#41: Where the Gospel Meets Deconstruction

#41: Where the Gospel Meets Deconstruction

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: On September 4th, 1984 – the beginning of first grade – Rhett McLaughlin and Lincoln Neal III, or Link as he calls himself, met for the very first time. 

RHETT AND LINK: The first day of first grade. You’ve been my best friend since 1984. 

JESSE EUBANKS: They remained friends all the way through college as roommates, both studying engineering, and after college they went to work for Campus Crusade for Christ.

RHETT AND LINK: Come help change the world.

JESSE EUBANKS: Performing and filming goofy sketches to entertain students. 

RHETT AND LINK: You don’t need to make a difference in the place you…

JESSE EUBANKS: In 2012, the comedy duo started their own YouTube channel called Good Mythical Morning. 

RHETT AND LINK: Good Mythical Morning. This first ever inaugural episode of Good Mythical Morning…

JESSE EUBANKS: And while their content was not Christian in nature, in response to a fan on Reddit, Rhett publicly stated that yes, he and his buddy were in fact Christians. They worked with Phil Vischer performing songs for his popular What’s in the Bible series. 

RHETT AND LINK: It’s called Judges… 

JESSE EUBANKS: Their own YouTube channel continued gaining popularity. 

RHETT AND LINK: We’ve surpassed 1 million subscribers… 10 million subscribers…

JESSE EUBANKS: To the point that in 2020, Rhett and Link were named the fourth highest earners on YouTube, making 20 million dollars a year. 

RHETT AND LINK: 3, 2, 1. Thank you. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And then, in February of 2020, to the shock of many of their fans, Rhett and Link – each of them gave their personal story as to why they were no longer Christians. They had actually deconverted. 

RHETT AND LINK: I kind of went through a period of anger. I was very mad at the Christian leaders and thinkers who I felt deceived by. I don’t interact in a healthy way at this point in my life with a robust belief system. I think I would say I’m an agnostic who wants to be hopeful. 

IVAN MESA: You know, Jesse, that’s the first time that I heard of Rhett and Link when they announced their de-conversion story, and so news organizations, including my own organization, The Gospel Coalition, started engaging this announcement. 

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, and this isn’t the first story like this to break out on the Internet. I mean, I think about the stories of author Joshua Harris who wrote I Kiss Dating Goodbye, worship leader Marty Sampson, singer Audrey Assad – all of whom publicly deconverted from their Christian faith. 

IVAN MESA: You know, and these are the kinds of stories that are becoming more and more popular, and each time I can’t help but wonder why. What happens that would cause someone even well-known Christians like Rhett and Link to announce that they’re no longer Christians?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. You know, I think that’s complicated because, you know, we’re complex people with complex stories, but one of the things contributing to these deconversion narratives, at least in part, is the current phenomenon called deconstruction.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets deconstruction. This episode is in partnership with The Gospel Coalition, and so joining me today is their books editor, Ivan Mesa. Hey, Ivan. 

IVAN MESA: Hey, Jesse. It’s great to be here with you. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so this is a topic that TGC has been actively trying to address. Why is this so important to you? 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, well this is something that we’ve been seeing again and again and again. We’ve been seeing it from well-known Christians on social media announcing that they’re no longer Christians on, on Instagram or Twitter or on a podcast, conversations like the one that Rhett and Link did. And sadly, there’s also many people that are nameless, uh, people in our churches, people that we grew up with in youth group, who likewise are processing whether or not they’re Christians anymore, so we’re trying to help those who are struggling with their faith and those who are ministering to those individuals.

JESSE EUBANKS: So today we’re actually going to deconstruct deconstruction. We’ll pull it apart as we look at – What exactly is deconstruction? Is it always a bad thing? And how can we as Christians engage in an increasingly skeptical world? 

IVAN MESA: And we do want to clarify that we are not gonna get into all the specific issues in this episode. Rather, the goal of this episode is to simply gain an understanding of deconstruction as a whole. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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JESSE EUBANKS: So according to sociologists, around 43% of all people will experience a major faith transition in their life. 

IVAN MESA: Wow. That’s almost, uh, one out of every two people. That’s a lot. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. You know, but if you notice, you know, a lot of the stories that we’re hearing today of those that are transitioning out of their faith – they’re coming from what we would call a fundamentalist evangelical background, meaning that there’s a very precise way in which you are expected to live out your faith. I mean, all the examples that I gave at the beginning are people who came from a fundamentalist evangelical background. 

