The Deconstruction: Conclusion

I’m not sure how the term “deconstruction” was first applied to the process of reconsidering long-held religious beliefs (my half-hearted googling produced nothing helpful, SO I GUESS WE’LL NEVER KNOW). It’s commonly used by fellow “exvangelicals” (people recovering from their hard-core evangelicalism) and made a lot of sense to me when I started the process of picking up and evaluating every brick that made up the structure of my faith, and deciding, piece by piece, what would stay and what would go. At this end of it, though, I’m not sure I like the image “deconstruction” leaves me with: a pile of rubble to be dumped, a stack of blocks to keep, and a patch of dirt, waiting for something new to be built on it. 

Actually, I feel like I’ve been simultaneously taking down and building up, deconstructing and constructing. Maybe the image of taming a jungle works better? It’s like I’ve hacked through those plants that squeeze the life out of other plants, and I’m left with only the juicy, healthy… plants...? (Look, I know nothing about jungle-taming. Possibly I should have thought about this before using it as an analogy.) Wait, no! Tidying a cupboard! It’s like I’ve pulled everything out of my faith cupboard, binned the parts that didn’t spark joy, and stored the rest in colourful boxes and jars that make me happy when I look at them. What I’m trying to say is this: to me, the term “deconstruction” suggests ending up with emptiness, waiting, incompletion. Instead, where I’m at feels ordered and whole and lush and done. To quote God for a sec, I now look at everything I believe about the world and think, “This is good.”

from here

I’d been taught that without God there was no real love, no real freedom, and no real morality. It hadn’t fit with what I’d observed in the world, but I’d crammed it into my faith cupboard anyway. No more! To the bin you go, weird doctrine! I could see that the no-one-knows-love/freedom/morality-like-Christians-do was a rather cult-y lie we’d been told in order to feel like we’d made the right life choices, so that we could continue to convince others to be more like us (“Hiya! The love you feel for your friends/family/self isn’t real love because you’re not a Christian! Come along to my church to find out how real love is about God killing Jesus because he hates everything you are on a fundamental level! Yaaaayyyy!”). I could no longer deny the fact that close friends and siblings were living good, happy, liberated and loving lives without God. As I found answers to life’s big questions outside of the Bible and church, I saw that one did not need religion to be ethical or kind, to experience peace, to enjoy healthy relationships, or to make the world a better place.

In fact, I now noticed many people outside the church who were working to make the world an easier, kinder place not only for themselves and their friends and families, but for others outside their immediate circles. Inside of Christianity, so many spent their time and talents and money on themselves and other Christians – attending conferences, writing books about what the Bible really, truly and actually says, donating a great deal of time and money to their church and to other individuals and organisations to allow them to perform their ministry work, delivering meals to fellow congregants. It felt uncomfortably insular when compared with the efforts of those outside of Christian circles, where there seemed to be fewer boundaries to the offer of help and relief and solidarity and empowerment.

Meals and time and money were given generously, with no one having to first agree to be preached to, and with nothing expected in return. People campaigned for justice and for the environment and worked tirelessly to smash the patriarchy and white supremacy and call out ableism and ageism and stand with those who were vulnerable and oppressed. The focus was on life now, rather than on what one bunch of people had decided happened after death. I chucked out the idea that people who look most like me should be the first ones to whom I dedicate my resources, and I put the checking-of-my-privilege and the campaigning and the mindfulness and the generosity and the equality back into my metaphorical cupboard.

///

Now may be the time to tackle the fact that though I did not intend this series to come across in a self-help-y “I ditched religion and now my life’s amazeballs!” way, I realise it kinda has. I know that I’m most likely not cured forever from mental illness, and, as enlightened as I’ve written myself to be, I still have a lot of work to do. I’m not perfect: I wear unethical jeans, I’m unhelpfully sarcastic when interacting with Jordan Peterson fans online, I grow too easily exasperated with Moses and Hazel when I’m tired, yet I continue to stay up well past my bedtime. I ignore my guilt and shop at Woolworths because it’s well-stocked and convenient. I always believe the mean things I think about myself, and struggle to believe the kind things others say about me.

