August 8, 2024 Show with Alisa Childers & Tim Barnette on “The Deconstruction of Christianity”

The Deconstruction Movement and Its Appeal

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this eighth day of August 2024.

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But I'm absolutely thrilled to have two first-time guests today on the program. Today we are joined by Elisa Childers. She's a singer, songwriter, and author, and we were also joined by Tim Barnett, apologist speaker with Stand to Reason, str .org, and he's an author.

And they're both going to be addressing their brand new book, The Deconstruction of Christianity, what it is, why it's destructive, and how to respond. And first of all, it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Elisa Childers.

Great to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me. And it's also wonderful to have you on for the first time, Tim Barnett. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's going to be a great conversation. I'm looking forward to it.

And I'm already going to give our listeners our email address if you'd like to join us with your own questions. It's chrisarnson at gmail .com. And as always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Let's say your church is going through something that you're not happy about, that is in some way connected to our conversation today.

We obviously don't want you to identify yourself so people will know what church you're talking about. So you may remain anonymous in cases like that. But if it's a general question, give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

And we have a tradition here, Elisa and Tim, whenever we have first time guests on the program, we have them give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include the religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and the kind of providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

So, Elisa, let's start with you. Let's hear some of your story.

I grew up in a Christian home in a Christian atmosphere. My dad was one of the converts of the Jesus People movement in the late 60s, early 70s. So he found the Lord and trusted in Christ through the ministry of Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel.

And so I was actually not raised in Calvary Chapel. We moved to the San Fernando Valley because my dad was in music and that's where the music industry was at that time. And I grew up in a, I would say, conservative, charismatic environment and trusted in the Lord from a very, very early age.

In fact, I don't actually remember not being aware of the Lord and being aware of the gospel and that I was a sinner and that Jesus was my savior. But when I was about five, my mom, I remember just being in the living room and she asked me if I wanted to trust in Christ.

And of course I did. And I prayed with her that night. So somewhere in there is the beginning of my journey. But I just always have loved the Lord. I've always been very deeply devoted to him and just persuaded in my bones that the Bible was God's word.

I grew up in a home where that was very much taught to me that the Bible was our authority. And we studied the Bible as a family and of course went to a Presbyterian grade school, Baptist High School, and got a lot of great discipleship from different streams of Christianity and really never questioned it until I was a bit older when I had a faith crisis after spending some time in the Christian music industry.

And it was really at that time when I began to really study the arguments for the existence of God, the reliability of Scripture, and then really studying Scripture myself. I didn't grow up really understanding hermeneutics or systematic theology.

So that was really the first time as an adult that I began to study those things. And then I guess you could say made my theology my own and made some course corrections as God rebuilt my faith. And then I started an apologetics ministry from that point on.

Well, praise God for that. And let me announce your website. I will be repeating that later on in the program. But it's Elisa Childers dot com. Elisa Childers dot com. And now, Tim Barnett, let's hear your story.

Well, like Elisa, I was raised in a Christian home as well. I grew up in a small country church. You know, half the people who attended the church I was related to. And the other half, you know, we called aunts and uncles because it was almost like we were related.

It was a really great church environment. Now, there wasn't that's not to say we didn't have some challenges along the way. But overall, it was a great church experience. Going to camp meetings is probably where I gave my life to the Lord.

I can't give you the exact date when that happened. But like Elisa said, there really hasn't been a moment where I could say, you know, I haven't been believing on Jesus for my for my salvation as far back as I can remember.

Now, I growing up loved the sciences, physics in particular. And so from an early age, I knew, man, I want to be an engineer or a science teacher or something like that. So I went to a secular university and there studying physics, I encountered all kinds of challenges that I hadn't experienced before because of that more isolated environment where I grew up with a lot of other Christians.

And so it was really the challenges that came from not within, but from without that started me on a journey of really seeking to understand what I believe and why I believe it. And so it was through that process where, you know, I was reading people like Richard Dawkins at the time and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are very popular in the early 2000s.

