Deconstructing your deconstructionism.

Since the mid 1990s anything ‘deconstructed’ was suddenly very cool and everything from deconstructed Aristotelian ethics to a deconstructed sandwich (which is effectively two slices of bread on a plate next to some ham) was suddenly column inch worthy.

Driven largely by postmodernism outside the church, deconstructionism inside was dressed up in ‘challenge everything’ and ‘strip everything back’ language. The popular coat this wore for a number of years was The Emerging Church (remember that?).

The thing is that I like this kind of language and approach. Arguably the basic attitudes around this kind of deconstructionism are found in sound exegetical methods and healthy critical thinking. We should challenge traditions and attitudes of our belief systems, and it’s also important to step back, take stock, and even strip back what we believe to its roots and uncover the gold under the dressings.

Taking this further, if we were to truly honour what philosopher Jacques Derrida meant by Deconstructionism, I think we would find all kinds of helpful avenues to explore. Although this tends to be far less what we mean by ‘deconstructionism’ and so won’t be the focus of this post.

I want deconstructionism to work, therefore, but at its heart there’s an issue: Deconstructionism, in the way we use it, literally means taking something apart.

If all you’re doing there is taking something apart to see how it works, then I can see some wisdom in this. It’s a smart way to figure out the mechanics of anything – take it back to its fundamental, component parts. This is also ideal if you have a supply of spares in case you break anything.

Of course, you can’t do that with living things. If you start ‘deconstructing’ a pig, at some point you’ll take something out that can’t just be put back in, and that pig will die.

You just can’t do this with people. They bleed. You can’t do this on yourself either. You bleed too. At the very least it’s a risky thing to do alone.

Shooting yourself in the foot

Taking the more positive side, you can look critically at your worldviews and (ideally facilitated by a therapist) do some healthy unravelling and delving into your personal history. You can look for root causes, repressed hurts, and milestone events. That’s healthy. The Bible would mark this out as part of our journey of sanctification and wholeness.

But taking yourself apart indiscriminately is just not the same thing. You bleed. The more you take apart without compassionate help, or invested guidance, the more chance you have of cutting something irreplaceable, or unscrewing something fundamental. The damage of caviller or isolated deconstructionism can last for years.

The same thing is true for organic systems like families, marriages, the environment, and even churches. If you haphazardly start taking things apart, at some point you could cut something that shouldn’t be cut. The modern deconstructionist attitude to this is, ‘well maybe that thing needed cutting’, but who are we to make that decision for other people? This type of cutting affects more people than just us.

Even without the inherent selfishness behind that, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. As soon as you start deconstructing an organic thing, you exponentially limit the ability for that thing to grow, change, or be made well. Isn’t that what we wanted?

Are you really doing what you think you’re doing?

Deconstructionism is held up as almost an Eastern philosophical approach. It’s used in the same conversations as mindfulness, reflective practice, and spiritual formation. It’s seen as a rebuke to the imperialistic and controlling nature of the world, education, politics, or the established church. All of this is super attractive to a Millennial like myself! In reality though, this dramatically misunderstands the epistemological nature of what deconstruction is.

As a quick caveat, if you’ve studied Deconstructionism (big D) as a theory, you’ll know it’s really the brainchild of Derrida as a way of contrasting and drawing words from meaning. Although there is overlap, this is rarely what people are really doing when they use the word ‘deconstruction’, and this is perhaps truer in Christian circles.

You can trace the roots of what we mean by deconstructionism directly back to Rationalist Philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume – or more recently, the Analytical approaches of Moore, Wittgenstein, or Russell. It is not an Eastern approach by any stretch of the imagination.

An Eastern approach looks at something in its organic entirety. It moves things around but doesn’t strip parts off the whole and it doesn’t naturally remove concepts from the table. It keeps things together and it keeps dialogue open. Eastern philosophy highly values to nature of community over the individual. The deconstructionist approach is Western and individualistic to its core.

How we approach deconstructionism destroys and it eliminates. It strips and it breaks. It pulls things apart and reduces ideas down to obtuse simplicity. It relies on an objective coldness towards, and disconnect from, the subject matter. This has its place – especially in arenas like engineering or chemistry – but it’s not the obvious place to go for organic health.

The destructive patterns of deconstructionism

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

• Person A has bad experience of church.
• Either Person A doesn’t seek, or church doesn’t provide, healing and reconciliation.
• Person A leaves church, but still feels spiritually connected to God.
• Person A starts a ‘time of deconstruction’ to harmonise their connection to God, and their experience of church.
• Person A gathers others and starts a new form of deconstructed ‘church’.
• New church starts to formalise and institutionalise.
• Person B has a bad experience of this
• Rinse and repeat.

This is simplistic, but it tells one of the many stories of deconstructionism.

Sometimes we engage in deconstruction when we should engage in conflict resolution. Sometimes we engage in deconstruction thinking we’re doing soul care but end up with a much smaller faith. Sometimes we engage in deconstruction as a way to ‘fix’ church, but instead end up disabling the very things needed for growth.

There is much in our faith that needs to be fought with. There is plenty in established church to be challenged. Church as a whole needs to do much better in all kinds of ways. There are also many legitimate reasons to leave a church – especially after experiences of abuse or harassment. These experiences can even necessitate seasons of solitude away from established Western church practices. We need to do something, but deconstructionism isn’t necessarily the answer.

I think the healthiest things we can do that resemble deconstruction are done carefully, with a therapist, in a family, or within a community. In fact, if we took the Bible seriously – especially the community ethics encouraged in the early parts of the book of Acts, Paul’s epistles, and the pastoral teachings of Jesus – then I think we’d find better practices.

Deconstruction, at its heart, is a cold, mechanical way of breaking things. It’s not designed for things that are alive, and as a result often makes things much worse. It’s tempting, and it’s hot right now, but that doesn’t make it helpful for longevity, healing, change or growth,

We should engage in critical thinking, in spiritual formation, in self-examination, in healthy debate and dialogue with church and family. We should be vulnerable and honest and seek mutual support in a community of meaningful relationships within a worshipping body. We need to consider the whole and think about the necessity for organic matter and systems to be connected in order to work, change, or grow.

Church is far from perfect – but it’s a big boat that moves slowly when were all committed to seeing it at its best.

Let’s leave our versions of deconstructionism to the inanimate.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash