Deconstructing Deconstruction

What follows is a paragraph-by-paragraph response to a piece on Deconstruction I came across on the Coffee Thoughts web blog, by Collin Brendemuehl.  

Deconstructing Deconstruction

Collin Brendemuehl answers what deconstruction is and why it should matter to Christians.

For the past several years the popularity of Critical Race Theory and some of its companion ideas have become popular topics of discussion. They are also, at times, popular whipping boys for conservatives. It’s not that conservative criticism of these things is wrong. I think their conclusions are, in general, right and important. But what is missing is a substantive discussion of the idea itself.  The term “deconstruction” gets bandies around as though everyone knows what it means and some of the best teachers on the subject never get around to defining it. (Some may have, in books or pieces that I’ve not yet read.)

Deconstruction: What is it and why is it important?

At the core of deconstruction is something quite simple:

“a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language which emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression.” (Oxford Languages)

This is pretty simple. First pick a subject. Then break it down into its components. Then find what drives it, what are its motivations. That will tell you its meaning.

That doesn’t seem to be a problem. In fact that sounds like a useful tool. And it is. It is, after all, used in every field as a diagnostic method for approaching problems and finding solutions.

This it begs the question: Why all the fuss?

The reason is this: The term should always be prefaced. There are types of deconstruction. Using the term without stating what type it is can leave the educated person wondering what is being talk about and the average person confused was to why such a useful tool might prove problematic. In other words, by being too general in our language we’re creating two problems. We’re telling both groups that we don’t really understand the issue. It can, and does, sound like we don’t know what we’re talking about.

If deconstruction is a useful tool, then has it been used in theology? Yes, it has. And its results are known to every evangelical. Back about 500 years ago, right after the Reformation, there was another movement called the Radical Reformation. In this movement was one very critical component. It was to move back to “what the Bible says” as a more primitive, a more Biblical theology. From this assumption we moved away from the liturgy of the Reformers and to the basics of (Ana)Baptist thinking: Call the individual to faith and baptize the adult on confession of faith. The teachings of the Bible were broken down to basic elements. Developed theology was, at least in part, rejected.

This was indeed deconstruction, in the sense that it was questioning the authority of the churches, and seeing them as a product of particular social, political and economic relations.  What is left out here though, is that evangelicals were also a particular product of time and social circumstances.  The story they tell themselves, (and us - as they'll proudly admit in "sharing their gospel"), as Brendemuehl points to here, is that their interpretation is simply based on a literal reading of the bible.  This is the antithesis of deconstruction, as instead of turning to the larger context around a text or belief, it goes directly into the text to find ultimate truth.  As a faith, this might be fine, however an initial move must be made to establish that text as authoritative.  Faith has a sort of epistemological "get out of jail free card" in this respect as no other idea in the human project is allowed to be its own authority, without relationship to history or the natural world around it.  As a supernatural system, one might grant this.  However, not all faith traditions make this move, or at least to this extent.  The one's that do we tend to refer to as fundamentalist.  A non-fundamentalist (liberal, reformed, etc.) point of view, while allowing the text to indeed express supernatural religious truths, does so with a bit more epistemic complexity and nuance.  It takes the text as divine, however also the product of human creators who were unable to escape their own social environments.  They will point to certain parts of the text as flawed and even sometimes outright wrong or even immoral.  Fundamentalists term this a "cafeteria style" activity, in which the word of God is being supplanted by humans merely picking and choosing what they "want to believe".  

However, the liberal will counter this by pointing to the fact that this is an inescapable reality of human limitations.  None of us can escape our social environments.  Further, this is easily demonstrated by fundamentalists' own obvious shaping by a social and political culture they both are created by and in turn attempt to create.  In this way, one might say that just as the liberal might be "playing God" by their own textual interpretation, so to the fundamentalist is playing God by insisting their interpretation is the only real word of God, after they have inserted themselves into their interpretation.  Yet, they will argue, they are merely reading the literal text.  But this isn't actually the case.  For instance, Evangelicals routinely highlight certain areas of the bible.  They often do so with general lines of scripture that could objectively be read in a significantly large number of ways - very specific political or moral claims.  e.g., "love your neighbor", or "thou shall not kill", are fine phrases, but what is "love" or is it ever OK to kill?  Inevitably, additional verses are required to compare and derive deeper meaning, and yet in the very act of choosing which verses to compare one has begun interpreting.  This becomes even more challenging when some verses appear to outright conflict.  One can either choose to deconstruct (interpret), but one cannot choose to be unconstructed.

Later on, when the revivalists started, men like Wesley not only called individuals to salvation but left the church with this: Get people saved. That’s all there is to salvation. Salvation was reduced to the individual’s salvation. The covenant demands of the liturgical churches were rejected. What mattered was the individual.  This way of thinking continues today where the theme is merely to “get them saved” and then deal with the rest later as time allows.

