Ontario philosopher Elmer John Thiessen offers a critical review of parts of the new book Blessed Are the Undone and a critique the deconstructionist movement
Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada, by Angela Reitsma Bick & Peter Schuurman (New Leaf Network Press, 2024). Read Faith Today's review of this book.
Blessed Are the Undone is another contribution to the growing literature on deconstruction in relation to the Church. One unique feature of this book is its Canadian focus. The book begins with a rather pessimistic portrayal of the Church in Canada. Church attendance is declining. The demographic of “no fixed faith identity” has swelled to over 34% of Canadians in 2021 (p.7). New categories like Nones and Dones are emerging for those who no longer have an affiliation with the church. Bick and Schuurman introduce a new word “Undone” to describe those who have deconstructed their faith, though I am not sure much is gained by introducing a new vocabulary (p. 230).
The study is based on interviews of 28 Canadians over a span of two years and across denominations, all of whom were once committed or “all in,” but who are now deconstructing the faith they inherited (p.3, ch.4). This focus on interviews highlights another unique feature of this book according to the authors. Their study is based on “lived religion” or “lived experience” – recounting the stories of those who are Undone (pp. 16, 73, 246-7). This is certainly a strength of the book, and the authors are surely justified in pleading with the church to listen to the stories of those who are deconstructing their faith (p. 248). It is further important to note that this study is focussed on the Undone coming from conservative or evangelical backgrounds. Indeed, the authors admit that the deconstruction movement is “definitely situated most obviously in an evangelical subculture” (p. 253).
Questions can be raised about the rather small sample size. There would also seem to be a bias in the sample in that a significant proportion of the interviewees had some association with The Meeting House, and four participants identified as LGBTQ+ (pp. 129, 16). These possible weaknesses are, however, mitigated by the fact that the authors also incorporate data from a podcast called Slow Train to Heck produced by Josiah Mahon, which is based another 42 interviews (pp. 17, 250). In addition, they draw on the growing literature and media sources on deconstruction and the Emerging Church Movement. The literature review in the Appendix is excellent.
Bick and Schuurman are clearly sympathetic to the deconstructionist movement in the Church. Indeed, a chapter is devoted to describing their own deconstruction experience, though I am not entirely convinced that deconstruction is the right label for their experiences (ch. 8). Indeed, the authors admit as much (pp. 69, 70), which then raises the question as to why this chapter was included.
My purpose in this essay is two-fold. It is a critical review of parts of Blessed Are the Undone and a critique the deconstructionist movement, which sadly has become fashionable, a “new form of piety” for many in the evangelical church today (p. 244).
Personal hurt in churches
Bick and Schuurman admit that it is difficult to define “deconstruction” with some scholars suggesting that the term is therefore useless (p. 12). At the very least, the concept of deconstruction is very confusing, and Bick and Schuurman illustrate this confusion when they use the term to apply to a number of very different phenomena and reasons for deconstruction. I therefore believe it is important to distinguish these reasons individually or at least in groups.
One of the important reasons for deconstruction scattered throughout the book is the personal hurt, and even trauma, people have experienced within the church. Some were hurt by leaders who used their power for sexual abuse (ch. 14), others are LGBTQ+ people who have been rejected in churches. Four of Bick and Schuurman’s interviewees and another twelve in Mahon’s podcasts identified as LGBTQ+ (pp. 16, 129, 251). And more than half of the people interviewed gave as “a catalyst for deconstruction,” how Christians have treated LGBTQ+ people (p. 142).
One can certainly understand why deep personal hurt in the church could lead to deconstructing one’s faith and even giving up on faith entirely. These sad stories deserve our empathy and it would be very wrong to ignore the pain they have experienced (p. 248). It is these cases that are most appropriately covered by the title of this book, Blessed are the Undone. But even here we need to be careful. Deconstruction due to personal pain is not inevitable. I have had painful experiences in the church, but this has not led me to deconstruct my faith. Instead, I needed time for healing. And I have had to remind myself that the church isn’t perfect, and yet Christ loves the church. So, hang in there.
