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Unpacking a thing I talked about with my therapist not too long ago:

Growing up in fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, I was taught about the immense importance of The Truth, about the need to read, study, parse, understand, explain, and defend a sacred book, and that not getting it right (or at least right enough) had eternal consequences. And I was a good student.

In retrospect, there are all sorts of problems with that approach. It’s not as simple as the teachers said it was. There’s millennia of interpretation around what the things mean. Nobody ever gets it 100% right. The point isn’t about getting it all exactly right, anyway - it’s about loving God and our neighbor.

And yet, let me describe my career niche (certification of safety-critical airborne software), an expertise in which I have risen to the highest levels in my industry.

We have a complicated and somewhat esoteric “sacred book” - an industry standard for how to do safety-critical software. I spent a long time reading and studying that book, understanding the meaning and subtext, teaching that meaning to others, evangelizing its importance, evaluating others’ attempts to meet that standard, and arguing with incredible levels of pedantry about whether the words that a project wrote down actually correctly describe that they demonstrated compliance to the book.

Sound familiar at all?

It’s a complicated thing, trying to pick apart and understand both how the same formative experiences were in some ways difficult and damaging and in other ways created skills that make me very successful in some aspects of my life.

Amy Grant has been doing a bunch of media lately in support of her new album The Me That Remains. I really enjoyed the podcast interview Andrew Osenga did on The Pivot - their shared Nashville community provided some great shared connections, and Andrew clearly appreciates Amy as an elder stateswoman of the Christian music scene as it has evolved over the decades.

But perhaps even more delightful was Amy’s appearance on Norah Jones’ podcast Norah Jones is Playing Along. Norah - a renowned musician and singer in her own right - is a generation younger than Amy, and describes how her first acquaintance with Amy’s music came with the pop breakout album Heart In Motion in the early 1990s. This provides the opportunity for Norah to ask questions about Amy’s background, her start in Christian music, and her transition into pop music. Undoubtedly Amy has told these stories before to a wide range of audiences, but it’s just so wonderful to hear her so deftly connect with Norah, gently expressing her perspective on faith and God in a non-intrusive way that is at the same time wonderfully inviting and encouraging.

Everyone I’ve heard talk who knows Amy describes her as one of those special people who just has a connection with people, and it comes through clearly here. At the end of the episode Norah says she’ll look Amy up next time she’s in Nashville, and Amy says that the rocking chairs on the front porch are always available. It’s such a genuine and honest invitation, and I hope for both their sakes that one day Norah is able to take her up on the offer.

Amy Grant’s music has been a part of my life since I was a small child. I remember Age to Age on vinyl on our turntable when I was in elementary school. I haven’t followed her music closely through every turn, but it’s so delightful to encounter her now, in her 60s, fully embracing her role as a grandmother, mother, mentor, and friend to generations of musicians who have grown up inspired by her music. What a beautiful example to follow.

My DayOne journal entry reminds me that it was six years ago today that after far too many years of waffling, I finally drafted a letter to the leaders at our evangelical church letting them know we were leaving. A brief excerpt:

…this [leaving] is largely a result of how my theological beliefs have shifted (grown?) over the past decade, pushing a larger and larger gap between the written and unwritten positions of [the church] and where I find myself. This would include Calvinism, the high emphasis on penal substitutionary atonement as the right expression of the gospel, Republican politics, complementarianism, and the need to focus so much on issues of sexuality and gender identity. These combine to form a church culture that I know I’ll never be able to lead in, which has become increasingly uncomfortable to fellowship in, and for which it’s very hard now to justify to my kids why they should be continuing to drink from this stream.

For the next three years we attended only our beloved “zoom church” of distant friends who were similarly exiles, shepherded by a faithful Presbyterian pastor lady who led us in prayer, liturgy, and community.

We always knew that zoom church wasn’t going to be the permanent solution, and in 2023 we started attending our local Episcopal Church. For the past three years they have been a welcoming family, giving us the time and space we needed to heal and then encouraging us to participate in the areas that fit us best. After three years here, my only regret is that we didn’t make the move sooner.

In my last post I talked in a round-about way about reconstruction. My post garnered a few comments from friends saying that reconstruction was a new idea to them, so perhaps it’s worth a few more thoughts.

To be able to talk about what I mean by reconstruction it’s probably best to start by sketching what I mean by deconstruction. The philosophers would tell us that the term properly is about examining the relationship between text and meaning. At least, that’s what Wikipedia tells me. I’m not a philosopher.