IVAN MESA: And so if it’s true that almost half of people will transition in their faith, then it makes sense why, once given the opportunity to start critiquing or questioning, those in more fundamental spheres would do so in some extreme ways. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, but the truth is that we aren’t the first people to create strict religious environments. In the gospel of Mark chapter seven, the Pharisees and religious leaders come to Jesus, but they aren’t coming with curiosity. They’re actually coming with a complaint. Verse five says, “The Pharisees and the scribes ask Jesus, ‘Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?'”

IVAN MESA: So a little cultural context here. We’re told earlier that any respectable Jewish person would’ve washed their hands and, and it wasn’t just about being clean and all about hygiene. This is something actually passed down from ancestors of old. This was a set belief and one they deemed necessary for proper faith.

JESSE EUBANKS: You don’t wash your hands – how can you call yourself one of God’s people? I mean, but listen to how Jesus responds. “And he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.'” All throughout the gospels, Jesus pushes against and challenges the religious leaders of the day because their understanding of faith becomes so narrow and tradition-centered that they were missing the point. 

IVAN MESA: So this might be a provocative statement, but what Jesus is doing here could be considered a form – a good form, that is – of deconstruction. What I mean by that is carefully examining and removing man-made biases to come to a true understanding of faith. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Sure. And you know, of course Jesus is the creator of our faith, so he actually doesn’t have any question as to what truly is God’s way and what’s not. But for us, we don’t have that kind of clarity. For us to deconstruct, that involves a journey. So let’s look at that journey. And to do that, we’re actually gonna break it down into three stages. So the first stage in this journey is questioning. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: And so I was like, “Oh, wait a second. That’s not that scary. Why did people tell me that it was that scary? Like, that sounds like it aligns with biblical concepts.”

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Hannah Johnson. Hannah’s actually one of our alumni from Love Thy Neighborhood. Her dad is a pastor. She was raised in the Christian faith. She told me that she first believed the gospel of Jesus at actually just four years old. Her faith was pretty smooth, pretty easy – that is, until she went off to college. And we said at the beginning of the episode that we’re not gonna dive into specific issues, meaning that we’re not going to do a huge diagnostic and deep dive on those things. But you know, for Hannah, there were issues that were really concerning for her and that raised some questions, and one of those issues for her was the issue of gender. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: One of my first friends that I made in college – like she staunchly claimed feminism. I had never met anyone who was like, “I’m a feminist.” And I was like, “What?”

JESSE EUBANKS: And this was confusing for Hannah because growing up in the Christian culture she did, she was taught certain things about feminists and mainly that it was definitely incompatible with Christianity. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: Feminists hate men. They burn bras. They, you know, they hate being women and, like, they push off any sort of, like, gender differences.

JESSE EUBANKS: But now becoming friends with this girl who actually claimed to be a feminist – what Hannah had been brought up to believe didn’t match what she was experiencing right in front of her. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: Just having conversations with her, I was like, “Oh no, this seems like pretty reasonable. What? Like, equality between genders? I think I believe that. Like, I think that’s not crazy.” And she really loved Jesus, and, like, you know, those beliefs for her really, like, aligned with her faith. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And gender wasn’t the only thing that Hannah started to question. The second issue she was confronted with in college, specifically at the local church that she began attending, was the issue of race.

HANNAH JOHNSON: They called themselves a racial reconciliation church., and so they were talking about racial issues in a spiritual space. And I had always had this idea, like I knew racism existed, but I was like, “Christians aren’t racist because, you know, like we should treat everyone with respect” and like, “Oh, of course – it doesn’t matter that my friend is black, like I don’t see them as black. That doesn’t matter.” And then suddenly, like from the pulpit being preached to like, “Hey, our African American brothers and sisters are experiencing the world differently and, like, we need to listen and we need to be attentive and, like, we need to care about that. And I was like, “Whoa. What? Wait a second.”

JESSE EUBANKS: So when we say that the first stage in deconstruction is questioning, it’s simply asking ourselves – “Do I have all the information around this theological belief or this issue?” It’s literally like I’m fine-tuning my faith. I’m just trying to make sure – do I perceive and understand something correctly? And so for Hannah, you know, asking things like – “Does following Jesus include giving attention to racial diversity? Is this a biblical concept, or is it just a fad of the times?” – those were some of the questions that Hannah was wrestling with. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: I was, like, questioning myself. I’m like, “Am I crazy? Like, is this crazy? Like, is it okay that I’m asking these questions?” I think it has to be.

