The Prairie Thistle

When our church refused to follow public health orders during the pandemic, and leaders began to politicize from the pulpit on issues like abortion and racism, and dialogue over our concerns was extended toward my husband and not to me, my husband and I walked away from our faith community – and faith as we knew it, never to return.

That was 2020. We all know 2020 was a hard year. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be the year I lost access to my religious community, relationships with my family of origin, and the Christian marriage I had been building for almost 20 years. Loss upon loss upon loss. Like many in the western world at the time, my life felt it was in upheaval, grief was a constant companion, and depression was more than a threat.

But there was another word I began to learn about at the time: deconstruction. Deconstruction is the responsible identification of the constructed elements of one’s faith and then taking them apart in order to see the underlying layers of construction wondering what might be useful gain and in what configuration, as defined by writer Josh de Keijzer.

So that’s what I did! Along with my husband, we deconstructed and eventually arrived, in ways both separate and together, at the realization that we were definitely not heading back to church anytime soon. We pursued the separate paths of mysticism and skepticism we were drawn toward, how far we were along them, and how they worked together (that’s a blog post for another day).

Fast forward and here is a short list of what I’ve learned in the last five years:

1. Loss is loss.

To me, although I suffered different losses in different ways, the feelings ended up being remarkably similar. Grief is a wilderness one traverses alone, nonlinearly, holistically, and profoundly, no matter what caused the sorrow. Loss of community or ways of life such as loss of a routine that used to bring us stability and joy, both bring on feelings of grief, as does being thrust into (or choosing) changes in our most intimate relationships. Estrangement grief is a grief that comes closest to death grief, except that the loved one is still living. Brene Brown has a definition of complicated grief in her book Atlas of the Heart and the Mayo Clinic defines it similarly, calling it, “An ongoing heightened state of mourning that keeps you from healing.”

I think what caught me off-guard was not knowing many who had gone through similar experiences to me before. I felt that because I had not lost anyone to death and that my marriage had not ended, I did not qualify as someone who was experiencing grief. It took someone who gave of themselves to listen to me from an unbiased point of view to point out that I was in grief, and validate it. Loss is loss. And it’s fucking hard.

If you’ve experienced loss while deconstructing or deconverting, and would identify you’ve had feelings of grief, you would not be wrong. You deserve to have your experience validated. Just like navigating grief of a loved one’s passing, you may feel like you are going through this alone and in the strange way of grief, you both are and aren’t. Well, anyway, for what it’s worth, you don’t have to be. There are grief support groups that accept people with complicated grief, there are more deconstruction groups around than there used to be, and mental health therapy is not a bad idea either.

2. Atheism isn’t scary.

Fundamentalist Christians who fear deconstruction (see above definition) will tout the slippery slope of critical thinking and asking questions. They say it is dangerous to doubt and be honestly vocal about that doubt. You will stumble and be at risk of going to hell! God cannot stand a lukewarm Christian! You will cause others to stumble! This is very scary to doubters/critical thinkers, and/because, of course, it is very scary for staunch evangelicals themselves. People questioning may mean people leaving, and people leaving means less group stability for those who remain. And that those who remain may themselves start to doubt or be honest about the doubts they’ve had for some time. With a lot of compassion, I will wholeheartedly affirm it is scary.

I felt that fear when my husband told me he was an atheist (actually, I told him he was, but see above re. other post and days and all that). What does a mixed faith marriage mean for me if I remain a Christian? Will I be alone? Not sharing something so intimate as a worldview and belief construct is challenging.

And challenging doesn’t even begin to describe my own internal turmoil over my changing views about God. Eventually I learned that sure, change is scary, but it is scarier to not respond to what was growing and changing inside of me. Giving voice to my thoughts and feelings and finding wise and trusted mentors who would converse about a wide variety of aspects of faith meant a lot to me. Being known and loved for my authentic self, and knowing and loving others for their authentic selves, well, it is kind of important. It made the difference between shutting down across a number of my human faculties, denying my human experience, and conforming for the sake of belonging, and becoming in tune with my true self, the way that God/dess made me to be, and continuing to develop my skills and gifts, discovering my path in life. In other words, it was the difference between life and death.

