Deconstrutionist Christianity

I don’t know how I got this way. Maybe being raised a-religious, in a largely modern society, caused me to be more suspicious and critical of spiritual things than some.

I came to faith later in life at age 20. The tenants of the Christian faith were, and remain, compelling to me. But so much of Christianity seems like an ill-fitting structure superimposed on my life. At first I figured I was just learning. And so I was. But I couldn’t seem to grow into it all as I thought I should. I was confused, frustrated and sometimes heartbroken. Why wasn’t my relationship with God like other peoples?

Early on there were those around me who seemed to buck the system. People who professed to be followers of Christ, but that was where the following tendencies would end. They didn’t conform well to the expected behaviors of Christian culture. (The first that comes to mind was a New Zealander I met in Africa. People questioned his salvation!) But there have been others since. They each caught my attention with their stubborn refusal to stop thinking.

I’m a bit slow so it’s taken few bonks on the head, but slowly I started to realize that perhaps some of the aspects of Christianity that seemed ill-fitting weren’t necessary at all, despite admonitions to the contrary from the pulpit and other faithful followers.

Jesus replied, "And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry…” Luke 11: 46)

As I looked around I found others who had a similar sense that something wasn’t right in their hearts as they tried to follow Christ in the prescribed methods. It’s hard to find them because they find they are rebuked quickly for asking the wrong questions, so they learn to stop asking.

It seems trendy now – to shed the Western cultural elements of this faith system in search of something truer and more authentic. I think it was a missionary friend of mine, who was questioning some of those things good Christians aren’t supposed to question, and I who started to refer to this process as “deconstruction”. We’re deconstructing our faith. Pulling off elements, examining them against scripture and personal experience and then tossing an over-abundance of them into the trash.

It’s unbelievably freeing.

Is it possible I can be a Christian – an orthodox Christian who believes the claims of the ancient creeds – and not hold with some of these lame, mindless, cookie-cutter western evangelical expressions of faith?

Yes, yes it is.

The problem, of course, the scary thing about shedding these extraneous trappings of something truer and deeper is that it exposes you. Those of us who have wildly flung the superficial cultural elements of practicing faith aside, pause at some point and find ourselves faced with the uncomfortable question, Do I really believe? When you get to the point of asking that question, really asking it, it’s a scary place because you don’t really ask any question for which the answer is self-evident. Not really. So after we’ve jettisoned the superficial, we are left with whatever is left.

Ah ha. Was it all just a rouse after all – this Christianity – this playing at church at following the rules? If it was, isn’t that worth discovering.

But what if it wasn’t all pretend, all role-playing, and meeting expectations, and fitting into a group, if it’s actually something else, isn’t that worth knowing too? And finding out what it is. What it really is? Not what they tell me it’s supposed to be?

I guess in some ways I’m just an adolescent in the faith. And so I am, 16-years a Christian now, doing all those things normal teenagers do – trying to find out who I am, and moreover, who God is.