It seems that every couple of years, I conduct an inventory of and reflect upon the roots of my deconstruction. Each time, the story I recount to myself is slightly different. It is not that any one version of the story is inaccurate; rather, it is that the potency of the major events that engendered my deconstruction sometimes changes with more distance from them. It is also my bias as a storyteller; different elements of my deconstruction may feel more or less salient based on my life's context at the time I recount the story. These are the same challenges associated with writing history books: What is the overarching narrative this book sets out to tell? What details are included or omitted? Who is the narrator telling the story? Why is the narrator telling the story in this way?
So, this is my quasi-biennial update to my deconstruction story, in which I take stock of what I presently view as the major factors that contributed to my eventual departure from evangelical Christianity. I am writing this now as this topic has been on my mind ever since I got lunch with my father a few weeks ago. In conversation, he brought up faith-related topics that had not entered my consciousness in perhaps a decade or more. Additionally, I received a cassette-to-digital converter for Christmas. Listening to old cassette tapes, some of which include bits of sermons my dad had acquired in the 1990s or Christian music I used in mixtapes I made in the 2000s, has caused me to reengage with my past, reminding me of where I have come from. This update may perhaps be thought of as an apology--as in a defense, not expressing remorse--in response to these two occurrences.
Upfront, I feel the need to emphatically state that I did not deconstruct because I am gay. I am insistent about this point because that presumption is all too often made not just by Christians, but also by gay people. The collective consciousness generally views Christianity and being gay as mutually exclusive life options, so a gay person's identity is presumed to be the causal factor for their departure from Christianity. While that relationship may be true for some gay exvangelicals, it is not true for me. Shortly after I came out to myself, I was prepared to commit myself to celibacy for life if that was what God required of me. My faith was my highest priority in my life; all other parts of myself, sexuality included, were secondary. I will describe later how that became undone. My deconstruction is much more nuanced than a Gay vs. God "whichever wolf you feed" story. Presupposing that my deconstruction story conforms to that paradigm is reductive.
I should also dispel the similarly reductive hypotheses that I deconstructed because I stopped attending church, or because the church hurt me, or because I didn't hear enough that God loved me. Presuming hypotheses such as these diminishes what my faith was to me, which was a strongly held intellectual belief system that governed every aspect of my life. What I knew as God's truth always superseded my feelings. I took it seriously when the church taught me that. It was when the ideas that comprised what I knew as God's truth fell apart that I began to deconstruct.
So, what were the causal factors of my deconstruction? Several anecdotes came to the forefront of my mind as I organized my thoughts for this piece, and I believe each of them falls into one of two major themes:
- The collapse of my belief in the literalness and inerrancy of the Bible
- The dissolution of my dependence on God to solve my struggles
The following paragraphs describe those anecdotes that stuck out to me as I prepared this piece as especially influential in arriving at the two themes described above. I have attempted to tell them in roughly chronological order.
About two months into 10th grade, I went on a weekend camping trip with my dad and two brothers. It was the first time I had seen my older brother since we had moved him into his Christian college dorm room. We stood around the fire pit conversing, and at some point, it became conversationally relevant for my older brother to point out something he had learned in one of his Bible courses at college: that the creation accounts described in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 differ from each other. In the Genesis 2 account, God created man before plants or animals. I did not believe him; indignantly, I pulled out my Bible. I read the same text that I had read dozens of times before, shocked to find that they were indeed not consistent with each other, at least on the surface. I had not noticed the discrepancy before, probably because I had not been looking for it. I sat with what I had read for a minute, trying to reconcile the two accounts in my head. Suddenly, something clicked in my brain that harmonized the two accounts in a somewhat convoluted way. I stammered into my explanation for how to read the text in a way that made them consistent. My brother was not convinced. The point he was making was that not all of the Bible can be taken literally. The conversation moved on, but I was left wondering if any other biblical texts I had assumed to be literally true might be more complicated than I thought.
During 10th and 11th grade, I reconnected with an alumnus of my high school and his friend group. He had been the worship leader at my Christian high school my freshman year, permanently cementing him in my imagination as more spiritually mature than I. He had a relationship with Jesus I wanted to emulate. Time spent with him and his friends meant many late nights at his (parents') house--often pushing up against the 11 PM driving curfew that California state law imposed on me--singing worship songs, inviting the Holy Spirit's presence, praying for revival and revolution of the church, and discussing miracles they had seen. They were not afraid to ask the Holy Spirit to heal aches and pains in that room. One night, they laid hands on my left ankle and repeatedly commanded that my stress fracture be healed through the power of the Holy Spirit. I drove home with pain still in my ankle, castigating myself for not having enough faith and blaming the state's driving curfew for getting in the way of God performing a miracle. One Sunday, I traveled to Bethel Church in Redding with this group. During the service, one of the group members received a vision of Mount Kilimanjaro that was intended for me, which she spoke over me. Another night, I watched a friend get filled with the Holy Spirit and lose her balance after being knocked over by a hand wave.