This is still with us. Many para-church organizations have their student participants go do beach evangelism, lead someone to Christ, and then leave the flounder. Tract-based ministries lead people to decisions without commitments. The ticket is punched and that’s what matters most.

In all of these situations the doctrine of salvation was deconstructed to its most basic, core components. The rest that surrounds it is generally ignored. The Christian faith has been deconstructed and not always for the better.

Here, Brendemuehl points to an example of this process of selective interpretation, by adding his own interpretation - that core components of the bible's truth have not been given enough attention.  What those components are and how true they are reflect his own consideration based on his own values. 

The Origin Story

But … what’s going on today that’s so important?

The current movement has been around since the 1930s. There was a group in Frankfurt, Germany. These were philosophical Marxists. They differed from Marx in a number of ways. Their goal was to take Marxism as a philosophy and affect social structures. 

 

Or, more precisely, they found Marxist critique of epistemological value - as a tool to get at deeper truths - and generalized it to further analyze not just economic but social and cultural systems.  

To do so they introduced a variation on deconstruction that views the components through the lens of Marxism. They reformulated “truth” and “reason” to become “authenticity” and “imagination” so that the new ideals could easily alter perceptions of reality.

Granting this incredible simplification, what they started with was epistemic skepticism, that is they recognized that we are all social products, and that truth requires bringing to light the cultural, etc. assumptions underlying truth claims.  And that as culture is such a vast web of entangled social relationships, getting at truth requires seeing the myriad connections behind all claims.  Some went so far as to claim that truth itself was non-existent, however the greater majority of deconstructionists have always emphasized that whether or not this is true, what matters is the social analysis if we are to even hope of seeing even a piece of truth.  In the scientific arena, this is easier because we are usually able to take measurements and thus have a way of separating the dependent from independent variables, replicating results, having other experts do peer review, and often to put technologies into practice that demonstrate effects.  In the social arena, this is far more difficult. As a behaviorist, my claim on the measurability and "functional analysis" of human behaviors (including thought) is likely higher than most, but I readily acknowledge that beyond simple behaviors, the environmental relations quickly become too complex to properly measure.  In large social relationships, our empiricism is diminished, and we must rely on many more subjective measures, and a such the opportunity to insert our own biases, etc. increases.

Ok, that sounds strange. You heard an example of this during the 2020 campaign when then-candidate Biden said, “we choose truth over facts.” By “truth” he didn’t mean accurate information (because if he did then he would have no reason to make such a statement). What he meant was that truth is the lens through which facts are assessed. This is how reimagines facts in the light of the truth.

I'm honestly not sure what is going on here.  Is he saying Biden is a relativist in the derogatory sense that no truth exists, and he wants to create his own?  This is a classic slur on the project of deconstruction itself, owning to a more specific argument about "cultural relativism", in which one is purported to believe that truth and more specifically morality - doesn't exist - and therefore "anything goes".  Like stated previously, morality may not actually exist, but rather social relations do, and you can measure things like pain, depression, etc.  If one is to claim that a moral truth exists, they must then demonstrate a framework showing from where, if not why.  Is it from a textual authority?  Then we arrive at the beginning in having to examine the authority of the text.  If it comes from man, or reason, then we must examine the social relations therein.  It is no accident that immorality of the past - say, slavery (which plenty of fundamentalist evangelicals actively supported) was at the time justified religious textual grounds, as well as by others on appeals to reason and social relations.  In the end, one will argue a moral point by appealing to the best analysis one can muster.  There were abolitionists who did so hundreds of years ago, and current debates about racism, bigotry, etc. will continue.  

What’s Happenin’!

Part of the work of these men in Frankfurt was to break down power structures. While Marx was about economic power and conflict, the Frankfurt Group went about tearing down more than just economic classes. They went after all forms of dominion. So just as Marx made some general comments about the family and how it should serve the state and the collective, these men took another tack, another direction to the same ends. A man named Foucault applied deconstruction to power structures.

Family is a power structure. The family has been deconstructed to power-submission structures that are to be eliminated. What are these structures? Patriarchy is about power. Motherhood is about power. Fathers should have little or no say over wife and children. Mothers have been reduced to birthers. Parents would have no say in the public education of the children. 

One cannot deny the role of power in a family, if one is to define power as the ability to influence the actions of another.  The degree to which power is distributed is the question here.  Underneath this small description of the deconstruction of atomic family dynamics, there exists a vast body of thought.  I'm not even sure where to begin, however I'll start with the critique that Brendemuehl is offering up a very unfair depiction of what a deconstructed view of the family actually looks like.  Most who disagree with patriarchal dominion of the family (as in, the believe women have just as much a right to autonomy as men) themselves tend to live in atomic units (even LGBTQ families).  They do believe power is important window into analyzing social relations as we continue toward a (hopefully shared goal) of human flourishing.  For instance, if both parents work 40 hours a week, maybe the father should also help out with the cleaning and child-rearing, right?  Or at least talk to their partner about equitable power sharing.  Is this something anyone would disagree with?