I learned that my changing definition of God/dess provided a new, dynamic, and life-giving point of connection between my husband and me. The “old, white, bearded, judging man-in-the-sky-God” that my husband rejected was the same one I rejected as well. Learning about concepts like liberation theology (and its compatibility with humanism), universalism, pantheism and more paved the way for us to wave at each other on our respective paths.

The way I understand things now, I have more in common with my atheist friends than I do with fundamentalist evangelicals. And I often find more acceptance in atheist, secular humanist, and spiritual but non religious circles than I do any place else, along with a sense that I can thoroughly trust that acceptance and not be waiting for the “Surprise! We’re just being friends with you in hopes that you will come back to our way of thinking!” bait-and-switch inevitability of relational evangelism (my least favourite kind of evangelism by a mile).

3. Religious language is weird.

Writing about my experience has gotten both easier and harder. Unexpectedly, I find myself holding court with my past and present selves, scrutinizing a word choice for what it meant in the past, what it means to me now, and what types of readers will hold what types of shared understanding over a certain word. Along with those questions, what shared understanding can I help shape using words – and do I even care? Often when reading the Bible or pouring over faith-based works, I have started streaming words and their various meanings through the veil of current understanding I wear. Like a beekeepers hat, words reach me through mesh, phasing through to land on me in a new way, in ways that I can with discernment either keep or reject.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, evangelicals are some of the best poets I’ve ever known (insert poet blah blah doesn’t even know it joke here). They will use religious jargon and not even notice how positively riddled with metaphor their speech is/has become. There’s a reason why many outside of evangelical Christianity can’t stand talking with people from their previous faith community after they leave. It’s plain ol’ hard to understand, let alone make allowances for religious words or ideas based on the benefit of the doubt that have caused or continue to cause spiritual harm to ourselves.

That said, I have always been a poet at heart. It isn’t hard for me to translate words and their meaning across different belief systems or socially-shared meaning. In fact, I love it. Give me a kindhearted evangelical who wants to talk about “God’s movement in their lives”, what they’re doing to ease the plight of “the hurting” or “the lost”, or how they “hear God’s voice of love” in their lives and I am unreservedly united in the shared meaning of these words. I have learned to trust my intuition about people and no longer feel uncertainty amongst evangelicals who still mean well, or dare I say are getting the gospel pretty darn right. I am not emotionally activated until I can tell someone is disingenuous and if I’m honest, this gift of discernment serves me no matter the religious affiliation of the person I’m talking to (one of the gifts of learning not to disregard my body and its signals now that I’m out of the evangelical world where we are taught to believe that our bodies are bad…).

4. Ohana means framily.

Finding community post-deconstruction is a challenge. Found family, or chosen family, are friends who function like family to us and take on the roles previously occupied by blood related family members or a faith community. For myriad reasons, chosen families have been forming an integral piece that meets the bio-psycho-social needs of humans for millennia. For those who have left a spiritually abusive faith community or distanced themselves from a toxic, close-knit family, found family is super important – and doubly so if you are consciously uncoupling from a situation that checked both boxes.

When you are changing patterns of behaviour that no longer meet your needs, you will be drawn to (or eventually realize you simply must) reach out to new people for community. Every person has a circle of support in which they are the centre and outwardly from there, we form intimate partner bonds or our closest relationships, and then relationships with people who know us and are supportive of us in our various work-life operations, and then friends or acquaintances who know us a little less, but still think well of us, etc. The circle leans out, and you will need others to lean on.

Your chosen family may have a lot of shared interests with you, but it may surprise you to learn that sometimes you may share hardly any! What usually ends up creating stable bonds between people are shared values, combined with mutual trust and esteem, combined with the time and energy to invest in ways that are meaningful to both or all parties. When you celebrate holidays – and this is a big one if you all you’ve ever known is celebrating the church calendar to mark the passage of time within a year – differently from now on, or at all, these are the people you can call up to celebrate with. These are the people who Just. Get. It. And show you through their actions and words that they are there for you.

I’ve asked myself if deconstruction of one’s faith is just the newest way of describing an adolescence of faith; it’s not surprising to me that deconstruction often ramps up during a phase of life where we may be experiencing another growth spurt in normal human development. Differentiation from our parents or needing to self-actualize in some way is normal. And making major changes to our lives as we grow and change is as well. But for many reasons making new friends during this season is just plain hard, harder than when we were young(er).

