Beyond deconstruction: why I choose to reconstruct my faith – by Tobias Mayer

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In recent decades, ‘deconstruction‘ has become the standard term for dismantling one’s inherited religious beliefs—a stripping away of layers to find what is ‘real’.

But what, really, does it have to do with faith at all? Where is Jesus in the deconstruction narrative?

Too often, it looks like a self-indulgent inward journey of ‘self-discovery’, rather than the outward journey of community awakening that true Christianity offers us.

Finding faith
Yet an inward journey was exactly what I was looking for when I first stumbled into the church.

I was not raised Christian, but found my own way here, and in those early days, I liked to say that I came to Christianity already deconstructed. I had a fiercely independent mind, was ready to challenge church dogma, primed for radical inclusiveness, and, let’s face it, enlightenment.

And that was my problem. Enlightenment.

My journey into Christianity—what I would now call walking ‘into the light’—began around 2001. I was forty-two, with a long trail of pain and destruction behind me. I had mistaken the true light of the Gospel for the intellectual ‘Enlightenment’ of the rationalists.

Arrogance

It is only with years of hindsight that I see the arrogance of believing I had arrived in my faith with an open mind, free of dogma, and primed for inclusiveness.

My guides were the likes of Peter John Gomes, Brian McLaren, Ched Myers, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Robin Meyers, Walter Wink, and John Shelby Spong – enlightened, liberal Christians one and all. They were a far cry from the fundamentalist, evangelical upbringings from which my fellow Christians were deconstructing.

Thoroughly modern

In reading such writers, I thought I was being radical, a thoroughly modern Christian. In reality, I was merely following the breadcrumbs left by my upbringing.

My politically leftwing, open-minded parents, my peer group (at least those that thought about it at all), and my socialist-orientated teachers and influencers had all, in their innocence, guided me towards a form of Christianity that aligned with enlightenment philosophy. I had attempted to justify my faith in the eyes of my family and peers by making it ‘sensible’.

When I finally realised this, I balked. I didn’t need a faith that was palatable to atheists; I needed a faith that was true to the mystery.

The fallacy of enlightenment theology
This “enlightenment theology”—the desperate attempt to justify Christianity by forcing it to align with modern science and rationalism—is a trap. It treats science as an all-knowing, absolute authority, as if the lab has replaced the altar as the source of all truth.

I now reject this subordination. To suggest that a spiritual truth is only ‘valid’ if it passes a scientific stress test is to misunderstand both faith and science. Science, as we currently know it, is a seriously incomplete body of knowledge; it is a shifting landscape of assumptions and guesswork, often heavily influenced by institutional incentives.

When we try to make the ‘Word’ fit into the narrow boxes of contemporary physics, we aren’t saving faith; we are shackling it to a human methodology that is, by its nature, prone to error.

And the irony is, the more the New Physics reveals the world, the more shrouded in mystery it becomes.

The cost of deconstruction
In 2016, seeking to learn from others, I joined the Nomad online community. What I found was a sea of disillusioned Christians in the throes of deconstruction—my kind of people, I thought.

However, I noticed a troubling pattern: many were not truly “deconstructing” their need for a creed; they were simply replacing the old one with a new, secular orthodoxy: psychotherapy.

They had traded the priest for the therapist and the liturgy for the diagnostic manual. But there is a glaring, systemic difference. The Christian way of life—the radical, egalitarian ‘Way’ of Jesus—is freely given to all. It belongs to the poor and the broken.

In contrast, the “psychotherapy way of life” is an elite pursuit, a commodity that costs thousands of pounds. To replace communal, cost-free grace with a billable hour of self-analysis is not liberation; it is just a different kind of enclosure.

Embrace mystery
Where enlightenment theology and modern therapy seek to resolve every contradiction through data or ‘processing’, traditional Christianity seeks to dwell within them. I acknowledge the gaps—the historical evidence for certain narratives is thin, and the New Testament miracles baffle the rational mind—but I feel no need to dismantle my faith because of them.

Instead, I embrace the mystery. I see these stories as “the glue” that holds the unknowable together. We live in an age of “Technological Man,” where we treat blessings as rights and seek to materialise our will through the financial markets and the pharmaceutical industry – false gods if ever there was one.

We have become “reluctant believers,” burdened with a demand for evidence but lacking the intuition to lighten the load. To embrace mystery is an act of defiance against the cold righteousness of absolute certainty.

The altar rebuilt
The difference between deconstructing and reconstructing is the difference between an ending and a beginning. Deconstruction is often about what you don’t believe anymore. Reconstruction is about what you do with what remains.

I am a Christian because I choose to embrace my history and the tradition of the land I live in. I am not interested in the “fake separation” of the spiritual and the secular; for me, Christianity and (true) socialism remain inextricably intertwined.

By reconstructing, I am not trying to get back to a “pure” version of the past; I am building a nuanced version of the future—one where the prayer, “Thy will, not mine, be done,” serves as a release into a force of love that is beyond my comprehension, but never beyond my reach.

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Tobias Mayer works as a teacher, facilitator and coach. He runs teamwork and leadership workshops utilising the Bible in creative and non-coercive ways, see Workshops and Events.