Deconstruction feels like a tired thing at this point. It’s well established that many members of the millennial generation with a religious upbringing in American evangelicalism have undergone various degrees of disillusionment with their religious milieu, often departing any semblance of the faith altogether. Having grown up in it myself, watching this trend unfold over the past decade or so has been unsurprising. My high school years map almost exactly onto those of the second term of the Bush administration, and were spent in the youth group culture of Southern California that in many ways felt like it stood at the vanguard of American Christianity. Orange County was home to the Crystal Cathedral, Calvary Chapel, and Trinity Broadcasting Network. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church was a five-minute drive from my home, and my youth pastor was a founding member of a successful Tooth & Nail Records band.
The infrastructure and architecture of Orange County gave structural manifestation to the tight coupling of evangelicalism and contemporary American history. Many of its sprawling suburbs were developed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, so that traditional church architecture was relatively uncommon. Even the buildings of more liturgical denominations more often than not blended seamlessly with the blank, stuccoed exteriors of commercial and residential buildings in the planned communities where they were built. Orange County, especially south Orange County, epitomized the wealth, decadence, and triumphalism of America at the dawn of the new millennium.
Youth culture was especially vulnerable to these vices. Even in its ostensibly rebellious forms, youth culture was a product of post-war capitalism. Despite the best efforts and intentions of our teenage selves, we nonetheless had disposable income to spend on CDs, concerts, t-shirts, zines, tattoos, and piercings because of the wealth created in latter decades of the twentieth century.
Just as American evangelicalism and right-of-center neoliberal politics converged in the late 1970s through the early aughts, so too did the evangelical youth group converge with the products of youth culture. And just as American evangelicalism found itself entangled with the world through consumerism, militarism, and jingoism while simultaneously trying to denounce the corruption of said world, so too did evangelical youth culture try to appeal to the rebellious sensibilities of millennials while also finding itself entangled in the market forces that facilitated teenage rebellion in the first place.
Music was the nexus of these converging forces. In many ways, it felt part and parcel to the religious culture of Orange County. More than a few local heavy music bands had self-identifying Christian members, and others wholeheartedly adopted the identity of a “Christian band”. It was common for the youth rooms of evangelical congregations, typically of the non-denominational, Baptist, or charismatic variety, to double as all-ages concert venues for both local and touring bands, Christian and secular.
Such a narrative does run the risk of reductionism. It won’t do to simply dismiss out of hand the work and talent of countless musicians who were also Christians just trying to create art for the sheer enjoyment of it. And it bears mentioning that the creation of the aforementioned Tooth & Nail records was in some ways a response to the real hostility encountered by Christian musicians in the west coast underground music scene in the early 1990s (those interested in digging further might want to look here for more).
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In the midst of these entangled trends, I found my high school self playing guitar for both a hardcore band (which went nowhere after a summer) and my youth group’s praise band. There was significant cross-pollination between both worlds. And, like many of my peers in the early aughts, I dutifully listened to many of the bands on Tooth & Nail’s roster. Showbread was one of those bands. They were truly unique — while many artists signed to Christian labels that were more or less positive alternatives equally fungible with their secular counterparts, Showbread’s dynamic, articulate, and key-tar laden brand of post-hardcore separated them from the rest of the pack.
But they didn’t just set themselves apart artistically. Their appearance and even their theology ran afoul of many axiomatically held sentiments at the time. This was the era of the Iraq war and the Left Behind novels. We eagerly awaited the rapture, and believed Christian faithfulness necessitated voting Republican. We were encouraged to maintain an anxiously ambivalent relationship to popular culture, imitating its language and thought patterns while simultaneously trying to remain unstained by its immorality. To be evangelical during this time was to be so deeply ensconced in that milieu that any deviation from it was inconceivable. But front man Joshua Porter (aka “Josh Dies”) and his bandmates held and proclaimed a sort of Christian faithfulness that was pacifistic, anarchic, and even transgressive — Flannery O’Connor’s “large and startling figures” come to mind. Porter often performed in eyeliner and fish nets, and cited Trent Reznor as a significant artistic influence. The titles and lyrics of songs were literary and allusive. Porter was an admirer of theologian Gregory Boyd, and an advocate of open theism, a view he zealously and heart wrenchingly defends in the song “Dear John Piper (Stillbirth in Space)”. They were unafraid of controversy, and even seemed to embrace it.
