An Open Letter to Evangelicals Wondering About My Deconstruction

I get it. It’s kind of mind blowing how someone can go from speaking boldly about what I think God is saying to me, what God is doing in my life, and what God is leading me to do, to suddenly not really wanting to talk about God at all. I went from hashtag bibleverseoftheday to hashtag exvangelical and sometimes I post things that cause you to have a reaction. Sometimes you feel hurt, defensiveness, or irritation. You try pushing back in public comments on social media posts but get swallowed by several unexpected replies. You try reaching out privately, inviting me for coffee or a Zoom chat or a walk but I don’t seem eager to accept. You try direct message dialogue but it never feels satisfying. Some of you try calling me names that I don’t even want to write here without a trigger warning. Others feel the need to explain why you unfollowed me. A few of you share articles with me from Christian magazines about the “dangers” of deconstruction.

So now here I am and I need to say a thing. Maybe a few things.

I am on a journey. I have no idea where it will end because it likely never will, but I can tell you where it started. It started with two realizations. The first is that what evangelicalism tries to say is absolute Biblical truth is actually their interpretation of the Bible. The second is that there are many systemic problems with evangelicalism, often a result of their Biblical interpretation, that cause harm. It started with what felt like a glitch in The Matrix. A small feeling of discomfort with something that was said during a sermon. As I dug into that feeling and studied what was said, the discomfort turned into a knowing. Slowly, as I read and studied and listened to stories and read more, I felt like I was pulling back layers and layers of knowledge that unmasked the truth about this system that I had sat comfortably in for more than 30 years. I found so much harm. It was in history, it was around me, and it was deep within me.

What you may not realize is that there are many painful parts of this journey. Maybe publicly I come across as confident and certain about things, but I’m flooded with uncertainty about who I was and who I am now while I sift through what I used to believe and formulate what I think now. There is so much grief in this space. I am leaving behind a place where I drew strength, comfort, solace, and refuge and shifting into new, unknown territory. It feels like not just the rug, but the very foundation under the rug has been pulled out from under me. I am in intense therapy as I unpack decades of experiences that I see through an entirely new lens. I am hurting and angry from feeling manipulated, and at the same time I’m angry with myself for not seeing it sooner. I cringe when I think about my own past refusal to question beyond a certain point, and my rejection of those who did give themselves that permission. You see, I’ve actually been in your exact shoes before.

So I hope you understand when I say that it’s not an easy thing to talk about. I spend most of my time talking about it with others that are on or have been on a similar journey to mine because they understand me more than anyone. And they don’t tell me my problem is a lack of faith or a failure to trust God enough. They know that if God does exist, They are big enough for all the questions… and also that it’s okay to wonder if God doesn’t exist. Either way, I think it's a good idea for all of us to consider that perhaps white American evangelical Christians have not cornered the market on faith and religion.

But occasionally I do accept the coffee invite, go on a walk, or respond to the DM. And I get frustrated. I’m met with deflection, defensiveness, and debate. I try to explain the harm I’ve read about in history and you discredit the authors I’m reading or say that those situations are outliers and don’t represent the system as a whole. I try to talk about the harm my friends have experienced and you say you’re sorry for them and their experiences, but your church, your friends, or *you* aren’t like the people my friends encountered. Or worse, you ask why it bothers me so much if it didn’t happen to me. And if I’m being completely honest, I rarely talk about my own harm with you because I’m actually quite scared to talk about my own personal experiences without knowing how you’ll hold them. I’m not sure if I’m ready to put some of my stories out there if I can’t be sure they will be held with care. Especially if you were there for those experiences and don’t understand how they harmed me.

So I do two things. Sometimes I withdraw. I don’t call as much. I don’t share as often or as deeply with you as I used to. It might feel like tension to you, but I think a better way to describe it would be boundaried. I know my own emotional capacity to dive into topics that are deeply personal and meaningful to me with people that don’t understand or don’t agree, and I can’t always do it. Other times I speak up. I am in a conversation and the language or ideology or theology is tied to something I have now learned is harmful and you call it being politically correct and I call it humanizing the voices that have been screaming to be heard for centuries longer than the day I started this journey.

I do try my best to have boundaries about what I put out into the world when it comes to the people I used to be close with. I realize that not everyone I’ve crossed paths with in life signed up to have a social media platform, and I’m not trying to drag my family and old friends through the mud by name.

I’ll also say that no matter what I do, I feel like a failure. I feel like I failed at our relationship because I can’t make it happy and sugary like before. I feel like I’m exhausting to be around because I can’t let certain things go in conversations. And on a more personal level, I feel like the foundation of everything I stood for is crumbling while rebuilding while crumbling again. I already have an inner critic that is quite loud and constantly tries to say I’m either too much or not enough. So these conversations, these shifts in relationship dynamics, and these moments that feel like tension are just ways that the inner critic doubles down and says, “I told you so.” All of this is why I’m in therapy too.

But know this. I am slowly starting to grasp that I don’t need to apologize for becoming a more true version of who I already was. Every single day I feel one step closer to finding contentment in a space that prioritizes harm reduction and inclusivity over loyalty to a deacon, doctrine, or denomination. For so long, I relied on others to tell me who I should be, and now I realize that who I am was in me all along.

So please understand if I’m a bit more guarded these days. I need to have agency over how my story gets out there and who I trust to hold space for it. Please understand why I’m hurt by the articles you’re sending me. They aren’t written by people who know this journey like I do. Please understand if I’m resistant to prayer. I spent a lot of my life not understanding what consent looks like and the least you can do is ask for consent before you pray the way I might not want you to. Please understand if I’ve closed my Bible for a while. My brain is scrambled with how manipulated I was into believing it said things that it actually doesn’t say. And please understand if I don’t want to read the same authors anymore. I spent decades reading those authors and I know what they have to say. I need to pay attention to the voices that were silenced for centuries.

I don’t know what else to say, except that sometimes the most difficult part of a painful journey is trying to help those around me understand what I need to feel loved, supported, heard, and seen while I’m on it. But this is me, trying to help you understand.

And know that the moment you’re ready to listen to, sit with, unpack, acknowledge, and address the harm, I will have my London Fog ready. You can even bring coffee.

Sincerely,

A Fellow Traveler