The tyranny of spiritual information

Things to Leave Behind, Pt. 1

This week, I was featured on the You Have Permission podcast with Dan Koch. We talk about my deconstruction story, ministry, parenting spirituality, and why it’s good for some people to leave Christianity. Give it a listen!

If you made a list of what would be in and what would be out from your past faith life, what would be on it?

What started as a New Years reflection trend all over the internet got me thinking about faith in general, and what we leave behind and bring along with us from the years we spent in religious devotion.

If you’ve been reading with me for awhile, you know that I’m on a mission to reclaim the goodness from the Christian years of my life, and not assume all of it is lost to the fires of deconstruction.

There are some things I’ve realized that were true and good in my past (even when wrapped in gross evangelical trimmings) and it’s been such a healing process to reclaim those into my post-faith life.

There are other things I think we’re all glad to leave behind: Good riddance, abusive theology, victim-shaming and spiritual bypassing!

But then there are things we SHOULD leave behind, but don’t realize are following us out, like toilet paper on the back of a shoe.

I see these stowaway ideas and worldviews crop up in comments and posts from deconstructors and it always catches me off guard like… wait, why are we still doing that?

Things like being ruthless and gleefully judgmental of people who we disagree with, or giving into panic and wringing our hands and reacting with blame every time we hear about something hard in the world.

So this month I thought… let’s give a backwards glance in the mirror and make sure we’re not bringing forward what we ought to leave behind.

Today, we’ll start with a mentality that personally drives me bananas:

Only trying to answer our spiritual questions with more information.

Thanks to all my paying subscribers who allow me to keep taking the time to think and write these things down. If you’re not one of them yet, I’d love to have you here!

In so many branches of Christianity, we have been trained to give away our spiritual power to people with more education.

Think about it: For hundreds of years you had to listen to a priest translate the Bible into your language. Our parents told us to believe the Sunday school teachers who told us we’re going to hell. The Christian industrial complex brings in millions of dollars in book sales of all the evangelicals looking for answers in the latest celebrity pastor self-help bestseller. And who doesn’t love how theobros patrol the internet to mansplain God to the rest of us.

This mindset of looking *out there* for insight was so pervasive we just thought it was how you “do” wisdom.

And don’t get me wrong… there are times we all need input from someone smarter than us, and thank God they’re out there. Sometimes we are way in over our head, or stuck in a blind spot, and outside help is the only thing that can save us.

But seeking wisdom from external sources has to start with confidence in our own discernment, or we won’t be able to know what’s wisdom and what’s not. We can’t even learn how to grow discernment from other people! They can give us tips and tricks, but just like riding a bike… it’s kind of something you just have to get on there and figure out for yourself.

It’s not that information is bad, it’s that it was the only option given to us for how to figure out the next right thing.

And too often I’m seeing people trying to work through their deconstruction using this same method. They need to find the right book, or the right podcast, or the new set of beliefs. While all of that is well and good and can be so helpful (she says while writing a newsletter featuring information designed to support people in their deconstruction), it’s useless if you’re looking to external information to tell you how to know your own soul.

We’ve also been taught to defer to the academic knowledge of others over the lessons we’ve learned from our own experiences.

But experience is just as necessary of a teacher as information.

That’s why doctors can’t be doctors without med school AND residency. Why psychologists need degrees AND clinical hours. Why teachers get credentials AND student teaching rotations.

In too much of Christianity, loyalty to abstract doctrine trumps the personal experiences of real-life people every time, and in incredibly harmful ways. 

You say you're gay and that you love God? Wrong, because the Bible says it’s an abomination.

You say you’re anxious? The Bible says you just need to trust God more.

You say your prayers feel empty? You must be doing it wrong because the Bible commands us to pray continually.

I mean isn’t that why so many of us are deconstructing in the first place? Because what we experientially learned of life wasn’t matching up to what we had intellectually learned about God?

And now, without even realizing it, we can find ourselves minimizing the power of our experiential knowledge, and seeking instead the intellectual knowledge of people who don’t know what it’s like to be us. 

I hereby declare this the year to leave that mindset behind.

Your story and experience is just as instructive as any book ever written about spirituality.

I don’t have any hard data for this but… It just feels like this inherited emphasis on knowledge is a side effect of the patriarchy. 

In a nonbinary era I don’t like to pit men vs. women too much, but when we’re talking historically, there’s certainly been a binary of stereotypes. Men are rational, women are emotional. So you women go be the comforters, and let us men take care of the brain stuff.

I love that people besides white cis-het men are now making waves in the academic world and bringing a diverse perspective of all the knowledge being presented to the world. 

But intellectualism in Christianity was, and still is, very much a man’s world… and lingers even into some of the post-Christian spaces I frequent.

I had male colleagues in church who were encouraged to attend seminary as part of their job, allowed to use work time for school (leaving their unfinished work to be completed by the rest of us) and were even reimbursed a portion of their tuition. I received no such offer, nor could I have, since it was a benefit reserved for pastors, and women couldn’t be pastors in my church.

Here’s the worst part: It’s not just that women weren’t given opportunity and access to learn information about God, it was that we were taught that information is the MOST important way to get to know God. Since women didn’t have access to the information, that made women dependent on men to learn what God wants for their lives.

F*&# THAT, YES?????

I still do not have a Master’s degree and while that may disqualify me from being a licensed therapist or a theoretical physicist it does NOT disqualify me from being able to speak with authority on the deep things of the human spirit. 

I confess I have a hard time learning about spirituality from men these days. I fully own this is just a personal sore spot that I have not moved on from.

There may be men with great content about deconstruction, they may advocate for all the things I agree with, they may be apologetic and humble… but then I see how easily some of them get book deals. I see how much confidence they have to charge premium prices for their support. I see all the letters behind their names and their impressive resumes, and notice how they all have wives who’ve supported them behind the scenes raising kids and menu planning and making sure everyone’s chromebooks get charged before Monday so the man can get all that work done… and I just can’t stomach it.

I love men, but for now, after decades of male-dominated education, I’m leaning into other sources for awhile… including my own life.

Moral of today’s story:

Learning and knowledge is a gift, and it’s valuable, but let’s leave behind the idea that information is the answer to spirituality. Ideas, feelings, intuition, discernment, autonomy and experiences are equally rich sources of wisdom, and we would do well to diversify our input.

Stay sane out there.

Until we meet again,

Joy

P.S. Maybe 2024 is the right time for you to deal with your spirituality and figure out what’s staying and what’s going from your past faith. If so, let’s chat.