Deconstruction Enters Its Flop Era

🎶 Deconstruction Junction, what's your function? 🎶

The Deconstruction Industrial Complex is already in its flop era, which makes it as good a time to examine just what happened there. I think the word “deconstruction” helped a lot of people put language to a rarely discussed experience, but lost a lot of its usefulness as it got flattened into a catchall term for pretty much any season of spiritual editing whatsoever. And whatever utility the word retained after that faded once it got demonized by husband-father-pastors who see deconstruction as a threat to their authority. They’re not wrong.

The conservative handwringing around deconstruction is at least a little hypocritical though. Over the last six or seven years, how many evangelical leaders have we seen tweak their theology to accommodate stuff like Trumpism, locker room talk and 4Chan variety “alphas rule, soyboys drool” social conditioning? Al Mohler and the rest of the Christian Nationalists deconstructed too. They were just savvy enough to simultaneously redefine evangelicalism according to their own political shifts and pretend evangelicalism had always been like this instead of acknowledging that they’d moved onto something different.