This post contains responses by BSA members to the question in the title and responses to comments amde in the thread. I did not include the OP as his skeptism and debating tendacies are not helpful. His post is here. The responses below are very interesting.
Tre Murillo – exegetical exvangelical
Hi Nathaniel, you’ve asked a number of complicated questions with complicated answers (and that’s what we’re all here for!). From my perspective, the key phrase in your post is “why the Bible or any specific religious truth claim is objectively and uniquely the correct transcendent interpretation.” I think a lot of Americans have understandably but erroneously developed the impression that this is how religious faith functions in general, due to the outsized influence that conservative evangelical strains of Christianity hold in our culture. The short answer is that many Christians outside of such traditions do not conceptualize their faith in terms of objective truth or scientific reality at all. Those tend to be the concerns of apologetics, which is not part of everyone’s faith journey. To your point about justifying through evidence—that isn’t a concern for a whole lot of people of faith, and many would say that it actively undermines the meaning and value of faith to require exhaustive, logical proofs.
As for the overarching question in your title, I can speak for myself as someone who grew up in a Pentecostal tradition and deconstructed as a teenager. I remained Christian for a few years in a more progressive church, before finally losing my faith altogether. None of this was an intentional choice, though it was the result of much thought and soul-searching. I couldn’t snap my fingers and stop believing something any more than I could magically start believing in something, and it wasn’t my goal to attempt to do so. Deconstruction is a complex and painful process that reshapes your entire worldview in the absence of the glue that once held it all together. For a time, remaining Christian made sense to me simply because I still believed in the core tenets. I had just undergone a shift in interpretation and outward expression. There are also strong elements of terror throughout the experience, as you untangle what you’ve been taught about sin and hell.
Like many exvangelicals, my faith slowly unraveled as I found inconsistencies in the allegedly inerrant scripture that I could not reconcile. For some, that leads more directly toward a a loss of faith, but I was able, as many Christians are, to acknowledge the flaws in the text without it affecting my faith in Christ. Then, over time, it was the question of suffering that fully undid my faith, and I have not returned to it in almost 30 years. For a little while in my 20s, I overcompensated and became an insufferable atheist who was angry at Christianity and Christians and the whole business of faith. I have thankfully left that attitude in the dust.
Anyway, I feel like I’ve rambled on long enough at this point. I hope that this gave you some perspective relevant to your questions. If not, I’m an open book if you want to ask me anything
Tre Murillo‘s followup
Oh, I see! Deconstruction does not have to mean losing one’s faith and leaving the religion altogether. We’re using “deconstruction” as a sort of shorthand for “evangelical deconstruction,” which itself implies fundamentalist evagelicalism, because not all evangelicals are theologically conservative (e.g. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). In this sense, we’re talking about things like purity culture, inerrant scripture, unquestionable church leadership, young earth creationism, anti-intellectualism, and spiritual (rather than medical) interventions for maladies. Perspectives that comprise a worldview but don’t necessarily leave one without faith in God or Christ when dismantled.
So, “Jesus rose from the dead,” “God exists,” and “Christianity is true” remain propositions for many, but often the deconstructed-but-still-Christian person tends to view these less as “claims,” because it no longer feels imperative to proclaim them to anyone. When I left my Pentecostal church for a more progressive mainline Protestant one, the emphasis on evangelizing (“witnessing”) to others evaporated. The conception of hell as a place of eternal torment evaporated. The understanding that one must remain pure until marriage, lest ye incur divine wrath evaporated. But the core of Jesus’ message, divinity, and resurrection remained.
I’m trying really hard to represent a broad spectrum of both conservative evangelical positions and forms that deconstruction can take, without turning this into a novel—and without disparaging people’s faith positions per se. I will say that the spectrum of deconstruction very much includes folks who come to understand their faith in symbolic, existential, ethical, or communal ways. It also includes people who land comfortably in other branches of Christianity, as it remains a quite diverse array.
Schaun Wheeler – Faith without doubt is just pretext – A separate response to the OP.
It seems to me that you’re treating belief as assent to a set of propositions — holding the right claims, which then need evidence to warrant them. Peter Enns calls this “the sin of certainty”: the assumption that faith is fundamentally about believing correct things, so that shaky evidence for those things means shaky faith. That’s one model of faith, and once you adopt it the conclusion you reached is already baked in. Define faith as propositional assent, notice the propositions are underdetermined by evidence, and of course you end up asking how anyone could justify it. The definition did the work. You’ve assumed that, not argued for it.
Your “skin in the game” version is the same move — heretics struck down, God enforcing the factual claims. That pictures faith as a bet on historical and metaphysical facts, settled by whether the facts hold up. If that were what belief is, I’d hold the same position you hold. But, again, this objection doesn’t test faith so much as assume the one model of it that was going to fail the test anyway.
You sharpened the question later: if these aren’t claims about objective reality, what kind of claims are they? You’re right that one of the answers is self-defeating. If someone keeps saying “true” and “I believe” while meaning only “this is a meaningful way to orient myself,” that’s an equivocation on the word “true,” and it collapses. But the two options you offered — objective fact or mere symbol — aren’t the only two. The claim “My wife loves me” is about reality. It can be false — I could be deceived, she could be pretending, I could be misunderstanding. There’s a fact of the matter that doesn’t depend on how the belief makes me feel. And it isn’t settled the way “lead melts at 327°C” is settled. I know it by living inside years of participation in the relationship. Most of what any of us claims about the people we love works this way. It’s not a rare exception. Your two categories have no slot for it.
