What's Behind People Deconstructing Faith?

It really no longer surprises me why some people walk away from the church.

Welcome to the Uncut Podcast. I'm Pastor Luke. And I'm Pastor Cameron.

And this is the Uncut Podcast, where we have uncut, honest conversations about faith, life,

and ministry. Cameron, you and I sat down a few minutes ago talking about what are we going to

talk about on today's episode of the podcast, and we've covered a lot of really, I don't know,

we've covered a lot of ground over the course of the podcast, but one of the things that we,

have kind of like circled around and talked about a couple of different times

is this idea of like deconstruction, and it's been a growing topic in Christian circles and.

We were just kind of talking, we were looking at a social media account that was kind of.

Recounting some, um, some pretty awful things that were said and done in the name of Christ

and Christian teaching and at least in the environment and it should have been in Christ

centered, right? Not in like, yeah, they weren't explicitly like crusades. Yeah, that's true.

A topic. But, you know, we just kind of were like, yeah. Well, we've been, like you said, we've been talking, kind of, we've named it a lot and

we've had, I think we've had whole episodes on deconstruction. But it's been kind of central

to my mind a lot lately as I'm considering, I'm still considering, considering whether or not

to do some writing and essentially write a book on not necessarily, well, yeah, on the topic of

deconstruction, but also on the topic of reconstruction and how in the midst of a

faith that gets kind of deconstructed for whatever reason it does, is there a way to

to reconstruct it, and how can we reconstruct it, and should we reconstruct it?

So, I've been following a lot of, I don't know if I came upon this account

because I've been following and engaging.

Probably. With a lot of, a lot of. Instagram probably thinks you're going through a faith crisis right now.

It probably does. And I will say to our viewers, I'm not going through a faith crisis.

I'm not deconstructing in any classical sense of the word. I'm just really, really interested

in the phenomena of deconstruction.

And how we can have,

I think it's really important to have both a pastoral response that understands the reasons for a person's,

deconstructing their faith.

And sometimes that leads to them walking away from the church, doesn't always.

So having a pastoral response that allows us to understand the reasons,

or at least empathize with their pain,

but then also having a theological response, a fairly grounded theological response,

that maybe communicates a more clear perspective.

Than the really, usually non-nuanced perspective that people are walking away from.

I think what you see theologically a lot of times is that people walk away.

Or they outright reject things that are communicated or made to seem to be black or white, right or wrong.

When if we take an honest view at the context of the scripture,

and sometimes not just the context, but the actual content.

That not everything is as black and white as many preachers, parents, administrators, teachers,

want it to be. Because we all want to believe that our particular way of thinking, of believing,

of processing this theological issue or whatever is obviously the only way to believe it. It's the,

only right way. And it's not always necessarily true. It's not a thing that most pastors,

I don't know, I don't hear a whole lot of pastors talk about that.

Yeah, as you say that, I'm reminded of something one of my professors said, and it took me a long

time to actually understand what he was saying because I remember growing up, I grew up going

to Christian school and going to church and stuff, and there was a whole lot of, you know.

Like, post-modernism, like, the church was like, do you remember when the church was scared of

post-modernism? Like, and that was like what, like, every sermon was like, well, the post-modernists,

modernists, right? And so that was kind of the cultural moment. And growing up, kind

of like talking about worldviews. Do you have a Christian worldview? And a professor who

challenged that when, and he just, he very much liked to say, he's like, there's no,

No one can have a world view, he's like, because you can't see that well.

And so his whole contention was like, sure, think, you know, he's like, your goal should

be to see the world as Christ, or to see the world around you as Christ. But the idea that

you can potentially, like, construct a thought system, or like, a philosophy and all of your

ducks in a row so that you can see the entire world with accuracy through your singular lens,

he said was hubris. That was his contention. What do you think about that? Is that in line

with what you're talking about? It is, it is. But it's true when it feels separated from my.

Own personal beliefs. Because I would say, obviously the reason that I hold my beliefs

is because I think that they're true, right? So I think it's also a little bit of hubris,

but maybe hubris is the wrong word, but I think it's also a little disingenuous to walk around

and say, no, I do firmly believe these things, but I could be wrong. Because I don't think that

I'm wrong, I think that I'm right. Otherwise, I wouldn't have chosen these.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have chosen them. I wouldn't believe them. There is a perspective.