JESSE EUBANKS: So when we move into the stage of questioning, usually something happens to bring us there. I mean, I don’t know anybody who wakes up one day and thinks, “Hmm, I wonder if I’m doing all of this wrong.” 

IVAN MESA: Yeah. Theologian Josh de Keijzer writes that this usually stems from three anomalies – one, traumatic experience; two, self-contradictory teaching; or three, inconsistent praxis. So in this case, it seems like Hannah’s experiencing some sort of self-contradictory teaching. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I was taught being a Christian meant these things over here, but now I’m being told that it actually means these things over here. And the truth is that, you know, all of us are gonna experience some level of this on our faith journey. I actually like the way that author and professor A.J. Swoboda puts it. 

A.J. SWOBODA: If we are truly seeking Jesus with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, there are gonna be moments we’re going to find out something we’ve been handed does not align with who he is.

JESSE EUBANKS: But the reality is that in some conservative Christian circles, the attitude and posture towards questioning is that it’s forbidden, that it’s off-limits, that it’s scary. It is not encouraged. And for any of us, if we find ourselves in a place where we’re never allowed to ask hard questions, we’re gonna end up with a pretty shallow, surface-level faith, one that’s been handed to us instead of one that we’ve actually nurtured and grown ourselves.

IVAN MESA: And really, I think a lot of people’s journeys wouldn’t need to go into deconstruction if we created environments that made room for questions and taught people how to search the Scripture. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. You know, it’s important that we make the distinction that being in a stage of questioning – that does not necessarily mean that we’re doubting. Nor does it mean that we’re now two steps away from abandoning faith altogether. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: I do wanna be a Christian, not walking away from the faith entirely, not like, “Peace out Christians. Y’all suck,” but like, “Hey, I really wanna be a part of the church, and I’m not running away from the church. But what if the church needs to change?”

JESSE EUBANKS: And thankfully for Hannah, she did have spaces where she could talk about her questions – at school, at church, even at home. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: I just came home with a rage, and I was like, “Listen, did you know?” And uh, my mom’s like, “Um, okay. Wow, you have a lot of different ideas now. Like, what is it?” And I’m like, “Listen, mom, this thing, this thing,” and it just, like, came out like a fire. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So questioning is stage one, but it isn’t until stage two that we see the actual deconstruction process. Some of us may be having questions and doubts, and our words are, “Well, I’m deconstructing.” But honestly, we’re just in that first stage of questions. 

IVAN MESA: So if questioning isn’t the same thing as deconstructing, then what does deconstruction actually look like?

JESSE EUBANKS: That is a great question. So I think that we should do a little “Deconstruction 101” after the break. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

IVAN MESA: And I’m Ivan Mesa. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets deconstruction. 

JESSE EUBANKS: We’re looking at the journey of deconstruction in three stages, and we’ve just explored the first stage, which is questioning. We heard from Hannah Johnson who went to college and was faced with all sorts of questions about her faith. 

IVAN MESA: And the second stage is the actual deconstruction. So, what does that look like? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so when we move into deconstruction, we aren’t just focused on practice, but now we’re targeting the belief itself. We are considering – should this thing even be a part of my faith at all? We’re literally beginning to pull our faith apart in pieces to reconsider them. Again, here’s Professor A.J. Swoboda. 

A.J. SWOBODA: Really, at the end of the day, what deconstruction is – is deconstruction is dismantling something that we have believed. It is dismantling something that we have already ended up believing. We don’t deconstruct things we don’t believe. We deconstruct things that we previouslyheld onto or currently hold onto.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so this is important. We can actually only deconstruct something that we believe, something that we hold onto as a worldview personally, that we’ve made a part of our faith. And doubt can often be a part of this as well. And the way that this deconstruction happens – it’s hard to succinctly define because it’s a philosophical term, but I actually like the way that medium.com explains it. They say, quote, “In short, faith deconstruction is the systematic pulling apart of one’s belief system for examination.” End quote. 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, so an analogy of this might be, say you have, uh, a car and it starts to make some funny noise. You, I think, would first question, maybe, is there something wrong with the car? You might even take it to a shop, get it fixed. But to deconstruct it would mean – “I think this noise is happening because the car wasn’t built right the first time around, so I’m gonna take it apart and see which pieces are essential and which aren’t.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Great analogy. You know, and at this point in her story, Hannah hasn’t actually made it to this level of the deconstruction process, but you actually told me a story of somebody that I think wrote for The Gospel Coalition who truly did deconstruct.