Regarding public education, this is a lot more complicated.  Sets of assumptions about the role of government and religion in society, are extensive. The basic premise of public education is the right of a child to an education.  However, it becomes murky when we disagree about what gets taught, especially as the classroom is a microcosm of the very topic of deconstruction itself.  Teachers, curriculum committees, Textbook publishers, professors, parents, and children themselves are all stakeholders and must come to some consensus in heterogenous communities in thousands of schools in as many cities across the countries.  All of them have their own ideas about what should be taught.  C'est la vie democracy.

This is the popular language of today. You can read it almost daily. These statements follow the theme.

Race relations and historic social structures are power structures. Economic class is a power structure. You’ve heard of that notorious “1%” gang. To be white is to inherit the guilt of abusive white people even if they’re not your ancestors. Just because you’re white. To be a person of color is to be a permanent victim, not a person with free will and unity. 

This is a lot, but just going to jump in here as a behaviorist and say that free will is something we actually can measure and have never found it.  We've found instead huge amounts of data and a theoretical framework built upon it that demonstrates empirically that we are all products of our genes and our learning history.  The environment forms a 4-term contingency in temporal space: the motivating operation (MO) > the environmental discriminative stimulus > behavior > the environmental consequent.  We are at all times subject to countless schedules of reinforcement and punishment which drive us in a deterministic manner through time and space.  There is no alternative explanation as demonstrable, replicable, and empirical.  

Darkly, the notion of free will has been used throughout history not just to justify oppressive social conditions, but as well vast power imbalances.  If one has a magical ability to simply "rise above" social conditions, the social conditions no longer possess as much valence.  Oppressive conditions, unless one is physically trapped in bondage, can be risen above in this view.  To the financially powerful - say a millionaire business owner with influence in government, the groups he supports, and large numbers of employees, etc. - this view would support more self-serving actions, instead of those that might otherwise focus more on his own moral requirement to distribute his power more equally if he also believes in equality of opportunity.  The behaviorist view states that equality of opportunity is not enough to the extent that we are all products of social circumstance and genes.  (I will leave it to others to elaborate on the ugly history of racist justifications for lack of opportunity based on genes).

 

(Critical Race Theory, aka CRT, is merely the application of this method of criticism to questions of race and it’s the only one where the purveyors of the movement were honest enough to use the term “Critical Theory” and thus reveal its origins.) To operate a store is to be exploitive and greedy, so that theft must be encouraged by the state. These things, too, are happening daily and you can hear about them like clockwork.

This is absolutely not a thing beyond the most radical or radical communists and anarchists.  However, there is a logic rooted in Marx's critique of capital, just as there is in the capitalist notion of private property.  Again though, nut-picking unrepresentative examples of people who adopt view X is not a substantive critique of view 

X.

These critical theorists did not ignore religious power structures. When a pastor speaks of “white guilt” or uses language that is consistent with it, he is compromising. When a church says women may be pastors, elders, or deacons, they’ve broken down the power structure to something small-d democratic and would allow anyone in based on skill set, not according to the typology of Ephesians 5 or the instruction of I Timothy 3. These are compromises of truth in light of today’s movements. It’s not just an alternative interpretation.[italics mine]

I refer to my argument above re: religious interpretation.  Brendemuehl is making a claim about social behavior based on the authority of a scriptural text, which is his own interpretation involving many assumptions about politics, economics, etc.  Does he claim we must follow it precisely?  For instance, it says to not drink wine for it leads to debauchery.  OK, but what if I just like a glass of beer with dinner?  Anyway, if he wants to take a fundamentalist reading, that's his choice, however as I argue above, even in so doing he is applying his own socialization to his decision to take the text literally. 

All of these things share the same theme. In technical terms it’s “neo-Marxist deconstruction” (also known as “Critical Theory”) from the Frankfurt school. But unfortunately, most people will get lost when you make such a precise statement. But at least you’ve got one here.

This is a thought patters which is inconsistent with Christian theology. The mission of the church is not to be a change agent intended on diminishing power structures. The Kingdom of God is a power structure built on His character and person. There is nothing higher or better. There is no other justice.

This just makes zero theological or historical sense.  I mean did Jesus not say plenty about overturning power structures?  Was he not crucified by actual Roman power structures?  Brendemuehl seems to be arguing that we, or the church, should not question power structures because it is part of God's power structure.  So secret North Korean Christian churches shouldn't oppose the North Korean government?  Should we not oppose our own government?  Earlier, he says parents should have say in their child's education (which I agree with!), but this is a power structure!  In grappling with this issue, he seems to have tied himself in knots and I personally can't disentangle them.  But I do appreciate the opportunity to do so.  I'm glad he's doing his best as well.