In recent weeks, there’s been considerable conversation about the reasons why people drop out of church or walk away from their Christian convictions.
Let’s consider three theories often thrown around.
Three Grand Theories
Some say deconstruction comes down to the desire to engage in illicit sexual activity. The people who walk away really just want to commit adultery, or entertain a divorce, or engage in same-sex relationships, or have premarital sex, or no longer feel bad about pornography. Holding to a Christian sexual ethic in a world where identity is defined by your desires and your pursuit of personal pleasure seems not only outdated but repressive. Revisionist views of sexuality and marriage ease that pressure. But soon, the rest of Christianity begins to collapse, like a house when a load-bearing wall is removed, until there’s a rejection of orthodox Christian teaching all across the board. People say they have a problem with the church, but what’s really behind their questioning is lust!
Others say deconstruction is a result of so many abuse scandals in the church and the way they’ve been handled or mishandled in recent decades. The church’s minimization of grave evil has led people to question the church’s moral authority and to reexamine other important doctrines. Perhaps the church is toxic through and through. Consider the church’s treatment of women throughout history, or the church’s complicity with large-scale injustice over the centuries, or the authoritarianism that surely must be inherent in pastors and leaders occupying a hierarchical structure. You can’t blame anyone for leaving the church because of the terrible injustice they or others have received at the hands of bad leaders!
Still others assume deconstruction is directly tied to white evangelicalism’s embrace of right-wing politics. The church is too married to the Republican Party, we’re told, and this conflation of political platforms with the faith once for all delivered to the saints has led to confusion, and in some cases, outright political advocacy in Jesus’s name. We must disentangle Christianity from politics, we’re told, or we’ll lose more and more people because of hypocrisy and compromise. The real reason so many are leaving is because of all the right-wingers who want to use the church as a tool for political power!
Complicating the Grand Theories
When I see variations of these themes circulating, I find the people who voice them share one quality: confidence. They think the reason they offer for church decline and faith deconstruction is so obvious that you’d have to be stupid, compromised, or complicit not to see it.
But I don’t think any of these explanations works as a grand theory for why people leave the church or walk away from the faith. There may be a measure of truth in all these accounts, but people are way more complicated—gloriously so.
For example, when someone no longer abides by Christianity’s sexual ethic, it’s often the case that their decision came after a season of broader disillusionment or disappointment with Christian teaching; it wasn’t the cause. Sexual sin followed the loss of faith; it wasn’t the driver.
Or take the “deconstruction because of abuse scandals” grand theory. Last year, I angered some readers online when I suggested, according to research on dechurching, that mishandling of abuse isn’t the most prominent factor and that it’s possible some who’ve drifted from the church for unrelated reasons may be more inclined to use abuse scandals as a way of justifying their deconstruction. My point wasn’t to minimize the real harms done by church leaders but to call out people who’ve not experienced those harms for the way they trumpet them as the cause of their own choices.
Or look at the surveys on political activism. Studies from Lifeway Research on students who left the church in their college years showed the church’s political views were lower on the list than one might expect, with more prosaic reasons near the top (not connecting well, moving to another place, etc.). Pointing to this research doesn’t mean I think we should conflate Christianity with right-wing politics. Neither does it preclude situations where political shifts can lead to questioning key Christian doctrines. I just want to complicate the grand theory a bit, especially when the political explanation often ignores the decline of churches associated with left-wing or progressive causes, which have been proven to be even more politically oriented than their right-wing counterparts.
Don’t Flatten Your Neighbor
I don’t deny anecdotal evidence that aligns with each of the reasons I’ve listed above. You can find a measure of truth in these theories. You can find stories that align well with your preferred narrative.
But I want to make sure we don’t flatten our neighbors who’ve deconstructed or who’ve left the church. Ian Harber’s forthcoming book prefers to speak of catalysts rather than causes, and he rightly emphasizes the emotional and experiential side of deconstruction rather than relying on intellectual questions. A monocausal explanation or grand theory will hinder our ability to attend carefully to the person God puts in our path. A grand theory will cause you to retrofit their story and shove their experience into a predesigned category. Even worse, you won’t have ears to hear the heartache of people whose experience doesn’t fit any of the above.
Let me tell you about a middle-aged woman who grew up in church, faithfully read her Bible, and devoted years of earnest prayer for a wayward child. There’s no happy ending after all that prayer. She loses her teenage son to suicide. The next year, her husband is diagnosed with terminal cancer and dies within months. Six months later, her church splits over leadership failures related to a volunteer with a history of sex abuse, and due to a vocal minority who want the church to be more outspoken on political matters.
Within a three-year span, this woman’s world has been rocked to the point she questions everything she’s believed. She no longer trusts the power of prayer. She doesn’t see the point in going to church when all her congregation could offer were platitudes. Her pastor’s moral authority has taken a beating. She feels as if God has not heard her, only hurt her. Online, she seeks a salve for her sadness by amplifying stories of church abuse, and as she connects with similarly wounded people, her political views shift. A couple years later, she begins a relationship with an unbeliever, and she moves in with him. She’s not sure she identifies as a Christian anymore.
Depending on your perspective or your commitment to one of the three grand theories I offered above, you could reduce this woman’s story to the real reason she walked away. She’s living with her boyfriend, so she clearly wanted to be freed from Christian restrictions about sex! Or She’s been burned by the church’s complicity in injustice! Or Her church was beholden to right-wing politics!
Jumping to these conclusions would flatten this woman. None of them takes into account the real and powerful persistence of grief and suffering as a result of significant loss or her feeling of being abandoned by God after earnestly seeking to live according to his ways.
What’s worse, rushing to the grand theory leaves her in a state worse than she was in before. The main word she needs to hear right now is REPENT! Because we all know she’s walked away because she just wants to sin. Or Good for her on leaving the church when the church has been so rotten! Or Finally, she’s able to see the political views of her church were all wrongheaded; aren’t those right-wingers awful?! None of these reactions gets to the root of her pain, the source of her struggle, the gospel’s comfort and challenge in response to her ongoing suffering and sin. All leave her bereft of any lasting help.
Beware the Grand Theory
We won’t prescribe the right medicine or adequately deal with real sin and real suffering if in conversations about dechurching and deconstruction, we fall back on grand theories that flatten out the real experiences of real people. Monocausal explanations don’t open our ears; they harden our hearts. They speak more to our need for reassurance of our moral righteousness, or our righteous cause, or our righteous stance than they do to the struggling person’s need for a listening ear during seasons of doubt and disillusionment, sin and suffering.
Everyone wants you to buy into their simplistic grand theory these days. Don’t.
Love your neighbor and listen.
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