Deconstruction: A Quick Church History

If you didn’t already read it, be sure to check out my first blog post in the deconstruction series on worldviews. That will come in handy for the rest of the conversations we will have on deconstruction!

In our continued series on deconstruction, today we are going to look at the last thirty years of church history. Certain movements and events influenced and paved the way, not only for the deconstruction movement, but how the church has responded to it as a whole. Let’s start by a quick summary of postmodernism.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism has changed society and culture. It’s also affected the church! Postmodernism, which began in the mid to late 1900’s, rose up against the modernist movement, where everything was defined by reason. Postmodernism, instead, “rejects concepts of rationality, objectivity, and universal truth. Instead, it emphasizes the diversity of human experience and multiplicity of perspectives” (Science Direct). Postmodernism culture tells us to look for what feels good, not necessarily what is true. We will see how postmodernism influenced the three different church movements below.

The Emergent Church

In the late 90’s, the emergent church movement quickly became popular (and just as quickly seemed to fade away). GotQuestions.com uses this phrase to define what the emergent church stood for: “As culture changes, a new church should emerge in response” (GotQuestions). The emergent church is a reaction to objective doctrine and a way of “doing” church to be relevant to the postmodern generation. Brian McLaren, an author, speaker, and former pastor, is one of the key founders behind the emergent church.

The emergent church has clear postmodern influences. In an emerging church, experience and subjectivity trumped reason and truth; the movement encouraged a focus on story and pictures instead of words. Compromise and differing religious views were promoted and statements of faith were eliminated; after all, that alienates people instead of bringing them together.

The emergent church was a desire to do church differently, but in the process destroyed a key pillar in the Christian faith: a commitment to the truth. We don’t hear much about this movement anymore, but the seeds were sown for future Christians to abandon truth in favor of how their feelings and desires led.

Progressive Christianity

Progressive Christianity is one seed that has sprouted—and spread wildly—from the emergent church movement and postmodernism. While it has its roots in the late 90’s, the movement has exploded within the last decade. Alisa Childers defines progressive Christianity like this: “This movement seeks to re-interpret the Bible, re-assess historic doctrines, and re-define core tenets of the faith. While claiming the title “Christian,” and boasting a high view of the Bible, it is sweeping up many unsuspecting Christians into a false view of who God is and how he saves people.” (White Horse Inn)

Progressive Christianity denies doctrines such as the atonement, Biblical authority and inspiration, original sin, deity, resurrection, and virgin birth of Jesus, and the Trinity. Meanwhile, it is known for affirming ideologies such as LGBTQ relationships and marriage, universalism, social justice and critical theory, pluralism, pantheism, and more. The focus on progressive Christianity is love and acceptance. The movement encourages Christians to follow Jesus, and often defines this to look like political activism and liberal interpretations of Scripture.

It’s important to note that progressive Christianity doesn’t mean a more “open minded” Christian or more liberal Christian; after all, it denies several major doctrines in the Christian faith. This makes it totally different from historic Christianity; is a different religion entirely.

Exvangelical Movement

The Evangelical movement was born out of progressive Christianity, but doesn’t necessarily align itself with progressive Christianity. An “ex-vangelical” is a person who has left the evangelical church, sometimes for progressive Christianity, but other times for atheism, agnosticism, or another belief or religion. An ex-vangelical does not need to consider themselves a Christian in this movement. There is also a broad religious background amongst ex-vangelicals; the term evangelical typically describes fundamental protestantism, but is defined different amongst different denominations.

While the ideas behind the exvangelical movement have no doubt been around for a while, the term was officially coined as a twitter hashtag in 2016 by Blake Chastain, who is a leader in the movement, as well as an author, activist, and podcaster. Ex-vangelicals who have left evangelicalism typically point to these things in the church: racism, LGBTQ discrimination, and conservative politics (can you think of any controversial political happenings in 2016?). In the book “The Deconstruction of Christianity”, the authors note that to be evangelical "…is perceived to be synonymous with misogyny, racism, homophobia, and the political support of Donald Trump” (Childers, Barnett).

My brush with the exvangelical movement happened in college, when I first noticed the hashtag trending on twitter. To my surprise, some Christian friends were using it. This led to a long trail of research on my part, especially reading personal accounts and testimonies, and a search to define and understand exactly what this movement meant. In my personal experience, the attitude surrounding the Ex-vangelical movement tends to be hateful and angry, especially towards Christianity and the church. This attitude makes it very difficult to dialogue with those who might be caught up in the movement. Since it is largely organized online, it creates a vacuum of sorts for a person to be totally sucked into the movement, online community, and ideals promoted by exvangelicalism.

There are many more movements, ideas, doctrines, and worldviews that have shaped culture and Christianity in the last few decades, but these are prominent ideas that have paved the way for the deconstruction movement. Not only did they pave the way, but in some ways they have also confused the deconstruction movement. Some who deconstruct will have been influenced by one or more of the ideas; others will have never heard of them. Still, the American church is on a downward trend—or should I say, spiral?—of rejecting truth.

Each of these movements centers around a departure from Scripture as authoritative and inerrant (something we discussed in my last post!). This worldview permits people, sometimes knowingly, other times unsuspectingly, into ideologies with dangerous implications. I do not think that the emergent church, progressive Christianity, and the ex-vangelical movement are harmless, but I do believe that some who had a genuine desire to follow Jesus have been mislead by the movements.

This is why the deconstruction conversation is so important. We must understand worldviews, and we must understand truth if we are to love others getting drawn into false teaching and movements that contradict Scripture. In the posts to come, we discuss the various definitions of deconstruction, understand the deconstruction process, talk about doubts and questions as a Christian, and how to help one who is currently deconstructing.