Your Deconstruction Is Too Small

There is much ado about faith deconstruction these days. I’ve personally perused around eight books published in the last five years that name the phenomenon directly, and there are dozens more on the general topic—which range in views from cheerleading deconstruction to cursing it as the work of Satan himself—not to mention articles and social media accounts dedicated to offering guidance to those going through it. There’s even a Faith Deconstruction for Dummies book. If the existence of a For Dummies book isn’t enough evidence that a once niche conversation has gone mainstream, I don’t know what is.

What stands out to me about this discourse is how strangely detached much of it is from any discussion of actual philosophical deconstruction. Not that I think everyone needs to read Jacques Derrida, or that I don’t believe that words drift away from their original meaning, as a matter of course in natural language. It’s not bad in itself that deconstruction has taken on the definition of “the dismantling and reexamination of ideas," which is pithy enough to be useful to everyday people. It makes much more sense on the first pass than, say, “positing an idea’s bond with its own negative to defer meaning endlessly in a critique of the metaphysics of presence.”

But the reason I find it strange that most writers and thought leaders out there aren’t in conversation with the original philosophical sense of deconstruction is that it’s a missed opportunity for a richer and more hopeful understanding of what’s going on. The way I see it, those on the optimistic side of faith deconstruction aren’t taking it far enough. By stopping short, we might be setting people up for more problems down the road. And the discourse itself has mapped onto a polarized conservative/progressive binary that might have been avoided if philosophical deconstruction had been more central to the conversation.

I want those deconstructing their faith to keep going. Never stop deconstructing. I want us to ask, in the words of John Caputo’s wonderful book title, “what would Jesus deconstruct?” And I want us to deconstruct that conservative/progressive binary, not because I’m pushing some limp moderate position between the two, but because the binary itself stands in the way of honest inquiry and an authentic expression of belief, religious or not.

Anatomy of a Faith Crisis

Regardless of which understanding of deconstruction we’re using, there’s clearly a real phenomenon that people are describing. In a general sense, what we’re talking about is a faith crisis, a period of questioning and uncertainty about what we once believed. Faith crises can happen for a number of reasons. A parent can lose a child, shaking their faith in a loving God. Someone’s spiritual role model can have a calamitous fall from grace, prompting them to question what they learned from that person. The weight of all the evil in the world can become too much for someone to square with the idea of a just God, which might seem more and more like wishful thinking. Someone’s prayer life can dry up in a “dark night of the soul,” and they have no one to guide them through it, and they conclude that they’ve simply lost the capacity to believe. In the modern, secular world we live in, all of these can threaten a believer's faith, regardless of what beliefs they used to hold. Whether we like it or not, belief is simply fragile in this age.

But often, when people describe faith deconstruction, it’s a bit more specific. It tends to be a response to the way those original beliefs themselves were formed in the person, and it often follows an arc that looks something like this.

Someone grows up in a Christian tradition characterized by a high degree of certainty about faith and the world. The term “fundamentalist” could be appropriate, or maybe the certainty is a bit more measured than what that implies. In that environment, the Bible may be described as “infallible” or “inerrant.” Or maybe they’re Catholic, and the teachings of the church and the Pope are held in similarly high regard. This person might have clear boundary markers separating those inside and those outside of God’s saving grace. It’s likely that the spiritual authorities in this person's life describe the world as a dark, fallen place—maybe hopelessly so—and there’s a sharp contrast between God’s teachings and humanity's. Because of this, when this person discovers incompatibility or even opposition between what Christian teaching is and what the world says, the choice is easy. Finally, and maybe most crucially, there isn’t a whole lot of patience for those who stray outside the lines of correct belief. Truth is often presented as quite simple. It’s what’s clearly written in the Bible. Or it’s what the church clearly teaches. If the believer fails to grasp it, for some reason, they might worry that they’re intellectually deficient or, even worse, acting out of some deeper urge to rebel against God. For good measure, we might also assume that this person was raised in an environment where their political allegiances were tightly woven into their spiritual beliefs. Hardly anyone in their faith community was from an opposing political ideology. Or at least that they knew of.

