The Catalyst

A Series on My Deconstructing Phases - Part I

Super Moon 2013

Between then and now, I’ve grown up. The 29-year-old woman who sat across from her friend and asked some difficult questions about their friendship and some lies that lay between them, is not the same woman. I grew up. I made a life not rooted in Evangelical norms. I raised a family. I went no contact with abusive places and people. I gave up god. I moved into this house in the city. I sit on the front porch and spin words. I take to my garden to grow life. I read banned books. I went back to school and got another degree. I have a job outside the home. My children are teens and young adults. There are no babies on my hip, no little children to wrangle. Life has moved on. My spiritual and religious life went through a complete dismantling. I learned how to shift and then kept shifting. I am not the same.

So, when I think back to that morning visit with a friend and that conversation in my tiny townhouse living room 17 years ago, I sit with that 29-year-old me and that 26-year-old her… and I reflect on what my heart wanted in that moment. While she needed me to be key things - enabling and maintaining the status quo, I desperately wanted to be true to myself and breaking free of people’s approval. I was a Christian good girl coming undone. I wanted something bigger from the authentic community I was told we were going to build. And to have a place in that and be ok with myself - I couldn’t lie for them anymore.

Looking back, I can see how I was becoming a liability. As happens in friendship, I found out some things that were not very good, things that could shake a friendship off its foundation. I was willing to sit with her in whatever she needed to be, but I wasn’t going to do that without asking some key questions. All this time later - I can remember how it went - the set of her jaw and the building chill in the room as we went deeper and deeper into unraveling what had been tightly bound and hidden.

Let’s Chat About Warped Accountability

“Accountability” is super big in Evangelical spaces. Some of these folks have an “accountability partner,” to help them navigate their “sin issues.” It’s weird. I get it. You may have heard them chat about having an accountability partner to help monitor their porn usage. Folks micromanaging their “friend’s” lives to “help” root out sin and temptation is disturbing and wack. I never said the system was healthy and ok.

We are raised to believe we are desperately wicked little sin beasts in need of a dead and risen savior to be whole again. And even then… we are far from whole. Even after accepting Jesus as savior, being baptized, and dedicating your entire life and walk to God… most folks still require some kind of method of accountability to stay on the straight and narrow. At least that’s what they tell themselves.

It couldn’t possibly be that the whole sin default narrative is a scam from the start. Those churched folks insist they have all the tools you need to root out those sin issues and patterns with a handy dandy friend to help walk it out. It’s exhausting.

Sin management is big money and big business.

Hiding sin is even bigger church business.

For all their obsessing about sin, they sure do rush to hide it unless it will benefit them in some way. If it offers substance to a public testimony and faith declaration, they will parade that sin out so the masses can “ooo” and “aah” at all they have overcome in Jesus’ name. Satan isn’t winning today. Praise be.

But there are some things and some people (read this as church leadership), who only share the acceptable highlight reel and not the authentic stuff. This is the stuff they can’t let out because they would be eaten alive for it (because Evangelical churchianity is a little cannibalistic) or they might lose their positioning in the hierarchy. Nothing stops the flow of cash more than a leader with hidden sin issues.

They also have a whole network of enablers to help them hide it and deny it and fight it. It’s not until way later - when the victims have piled up and the deception starts to stink - that we learn about all the secret lists they love to keep. Their lists of the perpetrators and predators they have shuffled around to keep the garbage from piling up in one place for too long.

There are some church spaces where no one asks too many questions and if you do… that means you are out.

Me? I was out. And it was brutal.

When the Catalyst Spins Out of Control

From a Wednesday to a Sunday, I was locked out. The seats around us would empty person by person. I can remember taking the long way around after a church service to pick up our kids and encountering locked doors. It was the last Sunday we would walk into that building. It felt like a metaphor of everything that was happening to us and around us.

The phone would ring, and I didn’t know who to trust.

The email would ping, and I didn’t know who to trust.

The doorbell would ring… and they couldn’t get away fast enough if the information didn’t freely flow.

