Why ‘deconstruction’ doesn’t work

Deconstruction, it’s a term that has been thrown around a lot in recent months. The pattern normally goes that people have been hurt by the church and they ‘deconstruct’. But I think that the whole process of wrong, and frankly a bit messed up, here’s why…

The word deconstruction conjures in my mind the image of a bricklayer pulling apart a wall and assessing what went wrong and where. In the ‘deconstruction’ process, I would expect people to asses what they believe and why.

I went through this process. I arrived at Bible College and began to investigate why I believed certain things. 2 years of deep investigation went on and some of my thinking changed on certain things.

But, I don’t think that the term ‘deconstruction’ works today because what many people are doing seems more like demolition than deconstruction.

Many people who deconstruct have sadly been hurt by the church and that grieves me. It hurts to think of people walking around with open wounds because a church has not represented Christ well.

But to deconstruct means to pull something apart in order to learn and grow. However, many ‘deconstruct’ podcasts and blogs seem to bypass the learning process and instead throw Christianity out all together.

I recently listened to a podcast where a few people discussed their hurt from moralism. They weren’t taught Christianity, they were taught that obeying rules meant that you were saved. But that isn’t faith or Christianity, that’s moralism.

They also discussed hell and the basic conclusion was that they didn’t like the idea of hell so they just stopped believing that it exists. To deny the existence of something, simply because you don’t like it, is illogical.

I think the better word for some people who ‘deconstruct’ today is demolishing faith instead of deconstructing faith.

This doesn’t make it easy, nor does it minimise the pain many of these people have that had been inflicted by church or Christians. We should be able to look at the church, and Christians, and see good representations of God. Sadly, that isn’t always the case. But to cast God off as mean and hurtful, just because some of His people are that way isn’t right. We need to look to Jesus and the Bible to see what God is like. Compare everything we think about God to what the Bible says and be transformed by the Holy Spirit to see who God really is.

I don’t think that the term deconstruction works because people seem to demolish instead. They focus on their pain and horrible experiences, instead of focusing on truth, which can lead to bitterness instead of learning. Also, this can lead to people demolishing their faith and becoming ‘evangelists’ of ‘leaving the faith’.