Point of View February 25, 2025 – Hour 1 : Walking Through Deconstruction

[00:00:04] Across America, live, this is Point of View, your guest host for Point of View. Happy Tuesday, it's a beautiful day and I'm excited to be here with you and I'm glad that you're listening. I'm Liberty McCarter on Point of View filling in for Kirby Anderson today.

[00:00:30] And boy, we have a great show lined up for you. Let me take you through what you can expect over the next couple of hours. And don't forget, you can follow along at pointofview.net to find all the resources and the links and the books and the articles that we're going to be discussing today. So here in just a moment, I'm going to be talking with Ian Harbour on his book, Walking Through Deconstruction, How to Be a Companion in a Crisis of Faith. And you know what? I've been reading it and it's excellent.

[00:00:58] I really think every Christian should get a copy because we probably all have somebody in our lives who is going through this journey or will at some point. Maybe that's us where we have this crisis of faith and we have to ask them really tough questions and figure out where to go from there. So listen to that. We're about to talk with Ian about that. In the next hour, I'll be interviewing Dr. Gregory Jantz on his book, Beyond Burnout, Regain Your Passion and Energy.

[00:01:24] Now, if that isn't relevant for anybody, I don't know what is because between work and school and family and all distressors of the modern day, we all need to learn how to spiritually and physically and emotionally recharge. That's going to be a great book and a great resource for you. And then we'll round out the show with some news of the day, talking about free speech, a little bit of what's happening around the world and what our president is saying about it all. But right now, let's turn to Ian.

[00:01:50] Ian, I'm so glad to talk with you about your book on deconstruction. Thank you for being on Point of View today. Thanks, Liberty. Thanks for having me on and I'm excited to talk with you. Great. Well, let me introduce you a little bit. Ian Harbour is a writer and Christian media producer. He has written for the Gospel Coalition, Mere Orthodoxy and Relevant. He writes about reconstructing faith in his newsletter, Back Again, and about faith, media and technology at Endeavor.

[00:02:17] And he lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife and sons, born and raised in North Texas. So we're from the same neck of the woods, Ian. But in this book, A Walking Through Deconstruction, you really write it because it's a journey that you're familiar with. So can you tell us a bit of your own story? Yeah, thank you. So it is, I decided not to write a memoir. I don't think that was the right book for me to write, but it is a very personal book in that it comes out of my own life experience.

[00:02:46] But that is definitely something that I've walked through is deconstructing and reconstructing my faith over the course of about a 10 year period. A lot of this starts, and this is sort of the point of the book, it's not just one thing, it's many things. And so I usually hate to be that guy, but a lot of this does start when I was born. I was born into a broken family. And that clouded a lot of my life from my earliest years. And so when I was three, I came here to Denton to live with my grandparents.

[00:03:14] And they raised me in the church and in Christian homes and Christian schools. And, you know, for all intents and purposes, I had a good childhood because of the sacrifice that my grandparents made for me. Some of the Christian environments that I ended up in, there's different words you could use for it. You might call it fundamentalist.

[00:03:32] And what I've come to really like is anxious, just kind of this feeling that if you're not sitting into the right cultural boxes that they have set out for you, or if you are having questions or you're wrestling through suffering or doubt or different things like that, then there's this anxiety that you're met with that tries to kind of keep you in that box and try to, you know, just sort of fix you as if you're a problem to be fixed.

[00:04:01] And so that was a lot of what I ran into. So early on, as I'm getting into high school, a series of events happened in my life. So the first one is that my grandmother who raised me passed away from cancer the day after Christmas. And that was the first in 12 funerals that I went to in the course of about two and a half years. Wow. That ended with my mother taking her own life.

[00:04:27] Shortly after that, I had a mentor at church who I was extremely close with abuse five of my friends. And throughout this process is when a whole bunch of cracks just start forming. So I start wrestling with, you know, some certain cultural issues of just like how the church is treating people of different races and ethnicities around me,

[00:04:53] our views of politics and culture and different things like that. And then, of course, that leads to doctrinal questioning as well of, you know, the resurrection, sexuality, the Bible, a whole bunch of different things. A lot of this is fueled by media too. There are a dime a dozen now, but back then they weren't. I stumbled upon one of the original deconversion stories on YouTube. And it was a very compelling case to be made against our faith. And at the time, I just had no intellectual resources for it.