Because I saw and experienced these supernatural things, my perspective broadened on what my faith could be. This was a far more expressive, emotional, supernatural, and radical version of a relationship with Jesus than I had been shown in my church and my Christian high school. I considered that there were more ways to seek God's truth than the framework I had grown up with. But I was unlikely to find these other ways from within my church and my high school contexts. I was going to have to look beyond these entities to take my relationship with Jesus to the next level.
That many of the members of that friend group used swear words as part of their vocabulary ("damn", "dammit", "hell", "hella", "shit")--words that I was taught were "unwholesome talk" tantamount to "taking the Lord’s name in vain"--emphasized my realization that there might be many ways to follow Jesus. I smarted every time I heard one of them utter one of these words, triggering my impulse to judge that they could not be Christians because they said certain words without remorse. Yet I could not see them as anything other than Christians because of how I had observed them relate to Jesus. If avoiding swear words was not essential to be in good standing with Jesus, then what else might not be essential?
Perhaps, for instance, it was possible for non-Christians to selflessly perform acts of community service with purity of motive. In the church, I had been taught that the difference between Christians and non-Christians performing good deeds was that Christians' motivations were to serve Jesus. Non-Christians' motivations, by contrast, were self-serving, such as to feel good about themselves or to enhance their reputations. As I prepared to begin undergrad at Berkeley, I learned about the existence of dozens of student organizations oriented toward service, social justice, and doing good in their communities. The sheer number of such organizations caused me to question my assumptions about people's motivations for doing good. Surely it would be probabilistically unlikely for that many non-Christians to harbor such self-serving motivations. Perhaps these people were truly dedicated to pursuing selfless acts of service. Perhaps it was possible to be a good person without being a Christian.
Sexual orientation, it turned out, also might not be essential to be in good standing with Jesus. In my senior year of high school, a close friend of mine from the church youth group came out to me as bisexual; three months later, another friend in the church came out to me as gay. From what I could tell, neither of them seemed particularly concerned about maintaining both their identities and their faith. Surely they knew about the Bible's prohibitions against non-heterosexuality. Surely they knew that non-heterosexuality was incompatible with a relationship with Jesus. Surely they knew that non-heterosexuality was as much a personal choice as a relationship with Jesus was.
And yet, these two friends, the validity of whose faiths I trusted, professed non-heterosexuality while continuing to remain involved with their faiths. Perhaps the biblical principles I had been taught and had adopted about non-heterosexuality were not as clear cut as I had thought. The simple "it's a choice" narrative, which was the most my church and my high school could offer me, was no longer satisfactory for instructing me how to relate to my two friends who stood before me. I was going to have to learn what it would mean to love these friends like Jesus would. That was going to require me to take my relationship with Jesus to the next level.
Near the end of my first semester of undergrad, I began my in-depth dive into this effort. The stakes amped up because I had recently come to the realization that I was not heterosexual myself. I knew what the Bible’s six "clobber passages" allegedly said about non-heterosexal people, but I needed to understand these passages more deeply. If 1 Corinthians 6 said, "homosexual offenders…will not enter the kingdom of heaven", then I needed to know why. Based on my own experience, being non-heterosexual was not a choice I had made; more than anything else, the label was a concise explanation of how my brain worked. I could not have imagined that I had done anything worthy of exclusion from the kingdom of heaven simply by being non-heterosexual, which I did not choose--likewise with my two friends.
Understanding why the clobber passages said what they did required that I research and understand the context of the passages to discern their true intended meaning. This explication was the precise type of rigorous biblical analysis my high school and my church had instructed me to do in pursuit of God's truth. God was trying to tell me the answer, and it was my job to find it. This was what taking my relationship with Jesus to the next level required of me.
I quickly wrote off the Old Testament clobber passages. To me, the Sodom and Gomorrah story was closer to condemnation of gang rape, and the Leviticus passages were irrelevant because Christians were no longer under the Law. For the remaining New Testament passages, I looked up the Greek words for the specific words in question in Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1. After considering the Greek verbiage and the rest of the context of Romans 1, a plausible explanation emerged that the passage condemned idolatry and pagan ritualistic practices rather than consensual committed romantic same-sex relationships. 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1 used the same Greek word--"arsenokoites"--a compound word of "arsen" (male) and "koites" (bed). It was not automatically obvious to me that "male bed" should translate to "homosexual offender". Could it be an indolent man (the "sluggard" in Proverbs)? Or any man who has sex? And, even if it did truly mean "homosexual", the Greek implied nothing about the nature of the homosexual person being condemned. Was he a prostitute? One who participated in homosexual orgies? Anyone who had same-sex relations? I could not find anything in the text that explicitly and unequivocally denounced consensual committed romantic same-sex relationships.