Upon which I carry my beliefs. But I'm also, I feel like the goal in belief should be to

be clear about what, at least in your mind, is non-negotiable and to also be clear about where

there is not always a lot of clarity or theological or academic agreement on things.

And to hold those things a little bit more loosely than we've been willing to hold them

before. I think one of the issues that the Church faces is this extraordinary fear of

of being wrong.

This really extraordinary fear of not...

Of not having the authoritative word.

Because a common principle has been that the word of God is authoritative.

And I agree. I think that it does have authority.

But I think it's less, I think that the word of God is less black and white than the church has made it to be.

Because it has made it black and white in terms of like it's the quality of its information,

but divorced it from so much of its context,

that the black and whiteness turns into,

like it's just not that simple all the time.

Like, what's a topic that we could talk about? Like, I guess the first one that came up to mind

would be like, divorce.

Let's talk about divorce in the Bible. What is the Bible? Take a mainline evangelical perspective.

On the biblical view of divorce, and you tell me, when is God okay okay with someone getting divorced.

LRH In matters of sexual infidelity. CB Right, and that's it.

LRH Right. Matthew 19. CB Right, and it's black and white.

LRH Yeah. CB Right? There is no nuance. There is no understanding of context there. There's no

understanding of marriage in the Ancient Near East. And so, the classic anti-example of that

in modern-day church and evangelicalism would be to say, okay, so let's say you have a one spouse

who is routinely physically, emotionally, and verbally abusing the other, but remaining,

sexually, like not committing adultery in the sexual realm.

Yeah.

Sorry about your luck, dude. We know you're getting beat up every night.

We know that he or she is emotionally abusive to you,

but he hasn't cheated on you, so if you leave him, you're living in sin.

You need to stay faithful.

You need to pray.

You need to persevere through this. God is using this to test your faithfulness

to the marriage covenant.

And I think that it's stuff like that as an example that creates such a dysregulation in

people about how the Bible functions in the Christian faith and how it doesn't.

Yeah. The last phrase that we talked about before we pressed record was this. I said,

it really no longer surprises me why some people walk away from the church.

Yeah. Where do you put, do you make any, how do you categorically separate,

because, like, okay, the teaching, like, Christ's teaching on divorce, and then, like, that.

The refusal to see the, like, kind of the principle, the operating principle, the,

values under which, like, Christ seems to be making that claim and all of that, like,

seeing it that broader. We were talking about those two examples, like, we were talking about,

Nephilim and the Mark of Cain.

Where do those like those negative awful interpretations of scripture are those?

Categorically different in some way like So for.

Yes, and no, mm-hmm so like For reference for people who are listening. Yeah, right about those things

we were talking about some examples of things that we've seen on Instagram, you know, of...

I've met people who thought that. Okay. All right. So apparently, I had never met or even encountered this belief before,

to be honest with you. But essentially, there is a some stream of Christian teaching out there

that teaches that the Nephilim, which is an Old Testament, an old- It's about one verse long.

About one verse long story of Noah, right? The Nephilim are essentially an angelic slash

demonic. They're a spiritual being that comes down and sleeps with the daughters of men,

I think that's the exact line or whatever.

So they interbreed with humanity and the offspring of that interbreeding,

could you find the verse, Elise, so that we can give reference to people?

So, and that the offspring of those, the offspring of those people are themselves Nephilim

or are just a inbred, like half-fallen angel.

Half-human person let's see.

Okay, so this is the ESV, Genesis chapter 6, it says, When man began to multiply on the face of the land, and the daughters were born to them,

the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive.

And they took as their wives any they chose. Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh, and his day shall be

120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God

came into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who

were of old, the men of renown." So, the way I read verse 4 there is it seems that the Nephilim,

were the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of man, and the Nephilim is

an explanation for the mighty men of old, the men of renown.

Okay.

So, it's four verses. We've seen people build full theological systems and beliefs off of that.

Yes. Say, well, the Nephilim still exist. Right.

You know, the interbreeding still exist. Mm-hmm. And that one example that we saw is that people on earth now with mental or physical disabilities are.

The Nephilim,

That was one person's. One person's. Not what we agree with.

Not what we agree with.

By any means. The other example that I've personally encountered was.

It's an old teaching, it's a racist teaching that the Mark of Cain, when Cain is set away.

Because he had killed Abel and the Lord, you know, Cain's like, well, I will be killed out there.