[00:05:23] And even today, it's still a compelling case. And I got done watching that and I thought, man, I just don't feel like I have the intellectual integrity to continue believing these things. So there was a while where I called myself not a Christian. Other times when I, you know, would adopt a Christian label, but it was twisted in such a way to where it was practically meaningless, if that makes any sense.

[00:05:48] And so I just, I was really wrestling through these things through a lot of my time growing up, a lot of my young adulthood, until it was a year after college when I'd been married for a year. And my grandfather who raised me passed away in a plane crash, fluke accident, which was the hardest thing I ever went through in my entire life. And around that time, I ended up in a theological training program as the first time I had ever formally studied theology in my life.

[00:06:18] And the, I got up there and the very first day, my teacher said a line that I've never forgotten. He said, we do theology in the light so we can stand on it in the dark. And for me, I kind of felt two things at once. I felt, okay, that would have been really nice to know about six months ago or longer than that ago. So that I had something to stand on right now. But the second thought I had was, okay, well, let's see what happens.

[00:06:46] And throughout the course of that training program, which is essentially seminary, shrunk down into the local church. It was like, Jesus has this line in Matthew where he says, every teacher of the law who is a disciple of mine is like someone who goes into the storehouse and brings out treasures new and old. And that's exactly what it was like. It was like somebody coming out and bringing the riches of the historic Christian. Hey, Ian.

[00:07:15] So Ian's been telling us about his own story, and he's certainly qualified to write this book. We're talking about walking through deconstruction, how to be a companion in a crisis of faith. And so Ian has just shared his testimony about being raised in a Christian environment and in a Christian home by loving people, but having, you know, a lot of different factors, tragedy, a lot of loss,

[00:07:46] maybe not a very firm theological foundation and an anxious environment where he didn't feel encouraged to ask those important questions. And so if you have somebody in your first of all, you may think, wow, that sounds really familiar. That's me. That's a journey that I'm on right now or that I've been on. Or maybe it reminds you of somebody in your life, maybe a child or somebody that used to go to church with you or a close friend, and they are asking these questions.

[00:08:13] And so I love that Ian has highlighted his own story for us because it reminds us that when you hear the word deconstruct, which is kind of a buzzword now, it can be easy to just roll your eyes and say, oh, you know, this is just somebody who selfishly doesn't want to follow the tenets of the Christian faith anymore. So they're backing away, they're backsliding. But it really is a lot more complex than that. And so when we come back, we're going to continue talking with Ian so we can better understand why people go on this deconstruction journey

[00:08:43] and how we can bring them back to the Lord. Stay tuned. This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson. Yesterday I talked about some of the political challenges that President Trump, his administration and Congress face this year. Today I want to talk about the economic challenges.

[00:09:12] As I write this, the U.S. debt clock shows that the country is currently $36.4 trillion in debt. As you probably know, the national debt has increased under Republican and Democratic presidents and increased no matter whether Democrats or Republicans control Congress. But it is also fair to say that the country's economic circumstances are much worse four years after Trump left office. Federal spending under President Biden in Congress increased dramatically.

[00:09:36] Congress passed a $900 billion so-called COVID relief bill just after Christmas 2020 as Trump was leaving office. At the time you could make the case that this was more than enough, but by March 2021, President Biden in Congress passed his $1.9 trillion American rescue plan. Did the country need a stimulus of that size? Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers explained that the spending amount was much more than was needed to address any of the economic issues

[00:10:04] and warned that such spending would lead to inflation. Even that spending was not enough for Biden in Congress. Later that year, they passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Then he proposed a $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act. But by the end of 2021, inflation had reached almost 7%. Some in Congress were nervous about the price tag, so they downsized the bill and President Biden decided to rename it the Inflation Reduction Act.

