A Guide to Deconstructing | Theocast

Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we're going to be talking about a current trend or something that we see happening quite a bit these days, and that is deconstructing. And by that term, we mean people who are deconstructing the Christian faith and leaving it.

So John and I are going to talk about that today. We realize that we do some deconstructing here at Theocast as we try to think about theology and doctrine and those kinds of things together. But we want to talk about how to do deconstructing well.

We'll talk about some of the pitfalls that people find themselves stumbling into. And ultimately, we want to talk about the building up piece. How at the end of the day, we want to be building one another up in the Lord Jesus Christ and his sufficiency in the place of sinners.

So we talk about that on the regular episode and then really kind of carry that over into Semper Reformanda today where we give some more words to our confessional friends out there. We hope this is encouraging for you, and we hope it's clarifying in some ways as you see stuff happening around you.

Stay tuned.

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Theocast, Deconstruction, and the Aim of Building Up

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

And I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Though that is not where I am podcasting from.

You are not.

No, those who are watching on the YouTubes might realize that the background looks a little bit different than typical. I am on location in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I am this week. My church, our elders recently decided in the last few months decided that they want me to start taking one work week a year to be removed from the regular duties of ministry so that I can get some big projects like writing, reading type projects accomplished.

And so that's what I am down here working on this week. I wrote a paper for our elders, just a position paper on baptism yesterday in terms of just some general thoughts about baptism from a covenantal reform perspective.

And also what that means for the administration of that sacrament in our local church. So that was today, today or yesterday.

So we're going to have an episode on that.

We're going to talk about that.

We could. And then today we're obviously doing Theocast right now. And then I've got some work on, can I say?

Yeah, go for it.

About this thing that's called the Grace Reform Network that John and I and a couple of other pastors have been working on for a number of months now. I'm going to be doing some work for that today, just with respect to the confessional doctrinal side of that.

And this is an association of churches that we are looking to put together. A number of pastor guys have reached out to us over the last couple of years. And so we'll see what the Lord does with that.

I just said that live on the web and the interwebs and the YouTubes and all those places. So there that is. And then the rest of the week, not that people are necessarily craving this information, but the rest of the week I've got several reading projects on.

One, I want to read more on just confessionalism and the history of confessionalism, the history of pietism in the American Protestant Church. So that's going to be an interesting project, I think. And then I'm hammering away finishing a couple other books on eschatology and law and gospel distinction and some of those things.

So just doing some personal study and I'm really grateful for the time. But I'm also happy to be on with you this morning, John. I'm excited about our topic, which I know you're going to introduce for us in just a minute.

But why don't you tell us something about what's going on in your church, what's going on in your pulpit?

Good times.

This weekend is our first men's retreat ever.

So I'm excited about that.

We're partnering with Covenant Grace Columbia. Patrick Crandall, he was on the episode on the rise of Baltimore.

I know that guy.

Patrick's church is going to be joining us there. So we're excited. This will be our first one where we're going to be talking about how do we as men in the church strengthen one another? Obey the scriptures and strengthen one another.

So that's what we're going to be talking about. I'm excited for that. Just finished James 1, verses 2 through 4, which is on trials. And we're going to even reference that today. I know, Justin, you just preached on Joseph.

We'll talk about that later in the episode as well.

Yeah, we will.

Stay tuned.

What Deconstruction Means and Why It Is Gaining Momentum

So let's go ahead and jump into it so we can get as much time on this subject as we can. This is something I recently did a Ask Theocast on. That'll probably have come out a couple of weeks ago. And it's definitely more and more we are seeing it on social media.

I have been hearing about it, had a conversation with my wife about it, not even knowing that was going to record this. She was telling me about a video she had watched. And I have personally taken the time to watch quite a few of these deconstructing videos.

I'm really thankful that YouTube allows me to watch them in double time.

So really quickly, John, can you explain to people what you mean by deconstructing and the deconstructing videos you've watched?

So one of the things that you are listening to this episode, you either listen to all of Theocast, so you may not know what the subject is, or you came across this because you do know what the subject is.

