who deconstructs their faith?
I took a poll earlier here today on a private Facebook page for The New Evangelicals with a few hundred people who are going through faith deconstruction, mostly because I had a suspicion but wanted to see if I was right.
According to the survey, it is as I suspected:
MOST people who were surveyed were ALL IN before deconstruction. The majority were zealous, outspoken, evangelists.
Those who were more shy and personal about their faith still felt the need and expectation to be vocal and evangelistic about their beliefs for the sake of the faith, even if it took them to the point of exhaustion.
Very few who deconstruct, according to this very informal survey, were just going through the motions prior to deconstruction. Like 1%.
Why did I want to know this?
I host a podcast called Honoring the Journey Podcast and the guests I have who share their stories are literally ALL coming from a place of being ALL IN with their faith. Many of my podcast guests were on the worship team or leadership in their churches. Most were very vocal about their faith back in the day and deconstruction has been deeply difficult for them. I am in that category, as well.
This tells me something very powerful. The majority of people who deconstruct are NOT half-way, half-hearted Christians. They are not the ones just showing up to church on a holiday to check a box or to appease their families. They were deeply into the faith, took it very seriously and shared the gospel with others regularly.
Reasons we were all so zealous can vary from being incredibly fearful that people are going to hell, to just being very excited about faith and wanting to share it with others, to even just being told it was expected of them as a believer. There was a lot of pressure to measure up and this was a big expectation!
I feel like many of the complaints I hear in evangelical spaces about deconstruction is that they believe people leave because they want to sin, they don't take it seriously, or they were never “one of us”. But I don’t see that pattern in my guests or in this (very informal) poll. I see a distinct pattern of people who are deeply committed and love others desperately. I see people who genuinely wanted to have a relationship with God. I see people who take their faith seriously, and when they began to ask the “wrong” questions, they were dismissed or shown the door.
When you believe in something so much that you’d become an extrovert (even though you’re an introvert!) to share the news with others, that’s a powerful indoctrination, folks.
I appreciate the difficult journey those who are deconstructing are on (and I’m on my own, too). If that’s you, I wanted to let you know that I believe you when you say you were “one of them”. I believe you when you say you didn’t seek out deconstruction, it found you in your curiosity and love for others. And I believe when you say you didn’t do this to commit sins or dismiss things because they didn’t matter to you. After all, why would anyone bother deconstructing if it didn’t matter? Why ask questions if you don't really care about it?
I think we can safely say that people deconstruct not because they don't have a strong faith or take it seriously, but because they actually do.
