What I mean with Deconstruction

The eternal process of letting go

A speech bubble comes out of a generaric modern building, which says “Okay, now we have the definitive answers.”

It has occurred to me that the word "deconstruction" could have many different meanings. I wanted to write what I mean by deconstruction just so we’re all on the same page. I’m not here to give you a lecture on the history of Evangelical Deconstruction. So instead, I will give a short overview of where, I believe, said deconstruction originated.

From the 90’s till now

In the late 90’s, there were already some cracks visible within the church. I’d like to categorize this as disillusionment with the purity culture movement, a response to the Moral Majority movement, and maybe even the Emergent Church, led by people like Brian McLaren. However, this “emergent” movement wasn’t quite focused on deconstruction; I’d argue that they were focused on the reimagination of Christianity.

In the late 2000’s, a rapid decline in millennial church attendance occurred. It’s understandably tempting to look at the correlation between exposure/scandals and their exit. It was also the time the iPhone came out, and the internet became more accessible than ever. This may still not be quite deconstruction, but more a group of people actively leaving faith behind.

Fast forward to 2015 and a whole new picture starts to form. Annecodotally, the people who grew up evangelical and explained to me why they left the church said they did so because of Donald Trump, when evangelical identity became fused with political ideology. I remember vividly when I asked people like Brian Recker and Joe Smith why they moved away from their pastoral positions, and they both shared similar stories. When Donald Trump became president, they couldn’t cognitively stay evangelical. This group is different, though, from the previous group that simply left the church. This group looks more like the first group that is trying to reimagine a post-evangelical world, but does so by deconstructing their current beliefs and carefully putting together a faith that makes sense to them.

Of course, take what I wrote above with a grain of salt. It’s just my observation, and I find the Deconstruction movement fascinating and necessary for Christianity to survive.

So what do I mean with Deconstruction?

Those close to me know that I’m a fan of Derrida, so they will not be surprised by my definition of deconstruction. But a few words before I continue. I know that the terms are mostly unrelated and that we are nearing the homonym territory. But I can’t help but believe that the deconstruction movement started with similar beliefs as Derrida and slowly moved away to be the new arbiters of Christianity. I say this with the utmost respect to my interlocutors. I am truly inspired and deeply respect the leaders of the current deconstruction movement. But our paths are not the same. I would like to explain why, and I want to connect it with my, sometimes, an absurd quest towards ambiguity.

Ok, so what does Derrida mean by deconstruction, and how does it differ from evangelical deconstruction?

First things first

If evangelical deconstruction carefully takes apart the faith and puts it back together slowly. Derrida’s deconstruction is, in its simplest form, a strategy to stay critical. Where evangelicals seek to replace, Derrida simply aims to destabilize.

For Derrida, the paradigm of the world often relies on binary oppositions. One of my favorite examples is the concept of “equality.” Because equality exists, inequality must exist too, and any person with a moral compass would say “equality is better than inequality.” But Derrida disagrees. Not with the merits of equality over inequality, but with the concept that equality is always superior to inequality. Derrida argues that a teacher-pupil relationship or a parent-baby relationship is inherently unequal but nevertheless virtuous and just. His point is to lean into the other side of the binary, glean what can be true there, and live in its ambiguity. Although Derrida didn’t call it ambiguity, he used the terms Aporia and Différance.

I’m not trying to claim to supersede Derrida, I just prefer ambiguity because it captures enough of the essence of Aproria and Différance without replacing them completely.

Aporia can be best translated as an impasse. For example, in order to execute justice, you have to be a rule follower, but sometimes you have to be a rule breaker to be just. Practically, undocumented immigrants are illegal in the US without due process, but it would be unjust to just throw them out, right? Derrida argues that impasse moments occur often in everyone’s life and that one’s opinion or even decision can’t possibly be fully grounded and stand on its own.

Différance is essentially a merger of “to differ” and “to defer.” I’m so sorry to my fellow Derrida fans. I know fully well that I’m butchering and oversimplifying things, but this will have to do. So différance is a combination of distinction and postponement, i.e., meaning only exists because of the difference with other words, and therefore the true self bearing the meaning of a word never arrives and is in eternal postponement.

Easy right? 🤭

In order to understand the word “faith,” we have to be satisfied with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean doubt, for example, but we need the word doubt in order to reach a temporary understanding of what faith means.

How would Derrida’s Deconstruction approach Evangelicalism?

So I thought it would be fun to let Derrida loose on evangelicalism in order to explain my dissonance with the modern term. What pressure points would Derrida find?

The first pressure point would be sola scriptura and the authority of the text. Evangelicalism puts enormous weight on Scripture being clear, self-interpreting, and directly accessible — but Derrida’s entire career was an argument that no text is self-interpreting. Meaning is always deferred, always dependent on a chain of other signs, contexts, and interpretive traditions. The evangelical claim to “just read what it says” is itself a reading which is shaped by tradition, community, and theological inheritance. But the framework requires suppressing that fact. The structure needs the myth of immediacy to function, but the myth is exactly what close reading dissolves.

The second would be the center. What evangelicalism places as the fixed, transcendent point that organizes everything else. For most evangelical theology, this is something like: the inerrant Bible as a transparent window onto the mind of God. Derrida would call this a “transcendental signified,” a meaning that supposedly stands outside the play of language and grounds it. But his argument is that no such anchor exists outside the system of signs. Even “God says X” is a human sentence, transmitted through human language, translated across millennia, interpreted within communities. The proposed center is already inside the play it was supposed to stabilize.

Third, he’d examine the binary oppositions on which evangelicalism depends: saved/unsaved, believer/heretic, orthodoxy/apostasy, sacred/secular. Derrida consistently showed that these oppositions are never clean. The subordinated term is always contaminating the privileged one. The heretic is required to define the orthodox. The unsaved are necessary to the soteriological drama. The secular keeps bleeding into the sacred in ways the structure must manage through constant boundary work. So for Derrida, deconstruction doesn’t flip the binary; it shows the binary was never stable to start with.

Modern evangelical deconstruction often follows a very un-Derridian path: people exit one structure (evangelical certainty) and arrive at another (progressive certainty). The structure of binary opposition and the desire for a stable center are reproduced, just with different content. Derrida would find that deeply unsurprising and would probably say the work isn’t done until you’re willing to live without the replacement center too, which is genuinely harder and more vertiginous than most deconstruction narratives allow.

So where do I stand?

So no, I don’t agree with modern evangelical deconstruction. Mostly because many of the new progressives, who have previously colonized the conservative spaces, are now colonizing the progressive spaces with their newfound binaries.

As I wrote above, living without a center is arguably harder. Take my own life: I’m Jewish by birth, grew up in a Pentecostal church, pastored a conservative evangelical church, and will be confirmed in the Episcopal church in May.

The irony isn’t escaping me. I don’t fully know what the Episcopal Church can offer me. I also don’t know if I theologically agree. Honestly, I just like singing and seeing my wife and kids be happy. And yes, I also feel a spiritual pull. But it is slightly odd: if Christians are grafted into Jews, then am I now being grafted into myself?

But to return to my point, deconstruction is living without a center and without binary truths. And yes, saying that completely undermines the claim I’m making. How can I state that I live without a center and without binary truths by stating that living without a center is my center and by stating, in quite a binary way, that I’m going to live without binary truths. But that’s the beauty of deconstruction. It’s not about reaching a new center; to me, it’s about indefinitely postponing one. It’s Différence. It’s Aporia. Or as I like to call it: living in ambiguity.