What Do We Do After Deconstructing Fundamentalism?

The harder work of recognizing what followed us out the door.

This is week 1 of a new series on what do we do after deconstruction. This won’t be an exhaustive list or a formula for what to do. This is based on my own life and observations of others I’ve walked with. I hope you find this helpful.

Leaving fundamentalism felt, in many ways, like finally coming up for air.

After years of certainty masquerading as faith, rigid boundaries defining who was in and who was out, and the constant pressure to have the right answers, deconstruction offered something that had been missing for a very long time: permission to ask questions.

For many of us, the early stages of deconstruction are focused outward. We begin identifying the systems that shaped us. We examine purity culture, Christian nationalism, biblical inerrancy, patriarchy, and all the ways fear and control became intertwined with faith. We pull on threads we’ve been told never to touch and discover that many of the things we thought were essential to Christianity were actually products of particular cultures, traditions, and power structures.

But eventually, if we stay in this long enough, a different question surfaces.

What do we do after deconstructing fundamentalism?

Because leaving is one thing. Recognizing what followed you out the door is another.

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One of the biggest disappointments I encountered after leaving high-control religion was discovering a new version of it waiting for me on the other side.

I don’t mean that everyone who deconstructs becomes fundamentalistic. Some of the most compassionate, curious, and genuinely humble people I’ve ever known are people who have done this work. But I have also walked into spaces that felt unsettlingly familiar. The language had changed. The conclusions were different. The politics had shifted. Yet something in the atmosphere made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I often joke that some of these communities sound exactly like my childhood pastor, except instead of his hair being combed to the right, it’s now combed to the left.

The certainty was still there. The suspicion of anyone who asked uncomfortable questions was still there. So was the impulse to divide people into the enlightened and the dangerous, and the consequences for stepping outside the group’s accepted boundaries. It looked different on the surface. Underneath, it was familiar.

That recognition forced me to ask a question I didn’t particularly want to answer.

What if fundamentalism isn’t primarily about what we believe?
What if it has just as much to do with how we hold those beliefs?

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When Fundamentalism Changes Clothes

During the darkest stretch of my deconstruction, I was meeting regularly with a friend named Steve Price. Steve is a Methodist pastor here in town, and he was one of the few people willing to sit with me in the mess without trying to fix it. No agenda. No pressure. Just presence. I don’t think I can overstate what that meant at the time.

One afternoon we were at a coffee shop near his church and I was venting. I was frustrated and exhausted and spinning. I felt like I was getting nowhere.

Steve listened for a while. Then he said something that felt, in the moment, like a light switch flipping on in a dark room. He told me, gently but without flinching, that I was doing the same thing I had always done.

I just had different targets. Looking back, I can see exactly what was happening. I was hunting. I was hunting for the new right answer. The correct framework. The better theology. I had left one set of certainties and I was furiously trying to replace them with another, as if the problem had been the content of my beliefs rather than my white-knuckled grip on them.

In the moments after he said that, we just sat and looked at each other. He was wise and kind enough to not say anything and just allow what he said to do what it needed to. I must have gone through a million emotions within just a few seconds. I went from “Who do you think you are” to “Oh man… you’re right” faster than I could say that sentence.

He just sat there with this little smile. It wasn’t a cruel smile or a “I told you so”. It was more like he knew exactly what was happening internally and was happy to sit and be with me.

Eventually I sat with what he said long enough to really look at it. And the more I looked, the more I saw. The anger I felt toward people who hadn’t deconstructed felt just like the anger my childhood pastor aimed at people outside our narrow form of faith. The smug satisfaction of being in the know, felt familiar too. Maybe you can resonate with that.

Sometimes we don’t stop being fundamentalists. We simply change teams.

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The Comfort of Certainty

Fundamentalism’s most powerful offering isn’t community or belonging, though it provides those. It’s certainty. A world where everything is clearly defined. Right people and wrong people. Right beliefs and wrong beliefs. The saved and the lost. Heroes and villains.

Most of us were taught that faith meant confidence without questions. Doubt was weakness. Curiosity was rebellion. Admitting “I don’t know” was dangerous because certainty was the price of your seat at the table.

What I had to slowly learn is that certainty is addictive. I liked having the right answers or being on the “right side”. Those things are powerful and they don’t care what the content of your beliefs are. They just want to be fed.

I can remember the moment I lost all that. I was walking my dog (as I did every eventing) and was listening to a book. I don’t remember what it was or what the narrator was talking about. But he said something so earth shattering that I had to grab a tree with my free hand just to feel something solid. The world had just crumbled underneath my feet.

It was incredibly disorienting. I felt lost. Nothing made sense anymore. And I’m not being dramatic. That’s how it felt. And I felt like that for a long time. Which led to my frustration/exhaustion and the conversation with Steve.