I sometimes imagine running over people who ignore pedestrian crossings and traffic flow and casually cross the road in front of my fast-approaching car. I often don’t love being spoken to between the hours of 7-9am and 5:30-11pm and am therefore extremely unpleasant to share a house with. I still fall back on “white saviour” responses to race issues, and am repeatedly uncovering more deeply-held racist beliefs. I call myself a pacifist but found it profoundly satisfying to watch the video of a young man cracking an egg over the head of a particularly awful politician today.

I consider deliberately misspelling the names of people who misspell my name in their replies to emails in which “Annelise” is clearly and correctly written. I yell at Moses for leaving it so long to eat that he can no longer cope with anything and has started yelling at everyone instead, and then realise that I’ve left it too long without eating which is why I’m not coping with his noise and yelling at him about eating. My default is never to face problems with vulnerability and grace but to run away and hide forever. I drink bubble tea despite the fact that a lot of plastic died to make it (even the plastic straw comes wrapped in plastic).

I’m weirdly good at spotting the flaws in things, which makes me a handy proof-reader and a frustratingly critical spouse/mother. There are many situations in which my go-to reaction is “THIS IS WRONG” when it could/should be “THIS IS INTERESTING.” I imagine macabre revenge scenarios rather than mature, redemptive approaches for everyone who’s harmed a vulnerable person. I write lengthy blog posts about how great I am now that I’m not a Christian, and reassure myself that it’s kind of acceptable because I did, after all, decide to include four whole paragraphs about how I’m actually annoying. 

I’m not completely acing the Being-a-Phenomenal-Human thing, but the fact that I want to ace it – and the fact that I am changing – belies the claim that such things are impossible without God. That’s what I’ve been trying to say. 

This picture doesn't mean anything, I'm just trying to
distract you from how many words there are.

During my grand tidy-up, I culled a LOT. I got rid of the idea that eternity existed after death, and that hell was an appropriate punishment for anyone. I chucked the idea that violence was justified when perpetrated by God. I (*checks thesaurus*) discarded the jargon and concepts that even as an insider I’d never been able to fully wrap my head around – “God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” “The church is the body of Christ,” “Marriage between a man and a woman reflects Christ’s relationship with the church,” “Forgiveness,” “The Bible is God’s Word” and also “Jesus is God’s Word.” (So much of what I said and sang and wrote in cards to my friends was strange and/or meaningless, but I said/sang/wrote it anyway, happy to know the lingo which proved I belonged. Nowadays, I read church signs and think to myself, “I’m not sure they realise that what they’ve written doesn’t make sense to anyone but church people.”)

I threw out literally everything evangelical churches had taught me about men and replaced it with what I knew from being surrounded by people for 30-something years: firstly, that men, like every other group of humans, are not a homogeneous bunch that can be simply defined with a statement that begins with “Men are…”. While it was true that some men truly were violent and/or creepy and/or terrible at caring for children, baking, or noticing that their wives were straining under the pressure of the family responsibilities they’d been lumped with, this was not because they were poorly designed. It was because throughout their lives they’d been taught in ways both im- and explicit that their time/opinions/feelings mattered more than anyone else’s in their world, and they’d never been offered reason to question any of this. I knew that those men existed, but so did other men, good friends who treated me as a fellow human rather than a sex object, men who had the same worries about their children as I did, men who split childcare and housework with their partners or took on the bulk of it themselves, men who enjoyed the same books/music as I did, men who were in love with other men, men who gossiped and cooked and juggled work or study and family life, men who didn’t flip out when anyone mentioned toxic masculinity.

By this stage, my studies had taught me that science showed a fascinating amount of variation both among and between the sexes, which suggested that offering only a Man Track and a Woman Track for us all to try to force ourselves into was sadly inadequate. I found the church’s focus on people’s biology boring and stifling; I had zero interest in learning about someone by knowing their hormone levels or anatomy or brain pings. I wanted to hear what that person was passionate about, what they excelled at, what made them laugh, what made them dance, what made them angry, what disappointed them, and why. I didn’t want to box anyone based on their body, as I’d been boxed. We’re all somewhere on the gender-y spectrum, and curiosity seems far more interesting and necessary to me than hard boundaries and the policing of categories.

