“I Left Christianity Because I Found a More Authentic Faith.”

Modernity does not have a Ten Commandments, but if it did one of them would surely be, “I am true when I am true to myself.”

The modern age (in the West) prizes the virtue of authenticity and sets it against the vice of conformity. The idea behind modern authenticity is that the ultimate purposes for a person are those which come from within. By staying in close contact with one’s authentic self, each person can find the way of living that is right for them and the patterns of belief that are right for them.

In earlier ages, the journey of establishing one’s identity would have been nearly the opposite. The task of the self was not to discover one’s unique way of being, but to conform one’s self to the given realities into which one was born. If your father was a blacksmith, you never heard the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” You joined him at the forge. If you were born in medieval Europe and had some hangups with the Christianity of your family and culture, there were no online communities of ex-Christians that could help you articulate your deconversion. Heresy was often a capital offense.

But today, in the “Age of Deconstruction,” it is often felt that it is no longer enough to simply download one’s beliefs from one’s parents or community. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it,

“No one simply inherits packages of belief anymore. We choose to believe (and even construct) the packages for ourselves, often as part of our self-actualization project.”

Beliefs are no longer a “package deal”, but can be unboxed and separated into their constituent pieces. What is lacking in one belief system can be grafted in from another or created outright. In this sense, the modern self is a patchwork of beliefs all held together under the organizing principle of “our self-actualization project.”

If finding one’s authentic self is the basic challenge set before every individual, then outmoded religious belief packages can only be helpful to a point. It would be inauthentic to simply swallow a whole belief system wholesale. So what is to be done?

Enter deconstruction.

Deconstruction is the second step on the modern hero journey toward authentic selfhood. It is the No Man’s Land that exists between one’s inherited beliefs and a newly forged, more authentic belief mix.

According to the ethic of deconstruction, to be warranted, any belief needs to have been disassembled, examined, and held against the light of one’s own values, personality, and moment in history. Only then is one able to see what is lacking in Christianity and what is to be kept.

For many today, the process of deconstruction renders the faith they grew up with tattered and implausible. Some re-form a faith from the disassembled pieces that is a chimera of Christian beliefs and secular axioms. Others abandon Christianity altogether.

I remember a friend and I got into a conversation about his own deconversion and he said,

“If I am honest, that time of deconstruction was confusing and hard. It felt like everything I’d always taken for granted was coming undone and that I was losing connection with my life up to that point. But now I am in a better place.

I used to think that if I let go of Christianity, I would have nothing left. But now I feel happier and freer. I feel like I finally believe something I can live with.”

Or consider the words of S. A. Joyce,

“I pieced together, bit by bit, a humanistic set of values which turned out to be far more self-consistent and pertinent to the modern world than some petrified Decalogue of biblical taboo.”

These are messages from people who have walked the path of deconstruction and come out on the other side with a newfound separation from the Christianity they had once avowed. It is a hard road, but at least on the other side you have the consolation of the discovery of a more authentic form of faith.

Or do you?

I agree with the Ethic of Deconstruction, but only to a point.

In the process of becoming a mature Christian, if you don’t engage in periods of deconstruction it might not be a sign that you have great faith, but that you have learned to dodge the doubts and questions that come your way. Rather than a mark of maturity, it might be a sign that your growth process has actually stalled.

The truth is that our faith will at times need a bit of deconstruction. To believe otherwise is to believe the hidden proposition that the arc of your belief has reached its zenith. It is to act as though your present answers to your former questions are the best answers that could possibly exist. But if Christianity becomes a static set of propositions to which we hold unswervingly, we will stop growing.

Besides, the cultural narrative that honestly questioning one’s faith will inevitably lead to deconversion is bogus.

It is not a given that everyone who enters a season of deconstruction will emerge from it a newly-minted atheist. Some emerge broken but limping on, humbled and hopeful. Some emerge with the sense that all their dead branches have been gently broken off in order for new growth to begin. Some emerge born again.

The knife of deconstruction cuts both ways. Should we accept the whole package of the Ethic of Deconstruction or can it be unboxed, broken down into its pieces, and examined? When I consider the whole paradigm of deconstruction, doubts and questions start popping up. I have an impulse to deconstruct the way of deconstruction.

The search for modern authenticity follows the rule “to thine own self be true,” but the hidden proposition in that slogan is that you will know “your own self” when you look it in the mirror.