But for those of you that are listening and don't know, there's a movement right now where it's been happening for the last few years, but it's definitely gaining some momentum, where people come out in public, either on social media or on YouTube in video form, or some have even done some written form, where they start to explain how they are moving away or they're pulling apart.

They are asking the big questions about their faith. And specifically, this has to do with either Catholic or evangelical faith. I've seen both Catholic and Christian evangelical, where they start to question the nature of the Bible, the nature of God, the nature of sin, the commands in scripture as it relates to sexuality, things like that, hell, heaven.

People end in all different kinds of places, but there's a movement where we're asking big questions and we're deconstructing, meaning we're pulling apart everything that has been built around us concerning our faith in God.

And that's what really we're going to be talking about today, is a movement where we have seen it. I think what tends to cause things to gain momentum is when you start seeing famous people do this. So we have seen several Christian band, Christian authors and pastors who have now come out over the last few years and have said, I am no longer a Christian or I have abandoned the traditional Christian faith.

The historic Orthodox faith.

Yeah, right. And they kind of are now presenting a deistic view of God in some form. And it's kind of hard to know where they land. It's the way that they present it. They're still processing. They are still deconstructing.

And it's a journey.

It's a journey that they're on.

Right. And they're not quite sure where they're going to go. Probably the most famous person that I remember 10 years ago, and more than that now, it would have been almost 15 years ago, that started this process was Rob Bell when he wrote the book on hell.

Yeah, Love Wins. He kind of started to go against his evangelical background when he started to question some of the Bible statements as it relates to God's love and hell. So that's what we're going to talk about today.

And really, one of the things that Justin and I, we love to do, probably my favorite thing in the week is the first hour of our conversation before the podcast. And that's where Justin and I just get caught up on life and what it is that we want to talk about.

New Theocast branding and merch.

Yeah, we just ordered a bunch of new hats, coffee mugs. Oh, stay tuned. That's all we're going to stay for that. New shirt.

So we do talk about those things. But to your point, I agree that those times are sweet. And we begin conversations about stuff. And the conversation today was good, which is what you were saying.

Why Many People Are Deconstructing from Bad Church Experiences

Right. So one of the things that we love to, love is not so much of a, we find it helpful to look at theological positions that are gaining traction or have had traction in the past and point out how they are not helpful and blinding and sometimes have, not sometimes, but often trap people and enslave them and then lead them to the freedom and the joy of Jesus Christ and the gospel.

And the rest of Christ. And so today we didn't want to just come in with guns blazing and blow apart. Deconstructionism or this idea of deconstructing, I should say.

Yeah.

And just show all the bad parts of it. But instead, in many ways, Justin and I do help people deconstruct some of the faith that has been built up around them.

Yeah.

But we aren't just pulling it apart, saying we aren't sure where we're going. So this is why we entitled the podcast, A Guide to Deconstructing, because what the biggest problem I'm seeing and the rest of this episode is going to be about is basically people are dismantling their boats and now they're left floating in the water for anything to come by and eat them up or drowned.

And that's what we don't want to see happen.

Yeah, bro, to deconstruct in the ways that you're describing is something that has become kind of trendy these days. And in saying that, I am not meaning to be flippant or dismissive at all. I assume that the people who are going through this, even to use their own language, who are on this journey, I assume that it is intense.

I assume it's heavy at points when you are abandoning and jettisoning and questioning things that you have, at least for some period of your life, believed sincerely and held dear that have affected your thinking and the way that you've thought about living your life and all of that.

So don't hear us in anything that we're going to say today just dismissing what people are doing or mocking it in any way or being flippant about it. We care for the individuals who are even making videos and posting them on YouTube.

And yeah, this is a serious thing. And what we want to do is make some observations about deconstructing. I want to echo what John said, because I think it really matters. We realize that this podcast, at least in part, and we realize that many of you may listen to this podcast, at least in part, because we are aiming to do some helpful deconstruction of things that you have experienced, things that you've heard been taught explicitly or implicitly in the church.

