Why I Deconstructed (Part of a Larger Discussion on Satan and Demons)

Introduction 

Hello readers - it's been quite a while since I've written on this blog. I haven't shared links from this blog in a long time, because my "deconstruction" journey continued, as one might imagine, and I continued to change my mind on certain subjects. Sometimes those changes were subtle, and sometimes they were bigger. And because of the way I'd changed my mind, I found myself not really wanting to share some of these writings because I either don't feel the same way I once did, or in some cases I felt I would at least argue for these issues in a different way.

But more recently, I've really felt like I wanted to share some of my ideas that I'd put so much effort into developing. I had spent so much time reading and thinking about these things, and it seemed such a waste for me to keep these ideas to myself. So I have been writing, just not on this blog. And in one online forum, I was having a discussion on Satan and demons. This is a subject I have written at length on in this blog in the past, and more recently I have written in other places about it, though I've been trying to develop my arguments on these subjects in newer, perhaps more effective ways.

As I was having this discussion on Satan and demons, it struck me that perhaps it would be helpful if I shared my story - the story of why I felt it necessary to deconstruct my old beliefs in this area. Before I go too far into the past, I feel that maybe I should go full disclosure before you think I am in some way being dishonest with you and mention that these days, I don't even use the term "Christian" in regards to myself, but I just come out and say I'm agnostic. Now, I've had some people chastise me and tell me I should say "agnostic atheist" and I'd like to explain why they say that and why I don't use those terms. Apologists seem to want to say that atheism is a belief system, but it is really not - it is like if someone were to say "there's a giant teapot in space." If someone said that to me, I'd simply say "show me the evidence." I wouldn't believe that this teapot existed until I saw that evidence, and if they showed me some fuzzy image that sort of resembled a teapot in space, I'd probably say something like "that's more likely to be a nebula that just happens to be shaped somewhat like a teapot if you look at it from the right angle." Note that my disbelief in the giant teapot in space is not an active disbelief - it is fully willing to change if I am given the right kind of evidence. So I realize I should probably say "agnostic atheist", but I don't because I'm trying to avoid cultural stigmas around the terminology of "atheist".  

Ooh, I think I see the teapot!

And before I go any further, I want to mention that my goals in writing about subjects such as Satan and demons are not to convert all Christians to agnosticism or atheism. Rather, I feel that certain forms of Christianity are healthier ways of thinking than other forms of Christianity. I feel that certain beliefs can be said to be life-giving - they can lead people away from fear and shame and towards loving your neighbor - even your enemy - as yourself. And other beliefs lead towards fear and shame and lead people to shun people who think differently. And I would also mention that it has been said at times that "there is no hate like Christian love" - now why would people say this? Well, if you really examine how certain Christians "love" people who are different than themselves, you find that what they are calling "love" is really an attempt to control and convert - to fashion other people into their own image and lead them to compliance. And that's not love - love accepts and seeks to understand.

And one other thing I'd like to mention is that I don't want Christian readers to think that the way I changed my mind on subjects such as Satan and demons is the reason I am agnostic - I want you to understand that when I went through my deconstruction phase and was reading obsessively, and I was actually more "on fire" for my faith than I'd ever been in my life during that phase. I was excited about my faith in ways I'd never been before. But I met a lot of resistance when I tried to share that with other people. And over time I felt like I was losing friends. 

My agnosticism really came about during the COVID quarantine. More and more, during Trump's first term, I'd been struggling with the problem of evil, or the problem of suffering. So when COVID shut everything down, and we weren't attending church at all any more, those questions just got much louder for me. And so I just don't feel like I can honestly say I "believe" in any form of God-belief any more - I'd love it if certain forms were true, and because I know so much about the Bible and actually enjoy talking about it, I try to push other Christians in those directions.

So I know that's a long intro, but let me try to tell my story and along the way explain why I started questioning the ideas of Satan and demons that I'd grown up with.