And and then, of course, there was guys on the other side, like Christian philosophers, William Lane Craig and and many, many others. And what I found was that, man, Christianity actually has the goods.

There really is good reason to be a Christian. And because of the trajectory of my life, wanting to become a science teacher, I thought, man, how is it that I've grown up in the church my whole life, going to youth group, doing the Sunday school thing?

I mean, all the Christian stuff. And I never heard this stuff before. How is that possible? And so I I made it kind of my mission that that I would try to prevent other young Christians from growing up and not experiencing those those those arguments.

So I started just kind of volunteering to speak at churches. And that really began to snowball. People began invited me to speak at more and more events to the point where I actually end up leaving full time teaching to become a Christian apologist full time and love being able to introduce apologetics, especially to young people.

And you just see their eyes light up. And man, there are really good reasons to to believe this stuff is true. And and I've dedicated my life to doing that ever since.

Well, praise God. And for more information on Tim Barnett's ministry, you can go to his website, TimBarnett .org, TimBarnett .org. And you can also go to the Stand to Reason website, str .org, str .org.

Well, Lisa, let me start with you. The obvious first question to start our discussion is what is, as even your subtitle claims, what is deconstruction of Christianity and how did you first become aware of it?

Well, the whole deconstruction conversation sort of traces along the narrative arc of my own story. So I hinted at this in the first question, but I'll elaborate a little bit to give you my perspective on this topic of deconstruction.

So after I spent about seven or eight years as a part of the contemporary Christian group Zoe Girl, we came off the road and my husband and I started attending a church in Middle Tennessee where we live.

And this was an evangelical, non-denominational church that had the Nicene Creed on its website. And we loved this church. And so after attending for about eight months, the pastor invited me to be a part of a smaller study and discussion group.

He said this would be like going to seminary. And I was really excited about that. But what I was unprepared for was that the pastor had already deconstructed his faith, but I didn't know that at the time.

And so the arguments that he was bringing were really skeptical. They were sort of making us doubt the reliability of scripture. They were casting aspersions on even things like the fundamentals of the faith, things like the resurrection and the virgin birth and and the nature of Jesus and the character of God.

And there was a lot of discussion that really was undermining the idea of biblical authority and errancy, inspiration. And so it really rattled me and sent me on a quest to figure out what I believed about all of these things.

And so what ended up happening was I was propelled into the faith crisis that nearly took my faith out. And and then years of study to rebuild is essentially what happened. And so I thought that I had been through deconstruction.

In fact, in my first book, Another Gospel, where I talk about that journey, I describe it as a deconstruction. Well, fast forward all these years later and I've been watching the deconstruction movement.

I have actually changed the way I talk about my faith crisis because what Tim and I discovered when we were researching deconstruction was that deconstruction is not simply just taking apart your faith, searching for truth, going to scripture, even going to evidence in reality to figure out what what is real, what is true, and then lining up your beliefs with that.

That's actually not what's going on in the deconstruction movement. What's happening in the deconstruction movement is it's really a shift of authority from an external source of authority for truth that's outside of yourself.

In other words, truth is true for all people at all times in all places. It doesn't matter what you think about it. It doesn't matter if you believe it or not. Truth is true outside of all of those things.

And it's really a shift of authority from an outside objective standard of truth to to a subjective one. In other words, what I feel is good or bad or helpful or harmful, oppressive or liberating. And that's what we really see going on in the deconstruction hashtag.

So I actually changed the way I talk about my my journey. I was always on a truth quest. And although it was agonizing and painful, it really wasn't a deconstruction. And so the way Tim and I define deconstruction in the book is that it's a postmodern process of rethinking your faith, but not requiring scripture as a standard, because that is the primary way we see deconstruction expressed in the movement, which is largely happening online.

It's not like there is a bunch of authoritative books written on this. This is sort of happening in real time. And as we can get into throughout the podcast, we use that word postmodern intentionally because it is connected to it has philosophical baggage, but it really does have a dominant express expression and culture.

And that's that's how we we are defining it.