And the Lord's like, no, I'll put a mark on you, and then sends him away. And the teaching that

some people taught and not that I can't think of the right word, but...

I know the word. It's called racist. Racist, yeah, was that the mark of Cain is anyone of a darker complexion or someone who's

African American blackness was result of the Mark of Cain, which is just awful Bible teaching.

It's not what the Bible teaches. No, not even close. Yeah. So we have really, really, really extraordinary pronouncements

off of virtually nothing in the scripture. So I would say how do we categorize the divorce stuff

with Nephilim and the Mark of Cain? I would say a few things. One is that I think part of what

happens is that people will take a very small piece of scripture and create an extraordinary

theological system off of it.

Yeah, okay, so they'll take something very small virtually insignificant within the text and,

They will blow it out up to here and all of the blowing out will be like,

inference conjecture,

Like hermeneutic Gymnastics seems to me right seems to me that well this must mean then it this equals that,

type of teaching,

that you can't really step down on anything that you would say is a foundational biblical truth

that exists within the whole counsel of God. It's perforatory to really everything that the church

has believed. It almost exists in this Gnostic environment of special revelation or special

knowledge. Yeah, I feel that.

I would say that the difference between those types of beliefs and a belief about divorce

that we just talked about is that there is a half-truth to the belief on divorce,

or to the system that's built around divorce. That it is well-established that scripture

does in fact say, right, that the main justification,

for divorce is infidelity. Right, and that you shouldn't,

that divorce is contrary to God's intention for marriage. Correct.

Right, biblical truth clearly taught. Yes, I think that the why then that becomes,

not that belief in particular becomes troublesome, but the conversation around it is that.

That there is then a kind of a reason to jump off of that what is true,

but to springboard off of what is true to conjecture.

And so you base your starting point for your beliefs now off of something that is true,

but the conjecture that it leads to is stretching the text a little bit further

than it should be stretched itself, right?

Whereas like, well, what would be the truth that you would stand on in the Mark of Cain?

Well, virtually nothing. Right, that it says there was a mark.

That it says there was a mark. Nothing about skin color,

nothing about the continued mark of Cain upon humanity.

No set of nuances in like believing that well, Jesus was probably more dark-skinned than he was light-skinned

Mm-hmm. He was from the Middle East right, you know, so.

So I would say the difference there is that the,

The jumping off point of the conjecture. Mm-hmm. How much truth exists?

Within the system of belief that could be rooted in what I would consider to just be classic Christian

belief or even Judeo-Christian belief. And so there are things that are, I would say,

closer to core belief than others. I would say the thing about divorce is closer to core belief

than the idea that anyone who is physically or mentally disabled is a nephilim.

Yeah, which actually, now that we read the text, makes absolutely no sense.

Zero sense. I think that text would make a better justification for the existence of like Amazonians,

like that mythological idea of like superhumans and stuff like that.

Which, and honestly, it just makes me fricking angry.

Just makes me so angry. Because we have people out here who are actually

proposing these as legitimate biblical ideas.

And there's the biggest bug. I know.

I saw it all out over there. And I was like, I'm not gonna distract Cameron.

Too late. Holy cow. That is a Nephilim right there. I don't even know where I am anymore.

There are people out there who would propose these ideas as legitimate and foundational beliefs

and teach them to others as truth.

And I return back to my foundational statement. It's no wonder people are like,

I'm leaving the church, like this is crazy Because it is.

People like that are crazy Yeah, you know, what would you say? Let's let's imagine,

What would you say to the criticism of like well Cameron?

You're you're taking the Bible and the simplicity of it and the clarity of it and you are making it complicated like you should just like,

Jesus says that only in matters of divorce or only in matters of sexual infidelity,

you are making the passage complicated.

Like you are, like what would you say to that?

I would say that it's natural to take a,

21st century perspective on the nature of the scripture and to use it only according to our perspective.

And that perspective is the 21st century is that we read books to gather information.

So we take a book and we can make a bullet point list of the information that it seeks to communicate

and that information then is,

there's no nuance even in the information.

It is a rule book, it is an ethical and moral handbook. And we hear people in evangelicalism

talk about the Bible like this all the time, is that, you know, what is the acronym for the Bible?

Basic instructions before leaving earth.

Okay, Aunt Karen, I get it.

I don't have an Aunt Karen.