[00:10:30] This is what the Trump administration has inherited and explains why the Department of Government Efficiency is looking for ways to cut spending. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view. For a free booklet on a biblical view of intelligent design, go to viewpoints.info slash intelligent design. Viewpoints.info slash intelligent design.

[00:10:58] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Welcome back to Point of View. We're talking with Ian Harbour, who has written the book, Walking Through Deconstruction, How to Be a Companion in a Crisis of Faith. Ian was just telling us about his own story and what led him to go through a deconstruction journey. And now he's written this book to help us understand other people who may be on that journey and also what the reconstruction process can look like coming back to the faith.

[00:11:26] So, Ian, something that you mentioned is how you like the term anxious to describe certain people or religious environments that maybe they don't really know how to handle it whenever somebody is having doubts or questions. Can you explain what that is a little bit more and how we can not be that? Yeah, absolutely. So, when I use the word anxious, I have sort of a technical definition in mind.

[00:11:54] In the book, I work off of the work of a family assistance therapist. His name is Edwin Freeman, who wrote a famous leadership book called A Failure of Nerve that, in some circles, is sort of being recovered right now in multiple different ways. But he talks about anxiety in a specific way. So, when he talks about anxiety, he really almost uses it as a synonym for reactivity.

[00:12:19] You can think of an anxious presence of if there's a fire in a room and everybody is running around scrambling kind of in their fight or flight mode or freeze mode. Those are the anxious people. The opposite is that of the non-anxious person, and that is the person who can stop, remain calm, find the exit, and calmly get himself and help other people get there, too. That is sort of the picture of a non-anxious presence.

[00:12:46] And Friedman talks about how there are three interlocking characteristics and symptoms, causes and symptoms of anxiety. So, the first one is the feeling of being on a never-ending treadmill of trying harder. The second one is looking for answers instead of reframing questions. And the third one is either-or thinking that creates false dichotomies. And Friedman's whole point is that this can scale infinitely up or down.

[00:13:15] So, it can scale all the way down into a family. You can have an anxious family unit. And it can scale all the way up to nation states. You can have an anxious nation. And so, right there in the middle is the church. And I read those three characteristics and I thought, oh, I've been in that church before.

[00:13:31] The ones who lack grace, lack any sort of sense of grace for being in process, grace for the messiness of sanctification and feeling like you're on an unending treadmill of trying harder. The ones who demand a sense of certainty of you having this unwavering faith in terms of every single thing that you believe, rather than reframing questions in terms of what the Bible is asking, what the church has always asked.

[00:14:02] And then this feeling of either-or thinking that creates false dichotomies. And this really gets to those secondary and tertiary issues I mentioned before the break of if you don't believe the same thing that we believe on these things that are not core to the faith, then your salvation is up for question. Which creates these euthal or dichotomies that the church has never really had before. And so, when I use the word anxiety, that is kind of the technical definition that I have in mind. That's so helpful.

[00:14:29] And I do think that that resonates. And it's good to keep that in mind because if there is somebody that we love and we're close to, I think it's natural for people to worry and say, no, no, don't fall away. But that can probably exacerbate the problem. And it's important to like you write in the book. We're not in control of somebody else's journey, their spiritual journey. We literally can't control that.

[00:14:54] But we can control the environment that we help to create when we are around them that might actually help bring them back or help them work through that. And so, you do make the point that deconstruction is not simply thinking critically or asking questions. It's because, as you say, every healthy Christian should be asking questions critically about their faith and might, you know, go through doubt at times. But deconstruction is more than that. It's a real crisis.

[00:15:24] But considering kind of this conversation about anxious environments, do you think that if we were encouraged more freely in our faith, in church environments, to ask those hard questions to start with, do you think maybe that would help avoid some of these deconstruction crises that people go through? Partly yes, partly no.

[00:15:46] I think one of the things that I try to do in the book is talk about how I think the church has always had categories for deconstruction, even if that's not the word that is used for it. And so, you look at something that like Augustine went through when he writes in Confessions or St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. We've always had words for it, even if we could never call it deconstruction. There's something about this that is a natural spiritual process that is part of God's sanctifying work in our lives.