This person we’re imagining might have even had a wonderful, joyful experience of faith on these terms. While we’re focusing here on those who experience faith crises, we shouldn’t forget the countless others who choose to remain in these communities, and for good reason. These communities can offer genuine belonging, purpose and coherence. Many people remain in them not because they are incapable of questioning but because the tradition continues to make sense of their lives. In a setting like this, life’s many facets often come together in a beautiful, seamless garment, a Möbius strip of certainty where every question worth asking has an answer and that answer is always the same.

But for others whose faith was formed in this kind of context, something starts to happen. The seamless garment turns out to be not so seamless. A seam emerges, and it exposes a loose thread.

Maybe this person has a relationship crisis that sends them to therapy, and in that therapy, they begin to uncover a culture of fear in their family of origin that kept them from questioning their beliefs.

Or it could be that a beloved friend or family member comes out as gay, and the more they learn of his story, the less their previous ideas about queer people make sense.

Or maybe (if they were raised politically conservative) they see a politician spewing shameless racism and sexism to the cheers of people in the audience holding up Christian slogans. Or (if they were raised politically liberal) they see another politician blithely justifying a genocide, while progressive Christians online trip over themselves with obsequious explanations of what the politician really meant. Then they find themselves asking, how is it, again, that my faith and politics are supposed to fit together so perfectly?

They start to tug on this loose thread, despite everything inside them telling them they shouldn’t. And after enough pulling on this thread, just as the Weezer song said would happen, their sweater is destroyed. Watch them unravel; they’ll soon be naked. Lying on the floor (lying on the floor), they’ve come undone.

This can be a highly distressing experience. Cognitive dissonance alone is destabilizing, and a complicated tangle of emotions and identities can get caught up in the already complicated task of figuring out what one believes. It can trigger shame, as the person realizes their former beliefs led to attitudes or behaviors they aren’t proud of in retrospect. But there’s also a steep social cost that comes with it. The person in crisis can harbor a fair amount of resentment toward those who helped shape their faith, feeling as though they were previously denied permission to think freely. It also causes pain for those around them. Depending on how far the person’s beliefs have strayed from where they were, parents and faith leaders can feel as though they themselves have been rejected, not just their beliefs. They can feel like a failure, like they should have presented things in a more open-handed way, or maybe they think they should’ve doubled down on teaching them correct beliefs. If loved ones believe that the person’s new belief system—or their lack of one—puts their salvation in jeopardy, that’s a loss that’s hard to put into words. I don’t care if I disagree with someone’s rigid beliefs about salvation and hell. If you believe that someone you love is going to experience eternal damnation after death, and that you won’t get to live with them in eternity like you once thought you were, that is hard.

It’s no wonder that the market seems flooded with books on how to get through faith deconstruction. We want people to feel less lonely and hopeless as they lose a faith that was once intimately theirs, a faith that no one believed for them and that no one else can lose for them. To lose faith is to grieve, pure and simple, and often the best we can do for someone in mourning is to simply be there with them, even if there isn’t anything we can do to take away their pain. As much as I lament what I see as negative polarization between the pro- or anti-deconstruction camps, I think there’s a shared consensus on this much, at least. Faith deconstruction is hard, and we all want to make it less so.

Enter Deconstruction

Now about that word: deconstruction. It’s curious to me that the sort of faith crisis I’ve just described isn’t new, yet the term “faith deconstruction” is. When some of my peers and I went through similar faith crises twenty years ago, I never heard anyone describe it that way. I’ll share some of my thoughts on why the current moment is different in a later piece, but for now, let’s talk about what philosophical deconstruction is in the tradition of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).

There’s a long tradition in Western thought of hierarchical binaries, going all the way back to Plato, that form the building blocks of our systems of thought. Good/evil is a binary, and obviously good is the superior half of that binary. Same with love/hate, peace/war, strong/weak, etc. It’s hard to imagine a complex system of thought without basic agreement on these binaries as a foundation. Sometimes these binaries are argued for overtly, as when Plato treated speech/writing as a binary and claimed that speech is superior and closer to the truth, and that we should understand writing as a secondary imitation.^[1] Most of the time, though, these binaries are presumed instead of argued for. Some of those binaries that Western thought presupposes are: unity over difference, solidity over fluidity, presence over absence and purity over impurity. In every one of these binaries, one half of them is elevated above the other as the pure original, and the other half is an unwelcome outsider, threatening to spoil it. Difference, fluidity, absence and impurity are the wolves lurking at the door of unity, solidity, presence and purity.