And Tim, is this movement portraying itself as evangelical, even if it doesn't use the term? Perhaps it does. And what are the inspirations that that the sources of this that have begun to transform for the worse those men in ministry that are leading this movement?

Well, I'll what you'll find if you go on social media, and that's where a lot of this is taking place, is if you type in hashtag deconstruction, you're kind of teleported into this this phenomenon or this movement that's happening on social media.

And right next to that term, hashtag deconstruction, you often find the hashtag exvangelical. And so what we noticed is that while in the deconstruction movement, people end up in all kinds of different locations or destinations.

So someone may deconstruct and end up as an atheist, whereas someone else may deconstruct and end up in the New Age movement. And another person may be in a different kind of Christianity, like a progressive Christianity.

Well, the destinations are always different with the source of what they're deconstructing. That original starting place is usually referred to as evangelicalism. Now, what's really interesting is when you start to do the research on what does it even mean to be an evangelical?

You get all kinds of different answers. There was a time when evangelical meant something very specific. And so there's something called the Bevington Quadrilateral, where it focused on four things. The Bible is the source of essential truth.

The cross as the atoning sacrifice of Christ. You have personal conviction that was necessary for salvation or conversion was necessary for salvation. You have some kind of activism, which is usually evangelism.

And so you have these four elements. But today, evangelicalism means something totally different. I mean, we found as we cite this in a book, a study by Ligonier and Lifeway in in 2022, they found that 43 percent of self-identified evangelicals in the U .S. do not believe that Jesus is God, but rather just a good moral, just a good moral teacher.

So, I mean, imagine this, that you have 43 percent of self-described evangelicals who actually aren't Christian. They're denying something central to the Christian faith. This is not a peripheral thing.

The deity of Christ is central. So when someone says that they're ex-evangelical, it's hard to know what that even means. Were they one of were they one of the evangelicals who actually held to what we call the Bebitun Quadrilateral, who were legitimate Christians who understood Christianity, or were they describing themselves as evangelical because of maybe the political party they, you know, their parents voted for or because of, you know, they just went to church Christmas and Easter.

And that's just, you know, they so they identify as evangelical. So it's hard to know exactly where that person's coming from. What we do know is that they identified whatever it was as evangelicalism, and they don't want to identify with that anymore.

And so they're describing the process they went through to leave that starting place as deconstruction. So that's I don't think you'll find many in the deconstruction movement who will want to label themselves as evangelical.

They'll want to use a different term. Now, remind me of the second part to that question.

The second part would be the sources of inspiration of the leaders, like, are there any particular leftist theologians, perhaps, of history that they've clung to? Like, for instance, you hear about some of those figures from history that those in the woke movement and social justice movement have gravitated toward.

Are there any specific figures from history that are gleaned from by the leaders of this? Yeah.

Well, this is this a good question, Chris, I actually think that they don't necessarily know the leaders who are forming kind of the foundation of their belief and the methodology they're using to break down their beliefs, deconstruct their beliefs like like they may not know who Jacques Derrida is.

But what we found was his postmodern methodology is all over the deconstruction movement. So while they don't know these figures and maybe they never learned about them in in their philosophy class or their history class, they're actually using his playbook.

And that's because these philosophies trickle down into our, you know, our media, into movies, into the music we listen to. It's it's literally the the kind of the water we're we're swimming in. It's the air we breathe, you know.

And so it's like a fish not really knowing it's wet, you know, even though it exists in water. And I think in a similar way, there's the the postmodern philosophy has so influenced Christians even that they don't even realize that they bought into it.

And so many of the things that they'll say, as Lisa just pointed out, when it comes to truth, they they think they're they can be the source of truth. It can be true for me, but not for you. When it comes to authority, they can be the ultimate authority.

And so I don't know if it's specific individuals that they would point to from history. I think it's it's it's more just the the influence of the culture and the philosophies that have trickled down over the over the last few decades.

We have to go to our first commercial break and when we return, we'll pick up with Lisa. And if anybody once again has any questions and we do already have people waiting for their questions to be asked and answered on the air.