There would be requests to get coffee and every single one was either:

1. An attempt to get more information OR

2. Another person to nail the coffin lid closed. Someone had to make sure that lid was on tight.

Keep the circles small - they demanded.

So, I stopped answering or engaging. I went silent and into mourning and grief, but the catalyst - it opened my eyes to see how deeply dysfunctional the management system of church really is. I was only welcomed as long as I was not a threat to the small circles. Any deviation from the approved script was a threat. And those churched ladies knew exactly how to eliminate threats.

I had witnessed it for almost three decades but never been on the receiving end of their rage.

Those lovely, churched ladies sit in prayer rooms with padded chairs and beautiful artwork - a carefully curated space to engage in sifting, dismantling, and gathering. Those crafty little prayer warriors with the name of Jesus on their lips and the list of grievances in their hearts. They are protecting their god and his church with all their might. Protecting his church means protecting the male leadership at any cost. To build and protect their male church leaders’ legacy is to build god’s legacy, and who will stand against them?

They keep their lists close - the investors and influential, predators and perpetrators, plus the enablers and the flying monkeys and don’t forget the black sheep and troublemakers. When those lists of investors and predators intersect, they lock the lists in drawers and hide the evidence. Because kingdom building is expensive work and church investors are finicky.

If you step too close to authentic types of accountability - the kind that roots you deep and helps you grow - they wiggle and squirm and protest like worms on a hook. There’s only room to hold some folks accountable.

They are like the sin sifters - they sniff it out and root it out - of others, but if you get too close to their own locked closets and junk drawers, it gets messy fast. I have never witnessed church women move so brutally as when they are asked to hold themselves and their men accountable for toxic systems and abusive behaviors.

For me, the Aftermath was crushing

I laid in my bed and didn’t get up for months. I know that my people worried. It felt like my spirit had been ripped in half - a great rending of the soul. How do you come back from that? How then do you live?

What Does a Deconstruction Catalyst Look Like…

The catalyst for folks who come undone in their faith can be anything. It can be as violent as being abused and having folks blame and hide it - while rejecting and denying you, the one who was harmed. It can be as simple and as complicated as family dysfunction being shown in a true light, a light that shows you a better, different way to walk life out. It can be finally seeing churched leaders and their theology and values in a true light. Maybe you read a book or heard a different perspective or traveled and then wandered down a rabbit hole that unraveled all the things you were taught.

It can be watching the reactions to a brutal man being murdered by gun violence - awful… but then watching how the churched folks around you rewrite his narrative as if he loved god and loved others with his whole damn life and heart. Now, because the USA Christian nationalist narrative dictates it - they need him to have been a good man. But he wasn’t holy, and he wasn’t even a little bit good.

When you turn to face all the ways that everyone around you has been lying about what they really think, believe, and build their lives on, it can be devastating. When you begin to see all the bigotry, racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, xenophobia, etc. that you didn’t realize was around you and inside you, it shifts something deep in you that cannot be easily put back together again.

When you realize that your people and the things they believe are not exactly what you thought they were - that you’ve been handed a faux reality like Jim Carey’s character Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, when he finally starts to notice discrepancies in the world around him. Once you start seeing it with fresh eyes - deconstructing eyes - it is difficult to unsee it. You can’t take it back.

So, you sit in it - the catalyst of grief and anger and coming undone - and you wait for what comes next. The next isn’t easy. It leaves you rung dry and aching.

But we learn how to walk it out - the deconstructing and coming undone - anyways.

This is the way of it. Sit with me for a moment.

J.

UP NEXT:

The stages of my deconstructing - a series.

1. the catalyst and denial

2. dealing in anger and reality (the predators are real)

3. depression skipped the line

4. coming undone - battling it out with god

5. giving up god for lent or life or whatever

6. acceptance - I’m not afraid anymore

7. deconstructing into deconversion (coming undone round two)

8. spiritually ambiguous - learning to hold mystery instead of certainty

Also…

More to come. In the meantime, other posts about this time period: