01/08/2025 – Religious Construction, Deconstruction, Reconstruction

Why are people religious? Why do they give up their religion? Why do some people return to religion and become re-religious, or religious again? I have some thoughts. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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It’s a new year. Welcome to 2025 on TenOnReligion. Today we’re going to talk about religious construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. This is a hugely important topic and I hope you can listen to the whole thing because there’s a lot of misunderstanding out there. I want to first set up the problem, which, if you’re already listening to this, it will probably sound familiar. Then talk a little bit about what is religious construction, religious deconstruction, and religious reconstruction. Let’s get into it.

Analyzing religion is not in itself an inherently religious activity. It’s an academic activity. That’s why the academic study of religion, or the academic field of religious studies, is quite different from the professional field of religion or the devotional study of religion. Analyzing religion is not the same as being religious, but people who are religious, who practice a particular religion, have some level of commitment to a religion often have questions about either their specific religious tradition, or perhaps the idea or concept of religion in general. This is why learning about what the academic field of religion is, is so important, because you can learn how to ask the right questions to get the answers you’re looking for. Step one is understanding that not everyone is at the same place. In my episode on the psychology of religion late last year, for instance, I covered James Fowler’s Stages of Faith. Not everyone is at the same level in their personal religious journey, nor are they at the same level in their academic religious journey. Some people will never reach the upper levels in either realm, nor do they necessarily need to. But for those who are interested in moving on, and are ready to do so, let’s see where the journey takes us.

We’re starting with religious construction, which often occurs during one’s upbringing and the family and/or social and cultural environment in which one is raised. It obviously also can happen later in life as well. What types of things does religious construction include? First, being socialized into a religious tradition means learning a way to relate every aspect of life to something ultimate. Second, it often provides answers to concerns about human boundary situations, the biggest of which are death and immortality. Third, it means being enculturated into a social group with a means of bonding human beings tightly together. Fourth, it often provides solutions to questions of human or natural evil and a means of healing, liberation, transformation, and personal self-cultivation. We are fragile contingent beings living in a world environment which we often don’t have control over. How to deal with that situation? Fifth and last, it supplies a source of orienting narratives which become an authority for ethics to be imposed upon the entire religious community. The end result is a religion providing us with a limited, parochial understanding of the world, especially in traditions which claim a higher degree of exclusivity, but on the flip side, religions can be psychologically helpful for many people. In any given religious context, one person can feel completely out of place, harassed, abused, hurt, or confused while another person can feel accepted, loved, and healthy. So, it’s not a one-size-fits-all type of situation. This is where deconstruction comes into the picture.

What is religious deconstruction? When people claim to have religiously “deconstructed,” they usually mean that they have fundamentally changed the way they view their own tradition, or perhaps have given up on religion altogether without realizing there are multiple ways to interpret religious traditions. Apparently, it is not easy to imagine a religious interpretation other than the one we have personally used to make sense of our worlds. We do this even knowing that there are people all over the world with religious experiences quite different from us. But, listen to this. By and large, throughout history, the rise and fall of religion is not dependent upon an understanding, or misunderstanding, of how the world works. It’s not related to the relationship between science and religion, or the education level of a person, or whether a person is rich or they are poor. People don’t generally give up religion when an outsider disagrees with them, or judges them as backwards, uneducated, or superstitious, or something like that. Religions survive because of the social functions that they perform. When religion stops inspiring and convincing people, or when the social function is somehow disrupted, that’s when they tend to give it up.

Now, here’s the rub, religious authorities, either knowingly or unknowingly, create and support power structures for the express purpose of intentionally keeping large masses of people within the exclusive grip of their tradition. How is this done? By maintaining deprivation conditions, that is, by blocking any method of learning about or understanding religious diversity, interfering with the education of humanities and the sciences by reinterpreting them in a non-conforming way against the consensus of humanities and science scholars, and resisting people under their authority to pursue individual freedom by imposing social punishment or retribution within their community. Ya can’t leave the bubble people. Those in religious authority over you don’t want you to leave the bubble because then they no longer have control over you and they lose their power. Get it? Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? Once questions start to arise, regardless of when or how they arise, when people start asking questions, and they are shut down, what do you think they are going to do? That’s right. Deconstruct. This system no longer works…for me.