Although deconstruction might be appropriate and perhaps even necessary in cases where Christians have been deeply hurt by the church, we must be very careful not to let these cases colour all the other reasons for deconstruction. Stories of personal hurt do not justify all cases of deconstruction, as the authors seem to assume (p. 236). It is important to examine these reasons case by case.
Religious upbringing
Another frequently recurring reason for deconstruction has to do with a conservative or even a fundamentalist theological upbringing, and here I will group several concerns. A chapter is devoted to reactions to narrow attitudes towards the Bible, with one person suggesting that “we rely way too much on the Bible” (p. 75, ch. 9). The Bible is viewed with suspicion because it is seen as “patriarchal, genocidal, homophobic, violent, and exclusive” (p. 76). Other deconstructionists were responding to a perceived incompatibility of Scripture and science, particularly with regard to evolution (ch. 10). Then of course there are the “Rainbow Battles” (ch. 15), where theological debates about LGBTQ+ people are dividing churches and denominations and are leading deconstructionists to forsake their conservative heritage.
Clearly, maturing Christian minds will evolve and sometimes come to disagree with what they were taught as children. We all grow in knowledge and understanding. And I suppose there is some validity to describing this in terms of deconstruction. But I find the term far too negative for describing normal growth in understanding of the Christian faith. More on this later.
Another problem with these reactions to a conservative upbringing is that it is being assumed that a conservative theology is wrong. For example, Bick and Schuurman describe deconstructionists as recovering from a “broken theology” or “plain bad teaching” (pp. 226, 248). This of course begs the question as to what a broken theology or bad teaching is. While I am sympathetic with some of the examples of theology needing deconstruction (e.g. 7 days of creation, Christian nationalism), other examples are not so obvious. Is patriarchy necessarily wrong? Are conservative views on LGBTQ+ issues necessarily mistaken? And aren’t objections to making exclusive truth claims self-refuting? These are complex issues that can’t be dismissed as obvious examples of bad theology. And we must be careful not to exaggerate the seriousness of some of this bad theology. There is after all something right about the “purity culture” of the church in the 1990s, a point which the authors are forced to admit (ch. 13). Clearly, those who have moved to a more liberal expression of faith disagree with conservative faith they grew up with. But they might just be wrong. It is all too easy for deconstructionists to see themselves as the Enlightened Ones. There is a desperate need for intellectual humility here.
Indoctrination
There is another dimension of a conservative theological upbringing that deserves to be treated separately. It is one thing to deconstruct the theology that we have been taught. It is another thing to react to the way in which this theology was conveyed or reinforced. Here we find repeated accounts of interviewees reacting to the demand for certainty and the refusal to allow for questions (pp. 86, 89, 232). Others worried about claims to “exclusive truth that required conformity of thought” (p. 28). Then there is the reaction to black and white thinking (p. 29-30, 85). Reflecting on their experiences as teenagers at a Christian summer camp, Hannah and Josiah Mahon now describe themselves as “hardcore little Christian robots” (p. 109). One of the interviewees use the term “indoctrination” to describe her upbringing (p. 179).
I want to focus on indoctrination as a way of summarizing the above reasons for deconstruction. “Indoctrination” is typically understood as a very pejorative term. But I believe it is very misleading to label a conservative upbringing as necessarily indoctrinatory. “Indoctrination” is a very slippery concept, and all too often means nothing more that “I strongly object to the way in which I was brought up” (see my Teaching for Commitment, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). Yes, children absorb what they are taught rather uncritically. They are trusting by nature, and there is nothing wrong with this. Yes, it is adults who “initiate” children into particular ways of thinking and believing. And again there is nothing wrong with this. All children, including children brought up in liberal homes and churches, are brought up within a “primary culture” that might look somewhat narrow after a child has grown up. So, caution is in order when labelling one’s upbringing as indoctrinatory.