Where deconstruction comes in is the way it invites us to squint and look closely at the boundaries between insider and outsider spaces, and see that they’re actually unstable, or at the very least, porous. The differences between them aren’t as neat and tidy as we tend to assume. Not all binaries are inherently bad, let’s be clear. Few would disagree with the arrangement of peace as the superior and desirable half of the peace/war binary. However, deconstruction can help us see that, often, the binary nature of those concepts can complicate and undermine the well-intended efforts for peace of some people—or bolster the malicious efforts of others.

Let’s look at gender as an example of this kind of binary. It’s fairly uncontroversial to say that one of the West’s most ingrained hierarchies is the privileging of man over woman. In the most archetypal framing, man came first; woman is a derivation. Man is rational, woman is emotional. Man gives, woman receives. And so on. But what even is the concept of “man” without an idea of “woman” to set it against? Just as we can’t describe “dry” without an understanding of “wet,” the definition of man is tangled up inextricably with the definition of woman. (Consider, for example, how you would explain to an alien the male sex organ without at some point having to talk about the female sex organ.) This is true even in contexts and traditions where gender is treated as a strict, rigid binary, such as under the Taliban or, say, in my own experience of male fragility as a middle schooler in 1990s Texas. (“Aw, you don’t like Korn? What do you like, those boy bands my sister listens to?”). In those settings, femininity is one of those outsider ideas that threatens to invade and spoil the insider space of masculinity. And the more the boundary between men and women is policed, the more insecure the concept of masculinity comes across. The qualities of one gender do not make sense unless they’re understood in the context of the other.

Now, the proper corrective to recognizing this hierarchical binary isn’t a simple inversion. It wouldn’t make any sense to swap them and posit that woman is actually the primary, pure idea, and man is the derivative impurity. The recurring feminist bookstore bit in the sketch series Portlandia is a great example of how simply reversing the binary, rather than deconstructing it, doesn’t actually free you from it. Women & Women First’s Candace and Toni are inadvertently captive to the masculinity they see lurking around every corner, such as when they discourage pointing because it suggests a phallus.

Neither gender exists without the other. They are co-originary and mutually defining. The better response than inverting the hierarchy, then, is to recognize that both concepts are in constant flux and in play with one another. There is no “essence” of maleness or femaleness that can stand independently on its own as a static reality, because each idea is shaped by the other.^[2] And if we keep going down this road, following deconstruction to its natural consequences, we’ll go on to see that gender itself doesn’t stand at a safe distance from other areas of thought, neatly separated by other boundaries. Maleness and femaleness also hover in relation to other ideas in an endless web of meaning, shaped by—and shaping—religion, language, biology, geography and on and on.

The upshot of deconstruction is that systems of knowledge become unstable and unfixed because the binaries that make up their very building blocks are shown to be pliable and enmeshed. The simple, ordered world we thought we lived in turns out to be complex, evolving and never as sure as we once thought.

Notice, though, that this does not mean that every system of knowledge comes crashing down. If Derrida meant this, he would’ve used the word “destruction” or “destroy.” Instead, he uses “deconstruction” to mean something like the opposite of “construe;” instead of putting meaning together, you’re opening meaning back up. This is the part of deconstruction that, unfortunately, doesn’t make it into popular understanding. Systems of ideas are opened up, like the windows of an old house letting in much-needed circulation. There is a positive side to deconstruction in that it frees ideas up to be more malleable and adaptive to the world.

I would argue that Lil Nas X’s audacious 2018 rap-country crossover hit “Old Town Road” is a work of deconstruction. It plays with and loosens up the boundaries around country music, not by launching an attack from the outside but by teasing out its own qualities from the inside. Country music has long romanticized 19th-century cowboys, as we know, almost like a guiding mythology. But this guiding mythology was never exclusively White. Black and Latino cowboys made up a substantial part of that workforce. Lil Nas X, like the other non-White artists embracing the genre in his wake, is highlighting a reality that’s been hidden inside of country music all along, fertilizing and cultivating it to transform the genre from the inside out. What’s more, it reminds us that the walls that separate country and hip-hop are thinner than we might have thought. Cowboy culture is itself a fusion of contributions from Anglo settlers and the Southwest’s original charros with their guitars and broad-brimmed hats. And hip-hop is the ultimate boundary-breaker, splicing and sampling clips from every music genre imaginable to create music that feels like something greater than the sum of its parts.