As I continued my research, I was pleased to see that I had independently arrived at many of the same findings as several biblical scholars. I further learned that the use of "arsenokoites" in 1 Corinthians 6 appears to be the first documented use of this term among any surviving texts written in ancient Greek. Many scholars think it was a word that Paul made up, increasing the difficulty in truly understanding what this word was supposed to convey. Additionally, I learned in a sociology course I was taking that semester that the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" did not enter the English dictionary until the late 1800s. The concept of one's sexual orientation as a characteristic that could vary between people was a modern invention within the last 200 years--certainly not when the clobber passages were written. Finally, I considered the range of terminology that existed within the different English versions of the Bible: "homosexuals" versus "homosexual offenders", and "effeminate" versus "male prostitutes". Clearly, there is no unique mapping from ancient Greek to English. More generally, no two languages cleanly port over one to the other. That was obvious to me even from taking Spanish in high school. Imperfect humans had to make imperfect decisions about how to imperfectly translate the ancient texts from one language to another.
I never planted my stake in the ground on any of my newfound alternative interpretations of the clobber passages. Nevertheless, the broader lesson that I learned from this process was that biblical interpretations are not as clear as I had been led to believe. I was more than willing to hear alternative interpretations of the passages that contradicted mine, but any such interpretation would have to contend with my alternative interpretations and satisfactorily prove mine incorrect. I had discovered there was fairly significant wiggle room in how the Bible could be interpreted. Because I had committed myself to the belief that there was only one truth--God's truth--such a discovery was deeply unsettling.
The applications of this experience were enormous. As an example, I applied a similar analytical framework to the question of whether the Bible actually forbade premarital sex. The Greek word in question turned out to be "pornei", which in some English passages was rendered as "fornication" and in others as "sexual immorality". And in some of the passages in which this Greek word was used, the intended message was to condemn post-marital infidelity, often using the relationship between Christ and the Church as a comparative analogy. In the end, I found no instances in the text that explicitly and unequivocally denounced premarital sex.
Similarly, the implications of this experience were also enormous. This was the experience that started casting doubt on biblical inerrancy for me. How could I know for certain that the version of the Bible I was reading correctly conveyed what God wanted me to know? Simply trying to casually read the Bible, listen to a sermon, or have a meaningful conversation about a Bible passage became an impossibly complex task. I could not engage with the text without dozens of questions immediately firing off in my head: What words were used in the original language? What do those words mean? What are the various ways that these words could be translated to English? What contemporary cultural context existed around the text's author that might be useful in interpreting the words? By the time I would finish asking these questions to myself, the pastor may have already made his first two points. Ultimately, a text becomes impossible to live by if every single phrase within it had to undergo such rigorous analysis and still did not always yield crystal clear interpretations. And for me, the text did have to undergo such analysis. If it did not, I would be left wondering if I had missed God's truth in an alternative interpretation.
The irony, of course, is that in my zealous pursuit of God's truth, the truth became unwieldy to find. The deeper I dug into the Bible, the less clear anything became for me. Beliefs I had held strongly which were based on biblical principles ended up being on sinking sand.
At no point did it ever feel like I made a deliberate choice to deconstruct the Bible. To me, it felt like the text deconstructed itself for me. Once my eyes were opened and I saw the vast ambiguity inherent in the Bible, I felt I had no choice but to reject absolutist interpretations. My logic and rationality would not allow me to hold onto the Bible-based beliefs I once held, because I could not accept them on face value anymore. And once I had tasted the forbidden fruit, I could not go back.
While I redefined my understanding of the Bible, several concurrent life experiences adjusted and ultimately dissolved my need to depend on God.
In my second semester of undergrad, I was assigned a midterm essay. The day before this essay was due, I had made little progress toward its completion. I sat down at my computer around 9 PM, knowing I was in for a long night, and the thought occurred to me: "Trust God with this." It was such a trite phrase that I had heard and even said myself dozens of times, but this time, the directive rang hollow for me. What did it mean, on a practical level, to "trust God"? It was not as though I could get out of writing the sociology paper, waiting on God to perform a miracle and provide me with a fully written essay. Perhaps my thoughts became more lucid while writing the paper; perhaps writing would have been more difficult had I not trusted God. But there was no way to prove that, no way to test the counterfactual. If I still had to do 100 percent of the work, then what difference did trusting God make?