But if you'd like to join them, if you want to get in line, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail dot com. Give us your first name at least city and state and country of residence.

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So, go to royaldiadem .com, mention Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio. And I am now back with Elisa Childers and Tim Barnett. We are discussing their book, The Deconstruction of Christianity, what it is, why it's destructive, and how to respond.

And our email address for questions is chrisarnson at gmail .com. And we do have already, and I'll allow Elisa to answer this question, since we left off with Tim. We have a listener in a city that must be the funniest name city that I've ever heard of, Minnehaha, Washington.

Morgan in Minnehaha, Washington, wants to know, how did Elisa and Tim meet and begin to collaborate on writing? And I have a second question, and I'll wait until you answer that, Elisa, and then I'll ask the second question.

OK, well, we met, I want to say it was back many years ago at one of the reality conferences, I think. I don't entirely remember the first time I met Tim, at least virtually. We met in person when we were both on the reality tour, which is a youth apologetics tour that Stand to Reason puts on, which is just phenomenal.

And so I think that's how we met. But I started to notice that Tim was posting about deconstruction and progressive Christianity. And I loved some of the things he was saying. So I just knew that we were like minded on this topic and it was just kind of made sense for us to work together.

OK, and the second question that Morgan has is, can you name names of primary figures promoting this deconstruction?

Well, you know, that's an interesting question because we could definitely name some and we do in the book, and I'll do that in a moment. But the thing to understand about the nature of deconstruction is that there are many, many just anonymous people on TikTok and on different social media platforms that might or might not even have a massive following, but they'll have videos that have millions of likes, hundreds of thousands of, excuse me, millions of views, hundreds of thousands of likes.

And so while there are certain figures that kind of lead the movement, I'm thinking of people like Derek Webb, even to a certain extent, progressive Christian leaders like Brian Zond and Brian McLaren and people like that.

You have people like Jen Hatmaker. You have people like even Glennon Doyle. It just it's so loose and it's so fluid and constantly moving and changing that a lot of the figures can just be maybe a progressive Christian figure or a new age figure.

There's people like the naked pastor. And I don't know, Tim, who am I missing?

Yeah, I mean, this is what's crucial about this. You could have someone like the naked pastor and don't Google naked pastor. That's that's his handle on Instagram. And when we started researching the book, he had, you know, tens of thousands of followers.

Now he's well over one hundred thousand followers just on Instagram. He's on TikTok as well. And he consistently puts out videos on deconstruction and how to deconstruct. And he actually credits himself about 10 years ago with kind of 15 years ago of quite a coin in the term deconstruction, using the term coming out of a hermeneutics class where they were applying Derrida's methodology.

And actually they were being taught not to do that. And he came away saying, actually, that's how we should deconstruct the scriptures. And so he started applying it to faith. And so you have these individuals who maybe, you know, in the big scheme of things aren't like bestselling authors or whatever, but they have a following.

People start to watch their videos and they show up in our algorithms. And and I think that's where that's where it's having the most impact is those kinds of profiles and those kinds of influencers rather than, say, a Brian McLaren, who, you know, who is kind of a thought leader in this movement, but maybe isn't getting the traction and the influence that some of these people online.

Are having. Excellent, by the way, Morgan, please give us your full mailing address in Minnehaha, Washington, because you've just won a free copy of The Deconstruction of Christianity, compliments of Tyndale House Publishing and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

CVBBS .com will be actually shipping the book out to you. Thanks for the excellent questions. We have Boris in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Boris asks, is this any way connected with the emergent church movement that seemed to die out?

One of the things that seemed to be familiar in my ears is that the emergent church seemed to have this idea that we're still on a journey and it's wrong to have concrete, established, systemized theology because we're all just in a process of learning and shouldn't judge each other for where we are on that.

Journey. Well, so regarding the emergent church, I might challenge just a little bit in that question that the emergent church died out. It actually didn't die out, in my opinion. It just sort of morphed and changed and changed its name.

