Book Review: "After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith Without Losing It" by A J Swoboda
AJ Swoboda offers wisdom on the cultural trend of deconstruction in After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith Without Losing It. Part memoir, part pastoral reflection, part cultural exegesis, and part exhortation, in this book Swoboda clarifies why many typically Millenial, formerly evangelical folks are leaving behind Christianity entirely.
Swoboda, now a professor and author, was a pastor in Portland who wrestled through doubt and deconstruction with hundreds of young people that had moved out to the Pacific Northwest to get away from tradition, from their parents, and from everything they had known before. Throughout the book he documents several interviews with real people that have undergone their own deconstruction journey, offers his own reflections on the anatomy of deconstruction and doubt, and charts a way forward.
Deconstruction as a Western phenomenon. I liked how Swoboda portrays faith-deconstruction as a decidedly modern, Western phenomenon. Wheres most cultures of the world are more traditional honor-cultures, Western culture is an achievement culture. He writes “In contrast to traditional cultures, Western culture underscores individuality and breaking with the past by giving social privilege to those who “earn” it.” While honor cultures guard, protect, and pass along deeply held beliefs, achievement cultures value breaking “free” from past dogmas and traditions, and give social credit to people who ‘evolve’ out of the ‘old ways of thinking.
In America, many young people are deconstructing and leaving behind the faith in which they were shaped for a variety of reasons, but according to Swoboda, many were never given agency in their younger years. “Deconstruction,” he writes, “is as much a reflection of our longing for boundaries as anything else. We react (even overreact) against the faith of our communities or families of origin because we were often never given agency as people in our younger years.” (11) Unfortunately, in our culture faith-deconstruction is socially popular, so the motives for doing so aren’t always clear:
“Walking through doubt and deconstruction in our time is complicated by how popular it has become to question, challenge, pull apart, and reject one’s deeply held beliefs. Deconstruction is “cool” now. Honor is now given to those who entirely leave their faith. This is further amplified by a form of hyperpartisoan tribalism that utilizes soft power, wordplay, and emotional coercion through the liturgies of social media to manipulate people to one extreme or the other.” (15)
Many people deconstruct because they want to get back at their parents, or they want to embrace beliefs that allow them to live however they want to live, rather than letting their beliefs determine the way they live, or simply because they want attention on social media.
I will say while it has become cliche for Christians to ‘deconstruct,’ its also become cliche some to dismiss faith-deconstruction as a bad thing. But Swoboda sees deconstruction as a normal part of a person’s theological journey, not unlike the Amish “rumspringa,” where Amish teenagers are allowed to go and explore the world and do whatever they want for a period of time, after which they get to decide whether they want to come back to the community. Indeed, “part of discipleship is leaving - and becoming the person God has called us to be in the world (Abraham, Jesus follow me). But leaving must never be unhitched from honoring.” Cultures are always attempting to reject this tension and emphasize either honoring or leaving. “The Biblical world was an honoring world; the Western world is a leaving world.”
God called Abraham to “leave” and go to the land He would show him. When Jesus called his disciples, he called them to leave behind their livelihoods and journey with him. Not all “leaving” is bad - its often a part of the journey. Its here that Swoboda draws a distinction between deconstructing beliefs and faith. Faith is a gift, but beliefs are not. God transforms our lives by giving us the gift of faith. But beliefs are fluid and often change over the course of many years. We spend our entire lives developing our beliefs. Swoboda writes:
“The difference between deconstructing beliefs and deconstructing faith is the same as the difference between remodeling a room in our home and tearing down the house. Distinguishing between the two is essential. One is intellectual repentance, and the other faith abandonment.”
In this, Swoboda invites readers to have patience or “tend” to the deconstruction and reconstruction of beliefs over the course of their lives, but to be wary of deconstructing faith.
Swoboda proposes a framework for understanding how our theological beliefs are formed using three stages: construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Construction involves the beliefs we receive from parents precritically, before we really question them.
