On Religion (good & bad) and the Necessity of Spiritual Deconstruction and Reconstruction

Religion can be helpful, fulfilling, and beautiful when it promotes kindness, compassion, and spiritual growth. Helpful religion encourages human flourishing, community, understanding, tolerance, and good works. Most faith communities are doing exactly that. People love and care for one another, offer practical help and support to their neighbors, take bold stands for justice, are life-affirming and hospitable. Throughout history, followers of Jesus nursed plague victims when everyone else fled the scene, opened and staffed the first hospitals, orphanages, and hospices, adopted unwanted babies, loved their enemies, and responded to hatred with nonviolent love. Their numbers multiplied because of their practical love.

Religion can be harmful, traumatic, and damaging when it controls, manipulates, and divides. No one is more zealous or violent than the person convinced they wield a divine sword.

The term “fundamentalist” derives from a group of Bible scholars and preachers who wrote a series of essays entitled The Fundamentals in response to growing skeptical influences from German seminaries and universities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There were some 64 authors including scholars like B. B. Warfield, James Orr, R. A. Torrey, G. Campbell Morgan, and J. C. Ryle. Many would not identify with what fundamentalism has become today. The essays themselves were more theologically diverse and generally more irenic than the later separatist fundamentalism of the 1920s and beyond. The contributors represented various Protestant traditions, including Presbyterian, Baptist, Anglican, and Methodist, and were united chiefly in defending historic Christian orthodoxy.

The Fundamentals was not a manifesto for Christian nationalism. It focused on defending historic Christian doctrines rather than advocating a political program. The later Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy shifted attention to battles for institutional control within churches. Only after mid-century, through a complex interaction of Cold War politics, anti-communism, the civil rights era, the sexual revolution, abortion debates, and the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s and 1980s, did significant segments of conservative American Protestantism and Catholicism become deeply intertwined with partisan political movements. 

Fundamentalism as we experience it in contemporary North America became increasingly separatist, legalistic, anti-scientific, and recalcitrant. Across traditions, contemporary fundamentalism discourages questions, honest doubts, varying opinions, and exploration. It is anti-intellectual. It seeks to dictate how a person dresses, talks, grooms, and associates. It promotes simplistic answers. Its practitioners often display an inability or unwillingness to engage different perspectives. Some fall into delusions in which they imagine God speaking to them more or less constantly. They see divine signs in everyday occurrences and simple coincidences. Others become grandiose, seeing themselves as special, imagining themselves as great prophets or possessing extraordinary gifts. Some become isolated and paranoid. Others morph into religious nationalists seeking to take control of governments, educational systems, and culture.

Unlike most people who have been harmed by toxic religion, I did not grow up in a fundamentalist or evangelical “Bible-believing” home. Instead, we were occasional mainline Methodists who stopped going to church altogether sometime during my late elementary school days. My father was an oceanographer, loved history and nature (especially birds), and took long swims in the ocean. My mother was a lab technician – the first electronmicroscope technician in America. Both lost their fathers when they were young; both came from Methodist backgrounds; both were raised during the Great Depression, were young adults during World War II (my father was a Naval officer during the war), and both were avid readers who loved classical music. They believed in God, they supported my belief in God, acknowledged my numinous experiences, but they were not by any means legalistic or biblical inerrantists. My parents weren’t missionaries or clergy. I attended public schools. I don’t remember anything about the few Sunday School classes I attended.

I had several profound spiritual experiences that eventually swept me into the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. For reasons I’ve yet to discern, I plunged into a fundamentalist worldview. Perhaps I was seduced by the feeling of being in a special in-group. I ignored opportunities to learn from top scholars in college, took the Bible with wooden literalism, eschewed the clear findings of science and bibliology, listened to nothing but contemporary Christian music, became a fairly arrogant know-it-all, cut myself off from friends, and, like many other former Jesus Freaks, was eventually coöpted by the religious right.

It worked for quite a while. Then I met some very religious, kind, loving, deeply Christian people whose very presence challenged me. These gays, lesbians, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, Bible scholars, and wise elders of other traditions messed up my fundamentalism and challenged my preconceived ideas with humility and grace.

It was not as traumatizing for me to jettison religious fundamentalism and right-wing politics as it is for many people, but it was still hard to face deep existential questions. People raised in the religious right, white, evangelical, fundamentalist bubble who were homeschooled (or Christian church-based schooled) and limited to only carefully vetted history, literature, media, and pseudoscience while surrounded by people of northern European descent with their televisions and radios tuned to rightwing disinformation and indoctrination, were more traumatized than I was.