IVAN MESA: Yeah, that’s right. 

IAN HARBOR: Just coming face to face with a lot of suffering while I’m trying to figure out who I am and what my place is in the world. 

IVAN MESA: So this is Ian Harbor. Like Hannah, he also grew up in the Christian faith, but the thing that catapulted him into questioning was not contradictory teaching, but rather traumatic experience. It was during Ian’s last two years of high school that he ended up having to attend 12 funerals. The first one was for his grandmother, and the last one was for his mother who had actually committed suicide. 

IAN HARBOR: And I just needed the world to make sense, and at the time the – at least the beliefs I had and the way that I held them – did not give me enough of a picture to make sense of the world.

IVAN MESA: What he means by that is the “church on Sunday and Wednesday, no cussing, read your Bible, go on mission trips” type of Christianity that Ian knew seemed to have very little to do with his reality. 

IAN HARBOR: I mean, especially with my, you know, with my mom and in that whole situation, it’s like if the whole point is to escape here and go somewhere else, why don’t we just kind of all kill ourselves? I know that’s like the most dark way of putting it, but I mean, there’s a little bit of that to it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Gosh, I, I just hear him, and I’m thinking about – I mean, 12 funerals, his own family. I mean, his grandmother, his mother – he’s having an existential crisis on top of so much grief and so much loss. Like, I just feel so much pain for this guy.

IVAN MESA: Yeah. Ian is starting to deconstruct because he’s come to a place of deciding the faith structure he had built wasn’t really sustainable. It, it wasn’t answering his deepest longings, and so he needed to pull it apart and see where it went wrong. And like we’ve said, not all churches offer this kind of space for examination, which is how Ian saw his own church.

IAN HARBOR: There wasn’t a lot of room to question it, think about it, rethink it, you know, at least entertain other interpretations, um, much less, maybe change your opinion. And I think that was a, that was a hard place to be because it felt all or nothing. It felt like I have to subscribe point by point to this, or I’m out.

IVAN MESA: So because this church wasn’t the place to look for answers, he turned to where most of us probably would – the Internet. 

IAN HARBOR: So, for me, a lot of the guides I turned to were kind of the, the standard emergent church crowd that was around back then. So, you know, the Liturgists and Don Miller, read Blue Like Jazz, you know, just sort, sort of that crowd, Richard Rohr. Those were more the guys I turn to. Oh, Pete Rollins, big time. Pete Rollins. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. So, you know, in this day and age, if you have a question, what do you do? “Hey, Google.” I mean, the Internet provides endless information, endless ideas. I mean, in fact, Professor A.J. Swoboda says that this is a common practice when it comes to deconstructing.

A.J. SWOBODA: When we don’t have somebody to talk to, we are gonna eventually take our questions somewhere, and if we don’t take them to somebody in our community that we’re worshiping God with, we’re gonna eventually take them to the Internet or podcasts or some virtual space. Actually, I think there’s a whole virtual cottage industry of deconstruction podcasts that exist because the church has not been a place where we can talk about the questions that we have about God.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. And so we see, you know, what happens when a church can’t provide a safe space for stage one, which is about questions. We see how rapidly we start forcing people over into deconstruction, and we drive them out of our communities to go find places where they can actually explore those questions. 

IVAN MESA: Now, if you aren’t familiar with some of the names Ian listed, here are just a couple. Rawlins -his overall project is marked by the themes of doubt, complexity, unknowing, and embracing brokenness. His Patreon account actually declares that he’s creating freedom from the tyranny of certainty and satisfaction. Rohr accepts the title “Christian Mystic” and defines a “Christian Mystic” as someone who places experiencing God personally as their number one priority, as opposed to simply knowing about God in Scripture, church doctrine, and theology. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and I think that, like, that’s some of the tension, right? Is that some of what these teachers are saying we would agree with and we could totally affirm, but then there’s also just a lot that comes out that I don’t think I can follow them down the paths that they’re going.

IAN HARBOR: It uses a lot of Christian language, you know, but turns the phrase a little bit and defines the words in a different way to where it really isn’t recognizably Christian anymore. 

IVAN MESA: But since Ian was dismantling his faith anyway and these teachers offered a space for him to do, Ian felt like he had a place to call home.

IAN HARBOR: Yeah. I think they were wrestling with the same things I was wrestling with. They were wrestling with science. They were wrestling with justice. They were wrestling with, you know, the LGBT questions. They were wrestling with all these things, with the resurrection and with the Bible. They were wrestling with all of that, and so was I. They didn’t have all the answers and neither did I, um, and they were comfortable with that and they were comfortable with uncertainty in a way that I had never seen before in my life and that was really attractive to me. So, yeah, I do think what I found was solidarity. 

