A Deconstruction Observed, Pt. 20
Sea Change
What caused me to examine and dismantle my fortress of certainty? You might call it a sea change in my thinking. If you’re not familiar with the term, a sea change is usually defined as a marked change or transformation. How did it happen? I’m not entirely sure, but here’s my best guess.
Even though I’m a writer, I’ve never been one to keep a journal. In hindsight it would have been nice to be able to look back through it now as I try to write about my deconstruction. However, there are a few markers I can point to. From 2017 to 2020 I carried on an extended correspondence about my deconstruction with a trusted friend. (I wasn’t ready to come out of the closet yet, so I only confided in a handful of people.) Several times in those messages I dated the beginning of my journey to somewhere around 2010.
I think my deconstruction started in earnest then because as of 2000 I no longer was employed by a church and required to affirm a doctrinal statement. I’d learned early in my ministry that changing one’s opinion on a doctrine was a good way to get fired [See: Rapture Wars]. It was safer to set aside my questions and stick with the status quo. So, now that I was freelancing, I had time to think through some of the questions that had been festering over the years.
But about the same time, my writing career and prison ministry took off and I was so busy writing, speaking, singing, and traveling that I didn’t have much time for contemplating theological questions. Thus, concerns about my layers of certainty were shoved to the back of my mental filing cabinet. But around 2010 things slowed down enough for me to have time to think, reflect, and consider questions I’d suppressed for years.
I decided to broaden my reading, investigate different perspectives on the things I believed, and generally challenge myself to think. For the most part I’d lived in a world of confirmation bias, reading primarily those things that supported what I already believed. I felt it was time to see how well those things held up.
I had no idea how challenging my reading program would be.
Reading May Be Hazardous to Your Confirmation Bias
Around that time I was in my “high-Calvinism” period and so I challenged myself to read Against Calvinism by Roger E. Olson. For some time I’d been so persuaded of Calvinism’s truth I couldn’t imagine how anyone would disagree with it. I’d been reading Olson’s blog posts and liked how he challenged my thinking. I figured that his book would be a good one to read. I didn’t agree with everything that Olson said, but it felt good to have my presuppositions challenged. And, surprisingly, I found myself rethinking my position.
After that I picked up Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer (Francis Schaeffer’s son). Reading that book gutted me, as I had idolized Francis Schaeffer since I was in college. Indeed, I regarded Schaeffer’s writings as the intellectual wall in my fortress of faith. Frank wrote some hard things about his dad and mom and about his home life, yet I perceived in his words a tenderness toward his parents. It hurt to read it, but it also awakened me to the fact that the leaders I put on a pedestal were human, just like me. (A few years later I got to meet Frank, and one of his oil paintings now hangs on our living room wall.)
By the time I finished Crazy for God I moved on to a book with a weird title. Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions by Rachel Held Evans. [Note: this book has now been retitled Faith Unraveled.] I found the title so intriguing that I had to read it. I had already listened to the audio of Rachel’s previous book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood and liked her writing style. I also liked that she challenged the traditional perspective of the role of women in the church–something I’ve long felt needed challenging. (And I’m glad to see it being challenged now!)
Evolving in Monkey Town was transformative. Rachel was asking most of the same questions that had dogged my mind for years. Questions I’d suppressed. Questions that I’d stuffed into my mental filing cabinet, but that persistently kept knocking against the walls, saying, “You can ignore us, but we’re still here.”
Rachel was a much better writer than I am. Here’s how she put it:
I don’t know why I have so many questions, while other Christians don’t seem to have any. I don’t know which of these questions I will find answers to and which I will not. And yet slowly I’m learning to love the questions, like locked rooms and mysterious books, like trees that clap their hands and fish that climb up cave walls, like mist that clings to the foothills of the Himalayas just like it clings to the Appalachians. And slowly I am learning to live the questions, to follow the teachings of a radical rabbi, to live in an upside-down kingdom in which kings are humbled and servants exalted, to look for God in the eyes of the orphan and the widow, the homeless and the imprisoned, the poor and the sick. My hope is that if I am patient, the questions themselves will dissolve into meaning, the answers won’t matter so much anymore, and perhaps it will all make sense to me on some distant, ordinary day.
Evans, Rachel Held. Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions. Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Letting the Questions Out
As I read Rachel’s book I came to believe something I’d long resisted:
It’s okay to ask questions.
It’s okay to think.
It’s okay to say, “I don’t know.”
It’s okay to dismantle the fortress walls, break open the gates, and step outside.
It wasn’t long after I read Evolving in Monkey Town that I knew I had to confront the one question that I had steadfastly refused to allow myself to think about, the question I’d kept locked in my mental filing cabinet even when I’d let others escape. The one fortress wall that I kept fortified.
I had to confront the question of evolution.
I had spent my entire ministry denying evolution. I’d even written an op-ed for The Dallas Morning News in 1999 arguing for the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. In that article I referred to evolution as a “secular religion.”
I remember saying many times that the only reason scientists believed in evolution rather than creation was because there wasn’t a third alternative.
Problem was, my words were hollow and I knew it. A few years earlier I’d taught a little class on creation vs. evolution, full of young-earth creationist talking points. But even as I taught that class, in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Jim, you have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.”
And so I decided that it was time to confront the question of evolution head on. But one thing had to be different this time. I’d read plenty of books about evolution before. But they were all written by Christians trying to disprove evolution. I’d never read a single book that presented the evidence for evolution objectively.
I knew that if I was going to be intellectually honest, I had to read a book from the perspective of someone who accepted the science of evolution.
And that’s why I picked up Francis Collins’ book, The Language of God.
By the time I finished the book, I was convinced that the science behind evolution was accurate. (It was genetics that tipped the scale for me, but that’s for another post.)
The Problem with Sea Changes
It’s important to understand that I did not embrace the science of evolution willingly. I was dragged, as it were, to that conclusion kicking and screaming. Yet convinced I was, and convinced I remain. The science is solid. And as one who had loved both Christ and science from my childhood, I was compelled to embrace what I knew to be true. Not what I wanted to be true.
That, of course, left me with a problem.
A big problem. And a whole new set of questions.
How was I to reconcile my faith and science?
Where did the Bible fit into all this?
That’s how I found myself standing at the edge of what I now call the dark forest of deconstruction. It wasn’t a place I wanted to be. It wasn’t a journey I wanted to take. But into the forest I went. There was no choice.
That’s the problem with a sea change. There’s no going back.
NEXT WEEK: Walking through the Forest
The posts in this series recount my journey through the dark forest of faith deconstruction and reconstruction, a process that covered about ten years of my life. I am telling my story, not seeking to debate. Please be mindful of that in your comments. I will delete any comments I consider argumentative.