Country music traditionalists might see only the negative, destructive side that doesn’t respect familiar definitions. That side is certainly there, to be sure. As a gay Black man, Lil Nas X himself is a potent symbol that stands in dramatic contrast to country music’s notions of manliness and Whiteness, and “Old Town Road’s” hip-hop beat and African American Vernacular English are a sharp turn away from the sounds people tend to expect from Nashville. But in a real sense, Lil Nas X opened country music back up to its own possibilities, which had been pent up by rigid definitions up until that point. Years later, not only are Black artists seeing unprecedented success in the country genre, but country music itself has reached a popularity it hasn’t enjoyed in decades. Despite all the hate directed at Lil Nas X for supposedly destroying country music, it looks like he might have actually helped revive it. By deconstructing it.

People who write in the tradition of Derrida’s deconstruction don’t tend to follow up with the topic of reconstruction because, if you’ve been following along, that would be a misunderstanding of deconstruction. A category mistake. We’re not talking about a destroyed South that needs rebuilding after the Civil War. Deconstruction exposes instabilities and suppressed possibilities that were always there, and we can’t go back to our previous naïveté having learned what we’ve learned any more than we can willfully believe that the emperor really is wearing invisible clothes.

And who would want to, anyway? When you’ve opened up the windows of an old house on a fresh spring day, why would you rush to shut them?

Deconstructing Christian Nationalism: A Solid Move

I mentioned earlier that someone might have noticed that their seamless garment of belief had a loose thread when they saw Christians cheering on a politician who spews shameless racism and sexism. It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s election disrupted a lot of people’s faith in evangelical Christianity.^[3] I remember the presidency of George W. Bush, when many cited Bush’s born-again faith as a motivating factor in their support of him. You might disagree with his decision to invade Iraq or his tax policies that favored the wealthy, but it was hard to deny that his faith was genuine. And it really did seem like he believed he was acting for the good of all, even with his more controversial policies.

Trump couldn’t be a starker contrast. He never claimed to be “a uniter, not a divider” as Bush did, and the language of “compassionate conservatism” would sound awkward coming from him. But even more awkward is hearing him pretend that he’s a sincere Christian, like when he struggled to answer whether he had ever asked God for forgiveness^[4] or when he read from “Two Corinthians.”^[5] (I know it’s correct in the King’s English, but I doubt that defense is convincing anyone.) But most Trump supporters don’t seem too bothered by that.^[6] His belligerence toward his political foes is kind of the point. When Christians have defended him on theological grounds, it has tended to take the form of assertions such as “God uses imperfect people to do his will.”^[7]

For those who grew up in the days of apologists for the Christian Right like James Dobson and Chuck Colson, this was jarring to see play out. For a lot of us, it seemed in hindsight like the defenders of Bush’s policies were probably never all that concerned with his personal piety. The real animating force behind their support of the Republican Party seemed to be good old-fashioned partisan tribalism: these guys fight for our people, those guys fight for the enemy, and what matters is whether our guys can punch the enemy harder than they can punch us.

I have a lot of thoughts about whether those views are justified. (I don’t share that perspective, but I actually have more sympathy for it than most non-Trump supporters seem to.) But it’s a bit beside the point. What matters is that the supporting structure connecting the way of Jesus to the Republican Party platform strained to the point of breaking for many people. It wasn’t just that it was hard to connect something like US military policy with a savior who rejected violence at every turn. It was that no one even seemed to be trying to connect it for us anymore.