Given their relatively avant-garde approach to faith and music, it would seem intuitive that they would also be at the vanguard of the 2010s trend of American evangelical rockstars deconstructing their faith to join the sad and mad alumni of Christianity.
Contra my expectations, however, I recently came across Porter’s book, Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion. Porter details his own fundamentalist upbringing, subsequent success as an icon of the Christian music world, and the havoc that world in many ways wrought on his own faith and that of others. Unlike many of his peers, however, Porter found himself discontent with the ideological offerings on the other side of deconstruction. His book is both polemic and memoir, addressing what he dubs the “Great Predators”: “shadowy brutes that prey on pain and confusion, making meals of once-eager Christians.” He identifies the five main predators as biblical illiteracy, the problem of evil, politicized Christianity, hypocrisy, and self-denial.
I found myself nodding along in recognition with the patterns he described both in evangelicalism and deconstruction. I remembered flat, didactic, and moralistic readings of scripture. I recalled the friend who was told that God was “testing him” after a dear friend of his committed suicide. I remembered the tangled attempts to correlate current events with apocalyptic imagery in scripture, sermons with R-rated, graphic warnings against the harms of “untraditional” sex, peers adding “N” to Obama bumper stickers with a sharpie to spell “NObama.” I spent a couple of years after high school in a particularly cult-like congregation whose members were all encouraged to invest in the Iraqi Dinar in expectation of the rapture, the idea being that we would use the newfound capital to help spur on a revival just before the end times. Between that experience, and the fact that I joined Mars Hill Orange County shortly thereafter, I’m often surprised I never finally walked away from the faith either (I’ll also be surprised if anyone trusts my decision-making skills after reading this).
Reading Porter’s book in many ways felt like catching up with an old friend with whom you hadn’t spoken for a few years, remembering the times spent together and tracing the contours of your respective growth and change. I felt deep resonance with him at some points, and divergence at others. Like Porter, I felt alienated from both evangelicalism and ex-vangelical deconstruction, sometimes for the same reasons, but also for very different reasons. Porter is a pacifist who critiques American militarism; I think violence in defense of self and neighbor is a lamentable necessity. Porter is an anarchist who warns against the idolatry of empire; I’m a non-partisan conservative who feels deep affection for his country. And between the two of us, I’d likely fall on the more liberal side of the marriage debate. But, for these minor differences, I deeply resonated with his felt alienation from the major ecclesial “camps” of the day.
Porter’s answer to the great predators of deconstruction is one of deepened faithfulness to Jesus. He writes, “Self-denial, in the Jesus movement, is a great equalizer of all who would follow Jesus. Everyone is broken, everyone has gone astray, everyone is going to have to die.” And he’s not wrong. But I think he also overestimates the degree to which we can will such a death. Elsewhere, he writes, “This wrestling inside me, the warfare in here and out there, all of it hangs on this: our ability to look into the eyes of God the Father with trust, and taking his hand, allow him to lead us. Even though he will lead us to a cross.” Perhaps I’ve heard the refrain of low anthropology too much, but if the outcome of spiritual warfare hangs on my ability, I see that as a recipe for despair. God does lead us to a cross, but it’s one where Christ hangs, where the death we need to die is found in him.
