Deconstructing THE Way: Part 2

Editor’s Note: If you haven’t read Part 1 about deconstructing the idea of a designed path being the only way, it gives a good setup of the mentality with which I’m approaching today’s topic: the courage it takes to walk outside a path whose boundaries are primarily psychological and social. (Yes, I’m talking about what happens if you leave Christianity, but it applies to stepping outside any prescribed path that takes you in directions you don’t want to go.) Here’s yesterday’s post:

The Power of Taboo

There’s a lot more than decorative chains and paved bricks guarding the prescribed paths of faith in Christianity. I’ll never forget a psychological restraint I imposed on someone in a Sunday School class I was leading who dared question the concept of the Trinity. The topic we were discussing was only indirectly related to the idea of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being one (even constructing this sentence in retrospect makes me feel nervous about getting it wrong and having readers send me angry emails). And he said, “I think to make sense of this, you really have to question the doctrine of the Trinity.”

I immediately replied, “You can’t.” My first reaction to my own words was to think I had been too blunt, but I went on to explain myself without apology. “You’re talking about the type of heresy that creates splits within the church.” This was not hyperbole. The very church I was in had a significant chunk of its membership leave to form their own church body some 15-20 years prior, and the crux of the disagreement that led to it was one guy’s assertion that the doctrine of the Trinity was impossible.

Sometimes in Sunday School classes (I think they were technically called Adult Bible Fellowships at the time, but we all knew it was Sunday School) conflict in ideas will spark a huge outbreak of diverse opinions, stories, and theories. Other times, the disagreement will quench all discussion completely. My comment killed the conversation dead. It was several minutes before anyone had anything to say, and the sad truth is that was by design. I did not want that topic discussed any further, and I didn’t care what other less controversial chats became collateral damage.

It wasn’t that I didn’t think the topic of the Trinity was worth discussing. I wasn’t opposed to people exploring that idea. Not at all, discussions are great. I was afraid of legitimizing doubts about a core church doctrine as a part of official church activities and teaching. I was afraid of publicly challenging THE WAY the Bible was taught and believed in my church.

I didn’t give logical, rhetorical support for the idea of the Trinity. I didn’t expose some fallacy in my friend’s (he was my friend, but I think that probably became a past-tense verb in that very moment) argument. I simply issued the equivalent of We don’t talk about that here. We do not question the Church. We do not question the Bible.

I said that. Me. Because I was afraid. Now, far be it from me to project my own issues on the entirety of the church, but I know the fear of seeing divisions in the church is a big deal and a big motivator in suppressing the free expression of doubts about doctrine. You think conservatives felt silenced when they tried to pretend COVID-19 wasn’t real? Try standing up in church and saying Jesus wasn’t God and he’s probably not coming back and see how much of a platform they extend to you and your First Amendment rights.

Unity is the Tie that Binds

Staying on THE path of truth in a group is important because unity in spirit and in message is a major part, possibly the most essential key ingredient behind the power and survival of the group. What a church claims to believe is the thing that holds that church together.

But what if that belief doesn’t make sense? Even better! To have unifying power, a belief has to contradict the conventional wisdom. If everyone in the world believes something, an ideologically centered group has nothing substantial to unify against and, therefore, no real purpose. Here’s an example:

The Facebook group for the Flat-Earth Society has (at the time of this publication) 223,000 followers. The top Facebook group for the Spherical-Earth Society has 1,300 followers. To unite around an ideology, the idea has to be specific, important, and distinct enough for people to feel the need to stay together. People who think the earth is flat have a global, no planal conspiracy against which to fight. People who think flat-earthers are nuts are simply aware of the existence of a bunch of weirdos. That’s not a big enough reason to call a meeting.

People who believe in God is a circle on a Venn Diagram, but it’s not an organized group of people. It’s a majority of the people on Earth. Atheists form a much more centralized, organized bunch than theists because of an easily identifiable and significant and therefore unifying threat: organized religion. There’s also far less or at least more minute ideological wiggle room. No God is pretty definitive, even if there is a range of ways to express the nuances of what atheism means.

