Patterns of Deconstruction and Reconversion
Unpacking the key elements of Credibility, Consistency, and Reverence
The evergreen topic regarding the strengths and weaknesses of different types of churches has recently resurfaced in the online communities I inhabit. As the same people try to rehash the same discussion again and again, the distinctions become clearer, but patterns of similarity also begin to emerge.
The emotional baggage connected with sacred tradition makes objectivity difficult, and I'm sure there are biases that cloud my judgement in ways I can’t perceive. However, I do have the advantage of gaining a perspective on different traditions before much negative experience. The relationship between my born-again father and the rest of his Catholic family was not contentious. While he made efforts to communicate an understanding of salvation by grace through faith, there was never any suggestion that leaving the Catholic church was required.
But because he left, I also got to witness the contrasting experience between my own upbringing and that of my cousins, who were all baptized and confirmed in the Catholic church. My father told me that after his encounter with Christ, his parents had asked him if he could remain Catholic. He recognized that he could, hypothetically. But his reasons for leaving were not ideological or spiritual, but practical. He said that it would be too easy to slip back into bad habits if he remained.
His two older brothers were both very industrious and successful. They never had the same difficulties as my father, who got in trouble with substance abuse, and ended up flunking out of college during freshman year. I’m sure their sense of responsibility and civic duty is due in large part to their Catholic upbringing. But it lacked the spiritual dimension. As a result, my cousins learned to value education, but were seduced by progressive ideologies, (ironically distilled from Christian teaching,) that reject Christianity as bigoted and patriarchal.
At a certain point in my adult life, I began to feel resentment towards my parents for emphasizing the importance of faith, and a personal relationship with Jesus, over and above the pursuits of education and career. They were proud and enthusiastic about my decision to pursue ministry, but after a disappointing run working at a large church, I felt lost trying to find a decent career without even an associates degree. I can relate to the experience of many other second and third generation evangelicals, who found their parents’ tradition lacking in tools to transfer meaning from generation to generation.
This has led many Millennial and Gen Z evangelicals to embrace the more ancient and traditional forms of Christianity, sometimes, but not always, after a period of deconversion. The belief is that Christianity with a tradition, is more capable of transferring that tradition from generation to generation than evangelicalism, which really only excels in dealing with new believers.
This introduces the first paradox in weighing the value of the tradition. How can you accurately measure the ability of a tradition to instill intergenerational beliefs by observing the converts? Eventually, we will be able to track the success of this experiment in the number of generations that remain within a given tradition. But in general, the older churches, including Catholics, Orthodox, the mainline protestants, are losing those born into their traditions faster than new converts are coming in. My cousins are the norm, not the exception.
This hints at the possibility that the inability to pass on the values and traditions from parents to children might be part of a broader cultural problem, more than a religious one. This can be seen in the general antipathy of Millennials and Gen Z’s towards their Baby Boomer parents. My intuition tells me that the level of respect for parents is probably higher across all religious traditions, including evangelicalism, when compared to the general population.
Gen Z’s greater interest in religion could be perceived as a rejection of secular values held by their own Boomer parents. If there is a greater generational turnover of tradition from Boomers and the children of Boomers, it should be an explainable phenomenon.
Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke has been speaking regularly about studies that provide conclusive evidence to predict what beliefs will be embraced by the next generation. The key factor is credibility, gained through “credibility enhancing displays”, behaviors that don’t make sense intuitively, which children emulate in the people they trust. Children will place their “faith” in the same thing as the most credible people they know. It could be God, or Science.
Children always perceive their parents as credible sources of knowledge, until they encounter a contrary worldview. At that point, the credibility of their parents must be weighed against the alternative. I think a large part of the “ex-vangelical” deconversions could be attributed to the fact that fearful parents did not adequately prepare their children for the contrary worldviews they would encounter in adulthood. The insecurity presented by such parents was sharply contrasted by the degree of confidence in which secular authorities embrace their materialist lifestyle.
But regardless of who presents it better, the first encounters with a foreign point of view are bound to create some cognitive dissonance. The first inklings of doubt towards our prior beliefs can only be ignored so long, and the longer they are ignored, the deeper they must be examined to assuage our doubts. This means that our prior beliefs must be “desecrated” to some extent, pulled apart and examined to determine the quality and substance within.
If nothing worth preservation is found, the beliefs are abandoned, and the new world view is adopted. If secularity provides happiness and success, there is no need to reexamine our spiritual beliefs. However, if the life outside the four walls of the church leaves people feeling empty, they will once again deconstruct, reexamining their newly adopted worldview. What they have now gained is perspectival knowledge, an awareness of the similarities and differences between various points of view.
With this newfound perspective comes the ability to reassess the previous framework, in light of the current one. Because the previously identified issues in their parents' tradition remain, many people come around to the idea that there was something of value overlooked, (the essence of the faith,) but it’s best sought in another place. This is why people often go to a different Christian tradition. What they are seeking is something called participatory knowledge, one of four “P’s of knowledge” coined by Dr. Vervaeke, which also contains the aforementioned perspectival knowledge.
Participatory knowledge is the fullness of understanding that provides meaning to our lives. It is to “know” in the biblical sense, as a woman is known by her husband. It is what many people experience in the process of religious conversion, what evangelicals referred to as being “born again”.
When people find the participatory experience they are looking for in a new tradition, they often credit it to a difference in the format of their churches. This is why the Evangelical churches of a generation prior were filled with people who grew up in Catholic and mainline Churches. They experienced their parents' tradition as “dead religion”, but became alive in Christ through evangelical movements of the late 20th century. The standard characterization is that they rejected the format of liturgical worship, or strict confessionalism, for a more “emotional” experience.