In either case, leaving the fishbowl is shocking, traumatic, disorienting, confusing. It is often disruptive to families and friend groups. Leaving risks parental rejection. Internal voices shout threats of judgment and hell. Profound psychic disequilibrium is not uncommon. A person can feel as if they are dying, drifting, lost, going insane. The painful process of deconstruction has begun. It can be so frightening as to scare people backwards. They quickly retreat and double-down on religious fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, and group-think. They join ultra-right-wing movements. Some embrace white supremacy and historical revisionism and enthusiastically support cruel corrupt politicians.

But for those brave enough to face truth head-on, the effort of deconstructing an unworkable worldview and then constructing meaning and purpose is well worth the effort. Everything that can be shaken crumbles. That which remains is steadfast, true, solid. The existential crisis of deconstruction fills us with questions – Is there a God? What is God like? What is the Bible? Can I trust it? How was it written and formed? What does science teach me about the world I live in? Is there meaning? Why am I here? What is my purpose, or do I even have a purpose? We question everything.

It’s a scary place to be. It is so much easier to accept a prepackaged philosophy of life with easy answers, to be simply told what to believe, and to join with equally self-assured peers in mocking the heretics. Hence the alternative of running back into fundamentalism.

Another alternative is despair. Life has no meaning. There is no god. Death ends existence. Buck up. Look it in the eye. Rage bravely against the nothingness.

Still another option is to ignore it and just do whatever you can to distract yourself with money, possessions, parties, and exotic trips. Or soothe yourself with some alcohol, some drugs, pop music, and sex.

The most productive path is for many people the hardest, especially if white evangelical GOP fundamentalism has been their life. Marlene Winell coined the term “Religious Trauma Syndrome,” (https://marlenewinell.net) not as a diagnosis of mental illness, but to describe the ongoing angst that can result when your entire worldview is challenged. Religious trauma is clearly at play when religious figures abuse their authority to harm or manipulate mailable minds and bodies. But it is also present when one makes a significant religiophilosophical shift.

For me, that shift began when I noticed a lack of humility and teachableness in fundamentalist voices. Then I started to listen to African American, mainline Protestant, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, feminist, womanist, and LGBTQ+ theological voices. My ability to do so critically, to learn in an openminded but discerningly analytical way that swallows the fish and leaves the bones, comes from being formed in an educational system that taught me to think logically. Learning the art of critical thinking must precede the process. Without it, deconstruction won’t happen.

When we critically examine what we truly believe about the nature of reality – not simply what we want to be true, but that which is independently true – religious fundamentalism doesn’t wash. The earth isn’t 6,000 years old. People and dinosaurs did not coexist. Evolution by natural selection is a fact proven by multiple independent scientific disciplines. So-called white people are not intellectually superior. The Bible contains some errors. The Civil War was about slavery. God doesn’t hate gay people. Poor people aren’t lazy. Immigrants are valuable members of society. America was founded on stolen land and worked by enslaved people. And so on.

I am faced with the big questions. What is the meaning of life? Who am I really? Is there a God? If so, what is God like?

The existential storm rages. And that storm is a gift. Calm seas make poor sailors. Only the strongest trees survive the derechos. The best constructed buildings still stand after an earthquake. Those who face the existential storm that harmful religion caused, emerge with a deep wisdom, a settled peaceful spirit, and a charitable heart.

Most of us do not successfully navigate that storm alone. We need help. A guide, a companion who’s been there. When I was a lad, I sailed coastal Cape Cod in all sorts of weather and around all sorts of rocks, currents, and eddies. When my mentor, a wise octogenarian named Prince, was with me, I feared nothing. Prince sailed mailbags to the Elizabeth Islands before boats had engines in them. He was born upon the tide. With him, I was safe.

Similarly, there are wise spiritual elders who can guide us through the deconstruction and reconstruction process, not by giving us answers, but by being a steady hand on the tiller as we navigate the waves.

With the help of wise spiritual guides, my heart-space has expanded. I know and love God more fully and deeply than ever. I love and forgive others more easily. My sense of wellbeing has deepened. It is a beautiful wild ride filled with wonder and grace.

Join me.

https://www.theunstuckspirit.com