So I crushed up the narrow, restrictive expressions of sexuality and gender I’d been taught. They’d been crumbling for a good, long while, but it was deeply satisfying first to smoosh them and then to set the vacuum cleaner on them and watch them disappear for good. (Do you like that I introduced a metaphorical vacuum cleaner?!) The gender roles and stereotypes taught and perpetuated by churches are harmful to everyone (straight, cis men included, although it’ll likely take some in this group longer than everyone else to notice the downsides); though I got rid of them, I kept my fury over their damage in a cute little box on my freshly-cleared shelves, next to the core values – integrity, honesty and authenticity – I’d discovered during my clean-up.

Another cool discovery in this deconstruction process was that my optimism fundamentally clashed with almost everything Calvin/God stood for, and that, overall, I actually felt a tingly love and generous hope for the human race as a whole. I began to feel connected with others in a way I hadn’t before in my black-and-white, Us vs. Them world; I started to see our many similarities rather than our one, religion-centred difference, and catch myself thinking WE’RE ACTUALLY QUITE LOVELY, US HUMANS and also I THINK WE’RE GOING TO BE OKAY. I threw out pessimistic ideas of us all being perpetually disappointing to God, and began to notice the regular ways in which we are wonderful to one another. (Please note that this warm feeling does not extend to anyone convinced that complementarianism is the only possible way to have a good marriage, Jordan Peterson fans, or anyone who tries to tell me mind-numbingly dull anecdotes about a conversation they had with someone I’ve never heard of before and will never hear of again. I truly am a work in progress.)

from here

Throughout the process, I also acknowledged that there were many versions of Christianity, and it’s as unhelpful to think about the religion as if everyone who stood under its umbrella was identical as it is to think this way about gender. I’ve talked generally about Christianity over this series, but I’m not opposed to all of it these days, mostly just the evangelical types I’ve spent time with, and any kind that makes anyone feel like it’d be better to suicide than to live life being who they are. I still like the progressive strains, where God is only ever love, never violence or retribution, and the dodgy parts of the Bible are never ignored or justified, and social injustice makes people crankier than swearing does, and masturbation and enthusiastically-consensual sex is talked about shamelessly, and right now matters, and everyone seems more honest about the ebbs and flows of faith and doubt.

I have a lot of time for such Christians; I might be one of them, if I could bring myself to believe anything. Alas, I see no evidence for God, and I feel neither the desire nor the need to find any. It was Christianity that taught me I needed a God, and, once I’d let go of the religion, I realised I’d never bothered to ask it why that was the case. Post-deconversion, I was unable to answer such a question myself; why did I need a god? What for? If my life was chock full of peace and wellness and happiness and awe and gratitude over sunsets and parrots and cuddles and community and kindness without God, what was the point of Her? I was tired of believing pointless things just because I’d been told I should. (In other news, I still feel a zap of joyful energy run through me at the sound/sight of She/Her pronouns for God. Every time! I bloody love it.)

I don’t think I have a problem with others believing in a god (any of them), as long as no harm is being done to anyone, although this quickly becomes tricky when taking into consideration the fact that many evangelical Christians, for example, define “harm” and “love” rather differently to most of the rest of the population (to name just one example, “love” for many evangelicals meant voting no on same-sex marriage). Invariably, the Christians I have the most respect for, such as Father Rod Bower or Glennon Doyle, are the ones most likely to be called heretics or to have their “Christian” badge threatened, usually for caring more about people than dogma.

