that only appeals to our reason.  Yet, when we hear and pray with his Pange Lingua, when we hear how he loves God and knows that he is loved by Him, it gives us the context through which we can better understand this intellectual giant.  Aquinas was a poet - in other words - Aquinas was a lover.  Poets cannot thrive if they are reducing the world to only what is rational; rather, they see the world through the lens of love and are able to speak into existence a way of seeing the world that is rooted in love.  If we strip Aquinas of his love of God and only see a logician, we have missed the entire point of Aquinas.  Everything he wrote, he wrote in love.  Even the most intellectually rigorous parts of the Summa are an expression of Aquinas’ love of God.  

If we want to properly deconstruct our “faith,” we have to recognize any way that we have substituted an actual relationship with God for mere intellectualism.  Do we give in to the temptation of finding satisfaction in ideas while neglecting the very real relationship we are called to participate in with our God? Again, this is not meant to be an attack on the rich intellectual history of the Church - it is meant to elevate it through the proper lens of reality. Otherwise, we will continually reduce reality to only what we can understand, meaning, we can become the measure through which things are gauged to be true.  

Faith is not a set of rules or morals

In a similar vein to our first rule, in order to really deconstruct our “faith,” we have to come to terms with any way that we are reducing it to a set of rules or morals.  Moralizing our faith - believing that the faith is only a matter of how we live our life - is one of the most common stories that I hear from people who have left the Church.  In this area of deconstruction I am not really referring to those who have a faint memory of moral formation from their youth and now live an entirely different life; rather, I wanted to focus on those who at some point had an incredibly deep conviction of what is right and wrong and now their moral certitude is less certain.

By reducing the faith to a set of moral principles, it shows that there is a clear misunderstanding of both faith and morality.  Fundamentally, every moral choice must be guided by a commitment to reach the goal of human life, which is to share in the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Morality itself is grounded in a relational reality with our God.  If we divorce our decision making from its inherent relational connections with our Triune God, we lose sight of why we ought to pursue good things and avoid those that are evil.  A reduction of faith to moralism leads a person to a warped perception of God, self, and others as it is ultimately disconnected from what is real.  This untethering from reality results in a disconnect between how we live and what we believe.  In other words, our faith becomes mechanical to the point that we are doing or not doing certain things in a way that can earn us the most points.  

If we have ever asked, “did this Mass count…” if we arrived late or attended a wedding earlier on the weekend - we are reducing our faith to a set of morals.

If we are constantly looking for the line of how far we can go before we sin, we have reduced our faith to a set of morals.  

If we are constantly justifying our actions and never taking responsibility for what we have done or failed to do, we have reduced our faith to a set of morals.

We can believe and live by what the Church teaches and still fall victim to this trap because we lose sight of the source of the Church’s moral authority.  The Church teaches because she has been taught.  Christ, the way, the truth, and the life, empowered the Church to teach and form those in the world so that they could flourish and live in true freedom.  The Church’s moral authority comes from this source.  It is not simply a matter that “the Church teaches x, y, or z,” but the reality that she teaches what has been revealed by God.  If it was simply the Church teaching for her own sake, it would be meaningless, but because what she says is rooted in what has been revealed by God for the sake of human happiness, we ought to listen.  

Let us deconstruct our moralism.  

Let us deconstruct a limited view of reality that sees faith as only a matter of rules to obey.  

Let us deconstruct a faith that does not correspond with the source of reality.  

Faith means that we have to forgive

Perhaps even more difficult to deconstruct than an intellectualism or moralism would be a bitter cynicism that hardens our hearts to the point that we believe that we have a moral responsibility to never forgive those who have hurt us.  

A false deconstructionism can lead someone to believe that by seeing the Church as a human institution it has somehow fortified the deconstruction-er in a righteous bitterness towards her leaders and those who have failed them.  

Let us deconstruct the Church, but let us deconstruct a false image of the Church.  

At the core of who She is, the Church is one who listens and obeys Christ.  She exists because Christ intended her to exist.  Our God decided that the best means of conveying his grace and reconciliation with the world was through establishing a Church.  The members of the Church did not decide this, those leading the Church did not decide this - God did.  The Church is meant to be an expression of human obedience to the Will of God.  Sadly, throughout the course of her 2,000 history, we see plenty of examples of men and women who have imposed their own will on what the Church ought to be or how it ought to engage with the world.  Every time this happens, every time this sin happens, we see deep wounds being inflicted on those who try to stay faithful.  

The wickedness that has transpired over the centuries does not and should not be forgotten or swept under the rug.  Excuses should not be made.  Seeing our own sins and the sins of those who lead us through the lens of our faith - a faith rooted in reality - tells us that we have a responsibility to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Love includes mercy.  This does not mean that consequences for deplorable actions disappear or that change is not expected - far from it, but it does mean that if we are holding onto a lack of forgiveness and continuing to harden our hearts, it does nothing but make us less capable of giving and receiving love.  

Let us deconstruct a faith that makes us believe that we shouldn’t forgive.

Let us deconstruct a faith that disdains mercy.

Let us deconstruct a faith that leads us to feeling completely hopeless.

Rebuild My Church

Part of “deconstruction” is “construction” - meaning, it is torn apart for the sake of building up something new.   If this deconstruction process is done within the wrong context, however, we will not be building something that is beautiful and rooted in reality, we will instead build something that resembles our own self.  Humans have such a tendency to put God and everything He says and does in a box that is more palatable or comfortable for us.  It is no wonder that those who “deconstruct” their faith in an unhelpful way end up believing in something that conforms to how we want to see the world rather than how it is.  

If we want to truly deconstruct our faith, we have to do so within the context of love.  Reality and all that exists in it flows from this truth:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. (1 Jn 4:7-9)

If we want to deconstruct anything it has to be motivated by love of God and through the love of God. We recognize that any past “blind faith” we may have had was actually not faith at all.  Faith is not blind - that would mean that we don’t know who we are trusting; rather, true faith is always placed in a person, someone that we trust, someone that we know loves us and would never lie or deceive us.  True faith means that we believe that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit want what is best for us and want to lead us towards human flourishing.  Thus, if we want to truly deconstruct our “faith,” we have to begin by looking at our actual relationship with God. 

It can be too easy to replace the living God with a set of intellectual ideas or moral standards, but this is not faith.  As Pope Benedict XVI told us in Deus Caritas Est, “We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”  It is through this encounter with a person that our intellectual and moral life can make sense.  It is through this experience of love that how we think and how we act can live in accord with what is True.  

Deconstructing outside of this lens of love puts us at an incredible disadvantage and ultimately ending in failure because we will never really know what is true.  The increased secularization of the West has led to a vacuum where we no longer have a common structure for how we can speak about life, death, or any other big question.  This vacuum is constantly trying to be filled by something and sadly, what we see is that it is a warped and limited view of reality.  

This is where we can see the foundations of the “reconstruction” of our faith.  Not a faith reduced to intellectualism or moralism, but a faith rooted in the trust of a personal relationship with our God. This same God has chosen to love us through this world, through the Church, through this reality.  

When we hear his voice speaking our name, it can lead us to want to know Him and know more about Him.  Do it.  Seek to better understand the Beloved, not in a bland way that is only about absorbing information, but in a way that is rooted in a pursuit of knowing Love.  This will lead us to want to conform our hearts to His, to live like Him and love like Him.  We do all of this in a community, a Body, imperfect in its humanity, yet still a privileged place of encountering the very face of Love.