Deconstructing Deconstruction Itself

Week 10 of What Do We do After Deconstructing Fundamentalism

This is week 10 of a series on what we do after deconstructing fundamentalism. This won’t be an exhaustive list or a formula for what comes next. It’s based on my own life and the stories of people I’ve walked with. I hope you find something of yourself in it.

There was a point in my deconstruction when I wanted to burn it all down. I was angry at the church, angry at pastors, angry about the things I’d been taught and the things I’d taught other people. Every time I pulled on another theological thread, I uncovered something else that made me angry. And for too long that anger felt like freedom.

I had spent most of my life inside a religious system that gave me very clear boundaries for what I was allowed to question. There were beliefs you could wrestle with and beliefs you couldn’t. There were questions that made you thoughtful and questions that made people concerned about you. Once I finally gave myself permission to cross those lines, I didn’t want new ones drawn anywhere near me.

I wanted a flamethrower.

Just look at my old social media posts or sermons. It’s all there for everyone to see. There was not a single day where I wasn’t railing against something or someone. I had become a hammer and everything was a nail.

I was still pastoring a church at the time and that rage fell on so many people. In fact, it started happening so much that I had a group of friends who were part of the church come to me and ask if I was ok. I need you to really feel that… I was so filled with this absolute fury that my friends came to me to make sure that I was doing ok.

Looking back, I have compassion for that version of myself.

For years I had explained away things that hurt me. I had tolerated behavior from pastors and church leaders that I would never tell someone else to tolerate today, and I had participated in systems that hurt people while sincerely believing we were helping them. When I finally allowed myself to call those things what they were, anger came with it, and I needed some of it. It helped me recognize that things I had normalized weren’t normal. It gave me enough distance from the system to finally see the shape of it.

I don’t regret that stage. I just wouldn’t want to live there forever.

Brian McLaren describes a stage of faith he calls Perplexity. It’s where the old answers have stopped working, authority figures look very different than they once did, and we become deeply suspicious of the systems that used to give us certainty. He describes our identity in that stage with a word I didn’t love hearing applied to me: counter-dependent. I knew who I was because I knew who I wasn’t anymore. I wasn’t one of those Christians. I wasn’t going back to that kind of church. For someone who had spent decades being told who he was supposed to be, defining myself against all of that felt… really good. I enjoyed it.

It took a while but eventually I began to wonder whether I was actually free. If the Christianity I left could still determine my mood, or consume my attention, or hand me ways through which I understood myself, it still had a lot of power over me.

I don’t remember where I heard this but sometime back, someone said to me “You don’t know what you don’t know.” I have held onto that sentence ever since. It’s helped me to understand that everyone has blindspots and that’s not inherently bad. It just means we have more to learn.

The control that the old church system still had over me was a massive blind spot. While I was over here kicking tires and lighting fires… feeling like I was taking it to the system, the reality was that the I was still part of it. Everything I was screaming at was just a version of me that I didn’t like.

It was like deconstruction held up all the parts of conservative evangelicalism that I hated. I mean, absolutely hated. What I didn’t realize, was that deconstruction also had a way of holding those things up as a mirror.

Yes, I was angry at the church. Yes, I was angry at doctrines and teachings. But what I really hated was I saw all those things in me. Underneath all the bravado and anger and rage and posts, was me. A version of myself that I had come to hate.

Richard Rohr calls this part of the journey Disorder. His framework is Order, Disorder, and Reorder, and he doesn’t pretend spiritually mature people find a way around the middle stage. There is, in his words, “no nonstop flight from order to reorder.” Something has to fall apart first.

That gives me grace for my own story. I needed the season when everything was on the table. I needed to be angry about the ways people had been harmed in the name of God. Trying to rush someone through that process can become its own form of spiritual control, and if you’re in it right now, I’m not interested in telling you to calm down. Maybe anger is the only way you know to finally tell the truth about something you’ve spent years minimizing. To finally say, out loud, what happened to me wasn’t okay. You get to say that.

I think about the story Jesus tells in Luke 15. We usually call it the story of the prodigal son, and most of the sermons I’ve heard about it focus on the son leaving home or the father welcoming him back. But there’s a small phrase in the middle I’ve come to love more than either of those parts. The son is sitting among the pigs. His plans have fallen apart. The life he thought he was building has collapsed, and Luke says he “came to himself.”

The Greek is even more beautiful than the English. Most translations soften it to “he came to his senses,” but the literal phrase is that he came to himself. It implies that he was beside himself and in this scene he finally came to his true self, his sane mind.

For me, deconstruction felt a little like that pigpen. I’m not saying leaving fundamentalism was a mistake, or that the answer was returning to the religious home I’d left. I wouldn’t go back. But the pigpen was real. It was the disorientation of watching the world I’d built my entire life around fall apart. For too long I lost track of myself in there. I knew what I was angry about. I could tell you what I no longer believed, exactly which churches I’d never attend again, which pastors I no longer trusted. I had gotten very good at knowing who I wasn’t. It took longer to start wondering who I was.

