In grappling critically with the strict religious teachings of her childhood, Mrs. Vuolo is taking part in a version of “deconstruction,” though she distances herself from the specific term. It’s an exercisethat has accelerated in the last five years among young adults raised in conservative Christian homes but remains controversial among many in the faith.
“I was just so crippled with fear, and I didn’t know why,” Mrs. Vuolo recalled in an interview. She described herself as a “serious rule-follower,” who took to heart her family’s admonitions to dress in long skirts, avoid rock music and date only under parental supervision. In Mrs. Vuolo’s world, it was never a question that she would bypass college, marry a man approved by her parents and devote her life to parenting and home-schooling.
With a label borrowed from academic literary theorists, deconstruction has a broad range of definitions and outcomes, from understanding more about a faith once accepted uncritically to full abandonment of religious belief. Today, there are deconstruction coaches, deconstruction seminars, deconstruction podcasts and deconstruction songs. The topic made the cover of Christianity Today magazine last year, with headline “Wait, You’re Not Deconstructing?” In other words, everyone’s doing it.
“For a person to go through deconstruction, it often involves being rejected by your family and losing your entire social network,” said Brian McLaren, a writer and former pastor who helped popularize the term in evangelical circles in the early 2000s. “Deconstruction is not just a theological matter. It ends up being a social matter, and the stress of that social pressure puts incredible psychological pressure on you.”
The exercise of deconstruction, Mr. McLaren said, has taken off in part as wide-ranging discussions about gender, politics, sex and power in evangelical life have prompted many young Christians to ask big questions about the culture in which they were raised. In some cases, people walk away completely from religion; in others, they shift their theology or practice.
Mrs. Vuolo writes in her book that what she is doing is not deconstruction, exactly, but “disentangling,” a process she compares to methodically working a clump of hardened putty out of a healthy head of hair. By “disentangling,” she has separated “the truth of Christianity from the unhealthy version I heard growing up,” she writes.
Ruth Graham
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