Week 1 Recap: True stories, backsliding, and deconstruction

I’m one week into my 40 days of trying Christianity (again).

It’s been a ride.

There have been so many things, but I’m limiting this update to those top of mind.

Conversations with Christians

I’m really grateful to everyone who filled out my google form - that's a dorky sentence but fr thank you. Some of the submissions were really moving and vulnerable, and it felt like a beautiful gift that you'd share yourselves like that. I look forward to continuing those conversations in the coming weeks. If you haven’t shared your story and want to, do iiiiiiit.

This was the best part

Beyond reading the form submissions, I got to have a few amazing multi-hour conversations with some longtime friends. All these men I’d known for decades and most of that time we would’ve said that our shared faith was our main bond, yet somehow we’d never really discussed the origins of our faith in much detail.

It made me realize a dynamic that seems pretty common in the church where we give this “testimony” version of our stories - often sounding something like “I grew up in church but never really took my faith seriously, but then my freshman year of college the Lord spoke to me through this sermon and and my life was changed.” And that story (whatever version of it you tell) may be totally true, but if you think about it, it’s a pretty surface-level description of such a deep experience. We use Christianese shorthand to simplify the relevant emotional, spiritual, and relational complexities. Communicating this way limits the degree to which we can understand each other’s or even our own experiences.

In the conversations I had last week, I focused on asking more in-depth questions that helped paint the picture of what my friends were experiencing during these pivotal faith moments, inviting them to share more specifics until I could really imagine being them in those stories. At that point it became clear and understandable why these moments were so meaningful to them.

Examples of questions that came up in these conversations:

• What was the aesthetic of your childhood church?
• What were your family’s car rides to and from church like?
• What did you enjoy about that youth group?
  
• Who invited you to that event? What was your friendship with them like?
• What was your emotional life like in the season leading up to that pivotal church service?

I finished these conversations with a much richer understanding of my longtime friends’ childhoods, family dynamics, emotional makeups, and why their faith is important to them. I think these guys also enjoyed the chance to reflect on some memories they hadn’t recalled for years and got to better appreciate their own points of view.  Some may recall one of my main objectives in this experiment was to regain a sense of empathy for religious believers, and it's encouraging to feel that happening in real time.

If you have religious friends you care about but haven’t taken the time to dig in to a deeper understanding their faith journey in this way, I'd highly recommend it!

Friction Points

Aside from these positive connections, there have also been challenges to the conversations. Of course, nobody will be surprised there's been a decent amount of the zealous, self-righteous, judgmental energy - which I can admit I've totally been the guy on the other side of those interactions at times, so no hate just an observation.

But within those exchanges, I want to draw attention to one particular disconnect I’ve noticed - where religious folks seem to conflate deconstruction with backsliding.

Backsliding vs. Deconstruction

Almost every faith story I’ve received highlights a season of “backsliding” (falling into complacency or avoidance of your faith, going against your “better judgment” to pursue distractions). I can definitely relate to that feeling - throughout my life but especially in adolescence where I chased girls, sports, social status, etc. or let my undisciplined self run loose (porn, temper, laziness). In those times, I felt guilty ("convicted") under the surface because I was ignoring a higher calling, prioritizing short term satisfaction over big picture joy and purpose.

But there's another experience of stepping away from faith that’s almost the inverse of backsliding, and not everyone gets it. A lot of us label this process “deconstruction.” It’s the work of accepting that the beliefs you’ve held for a long time don’t make sense to you anymore. It's letting go of these old beliefs and grieving the version of yourself they mattered to in order to re/gain your integrity.

I say deconstruction is the inverse of backsliding because it involves facing a truth in yourself that would be easier to avoid in the short term (whereas backsliding is trying to avoid a truth by distracting yourself in the short term).

Deconstruction doesn’t have to mean the end of religion forever or for everyone. I have several friends (including a few that filled out my form) that have deconstructed their religion but then reconstructed a new understanding of Christianity that feels more authentic to them. Maybe that’s the journey I’m on now, idk time will tell.

Like faith, you can’t prescribe deconstruction to somebody - it’s a process they have to arrive at for their own reasons in their own time. Or sometimes they never do - it seems like a lot of people go their whole lives without deconstructing. I don’t need everyone else to deconstruct for mine to be valid, but the disconnect does feel like it sabotages mutual respect and understanding. When I'm genuinely seeking truth and goodness in my life in a way that's unfamiliar to someone and the only way they can interpret it is through their own projections of "running from God" or "hardening my heart," it feels like the conversation has nowhere to go.

This is maybe a lot of words to say: ideology divides people because it leads us to assume we all have the same experience of life when we don't. I wish I had a solution to overcome that barrier but for now it just is what it is. Perhaps at some point (possibly in the next 5 weeks) I’ll have more wisdom there.

Books & Podcast

To wrap up, I wanted to share the media I’ve CONSUMED in this first week:

• Gospel of Matthew
• Gospel of Mark
• Augustine’s Confessions (books 1-3) - thx Justin
• DOAC interview with Wes Huff - thx Alex
• The Freedom of the Christian by Martin Luther - thx Doug

These were all interesting to explore but tbh this was too much for me for just one week. Trying to process this much information at once made it hard to sleep. I'll keep dialing to find a more sustainable rhythm.

Invitations to Get Involved

Share your faith story here (I’d specifically love to hear from people who converted to religion later in life - pretty much everyone I’ve heard from was more or less born into Christianity.

Share my posts with anyone you think could relate to this exploration (on either side of the belief fence). I’m finding this concept to be a rare neutral ground for religious and non-religious folks to connect over.

Ironically, my social media feed has been flooded with anti-religious content lol, and I thought maybe following some Christian creators during this time could be a good addition, so feel free to send through any Christian ig/tiktok accounts you appreciate.

I’m thinking about a good way to invite people to a contained discussion channel where I can converse and share ideas with the people interested in this. I think a Discord group is prob the right tool but I’ve never really used Discord and don’t know who does. A group text would be miserable, my mba social media feels too public and noisy to my friends who don’t care about this project. Reach out to me know if you’d be interested in joining something like that, or have a suggestion of a tool you’d use for it.

Ok thanks for reading. Godspeed fam.