Questioning THE Way

If you were to ask a Christian how they know faith in Jesus is the only way to heaven, they’d probably tell you that Jesus Himself said it and then proved it by rising from the dead. John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” (Thank you King James, and I don’t mean LeBron.) Pretty definitive stuff. But who wrote the Gospel of John? How do we know it’s reliable? What makes you think the book that is bound and printed under the name The Holy Bible was ever intended to function as a single publication with a unified voice, let alone delivered to humanity from God Himself as His Word, His message to each and every one of us? What would make you think the translation and preservation of these original writings has been accurate? What gives you confidence in the truth of any bit of it?

Is it pure research and critical thinking that have brought you to this point of understanding? Or is it the people you’ve trusted, the people they’ve trusted, the people those people have trusted (and so on, and so on) and the unifying force that we all really want it to be true?

So we stay on this path walked by the people we trust, designed by the people trusted by the people trusted by the people trusted by the people we trust. How do we know?

Substitution Theory

One of my favorite psychologists (not because I’ve studied him exhaustively but because his work shows up in almost every single book I read—he’s your favorite thinker’s favorite thinker) is Daniel Kahneman. He and his partner Amos Tversky are world renowned in the areas of both psychology and economy. I bring him into this discussion because of one particularly ingenious observation called Substitution.

The idea is a bit ironic. Our brains actually do more work than we’re aware of, and sometimes that causes them to replace the question being asked with the answer to a different question altogether. When asked if two words rhyme (a question about sound) our brains visualizes the words to see if they’re spelled the same. (As a result, it takes us longer to verify that goat rhymes with note than to see that note rhymes with vote.) When asked to compare the sizes of two shapes in an optical illusion on a screen or a printed page, our brain intuitively uses the perspective cues to calculate the three-dimensional sizes and give us the right answer to the wrong question. In both of those examples, our brains do more work than necessary. But sometimes, as the video below is cued to show you, our brains substitute the answer to an easier question (How many dates have you been on in the past month?) in place of an answer that’s much harder to pin down (How happy are you?).

So when questions about faith arise, questions our brains might never be able to answer with lifetimes upon lifetimes of research available to us, our brains substitute the answers to questions we do know. How do you go on living even after your body dies? Boy, that’s a tough one. I can’t answer it, but I can answer What does God say about that? Well, okay, I don’t really know what God says, but I can give you the answer to What does the Bible say about that? Actually, I can’t really answer that one either, because the Bible is really long and not everything in it matches up, but I can answer What have I been told the Bible says about that?

Sometimes the question we’re really answering is, What answer makes me feel good? Straying outside the path walked by the people you love and trust is not going to be the answer to that question. I’ll tell you that right now and anytime anyone asks.

What happens when you remove the chain guiding the path you’re walking? What happens when you walk through the grass and leave your own footprints? What happens when you leave Christianity?

I don’t know the answer to that question for you. Maybe you don’t either. You’ll probably find other footprints to follow. You’ll probably have other questions to answer (I don’t think very many people isolate the variable of leaving Christianity when they do it—there are always other changes that have their own ramifications that we all too often attribute to our deconstruction of faith).

That’s the scary part. The not knowing. Not knowing the answers and not knowing how people will react. Knowing, whatever happens, it will be difficult. It’s tempting to say the first step is the most difficult. That’s not true. The first step is difficult. Then some get easier. Then some get really, really hard. That’s how it goes when there isn’t a path laid out in front of you. You never know when the level of difficulty is going to change.

The only reassuring thing I might be able to tell you is this: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Some connections will weaken, and some relationships will change or end forever. But you are not alone, even when it feels that way. You’re not, you’re not, you’re not . . . alone.

And whatever path you choose to follow or to create, it’s worth it. Don’t give up.