Deconstructing the Wall
The Crisis
My friend Jenny was telling me about how she was struggling with her faith and how no one really seemed to understand what she was experiencing. She apologized for crying.
She had talked with a friend of hers about her questions and wondered out loud if she was deconstructing. Her friend responded, with the best intentions, that deconstructing is a great thing to do because it’s just critical thinking and that there was nothing to worry about because critical thinking is good. She said that every Christian should deconstruct!
Of course, critical thinking is good. To be sure, Jenny was thinking critically about her faith. She was asking questions about the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible. She was asking questions about the church’s treatment of women and their role in ministry. She was questioning whether God even exists or if this whole thing we call Christianity is just a sham. Had she believed all this stuff just because those in authority told her to? How could she be sure any of this was real? Belief always felt so easy until she became a mom, and the realization set in that now she was the authority figure in her daughter’s life, and she had to teach her daughter something. But the weight of that responsibility seemed crushing when she didn’t even know if she could trust her own beliefs.
She was thinking critically, all right. But it was more than that. She couldn’t sleep at night. The doubts and fear constantly occupied her mind. The question, “What if I’m wrong?” haunted her. Calling it “critical thinking” was true in one sense, and in another sense, it completely misunderstood what she was going through. It was true on a pragmatic level, but it minimized the confusion, disorientation, and, frankly, terror, that she felt on an experiential level. Jenny wasn’t just thinking critically. She was experiencing a crisis of faith.
But Jenny’s questioning of Christianity wasn’t her trying to find loopholes so she could indulge in sin. Nor was she simply looking for a way to leave the faith because she was tired of being in it. She didn’t want to leave the faith. She wanted to stay. She wasn’t one step away from apostasy. She was desperately trying to trust Jesus and hold on in the midst of the deep questions and the dark night of the soul that she experienced.
For a long time, Jenny thought she might be a bad person—a bad Christian—for having those questions, but she couldn’t stuff them down any longer. She had to ask them. She had never thought of deconstruction as a crisis of faith before. But when she did, it was like a lightbulb was turned on in a room that had been dark for ages. She didn’t immediately have relief from the fear or answers to her questions, but she finally had language for what she was experiencing.
Jenny isn’t bad for asking questions. This crisis wasn’t something she sought out just because she was curious or wanted to sin or leave the faith. It’s something that came to her that she had to somehow find a way to move through. It wasn’t just a cold, intellectual exercise that she had to approach like a scientist or academic, testing out different hypotheses until a result was achieved. It was a grieving process. She was mourning the loss of the innocence of her faith, the trust she thought she had, and the difficult journey that lay ahead of her. Jenny’s story isn’t unique. In fact, I believe that this is the story of the majority of people who would say they are deconstructing. Stories like Jenny’s are exactly why I define deconstruction the way I do.
It’s not enough to simply look at the act of deconstruction. We also need to take into account the experience of deconstruction. Any attempt to address one without the other will fall short, because it’s only seeing part of the picture. We need to spend time looking at the act of deconstruction, examining the doctrines and cultural narratives that are being deconstructed. But if we don’t start by understanding deconstruction as a crisis of faith before anything else, then we won’t understand it at all.
Hitting “The Wall”
If you approach the life of faith with the up-and-to-the-right framework, thinking you should always be experiencing more and more of the presence of God in your life, then it will come as a shock to you when, in a trough, you hit what some have called “The Wall.” For most people who hit The Wall, it comes as a terrifying shock to the system that breaks down the categories you previously thought to be impervious. The truth, however, is that many people hit The Wall at some point in their lives, but they were never told that The Wall exists. So they either abandon their faith altogether or stuff down their fears and try to forget about it, leaving them stuck standing in front of The Wall and refusing to go through it.
Instead of an always up-and-to-the-right faith as I described above, in the book The Critical Journey, spiritual director Janet O. Hagberg and New Testament professor Robert A. Guelich describe six stages in the journey of someone’s life of faith.