But in ex-evangelical circles, the term deconstruction has been used popularly to describe the disassembly of the rigid belief structure and thought framework that evangelicalism catechizes. Evangelical theologians often stress that questioning one belief or another is a “slippery slope”, and warn that if you remove one piece, the whole framework of belief is likely to come down like a Jengatower. While this warning is usually intended to keep evangelicals aligned with the particulars of fundamental belief, it can end up having the reverse effect. Once a questioner begins to accept, say, that Genesis 1-2 can be understood less than literally, and that the cosmos might actually be older than, say, 10,000 years, the dam has broken, and any number of other scriptural understandings become possible.

The “deconstruction” process of that dam breaking free usually comes with anger, with a sense of being unmoored, with a lot of questions about what even is real and true, about who or what can be trusted. That process is necessary, will look different for everyone, and will take some time. In my own experience, the anger provided the energy I needed to finally take the steps to break away from the system that had been my whole life. Anger as I began to understand how words and texts were manipulated; anger at how complex, nuanced, millennia-long debates were portrayed as simple, settled, “plain” truths; anger realizing how systems had been carefully constructed to protect hypocritical and sinful leaders at the expense of the people in the pews. I believe that anger is righteous, closer to the heart of God for God’s people than any of that fundamentalist teaching. I suspect every deconstructor goes through a “burn it all down” phase. Some for a very long time.

But you can’t really flourish while living in perpetual anger. Sooner or later you need to move on from it. That doesn’t need to mean coming to accept the broken system you left. It might not mean coming back to Christianity at all. But we still have a need for the things that religion typically provides: things like community, an anchor for a system of ethics, a framework to think about the Big Questions of life. And that’s where this idea I think of as reconstruction comes in. Because while I definitely had a phase where I wanted to burn it all down, I don’t want to live in the ash pile forever.

After a lot of thought and reading and study, for me right now this reconstruction is turning out to look like an Episcopalian flavor of Christianity, with a strong dose of Universalism mixed in. I’m still working it out as I go, but in this vein of a faith tradition I have found a community anchored in the strong assurance of God’s love and strongly committed to upholding the dignity of all people by loving them in God’s example and power. Crucially, this community is secure enough in that love that the hard questions are welcome. No one is afraid that pulling on a particular Jenga block of belief is going to bring God’s love tumbling down.

It can be easy for those of us trained in fundamentalism to hold just as rigidly and fundamentalist-ly to our new belief system as our old one. But reconstruction should be dynamic. Once you’re freed from the fear that has maintained that rigid structure, you can breathe, and read, and think, and pray, and discuss, and change. And that should be an ongoing process. My beliefs today aren’t the same as they were 5 years ago, much less 10 years ago. And I hope that 5 years from now I can look back and see that they have continued to evolve. Building on the foundation of God’s love for me and God’s call for me to love my neighbor, reconstruction can be a lifelong creative exploration and delight.

I’ve got some threads to weave together here, and I’m not sure as I start just how they’ll go, but hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?

Thread One

The first thread is the experience of listening to the live Rich Mullins tribute concert recording that I wrote about earlier this week. To listen to it was an intense experience. While I didn’t break down in tears on the airplane during the listen, I did choke up multiple times. And where it got me wasn’t so much in my favorite songs; where it got me was in the moments where the audience (or, let’s call them the congregation) entered the mix and sang along. 2300 of us there in the pews at the Ryman simply knew the songs and the notes, and when the opportunity arose, there we were. The bridge in “Calling Out Your Name”. The chorus on Andrew Peterson’s “The Good Confession”. The call and response on “I See You”. The whole freaking chorus of “Step By Step”. Amazing, glorious music reverberating through the timbers of an old Nashville church.

A Brief Interlude

I’ve heard it said that if you want to put a finger on the things that are really important to you, the ones where you say yes, this is one of the important things I am built to do and should be devoting my life energy toward, look for where the tears and emotion come easily. And for me it’s really only one thing, and that one thing is people making music together. Not that I dislike being a solo musician. But where my heart gets grabbed before I even have a chance to think is group music - really, it’s people singing together. Musical theater. Audience participation with a band at a concert. Several people singing in harmony around a piano or guitar. Were I to sit down with you right now and just describe the experience at the end of the Ragamuffin concert of the congregation going from Step By Step into an acapella singing of the Doxology I would be choking up just verbalizing the memory. Whatever’s going on back deep in me, it’s that strong.

Thread Two

The next thread to pull on is the combination of my painful departure from the evangelical church and my strong reluctance since then to sit down at the piano and play and sing songs. I’ve been playing the piano and singing ever since I was old enough to play the piano. Accompanying family hymn singing when I was just learning to sight read, playing for church, teaching myself how to play songs that I liked off the radio. Learning all of the Liturgy, Legacy album after getting the sheet music for it. In my adulthood that primarily translated into leading worship at my evangelical churches. I was very good at it. And I loved it. Well, not all of the politics of it and not the endless rehearsals. But when things were really on? When the band is tight and the songs are good and the congregation is responsive? There’s nothing like it in the world. Church music was largely my life outside of work and family since college. And in 2020 when we left the evangelical church that all got left behind. And I’ve barely sat down and played and sang a song since.

