I’ve been deconstructing, and reconstructing.
Deconstructing religion, faith, faith practices, religious language, Christian culture and the ways of the American Christian church. The institution, the implementation; the choosing and framing of information.
I’ve been reconstructing my relationship with the whole thing – faith, church, God, religion, history.
I’ve come to a point in my faith journey where I can no longer continue as I have been, because I haven’t been going anywhere. I didn’t even realize how long I’ve been plateaued until I really started to measure the time. I needed to rest, I needed to let things sift and settle, but I got a little too comfortable here. I’ve gone days, weeks, maybe even months, numbed out.
I’ve wanted to move forward for so long and haven’t figured out how. How do I acknowledge everything precious and terrible, everything honorable and disgraceful, everything holy and evil?
Before I begin the airing of grievances, I want to be clear: I’ve had an overall really good church experience. I wasn’t run out, I wasn’t put out, and I didn’t suffer any outright abuses or traumas. I was the 6th generation of my family baptized in the church I grew up in. It was home in so many ways. I was golden there. I was safe and beloved. I loved it.
My grievances regarding the church are deep because my love and roots are deep. They are not specific to the church I was raised in. So many of my grievances have very little to do with me specifically. The church is a body and an institution and it wields mountains of power and it must be held accountable and our faith practices need growth and revival.
All that said, I can’t pretend I didn’t have questions and concerns. Even as a child, there were things taught in church or by church that didn’t sit right with me. Things that didn’t align with the Spirit in me and the discernment and wisdom of the Spirit in me. I didn’t know why the dissonance was there, but I knew it was. I had to walk far enough from my safe places to see past the blinding power of my own comforts.
An Airing of Grievances
So much of the American church experience weakens our spiritual connection by design and instead of true spiritual development, pushes us to depend upon and adhere to man-made guidelines and guidance.
The church has an awful history of denying the image of God in others for the purposes of greed and evil and in ignorance and arrogance – destroying the sacred cultures and homelands of other people (instead of honoring them as God’s creation and learning from them), acting as if and believing that they have both the right and approval of the Divine Creator do so and justifying those actions with scripture.
Additionally, church/scripture has been used by people as the foundation and defense of racist movements and genocide (colonization, slavery, the Holocaust, Jim Crow, white supremacy overall, etc) and the mistreatment of women and minorities for centuries and the persecution of anyone who didn’t comply with their rules (i.e. witch trials).
The patriarchal structure churches have followed for ages has supported and contributed to the abuse and mistreatment of women and divorces people from their true fullness in Christ and from pursuing their true spiritual callings if they don’t fit into the desired social structure of the given time. It has contributed to toxic masculinity where men can’t be kind, tender, in need, or sweet without being instructed to “man up”, leading men to suffer and often harm themselves or others.
It has contributed to generational sexual harm by sexualizing women and girls and pushing purity culture with the weight of “managing” purity on women while absolving men and boys – treating them as if they are merely animals susceptible to feral instincts and desires, allowing for and even at times encouraging marital rape and sexual coercion to satisfy male “needs” throughout the course of history.
It utilizes legalism and prescriptive standards instead of trusting the Holy Spirit to guide and redirect.
It has historically swept abuses by those in power under the rug, often ignoring, shunning, shaming, and gaslighting the victims of the abuses.
It has obsessively used shame and fear as it’s main tools of managing “the flock”.
The use of shame and guilt and fear as motivations to get people to turn to Christ instead of love and peace and freedom are not of God and are spiritual abuse and have contributed to generational trauma in many families and communities.
The message of a “good Christian” being “put together” is toxic when faith is messy and life is hard and it creates a culture of people who hide their heartaches and struggles and questions and general mess so that they aren’t shamed or gossiped about.
The obsession with monitoring/dictating “appropriate” lifestyle choices, attire, and social activities is an effort to control and subdue and does not leave room for people to use their own spiritual discernment and to develop spiritual maturity.
People who are raised to be fearful of hell and “messing up” and who are told they can’t trust their inner voice because it is “deceitful” and who are shamed into being compliant in the name of “being a good Christian” are spiritually weakened and easily manipulated and can and will be used by and for dark forces.
