Deconstruct Your Doubt

There is much talk among young evangelicals these days about progressive Christianity and “deconstructing” your faith. I recently talked to a young man who has reinterpreted the scriptures to move from a “non-affirming” to “affirming” stance on sexuality. And a friend who sent his daughter to a Christian university thinking it was a faith-friendly environment, only to have her buy into an extreme version of trajectory hermeneutics and announce that she no longer believed in Jesus. As for me and my house… I cannot affirm anything the Bible does not, and progressing is not positive if you are progressing off a cliff. This is a bad trajectory, and the smart thing to do is turn around.

I realize we live in a culture where Harvard hires an atheist as chief of chaplains, but I am somewhat skeptical of new revelations that contradict the plain teachings of scripture and are about five minutes old. And beware of any ideology that has to constantly invent new words and reinterpret old ones. It is great hubris to think everyone before you got it all wrong, and that your generation is much smarter than the giants of church history. Of course, I have not always thought this way.

To give context, I am Canadian, so I have seen much further down the postmodern highway than my American counterparts. I was also raised as a “none,” growing up outside of the church and basically “woke” before the term was invented. I was categorically against tradition and institutions on all fronts. But then something happened. I began to deconstruct my doubt and had a real encounter with Jesus that I have never recovered from. For me, woke just reads as a cheap secular knock off of being born-again, and transitioning a poor substitute for real transformation. Gonads and melanin are such surface and shallow ways to frame life. There are much deeper issues at play; issues that determine where we will find our identity and decide what lifestyle we are going to embrace. Jesus changed my thinking and my trajectory. I have absolutely no regrets about that.

Typically, the process of maturation moves from construction (childhood) to deconstruction (adolescence) to reconstruction (adulthood). We are handed a set of beliefs in childhood. In our teen years we take those apart and decide what is worth keeping and what we are going to throw away. As adults we put it all together into an identity and a lifestyle. The problem is that our culture is stuck in the middle: perpetual deconstructive adolescence. It is so much easier to tear things down than to actually build something. There seems to be very few adults in the room… just wrinkly adolescents who have the mistaken notion that the universe revolves around their small, self-focused understanding of the world. God help us!

If you find yourself theologically conflicted these days, I would suggest that a skeptical world is preaching at you 24/7 through its entertainment and media, and that your intake of doubtful ideas is way higher than your intake of Jesus’ truth. To put it bluntly, my friend, you are being discipled in doubt. If that is working for you, fine… but you know that it isn’t. You need to at least give God a fair hearing. Shut off your phone for a while and ask God to speak directly to you. He will. Read the Bible this week instead of watching Youtube. Theology from Tik Tok may make you popular for a time, but your soul longs to be on the right side of eternity, not just the moment. Whatever we feed gets bigger and stronger, so we need to feed our faith. Deconstruction has its place, but it is not a permanent dwelling. If you are going to deconstruct anything, deconstruct your doubt. Jesus will be waiting for you on the other side, with a mature and satisfying faith.