So when you ask what kind of claim I’m making: I’m making a claim that something real is there. Not a symbol I happen to find useful. I’ve dropped two things you’ve fused together — that believing consists in signing the propositions, and that a historian’s methods are the court that decides them. The referent is real. What you call propositions are the tradition’s multi-vocal, revisable attempts to point at the referent. It’s a claim and not just an orientation because it’s true or false depending on whether there’s something there, whether or not it being there helps me (oftentimes, frankly, it feels like it doesn’t so much help me).
Take your own example: “Jesus rose from the dead.” I’m undecided about it, and comfortable being undecided. It may have happened. It may be the early Christian renegotiation of Jesus’s death — same as the Hebrew Bible’s renegotiation of the monarchy after the exile. At minimum, it expresses what those communities were convinced was true about the permanence and unconquerability of what Jesus brought. I don’t have the evidence to say it happened, and you don’t have the evidence to say it didn’t. That’s fine.
That is, I think, where I take strongest issue with several of your framings. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (except in the edge case where you’d expect evidence if the thing were true). For a single past event that wouldn’t leave the kind of trace historical method can check, that condition isn’t met, so the honest position is agnosticism – specifically regarding that particular event, not other events in the tradition or regarding the tradition as a whole – not denial. Concluding “it didn’t happen” from “we can’t show it happened” is the same unscientific move you’re worried believers make in reverse. Deconstruction doesn’t require me to throw the claim out. It requires me to be clear about what the evidence warrants and what it doesn’t. On the resurrection, the evidence requires neither yes nor no, but permits an qualified assumption of either.
On “why the Bible, or any specific tradition, rather than another.” I don’t claim it’s the only one. I’m LDS, so I already hold more than the Bible as scripture, and I have no problem believing the Quran or the Vedas or the different traditions of Chinese scripture or other texts do the same work for the people formed by them. “Why this one” isn’t “because this one is true and the others aren’t.” Metaphor and allegory don’t have to warrant unique correctness, because I’m not claiming unique correctness. What “this one” gets me is a tradition I can actually be met by. Encounter is hard to cultivate, and it needs enough shared ground to happen at all. A tradition foreign to me would take all my effort just to become competent in it — I’d spend years learning to read it before it could ever challenge me, and I’d get intellectual satisfaction out of that, which I can get more cheaply elsewhere. This is the water I can already swim in, so it can meet me and correct me instead of just taxing me. It’s like asking why I love my own family and not some equally worthy stranger’s family. Relationship runs through particulars.
That’s also why it isn’t Plato’s noble lie. A noble lie is a story its tellers know to be false and administer from above to keep a community stable. What I’m describing runs the other way — submission to something I take to be real and can’t control, whose whole effect is to unsettle me. The text obligates me because it’s external to me. It contains material that repels me and/or confuses me and/or frustrates me, and I choose not to edit any of that out, so I have to keep wrestling with it. If my reading of it always flattered what I already believed, that would be the tell that I was using it as a mirror. The friction is the part that matters.
On your worry that any eureka moment can be explained away by cognitive psychology or psychoanalysis — I think that proves too much. Our brains didn’t evolve to track truth; they evolved to make and weigh arguments that serve cooperation, and truth-tracking is incidental and unreliable, over-firing on some things and missing others. We accept socially distributed knowledge constantly, even in rigorous work. “You believe this for psychological or social reasons” is true of nearly everything humans believe, including most of what we’re most confident about. It explains faith, it explains your confidence that faith is unwarranted, and it explains a mathematician’s certainty about a proof. If it disqualifies one, it disqualifies all three. It’s the ordinary condition of being a person, not a special strike against religion.
Henri Poincaré tells a story of how he’d been stuck on a hard problem, set it aside, and went on a trip. Stepping onto a bus, with nothing in his prior thoughts leading up to it, the answer came to him — that the functions he’d been working on were identical to those of non-Euclidean geometry. He didn’t verify it; there wasn’t time, and he went on with a conversation he’d already started. He felt a perfect certainty, and checked it later at home, where it held. The intuition ran ahead of the proof, and he trusted it before he had the proof. The same Poincaré argued that even the axioms of geometry aren’t truths at all:
The geometrical axioms are therefore neither synthetic à priori intuitions nor experimental facts. They are conventions. Our choice among all possible conventions is guided by experimental facts; but it remains free, and is only limited by the necessity of avoiding every contradiction, and thus it is that postulates may remain rigorously true even when the experimental laws which have determined their adoption are only approximate. In other words, the axioms of geometry (I do not speak of those of arithmetic) are only definitions in disguise. What, then, are we to think of the question: Is Euclidean geometry true? It has no meaning. We might as well ask if the metric system is true, and if the old weights and measures are false; if Cartesian co-ordinates are true and polar coordinates false. One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.
There’s a passage in John 6 where people are offended by Jesus and walk away, and he asks the twelve if they’ll go too, and Peter says, “Where would we go? You have the words of eternal life.” That’s about as good an account as I can give of why I stay with my tradition through doubt, complaint, and fatigue. I’ve had experiences I can’t explain away (I’ve tried). I find something there, for myself, something I’m convinced I’ll never fully put into words. My faith is the expression and outgrowth of those experiences and my attempts to make sense of them. All of human experience is embodied. We act on intuition we can’t articulate . We love when it makes no sense. We commit to things because of experiences that landed as true even though we could never prove them to anyone else. And some of those experiences can’t be put into words at all, which doesn’t make them incoherent or unreal. You know what salt tastes like. Try to describe it to someone who’s never tasted it, in words alone, without handing them any — and you can’t, and the failure says nothing about whether you know what salt tastes like. Plenty of ordinary, real things are un-wordable. My faith lives in that register.
George Saunders said:
Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening… A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.
Saunders calls it poetry. I call it religion. Toh-may-toh, toh-mah-toh.
I can’t hand you positive evidence that would settle the issue, and I’ve stopped thinking I’m supposed to. It belongs to that class of human experiences that evidence doesn’t settle.