IVAN MESA: So, going back to that car analogy, if you imagine Ian’s faith like a car, he kept pulling it apart piece by piece by piece, to the point where there was nothing left – just scrap metal.

IAN HARBOR: Just straight up said, “I don’t believe in God,” and just walked away from the whole thing.

JESSE EUBANKS: It makes me think of this analogy from Lisa Fields where she talks about, “Well, I saw my parents suddenly turn the car in one direction and they drove off a cliff and so I’m not gonna be like my parents. I’m gonna make different choices. So we just turned the wheel the other way, but all we end up doing is we just drive off the other side of the cliff. It’s the same mistake, just with a different application. And so much of what Ian’s expressing here is like in reaction to so much of the faulty Christian faith that he saw in his world – rules and judgment and strict belief – and so he’s like, “You know what? I don’t wanna be like that. I’m gonna go to a place that doesn’t have such firm, strict boundaries. I’m gonna believe whatever I wanna believe. All bets are off.” 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, that’s true. At the same time, I wanna say not all deconstruction leads to deconversion, but we can see how easy it is to slide in that direction. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Totally. So what you’re getting into is actually the third and final stage in the deconstruction process, and that stage is reconstruction. So we might be most familiar with the dramatic stories on the Internet that end in deconversion, but reconstruction can actually have three different outcomes and I’m really curious to see which one Ian is gonna land in when we come back. So stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Jesse Eubanks. 

IVAN MESA: Ivan Mesa. Today – where the gospel meets deconstruction.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve been following the story of Ian Harbor. Ian has been deconstructing his faith. He’s taken it apart all the way to the point of deconversion. But the last stage in fully deconstructing is actually reconstruction – so not leaving the car in pieces and scraps on the floor, but putting some version of a vehicle back together. But before we hear about Ian’s reconstruction, I think that we need to understand what the different forms of reconstruction are. Okay, so I want you to think about deconstruction as a horizontal line. The first dot where this line begins is questioning. You go a little bit further along, there’s another dot, and that dot is deconstruction itself. And then we come along to the third dot, and at the third dot, the line actually branches off into three separate lines. And those three lines – those are the three choices that exist within this third stage, which is reconstruction. Depending on the type of reconstruction you do, will actually decide which of three forks you’re going to take. The first path is to return to the faith that you started with – so your original car gets put back together, but the parts have been cleaned, older, rusty things have been replaced, and it’s just a stronger car than what you started with. The second path is to adapt the faith that you started with. So in this path, you keep some components of the car, but you also add pieces from other cars, building a sort of hybrid. And finally, the third option is to use none of the parts that you started with and build something completely new, to build an entire new worldview that is not based on God, Jesus, or the Bible. This is what we would call deconversion.

Okay. So in light of all this, going back to Ian’s story, where he’s kind of at the end of the second stage of deconstruction, he seems to be right on the cusp of reconstruction – what exactly is life like for him at this point in his story? 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, so this took several years for it to unfold, and at this point in the story, he’s outta college and he feels really good about life.

IAN HARBOR: Being full of doubt does not mean life is bad. You know, life was good. 

IVAN MESA: Well, like he said, life was good. He was comfortable, but it all got shaken up again by another situation – the 2016 election. 

NEWS CLIPS: Clinton or Trump… So let’s be stronger together my fellow Americans… I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the president… Heading into this election day we’ve already seen…

IVAN MESA: Now, we’re not gonna get political, but what happened for Ian was another anomaly that causes questions, something we looked at earlier, and that is inconsistent praxis. 

IAN HARBOR: The thing that surprised me was progressives, who had always been the ones talking about love and tolerance and acceptance and transcend – I mean, Richard Rohr talking about transcend and include – were all of a sudden acting and talking just as fundamentalist as the conservatives that I had tried so hard to get away from. 