That’s where coming to myself began, and it had very little to do with returning to the person I was before deconstruction. Coming to myself meant recognizing the person underneath all that anger: someone who still loved Jesus, still wanted to pastor people. Someone whose life could be about more than everything he was against.

Maybe that’s what waits on the other side of Disorder. Not going backward. Not returning to the religious home we left, or making peace with people who hurt us. Just a point where we look around at the pigpen we’ve been sitting in and realize we’re ready for something else.

We come to ourselves.

Then, when we’re ready, we get up.

That’s around when I started noticing something uncomfortable about certain deconstruction spaces: sometimes they felt strangely familiar. The theology was completely different, but the way we treated each other could look a lot like the fundamentalism we’d supposedly left behind. There were still purity tests; different vocabulary, same instinct to write someone off the moment they used the wrong phrase or hadn’t arrived where you had. It was like certainty snuck back in through a side door I didn’t see.

I recognized it because I had lived that way for my entire life. Fundamentalism didn’t just taught me a set of doctrines. It had taught me a way of seeing people, and leaving the doctrines behind didn’t automatically undo that. I could become progressive and still be rigid about it. I could hold inclusive theology in one hand and treat people as disposable with the other.

That was hard for me to admit.

Now, I want to be very careful here. I’m not saying all beliefs are equally harmful because they aren’t. Theology that dehumanizes LGBTQ people has real consequences. Christian nationalism is causing real harm right now, to real people. Religious institutions that protect abusive leaders deserve accountability, not a gentler tone from me. Moving past the burn-it-all-down stage doesn’t require pretending any of that is harmless. What it changes is what I let those things do inside me.

This is where the line between anger and bitterness has mattered most for me. Anger can tell me something is wrong. It can move me toward someone who’s being harmed, and it can give me the courage to speak when staying quiet would be so much easier. But I’ve also known the other kind… the kind that eats everything around it, until outrage becomes the primary way you relate to the world. I don’t want to live like that anymore.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the ways religious trauma can stay in our bodies long after our beliefs have changed. I think this is connected. Some of us learned Christianity through vigilance: always watching for deception, sin, compromise, the false teacher hiding behind the pulpit. Then we deconstructed, and suddenly we were watching for something else: the narcissistic pastor, the nationalist dog whistle, the phrase in someone’s bio.

Some of that watching is warranted. But at some point I had to ask whether my nervous system actually knew the difference. I’d changed what I was scanning for. I hadn’t stopped scanning.

Maybe that’s part of what Rohr means by Reorder. It isn’t pretending Disorder never happened. It’s letting what you learned there become part of something bigger than the disruption itself. I don’t want to unknow what I know now. I don’t want to become less aware of harm. I want it integrated into a life that’s still capable of joy, which is a harder trick than it sounds like.

McLaren’s stage after Perplexity is Harmony. It’s where the focus starts shifting toward connection and the common good, including how we relate to people we consider opponents. Harmony doesn’t mean everyone sings the same note. That’s exactly the thing I’m trying to leave behind. It means making room for difference without losing myself inside it.

Maybe that’s what coming to myself has actually looked like.

I still speak loudly about Christian nationalism. I still advocate for queer and trans people. I still get angry when Christianity is used as a weapon. But none of that is the whole of me anymore. I’m a husband and a dad. I’m a pastor, and a friend to people I once thought hated me. I’m someone who loves good food and laughing until my stomach hurts, who still finds Jesus endlessly compelling, who wants to stay curious about God and people and this strange life we get to live.

I almost lost that person in the pigpen.

Deconstruction gave me something I desperately needed. It helped me tear apart a faith that had become too small to hold everything I was learning about God, myself, and other people, and I’ll always be grateful for that. But deconstruction was never supposed to become the place I built my identity.

Maybe that’s the invitation for some of us now. You don’t have to go back, and you don’t have to pretend you weren’t hurt. You don’t have to forgive anyone on somebody else’s timeline, or make peace with systems that haven’t changed a thing. You can keep everything you’ve learned. You can carry the boundaries you fought so hard to establish, and you can tell the truth about what happened to you for as long as you need to.

But you can also come to yourself.

There might be pieces of you waiting just outside the anger: joy you haven’t felt in a while, something you want to build now that you’ve spent so long tearing things down. You don’t have to know exactly what comes next. Neither do I.

I just know I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting in the pigpen, explaining to anyone who’ll listen why I left home. There’s too much life waiting beyond it.

Deconstruction helped me leave something that was hurting me. Now I’m interested in what I’m becoming. That’s where the next part of the journey begins.

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