But when...

Like the Bible was never written, nor did the earliest believers or Christians

use it as a way to say, okay, let us use this as a moral, ethical, religious handbook

of things to do and not to do,

to believe and not to believe.

These were stories of real people in a real context and time,

with a real like, with real environmental context around them, right?

And so, you could say for instance like, even Jesus himself was not willing to say,

let me just be really clear about what I'm saying.

Let me just be really clear about what I mean here. In fact, he was intentionally vague,

and hidden in some things.

I'm gonna speak in parables, so that those who hear don't actually hear,

that those who see can actually see.

So he was intentionally, what do we do? We pull out the meaning from those parables.

And in some ways, we can be fairly confident in the spiritual principles that they are teaching.

If we're honest with ourselves, we're not gonna speak intention,

we're not gonna speak intent into the things that Jesus said beyond what is perfectly clear.

Right, we're not gonna say, this is obviously what Jesus meant.

Jesus obviously meant that if you're being physically abused, you still must stay in your marriage.

He's obvious, because if he was... He would have said it if he meant it another way.

Or...

We could back up a little bit understanding the heart of God right the justice of God

the protection of the oppressed the protection of the widow right the protection of like.

Those who are least last and least loved right Yeah, right the the seeming prevent the provision that seems to be made

Pragmatically because of the sin in the world and the sin in marriage relationships

Like, that's the principle there.

He's like, like the intention's no. Like, you guys should stay married.

Like, that's the intention for marriage.

But because you're sinners.

Yes, yeah. Like, there needs to be a way for this to be absolved.

Yeah, so what I would say is like, if someone were to ask me the question,

well, why aren't you just believing the clarity of the scripture?

Because I would say because the scripture's not clear on all things.

It is clear on some things.

We are saved by grace through faith through Jesus Christ alone, right?

Not of our own so that no one can boast, right?

It's clear about stuff like that. It's very clear.

But on stuff that it's not clear about, it's not clear about.

And we shouldn't propose to make it clear and then impose those seemingly clear beliefs onto others

as if you must believe this in order to maintain,

a positive spiritual trajectory.

Just don't believe that, because even like I said, Jesus himself was not endeavoring to be 100% clear,

or comprehensive in everything that he said. He spoke in parables for a reason.

So, you've been looking at a lot of this deconstruction stuff, and do you think,

Like, I guess I've got my own experiences here, but do you think that a lack of nuance

in church teaching is one of the big reasons why people are, like, deconstructing?

Yes, I do, although that's not even a really clear statement, you know?

So like, what do we mean by a lack of nuance? Yeah. I think.

I generally agree with that, but I'm not... Yeah, what is nuance?

Yeah. Yeah, what am I getting at there? Right. I know what you're getting at, but I don't know that the question adequately represents,

what's actually going on there. I would say it would not even the lack of nuance,

but it would be the freedom to explore the nuance of scripture that often turns people clearly away.

What I'm discovering in my research for this book,

is that there are some pretty consistent theological themes,

that come up in people's reasons for deconstructing. And so, kind of tracing the history

of theological teaching around those themes is really interesting.

This thing like, okay, how has the church throughout time taught this theological principle,

or engaged with this topic?

Two of the, probably two of the most significant ones that I've seen, well three really,

is one is around issues of sexual ethics. What is the nature of human sexuality?

What is the intent of human sexuality?

What are the boundaries for human sexuality?

Probably, from a contemporary perspective, the most, the biggest one.

So that, you can't talk about deconstruction and the history of theological belief

without looking at those things. The second one that I'm seeing a lot of is,

uh, questions around eternal punishment. Yeah. And hell.

And the supposed mainline evangelical teaching.

That God loves you so much that he will make you burn eternally if you don't choose to love him back.

Now that's the way that it's being phrased from those who have actively deconstructed that.

Now is that a nuanced, even like communication of what is actually being taught?

No, I think it's a caricature. I think it's an overblown simplification

of probably what was communicated.

Do, have people communicated it like that? Yeah, of course, I've heard it, you know.

And then the thing that kind of undergirds those two is the nature of scripture. The Bible is an extraordinarily provocative and controversial

topic for not just non-Christians, but Christians as well in terms of its authority, its development,

the historicity of how we got to have this thing as it is to us right now. And not only is it,

provocative and controversial, we're fairly illiterate on how we got here.