And so deconstruction is not wrong to do. To deconstruct is not inherently bad. But there is a lot that needs to be said about it. We need to be thoughtful in the way that we do it. And to John's point, we don't want to just deconstruct and tear things down and just kind of leave ourselves or other people out in the middle of nowhere just hanging in midair.

We need to be able to deconstruct and prayerfully, hopefully, pull people onto something better, which is certainly the aim of this podcast every week. And I know it's the aim of John, and it's my aim as well, even as a preacher.

And we're going to get to that more at the end of the episode. But let's start, John, by making some observations about some of these deconstruction, deconstructing videos, people who have abandoned the faith.

And in particular, I mean, Roman Catholicism is one thing. That's not really our lane. We'll kind of leave that to Rome to figure that one out and talk about that one. But let's talk about evangelicals who are leaving the evangelical faith, who are leaving Christianity, at least as it has been historically defined, if not just rejecting the notion of God altogether.

So here we go. I'll just go ahead and say this up front, and then you and I are going to unpack this. We are not saying that people do not leave the Reformed confessional faith.

They do.

We're going to get there in just a minute. But what we have observed about many of the people that are on YouTube, the famous people in particular, John, that you alluded to a minute ago, the people that have garnered a lot of attention, they are leaving some version of evangelical Christianity, but often what they are leaving is not the historic Orthodox Reformed confessional faith.

They're leaving something else, right? And that looks different in different contexts, and we may name a few of these. Any thoughts generally, dude, about that? A lot of times what people are leaving is not the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

I think a lot of stuff is getting clumped in together. Christianity is such a broad word, and so when people say, I'm leaving Christianity, I'm losing my Christian faith, and then I hear them describe what they're leaving, it's confusing at times.

What I've observed as I've listened to a lot of these videos and even interacted with some people, they have a really negative experience when it comes to their involvement with the church. I am very sympathetic to the process of deconstructing because I too went through a moment in my very early 20s where I began to wonder about everything that I had believed.

I had a really negative experience in my own life where theology didn't seem to be lining up with practice. Things I had been told were unmovable, unshakable, it must be this way, weren't lining up with my experience, weren't lining up with the Bible.

I can remember being told theological perspectives about the Bible and then looking at the Bible saying, there's no consistency here. This is not what the Bible is saying, so who's right? Is it the people that I grew up with, the theological system I found myself in, or is the Bible schizophrenic?

It seems like the Bible can't determine what it believes. A lot of my theology got put out on the table, and I didn't say this out loud, but in my own experience and in my own heart and head, I was questioning everything.

I was willing to take off the table whatever I didn't feel like needed to be on there, and I was willing to add to this theological framework what I felt was biblical. I'm not opposed to this process, especially for those who have had a bad experience when it talks about theology.

Justin Perdue. Totally. I think we're going to continue to talk about this, how a lot of people are driven to deconstruction or to deconstruct because of bad experiences that they've had in the church.

You are sympathetic, like you just said, so am I, because I've said this, I know at points on this show. I remember the very first time when you were bringing me on, when we were bringing me on Theocast, and I was becoming a host and all that stuff, and we did my introduction thing two plus years ago.

I remember talking about this. I grew up in a church environment that was not healthy at all. Mine was different than yours, and we could talk about this, but still, I too had grown up very disenchanted with Christianity as a religion and very disenchanted with the church as an institution because I had not had good experiences with respect to all of that stuff.

There was something about Jesus that I knew was legit, but everything else around him, the trappings and the really day-to-day of the Christian life in the church, it just was not compelling. If anything, it was off-putting to me, and so I am very sympathetic to people, with people, toward people, whatever.

There's a compassion flowing from me toward them because I get what it's like to have had really bad experiences, to be burned by the church in various ways. Now that we've said that, some of the ways that people have had bad experiences or some of the contexts in which, I should say, people have had bad experiences are the following.

Some people come from a very heavy-handed, legalistic, fundamentalist background. John, that would be kind of like you, where you could unpack this better than me. I definitely grew up in a moralistic environment, but it was not heavy-handed fundamentalism in the same way that you experienced, but that's a scarring thing for people.