Calvinism

I grew up as a Fundamentalist Evangelical Conservative Calvinist Christian. Some of those terms are not terms I would have used about myself at the time - for example, I think that for a long time, my parents and I had no idea what a "Fundamentalist" was, but as the terminology became more popular and widely circulated, we became aware of it and sort of wore it as a badge of pride - like "of course we believe in and emphasize the Fundamentals!" And I don't want to explain every one of those labels at this time and take a lot of time doing so, but let me just explain that Calvinism was a big part of my journey. Calvinism teaches that God has no intention to even try to save some people - that some people are "predestined" for Heaven and some people are "predestined" for Hell. That from the beginning of time, God said "I'm going to make Tommy...hmm...Tommy's going to Hell. Now I'm going to make Susie...hmm...ok, I'm going to save her and she'll go to Heaven." Calvinism also teaches that if you are in the "elect", you  will not be able to resist God and you will end up in Heaven, and if you are not in the "elect", there is absolutely nothing you can do to save yourself. 

Now, I was worried about my salvation. Because here's the thing - I never really loved God, and I knew it deep in my heart. I could go to church and sing my heart out (even though I didn't really like the hymns all that much), and I could put on a great act, but I always knew deep inside that I didn't really love God. And how could I? I believed that my sweet old Grandma was going to hell because she didn't believe the right things, and I knew deep inside that Grandma was a sweet kind lady who didn't deserve eternal torment. So I really didn't love God. And I would ask my faith leaders: "how do I know I'm saved? How do I know I'm one of the elect?" And I'd get this circular reasoning that went like "well you know because you believe orthodox beliefs." "But how do I know my beliefs are orthodox and correct?" "Don't worry about that, you're one of the elect because you're with us." Now, occasionally someone might talk about fruits of the spirit and such, and then my questioning would go along the lines of "I try to be kind and loving, but my little brother annoys me so much and I get mad at him" or something like that, and then I'd once again get this explanation that was really an exercise in circular reasoning.

Jennifer Carpenter as Emily Rose

 

Now this in itself is a longer story, but in my 20s, I was struggling with my faith and stopped going to church for a while. I told my parents, and others, that I was agnostic. But at the time, I wasn't, really - I still believed God existed. I just believed God hadn't elected me - hadn't chosen me for heaven. And so I had a lot of fear. I remember I did something really dumb and went with a friend to see the movie "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" in the theaters, and it terrified me. There's a concept in the movie where bad things happen at 3am or something (I can't remember if it might have been a bit more specific - like maybe 3:30am or something) because this is the "witching hour", and it is the "witching hour" because it is, supposedly, the inverse of the time that Jesus died on the cross. Well, I have this strange ability - I have a really in-tune internal clock. I almost never get woken up by an alarm clock - even if it's outside my normal time to wake up, I usually will wake up 10-15 minutes before my alarm goes off. So for months after that movie, I'd wake up, and I'd be lying there, terrified to look at the clock for fear that it was "the witching hour". And when I finally looked, sure enough it would be that time of the night.

I didn't know it at the time, but this was one of the first steps in my journey to questioning my beliefs regarding Satan and demons - because later in life, I felt I needed to confront this terror.

The Vineyard

Later on in life, I went back to church. And when I was 30, I ended up in a Vineyard church. And this was an important part of my deconstruction journey, because when I was in the Vineyard, I was introduced to some new ideas that excited me and challenged certain aspects of my earlier faith. In order to understand what makes the Vineyard unique and why I liked it, you have to understand that the founder, John Wimbur, was a Quaker who later on became part of the Charismatic movement. So the Vineyard has some Evangelicalism (which means they didn't challenge my faith too much at the time, which was probably good), but they also have the Quaker attitude that being a Christian means being dedicated to non-violence, which I found incredibly refreshing at this time in my life. And another part of my faith that was challenged while I was in the Vineyard - another important part of my deconstruction - was a result of the fact that the Vineyard tends to challenge the idea of "going to Heaven when you die" because of John Wimbur's emphasis on "Kingdom theology", grounded in the idea that Jesus came to establish the Kingdom of God, not escape everyone to Heaven when they die. 

But perhaps the most important thing about the Vineyard that really challenged me and kicked off my deconstruction was the fact that the Vineyard really seemed to influence Jesus' teachings on loving your neighbor as yourself, and even loving enemies. And I became involved in various outreach efforts because of this. So I would meet atheists and agnostics, and in my efforts to "love my neighbor", they would challenge me. And I recall going back to some of my friends at the Vineyard church and telling them about how I was starting to change my mind on certain subjects. What would always seem to happen in these scenarios is that these Christian friends of mine would say that my changing my mind on these subjects was the result of me allowing the Devil - Satan - to manipulate me, and that I needed to submit to God and allow the Holy Spirit to lead me. But I would push back on them and point out that they really didn't seem to have any real, solid standard for distinguishing whether something was coming from Satan or the Holy Spirit - rather, it seemed like Satan was just a scapegoat for them to pin the blame on for anything they didn't like, and the Holy Spirit was talking to you if you happened to agree with them. 