IVAN MESA: So inconsistent praxis basically means discovering that people actually aren’t practicing what they preach. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. You know, for a long time when we think of Christian fundamentalists, we think of hyper-conservatives. Like I grew up in the nineties. It makes me think of, like, the boycott on Disney because of their support of LGBTQ issues. You know, the pushback that conservative Christians received from the culture was that we were being intolerant, we were inflexible, that we were judgmental, but now we’ve seen the same things coming from those on the progressive side, including non-Christians, like the homosexual activist who was cited in The New York Times, who wrote, quote, “Church leaders must be made to take homosexuality off the sins list,” end quote. I mean, it gives off the exact same air of inflexibility and intolerance. Fundamentalism exists both in conservative circles and in progressive circles. It is the exact same playbook, just with different enemies. 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, that’s right. Ian was used to judgment and rigidity from the conservative group he grew up with, but was shocked to see the progressive group he had come to love acting the same way. 

IAN HARBOR: It felt exactly like the judgment and the restriction and the tightness that I had tried so hard to get out of. So I found solidarity and I think that’s needed, but I did not find the solid ground of the anchor for my soul that I was needing. 

IVAN MESA: So amid this deconstruction journey, Ian now starts to essentially deconstruct his own deconstruction.

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s so meta. 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, but here’s the thing – there, there seems to be this innate instinct in us that when we’re in dire need, we can’t help but pray. So even though Ian didn’t know if God was real or if he could be trusted, he prayed. 

IAN HARBOR: I remember asking for one thing. I said, “I wannna keep my intellectual honesty.” Like I wanna be able to be honest about what I believe and where I’m at and wrestle through these things because I don’t have all the answers and I don’t know when I will or if I will. And I remember – you know, I grew up in a cessationist church. I’m not a charismatic person, but I remember hearing, “I can work with that.”

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s amazing. So I’m thinking about, like, even though he doesn’t even believe in God at that moment, God is still speaking to him. 

IVAN MESA: Yeah. So here’s what Ian decided to do. He decides to sign up for a seminary-level class being offered at a local church, a nine-month theology doctrine intensive. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, I guess that’s one way to do it. 

IVAN MESA: And what Ian found throughout that class was that Christian faith that Ian previously believed what he thought was Christianity – he discovered that wasn’t Christianity at all. 

IAN HARBOR: My goodness did the world open up to me after that because I just realized there were so many riches in the Christian tradition that I had missed.

IVAN MESA: Things like a true understanding of the purpose of doctrine. 

IAN HARBOR: Doctrine is not this checklist that we have to check off every box in order to get to heaven when we die. It’s not that. What it actually is is the script of reality. It’s lining yourself up with reality, what’s real and true and good and beautiful. Um, and when I do that, I flourish and the world flourishes and our community flourishes, and yeah, I’m on board with that. Let’s go. 

IVAN MESA: And also realizing the modern church isn’t the only reference point we have.

IAN HARBOR: The questions that we’re asking have been asked before. It’s easy to look at the “White American Evangelical Church” in 2021 and be very discouraged, but that’s not the only church that exists in the world today or has ever existed. And we have had fathers and mothers come before us that have asked the exact same questions that we have, that have wrestled through it, that have come up with answers that make sense – not just of Scripture, but of life and reality. Our tradition is just much wider and deeper than maybe those of us who grew up in the cultures that we grew up in, thought it was, and were told it was. 

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, Pastor Hunter Beaumont – he has a term that he likes to use for this. He says that we shouldn’t deconstruct, but instead we should dis-inculturate. Uh, that is that many of us may not have a problem with actual Christianity. The problem that we have is actually with the culture that has surrounded it and the way that the Christian faith has been presented. You know, in fact, Professor A.J. Had an analogy for this. He said that he grows tomatoes in his garden at home, and he loves having people eat those tomatoes when they come over to his house.

A.J. SWOBODA: And whenever we have people over for dinner in the summertime, we will always have somebody who doesn’t like tomatoes and we will serve them our tomatoes anyways and they will eat our tomatoes and then they will say, “Oh my gosh, this is a really good tomato.” And you learn something in Oregon in the summer when you serve tomatoes here, and that is that people don’t hate tomatoes. People hate fake tomatoes, and they’ve spent their life hating something that’s not real. And the truth is so many of us – what we’re really calling deconstruction of Christianity is not deconstruction of Christianity. It’s deconstruction of fake religion. And if we are deconstructing fake religion in an attempt to love God, amen. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so we’re saying that the three stages of deconstruction are number one, questioning; number two, deconstructing; and number three, reconstructing. So I asked Professor A.J. why all three of these stages are important, and here’s what he had to say. 