The first three stages are ones that would be recognizable to most people who have been Christians for a while: (1) awe and reverence before God with an eagerness to learn and insecurity about not knowing more, (2) a strong sense of belonging to a church community and finding a strong sense of safety and purpose by identifying with the group, and (3) feeling empowered to use your gifts in the community to productively help and serve others.
These are stages of growth that many of us can identify with. Our churches are usually set up for these kinds of people. This is the typical pathway of discipleship for most churches and is what is right about the up-and-to-the-right way of thinking. We want this sort of growth for people. The problem is that this is where most people and churches stop. They think this is the end goal and the farthest anyone can go. They’re wrong. There is more.
This is where Hagberg and Guelich’s concept of The Wall becomes helpful for us. There are other ways of describing The Wall throughout church history that apply to the same experience. You might have heard of “the dark night of the soul” as coined by Saint John of the Cross. Or it might be the “long dark corridor,” as described by Teresa of Avila. While none of these are necessarily a one-to-one analog for deconstruction, they are all phenomenal descriptions that help us understand the experience of deconstruction. One way of thinking about deconstruction is someone hitting The Wall without having the resources in their faith to withstand it.
It’s worth quoting Hagberg and Guelich at length here to get a sense of what The Wall is.
When this stage comes, many feel propelled into it by an event outside of themselves. It’s usually a crisis that turns their world upside down.
If we have been people of strong faith, our life, though not necessarily easy, has fit nicely into our faith framework. Then the event or crisis often takes on major proportions. It often strikes close to our core, for example, our children, spouse, work, or health. For the first time, our faith does not seem to work. We feel remote, immobilized, unsuccessful, hurt, ashamed, or reprehensible. Neither our faith nor God provides what we need to soothe us, heal us, answer our prayers, fulfill our wishes, change our circumstances, or solve our problems. Our formula of faith, whatever that may have been, does not work anymore, or so it appears. We are stumped, hurting, angry, betrayed, abandoned, unheard, or unloved. Many simply want to give up. Their life of faith may even seem to have been a fraud at worst, or a mirage at best.
Some enter this stage of the journey through a crisis in their faith more than in their personal lives. This is particularly true for people raised in churches with a clearly defined belief system, one with a strong code of conduct that provided guidance and answers for life and life’s questions. . . .
Suddenly, something in one’s strict adherence is called into question. One of the foundation blocks crumbles. Perhaps someone considered to be a model of faith, a person of genuine piety, is exposed for being involved in an immoral or illegal activity. Perhaps another way of looking at the Scriptures or relating to God and life begins to catch one’s attention. For example, specific doctrines about Scripture or the Church’s infallibility come into question. Gnawing questions become more and more unmanageable, questions about what we believe and have believed about how we live and why we do what we do and do not do certain things. We are no longer able to ignore or repress them. They haunt us continually. So much so that we become aware of a larger gap in our lives of faith. We sense ourselves slipping more and more into a period of limbo.[1]
Does any of that sound familiar? This is the experience of hitting The Wall. While not everyone who hits The Wall goes on to deconstruct their faith, you can imagine what this experience would be like for someone who has been raised in cultural Christianity, attends a compromised church, and has a life full of cumulative anxieties. Even just one of these would set someone up for disaster when they hit The Wall. It takes a deep spiritual well to hit The Wall and not panic or feel frightened by it.
For many, this is the beginning of deconstruction. But most believers and churches don’t know about or acknowledge this experience of faith. When the lights turn off, and the floor drops out from under you, and you experience God’s absence, not his presence, what do you do then?
Did you catch the word repeated three times in Hagberg and Guelich’s description? Crisis. It’s typically catalyzed by a personal crisis or a crisis of faith. The experience of hitting The Wall, of deconstructing, isn’t a fun intellectual exercise, or an excuse to go about sinning (though, of course, it can be catalyzed by both of those, since a life of willful sin can produce a crisis of conscience that demands a choice be made). A crisis brings deconstruction about and is itself a crisis. This experience of hitting The Wall is what we talk about when we talk about deconstruction.
Taken from Walking Through Deconstruction by Ian Harber. Copyright (c) 2025 by Ian Harber. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com
[1] Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich, The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith (Salem, WI: Sheffield Publishing Company, 2005), 94-95.