This does not mean that one can never make the charge of indoctrination. I would argue that the label “indoctrination” (understood pejoratively) should only be used if parents fail to encourage their maturing children to become independent or autonomous thinkers, though these terms need some qualification as we are never completely independent or autonomous. I agree that indoctrination sometimes occurs in conservative households. But the extent of this failure tends to be exaggerated. The vast majority of parents want their children to mature into adults. And most churches welcome the honest questions that young people raise. So, this reason for deconstruction is most often problematic in my opinion.
There is a desperate need for more careful thinking about how adult faith relates to a childhood faith. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned as a child,” Paul says (1 Cor 13:11). And yes, when a child becomes an adult, then one moves beyond such “childish ways,” but this is no reason to look down on one’s earlier way of thinking or to disparage one’s upbringing. Instead, we need to look at our childhood faith as something that provided a foundation upon we have built. A narrow religious upbringing can and should be seen as an asset rather than a liability. It is not something that we deconstruct, but rather build on and revise as needed. Nor should our upbringing be seen as something that we need to recover from, a description I have heard all too often (p. 248). Rather, it should be seen in a positive light, as providing the foundation for further growth.
Social constructivism
There is another dimension of deconstructing a conservative upbringing that deserves to be mentioned briefly. Bick and Schuurman like to stress the human origins of evangelicalism, and hence its temporality and thus also the need for it to be “chastened” or deconstructed (pp. 8, 70). They refer to D.G. Hart who published Deconstructing Evangelicalism in 2004, in which he argued that “evangelicalism is a social construct and thus it can be deconstructed” (p. 243). They also reference Brian McLaren who was one of the first evangelicals to write about unravelling his personal faith in his autobiographical trilogy published in the early 2000s. McLaren has one of his characters justify the deconstructing of the notion of hell. “If it is an idea that arises in human history, then it’s constructed by humans, and if humans constructed it, then humans can deconstruct it” (p. 244).
Social constructivism is the dominant school of thought in the social sciences today. But social constructivism is itself in need of deconstructing. Indeed, the notion is self-defeating. If social constructivism is merely a human construction, then it too should be seen as a temporal blip in the history of ideas. Human thinking cannot simply be reduced to a human endeavor. All serious thinking is trying to describe the way things really are. There is an objective reality that puts constraints on human thought. So yes, evangelicalism is in part a human construction. But it is also an attempt to capture what God has revealed about himself. The Bible is not just a social construction! I agree that it is legitimate to ask whether evangelical theology is better at capturing God’s revelation than other theologies. But it is foolish to think that it must be deconstructed or dismantled or relativized because it is simply a human construction.
Bick and Schuurman also associate deconstruction with a number of other concepts, associations which I find problematic. Consider this summary statement: “It is our firm conviction that some sort of deconstruction is normal of growth – whether it takes the shape of falling away, repentance, or the quiet reconstruction that we call sanctification” (p. 33; cf. p. 157). Notice first the vague reference to “some sort of deconstruction.” It seems the authors recognize that there is something inappropriate about using the very negative notion of deconstruction to talk about normal Christian growth. It is even more inappropriate to link deconstruction with repentance, and then to associate reconstruction with sanctification. We need to be careful not to trade on the positive meanings of theological concepts as a way of justifying deconstruction which has strongly pejorative overtones.
Deconstruction and destruction
I now want to deal with what I see as the fundamental problem with deconstruction – its negative overtones. This is best brought to the fore by looking at the history of the concept, which Bick and Schuurman in fact do in Chapter 2. The notion of deconstruction has its origins in Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher and postmodernist. Although the conversation about deconstruction started in philosophical and literary circles, it had social and political roots. The aim was to break the structures of power by subverting the structure of language, always looking for contradictions within a text (pp. 12-13). There are clearly strongly negative connotations to this notion.
Christian deconstruction carries this same negative connotation, though Bick and Schuurman try to gloss over this when they often combine deconstruction with reconstruction, drawing on James K.A. Smith who interprets Derrida as having a positive aim in deconstruction (p. 13). I have raised some concerns about Smith’s take on Derrida elsewhere, and therefore will not deal with these concerns here except to say that Derrida and Smith leave us stuck in a prison of deconstruction.
