On Deconstructing Your Faith: a personal story

I never thought I would get to this place. 

This place is questioning.  This place of...deconstruction. 

I was raised in the church. I have been a believer all my life, I was baptized when I was 16, I re-surrendered my life to Christ at 21. I ran hard and fast after The Lord and never looked back. 

I joined a nondenominational church when I was 22 that was multi-ethnic, multi-generational, and encouraged me to serve the Lord in faith. I also expanded my Christian circle outside of my local church by finding community with women in the online space, as social media was just beginning to gain exponential popularity. At the time, I thought that the church (at large) could do no wrong. I attached myself to every single word that a person of faith said and believed them as doctrine. I compared myself to how other Christians were living and pushed myself to be more like them. I allowed that comparison to convince me that my own flaws made me less holy and that the Christian women I looked up to were the epitome of holiness.

In those days, I came across as a loving person, but inwardly I was rude, judgmental, and prideful.. I was saving sex for marriage, I had never taken a drink, and I smiled in the face of members of the LGBTQ+ community while judging them behind their back.  I now know that those behaviors were rooted in fear and insecurity that was brought on by a toxic Christian culture that itself is rooted in white supremacy and, as a result, perfectionism.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Who was I? To silently cast these stones of judgment against my brothers and sisters? Against image-bearers? As if I had no sins of my own? 

Meanwhile, I was also constantly judging myself — falling deeper into an unhealthy relationship with the personification of what it looked like to be the perfect Christian woman. The louder my inner critic toward myself, the louder I silently judged others.

Fast forward to this year. The Lord has used social media to show me so many true colors of the Church that I never expected to see. 

I was blind to the history of racism in the church. 

I was blind to the hatred of the Christian community toward Blackness, the LGBTQ+ community, and women facing difficult decisions in their pregnancies. To me, hatred and God didn’t mix. Yet, here I was, discovering many people who loved Jesus spewing judgment and hate toward anything they didn’t agree with, silencing the voices of oppressed groups, and more.

Now, let me be clear. You just read that I, too, was a judgemental, hateful person. Yet, I was blind to the hatred. I was blind because a) I was choosing to be blind and b) the religious community does an excellent job of believing and convincing themselves that they are above sin. It is easy to justify your sin when you believe you are behaving a certain way in the name of Jesus. I believed that my judgment was “holy” or “righteous” because I “wasn’t sinning the way they were sinning.” That just sounds gross, doesn’t it?

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Conflicted, I sought God. Because humanity is humanity and Truth is Truth. 

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

I’m doing a lot of unlearning. It is hard, holy work. I don’t mean holy in a self-righteous way. I mean holy in an extremely sanctifying way. It is work that is forcing me to dig deeper than I ever have before to actually heal wounds that I was used to putting bandaids over. It is work that is forcing me to completely uproot my old patterns of thinking that I once believed were rooted in Truth and plant new seeds that are actually rooted in Truth.

Most importantly, this work isn’t something I’m doing every now and then when I feel like it. This is work that is happening every single moment. The false beliefs and untruthful patterns of thinking, and then therefore living, drove my every move. My every single move. This means I must now re-wire my brain almost constantly.

It would be easier to throw in the towel. Heck, it would be even easier to walk away from the Christian faith altogether. It’s often tempting to just throw everything out the window. But, what good would that do? How would that create change? How would that do anything for myself and future generations that deserve total liberation from the systems of oppression that exist both in the church and in the world?

It wouldn’t.

So, we continue on.

Faithful deconstructing, faithful Truth-seeking, and finally faithful living.