[00:16:15] But then, yes, there are unique kind of cultural factors that go into it that maybe make it more intense than it needs to be. And I think that's sort of what you're getting at, and I agree with you. You know, I think part of the conversation that I want to have around this is that a lot of times we leave deconstruction in the intellectual register, and we think about it in terms of arguments or, you know, doctrine and culture. And that is all part of it. But it is ultimately a spiritual and existential experience first.

[00:16:45] It's an emotional experience first. And so, some of this has to do with belonging. Some of this has to do with feeling safe in an environment. Some of this has to do with being secure in our union with Christ, knowing that he is holding us as we try to work things out. Another teacher of mine talked about how, you know, again, the church has always had this phrase called faith-seeking understanding that, again, we've sort of lost.

[00:17:13] And that's what I want us to recover, this idea of faith-seeking understanding. We do have faith. We do believe in God. We are trusting him. But that doesn't mean we understand everything immediately, and we should be seeking understanding throughout our whole lives. And that is a process. And there are not just set answers to every single thing. There are certain things Christians have always believed, Trinity, two nations of Christ, authority of Scripture, you know, all of those things. But some of these things have been hotly debated throughout all of church history, and I think we need to have patience with that.

[00:17:43] Yeah. Good. So wise. I did resonate with this as a fellow millennial on kind of the early 2000s evangelical culture of being on fire all the time. And like you just said, you know, we've always had those dark nights of the soul, so to speak, of kind of part of the Christian journey.

[00:18:03] But a lot of us were raised in an environment where we didn't talk about that because it was always about chasing that spiritual high or literally conferences about being, you know, on fire all the time. And you feel like if you're not, then you're failing. And so do you think that's what a lot of people maybe feel guilty about? Yeah, absolutely. I don't think we have a spiritual realism about what life in Christ actually looks like.

[00:18:30] It is not a 24-7 constant emotional high, spiritual high throughout all of our lives. And so I think that's what we're going to do is our faith gets worked out in the ordinary day-to-day dirt and grime of our life. I love this line from Dallas Fuller, the theologian and philosopher, who said, God has yet to meet anyone except for where they actually are. And God meets us in our everyday lives, and it gets worked out in the hardship.

[00:18:54] And we have to have this category of suffering and the hard knocks of life and the nitty gritty of God working in the ordinary parts of our life. And so if we think that, you know, our entire Christian life is just going to be on fire and passionate and always feeling this sense of spiritual euphoria, then we're setting ourselves up for spiritual failure.

[00:19:17] Because anything that doesn't rise to that standard feels like, going back to the kind of the early 2000s nomenclature, it feels like backsliding. When really, it's not. That's just a normal part of the Christian life. And to realize that, all you have to do is go read the Psalms. Or really, go read the Gospels. You and Jesus did. Jesus is in the garden, sweating blood and tears. He's on the cross and dying, and he's calling his followers to follow him, his disciples to go after him and take up their crosses.

[00:19:45] Because in this life, you will have trouble. And Paul has this category in Romans where he says, we glory in our sufferings. So Christianity, the Bible, has this category of somehow our sufferings become our glory when we endure them in Christ. And that is something that I think we are desperately in need of recovery. Absolutely. That's not a popular, you know, sermon to preach necessarily. It's not that feel-good message that so many people are seeking.

[00:20:13] But I remember, I don't know, I was a young adult out of college. I was already working, and I was reading a book that really used the term theology of suffering. And I've been raised in the church, and I had never heard that before or really thought about it. And thankfully, you know, I was in an environment that did give me a strong spiritual foundation.

[00:20:34] But just that idea of being able to really wrestle with and contend with the suffering that we see in the world from a biblical basis, that is something I think we're lacking. And so I think you're so right on there. But we have a lot more to cover. We're about to go to one of those breaks. But coming up, I'm going to highlight whenever we come back a quote from the Lord of the Rings. I'm a big Tolkien fan or nerd or geek or whatever you want to call it.