Much of the faith deconstruction discourse has been framed around Christian nationalism and not just the contradictions of the Christian Right. I think that’s a good move. It’s not so much about whether Democratic or Republican policies are more aligned with Christian teaching. It’s about how the interests of the United States seem unquestioned by so many people who profess Christianity, and how our identities as Christians don’t carry more weight than our national identities. For example, Christians who championed the Iraq War—just like I did when I was a freshman in college—didn’t seem to be that concerned for the danger it posed to Iraq’s million or so Christians, many of whom represented some of the most ancient traditions in Christianity. That’s because we thought of ourselves firstly as Americans, not as Christians who shared a deeper communion with each other that predated our modern nationalities by centuries. The United States’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq and the ensuing instability resulted in an Iraqi Christian population that is less than a tenth of what it was before.^[8]

These contradictions have only sharpened in the age of Trump. Whereas George W. Bush showed credible compassion toward Latin American immigrants (the vast majority of whom are Christians,^[9] in case we need reminding), even losing considerable political capital within his own party with his second-term push for clemency toward the undocumented,^[10] Trump couldn’t be a more dramatic contrast. He launched his first presidential campaign with promises to build a border wall and to send undocumented immigrants back over the other side of it. And for good measure, he made sure to characterize those millions of people in question as disproportionately made up of violent drug dealers and rapists who the Mexican government was only too eager to offload onto its northern neighbors.^[11] A decade later, his second term continues to make good on many of his promises as ICE detains and deports en masse and border wall construction plows through some of America’s most precious natural landscapes.^[12] And again, no one even seems that bothered to try to connect those things to the Christian values that used to animate so much of conservative Christian discourse.

My observations here aren’t all that original. I want to draw attention, however, to the way many of these criticisms of Christian nationalism are actually forms of deconstruction, even if they aren’t spelled out as such. Christian nationalism depends on an us/them, insider/outsider hierarchy that becomes unstable once we examine what it excludes, suppresses or hides. It presumes aligned, coterminous American and Christian identities: what’s good for the United States is good for Christians. But it’s easy to see which of those identities is the dominant one when we consider the outcomes of Christian nationalism. The us/them boundary is no longer merely figurative. It’s a literal, grotesque monument to itself that cuts a scar across Creation and separates US-born Christian children from their deported Christian parents.^[13] The us/them boundary excludes from the self-conception of US Christians the communities and ancient traditions of Iraqi Christians who once numbered over a million but whose presence is now diminished almost beyond recognition—Christians who were baptized into the universal Body of Christ and mystically connected to Christians around the globe through Communion.

The Christian identity that is suppressed under American identity in Christian nationalism is a subtle but persistent destabilizing force—quiet, like a sheep before the shearer, yet still capable of shaking an empire at its foundations. The very Gospel of Jesus Christ is what ultimately deconstructs Christian nationalism. And if we surrender that golden calf to the deconstructive power of the Gospel, do we have the courage to allow it to continue its work and deconstruct our other golden calves as well?

Don’t Stop Deconstructing Just Because You Found New Politics

If we’ve been employing deconstruction to get us this far, it would be theological malpractice to suddenly ease off the gas once our politics have settled around a new political ideology. But unfortunately, this is what many critics of Christian nationalism seem to do. Let me begin by saying that I myself have been guilty of this. My own political transformations as a young adult were dramatic and admittedly perplexing. I went from being a conservative supporter of the Iraq War as a college freshman to a pacifist who abstained from voting in the 2004 election. By the time the 2008 election rolled around, I had so thoroughly adopted liberalism that I was doorknocking as a precinct captain for Barack Obama’s campaign. To be honest, I cringe when I look back at my Obama boosterism and the inherent contradictions in my thinking during that time. I employed the full prophetic force of the Gospel against Republicans yet treated Democrats with kid gloves.

I wasn’t the only one. Brian McLaren is a prominent voice in progressive Christianity and has become an increasingly vocal critic of Christian nationalism over the past twenty years. On the eve of the 2020 presidential election, he wrote a four- part letter to White, pro-life voters, urging them to consider voting for Joe Biden.^[14] In it, he condemns Donald Trump in the harshest possible terms, stopping just shy of assigning Trump voters responsibility for his racism, narcissism and a litany of other toxic behaviors. He contrasts Trump with Obama and with Biden, whom he describes as “a dedicated church-going Christian, […] a kind and empathetic man who is devoted to the honest family values I’ve sought to live by for my whole life.” McLaren remains proud of his past efforts to promote Obama’s elections, beginning with an essay he wrote on the reconciliatory promise of the 2008 Obama campaign.^[15]

To be fair, McLaren has made efforts to establish a critical distance from the Democratic Party establishment. He publicly opposed Obama’s escalation of hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009,^[16] and in 2011 he argued that progressive Christianity is not “simply functioning as the religious chaplains of the Democratic Party (as their counterparts have often been for the Republican Party).”^[17]

Yet the difference in register when talking about the two parties is hard to miss. His 2009 letter to Obama begins with the statement, “I am a loyal supporter of your presidency.” In his 2020 letter, he lists a number of offenses that a vote for Trump is also a vote for. Some of these things include deportation and family separation, support for fossil-fuel extraction, adding to the national debt with military spending and military intervention, reducing public protections from corporate misconduct, assisting Israel in the displacement of Palestinians and threatening international alliances.