(It seems that deciding who’s In and who’s Out is a never-ending job for many Christians, and one of the things I now hate most about fundamentalist flavours of religion. During my time in Anglican churches in Sydney, I learned that Catholics weren’t really Christians, and that even among Protestants there was a hierarchy of rightness, with the Uniting church waaaay down the bottom of the pile and Sydney Anglicans [only the good ones, not the ones who thought women should be fully ordained] up the very top. The people on top decide who’s actually In; the people at the bottom seem completely disinterested in participating in such a game. Back when I was in that world, it was exhausting constantly measuring others to figure out where they sat on the ladder, and whether I needed to intervene and change them. It was freeing to chuck out the judging.) (Some of the judging, at least.)

I’ve also learned that there are progressive people-lovers in and out of all faiths, not just Christianity, and that the god one follows (or doesn’t) matters far less than one’s views on who deserves love and justice and empathy and equality, and - most importantly - how such views translate into practice.

///

As the deconstruction progressed, I learned to check in repeatedly with my values and my body, getting better and better at deciding how to stock my “cupboard.” I listened to my gut to make decisions about unclear situations in which I felt as though my integrity was being compromised. I prioritised honesty and authenticity over people-pleasing. This self-care also meant reflecting on and finding compassion for past-me, who’d dived deep into Christianity for so long. I analysed what had driven me to God and accepted that religion had filled certain needs of mine well for a time.

I’d grown up hearing no alternatives to evangelical Christianity; my mother was hugely influential in forming so much of my worldview, and I unquestioningly believed most of the things she said to me about religion (and men, and vaccines, and dieting) up until the age of 22, when I finally, startlingly, began to wonder if perhaps she could sometimes be wrong about some things. Converting to Christianity was a fail-safe way of impressing her, where ambition and moxie had so far proven unsuccessful. So there was that.

Having God in my life had also helped me cope with my sister’s premature birth and death, as well as offering a sense of control over what would happen to me after my own life ended. Also, if I was completely honest, I’d really liked the idea of a God who could hold to account and cruelly punish the man who’d molested me; I didn’t know that He would, but I knew that He could, whereas I’d felt utterly powerless to seek justice for myself. (God seemed way more down with the idea of torture than I was, and I’d been quite happy to hand this situation over to Him for this reason.)

Social psychology classes taught me the importance of belonging; we all want/need to be included in groups, and gravitate towards like-minded people. I craved such community in my 20s – moving to Sydney from country New South Wales was scary and left me feeling isolated and lonely. At church, I was instantly welcomed into a ready-made gaggle of friends, all of whom were keen for me to stick around and join their cause. I also found there an answer to all of the questions I had (or didn’t yet have) about the world; everything I needed to know could be boiled down to 6 simple boxes in a (strangely power-centric) gospel presentation (which we learned off by heart so we could recite it perfectly at our unsuspecting lunch-eating victims). Everything else could also be known, if I learned my Bible and waited long enough for God to talk to me through it. I loved this idea! My anxiety loved this idea! No more confusion! No more incomprehension! At night, I felt comforted by the thought that God was always nearby, ready to listen to my thoughts and worries when I had no one else with whom to share them. It all felt really nice.

I began to feel gratitude for what my faith had offered me throughout the time it’d played a role in my life, including introducing me to my husband and some beautiful friends. It’d protected me from icky feelings for a while, before it became the reason for different icky feelings. I got a sense of why others remained or felt freshly drawn to Christianity, acknowledging everything I’d used it for and gained from it.

If you’ll allow me to introduce just one more metaphor to this ridiculously metaphor-saturated post, by the end, Christianity felt like an outdated rain-jacket that was now entirely the wrong shape and size for me, stopping me from breathing easily and cutting off my blood supply whenever I tried to squeeze myself back into it. It’d once brought protection and comfort, but it no longer fit; it was time to throw it out. (I’d have sent it to Salvos, but there were holes all through OMG I’M LOVING THIS SO MUCH.)

So. That’s where I’m at now: a quirky but logical, meaningful and flexible structure. A luscious green forest, growing and stretching up towards the sun. A tidy cupboard (always open for rearranging). A full heart, a chatty body, listening ears, a hopeful outlook, lots yet to learn, far more evolving to do.

As Jesus said it would, the truth really did set me free.

*cue dance party*