[00:21:01] And so he writes so much wisdom on friendship, and we can apply that to our own relationships where people may be walking through deconstruction. And I also want to talk to you when we come back about this thing called an imaginative gridlock and identifying that and how that might affect somebody's deconstruction journey. So a lot still to cover with Ian Harbour when we come back on Point of View. Don't go anywhere.

[00:21:31] In 19th century London, two towering historical figures did battle, not with guns and bombs, but words and ideas. London was home to Karl Marx, the father of communism, and legendary Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. London was in many ways the center of the world, economically, militarily, and intellectually. Marx sought to destroy religion, the family, and everything the Bible supports.

[00:22:00] Spurgeon stood against him, warning of socialism's dangers. Spurgeon understood Christianity is not just religious truth. It is truth for all of life. Where do you find men with that kind of wisdom to stand against darkness today? Get the light you need on today's most pressing issues delivered to your inbox when you sign up for the Viewpoints Commentary at pointofview.net slash signup.

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[00:22:52] You are listening to Point of View. The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, your guest host for Point of View. Welcome back. I'm Liberty McCarter sitting in for Kirby Anderson today.

[00:23:18] Follow along with everything we're talking about at pointofview.net, and you can also watch live on Facebook, so make sure you follow us on social media. But right now, I'm talking with Ian Harbour on his book, Walking Through Deconstruction. And Ian, this goes back to something we mentioned towards the beginning of our conversation when you were defining anxiety. But I also really liked this term.

[00:23:41] I hadn't heard it before, imaginative gridlock, and how that can affect individuals but communities as well. So can you break that down for us and give us an example of how that might play out practically today, either in an environment that we're in or maybe with somebody that we know? Yeah, so this goes back to the three characteristics that we talked about of anxiety. Unending treadmill is trying harder, looking for answers instead of reframing questions, and either or thinking that creates false dichotomies.

[00:24:11] So anxiety is one word for what that produces. But another phrase that Edwin Freeman, who coined this, uses is this idea of imaginative gridlock. And if you think about it, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's the imagination is stuck. What someone imagines to be real or to be possible is stuck. It's gridlocked. And so you can see how someone stuck in an environment like that where there's no grace. They feel they always are having to try harder.

[00:24:40] They are always looking for certainty with the right answers instead of asking the right questions. And they're stuck in this, all of these false dichotomies, and they're gridlocked into, you know, one way of thinking about it is almost epistemological horse blinders, right? You can't see to the left or to the right. You don't know what's out there except for what's right in front of you. And everything that you can't see is unknown and it's scary, and you don't even know what it is. You don't even have categories for what else is out there.

[00:25:08] You can only see what's right in front of you. You have no imagination for anything beyond the environment that you're in. And that is the circumstance that creates anxiety because you feel like if you deviate from this, you're basically going out into a wide blue ocean with who knows what's out there. So there's fear that comes from that and anxiety. And so you can imagine how this plays out in the church of people feeling like they can't disagree with their pastor on any issue,

[00:25:36] big or small, that they don't know about other, you know, obviously lowercase orthodox church traditions that exist outside of where they're at. And so deconstruction is sort of this, that illusion breaking or cracking where something comes in from the outside to sort of shatter that illusion and break that imaginative gridlock. But you still don't know what those things are.

[00:26:04] There's a lot of exploring that you have to do to figure those things out, but you're all of a sudden not just seeing what's in front of you anymore, which creates a lot of fear, creates a lot of anxiety because you feel bad for leaving that sort of environment. And so one thing that Edward Freeman talks about is there is an antidote to imaginative gridlock. And he lists these three things. He says, replacing certainty with a sense of adventure,

[00:26:32] which I think is interesting because Andy Crouch actually calls a Christian life an adventure of love. Yeah. And there is something adventurous about following Jesus. Embracing serendipity. And so again, there's a sense of evangelical environments that just simply want to hand people all of the answers, rather than allowing people to discover the faith for themselves. And I think that's important of having this, you know, there's a popular author writer, Jen Wilkin.