Obama did all of these things.^{[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]} You could argue that some of them are not as bad as what Trump did, and there are many criticisms of Trump that have no parallel in Obama.^[26] But there are also areas where Obama’s record is arguably worse.^[27]

It’s not really the point, though. What matters is that the whole hermeneutic of suspicion toward Christian collusion with the spheres of power seems to disappear the moment that power serves progressive interests. And that Christian nationalism that coopts Christian identity to serve the interests of the United States? Even that comes creeping back in. Some call the progressive version of Christian nationalism “American civil religion,” but I’m less interested in the differences between them than in how they both sacralize the American project and subordinate Christian principles to its priorities. McLaren argues that Trump leaves US democracy vulnerable to interference from foreign governments and undermines NATO, but he doesn’t feel the need to argue why Christians should even be invested in these things at all. The history of modern Latin America could be told as a rap sheet of the United States’ efforts to interfere in other countries’ democracies whenever they stood in the way of US interests. NATO, an alliance formed as an effort to contain the Soviet Union, has outlived its founding purpose by over thirty years, yet few seem to question why it continues to exist at all, to say nothing about what it could possibly mean for those who profess Jesus Christ as their Lord.

Brian McLaren is just one example, and Barack Obama is just one politician frequently championed by progressive Christians.

There’s John Lewis, the Democratic congressman from Georgia from 1987–2020 who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. and suffered a fractured skull from police brutality on Bloody Sunday. Sojourners has hailed him as a hero of progressive Christianity for his “immutable principle” of non-violence.^[28] His voting record during his thirty-three years in office is strikingly free of any votes for war that might otherwise stain a legacy like his. However, he accepted multiple campaign contributions from the arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin.^[29] And while he himself refused to vote in favor of war efforts, he held considerable power in his position as a senior member of the Democratic whip operation yet declined to organize others to do the same. In 2007, even though he voted against Nancy Pelosi’s $124 billion war bill, he stopped short of whipping other votes to join him. The measure passed narrowly.

Finally, Jimmy Carter is something of a patron saint of politically progressive Christianity, and his bona fides hardly need listing. He spent his post-office years tirelessly advocating for human rights through the Carter Center, and he wore his Baptist faith on his sleeve while doing it. Yet you wouldn’t know about the devastation his policies wrought on East Timor from reading the hagiographic adulations of him in Sojourners. The United States had supported Indonesia’s military dictatorship in the 1960s as it massacred dissenters in numbers that are mind-numbing. Estimates range from 500,000 to 1 million dead in a span of six months. That regime was still in power during Carter’s presidency, and he continued to supply it with arms as they carried out a genocide of the Timorese people. Carter later claimed he wasn’t properly informed of the violence,^[30] yet memos show that he initially expressed hesitation to give aid to Indonesia out of concern for human rights violations in Timor but ultimately authorized the decision to send them A4 bombers,^[31] and overall military aid to Indonesia surged during his four years in office.^[32]

Defenders of Obama, Lewis and Carter often argue that this is the reality of politics, that sometimes you have to abide policies that don’t pass the purity test of your personal morals if you want to be effective at working toward the greater good. And of course, they argue, no politician is perfect; everyone makes mistakes in their professional lives, and the shortcomings of politicians happen to be on display for the world to see. This is what I reasoned, after all, when I watched as Obama refused to hold Wall Street executives accountable for the 2008 subprime scandal that wrecked the economy and later when he authorized drone strikes on civilians in Yemen.

I won’t get into my thoughts on whether any of these amount to honest mistakes, or whether I believe the ends can justify the means, or whether one can even draw a straight line from any of these actions to a greater good. (Or a long, winding line that circles the page to a greater good, for that matter.) What matters is that, in each of these cases, the exigencies of US statecraft overrode any private commitments to Christian principles these leaders may have had.