And on that last point, I think we would ultimately agree. It would be utterly unfair of me to reduce his argument to selected passages. And the wider context of his book also consists of memoir that is far from triumphalist. He recounts the attrition that touring wrought on the faith of many musicians:
Our peers were dropping like flies. When we set off, there were so many of us, like-minded in our enthusiasm for Jesus and punk rock —the artistic and evangelistic marriage of the two. Now thousands of miles from their families and pastors and youth groups, the Jesus thing seemed less interesting to just about everyone we knew. What was more interesting was alcohol, sex, cocaine hysteria, and a kind of lived nihilism. The other bands, the ones who left home Christian but didn’t return that way, they’d see me carrying my Bible into dressing rooms and hotels, and they’d ask, “You still believe in that stuff?”
And indeed, years after Showbread’s career ended, Porter details how his own faith deteriorated, leading him to suicidal ideations while also working as a pastor. He goes on to write, “I’d survived the deconstruction of my younger years with my faith intact, but it turned out that faithfulness had not erased my brokenness or my pain.”
He candidly reveals how moving past the intellectual deconstruction still left him undergoing spiritual deconstruction wrought by self-loathing and despair. And in the end, that is not something he overcomes through herculean effort, but something God undoes for him while he is in its grasp.
The most powerful part of Porter’s book was his personal recapitulation of what he always sang about as front man for Showbread. Before I had ever learned of the “law / gospel” distinction, Showbread sang the song of God’s mercy to high schoolers like myself and my friends when we were surrounded by the din of competing voices. On the final verse of “Matthias Replaces Judas,” guest vocalist Reese Roper sings,
Jesus, my heart is all I have to give to you
So weak and so unworthy, this simply will not do
No alabaster jar, no diamond in the rough
For your body that was broken, how can this be enough?
By me you were abandoned, by me you were betrayed
Yet in your arms and in your heart forever I have stayed
Your glory illuminates my life, no darkness will descend
For you’ve loved me forever and your love will never end
Lyrics like this stunned me when I first heard them. The heart that we give is not one that’s devoted, but one “so weak and so unworthy.” These words were pure gospel — no exhortation, no commandment, but only (weak and weary) repentance and absolution. Bands like Showbread sowed seeds of faith that I believe sustained me over the last couple of decades. When I remember my high school years and those shortly after, I remember a lot of things fondly, but also feel profound grief. A number of friends struggled with depression, despair, addiction, and self-destruction. Some left the faith entirely. A few too many people I knew back then even died. I could blame the culture that raised us for failing to give us the spiritual resources to appropriately handle the pain that life inevitably deals us. And while criticism is warranted there, it also elides the fact that suffering is a given.
But the mercy of God is also a given. It’s a mercy that’s true regardless of the sin and darkness we give, receive, and witness throughout our lives. That’s a truth I’ve been fortunate enough to hear as I entered adulthood, and it’s one I wish everyone I knew in those formative years could have heard a bit more. But I’m also thankful for people like Porter, from whom we heard it nonetheless. And regardless of how deconstructed or dead we are, in Jesus’ arms and heart forever we have stayed, for he has loved us forever, and his love will never end.
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3 responses to “Death and Deconstruction”
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Yazı için teşekkürler çok işime yaradı 🙂
This hit me between the eyes today. 37 years ago I walked away from drug and alcohol addiction due to a profound experience with God when, all that I learned in my formative years in the Lutheran church suddenly became alive and it was no longer a dull theology teaching I had learned but his resurrection brilliantly opened my eyes. Granted, it was a night I was crying out in pain from my addiction and immoral life but in my tears of repentance I gradually became overwhelmed by mercy and grace and broke into shouts of laughter and joy. But disappointedly my venture into the “non-traditional” churches, which at first seemed full of joy, became a competition to see who could act the most spirit filled Christian. I didn’t walk away from my belief but I walked away from the church. Recently I stumbled across “deconstructing “ at first it seemed like, this is what I needed to hear! but it’s also left me wary and confused. What’s real is I’m broken, what’s also real is grace and mercy. I don’t need deconstructing but I always need his grace in my life.
This is great Robbie. Thanks for sharing