It is. I know a lot of people from my college years and just my past where they have abandoned the faith altogether. One of my kids that was in my first youth group contacted me three or four weeks ago and just started listening to Theocast, and he said he's been away from the faith for years.

It was listening to Theocast that made him reevaluate why he left the faith in general, and it's the baby out with the bathwater. It's what we call the ex-smoker syndrome, where they had such a horrible experience that anything that remotely looks like what it was, they don't want anything to do with it.

Anything that resembles at all what scarred them and wounded them, it's like, no, I can't touch that.

Things that are good by nature and healthy and biblical and right cannot be digested because they've coupled with this experience that was wrong. You can hear this in a lot of the interactions that are there, where there was illogical, bad theology.

I'm listening to one young lady who was talking about how she was asking questions. She was basically, and I don't mean to belittle her or put her down and I won't mention her name, but as if she was the first one and the only one who was taking these questions serious about evil and why would evil exist and God is sovereign and good.

I'm like, dear child, you're not the first person to wrestle with this, and you're not only the first person to take this serious. I get when they start to question those things and really bad answers are given.

All of that is just, I don't think I can touch that.

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The fundamentalism stream, the heavy-handed legalistic stream, I think people know what we mean by that. It's understandable in some senses why people would leave that and abandon that because it is all about what you do overtly.

There's not even a whiff of, oh well, it's great. The gospel is preached and it's there somewhere, but really this is about you and your performance and your obedience. It's all these do's and don'ts, and Christianity literally is a list of rules.

You need to conform yourself to it or you should be afraid.

Christianity is what you don't do. That's what it is.

You're right. It's more of that.

It's a don't-do religion.

It's more about the prohibition than it is even the good things we should be doing.

Which is where prohibition came out of, out of fundamentalism.

Well, there that is.

There that is.

That's another podcast for another day. But it's not just fundamentalism. It's not just the legalistic heavy-handed stuff that people are leaving. I think some folks are leaving. I'm thinking like Hillsong type stuff.

They're leaving what I would call this broad evangelical hype train. We're not trying to slam big churches here at all. You can have a big church that's very healthy. Please don't misunderstand me. But it's this kind of megachurch culture.

It's the excitement. It's the hype. It's the vibe. It's energy. People had grown up. Maybe they had grown up in some backwoods Baptist church somewhere. It was small and it was legalistic or whatever.

Then I'm exposed to this super cool, super hip new thing where it's funny. It's engaging. It's entertaining. There's Jesus here, so I feel good about that. There seems to be some sincerity in terms of how we would go about living our lives.

In a lot of these contexts, I'm being given a lot of helpful wisdom on how to live life and how to approach things. It was good for me for a season. I go and I sing. It's thump and it's like a concert.

I'm excited. I'm pumped up for Christ. Then the speaker's engaging and he's probably really funny. He could probably do stand-up comedy if he wasn't a pastor, so I enjoyed this. Eventually, what happens for some people, and I'm not trying to be grossly unfair in caricature, but there are some elements of truth in what I just said in terms of this broad evangelical hype train experience.

Eventually, you look around and maybe something's happening in your life or maybe there's just a struggle that you're experiencing. You look around and some of it just falls flat and it feels hollow and empty.

You're like, yeah, I don't know. People leave that. They leave that sort of thing where a lot of it is more about the hype and the emotion. It might even be about community and being part of a movement and being swept away and swept up in that.

It might not be grounded so much in doctrine, theology, Christ for you, that kind of stuff.

Well, it's superficial. At surface level, it doesn't deal with the significant issues of life, the real problems of life. It doesn't answer the big problems of life. It's more of let's stay positive and we'll leave the negative over here because negative isn't what builds.

We can't say every church is impugned in this way, but Justin, I told you this before we recorded that most people are deconstructing away from modern American evangelicalism.

Correct.

Which is what we're describing right now, various aspects of it.

That's right. That's exactly what you're describing. When I hear people think about their experience, and you can look at these people who, Gunger, you look at some of the theological background of what they have.

They're deep thinkers. They can write things that are very rich, but they're built upon a foundation that is very weak. This is the second thing of the observation that we're going to make is that this generation, our generation, generation that seems to be on YouTube and putting all this stuff out on social media are so ignorant, and I don't mean this derogatorily at all, of church history.