[00:26:59] She talks about having this firsthand knowledge of scripture. That's huge. Being able to actually take people to scripture and say, look at this, look how beautiful and amazing this is, and taking them on a adventure of discovery and serendipity for themselves. And then the third one is pretty simple. It's having the will to overcome imaginative barriers. Some people don't have the will to get to leave something that has gridlocked their imagination. They feel stuck.

[00:27:27] So they either stay there forever, or in some cases, this is where some people just leave. They just leave. They don't do the hard work. They don't actually try to figure these things out. They just say, I'm done. And they just don't even overcome the imaginative barrier. They just leave the barrier altogether. And so, but I think being able to re-infuse these things back into our discipleship is one way of helping people overcome this imaginative gridlock and reduce the anxiety that we experience in some of these environments.

[00:27:57] Yeah, that is so helpful. And so for people who, you know, again, you know people who may be going through this or you want to just be preemptive in your family or in your own environment, your own community. I love how you give us those counterpoints for imaginative gridlock of adventure over certainty, embracing serendipity, and having the will to overcome imaginative barriers.

[00:28:22] But something that I did want to just acknowledge that you do such a good job of emphasizing in the book is that when you do kind of, like you said, break that barrier or you take the blinders off and maybe you realize you've been stuck in an environment that is anxious or has imaginative gridlock and somebody finds themselves deconstructing, that's a scary place to be. This isn't, we aren't talking about people who just kind of drift away and they stop going to church.

[00:28:52] This is, like you said, an existential crisis and it really is a grieving process for people who are going through this. They didn't necessarily want to go through this. Am I right? That's right. I don't think a good way of thinking about deconstruction is this, you know, I don't think anybody wakes up one day and says, you know what I want to do? I want to be closer to God. I wonder what the best way for me to do that is. I know I'm going to deconstruct my faith.

[00:29:20] But I'm just not sure that's a good or even helpful way of thinking about it. Truly what it is much more like is it's something that happens to you. You're not expecting it. Most people realize they're deconstructing after they've already been deconstructing for a while. And if that sounds confusing, that's because it is confusing. It's not this cut and dry process with linear ins and outs. It's very messy.

[00:29:46] And so I think we have to recover this idea of there are things in our life that happen to us because of the environments that we're in, because of the sin around us, because of the sin in ourselves. And a lot of our lives is just trying to make sense of these things. And deconstruction is one way of making sense of these things. And it's something that happens to you. Yeah. Yeah. Well said. And just as you have been reminding us, that's why we need to have grace.

[00:30:17] You know, we have this new word now, deconstruction, that we hear a lot. But a crisis of faith is something that Christians have experienced in their walks forever. And so this is something that we need to have grace for and also sympathize, even as we try to lovingly encourage our loved one back to Scripture. But understand that this is not an easy process. This isn't something that they chose.

[00:30:44] But I do want to focus on, before we go to the break, kind of being that companion. So I'm going to quote your quote from the Lord of the Rings here because I love the Lord of the Rings. But Frodo says, it does not seem that I can trust anyone. And Mary says, it all depends on what you want. You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours closer than you keep it yourself.

[00:31:12] But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Such a great quote. We've got a couple minutes before the break. But, Ian, how can we apply this to our relationships whenever we have a loved one that maybe is going through a crisis of faith? Yeah, that quote struck me, too, when I read it. I thought that's exactly the kind of friend or family member or pastor someone needs to walk with them through deconstruction. You know, just this idea of I'm not judging you. I'm not scared of you.

[00:31:42] I'm not going to sit here and try to answer every single one of your questions and fix you. We can have the hard conversations. I'm not scared of them. But you just need to know that I love you. I care for you. I'm praying for you. And I'm going to be here for you through thick and thin. Just this not letting someone face trouble and go off into the darkness alone. I think it's a really powerful image. When someone's deconstructing, it's hard for them. And they feel out of place.