When the reconstruction is done at the end of the process, how will you know what you have is more authentically “you”? How do you know you haven’t just rebuilt your worldview in the culture’s image? How will you know you haven’t experienced, in sociologist Peter Berger’s words, “cognitive collapse in the face of societal pressure”? How do you know you have not just followed the dictates of the prevailing cultural mood?

To borrow a hypothetical scenario from Tim Keller, if you were a young 10th-century Viking man who is sexually attracted to other men, your culture would tell you to suppress your sexual inclinations and develop your impulses toward physical violence. If are a young, gay New Yorker in the 21st-century, your culture tells you to repress your urges for physical violence and develop your sexual inclinations. Who is being more authentic? What are the grounds on which such a determination could be made?

The problem with the modern pursuit of authenticity is that we do not search for our identities in a vacuum, but in a compromised, noisy ideological space in which everything vies for our attention and loyalty.

The advertising industry has mastered the art of making tiny alterations in the self you feel you need to be authentic to. In the 21st-century the self has become a commodity that marketers try to buy and sell. What if your sense of your self is compromised by the things that an exterior voice has persuaded you to care about? We are inundated with such exterior voices; it is all too easy to outsource our allegiance, dreams, ambitions, and our very selves to them without even knowing we have made the exchange.

Put this way, is it possible that an ancient faith might be better able to guide you to your true self?

The wisdom of Christianity precedes the age of self-as-commodity. It has been time-tested and has accumulated the experience and moral mettle of sages throughout the centuries whose wisdom did not expire upon their deaths. It can be a stable partner for the dialogue of the discovery of self, because it comes from an age that did not share the particular blind spots, prerogatives, and prejudices of our cultural moment.

As in the Ethic of Deconstruction, in the Christian story, your truest self is also hidden. It is something that needs to be developed and uncovered. There is dross in you that must be revealed and removed. There is something that needs to be deconstructed before it is built again.

Unlike the modern search for authenticity, however, the truth of your identity does not lie primarily within yourself. Rather, the way to authenticity lies in the dialogue between yourself, creation, and God himself.

When Paul wrote in the letter to the Colossians that their “true life is hidden with Christ in God,” it was an invitation to become who they were always meant to be, but only on certain terms. There is a process of self-discovery to be undergone, but it comes as the result of the process of apprenticeship to one’s creator.

Our true selves are not hidden like a pearl inside the shell of our own experiences, emotions, ego, and intuitions. They are hidden in God.

The modern age would have you believe that you have to cast off every divine fetter and follow your existential feet wherever they take you. But it is in the midst of this apprenticeship with God that a soul can find a safe place to, like a creature sheltering inside a chrysalis, become what it was meant to be.

Though the stories of those who have left Christianity are replete with experiences of questions suppressed, doubts shamed, and obedience coerced, real Christianity invites exploration, questions, doubt, journeys of discovery, and dark nights of the soul.

What else are we meant to make of all the figures in the Bible who wrestled with God, riddled him with questions, and walked with him three steps forward and two steps back?

God didn’t blast these doubters from the face of the earth; he condescended to wrestle with them too. He spoke from the whirlwind and asked them more questions until they felt they were answered. He let them see his glory as it passed them by. He spoke to them in a still, small voice at the cave’s mouth. He appeared before them in the flesh, the long-awaited Son of God. He let them put their fingers in his wounds. He let them deny him in his moment of greatest need and then stumble up the beach and renew their love. God let his precious doubters kill him while he prayed for them because they didn’t know what they were doing. That is what it is like to take the journey of identity with the Living God.

It may be that God himself is inviting you to undertake such a journey-a journey whose meaning comes to fruition only when it is complete. Along the way you may be welcomed to rail against your maker, to wonder at the beautiful symmetries he is drawing inside you, to bring your wounds and be healed, to bring your questions and hear his in return, to find your right mind in the midst of the internal cacophony, to give yourself away and receive your self back again, transformed.

That is the way of Christian self-discovery and the way to a truer authenticity than the autonomous visions of the modern self can hope to offer. It is a wilder, more enigmatic, more demanding, less compromising, more frustrating, and more illuminating path-but it is the only real path available.

Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)

Photo by Resi Kling on Unsplash

Originally published at https://stillpoint.substack.com on October 25, 2021.