But when they are asked why, Baby Boomers often describe a decontextualized swap between the other two p’s - procedural knowledge, and propositional knowledge. For example, a former Catholic may say that what they found in Evangelicalism is a clear understanding of the gospel - a propositional statement about who they are in Christ, rooted in the text of scripture. They will contrast this to the “empty ritual” of liturgical procedure in Catholicism, where (a few generations back,) asking questions and reading the Bible was discouraged. The solutions offered instead were seeking confession, praying the rosary, attending mass, and partaking of the eucharist.
In contrast, someone with a background in the waspy, intellectual mainline church may describe an experience in which there was a great deal of propositional knowledge— whether doctrine and theology, or psychology and sociology, —but no spirit, and no effect on the lives of the people or the community. They describe the elements of worship and outreach in the evangelical church as a great improvement in procedural knowledge.
What is common in both instances is that people find what they are looking for in churches that are faithful, sincere, and consistent in the areas where their former tradition had lost its credibility.
In the current discourse, the Millennials and Gen Z’ers coming out of evangelicalism are once again leaving for different streams of tradition, making the same swap. Those from the more charismatic expressions of evangelicalism (the procedural strain, rooted in worship), are embracing reformed confessionalism - propositional knowledge that provides the guide rails for providing a stable community. At the same time, those coming out of a more propositional, “gospel-centered” movements, heavy on apologetics and evangelism, or lifeless cultural Christianity of progressive ideology are turning to the procedural solution of liturgy.
The equation of participation with either correct procedure or propositions is more readily recognized with another increase in perspective, but this requires further deconstruction of additional frameworks, something that can result in jaded cynicism, where everything is equally bad, or a new age enlightenment, where everything is equally good.
But for those seeking real solutions to real problems, the pattern of deconstruction is usually stopped by another element that plays a significant role in conversion - reverence.
Reverence is often framed as a somber respect towards the sacred, in opposition to the happy-clappy aspects of Charismatic Evangelicalism, or the frank practicality of the purpose-driven church. Young converts to old traditions display a great deal of reverence when they discuss aspects of their newfound faith such as the liturgy, the eucharist, or their confessional documents. These elements do have something that evangelicalism often lacks, a presence often mistaken for reverence itself, called gravitas.
Gravitas is the somber dignity of serious things. It is something that demands respect. An Orthodox priest performs the divine liturgy with a greater degree of gravitas than a mega pastor preaching a sermon. I think one reason that younger believers are seeking gravitas is that it speaks to the point where their own upbringing lacked credibility.
The evangelical church, especially in the seeker sensitive and mega church varieties, tried to fix what was wrong with the traditions of their youth by making church fun. Nor was this a false correction; just think of the entirely Biblical 1991 praise chorus “Mourning Into Dancing”. The upbeat tempo and major key melody are perfectly suited to aid in lifting the spirits, completely congruent with lyrics based on Psalm 30.
Praise music is a sacred element for many believers of our parents generation, a liturgical offering imbued with the real presence of Christ. Like confession, it is a release valve to diffuse the pressures of weekly life. Like the Eucharist, it is a means of grace that heals and fills up the soul. That is how many of our parent’s experience it; but it doesn’t resonate the same with their children.
One peer, who grew up in church but does not believe, put it this way; “Christians should be the happiest people, but they are all the most miserable.” His major mental example comes from his father, who used his powerful voice to sing worship and special songs at church on Sunday. But the rest of the week, he used it to shout at yell at his wife and kids. His credibility eroded completely with a divorce.
For many Millennial and Gen Z believers, this common incongruity has added a bitter aftertaste to anything coded as fun or happy that happens within church. Yet there are elements of mirth and joy present in the gospels that lack gravitas, but still demand our reverence. What then is reverence?
Reverence is the refusal to deconstruct. It allows a thing to remain whole as it is. It is practiced by religious converts who have experienced participation with God in a particular time and place, a place that becomes holy ground. This is part of the reason why the critiques of evangelicalism fell on the deaf ears of boomers. To question the modern mega church was to question the sacred nature of being born again. Many found the gravitas of the old world both overbearing and incomprehensible. They came to know Jesus through participation in his joy.
The point of failure in the spiritual journey of Millennials and Zoomer’s lies in their inability to perceive their parent’s reverence for a church they don’t understand. Until you recognize the reverence within your parents' faith, without trying to fix it, your journey is not complete.
This was the framework afforded to me by my parents and grandparents, which made it easier to remain within evangelicalism, and see the unique benefits it provides. It’s also important because the patterns of history tend to repeat; if you can’t learn to understand your parent’s faith, don’t be so confident that your children will embrace yours. The catechisms and confirmation classes are not so different from the evangelical Sunday school and VBS programs Boomer’s put their faith in.
In reality, there is no structure of liturgy, confession of faith, or infallible leader who can ensure that a church will remain credible or perfectly transmit the teaching from one generation to another. The ever changing nature of culture and language means that things will always get lost in translation. In my cousin's case, the slow pace of change rendered the catholic tradition more and more irrelevant with every passing year.
Every tradition has its problems, and even if Evangelicalism has more than most, it is also uniquely suited to view those problems as things that can be improved in a way that other traditions lack. But every tradition also holds the possibility of bringing people into a fuller knowledge of Christ, which is why they all deserve a degree of our reverence.