What I was really looking for wasn’t better answers. It was the same feeling my old answers used to give me. The solidity. The ground under my feet. The sense that I was no longer lost. That feeling isn’t available for purchase. Not through theology, and not through deconstruction either.

The work isn’t finding better certainties. It’s building the capacity to live without them. To say “this is what I believe right now, and I remain genuinely open” and actually mean it. Living in that space is not a weakness. It takes massive amounts of strength to do so. Most of us never developed that kind of strength b/c we were taught to build it was dangerous.

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Safe People and Dangerous People

Fundamentalism teaches you to categorize quickly.

Now, before I go any further, I need to say something about where I’m standing when I say what I’m going to say. Otherwise, this will be really easy to misread.

I am a straight white Christian man. That is not a neutral position. It means I move through the world with a set of protections that most people don’t have, and it means that some of what I’m about to say is only available to me because of that. I can afford certain risks in relationships that others cannot. I can extend certain amounts of patience and proximity across ideological difference without it costing me what it might cost someone else. I want to be honest about that, because if I’m not, what follows could sound like I’m telling people how they should handle their own lives. I’m not. I’m describing what this looks like for me, from where I stand. Your calculus may be entirely different, and you’d be right.

With that said.

There is nothing wrong with being wise about who gets close to you. Some people have demonstrated, through their behavior or through the beliefs they actively wield against others, that they shouldn’t have full access to your life. If someone dehumanizes people who look like you, or people you love, if they support policies or politicians that treat certain human beings as expendable, you are not obligated to give them a seat at your table. Protecting yourself and the people you care about from that kind of harm isn’t a character flaw. It’s wisdom. I would even go so far as to call that love.

We are living through a moment that makes this especially sharp. There are people in our lives who voted for things that have caused, and are causing, real harm to real people. Some of them are doubling down. Others are sitting with regret. How you navigate those relationships is yours to figure out, and no one should tell you that you’re doing it wrong. If you’re a person whose safety, dignity, or existence is directly threatened by what they voted for, you don’t owe anyone proximity. Full stop.

That’s not what I’m examining here.

What I’m examining is a different kind of sorting, one I recognize from my childhood and have caught myself doing long after I left it behind. Fundamentalism’s categories aren’t primarily built around whether someone has caused harm. They’re built around whether someone threatens the system. The question isn’t has this person hurt anyone? It’s does this person’s presence make our certainty harder to maintain?

That’s a crucial difference.

In the communities I grew up in, someone could be generous, kind, genuinely good to the people around them, and still get quietly pushed to the margins because they asked the wrong questions or held the wrong views about scripture or showed up at the wrong church. Their character was never really the issue. Their threat to the system was. The sorting had almost nothing to do with fruit and almost everything to do with whether you fit the categories that kept the whole structure intact.

I experienced this first hand. The moment we started moving on from some of the core beliefs that fundamentalism demands (inerrancy, LGBTQ+ exclusion, hell), we were pushed out immediately. People we had known for decades stopped speaking with us. I was the exact same person I was before, I just didn’t hold the same belief as before. That alone was enough to place me on the outside looking in. It was easier to label me a heretic or false teacher than deal with the questions I asked.

Which is why, what’s coming next is really uncomfortable… for me anyway. I’ve caught myself doing the same thing in reverse.

Not protecting myself from people who have actually caused harm. It’s subtler than that. I have found myself filing people away based on a position they hold or a vote they cast or a framework they’ve not abandoned yet. Before I’ve actually looked at who they are or how they live, I’ve treated those few things as a full diagnosis of their character.

For me, with the privileges I carry, staying in some of those relationships feels like part of the work. I have the capacity, and honestly the personality, to function as a bridge in spaces where others can’t or shouldn’t have to. I don’t say that as some sort of pat on the back. It’s just what’s available to me from where I stand. Someone coming from a more vulnerable position, someone whose dignity is directly on the line, isn’t failing some test of open-mindedness by choosing not to maintain those relationships. They’re surviving. Those are not the same situation and they shouldn’t be treated as if they are.

What I’m trying to stay honest about is the difference between a boundary that protects and a habit that just sorts. Discernment looks at what a person actually does with what they believe. It asks whether they’re using their convictions as a weapon. It pays attention to fruit.

What I’m trying to resist is a pattern recognition that stopped paying attention to the actual person. Basically it’s the old software, running in a new direction.

The categories changed. The machinery didn’t.

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When Disagreement Feels Like Betrayal

In high-control environments, agreement gets confused with loyalty. To question is to rebel. To disagree is to betray.

That doesn’t automatically stop when you leave. That is still hardwired into us.

I noticed it most when someone I respected said something that didn’t fit my current framework. What was most surprising was how fast my reaction to it was. There was an almost immediate ousting of that person, in my mind anyway.

I’m not talking about obvious things that would warrant such a reaction. I’m talking about moments where that internal response was larger than the situation called for. And when you feel something larger than that situation calls for, it’s usually worth slowing down and sitting with whatever is underneath it.