I believe it is important to separate deconstruction from reconstruction and focus on the former on its own. Deconstruction, according to Bick and Schuurman can be summarized in the phrase “question everything” (p. 63). They also devote a chapter to the book of Ecclesiastes, “a progenitor of deconstruction” in suggesting that there is a time to doubt and question and tear down (ch. 7). We must never lose sight of the fact that deconstruction at its core has a negative connotation, and this raises the question as to whether deconstruction is a good thing.
A philosophical problem
I want to suggest that there is a fundamental epistemological problem with deconstructionism. I prefer to trace it back to Descartes, father of modern philosophy, who in his Meditations, written in 1641, tried to doubt all of his beliefs as a way of finding a solid foundation for knowledge. After doing so, he thought he had found certainty in his famous “I think, therefore I am.” Unfortunately, even this foundational certainty isn’t quite as certain as Descartes assumed and it is based on a number of unquestioned assumptions.
More concerning is Descartes’ approach of methodological doubt, the precursor to deconstructionism. It is simply impossible to doubt everything. Further, doubt is parasitic on belief, as Wittgenstein taught us. We learn by first inheriting a system of beliefs, and only after being initiated into a system of beliefs and values can we begin to raise questions about these beliefs. You can only deconstruct if you have first been given something to deconstruct, and it behooves us to treat what we have inherited with a good deal of respect. Indeed, we can never entirely erase the belief system that we inherited. You simply cannot start from scratch, as Descartes and deconstructionists assume.
Healthy deconstruction?
Now I am sure that Bick and Schuurman will object to my critiquing deconstruction on its own. After all, they keep linking deconstruction with reconstruction. They also make repeated references to “healthy deconstruction” (p. 8) or “healthy skepticism” (p. 33) or “healthy dismantling” (p. 225). But this is misleading. Many people who deconstruct their childhood faith do not move on to the reconstruction phase (p. 204). Further, the distinction between healthy and unhealthy deconstruction cries for clarification.
At one point the authors do try to describe the nature of healthy deconstruction. “Good deconstruction burns the dross and keeps the gold of Christina doctrine and practice” (p. 225). But this begs the question as to what is dross and what is gold. It also assumes that deconstruction is concerned about keeping the gold. But deconstruction is all about dismantling, destroying, unbuilding (pp. 12, 55, 234). It is simply misleading to give it a positive meaning by combining it with reconstruction.
Again, I would remind the reader of the overall negative orientation of Christian deconstructionism. Most of chapters of the book are devoted to describing the failures of the evangelical church (p. 204). Indeed, there are repeated paragraph-long descriptions of such failures (pp. 29, 182, 212, 224, 226). “Evangelicalism is in crisis and its institutions need reformation,” the authors argue (p. 231). Then in the chapter where the authors describe themselves as undone, they give personal voice to this negative tone. Angela admits that she has “always been drawn to that broken side of the lamp” (p. 68). Peter admits that his mind “turned a corner” during the Bruxy Cavey scandal (p. 72). He now finds himself focussing on the “brokenness” of the church, and “this book is a testament to such pain” (p. 72).
More negative than positive?
Now I quite agree that the evangelical church is not perfect. But I do have concerns about the largely negative description of evangelicalism. The authors are at times aware of the danger of focussing only on the negative (p. 235). But if so, they should have given us a more balanced evaluation of the evangelical church. To suggest that the evangelical church is in need of a Luther-like reformation is just far-fetched, and rests on a hyper-critical attitude that characterizes most deconstructionists (p.211). Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, hyper-criticism is an intellectual vice that calls for repentance (see Chapter 4 of my Healthy Christian Minds, Cascade Books, 2024).