It may be hard. But, when you find it, framily is well worth the risk.

And lastly:

5. It’s OK to still believe.

It’s OK to still believe. Whether you end up believing they can be proven or not, everyone has a set of beliefs they hold about the origin of life and our reason for being here. Everyone has a construct they hold in their mind, heart and body about what God is, even if they need to hold that construct in order to deny it exists. And if you end up feeling or thinking or intuiting strongly that Something exists that may be “God”, that is going to be OK. You will be OK and there will be a community for you that 100% accepts, knows, and loves you.

And it’s OK if that community starts with you.

For me, my church for the last five years has had a congregation of one. I lack the ability to fit easily into boxes and so when I removed the pressure to do so, my world got very small. I was able to learn about different schools of thought and try on different spiritual practices for size until I found some that sort of fit. Some may say I hold a spiritual, but non-religious worldview, which may be as good a label as any right now. I would say currently my personal spiritual path includes Christian and pantheist contemplative disciplines in the perennial tradition (to borrow verbiage from Richard Rohr). Ask me again, tomorrow! 🙂

What does this non-religious spirituality look like in practice? After I lost both the external and internal impetuses to adhere to the structure of the evangelical rituals, traditions and seasons of the religious life I got baked into, I found within myself the freedom to respond to what felt meaningful to me. Jim Palmer has published many books on religious deconstruction and in Inner Anarchy, he recommends not dragging forward religious iconography or ritual for their own sake, but to ask our individual selves, what do we have available to us who used to practice? Despite the potential harm in participating in old traditions, it can be redemptive to approach them and utilize them in a new way.

To be “in the world and not of the world” is a fascinating concept that I found applies now to how I can exist in the spiritual, but non religious-world. I am trying on a way of living that potentially includes being in the church and not of the church, and I’m finding it life-giving. It’s not for everyone, and hey, isn’t that another beautiful part about not buying into evangelicalism anymore?

When I started to come out of my COVID- and self-imposed cocoon, one of the places I sought out a community that could support my belief structure was Shekinah: Centre for Deep Listening. This program surrounded me with people who were committed to whole- and open-heartedly supporting my growing and changing beliefs surrounding the Divine, fully trusting that I had within myself the capacity to hear and discern truth for myself. And I flourished in their company.

Palmer is an avid blogger and in one of his listicles he encourages those new to deconstruction: “Get out of your head and turn toward what is real in your deep feelings and what you know is true in your gut – listen to it, lift it up, express it, speak it out naturally in your own words.” To me, this was life-changing. It hit oddly at first, because I had to first realize that there are so many people out there who don’t do this. I spent so much of my life in church believing that this is what everybody does! But I learned that in actuality, the Evangelicalism system creates an environment of submission to authority which supplanted this idea, this way of being, for so many people. And that’s really, really sad.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.” – Albert Camus, atheist philosopher.

This something better that pushes back, this little voice inside that I still listen to, whether I call it the True Self, the soul, or my construct of the Holy Spirit within me as I understand it – I’ve still got it. I still believe in it, whatever It is. I still believe in God/dess, and I will spell it God/dess which has an instantly recognizable differentiation from other spellings at the risk of alienation. Maybe there are others out there who will experience a shared understanding of my beliefs, maybe not. It no longer matters as much to me as it once did anymore. It no longer matters as much or perhaps it just matters differently.

Because in conclusion, I admit it still does matter. Of course it does. I am human and I long for connection. I’m glad for these things I’ve learned and for the circle of support I have cultivated over the last five years since leaving Evangelicalism. I continue to recognize the skills of community-building I left the traditional church with. I just use them differently now. I’m deeply honoured when anyone expresses interest in connecting with me in good faith and I continue to make myself available to people in my community. They’ll just need to get to know me, adjusting assumptions as we go and lovingly making space for me and my imperfections as I intend to do for them and theirs.

So if you’re new to my blog, welcome. And if you’re learning new things about me, welcome again. I can’t say for sure when you’ll see the next post from me. But I do hope it will be soon. And if any of this has resonated with you at all, I’d love for you to stick around, lurk, read more stuff here and let it lead you to other great stuff elsewhere. Or, you know, reach out to me for a great conversation. People still do that kind of thing.