Let’s pull the curtain back for a second. Many people, if not all of us, have carefully trained critical-thinking skills which we use almost every day in our area of expertise, like a career or sport or hobby. But they do not often use those same thinking skills in other domains of life, such as religion. I don’t want to get too technical here because I might lose some of you, but this might help some viewers so let me explain a few things. Religious traditions tend to fall on a sliding scale of more anthropomorphic to less anthropomorphic. More anthropomorphic means they have strong connections to human figures and/or their views of deity are more human-like. These are very popular because the anthropomorphic aspects of the tradition make them very relatable and they provide a strong basis for hope. The problem is, they are often less proficient at explaining important things that are outside of, or divergent from, the traditional interpretations of their narratives or scriptures. And changing interpretations takes a long time. Like some versions of Christianity are still grappling with what Galileo discovered in the 1600’s. Seriously. The result is that people shift away from more anthropomorphic to less anthropomorphic understandings of religion because in these versions, people can still be religious but without all of the excess baggage so to speak. The trade-off is that they are less relatable, though that’s a trade-off many people deconstructing are willing to live with. Thus, we have movements like “Spiritual But Not Religious,” or the many forms of mystical traditions with various religions. But what if one is “deconstructing” but the less anthropomorphic options don’t work and one still wants some connection to religion? Then what? Keep listening.

Yes, and now it's time to talk about reconstruction. When the religious narratives and doctrines connecting them to life today no longer make sense for you, what to do? What’s the answer? A very famous scholar named Paul Ricoeur referred to this as being in the “desert of criticism.” Go check out my video on that. This is when people use their critical-thinking skills to expose the current interpretation of their tradition from their religious community. It’s all about reinterpreting the symbols. Think about that for a second. We can get really good at playing a game without ever really realizing what the game does, the magic it weaves, and what effects it has on us. Religious symbols depend on our not being aware of how the magic is performed. As soon as we see how the magician performs the trick, guess what…the trick no longer works for us. It’s no longer a “trick.” Religion isn’t all that different from this scenario. Religions operate by engaging people in and with symbols, and groups of symbols come together to form a system which can then cross over cultural and linguistic lines. There is a “tricky” (pun intended) balance here between anxiety about the truth of reality on the one side, and anxiety about how well the symbols religiously represent what they are supposed to represent. We all live with myths about how the various worlds operate – the natural environment, the social world, the political world, the working world, and so on. Is climate change real? Does trickle-down economics work? Should the repeatable experiment be a source for knowledge? You get the picture.

Reconstruction means going beyond the cognitive dissonance we experienced in deconstruction to reinterpret the symbols, or, in some cases, create new symbols. It means explaining how religious symbols effectively engage people authentically with boundary situations even when they are aware of their symbolic character. For example, in Western religious traditions the figure of Moses is a very important symbol. But even though there is no archeological evidence for the existence of Moses and it’s likely all a trope written by people from ancient Judaism to explain their exile experience in the 500’s BCE, that doesn’t mean the importance of Moses as a symbol vanishes into thin air. The lessons learned from the narratives about Moses are far more important than the question surrounding the existence of Moses. And…groups survive best whose identity can be understood, remembered, and narrated intergenerationally from children to adults. So, what does all of this mean? We need some new magic. The social construction of reality requires it to be transparent. In short, our myths never really get deconstructed. Without us realizing it, they only get transformed into other myths, be it scientific, political, economic, social, religious or otherwise. The point is, religion can be reconstructed, or to use Paul Ricoeur’s term, one must go on to the second naiveté. We should ask, what is the meaning of the story in the language of the story, and how can that be applied to our lives today? Reconstruction is about accepting and understanding the criticism while choosing to take the step beyond the criticism. Again, remember people who deconstruct and then reconstruct are in a different place and stage in their journey. People who aren’t there often criticize those who are because the magic still works on them even if it no longer works on you. It’s sometimes hard to be sensitive to those who are in a different place than we are, but the high road is generally the better option. Practically speaking, if you’re asking questions, that’s great. Find people who are asking similar questions. Start a productive conversation. No yelling or name-calling, but respectful. Be open to learning from someone else who is different from you. That’s why the tag-line for this TenOnReligion channel is stay curious.

Today we were talking about religious construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. So, what do you think about this presentation? Which aspect did you find the most interesting and why? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. And again, if this was in any way helpful, drop me a Super Thanks. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.