Yes. Yeah. The majority of the church is fairly illiterate. We've just been told,

this is the word of God. He downloaded it into someone's brain and told them to write it all out.

Yeah, and that's the thing that a lot of people, even... It was even a source of.

I don't wanna say full-blown deconstruction, but some deconstruction for people who went to Bible

College is they show up...

And we've got your introductory... I think intro to Bible was one of the freshman classes that

everybody at my school took. And we're learning how did the Bible become the Bible? How did it.

Get formed? How did all the letters that Paul wrote and these poems all end up in one volume?

And how was it translated and all of that? And...

Can it be trusted?

Yeah. And people who are at Bible college learning about the Bible become so scared and terrified and confused because what they're learning

is at Bible college that's like preparing them for ministry is different than what they were

taught in church. They were like, why didn't my youth group leader, like, he just said, like,

you know, God just gave us this, like, that simplicity, like, God just downloaded this book.

I didn't know that we had copies and all of that seems really scary because it's more complex

than the simple Sunday school answer that they were given. And now fortunately they were in a

context of faith, but some people encounter those ideas when they go away to secular college.

And then they begin to learn, they're like, oh, and they like hear the, what was the council

that Dan Brown, Nicaea, right?

That whole idea that like, they hear some version of like the creation of Jesus as a

legend and- A bunch of white guys in a room deciding what the Bible's going to be.

Yeah, you know, so- So I see all of that, like I've witnessed that in people who just like, well, this is,

more complex than I thought it was.

Yeah, well, and it requires a lot of intellectual honesty and humility to say, oh, wait, this

was actually formed within the milieu of history as well. Do you think that like churches need to...

Be willing to bridge into that more? CB I do. However, I think you better pastors

to do that better be really, really ready for the backlash because it is woven into the culture of

American evangelicalism that you just receive this lock, stock, and barrel as the downloaded

message from God rather than it's what it actually is, which is the history of faith

within context and letter writing and narratives and poetry and gospel writing and all of that.

And I think that there is a very, very small threshold of acceptance for the non-spiritual

download explanation for the authority of the scripture than there is for like the scripture

is authoritative because the church has agreed that it's been authoritative from the very

beginning. That's a lot less palatable for most people who simply want the answer that God said

it, that's it. It requires that we think, it requires that we operate in an environment

that is not black and white all the time. I don't think that most modern Christians

have the stomach for it. I think we're spiritually lazy and fairly spiritually

immature, and so what we do, what we have, doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny.

Yeah. Which is why people, which is another reason why in all of life people just search

for confirmation bias. Yeah, yeah. And then the moment that somebody begins to wonder,

they encounter some, like stick with the divorce example, they encounter a life circumstance

where they're in an unhealthy relationship, unhealthy marriage relationship. The church

seems to be saying, you should not, you should just stay there. We're not really going to do

anything substantial to your partner. We're just going to encourage you to stay in it.

And then in that circumstance, they begin to look, heck, on Google, social media,

and they encounter like, hey, there's a,

that passage, there's maybe a different way to understand it than you've heard before,

and it becomes the release valve for them to like move forward from the place that they're stuck in.

Sounds really natural that that would create like a cascading effect.

Yep, yep, and then you get back to the, I understand why people leave the church. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's where, that's kind of like, if you.

We don't want people to leave the church. I don't. No. I do believe Christianity to be true and faithful.

And I don't, I do believe that the Bible has authority. I just don't maybe think it or believe it in the same way that a lot of evangelicalism

believes it, which is maybe an unfair statement because it's not very clear, but—

RLF – That's like, who?

CB – Right, who, right, yeah. RLF – Defining an evangelical is so hard. CB – Exactly, yeah.

But maybe let that be the foreword to the book.

The coming book of that'll probably, I don't know when it'll, if it'll get written, when it'll get

written, but in the month of November camera, that's when it's going to get written. Come on,

got nothing else going on then. So I don't do it. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's, um, I think it's a

valuable topic. I think it's an important topic. I think we would be foolish to ignore it as

Christians and as pastors, particularly since I think, I think more and more people have loved

ones who have stepped away from the church, and whether they're calling it deconstruction or not.

That's kind of what's happening in a lot of spaces. And so, how do we even, how do we begin to,

strike up a conversation with them that isn't just immediately stalled out because of, you know,

conclusions and an unwillingness to hear?

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