A.J. SWOBODA: I can already hear individuals listening to this podcast who are in the throes of deconstruction who don’t like the question that you asked because it assumes that there are boundaries and it assumes that there is an end goal in mind. And I think that we have to ask the question – what is the telos? What’s the goal? What’s the end? And the end is Jesus. The end is an experience and a love and a worship of Jesus, and that has to be the goal. 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, and I, and I think that is so good if, if we as Christians are deconstructing just for the sake of being fed up with the church, we’re really actually missing the point. The, the point isn’t to just locate all the wrong expressions of Christianity and get as far away from them as possible. The point ultimately is for us to find Jesus. Where is Jesus amid our reality? What is the truth that he’s said about himself, and what does it look like to follow him? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and I think that all of those questions – those are questions about reconstruction. You know, now some people may choose to reconstruct a faith that isn’t Christianity, but our hope is that you would deconstruct the cultural additives and come away reconstructing the true faith that Jesus established. 

IVAN MESA: So it’s been now five years since Ian took that seminary class and began reconstructing his faith, so I asked him what his faith looks like today. 

IAN HARBOR: Yeah, I would – man, probably for the first time in my life I would describe my faith journey is confident and at peace. There is absolutely a place for mystery in our faith. If we don’t have a category for mystery in our faith, then we’re fooling ourselves. We, we can’t know all there is to know about God. We’re seeing through a glass dimly, but if we can’t know anything about God for certain, then we’re just gonna be tossed to and fro by the wind and the waves and have nothing to stand on. I don’t have to have every fine detail picked out, but I know who God is, I know I can know him, and I know what he’s done for me in the world, and let’s figure everything else out as we go, no matter what happens, no matter what comes my way, no matter what doubts or questions I have now or later, that because of what he’s done for me and who he is, I’m good. And I can work with that.

IVAN MESA: So what about Hannah? Where is she at in her whole deconstruction journey? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you know, Hannah’s still questioning. She’s slowly starting to take apart some aspects of her faith, and the thought of this journey – honestly, it’s really scary for her. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: If I change my ideas and if I kind of walk away from some of what I grew up believing, am I gonna have a place in the world?

JESSE EUBANKS: Hannah’s in the middle of the journey, and the truth is that there’s just a lot of unknowns for her. But you know, she’s talking with mentors, she’s reading the Scriptures, letting the questions come to her as they do. And just like Ian, Hannah knows that through it all, she does have an anchor for her soul.

HANNAH JOHNSON: I think I feel anchored in the very simple gospel that, you know, God so loved the world that he sent his son and it was Jesus and Jesus died for me and because he died for me I am now accepted. And so even if I go on this journey and I’m asking all kinds of questions and I’m like, “God, what about this? What about this?” Even if I land in the wrong spot, his blood covers me. So I don’t have to be afraid when I’m questioning. I can come to him and say, “Hey, I’m angry or I’m frustrated or I’m scared and I don’t understand. Help me understand.” It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m gonna get an exact answer, but he does promise to be with me on that journey. I think that that is what roots me and anchors me. 

JESSE EUBANKS: If you are somebody who’s in the midst of deconstructing your faith, we just wanna tell you that it’s okay. You know, a lot of good can come out of examining the things that we’ve picked up or been handed through the years, but we also just wanna encourage you to give your deconstructing some guidelines. Anyone who has learned to implement boundaries in their life will tell you boundaries don’t inhibit freedom, but actually allow for it. So the two boundaries that we would encourage are this – first, if you’re going to deconstruct, deconstruct in community. 

A.J. SWOBODA: I think this could be hurtful for some people. I wanna be very cautious how I say it because I don’t want it to come across as cheesy or easy, um, but there is a profound power in reconnecting and reintegrating our lives into a group of people on the ground, flesh and blood, that are struggling together. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And I think that part of what Professor A.J. is getting at here is that we need people to journey with us, but I also think we really need to be wise about who we choose to journey with us. So on the one hand, we obviously don’t wanna, you know, try to pick a community that never allows us to ask questions. But on the other hand, we also don’t wanna go sit in a community that just literally says, “Hey, let’s just ask questions and never, ever settle on any answers.” Neither of those are really gonna help. You know, get in a community that seeks to stay rooted in Scripture.

IVAN MESA: We also need those who are mature who have gone through this process and have arrived at a sturdy faith. If you’re just with fellow questioners, that’s not gonna be the formula for a, a really healthy, settled faith. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Okay. So I think even what you’re saying now leads actually to the second thing, and that’s, you know, that we should pay attention to those who have gone before you.

A.J. SWOBODA: I’m gonna sound a little “Focus on the Family” here, but we do become who we listen to. And I think that if we spend all of our time listening to podcasts that were published yesterday at three times speed, we’re going to become people that are disconnected from the past, from history, from wisdom and tradition.

