"I Outgrew Christianity."
With the advent of modernity the world has come of age. Or has it? | Deconversion Series
Conversion and deconversion are anything but simple; belief and unbelief are as complicated and various as the transition between them can be. However, that isn’t to say that there aren’t common themes in deconversion today.
In After Doubt, A. J. Swoboda wrote that we are living through “the Age of Deconstruction.” For many, the plausibility of the Christian faith is at a low ebb. They find, often to their dismay, the whole Christian project just doesn’t seem believable anymore. Many are experiencing the dissolution of their faith as inescapable.
If you survey the accounts of those in the midst of deconstructing their belief in Christianity, you see common patterns. Like recurrent leitmotifs in a symphony, certain movements, motivations, and narratives keep showing up again and again. These narratives become both the explanations for deconversion and the engines behind it.
One of the most frequently echoed narratives is the idea that deconstructing one’s faith in Christianity is a step toward spiritual adulthood and maturity. Many people are leaving Christianity simply because they feel they have outgrown it.
The Modern World Has Come of Age
Our secular age tells a story about itself that with the rise of modernity, the human race has grown up. We have at last moved beyond the primitive ways of our ancestors, including their need for religious explanations of reality. Science has given us a surer means of understanding reality than any religion ever could. We know what causes hailstorms and plagues of locusts and floods and it isn’t the gods. We don’t need the archaic, repressive, violent, imperialistic, sexist, tribal, homophobic, patriarchal metanarratives of religion anymore. We have come of age.
Within this narrative, when a person converts to a religion, they are moving backward. It may be comforting to imagine you are not alone in the universe, that God is watching out for you, that things will magically be OK in the end, but those who are prepared to face the harsh realities of the universe don’t need such fantasies. As the Catholic philosopher, Charles Taylor writes in A Secular Age,
“The unbeliever has the courage to take an adult stance and face reality. He knows human beings are on their own. But this doesn’t cause him to cave in, rather he determines to work for the human good without false illusion or consolation.”
A friend once captured this sentiment when she declared, “I am not a Christian because I don’t need a crutch.” Even more than her words, what has always stood out to me about that memory was her bearing as she said it. Her head was high and she wore a wide smile. She wasn’t making a hesitant confession of unbelief. She was issuing a heroic vision statement for her life. Another writer said, “It is a tough life and if you can delude yourself into thinking there is some warm, fuzzy meaning to it all, it is enormously comforting. But it is just a story we tell ourselves.”
It is just a story we tell ourselves. If you need that happy story, fine. But it is still just a story.
Christianity is the Deviant Knowledge Now
In former times, (and still in plenty of places today) the one who left Christianity was the outlier, the outcast, the one making the socially taboo choice. Social scientist, Peter Berger dubbed that position as the “cognitive minority.” In A Rumor of Angels, Berger defined a cognitive minority as “a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from one generally taken for granted in their society… a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge’.”
There is a cross-pressure for anyone who would hold a minority view in the midst of a society in which that view is deemed, at best, implausible, and, at worst, deviant, regressive, and blameworthy. Berger adds that many undergo “cognitive collapse in the face of the pressure.”
However, today, the “cognitive collapse” of deconversion isn’t considered taboo by the larger society, it is considered an achievement. In Europe in the year 1400, deconversion didn’t get you a book deal; it got you burned. But the person in the midst of a process of spiritual deconstruction in the 21st century has a whole community on the other side waiting to welcome them. Christianity is the “deviant knowledge” now.
So in the midst of a personal deconversion, there is a ready resource available in the larger societal narrative that comes alongside the deconvert with encouragement that it is time to put their childish beliefs aside.
It seems increasingly plausible to many today that the transition to modernity writ large in society should be mirrored in their individual lives. Just as society has come of age, we too must grow up by undergoing the same disenchantment that society has undergone.
In this narrative, the comfort provided by Christianity is proof positive of its unreality. Christianity is a vestigial limb that helped buffer us from the harsh realities of life, but which we have now outgrown.
It is just a crutch – and now that the body is healed, the crutch can be set aside.
The Intoxication of Being “Post-Anything”
C. S. Lewis coined the phrase “chronological snobbery” to label the attitude that we modern people have reached the pinnacle of human knowledge and wisdom simply because we have the luxury of living in the present.
It is an easy mistake to make. After all, there is so much about previous ages that seems so primitive and backward, it is easy to imagine those adjectives should apply to the wisdom of the ages generally.
AJ Swoboda describes the mentality this way:
“[Modern culture] prioritizes and privileges breaking from past dogmas that are dogmatically dismissed as sheer naivete. New ideas, it is implied, are more likely to be true. Being and “evolved” person means breaking with these past superstitions. Being post-anything is now a sign of arrival and maturity—postmodern, post-Christian, post-Enlightenment, post-liberal, post-conservative, and post-political. Being post-something is powerful and intoxicating. We’ve been there. We’ve left. We’ve transcended, enjoying the ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ view from the top. We caress our own ego by calling this ‘being on the right side of history'.”