However, life happens, and we realize that many of the beliefs we embraced in our younger years are no longer adequate to answer the questions posed before us by life’s circumstances:
“Our theology often exists in our life the way our pipes exist in our home. We give little thought to them, but we rely on them unthinkingly. Too little attention is given to them. That is, until grew water begins pooling in our bathtub or a pipe bursts, flooding our kitchen. We usually begin rethinking our theology when it no longer seems to work.” (26)
In this stage, its helpful to remember that some deconstruction of beliefs is actually good, especially if some of those beliefs are not true or are beliefs that undermine the Gospel. Its also important to understand that you can deconstruct beliefs without deconstructing faith. Unfortunately, I’ve seen far too many friends over the years walk away from faith because they failed to understand this difference.
Those able to healthily deconstruct their beliefs without deconstructing faith eventually enter into the reconstruction stage. Reconstruction involves returning to beliefs that one has critically examined, sharpened, and refined. When we ‘reconstruct’ our faith, we return to church, we reconnect with worshipping community, and with ourselves.
In the chapter titled “Knowing the Whole Self,” Swoboda argues that much of what we end up embracing theologically comes from our own biographies - meaning to know God is also to know oneself. He highlights that a lack of self knowledge can “construct false barriers between us and God,” and can also “cause us to seek God for the wrong reasons. So the journey of reconstruction is also a journey of knowing yourself more intimately and deeply.
His chapter “Feeling Everything” explored the nature of the emotions in belief-formation. Against some contemporary voices that seem to excoriate the emotions, Swoboda claims that the Christian life should be triangulated between “right belief, right action, and right feeling.” In a culture that has mistaken emotion for fact (what Alisdair MacEntyre refer to as “emotivism”), or using emotions as the sole compass for what is right and good in the world, we cannot mistake emotions for truth, but we also can’t deny they exist. He writes “when we equate emotions with belief, our feelings can lure us away from right beliefs. This is now commonplace—we check social media or the news cycle and take in some painful story that flares up our rage at injustice. Again, emotions are good and created by God. But they take the wrong place when they become the engine for our action.”
The remainder of the book is filled with great insights into how we can healthily deconstruct and reconstruct our faith, including the practice of tending - patiently working with our doubts over a longer period of time instead of needing immediate gratification or social credit for making them public. He recommends that we “practice being wrong,” returning to a gentle dogamism - holding our beliefs, but holding them with humility, knowing that much of what we believe will be corrected in heaven. He encourages us to “doubt your doubts” and “suspend your disbelief” and “deconstruct your own deconstruction.” He invites us to a healthy criticism about the beliefs we embrace: “For the person in deconstruction or doubt, it’s important to remember that just because something feels spiritual or enjoyable or liberating doesn’t mean it’s permissible.” (144) He invites us to read old authors and recognize that for thousands of years there has been a “rule of Faith,” or a history of what the Church has considered Orthodox beliefs and not rather than embracing every new idea or new author we read.
The chapter on “Embracing the Whole Kingdom” shows Christians the middle road - our world wants to divide everyone politically into Conservatives or Liberals, Republicans or Democrats. Swoboda invites us to have a healthy skepticism about the ways we’ve been co-opted by these false categories and how Christianity doesn’t fit neatly into either of them.
Ultimately, Swoboda’s invitation is a hope-filled invitation to place our trust back in Jesus. Not to perfect our beliefs or sharpen our doctrine (though these things are important), but, beyond our times of doubt and deconstruction to remember that Christianity is ultimately about a trusting relationship with God. He invites his readers to discern the truth, embrace the whole kingdom, and to remember that behind and above their doubts is a Person who invites them to trust again.
I found this book particularly relevant to our cultural moment in American Christianity. I’m seeing so many people I know that are either walking away from faith entirely or embracing a more culturally palatable form of Christianity that bears no resemblance to its historical expression. Also, on top of all this, Swoboda is a pleasure to read. He’s a great writer. I can’t recommend this book strongly enough.