Beyond Deconstruction: Exploring Faith After Religion
This morning, I received a familiar follow request on Instagram — it was from an account seeking to expose a Church I used to attend for its homophobic stance. This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered such requests, having been a part of Evangelical mega-churches like Hillsong, C3, and Calvary Chapel. It won’t be the last either.
I’ve come across and participated in online forums like this one before, where people share their experiences of being hurt by the Church. These communities mostly revolve around the traumatic and frankly, horrifying stories of those who have left the Church or are struggling with their faith. These stories, unfortunately, are often shared by marginalized individuals such as women, BIPOC, and 2SLGBTQI+ individuals.
But this article isn’t about targeting all the bad Churches and leaders who have caused irreparable harm to their congregations. I think it’s important to acknowledge that there are plenty of great Churches and leaders out there who have positively impacted lives (mine included). I want to make it clear that this is not an anti-church or anti-Christian publication. Many blogs and podcasts like this one focus exclusively on spiritual trauma and stories of misused power, and those are valid narratives, but I intend to take a different approach.
Let me explain.
When I first embarked on my own faith deconstruction journey in 2015 — questioning and reevaluating my beliefs — it wasn’t yet considered a cool or trendy thing to do. The term ‘faith deconstruction’ wasn’t widely known, and the pastoral scandals that have made headlines in recent years were still in the shadows.
My initial doubts about my faith arose during a trip to Lebanon in my mid-twenties. I had a remarkable opportunity to visit Lebanon with a group of young people from Canada and the US who were seeking to reconnect with their Lebanese heritage. Throughout the trip, we engaged in talks and activities that shed light on the country’s history, both its beauty and its tragedies. It became apparent that religion lay at the heart of much of Lebanon’s political and societal distress. The decades-long civil wars between Christians and Muslims, and the ongoing division rooted in religious differences, compelled me to reevaluate my own beliefs.
During that trip, I encountered faithful Christians and Muslims alike. It made me wonder — for the first time ever — if perhaps both their understanding of God and mine could be valid. Maybe we didn’t have to claim exclusivity.
Perhaps there was room for multiple paths to having a relationship with God, and maybe God was so vast that all beliefs and religions could lead to Him.
At the time, these ideas felt dangerous and foreign, but once they took root, I couldn’t ignore them. I couldn’t help but question if everything I had believed until that point needed to be reexamined through a new lens of radical openness and inclusivity.
That journey to Lebanon served as the catalyst for my difficult, exhilarating, frightening, and liberating faith exploration over the past seven years. Deconstructing my faith has been one of the most grief-filled yet necessary experiences of my life. There have been numerous ups and downs along this path, but today, I don’t wish to spend time critiquing, gossiping, or obsessing over the failures of the Evangelical Church.
Instead, I want to focus on the present. Where does my faith stand now, and where do I want it to go? What lies ahead?
My own story is a big part of the reason I wanted to start this publication. I’ve noticed a gap in the faith deconstruction space that has been troubling me for a while now. There are a ton of great resources available for those wanting to work through spiritual trauma and hold spiritual leaders accountable, many of them stop there. Very few offer alternatives for those who still crave spiritual community and faith, but no longer know where to find it outside of the Christian Church. That’s why in this publication, I aim to concentrate on the here and now. I’ve spent years researching and searching for the best way to live out my faith post-deconstruction, and I know it’s time to share those learnings with the world.
With that, I will end with a question that I hope we can explore together throughout this publication. For those of us who no longer resonate with the teachings and beliefs of the religious systems we grew up in, where do we go from here?
I have a few ideas, and hopefully one day I’ll get to hear yours too.
