Notes on Deconstruction: A Review of Brian McLaren’s “Faith After Doubt”
In many ways, Brian McLaren is the type of public figure and author I am grateful for. A mainstay of the emerging church scene for just about two decades, McLaren and his ideas have invited many in my age bracket (and beyond) into a richer, deeper, and safer faith after disillusionment and pain—or at least, I hope he has.
And his latest offering—written amidst a chaotic moment for the world and especially his own home in North America—is no different. This is a text which seeks to pastorally care for those in the midst of a crisis of belief, offering, as the title suggests, Faith After Doubt. Written sensitively through story, personal experience, and rather vague theological reflection, it continues the legacy of McLaren’s so-called ‘generous orthodoxy,’ inviting readers into a deeper, richer, and safer faith after disillusionment and pain. For this gift, McLaren should be applauded.
In the book McLaren develops his typology of four faith stages: (i) what he calls the ‘simplistic’ stage; (ii) the ‘complexity’ stage; (iii), the ‘perplexity’ stage; and (iv) the ‘harmony’ stage. The constructive task of the book, alongside elucidating this four-stage journey of faith, is in offering a vision of ‘fourth-stage communities’ which can practice and embody this type of generous, open, mature religion.
Faith-stage models have all the familiar risks of essentialising and reducing diverse and complicated human experiences. Important questions such as “Is a faith journey always a linear experience?” or “Why is the next stage, if implicitly, valued over the previous one?” are perhaps a little too easy to point out. One key point that is always worth raising is what such models look like for those with cognitive disabilities. Moving through the stages seems to posit some sort of rational progression or ability to reason that begs the question: what of the faith of those who don’t move through these stages?
Another strange feature of the book is McLaren’s descriptions of the virtues of a stage four community. McLaren surveys a number of different Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities, pulling language and self-assertions from their websites. The virtues of these communities include self-expression, social activism, and edgy self-descriptions (pp. 158-160):
“We are dreamers … We are seekers … We are activists … We are thinkers … We are hell-raisers”
“Through Love, we are each created in God’s image and filled the Divine Spark”
“a joyous celebration of the transformative power of love”
“awake, mindful wanderer, bearded rebel, skeptical activist”
“we do love out loud as we work for justice”
Christians, even progressives, have never been the best at marketing. One can’t help but feel like this kind of modish, not-like-other-girls faith being praised by McLaren here is just another type of Christian branding that McLaren seems to be so against. Perhaps this is just another frustration I feel with the (distinctively Northern American) “… with a twist of Christianity” trend. In his brilliant reflection on Carl Lentz and the other ever-increasing list of scandalised-male-pastors-who-have-no-accountability, Ben Sixsmith describes the culture of the neo-pentecostalism expressed at places like Hillsong as indicative of a much wider form of Christian faith and practice that ranges across political and theological spectrums:
“We can see the ‘…with a twist of Christianity’ trend elsewhere. [Jerry] Falwell [Jr] was representative of the right-wing, business-oriented evangelicals who offer capitalist self-enrichment and hubristic jingoism … with a twist of Christianity. Then there are progressive Christians of whom Nadia Bolz-Weber is an extreme example, who promote the usual left-wing causes … with a twist of Christianity. While different in beliefs, such people share patterns of thought: the former believe secular individualists mysteriously share God’s wishes for what should be done with money while the latter think that secular progressives mysteriously share God’s wishes for what should be done with bodies. So, if Christianity is such an inessential add-on, why become a Christian?”
I do indeed feel this sense as I read through McLaren’s notably pluralistic religious utopia. What is there to hang onto in the Christian faith when it seems as though so much of Christianity, especially in the evangelical tradition, is supposedly a defunct and inept stage one simplicity? The familiar list of social movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, climate change activism, and so on all take centre stage—as they rightfully should. Yet these movements hardly originate in the work of religious communities, even if religious communities may or may not be involved. If there is anyone to thank for their ongoing practical work and ideological effort, it is some sort of secular humanism, not the contemporary North American church. This question of distinctiveness is hardly hidden by McLaren; in fact the upcoming sequel to Faith After Doubt is quite literally called Why Remain Christian?
But, to be fair, these issues—while frustrating—are not catastrophic. This book, after all, is probably not written for someone like me. The deeper difficulty I felt reading Faith After Doubt, however, is something which is a difficulty I feel with the wider deconstruction movement in the western church. It seems to be some sort of category mistake about what faith actually is in the first place.
It’s true of course that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith—certainty is. But what actually is faith, considered in the Christian tradition? In short, faith is not something we as humans do—faith is a gift from God in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus, fully human, lives the life of a faithful human in obedience to his Father. Jesus’ life on earth recapitulates the story of humanity’s shortcomings, yet where humanity fails, he succeeds. Jesus lives as the true human.
In the act of faith, we are not finding a way to God, making our own way to salvation. Rather, Christ himself gives human beings his very faith, the perfect faith which he lives at the right hand of God. One lives the Christian life not by their own faith in the incarnate Son of God but rather by the faithfulness of the incarnate Son of God. Faith, in all ways, is a gift given by and held by God, not something that has to be achieved. The implications of this for one’s spiritual life is profound.
I fear that the type of Christianity McLaren describes in the end becomes another option on the spiritual market for one to pick based on temperament and personality. Faith After Doubt is not a bad book. You could certainly do worse. But what if faith itself was a gift given, and thus a gift received?
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Rating: 3/5
Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to do About It is available now.
You can hear McLaren be interviewed on the book on Nomad Podcasts.
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Andrew Clark-Howard is currently an editor at Metanoia.