People use religion as a weapon against one another in political and social settings, but are often so spiritually disconnected or underdeveloped, that they are able to do no actual work against the spiritual warfare that is around them.
The American church makes God out to be too small, too petty, and too vengeful and the Holy Spirit too weak and boring and Jesus too simplistic, flat, and law-abiding.
The church speaks out far too little about the spiritual danger of the love and money
The church doesn’t cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in it’s congregations enough to share the fruit abundantly with those around them
The American church has allowed itself to be overcome with Christian nationalism and has become a gross display of selling out the gospel for the greed of money and power in the political sphere.
Throughout the history of the church, people in power have decided what to teach and how to teach it for the sake of their own advancement and control and have committed egregious crimes against their brothers and sisters in Christ while doing so.
It seems that often, religious ways and the “ways of the world” are two sides of the same coin even though many in the church fail to see the ways in which the church itself is regularly perpetrating harm.
I hadn’t heard the phrase “ain’t no hate like Christian love” until recently but so many people around us right now feel that wound to the core of their being. We should not settle and strive only for our own comforts and security while our brothers and sisters still suffer. The church can not abide that and still be considered a light in the darkness.
The community of a church family can be beautiful and powerful and healing. I am hopeful for the revival I see in the hearts of others who are also rebuilding their faith practice from a place of love and care. I am hopeful when I see church leaders and church goers asking questions and listening with honor and love and care and humility. I am hopeful when I see people reconnecting to sacred practices that were taken from them or hidden from them. I am hopeful when I see people leave places of harm and find open arms of love waiting. I am grieved with the church but I am hopeful for the church.
Re-tuning My Heart
I mentioned most of my grievances aren’t really about me, but I have also been wounded and wounded others with harmful spiritual teachings and have been misled by church culture. I’ve thought things and made choices that affected my heart and my life in harmful and hurtful ways because of spiritual traumas and abuses and lies that I believed because they were so prominently assumed to be true and expected to be adhered to. I spent a lot of time boxed up and in religious chains and disconnected from the Holy Spirit within me while I tried to jump through religious hoops that only weakened me and led me further from the truth of who God is.
Healing my connection to the Divine within me and re-tuning my heart towards God as love has meant rejecting or releasing a lot of “teachings” and standards of church culture. It’s meant finding different language with less loaded religious baggage and it’s meant feeling out of place in and amongst some groups. Most recently, I’ve been letting go of the desire to “prove” my beliefs are “right”.
I know what I know and there’s a peace and openness to it. I feel settled not in the specifics, but in the Holy Spirit and my connection to the Spirit. I trust God within me. Other things will shift and change over time, so I’m really only staking my peace and my place in the love and light and peace of God. The details and reasons feel less and less important as time goes on.
I respect the work so many people put into learning and teaching scripture and I don’t assume to understand what I don’t understand. I do know that you can find a respected pastor or Bible scholar to support various conflicting theological ideas though – so there is much in the gray even for scholars of the text. I don’t want to depend more on that than on my personal relationship with God. There is truth and wisdom in the text, there is also a lot of room for interpretation. I am choosing to defer to the Spirit if a human interpretation of the Bible (even a really popular one in religious circles) does not align with the Spirit.
I believe the Bible is a sacred text that we can keep learning more about. We can question and examine historical and popular interpretations. Learning the word of God within the context of the historical, social, and political times in which it was not only written but also translated is interesting and important and helpful. I’ve found I can ask myself: does a new understanding of this text change the truth about God or just the application to daily living?
I consider now what I’ve been taught and why and by who and I am no longer willing to accept teachings that don’t line up with who I know God to be through Christ living in me. I can remember even as a child listening to the way some stories and lessons were presented and thinking “that doesn’t seem right if God is who God is”. I honor that voice now, where once I felt pressure to conform to the understandings and interpretations of others and the traditions already set in place.
The Word is only Holy and alive if the Divine surpasses the earthly in the act of seeking wisdom and guidance from it in real time.
When everything else is stripped down and away, the Holy Spirit is all that remains – with Jesus as the example of how to live a spirit-filled life on this earth and God all around in the details of everything, breathing light and life and love into our existences.