The question of what it meant practically to trust God lingered with me for months. Whenever anyone dropped the phrase "trust God" into conversation, I interrupted to ask what they meant by that. I found biblical aphorisms I had heard countless times such as, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart," and, "Cast your anxieties on him," and, "'Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear,'" to lack practical guidance for what I was to do after pledging my trust in God about a concern. Trusting God, I realized, did not alter or remove my responsibility. I could not passively wait for God to miraculously intervene; I had to take action. I had to depend on myself to overcome my concerns, and perhaps God would help me in some unknown manner. Growth in my faith required me to reassess and modify my role in my interactions with God. Ironically, this seemed to go against the biblical guidance to "lean not on your own understanding."
During my sophomore year, I had a mental health crisis that gave me the push I needed to seek out regular one-on-one therapy. Instead of passively waiting for God to fix the circumstances precipitating this crisis, I took action. For six months, I met weekly with a Christian therapist trained in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Our objective was for me to reach a mental state where negative thoughts and feelings did not have power over me. Her approach was much more humanist than I had expected; emphasizing my own ability to assert control over my thoughts, she almost never brought up my relationship with Jesus as part of my treatment. Willing to try anything to improve my mental state, I leaned into the approach. I resolved to put in the work myself, ignoring my internal objections that doing so without asking for God's help might be the sin of pride. If God wanted to help me, that was his prerogative. But I could not wait around for him to show up--my life depended on it.
Through therapy, I discovered that I was not helpless, and that I could actively take steps to improve my mood. And I was doing it faster than prayer ever did for me. I did not need God to help me. In effect, it was the logical extension of the lesson I had learned related to trusting God. As my dependence on God decreased, both my mood and my self-esteem increased. Perhaps this was an example of correlation not equating to causation, but the more I experienced how much more enjoyable life could be, the less inclined I was to revert to my relationship with Jesus as it had been. Living in this new way was much more fulfilling. Once I had tasted the forbidden fruit, I could not go back.
The irony was that the techniques I practiced while working with a Christian therapist took me further from God--or, at least, my perception of who I had known God to be.
Thus, halfway through college, the two major factors for my deconstruction--abandonment of belief in biblical inerrancy and the dissolution of my dependence on God--were established. I began to diverge from the path I previously walked. As time progressed, this divergence only grew wider, and habitual spiritual practices began falling off. I stopped attending Sunday church; I stopped reading my Bible regularly; I stopped praying regularly; I stopped attending the college student church group. The big-picture matters to which I dedicated much of my mental energy evolved from theological questions to social justice, interpersonal relationships, community, and self-discovery.
This divergence became apparent in my conversations with other Christians. During my senior year, I was part of a "triplet" group in my Christian fraternity. We met on a weekly basis to catch up, read the Bible together, and pray for each other. One week, I shared my stress about my difficulties in finding a romantic relationship, an item for which I wanted advice and prayer. Neither of the other two guys in my triplet believed that same-sex relationships were permitted within the bounds of Christianity, so they were unable to offer sympathy, much less advice. They struggled to find the words to pray for me, because they could not bring themselves to ask God to help me in my search for a relationship. But by that point, I had long since resolved that conflict within myself. I realized that I had ended up in a place where I could no longer even agree with other Christians on the basics.
One might counter that perhaps I could have found a liberal church to grow my faith. I somewhat attempted to do so during grad school. A friend from high school and her husband began attending an Episcopal church; I joined them several times. But I found I would rather spend time with them without the accoutrements of attending church: singing songs, discussing text, and praying to someone who wasn’t tangibly there with us. It was more valuable for me to focus on relationships with people standing in front of me, rather than my relationship with someone I had never seen who may or may not respond to me on an indefinite timeline.
By the end of grad school, I had nothing left to demonstrate that I was a Christian, other than the fact that I loosely held onto that label. A year or two later, I finally stopped pretending that the label was an accurate descriptor.
I cannot emphasize enough how involuntary my deconstruction felt at every step of the way. I never actively chose to reject Jesus or Christianity. Instead, my continual pursuit of truth, frequently motivated by my desire to grow my faith, seemed to point me in directions that distanced me from who I thought God was. To maintain intellectual honesty, I could not believe the things I used to. "'Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'"
And I am free indeed. I am incomparably happier, more secure, and more confident than I ever could have been as a Christian. At this point, returning to faith would be a massive regression. I would have to actively ignore all the knowledge I have accumulated about the Bible. Additionally, I would have to take away my agency and give control of my life to a being whom I have never seen and--based on what is written about him in the Bible--has a moral code far inferior to my own. I haven't needed him for over a decade at this point; what benefit would reintroducing him into my life provide? I have found that I can do better without God or Christianity.
