My first advice column

Not really, but sort of.

“We must take caution that we do not find ourselves in a world where our systems do not allow what they cannot imagine—where they, in effect, enforce the limits of their own understanding”.

            Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, (327).

I’m going to do something I don’t usually do, which is give advice.

Two years ago a piece I wrote was featured on the cover of Christianity Today. It was about a trend called “religious deconstruction”, which I took to mean “an attempt to reframe or reconsider theological opinions in service of the truth”.¹

I was fond of the idea of deconstruction, at the time. It has its roots in both the Christian tradition and in the academy. I have a foot in both places, and it seemed to me that this current concern could be borrowed to facilitate serious discussion about God.

Because I trained as a theologian after being brought up in evangelical churches, I knew well the challenge of getting both theological depth and clarity while not losing the beating heart of faith. One should not have to trade doctrinal clarity for a religion’s emotional goods- among them a feeling of connection to God, a sense of belovedness, and a connection to all other creatures who might know this love, too. It is difficult to find venues to have serious and critical conversations about the Christian tradition and not have to make this trade, so I wrote the piece to encourage “deconstruction”.

But I have come to think that I was wrong in writing a piece that encouraged religious deconstruction.

As I am writing in this series, the American church continues to be quite thin on the ground when it comes to theological depth. Some of the forms of religion we are examining proceed unabated without nearly anything truly religious about them. They could proceed almost uninterrupted without a real consideration of the things that makes them religious- a yieldedness to tradition or an understanding of the commandments chief among them. Many religious experiences seem to function primarily as experiences- weekly choreographed engagements with music and reading that seems often designed to induce improved behavior in people who attend. Church could be the Elks, or the Boy Scouts, and function identically.

I’d hoped in my piece to encourage the careful consideration of the Christian tradition and its legacy that might allow a questioner to consider, and then reconsider, their doubts about God in light of what is taught by the Church. It seemed a fruitful opportunity to engage the people who were disaffected with the story of Christianity and remind them that they were part of a larger tradition, one whose waters are deep and wide and can create buoyancy for people as they struggle and thrash against their doubts and personal pain.

I think I was terribly naieve.

I wrote a few weeks ago about “experiential expressivism”; which is the form of doctrine that privileges the private, inner experience of God. I’m increasingly concerned that some American Christians have only a private, inner experience to yield themselves to. For this reason, I wonder if “religious deconstruction” is, for many, a form of emotional reckoning with religious traditions that are outdated and religious people who were abusive/mean/ intolerant. As Lindbeck writes, traditions are well equipped themselves to deal with religious change and to rid themselves of religious error, but only if they are functioning as normative religious communities. If they are simply therapeutic engagements, they lack this potential. They become merely figments of our imaginations.

So here is the advice-column part, based on my observations and failed attempt to understand a religious trend.

There have been several pieces circulating recently about the challenge of Christian writing and publishing. Their focus is on the challenge of selling books, of finding an audience in a fractured media environment, and on balancing family responsibilities and even the vagaries of aging and attractiveness and how these things affect one’s “platform”. The focus was not on the writing itself, much less on the thinking behind the writing.

So much online writing lacks religious instincts- or at least the instincts that would move us beyond the stalemate that experiential-expressivism and cognitive-propositionalism have landed us in. I am less concerned that it is difficult to make a living as an author and more concerned that it is difficult to learn to think as a Christian. The two are certainly related, but we ought to focus more on the second than the first.

So here’s the advice.

Practice saying three things when you engage with online writing.

1. I’m not sure that’s true.

This might be a catchy slogan or a “gotcha” observation, but does it reflect broadly on both the world, outside my experience, and the tradition of Christian teaching about this? Is this a problem with “the American church”, or just my mom’s church? Am I angry and wounded, and using my audience to feel better?

It is so, so rare to get careful critical feedback on your writing. Typically you get two types of feedback on online writing- angry people who hate everything about what you’ve written, and the “you go girl!” tribe. [I’d like to say my readers are different on this account- I do get good careful feedback, sometimes positive and sometimes critical, and that is pretty amazing]. But if you only hear from trolls and cheerleaders, you will likely not be challenged at all in your content- you may even start talking louder, because you feel vindicated by the negative pressure.

So if you do encounter a post or observation that seems outmoded or exaggerated or poorly argued, practice saying “I’m not sure that’s true”. You could even engage the author directly! These sort of gentle prods are the first step on the path to actually thinking.

2. Two things can be true at the same time.

Did complementarianism really ruin everything? Can one person’s experience of an “abusive pastor” be due to their own personal history, and not necessarily be a universal? Am I allowing my mental health/ emotional trauma/ personal pain at broken institutions to narrate how I see everything? Is there another possible explanation for what happened?

Online writing encourages us to tell a single story. This is ironic, because good writing actually encourages the reverse. Novels especially invite us into the vagaries of human experience and motivations in ways that challenge simplistic narratives or moralistic readings. But online writing increasingly seems to encourage reducing a story or a phenomenon to a very rigid binary of good and evil and victim and oppressor. We behave as if a “systems” explanation is all-inclusive. But life is just weirder than that! Some of this may be that we write in short-form- but I suspect it is just easier to translate our experience into systemic evaluations and so make of a first person story a universal one. But this is not how stories work, not at all. Let two things be true at the same time. Say, “That is really interesting/sad/upsetting. Can I tell you my story?”

3. What story about God am I telling?

God is not a being in the world. He does not exist to serve our deepest expectations or massage our emotional wounds or create a feeling of at-peace-ness with the universe.² Yes, he does these things! But God exists outside of our emotional needs, outside of our experience of Him. Can we imagine a religious engagement that was not primarily about making us feel better? Can we imagine a reason for God that is not a reason?

I like to tell my students that the difference God makes is different from any difference that they think he makes- and in fact, God may be said to make no difference at all. But more on this later.

So when you are reading religious writing, ask yourself- “Who is the God that is described here? Is he portrayed as God the Father, or is he supposed to be my dad?” Does he exist only to meet my needs? This is a poor formula for any kind of relationship, notwithstanding one with God.

1. I’m quoting from myself; you can find the piece here.

2. I do use male pronouns for God. I used to insist on gender neutral pronouns. This is one occasion where I have changed my mind. Perhaps I will tell you why someday.