There is a further assumption made by most deconstructionists that a liberal expression of Christian faith is to be preferred to evangelical Christianity. Indeed, the Undone often move to liberal churches. Bick and Schuurman themselves seem to be rather sympathetic to liberal theology and mainline churches. Angela describes herself as not being “deeply invested” in the historicity of Jesus (p, 68). Peter confesses that his “identification with things evangelical has thinned over the last 15 years” (p. 72). Then there are the frequent positive references to causes that are most often associated with liberal churches – peace and justice, affirming LGBTQ+, environmental justice, sympathy with indigenous religion, anti-colonialization. And the authors seem to exempt liberal and progressive Christians from deconstruction (p. 28).
But this positive alignment with liberal theology and liberal causes requires justification, and such a justification is not as simply as deconstructionists and Bick and Schuurman assume. The new is not necessarily better than the old, a mistake that Brian McClaren keeps making when he inserts the word “new” in the title of many of his books (pp. 14, 243-4). I would suggest that a careful study of liberal churches will reveal much that needs deconstructing here as well. Dogmatism and narrowness exist here too, only about different issues. But I would rather not dwell on the negative. Let’s focus instead on what is positive in both conservative and liberal Christianity, and how we can make each even better.
Critical thinking, honest doubt
One cautionary note. Lest I be misunderstood, I want to remind the reader that I believe there is a place for critical thinking and honest doubt, and even for healthy deconstruction. I am after all a philosopher and so I have a good deal of respect for rigorous critique and argument. I also believe that there is something appropriate about using the word deconstruction to describe the process of distancing oneself from problematic theological positions that have been taken in the evangelical (and liberal) church. What I am critiquing is deconstruction that has gone off the rails, criticism that has been taken to the extreme and become hyper-criticism. I am critiquing worship of the idol of newness, as though the new is always better and more enlightened. Healthy criticism is humbler, knows its limits, and recognizes the positive that exists in an evangelical faith and upbringing.
Bick and Schuurman will no doubt respond to my critique as being too theoretical in nature. Indeed, this is the objection they raise against the critics of the deconstruction trend which to their credit they review in the appendix (pp. 247-9). They argue that we need instead to listen to the “lived religion” of those who have suffered painful experiences in church (pp. 246, 248). I have already responded in part to this quite legitimate plea of the authors. Where the evangelical church has inflicted pain on its members, it needs to listen and understand and repent. But we must be very careful not to extrapolate from these cases to the many deconstructionists that are simply adopting a hyper-critical attitude to their upbringing, tradition, and the institution of the church. I believe this is a major weakness of the analysis given by Bick and Schuurman and a result of their lumping together the many very different reasons for deconstruction. Appealing to lived experiences can be a way of silencing the critics. Theoretical critique needs to be listened to as well. And lived experiences are not necessarily valid.
I conclude with a positive suggestion. Austrian philosopher, Otto Neurath (1882–1945) provides a useful analogy to illustrate the wisdom needed in re-evaluating our beliefs. He compares the need to evaluate and revise our beliefs to rebuilding or doing repairs on a ship while at sea. It would obviously be disastrous to take the ship apart entirely while at sea in order to do rebuild or do a repair on it. Instead, we keep the ship afloat, repairing it part by part. Similarly, a person’s or a church’s belief system can and should only be critically assessed part by part because you have to go on living with the beliefs you have as you do this gradual rebuilding and repairing. Too much of an emphasis on deconstruction, criticism, and doubt leads to the sinking of our epistemological and ecclesiastical ships. This analogy further underscores the fact that revising our beliefs always takes place within a certain tradition. And that tradition needs to be cherished as something that we can build on and improve.
In the end, I believe this is what Bick and Schuurman have in mind, not a complete demolition but reformation that is always looking to improve what we have inherited (p. 225). It is unfortunate that they have chosen to focus on deconstruction and paint such a negative view of evangelicalism.
May God help all of us to be faithful in revising our Christian convictions and rebuilding them one by one so as to be more in accord with the truth as revealed in God’s word and in Jesus Christ.
Elmer John Thiessen is a retired philosopher in Ontario. A version of this essay was originally published at his blog. Adapted with permission.