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, I think that a lot of times when we go through seasons of doubt or questions, we think, “Oh my gosh, it’s a modern phenomenon that I’m struggling with this.” It’s not. Like, any legitimate Christian at some point has struggled with doubts and questions of the faith and reevaluations, and, and the truth is, like, we can look backwards to the saints of old to guide us. Look to people and the Christians that have come before us.

IVAN MESA: Yeah, and this is really where we can learn from church history. We are not the first people here to struggle or raise these questions. We can look to the past and learn from the community of the dead, uh, people that have walked the, the journey of faith, uh, people like Augustine and Spurgeon, those individuals who really wrestled with what it means to be disciples of Christ, some of them struggling with sin, with doubt, with depression, and we can learn from them. We’re not the first people to really wrestle with these questions. And, and finally, if, if you know someone who’s deconstructing – a friend, a family member, a church member – we’d encourage you to do two things as well. The first is to thank that person for letting you into their journey. 

A.J. SWOBODA: Be grateful that they are being honest with you. Thank them. And don’t go into – in that moment, resist that muscle to wanna get all apologetics on ’em and resist the urge to just wanna send them some video on YouTube or some book that may fix them. Resist that. Just thank them for their willingness to bring their true selves to you. 

IVAN MESA: And the second thing is be present with them. Make space for their questions regardless of where the journey takes them. 

A.J. SWOBODA: More often than not, people that are walking through deconstruction – they are looking for someone to walk with them.

JESSE EUBANKS: A lot of times in our culture, conservative Christians are scared of questions and can tend to overly rely on certainty to a fault, sometimes relying on things that, honestly, we just don’t know for sure yet. But progressive Christians can make another error where there could be so much love for questions that sometimes we think that certainty is laughable. But the truth is that neither one of those views are entirely correct. There’s a lot of mystery in life, but there’s also a lot of things that we can be certain about, and the only way that we’re gonna make it through this tension point between mystery and certainty is by looking to Jesus himself. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus criticizes the religious leaders for demanding man-made rules, even tells those around him the true heart of God and his commands. Jesus is the ultimate deconstructor. He critiqued the ways people had interpreted the old covenant. He ushered in a brand new covenant. But Jesus is careful to say that the old ways were not pointless. He says, “I have not come to demolish the law, but rather to fulfill it.” When Jesus deconstructs, the end goal is perfect communion with God for us. 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, I agree, Jesse. Our greatest desire is to point people to Jesus. We ultimately don’t point to ourselves as having all the answers. We ultimately point to who Jesus is and what he said in his Word. And so we want to, at the end of the day, wrestle with who Christ is and draw closer to him, knowing him, trusting him, obeying him, and ultimately that should be the end goal of our deconstruction – Jesus himself. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So, yes – examine, question, study, critique. Paul commended the believers in Berea because they searched the Scriptures daily to verify if what they were being taught was true. God is big enough to hold you, to hold your questions. They are safe with him. So no matter where you are on the spectrum between deconstruction and reconstruction, between certainty and mystery, the truth is you will never find enough answers to fully satisfy you. True satisfaction can only be found in Jesus himself. So bring your questions. Bring the things that you’re struggling with, the things that you’re unsure about – bring those to Jesus because he is the only guide that can truly and faithfully fulfill all that you’re looking for, and he will show you the way.

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JESSE EUBANKS: For more resources on deconstruction, check out The Gospel Coalition‘s new book, Before You Lose Your Faith, edited by Ivan Mesa. There’s a chapter written by Ian Harbor, as well as thoughts to help you deconstruct particular issues such as gender or race. To purchase this book, head over to tgc.org/store. For more content as well as our past episodes, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/ltnpodcast.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode – Hannah Johnson, A.J. Swoboda, and Ian Harbor. 

IVAN MESA: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Ivan Mesa. Ivan, thank you so much for being here. 

IVAN MESA: Yeah, it was great. Our media assistant and audio engineer is Anna Tran.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our media director and producer is Rachel Szabo, who sometimes gets really, really mad at our interns. 

HANNAH JOHNSON: They burn bras.

JESSE EUBANKS: This episode was edited by the following Love Thy Neighborhood staff – Kiana Brown, Leandro Lozada, Rachel Hamm, and Marley McCune. Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Poddington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX. 

IVAN MESA: Apply for your social action internship supported by Christian community by visiting love thy neighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, “Go, and do likewise.”