Perfect Love Casts Out Fear 

As I began to seriously deconstruct my beliefs, I was dealing with a lot of this rhetoric that was designed to scare me away from questioning. But one thing that strengthened my resolve at the time was that a certain chapter of the Bible had really begun to be very important to me - I John 4. There were some very powerful statements in that chapter that gave me strength. Such as when verse 7 of this chapter says that "love is from God" and that "everyone who loves is born of God and knows God." And later on in verse 12 is says that "if we love one another, God abides in us." So when my friends would tell me that I was changing my mind because I was being manipulated by Satan, I would retort: but I'm changing my mind because I am trying to love my neighbor, and so what if this is actually coming from God? 

But one thing in that chapter that especially gave me strength and inspired me to question was the fact that I John 4:18 says that "there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." This drove me especially to question my beliefs on Satan and demons, and in no small part because I realized just how much fear those beliefs had caused in my life. And I recognized right away that when I was trying to use logic and data to demonstrate why I had started to change my mind in other areas, my friends were trying to use fear of Satan to manipulate me and dissuade me from this. And so the very ideas of Satan and demons began to become very suspicious to me.

As I began to think about this, it was also very interesting to me that I John 4:18 says that love casts out fear. I found this very interesting, because this is the same language used to talk about demons. The verse says that love casts out fear - the Greek is exō ballei, and is very similar to a case in Mark 16:17 when it uses a grammatical form of this - ekbalousin - to describe casting out demons. 

You Will Know Them By Their Fruits 

When I realized that the beliefs I had inherited about Satan and demons were not casting out fear, but were instilling and affirming fear, I realized that this was a problem. Because another passage of the Bible that strengthened my resolve to question at this time in my life was Matthew 7:15-20, where Jesus tells his followers that they can discern whether they are dealing with a false teacher by examining their fruits. And if you flip over to one of Paul's writings in Galatians 5:22-23, he says that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." So if the fruit of a teaching is not love, as Galatians mentions in its list, but is instead something that love is supposed to "cast out", as I John 4:18 says, this is a problem.

In other words, there are teachings - ways of thinking - that lead someone to love their neighbor unconditionally rather than to recoil in fear from people who are different. And there are other teachings and ways of thinking which do the opposite - ideas that cause people to shun people who are different, to cast them out and condemn them to hell. Some ideas may even lead to violence. During my deconstruction phase, one book I read early on was called "Good Goats: Healing Our Image of God", and in one part of the book, the authors quote a section from another book called “No Fire Burning in Hell”, by Thomas and Gertrude Sartory:

No religion in the world (not a single one in the history of humanity) has on its conscience so many millions of people who thought differently, believed differently.  Christianity is the most murderous religion there has ever been.  Christians today have to live with this; they have to "overcome" this sort of past....  If someone is convinced that God condemns a person to hell for all eternity for no other reason than because he is a heathen, a Jew, or a heretic, he cannot for his own part fail to regard all heathens, Jews and heretics as good for nothing, as unfit to exist and unworthy of life.  Seen from this viewpoint, the almost complete extermination of the North and South American Indians by the "Christian" conquerors is quite consistent.  From the aspect of the dogma of hell "baptism or death" is an understandable motto. 

In conclusion, I want to restate that my goals for this discussion are not to convert anyone to agnosticism or atheism - rather, I still believe that there are certain ways of thinking about God and other religious ideas that are life-giving and that lead to loving your neighbor as yourself. But there are other ways of thinking about God and other religious ideas that lead people to accuse, to scapegoat, to shun, and even to excuse or even commit violence. If a belief is challenging you to love all people unconditionally, I will affirm this belief, not challenge it. But if a belief ends up being used to excuse attempts to stamp out diversity, or to shun people, or to even commit violence, I see that as a toxic belief that must be challenged.