D – d – d – d – deconstruction

It seems everywhere I turn recently there's somebody who claims to be deconstructing their faith. Try “deconstructing faith” as a Google search and let me know when you come up for air. In response, there has been some pushback from churchy folks saying that maybe deconstructing isn't such a good idea or at least not all it's cracked up to be. Even our former conference pastor (now academic dean at Steinbach Bible College) put in his somewhat more than two cents on the matter in a recent article that you can find in the September issue of The Messenger or online here.

So, what is deconstruction? How might it apply to faith and/or our experience of the church? And is it a good idea?

Deconstruction is a term connected with post-modern philosophy. Maybe it would be good to talk about being modern before we talk about being post-modern. Modernism is the belief that people can explain things and should be able to solve our problems with enough careful investigation, categorization, and science. Modernists were frustrated with those who came before them (the pre-modern era) for being gullible and relying too heavily on religion or tradition. If a medieval peasant got sick and died, their family would be sad and say it was the will of God and that was the end of it. Nonsense, said the moderns, we need to do some scientific research and categorize all the sicknesses and see what causes each one and then take action to address those causes and then we'll have less sickness. Sure enough, it turned out that the peasant died of cholera and some research indicated that cholera spreads through contaminated water, so some carefully organized attention to keeping water clean did in fact result in much less cholera and much less illness and death. “So There!” said the modernists, “It wasn't God at all! It was a disease with a specific cause and people can find that cause and solve that problem!” This shift in worldview resulted in a war of words (and sometimes plain old wars) between modernism and religion, including Christianity, that continues to this day. If you are familiar with the argument between creationists and evolutionists that folks like Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis organization are involved in, that's an argument between a pre-modern religious view that says that God did/does stuff and a modern view that says that things happen for scientific reasons which don't involve God.

Sometimes there is overlap, as when people like our guest speaker several weeks ago, Dr. Dustin Burlet, use the tools of scientific research to defend a thesis that is pre-modern at its core. And it's important to know that although people sometimes use the word 'modern' to describe events that happened recently this discussion about premodern, modern, and post-modern isn't about time. All three approaches exist together and they are ways of understanding the world. In a general sense, European society was pre-modern until about the mid-1500s. Then modernism grew and grew until it's peak just after the Second World War when seeds of discontent emerged and post-modern ideas started opposing it. Post-modernism really came out into public view in the '70s and '80s. We now have all three ways of thinking at the same time, sometimes mixed together, overlapping, and often poorly understood.

Modernism was very successful. People's efforts to figure things out led to invention and understanding of technical and natural processes that nobody had given much attention to in pre-modern times because they assumed it was none of their business to figure out why or how God did whatever He pleased. When people got together on figuring things out it became clear that all sorts of problems could be solved and previously unimaginable things could be invented with focus, effort, concentration, organization, and the methods of science. Modernism led to revolutionary advances in industry, agriculture, health care, and technology. We wear glasses, get our knees replaced, call each other on the phone, drive down the road, fly in airplanes, and eat preserved food because of modernism. We have democratic governments instead of tyrannical kings because of modernism and we have job options besides whatever it is that our parents did because of modernism.

But modernism wasn't all benefits. Traditional religious folks have bristled for many generations about the way modernism sidelines God or puts God in a little box together with telling fairy tales and other old-fashioned things that modernists find impractical, irrelevant or somehow opposed to progress. But that's not the only problem. Modernism, with all its emphasis on progress, advancement, categorization, and factual understanding, bulldozes everything in its way. Along with all its benefits modernism also brought industrial-scale race-based slavery, mass child labour, rural depopulation, the Great Depression, secular and communist dictatorships, and the globalized destruction of the first and second world wars and the cold war. On a more personal level, modernism has no place for mystery – everything needs to be factually understood so it can be exploited or taken advantage of to its full extent. At a gut level, many people began to feel that they didn't want to have the experience of awe at gazing at the northern lights in a star-filled midnight sky explained by which pheromones were active in the pre-frontal cortex of their brain. And they certainly didn't want that experience captured in a bottle of pills and sold to them by a corporation. Surely there must be something else going on. Surely there was more to life than modernism.

So, in the 1950s and '60s people like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Simone de Bouvoir, and Michel Foucault started looking for what might come next. Post-modernism, at its simplest, is just a question of what might come after the complete bulldozer that is modern industrial science and its assumptions about progress. If you've ever gone swimming in a pool you know that it takes some effort to get yourself up over the edge so you can think about something besides treading water in the deep end. Post-modernism is exactly that effort to get far enough away from the flaws of what you're already doing so you can get some sense of what the other options might be.