There is a lot to question about that narrative. Are ideas really more likely to be true simply for being new? Is the wisdom of the past really more likely to be folly simply for being ancient? Is it really more mature to conceive of the universe as a meaningless collision of atoms in the midst of a void that will one day swallow all matter and all meaning back into itself? Is taking comfort in the thought that God exists deplorable because it is comforting? Is the wisdom of the 21st-century more likely to lead to life just because science has given us greater knowledge than our predecessors?
Deconversion Isn’t Growing up
Is the societal story of “deconversion as growing up” an inevitable one, or can it be questioned? Taylor thinks that it is not at all inevitable. He writes:
“[In the transition to modernity] it isn’t that one moral outlook bowed to brute facts, but that one moral outlook gave way to another… The new model has a lot going for it: images of power, untrammeled agency, and spiritual self-possession… on the other side, if one’s childhood faith had perhaps remained childish; it was all too easy to come to see it as essentially so…”
The modern age looks back at the pre-modern age and tells a certain story about it. Despite the superstitious opinions of our ancestors, the universe has been found to be only made of material things. If science can’t detect it, it doesn’t exsit. Once you have stripped away unscientific superstition, you are left with modern secularism.
But Taylor is saying that triumphal story isn’t all it is cracked up to be. The birth of modernity was not a process of subtracting myths until we got down to the existential bedrock of secular materialism, but was an achieved worldview, a built belief which replaced a prior belief.
Humanity had to learn to live in a disenchanted universe. This involved not only setting down old patterns of belief but creating new ones. The transition to modernity wasn’t growing up; it was becoming something else.
This means that we can introduce some distance between the societal story of deconversion and the personal one. If the disenchantment society has undergone in the last centuries was not an inevitable uncovering of the brute facts of the universe, what if the story of “deconversion as growing up” can be questioned as well? What if personal deconversion is also an exchange of one worldview—that can either be held with maturity or childish simplicity—for another worldview that can be either mature or immature?
Growing Up Into Christianity
Faith needs to grow and become mature in order to endure, but the path from a childish Christian faith to a shrewd, worldly, and wise unbelief isn’t a necessary path. You can grow up into Christianity, rather than only out of it.
Actually, this is what every Christian has to do. Most people begin their Christian journey with a shallow faith because growing up takes time. However, Christianity itself is not insipid. It is not naive or shallow. Rather it is a profound, rich, and nuanced body of ideas and modes of life. It is deep enough to meet the needs and answer the questions of real people in the real world.
Christianity (at its best) is about reality—discovering it, facing it, wondering at both its richness and its depravity, shaping it and being shaped by it. Real, mature Christianity doesn’t breed hothouse flowers, prone to wilt when faced with the harsh realities of the facts of life. Rather, it equips those who would be disciples to face any reality no matter how harsh.
You Can’t Bear It Yet
There is something very comforting about Jesus’s words to the disciples in John 16. Jesus has come to the eve of his death and knows that a lot of things are about to change. He has had three years of constant travel with his disciples and he finds that, despite all their time together, despite the fact that he knows them better than they know themselves, despite the fact that he is the perfect teacher and the incarnation of the infinitely creative God, he is at a loss for words.
“I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” -John 16:12, 13
They couldn’t bear what he had to say not because they were primitive pre-modern people, but because it takes a long time to grow up. Even in their best moments, these future pillars of the church were as ham-fisted as the rest of us. They were just children who got to spend three years with God enfleshed and the experience had started to transform them, but the process had only started.
This brings us to the key differences between the growth process promised in the gospel of Christ and the coming-of-age narrative trumpeted by the gospel of modernity.
The important thing about growing up is not to exchange the wisdom of former ages for the knowledge of the 21st-century. Rather, it is to exchange the unrealities and distortions we encounter in our own lives and in the culture at large for God’s truth and God’s reality.
But Jesus promised them what he promises us. “I have so much more to say to you.” God is not hesitant about disclosing reality to us. His every move with, in, and around us is designed to lead us exactly to the real and make us into the kinds of beings who can walk into it with maturity.
Because God is committed to us, he does not leave us in the unreal. He encounters us in glimpses of his fullness, in the failures of our distortions of reality, and in confrontations with himself in the midst of our days. Each encounter is an opportunity to step further into reality or further into the unreal. True maturity hangs on the outcome of those choices, not the fact that we happened to be born in this century.
Walking With God
The opportunity before us is to walk with God himself as he leads us along our own journey into maturity. That journey is was just as available (and just as challenging) to ancient people as it is to us moderns.
If we look at ourselves and see, as the disciples did on their own journeys, only pale shadows of Christ, should we be surprised?
If we find immaturity, and even falsehoods, on the lips of those who hope to tell us the truth, should we be shocked?
We are all just children too. Even though it is the 21st-century, our personal journeys are just beginning. Jesus still has so much to say to us, if we can only bear it.
True maturity doesn’t lie in walking away from the way of Jesus, but in grappling ourselves to him come what may. It doesn’t lie in decoupling ourselves from ancient faith, but in being humble enough to sit and wait and listen until we are “led by the Spirit into all truth”—a process that is unhasting, unresting, and neverending.
Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)
Photo by Timo Stern on Unsplash