Deconstructing Christianity: The Musical

That video is cued to the exact moment it started to rip my heart out of my rib cage in the nicest way possible. I recommend listening to the whole thing, but that last verse steamrolled me.

I’ll get into it in a moment, but first a little background.

I’m a big fan of the show Nashville. It was like The Monkees slathered in barbecue sauce. The sheer volume of great music generated by that show and the wide variety of songs that resonated in my soul (and in my car) astounds me to this day. The show, the music, the characters, the drama . . . it all feels like home to me.

There are probably more than 100 songs from that show—there are 17 albums by Nashville Cast on iTunes. For me, they fall into three categories: songs I love, songs I like (but they could easily grow on me), and songs I don’t really listen to.

“How You Learn to Live Alone” is one of those songs I have always liked, but it didn’t click with me. It wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I happened to shuffle through my Nashville playlist and found the final verse eviscerating my soul.

It was the anthem of my deconstruction I had never really heard:

I’ve often compared leaving the church to breakup (and even made a playlist of church breakup songs) but this breakup song goes well beyond describing a breakup. I couldn’t have captured the emotion of leaving the faith any better than this song did. It matched my experience perfectly, but it seems like the type of description that could fit what anyone might feel when they deconstruct to any degree.

I mean . . . come ON.