[00:32:09] And so they're going to potentially self-isolate. But there's potential for them to even damage some relationships, depending on how they handle the process. And for you to be the person who says to them, I see you. I hear you. I'm not scared of you. Now, that doesn't mean compromising on your convictions. And I think it's important not to do that. And some people in the name of love and compassion will do that.

[00:32:33] And I don't think that's the right thing to do, because if it was that easy for you to compromise to begin with, how much of this do you actually believe? Right. But being able to stand on your convictions and say, I'm going to walk through this with you. I'm going to be here for you. And I'm not judging you. And I'm not scared of you. That is a powerful witness. Oh, absolutely. And just, again, goes back to the wisdom of God and giving us community.

[00:32:59] He created us to walk our journey, to walk out our faith, not alone, but with others around us. And I think, you know, this is why the wisdom of Scripture, when one falls down, he has friends to pick him back up again. And this is what we need to embody in our relationship. So when we come back, we'll have a few more minutes to round out our discussion.

[00:33:21] And this is really, I think, such a good book and conversation to be having during this time, because we are seeing skyrocketing rates of loneliness in America. And so this is a relevant thing. And if we take the right approach, I think that the church can be a balm to that. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back on Point of View talking about deconstruction.

[00:33:43] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Welcome back. We're wrapping up our discussion with Ian Harbour, author of the book, Walking Through Deconstruction, How to Be a Companion in a Crisis of Faith. I've got it here. If you're watching, you can see all my sticky notes in it. It's great.

[00:34:13] Go to pointofview.net. You can find a link to get a copy of the book for yourself. And I definitely recommend that. But before the break, we were talking about how when somebody is going through deconstruction, often they will tend to self-isolate. But what they need are friends who are not going to be scared of the spiritual process that they're on, that are going to be calm and firm in their convictions, but are going to be with them and not go anywhere. And I wanted to talk about the loneliness epidemic.

[00:34:43] And I appreciated that you address this in the book, too. And you, in your words, we're putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound in terms of how we are addressing loneliness. So what does this have to do with deconstruction, Ian? Yeah, well, this is one of those things where this is in the chapter where I talk about deconstructing self.

[00:35:02] There are some things that happen in the person who is deconstructing that doesn't produce the best soil for faith to grow in. And one of these things is loneliness. We are not meant to be alone. And it's not good for men to be alone or for any of us to be alone. And so one of the things that we need is community. For a lot of the reasons that we talked about before the break, we need people to hold us when we are in our weakest, both literally and metaphorically.

[00:35:30] And also, it is our responsibility to hold others in their weakness. And even that responsibility for others gives us a sense of dignity, need, and purpose. And then when we are weak, they hold us. And so being isolated is one of those things that erodes the soil of our faith and just makes it, I don't know a better way to say it, makes it hard to believe. There's nothing private or individual about Christianity.

[00:35:57] We are saved into the church, into the body of Christ with other believers. And we are made as relational creatures who need one another. And trying to do this on our own or thinking that we can do this on our own or just not having those people around us is not a conducive way for us to live our life and for our faith to flourish. Yeah.

[00:36:22] So definitely, I mean, there's more and more loneliness as people are losing touch with those traditional institutions, including healthy families and the church. And so it's kind of like just perpetuating cycle of loneliness and then people falling away from these. They're not falling away, but having problems, crises of faith, getting more lonely because of it.

[00:36:47] And we can't really talk about loneliness or deconstruction for that matter in the modern age without talking about the digital realm and social media. And so you talk about this, but what are some of the ways that maybe the digital sphere is exacerbating the problem of the crisis of faith that so many people are having?

[00:37:10] There's so many ways that if we base our view of reality on social media, it detaches us from reality. One thing I want to say is it literally raptures us from our bodies into cyberspace. It takes us out of our local communities. It takes us out of our embodied relationships. And it disembodies everything. And there's certain things that social media and technology gives us that are good gifts that we should use and steward and partake in. And there's something that it takes away from us. There's always tradeoffs to these things.