As if they are the first ones to discover the problem with the Bible. It's like no one else before us. Everybody's lived in an echo chamber. Everybody's just been patting each other on the back.

Everybody just kind of ate the thing up hook, line, and sinker and never asked a question.

Right.

And we're the first ones to stop and say, wait a minute, there's a problem here. As if the rebellion has never happened before or a .k .a. the Reformation has never happened before. And we are dealing with the first generation who wants to take the Bible serious or I would even just say the world serious.

And this to me is where I want to say, hey, look, let us guide you a little bit so you don't make the same mistakes that hundreds of thousands of people made before you. And because we're ignoring history, we're about to repeat it and do a lot of damage that doesn't need to be done because, you know what?

There's a way to do this and this is not the way.

Church History, Reformation, and the Need for Confessional Guidance

So the final sort of stream of this kind of bad experiences in evangelicalism portion of this podcast that I want to touch on. We've already talked about fundamentalism, kind of legalism. We've talked about broad Eva, like the hype train.

The other sort of prong of this that we see some people deconstructing and right now I'm even thinking like Josh Harris. And again, not trying to just name drop here, but is the Calvinistic evangelical stream.

And a few thoughts on this. We talk about this stuff a lot. I don't want to spend a ton of time here because there's one other category of the deconstructor that we want to talk about before we pivot and really get toward the encouraging piece of this.

So when it comes to Calvinistic evangelical folks that are leaving that, I think a lot of times there's a couple of things at least underneath this. There can still be, I don't know, a tinge of fundamentalism with some of those folks for sure and all that can be acknowledged.

But there definitely in the Calvinistic evangelical world is a pietistic perspective that we talk about regularly where, yeah, we talk a lot about good things and right things biblically. We preach a lot of sound doctrine when it comes to Christ and the gospel.

But at the end of the day, it still does circle back in on you and point back in on you where your affections, your disciplines, those kinds of things really do carry the day it seems. And there is a lot of, I think, anxiety and stress and pressure that is produced by that stuff and people are exhausted.

And they're just kind of weary of the hamster wheel and are kind of weary of being told that they're going to just prove themselves to be a non-believer if they don't do well enough and people leave them.

Then I do think in that world there can also be some, I think, well-intentioned but sort of reductionistic and unhelpful talk about the sovereignty of God when it comes to pain. I think a lot of times the sovereignty of God is sort of the cop-out answer for anything hard and we just think, oh well, you know, God's sovereign and that needs to just solve it.

And I don't think that's the best way to talk about it because what I think is lost in that conversation is the fact that there is so much complexity to how God works in terms of agency and means and all that stuff.

That's often flattened and reduced. I think that oftentimes it's overstated, like God is just sort of pushing pieces around on a chessboard and it's like, yeah, God did that to you and we know that's painful but he means it for good.

And that's just not always the best way to talk because God is quite clear that He does not delight in any way in our suffering. He does not take pleasure in it. In fact, what He delights in is saving us and He is good and benevolent toward us.

He never tempts us. And so we need to be really thoughtful about how we talk about these things and I think that is sometimes lost and people are wounded by that and it doesn't help them process the world in which they live and the pain they experience and the pain they see others going through and just the sin and the wreckage that they see all around them.

Yeah, when you listen to the people describe God and you'll hear things like this is not my God, this is not the God that I would believe in, this is not the God that I accept. And what is sad is that because we don't have the right understanding of who God is, we don't have the right understanding of God's perspective of us, we create within us the own image of God or we create an image of God, which is breaking a commandment.

But we begin to say, well, this is the God that I believe should be, this is what a loving God is. And ultimately you become the arbiter of truth. You determine the ground level.

Of what is acceptable. That's true of anybody who's deconstructing.

Yeah.

Generally.

Right.

So I'm okay with deconstructing. When you're thinking to yourself, man, I think what I have been built up around me is on shaky ground, and I need to maybe remove it and rebuild back upon something that is a foundation.

