“Ready, fire, aim” seems, at times, to be the battle cry of American evangelicalism when it comes to the growing number of people questioning, reconsidering, or abandoning the faith. Yet before the church begins firing in every direction, it is worth asking what exactly we are aiming at and whether we have understood the problem we are trying to address.
Some have described what is happening as a faith exodus, while others have used terms such as church hurt, religious trauma, or simply apostasy. The term that continues to gain the most traction, however, is deconstruction, even though the word has become broad enough that two people may use it while describing very different experiences.
For one person, deconstruction may mean the rejection of historic Christianity altogether, while for another it may mean questioning the particular expression of Christianity in which they were raised, including beliefs, practices, and expectations they had previously assumed were inseparable from the faith itself.
Because these experiences are not identical, the church cannot respond to all of them in the same way. The lack of clarity surrounding deconstruction has often pushed American Christianity toward two reactions, with some waging a culture war in defense of inherited Christian traditions and others searching for ways to reshape Christianity into something more attractive or palatable to those who have walked away.
One group feels compelled to defend nearly everything that has been handed down, while another is willing to reconsider nearly everything that has been received, and both responses can miss the more basic question of what actually belongs to the foundation of the Christian faith.
Although deconstruction may be a modern term, the problem it describes is not particularly modern, because the church has always faced the temptation to elevate secondary doctrines, practices, and cultural expectations into positions of authority they were never intended to occupy.
Secondary Things Can Be Deadly
When writing to the church in Rome, the apostle Paul warns believers not to “destroy with meat” the person for whom Christ died and later commands them not to “destroy the work of God” for the sake of food (Rom. 14:15, 20).
Paul is addressing disagreements among believers in which some possessed liberties that others did not yet feel free to exercise, and those differences had begun producing contempt, judgment, and spiritual injury within the body of Christ. We should not miss that Paul’s warning concerns secondary matters while the damage caused by the way those matters were handled was serious, which forces us to recognize that secondary things can do primary damage whenever they are given primary importance.
A person may have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that faithful Christianity requires faith in Christ along with adherence to a particular political identity, educational philosophy, worship preference, dress standard, parenting method, or other expectation that has become associated with Christian faithfulness. Some of these practices may be wise, and some may arise from an attempt to apply biblical principles, yet wisdom and application do not give every practice the authority of the gospel.
Eventually someone begins examining one of those assumptions and discovers that it does not possess the biblical weight they were told it possessed, and because that assumption had been woven so tightly into the rest of their Christian identity, questioning one part of the structure causes the rest of the structure to begin shaking. What began as a question about something secondary can then become a question about everything.
For some people, deconstruction will ultimately involve a rejection of Christ and the historic Christian faith, while for others it may begin with the realization that they were handed Christ together with an entire system of expectations without ever being taught how to distinguish the foundation from the things that had been built upon it.
One of the church’s responsibilities, then, is to help people make those distinctions before they conclude that discovering weakness in one part of their inherited Christianity requires the abandonment of the whole.
Love Must Govern Liberty
Once Paul identifies the danger created by secondary disputes, he insists that Christian liberty, conscience, and disagreement must be governed by love.
Paul writes that if a brother is grieved by what another Christian eats, that Christian is no longer walking in love (Rom. 14:15), which means that even the rightful exercise of Christian liberty can become sinful when it is exercised without concern for the spiritual well-being of another believer.
Paul also refuses to give the restrictive conscience unlimited authority over everyone else, since both the strong and the weak are called to live together as members of the same body, with their relationships governed by love rather than by the demand that everyone share the same preferences or scruples.
Love orders the way Christians live with one another in the midst of disagreement, which is why Paul can say elsewhere that love fulfills the law toward one’s neighbor and that Christian freedom is to be expressed through serving one another in love (Rom. 13:8–10; Gal. 5:13–14).
This becomes especially important when dealing with those who are questioning the faith they inherited, because the church’s instinct can be to determine immediately which side a person occupies before taking the time to understand what that person is actually questioning and why.
When Paul tells the Colossians to put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love while bearing with one another, he describes a Christian community capable of receiving difficult questions without immediately treating them as signs of rebellion or unbelief (Col. 3:12–14).
Likewise, when Christians are commanded to bear one another’s burdens and thereby fulfill the law of Christ, the church is being called to become a place where believers can bring doubts, confusion, wounds, and difficult questions without being told that the presence of a question proves the absence of faith (Gal. 6:2).
A church shaped by this kind of love can take questions seriously because it takes truth seriously, and it can walk patiently with people through those questions because its confidence rests in Christ rather than in the preservation of every inherited assumption.
The Church Should Be a Place for Reconstruction
One of the failures in the church’s response to deconstruction may be the assumption that questioning the structure surrounding Christianity amounts to rejecting Christ himself. When people come to believe that certain questions cannot be asked within the church, they will often search for somewhere outside the church where those questions can be explored, and the voices they find there may have little interest in helping them preserve what is true.
The church should therefore become a place where inherited beliefs can be examined against Scripture, where cultural expressions of Christianity can be distinguished from the substance of the faith, where personal preferences can be separated from biblical commands, and where people who discover errors in what they were taught can be helped to rebuild around what Scripture actually says.
This requires more than permission to ask questions, because reconstruction also involves helping people recover a foundation capable of bearing the weight that had previously been placed on traditions, personalities, institutions, or cultural expectations.
Although deconstruction is a present issue within American Christianity, the impulse behind it has existed for centuries and will continue to exist as long as sinful people imperfectly hand the faith to other sinful people. Every generation receives both truth and the accumulated assumptions of the generation before it, which means every generation must learn again how to distinguish the two.
The danger to the church is that it becomes so preoccupied with defending itself that it never asks why people came to believe demolition was necessary in the first place, while the danger for the person who is deconstructing is that the process never moves beyond criticism and becomes an identity built around what has been rejected rather than a search for what is true.
The church must therefore maintain the humility to repent where it has confused its traditions with Christ, the patience to walk with those who are sorting through what they have received, and the courage to call people back to the faith once delivered to the saints when the process of questioning begins to move away from the truth of the gospel.
What we need is a church continually reformed according to the Word of God and continually directing wounded, confused, questioning, and weary people back to Jesus Christ, who remains the foundation beneath every faithful act of reconstruction.
Bad construction requires more than demolition because a cleared foundation is still waiting to be built upon, and faithful reconstruction begins when the church helps people place the weight of their faith where Scripture has always placed it, upon Jesus Christ, for, as Paul writes, “other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11).