In fact, Brian McLaren, who was an early leader in the emergent church, said that said just that in a blog post that he wrote in 2012. He says, it's not like we went away. We just kind of went underground and now we call it something else.

And when it reemerged, really what you have is what we know today as progressive Christianity. So the relationship between progressive Christianity and deconstruction is a close one. It's not exactly the same thing, whereas progressive Christianity might be one of the destinations that deconstruction can take you to.

There are people who deconstruct. And Tim did such a good job earlier of explaining how really it's leaving that singular starting place in deconstruction. But people can go to various different destinations, whether it be progressive Christianity or secular humanism or agnosticism or some type of new age or some sort of mixture of all of those.

And so progressive Christianity is really the sort of the continual work of that emergent church. And it's very closely related. So what I would say, I would probably say it this way, is that people who become progressive Christians have deconstructed while not every person who deconstructs becomes a progressive Christian.

Anything to add, Tim? And by the way, yeah, this actually relates to the previous question from Morgan about kind of where this book came from, because what's fascinating is I, a number of years ago, put together a whole bunch of material to teach five different days at a camp, a kind of weeklong camp thing.

And it was all going to be on deconstruction because that was the hot topic of the time. I mean, there was well-known people like Joshua Harris, who wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye. There were people like Marty Sampson from Hillsong.

I mean, the list went on. John Steingart from Hawk Nelson. A lot of musicians in particular were copying on Instagram or other platforms and announcing their departure from Christianity. And they were using the term deconstruction.

And so trying to bring some clarity, I put this series of classes together. About halfway through the week, it came to me that, man, a lot of the people who end up in progressive Christianity got there through deconstruction.

And so in my mind, it's like this was the vehicle. Progressive deconstruction is like a vehicle that takes you somewhere. It's not a that, it's a how. It's a methodology. And because Elisa had written the book, Another Gospel, basically responding to progressive Christianity, I reached out to her and said, Elisa, you need to write the book on deconstruction because it's like the prequel to your book.

It's how people end up in what you wrote about. And so when I emailed, when I texted her, she's like, well, I'm really busy right now. She was actually working on a different book at the time, Live Your Truth and Other Lies.

And then I just kind of threw it out there. Hey, do you want to write this one together? And then she said, let's talk. And so that's kind of where this whole thing started. But it was because of this connection.

It was because of the connection between the process of deconstruction and a destination that a lot of these people end up in, which is progressive Christianity.

Well, thanks, Boris. Give us your full mailing address in St. Petersburg, Florida, because you've also won the deconstruction of Christianity. Thanks to our friends at Tyndale and thanks to CVBBS .com.

We'll be shipping it out to you. We have Max in Calverton, Long Island, New York. And Max wants to know, what is the appeal of this to people who are established in evangelical churches? I know that very often left wing Christianity, which we know is not really Christianity, appeals to the compassion of people and makes the lie that they are more like Jesus because they're more forgiving and tolerant and compassionate.

And they will even cite that liberals are very much involved in feeding the poor and clothing the poor and housing the poor. And I'll take that one.

Yeah, sure. I'm sorry about that. Sure. I mean, I'll start. I think part of the appeal is, I mean, go back to the Garden of Eden and and and look at the appeal to to Eve. You know, did God really say?

And of course, he hangs this like this fruit. And it's kind of like you can be as God. You can be your own authority. You can determine truth for yourself. And there is something really appealing to that from that message and that philosophy.

And I think just as people fell for it, you know, they fell for it in the garden. They've been falling for it ever since. I want to determine what's true for myself. I want to determine what's right in my own eyes.

And this is what we're seeing today. Now, what's new about it? So it's an old story. It's this kind of the same old thing. What's new about it is social media. And so people have been deconstructing. They've been going through this same process since the beginning.

But now you have people going online and announcing it to the world. And there's something very evangelistic about it, like about this, about how the process takes place. When Joshua Harris, who had a massive platform on social media, said, you know, he went on Instagram.