It’s not that I don’t want to sing songs. I mean, there are some songs that I definitely couldn’t in good conscience sing any more. Rotten theology, manipulative musical choices, songwriters who have turned out to be better Nationalists than they are Christians… but there are still songs that I could want to sing. But since 2020 I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit down and try. It’s like it’s still too raw to be able to handle it. Could I make it through a song without just breaking down and weeping for reasons I can’t even articulate? Is that reason enough that maybe I just should, regardless? How do I carve out the space to have some room to process through all that? From a practical standpoint, my house is pretty small. I don’t really want my wife and kids to sit through nights of Dad just sitting choking out songs and crying on the piano bench. What will it take for me to be ready to start the healing process in this area of my self?

Thread Three

About the time I was listening to the Ragamuffin album, a piece from Crisanne Werner hit my inbox. I met Crisanne at a retreat several years ago that, even though it wasn’t advertised as such, ended up being a bunch of people all in stages of religious deconstruction and related grief. Crisanne has been writing about her experience since then, and her latest post is about coming to grips with starting to reconstruct. She talks about needing to enroll her child in a preschool run by an evangelical church, about it initially triggering all her anti-evangelical responses, and by the end of the year starting, as she said it, to “come to peace with evangelicalism”.

I am very happy for Crisanne that she has been able to start to find that peace; I am completely not there yet. Not even ready to start thinking about heading there yet. The darkness, harm, deception, hatred, manipulation, lies, and idolatry that drove me from the evangelical church are still, 6 years later, fresh enough offenses that I’m not ready or able to start getting over. I think I want to, eventually. But I don’t know how or when I ever will be able to.

Now what?

And so when I weave all those threads together I find myself at what feels like an impasse. How do I find the key to unlock the huge part of my heart that is my life with music when that musical life is so entangled with a religious background that caused so much estrangement and harm? How do I start to feel safe around the good songs, the non-problematic ones, when the very memory of playing and singing those songs is all balled up in the pain of where I came from? When and how does that reconstruction start? I’m not sure where that answer comes from. But eventually I need to get myself back to that piano bench and start to figure it out.

I’ve been talking about the idea of universal reconciliation at my church’s adult forum the past two weeks. This afternoon while doing chores I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, called The Sacred, and guest Leah Libresco Sargeant said something about how she tries to have a Jesus-like perspective toward people who make her angry dovetails very nicely with the discussion we’ve been having at church.

Host Elizabeth Oldfield asks Sargeant how, in a debating environment, do you maintain the positive perspective of thinking and trying to represent the best of your opponent and their view? Here’s how Sargeant replied (podcast link at about 57:30:

When I’m in an argument and I don’t like people - this happens to me, not infrequently - one thing I try to do is to look at them and think for a second - and this is the thing in the Bible when Jesus is asked by the rich young man what he needs to do to be holy. He’s followed the commandments, and Jesus is about to tell him ‘you need to sell everything you have and give it to the poor’, and because he’s Christ he probably knows the boy is not going to do this. That he’s done a lot but he’s not willing to go this far. And the text of the Bible says, before he speaks, it just says “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.”

And I just say that in my head, looking at the person, knowing that this is true. And what I also remind myself, especially if I’m quite angry, is that my goal in relating to this person is that if I die, and this is the person who I first meet at the gates of heaven welcoming me there, that I will be happy to see them, and I will have no fiber of my being that’s angry that they’re there or scorns to be welcomed by them in particular. Because if I feel that way about anyone on earth, that I wouldn’t be thrilled to see them in heaven, then I am picking hell for myself, if I would rather not enter than be welcomed by this person.

Real reconciliation and love for your enemy is immensely hard, but it might start, at least, with a thought like this.

Falling from Grace: Part 3, High-Handed Sin:

Calvinism has never been immune from anxiety, given how you worry about if you are, indeed, one of the elect. Sure, when you see a fellow believer “fall away” you can console yourself and protect your dogma with “they weren’t one of the elect” in the first place. But your doctrine has become functionally and pastorally meaningless. Sure, Arminians might be anxious over losing their salvation, but Calvinists worry about if they are saved in the first place. Seems like six of one half-dozen of the other. All we’re doing in this debate is anxiety shifting.

I appreciate Richard Beck for saying this so clearly. My time in a very Calvinist evangelical church made it clear to me there was plenty of anxiety to go around.