And healthy deconstructing, you're doing that corporately, not by yourself.

Right.

I have unfortunately seen so many, even good evangelicals, deconstruct to the point where they have no solid foundation of the holiness of God and the distinction between the law and the gospel. Even those who would promote law gospel distinct can deconstruct so far that now they're even, I mean, as Hebrew says, they become enslaved into sin.

Fighter Mentality, the Cravings of the Flesh, and the Need for the Church

Yeah.

One of the things that I have warned against for years, Justin, and we talk about this all the time when I say things like, or we say things like, don't be known for what you're against.

Or what you're for. Can I just quickly insert this? So I think we're pivoting now to, all right, we're acknowledging this in the room because there are people who do leave the Reformed confessional faith.

And so now what we're talking about is what we would say, like, all right, guys, you've talked about how people leave evangelicalism, but what about how people, when people leave the confessional faith, what then, John, what then, Justin, what would you guys say?

And a big portion of our answer is what you're talking about right now. There can be amongst confessional types, this kind of fighter posture where we're always defining ourselves by what we're against.

And I want you to talk about that for a second and then I may riff on what you say.

Yeah, and then where I want to conclude is even encircling back to the whole evangelical, because I know people will say, well, if you're no longer claiming to be a Christian, then you never were a Christian.

And I'm not so quick to give that answer and there's a reason for that because of the confession that I hold, which is 5 .5. We'll get into that in a moment. But one of the dangers, and we fight this here at Theocast quite often in the Facebook group.

I had to post a video in there recently. In many ways, the joke is, and we're secretly coming up with a shirt on this, but it's kind of like, listen, rest in Christ and calm down. Trust Christ.

Trust Christ and calm down.

That's right. And what happens is that there's a lot of people in my church who I have this conversation with and if they hear me say patience one more time, I'm pretty sure they're going to punch me.

But it's true in that when you're dealing with theological transition, when you're shifting someone's complete worldview and you're trying to convince them that Narnia is an actual place as an illustration,.

It's not.

But that's what you feel. You feel like you're trying to just shift to someone's complete view of the world. You get really excited and many times agitated and your entire theological existence is fight mode.

You are just going to defend and you're going to prove. And here's the other thing that happens, and this is where I was, Justin, and I had to learn to let this go because it was destroying me. It was destroying my marriage.

And I've had to counsel a lot of my own congregants and listeners through this in that I was trying to deal with my pain of my past and how people hurt me theologically. And I was taking all of that energy and I was putting it into my defense mechanisms on the internet and with people that I knew.

And I thought as if, oh, I need to protect the world from these tyrants who are teaching this really bad theology. And all I was doing was just creating more anger in me and I was pushing people away from me.

And it wasn't until I realized the damage I had caused to my own soul, I was just always angry. All the time I was angry. And I had no patience for anyone. And it was a very, very shaky time in my relationship with my family and my wife where I had to realize that I actually wasn't living the very gospel I was preaching.

I was an angry, upset, bitter person and I needed to repent of it.

A few thoughts on this, because I think this is a big observation to make. And this could be true of people in other streams too. But in particular, when I've observed people even lately leave the confessional faith, it becomes very clear that one of the common threads at least is this fighter mentality.

And by that I mean it's not a good thing if you are always sustained in the faith by having to be against something. If it's always a polemical situation, it's almost like my faith is fueled by controversy and argumentation.

I've got to be able to fight and that's almost how I know that my heart is beating spiritually. It's the only time I feel alive is when I'm trying to win an argument. And when I'm trying to prove that other people are wrong.

Or maybe I just have this really contrarian bent in me and I can't stand to be the person that's kind of in the mainstream of my context. I always have to be the guy over here driving the stake in the ground, sort of going it rogue, going alone.

And I think we all need to assess ourselves because there can be a little bit of that in all of us, right? And I think that some people who end up in the confessional faith are doing that from a purely reactionary perspective where they're reacting against something that harmed them.

They're reacting against something that they saw some holes in. And this confessional thing sounds better and it seems to provide some light, some freedom, whatever, some rest. And it's like, okay, this is good.