[00:37:39] And so one thing I talk about in the book is there's this kind of heuristic that Andy Crouch uses where he says technology makes us kind of confront four truths. The first one is it says now you'll be able to. It gives you new capabilities. And then it says you'll no longer have to. So it takes away things that are hard for us to do. Those two questions together makes our lives easier. But there's tradeoffs to it.

[00:38:08] It says you'll also no longer be able to, and now you'll have to. And so one of the things that it does for us is we're able to now access spiritual content from anywhere for free. We are able to. And I think that's a good thing. You're listening to this radio show right now, and I think that's a positive. You're listening to it on podcasts. I think that's a good thing. Or on YouTube.

[00:38:29] And it says you'll no longer have to pay for, you know, a really expensive seminary education or rely solely on your local pastor or church who might not have the resources they need in order to disciple people in all the ways that are needed. And, again, I think these are good things. But here's the tradeoff. It says you'll no longer be able to easily discern the difference between trusted and credible voices or, even worse, those who are ill-informed and malicious.

[00:38:56] And so there's sort of this collapse of trust of I don't even know who I'm supposed to trust anymore because every voice is weighted equally online. And so you just sort of end up trusting whoever your intuition leads you to trust more rather than people who actually know what they're talking about and are speaking truth. And then the final thing it says, it says now you'll have to. You'll have to choose. You have to make a choice. Who do you trust more?

[00:39:23] Your local church, your local pastor, your local community, or the people that you're listening to online. That's not an easy choice. And we have to make a conscious decision about how we define reality. It's not that we can't use these digital resources that I think are, in some cases, very good.

[00:39:42] But we have to choose to define reality by the flesh and blood friends and community that are in front of us, that are sitting around our table, who we know love us and we can trust them more than any voice that we hear online. What we consume online has to supplement what's going on in real life instead of replacing it. And I think far too often, and this has been true in my life in the past as well, it's replaced it.

[00:40:07] And once that happens, you've essentially reversed what you need as a human being by disembodying yourself in these online spaces. Wow. Such good insight. And I love those terms that you give us to help us understand this world that we live in about defining reality.

[00:40:29] And we can use tools like social media to supplement our lives, but not replace the community that we were made for. That's so good. So we've spent the last hour talking a lot about understanding what deconstruction is, how people get here, what kind of environments and support they need during this time. But half of the book is on reconstruction.

[00:40:55] And I loved in the beginning how you warn us that your tone is going to be brutally honest, but defiantly hopeful, because there is hope for reconstruction, for a healthier faith and building that back. So again, for listeners, I encourage you to go to pointofview.net, click on the links there where you can learn more about this book.

[00:41:19] And we've scratched the surface today, but it has so much helpful wisdom and practical, applicable wisdom for us as we deal with the issue of deconstruction in ourselves or with loved ones. But just in the last few seconds that we have here, Ian, tell us where people can find more information about you and your ministry, if they want to look at other resources that you have and your final thoughts.

[00:41:46] Yeah, I have a newsletter, back again, words.com, where I try to write to me regularly on these things. I'm on social media. You can find me on Twitter, Christ X now, and Instagram at Ian Harbor. And I'm starting a new role right now as a director of marketing and communications for mere orthodoxy. So if you want to learn more about that, you can go to mereorthodoxy.com. Great. A lot of great resources there. And so, again, you can find those at pointofview.net. Thanks for being with us today, Ian.

[00:42:12] That book was Walking Through Deconstruction, How to Be a Companion in a Crisis of Faith. Definitely, I recommend it. You should check that out. But we're about to go to a break, and then we'll start the second hour. It's just flying by. We have such a great show today. But next, we're going to be talking with Dr. Greg Jantz. He wrote Beyond Burnout, Reign Your Passion and Energy. This is a little book, but it's full of practical advice.

[00:42:41] And I think you're going to want to listen to this because if you don't need this book, you know somebody who does. So stay tuned for that. We'll be talking to him at the top of the hour. And then towards the end of the show, I'll address some news and topics of the day. We'll talk about foreign policy a little bit, a little bit about free speech. So don't go anywhere. Stay with us on Point of View. We have a lot of good stuff to cover coming up.

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