Call it Christian nationalism, call it American civil religion, call it whatever it was that motivated Spain to conquer the New World for the Catholic faith or whatever the Crusaders told themselves to believe that they were waging war for Christ. It’s the same tendency at its core. It’s the lie we tell ourselves when we think we can serve power without giving up our commitments to live a life shaped by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s the belief that we can serve two masters as we nestle our American and Christian identities into one. But you will either hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to one and despise the other. It’s clear to me which is which when we’re willing to deconstruct one side’s sacralization of US politics but not the other’s.

What would happen, then, if we let the radical message of the Gospel break out of the cage our political identities have so often kept it in? What if our ideas of justice and peace were truly shaped by the message of Jesus and not penned in by what this or that political party wants us to think is possible? What if we’re only beginning to understand how much our political identities have constrained our imaginations until now?

I don’t know what it would bode for the American project if more people took up this challenge. My guess is: probably not good things. The wheels of capitalism, imperialism and war might get gunked up. And the American project, loath as we may be to admit it, has relied on these wheels rolling smoothly to get where it is today.

But I am not that concerned about it. Maybe because I am not all that American. I am a follower of Jesus Christ. My fate and my destiny are not tied to anything that happens inside the Washington beltway. I am a member of a Body that includes Iraqi refugees, Venezuelan migrants, Americans of all stripes and Christians who lived centuries before these nationalities even existed. We’ve outlasted empires before. I think we can do it again.

Deconstructing Politics Is Only the Beginning

Deconstruction is a movement that resists containment. When you deconstruct the male/female binary, you eventually see that gender itself is not a category safeguarded from other considerations like biology, geography and culture. The same goes for deconstructing politics. Politics is only one area of a faith that deserves deconstructing—it just happens to be the easiest to see.

When someone goes through a major faith crisis, old certainties can tear apart in a way that can’t simply be restitched together. But even when the person understands that their old belief system was untenable, it’s hard to forget how reassuring it was to have a seamless garment of faith, a Möbius strip of certainty that ordered and positioned everything else they believed. But certainty is not faith. It’s a false god. And false gods promise us something that they inevitably fail to deliver.

Faith is not about ordering and positioning every other belief. The Bible, for example, does not tell me how to adjudicate between two different theories of macroeconomics. What it does do, however, is tell me something about how people ought to treat one another, the value of hard work but also the limits to what it entitles you to, what value merit holds in the Kingdom of God and how much trust I should put in those whose interests are tied up in the highest echelons of earthly power. There’s plenty there to help me make moral sense of the world without needing to have an answer to every question. I’m glad there are professionals tasked with weighing different macroeconomic theories, because there’s a lot at stake. But it is genuinely liberating not to need a fixed set of beliefs of my own on that or any other issue. Faith means trusting that God has provided us with everything we need to live simple lives full of meaning and joy and allowing God to be God over everything else.

It is vitally important to hold this in view when we are trying to reimagine faith after a major crisis of belief. The temptation to start building something around a new set of certainties is all too real. There are still areas of my own belief where the absence of new certainty is a felt anxiety. For example, I have yet to form a theology of sex that is robust enough to fully replace the sexual purity culture I grew up in. My children are entering their teenage years, and it would be extremely reassuring to have a new set of beliefs that could answer every question they might have. It’s tempting to adopt sex positivity wholesale, the kind that only talks about the importance of consent and makes sure the kids always know where the condoms are kept.

But maybe the reassurance that would come from that set of beliefs is just another false god promising neat and easy answers. And maybe having easy answers isn’t the point. Yes, there are some specific issues where our calling as parents is to provide clear guidance during a stage of life that is sure to be difficult and confusing for our children. And being leaders to them means recognizing that consent is a crucial virtue to hold in view as we think through healthy new theologies of sex, but it’s a weak lifeline if that’s the only thing we’re offering them. But maybe the problem with our old sexual purity culture was that it was too obsessed with having an answer to every question. Maybe the sexual purity culture that so many of us grew up with fetishized certainty. It’s possible that our calling as parents isn’t to anxiously patrol the boundary around our children’s sexual purity but to trust that God has provided us with what we need to commend to them a vision of a life full of meaning and joy from childhood through puberty and into sexual maturity. There will be difficult questions along the way, but we should trust that God will be with us through them all.

