Keywords: Deconstruction, Faith deconstruction, Derrida, Christian deconstruction
The faith deconstruction movement (or phenomenon if you’re asking guys on Reddit… which you shouldn’t be) has been around for a few years. Not that many, but long enough to make the rounds on social media. One article defined it as follows:
Deconstruction means to take apart a tradition, belief or practice for the purpose of understanding reality. Noted author Rachel Held Evans described it as a “massive inventory of faith, tearing every doctrine from the cupboard and turning each one over in your hand.”
As Alisa Childers & Tim Barnett point out in their well-researched volume on the subject, The Deconstruction of Christianity, there are other definitions. However, disregarding the least frequent/influential usages (as by pastors hoping to baptize the idea), the above definition roughly approximates the most common and influential way it's understood. The process is viewed as a dismantling. Think of a building that’s been around for decades – well, they’re going to take it apart one brick at a time in order to inspect the bricks, the cement, the windows, and all other relevant building things for quality. By George, they’ll be tossing bricks and windows in the garbage left and right if the quality’s no good – and if that means the whole building crumbles, so be it.
The word “deconstruction” was co-opted by David Hayward from Jacques Derrida, whom he was studying at the time his faith fell apart. Hayward actually has a slightly different (but still very close) definition of the process when compared to its more colloquial uses. He describes it as being “not the slight changing of beliefs but basically the demolition of one’s belief system.”
So, what’s the problem? Well, the key problem, as I see it – and it’s a subtle one, very slight, in fact: deconstruction isn’t the opposite of construction, and they're using it wrong.
Note: the Wikipedia article on Faith deconstruction claims that the great Postmodern Theologian John D. Caputo is an advocate of it. While I’m not sure about this, because Caputo has written extensively on Derrida and the church, I would guess he’s only in this article because he uses similar terminology, not because he’s associated with the movement (phenomenon).
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” – Bill Clinton
Deconstruction (in Derrida’s original formulation) is a notoriously difficult idea to understand. In fact, it’s so difficult to understand that literature scholars have been misunderstanding it since Derrida coined the term! Though he was inspired by Heidegger’s destruktion when naming “deconstruction,” destruction is not what deconstruction is all about (though, interestingly, destruktion might be closer conceptually to this faith deconstruction thing). Destruction is, to Derrida, the opposite of construction – this is the dismantling or taking apart that we keep hearing about in faith deconstruction. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s hear from the man himself, who stated in an interview:
“Deconstruction, let’s say it one more time, is not demolition or destruction.” – Jacques Derrida
Deconstruction is neither negative nor positive. In fact, the dialectical binary of negative and positive is precisely the sort of thing that deconstruction sought to complicate. Think of any binary – light and dark, yin and yang, construction and destruction – Derrida believed that there were flaws with the sorts of assumptions that would lead us to such binaries, so he sought to step outside of them. Thus, for deconstruction to be a “tearing down of doctrine” is to allow oneself to simply engage the negative side of a construction/destruction binary. This sort of simplistic approach was one that flustered Derrida on more than one occasion.
Derrida was repeatedly critical of scholars (especially those pesky literature scholars I mentioned before) who sought to simplify his concept by turning it into a process, method, or tool of dismantling. To his mind, deconstruction wasn’t a cynical, skeptical, or nihilistic idea but a strategy for examining the interplay of meanings and exposing the layers of biases or assumptions that are present (often arbitrarily) in language, texts, and concepts. If you were to pick up a book on literary theory right now, you would likely find a section dedicated to the “method” of deconstruction of literature. But Derrida preferred, rather than a method, a general strategy.
To engage in this strategy, Derrida would often identify some binary relationship. To stay on topic, let’s consider sacred and secular. In a religious context, the sacred would lord over the secular in prestige. That is to say that, while presented as a dialectical binary, one term is (in certain contexts) privileged over the other – sacred > secular. Thus, the deconstructive strategy would first entail an inversion of the hierarchy of the binary – perhaps some positive emphasis being placed on secularity over sacredness. He would then problematize the binary by arguing that the sacred and the secular are not inherently opposed to one another but are mutually constitutive, each gaining meaning only in relationship to the other. The point here is to demonstrate that the binary is not inherent but constructed and contextually dependent. He might also introduce something like the concept of “profane” which in some contexts might be “not sacred,” while in others might be some blend of secular and sacred. For example, a warped or displaced sacred thing, such as a secularized eucharistic meal. This would serve to complicate the binary of sacred and secular by showing that some aspects are difficult to categorize neatly. Then, he would likely further muddy the waters by arguing that sacred and secular contain traces of one another in each. The sacred is only known to be so in reference to and in relation to the secular, and so on. Finally, he might examine different historical or geographical contexts in which sacred and secular practices differed from those understood by Christians to highlight that the definitions were and are never fully settled in one place.
The strategy of deconstruction, rather than the method or process, is an intentional deferral of meaning that was demonstrative of its nature. The word (signifier) and its meaning (signified) were dynamic for Derrida, not static, and thus, he would often avoid concretizing as much as possible – whether in a method/process or a definition. Its application as a conceptual tool was open-ended rather than specific and goal-oriented. Deconstruction was to lead to questioning things in an ongoing manner, not to reach some fixed end, but to keep right on questioning.
Somewhere along the lines, it hoped to complicate our assumptions and sometimes transcend them. To take the biases that we use to bind the world and remove their limits.
Hopefully now the differences between Derridean deconstruction and faith deconstruction are clearer. Faith deconstruction is a dismantling. It is a negative term (not in the moral sense, but in the relational one) that describes a process of taking apart beliefs bit by bit. It’s closer to destruction than deconstruction. It’s also often expressed as a process or method Derrida would’ve rejected.
This isn’t to say that there are no similarities. It can be, to some, a rather open-ended process not necessarily meant to lead to either atheism or the reconstruction of beliefs. Some have seen it as intended to challenge beliefs and assumptions ingrained into Christians from a young age. This, along with the broader implied notion of questioning authority, tradition, and absolutes, is a rather Derridean way of thinking.
So, finally, who cares? There’s that deconstruction, there’s this deconstruction, what’s the problem?
The real problem I have is that deconstruction is complicated. Derrida articulated it across texts and interviews for years, and his understanding of it is neither simple nor formulaic. Even in my “general strategy” section, I likely did it some disservice. But, unfortunately, Derrida spent a great deal of his life arguing that the signification process in language is perpetually adrift, so it would’ve been unreasonable for him to drop a neologism like “deconstruction” on the world and expect nobody to mess with it.
Though most all the nuance, complexity, and beauty of Derrida’s deconstruction is lost in faith deconstruction, I’d be anti-Derridean if I advocated for a fixed meaning that was correct only when Derrida articulated it. While the word “deconstruction” has traveled far from its origins in Derrida’s philosophy, its journey reflects the very nature of language and interpretation that Derrida aimed to expose. The word’s application in this new, highly personalized, religious, usually internet context is as legitimate as its application in various Universities, textbooks, interviews, and everywhere else.
Which is annoying.
Dissemination – Jacques Derrida
Writing and Difference – Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology – Jacques Derrida
Deconstruction – David J. Gunkel
The Deconstruction of Christianity – Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett