We Need to Talk About Christian Deconstruction
And why it’s not a bad thing, but necessary
It was during high school in the 1990s that my doubts about the Christian message I’d grown up hearing crumbled. My parents let me leave the church I had grown up in to find my path, but the one rule was that I had to attend a church of some kind. My friends and I didn’t really like church, though. We liked hiding warm beer in a hollowed-out section of my friend’s bathroom cabinet. Then we’d pour it over ice and drive our trucks into the woods and party. We also enjoyed attending concerts, where we would raise our hands in the sign of the horns as we moshed to music. We dated different girls and tried to get lucky in the beds of our trucks.
So while we called ourselves Christians, because that was all we’d known, we didn’t care about living it. Plus, no one we knew cared to live their faith either, except for the weird effeminate ones at our school who made Jesus into their boyfriend.
My friends and I just weren’t into singing songs about wanting to climb up into Jesus’s lap and nuzzle Him. That was weird. Plus, none of us could tell you why we believed in the faith, except for the fact that we’d repeated some weird incantation where we asked Jesus to live in our hearts. It was fire insurance more than anything, and since everyone claimed to…