One of the first and most important tools of a post-modern approach is deconstruction. Deconstruction is carefully taking something apart and examining it in detail bit by bit to see how it works, what role it plays, and why it might be important. You can deconstruct a piece of literature, an event in your day, a product on your kitchen counter, an organization, your understanding of the gospel of Mark, or anything else. It's important to note that deconstruction is not demolition – here I take issue with Layton's article mentioned earlier. Both Saul (in Acts 9) and Isaiah (Isaiah 6) in the Bible had experiences with God that knocked them completely off their foundation and made them start over from scratch. That's an important process that sometimes happens but it's not deconstruction and they are not substitutes for each other. As an analogy, if you want to remove a closet from a room in your house there's no need to burn the house down and start over with a new building. Instead, you do some deconstruction – carefully removing specific pieces of trim, drywall, lumber, and wire – so that you understand where each of them came from and what role it plays. Some of the pieces are used again in the new version of the room without the closet and others need to go in the dumpster but you carefully sort out and examine each one as you go to determine what to do next so that the structure stands and electricity flows as it should. It's exactly the same with deconstructing anything else. We examine each part in detail, expecting that it has some value, some purpose, some significant place in the way things go together. As we do that we decide which things get re-used, which things get used in new ways, and which things don't get used anymore and might be discarded. Deconstruction is slower than demolition and it's not immediately as gratifying as building something brand new but it's a common and important part of our experience in the world that we understand with the help of post-modern philosophy.

When people say they are deconstructing their faith experience or their experience of the church they may mean several different things. First, because the word is culturally trendy now, it is sometimes used as a back door to get out of something without explaining anything more. It can be a bit like a dating couple when one person says they need some space to think about stuff because ... it's not you, baby, it's me. What they really mean is they want out, now, and don't want to or don't know how to go into more detail. That has been happening in churches for as long as there have been churches and it's sad but one of those things that sometimes is. Maybe one side or the other should have tried harder or done something differently or maybe it's just a basic disconnect but that ship has sailed and now the relationship is over. In that way, the word 'deconstruction' really has no meaning it's just a word to attach to a process that is very difficult to put words to. More on that reason for people leaving faith or the church another time.

Second, when people do use the phrase 'I'm deconstructing my faith' intentionally, it can be a powerful move towards removing obstacles. Sometimes when you deconstruct a room in your home you realize that without that closet in there the whole thing seems larger and more usable and full of wonderful new opportunities that you couldn't see before even though the basic room is the same as it ever was. My grandparents (although they didn't know the word) deconstructed their faith experience together with others and discovered that it was important for them to change languages in their worship service. The church they were involved with as young adults boomed as a result of that process of deconstruction and thrives to this day. They did not destroy their faith or throw out everything they ever learned about God and Jesus but they did get kicked out of the church conference they were part of at the time because they refused to do as they were told just because something had been valuable in previous years. They stopped singing only Lutheran revival hymns in German and began singing some Billy Graham revival hymns in English. It seems like an oddly small thing to get kicked out over but they did. It led to starting a youth group and putting in some electric lights which seems minor and dumb but at a more basic level, it led to thinking of their friends in the community as a “we” who could worship together rather than as a split between “us” and “them” who needed to stay apart. I don't feel the need to change worship language even though my grandparents found that step valuable because my process of deconstruction together with others has not raised that as an issue that is causing problems for us. But as I or we deconstruct there will be similar things that seem small on the surface but ripple out to important wider consequences.

Third, being open to the word 'deconstruction' reminds us that in spite of the church's historic arguments with science, we have become modern people with both the strengths and weaknesses of modernism in everything we do. If somebody uses the word deconstruction while walking out in frustration as we form an ad-hoc working group reporting to the subcommittee of the committee on procedural modification on reports to the board of directors for submission to the chair of this and that ... we may be reminded that we've become a modern corporate organization as well as (or perhaps instead of) a body of faith. If we need to listen to a report from a mission organization that counts its success in statistical numbers of converts and rededications in a cost-benefit analysis against greater efficiencies in staffing and reduced national expenditures ... we may wonder if we've harvested and stuffed taxidermy specimens rather than made disciples. Deconstruction, at its best, is a way of stripping away layers of accumulated debris. Sometimes we may not want to look at what's in that pile or we may be afraid that there is nothing of value under the pile – the accumulated pile is all we have – but we are compelled to be more straightforward and honest with ourselves and each other and God as a result. That's tough in the short run but good in the long run as the biblical analogy of gold refined by fire illustrates.

There is a risk when you start deconstructing that you will discover your house does not have an adequate structure or foundation and although you intended to just renovate one closet you end up gutting the whole thing. That's a risk you take any time there are changes made and if you are wary of renovation because you suspect that the whole thing might fall down then perhaps it's best to have at it and be blown off your foundation as Saul or Isaiah were. There is also a risk often thrown at post-modern critiques of anything that of course a thing doesn't work after you take it apart. Deconstruction done poorly or haphazardly can be harmful in the same way that anything done poorly and haphazardly is harmful. There is sometimes a sense that people who are into deconstructing their faith are similar to a person who takes a car engine into a thousand pieces spread all over the floor and then says, “See I told you it doesn't work!” That's a fair observation and if you do some image searches online for post-modern art or architecture there is a scattershot disorganized in-joke referential sense to it that gets hard to take after a while. Maybe if all we ever do is deconstruct there's not much hope but if we don't start with some deconstructing there's also not much hope so it has a place in the process but is not the whole process.

Is anybody still reading? I think post-modernism has a lot to offer to the church as a whole and to each of our journeys of faith. I would have a tough time staying in church if it wasn't for a post-modern understanding of how and why we do things. The emphasis on close reading and layers of interpretation and meaning in our experience offer benefits on every level as we read scripture, interpret it together and apply it. The process of deconstruction, whether part of a coded reaction of frustration against the established patterns of our church life and spirituality or whether a careful meticulous search for intersubjective connections is good for us as Christian people in relation to God through Jesus and we should encourage it in ourselves and each other whenever we can.