What I’ve found in my own life, most of the time, was the old fear.

If this person is right, what does that mean for everything I’ve built?
If my framework has cracks, where does that leave me?

That’s not a question about them. It’s a question about me. And as long as I kept externalizing it, I couldn’t answer it.

Communities that form around deconstruction can reproduce this without ever meaning to. If we’re not careful, we’ll form new purity tests around new answers. And the ones that don’t pass our new tests, get shown the exit. Which, as I’m sure you all can imagine, is just as painful as the exits we were given.

It’s worth asking honestly whether we’re building something different or just something that looks different from the outside.

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Trading One Authority for Another

Fundamentalism trains you to outsource your thinking.

You’re taught who to trust, what to believe, and who deserves your allegiance. Independent thought isn’t just discouraged. It’s framed as the first step toward losing everything. The system needs you dependent on it, because a person who thinks for themselves is a person who might eventually leave.

Deconstruction usually starts when those authorities fail us. A pastor who abuses his position. A theology that can’t hold the weight of real suffering. A community that chooses the institution over the people bleeding inside it. Something cracks, and you start pulling on threads, and eventually the whole thing comes apart in your hands.

When you’re standing in all that rubble, the silence is enormous.

What I didn’t anticipate was what I would do with that silence. I had assumed that leaving bad authority was the same thing as becoming free. It wasn’t. It was just the beginning of a different kind of problem.

For me, the new authority was no authority. I burned it all down, and the burning became its own kind of certainty. I didn’t replace one trusted voice with another. I replaced the whole concept of trust with a kind of scorched earth policy. I didn’t know who I could believe anymore, so I stopped believing anyone. I became suspicious of every voice that claimed to know something, every framework that offered clarity, every community that asked me to belong to it.

And without fully realizing it, I made myself the authority. Not in a healthy way. Not in the sense of developing genuine discernment or learning to trust my own carefully examined judgment. More like: I decided that my skepticism was the most honest thing left, and I stopped being accountable to anyone or anything outside of it. My deconstruction became unquestionable. My conclusions became the new orthodoxy, at least inside my own head. Anyone who challenged them was either naive or still captured by the system I had escaped.

I was still a fundamentalist. I had just made myself the pope.

The loneliness of that position is hard to describe. There’s a particular kind of isolation that comes from deciding you can’t trust anyone. It feels like clarity at first. It can even feel like strength. But it’s a cold place to live, and it doesn’t actually lead anywhere. You can’t rebuild from total suspicion. You can’t reconstruct a life or a faith or a sense of meaning entirely alone, treating every offered hand as a potential trap.

I’ve also watched people go the other direction entirely. Walking out of authoritarian church structures and straight into the orbit of a podcast host or a deconstruction influencer, extending the same uncritical deference they used to give a pastor.

I understand it. The scaffolding of someone else’s certainty is easier to stand on than the slow, unsteady work of building your own. When you’ve spent years being told your own judgment can’t be trusted, the idea of relying on it is genuinely frightening. Of course you look for someone to tell you what’s true.

But there’s a cost to both paths. Giving yourself over to a new authority costs you the maturity that only comes from learning to think for yourself. And refusing every authority, making your own skepticism the only thing you’ll bow to, costs you the humility that only comes from staying genuinely accountable to other people and other perspectives.

Real reconstruction lives somewhere harder than either of those options. It asks you to listen widely without becoming dependent. To stay teachable without outsourcing your judgment. To let someone’s thinking unsettle yours without letting it replace your own capacity to sit with uncertainty and keep going.

It asks you to trust again, carefully and with open eyes, knowing you might get it wrong.

No person, movement, or ideology should become unquestionable. But neither should your own certainty, including your certainty that certainty itself is the enemy.

That was the thing I kept missing. The goal was never to find the perfect authority or to need no authority at all. The goal was maturity. And maturity, I’ve found, is mostly just learning to hold all of it with a little more honesty and a little less grip.

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An Invitation, Mostly to Myself

None of this is aimed at anyone else.

Or rather, it’s aimed at others only insofar as it’s first aimed at me.

I don’t want to become the mirror image of what I left. I don’t want to rebuild systems of fear and exclusion with different language and different enemies. I don’t want to mistake being right for being wise, or certainty for maturity.

That afternoon with Steve didn’t fix anything, not right away. But it cracked something open. It gave me a way to see what I had been doing. And once I could see it, I could, slowly and with a lot of stumbling, start doing something else.

The question deconstruction eventually forces isn’t what do you believe now?
It’s how are you holding it?

Are you holding your convictions with enough looseness to keep learning? Are you extending to people outside your current framework the same patience you wish had been extended to you when you were still inside yours?

Leaving fundamentalism was a beginning.

Learning not to recreate it (in myself, in the spaces I’m part of, in the way I treat people who see things differently) that may be the work of a lifetime.

And I suspect I’m not the only one still in the middle of it.

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