In the end, taking deconstruction seriously amounts to taking our trust in God seriously. If our deconstruction is too small, it could be a sign that our God is also too small. I believe in a God who is big enough to handle the biggest acts of deconstruction. And my faith in God is what allows me to recommend deconstruction for anyone. Even for dummies.

1. This is a Derridean gloss on what Plato argued. Plato, Phaedrus 274c–277a, especially 275d–276a, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). The deconstructive gloss: Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 75–83, 110–12, 136–38. ↩︎
2. It’s worth noting that some interpretations of the Hebrew creation story reflect this. When God creates the first human, he is given the name ādām (אדם), which is also the gender-neutral term for “human.” It isn’t until the woman, Eve, is created that Adam is referred to with the gendered word for “man”: îš (איש), suggesting the possibility that Adam was not gendered before that point. Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah (HarperSanFrancisco 2001), 16. ↩︎
3. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2018/04/clinton-trump-voters-evangelical-identity-2016-election/ ↩︎
4. https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-ames-ia-july-18-2015/ ↩︎
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EIgHsGZAmk ↩︎
6. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/ ↩︎
7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/25/why-evangelicals-like-rick-perry-believe-that-trump-is-gods-chosen-one/ ↩︎
8. https://2021-2025.state.gov/reports/2023-report-on-international-religious-freedom/iraq/?safe=1 ↩︎
9. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/05/17/the-religious-affiliation-of-us-immigrants/ ↩︎
10. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/stateoftheunion/2007/initiatives/sotu2007.pdf ↩︎
11. https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-announcement-speech-new-york-ny-june-16-2015/ ↩︎
12. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/03/21/border-wall-expansion-trump-environmental-impact/ ↩︎
13. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-36 ↩︎
14. https://brianmclaren.net/dear-white-christian-pro-life-friends-1-4-compiled/ ↩︎
15. https://brianmclaren.net/why-im-voting-for-obama-and-why-i-hope-you-will-too-reason-1/ ↩︎
16. https://brianmclaren.net/dear-president-obama-an-open-letter-on-afghanistan/ ↩︎
17. https://www.patheos.com/resources/additional-resources/2011/06/not-conservative-not-liberal-progressive-brian-mclaren-06-13-2011?p=2 ↩︎
18. Mass deportation under Obama: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/journal/policy-beat/obama-record-deportations-deporter-chief-or-not ↩︎
19. Immigrant family separation under Obama: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/wish-new-year-end-mass-deportation-and-family ↩︎
20. Expanding fossil-fuel drilling under Obama: https://www.doi.gov/node/14392 ↩︎
21. Military spending contributing to the national debt under Obama: https://www.brown.edu/news/2016-09-09/costsofwar2 ↩︎
22. Military interventionism under Obama: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/23/letter-president-war-powers-resolution-regarding-syria ↩︎
23. Leniency toward big banks that were “too big to jail” under Obama: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/holder-big-banks-clout-has-an-inhibiting-impact-on-prosecutions/ ↩︎
24. The United States blocking a UN measure to halt West Bank settlements under Obama: https://press.un.org/en/2011/sc10178.doc.htm ↩︎
25. NSA accused of spying on European allies under Obama: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/merkel-frosty-u-over-unacceptable-spying-allegations-224259440.html ↩︎
26. Obama, by all accounts, is a devoted husband who has not been credibly accused of sexual assault or having ties with alleged sex traffickers such as Jeffrey Epstein. ↩︎
27. Obama issued 563 covert drone strikes abroad (https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush) and chaired weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings to approve a kill list of suspected terrorists (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/14/obama-secret-kill-list-disposition-matrix). ↩︎
28. https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2018/conversations-worth-having ↩︎
29. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/eo/documents/governance/2014-Political-Disbursements.pdf ↩︎
30. https://www.democracynow.org/2007/9/10/fmr_president_jimmy_carter_on_palestine ↩︎
31. https://history.state.gov//historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v22/d206 ↩︎
32. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/national/1979/06/16/us-jets-slated-for-indonesia/9c94f0b6-f9ae-4c3f-9076-a5eae6783b81/ ↩︎