A Deconstruction Chronicle: Lily Taylor

In the summer of 1970, when I was 9, we moved into a house across the street from a little Baptist church, and I walked there for VBS. My father was in the military and overseas every other year. My Japanese mother was stressed out all the time because she didn’t speak much English and so I was her translator. This is not too far removed from WWII, and she was in Japan when Nagasaki was bombed, so she remembered the horror of it. But she was also familiar with the American concentration camps for Japanese Americans, and she feared for my and my sister’s lives. She worried 24/7 that we would be picked up by the government and her fear led her to become a terrible alcoholic, trying to cope. Meanwhile, I was that eldest caretaker child of an alcoholic whose father was frequently gone for work and who was trying to cope with the mood swings and lack of love from the parent who was home all day. 

So VBS was a welcome outlet for me. As was the local library. That summer, I had checked out every book I could on various religions, and I made a chart on poster board w traits, beliefs, pros & cons. While in VBS, we were talking about the story of the pearl, and because I had been the first to memorize all 66 books in order, I was given a string of fake pearls. Which made me think of the Matthew 13 parable and how I was holding a lot of fake pearls but would I give it all up for the real Pearl. I realized I would, and so I was saved. 

By 1979, I had graduated high school but had fallen into purity culture before purity culture was a thing because my father, a lapsed Church of Christ member and lapsed Lutheran, had only two pieces of advice for me: 1) Your body is a temple so be careful what you put into it; and 2) don’t sleep with anyone you wouldn’t marry. I was still a virgin in a public high school where herpes seemed to be everywhere, cocaine was the drug of choice, and AIDS was just hitting its public stride. So I leaned into church more. I was very active, 3x a week at services, volunteering everywhere, and generally building my life around church, which included marriage and kids. That part of the journey is found in The Lifesaving Divorce.

By 1997-1998, I had begun deconstructing. I was a Messenger for my NOLA SBC church and I remember when Paige Patterson was selected as SBC president. I was there for the Disney boycott (which I supported) and the Reconciliation statement about slavery. Prior to the mid-80s, SBC had not taken a stand on abortion (Roe v. Wade was decided by a conservative court), and SBC was not very active in politics. The marriage of church and politics was triggered by the Moral Majority rising up, and I began to get alarmed at what I was seeing. The SBC had lost on segregation, I was then in Louisiana working for a federal judge on Baton Rouge’s longest desegregation case. I had to vote between Edwin Edwards and David Duke for governor, and the KKK was rearing its ugly head more strongly. But at the same time, Paige Patterson and his ilk were pushing the patriarchy and pastors were telling women to stay with their abusive husbands, to love them back to the Lord. 

So I would change churches, and begin working behind the scenes to see if change could happen from the inside. By now, pastors weren’t checking the curriculum I was teaching, and I had developed two curricula: The World’s War on Women and Extraordinary Women: Ordinary Women in the Hands of an Extraordinary God. I was watching inside the church as SAHM were lifted up as better than working mothers. I was hearing how my kid w NF1, ADHD, ASD, complex partial absence seizures, and two learning disorders was that way because I had some sort of secret sin. I was watching some SAHM lose their husbands to younger women and being unprepared for life as a single parent. So my curriculum was to help women see what was happening and why they mattered to God. But I missed the church’s war on women because I was too inside it, like a frog added to water that gradually boils.

By 2003, I knew the Disney boycott was wrong, ungodly, and unloving. So I was on the Monday night visitation team, where I requested to visit only women. I began a ministry for unwed teens to prepare them in a practical way for single motherhood. I would bring them home with me on weekends to teach them job & interview skills, how to care for kids, etc. It was successful and unwed teens were asking Christ into their hearts, all without my using the Romans Road evangelism method. I instead used Relationship Evangelicalism to show them that God loved them just as they were. 

By 2013, I was seeing Gothard influences inside the SBC. I was seeing situational ethics being taught in middle school Sunday School. I was seeing my daughter being mocked in a young adult class for saying she was building up treasures in heaven by very rich classmates. I was seeing more patriarchy, less mutual submission. Men in our Singles Class didn’t like that we had a co-leader class because I was a woman, who they said was called to be silent in church. 

By 2015, I had studied the Clobber verses, and sought out non-SBC source materials because I was struggling with what I had been taught in church and how it differed from reality. I was seeing more hate and so much less love. Then Trump showed up. I have had SBC friends going back 10, 20, 30+ decades, but was stunned when they voiced their support for him, called him an answer to prophecy, called him the Chosen One. Now all this time, I had been a Democrat. Sometimes the only one in a church of Republicans. It had never once been an issue. Republican women sought me out for friendship and advice. I had run several women’s groups, retreats, and conferences. But this all changed. For the first time, I heard, “How can you call yourself a Christian and be a Democrat?” I said, “The same way you do, by the blood of Christ.” And it got worse from there, so I closed my Facebook, emailed them all and said good-bye. That their questioning of me when they had been there for me as my support system for decades so knew me better than most, was the last straw.

I was now adrift. No Christian friends. No support system. No activities. No church.  That was the same year I was on a fishing boat bound for the Dry Tortugas when a storm came upon us. I was the only one outside on the deck when a 15-foot+ wave approached. I can’t swim. After almost drowning that same summer in 1970, my fear of the water was too great for me to learn. When that wave came close, I remember praying to myself, “God, You will need to either calm the storm or calm me.” The wave stopped. Just stopped. When I left the church entirely later in 2015 and was adrift and feeling so alone, I remembered the wave and my prayer. Only now I didn’t know how to proceed. Alone. With a child who had already left because of that young adult class and its mockery of her.

On Twitter, I met someone. He was local to me, taught Russian history at the university and he had started deconstruction. I had reached out to him to ask him what deconstruction was. We met for lunch, which turned into dinner. He talked about the harm he felt from church. Deconstruction is a spectrum, and for a few years, I moved up and down that spectrum between belief and unbelief, trying to reconcile what I had been taught with what I was now seeing with new eyes. In 2017, I returned to college and took a World Religions class, which further opened my eyes so much that I ran out of the room crying one day. There was just so much about which I was ignorant. I continued to meet others on Twitter, and soon I felt like I had found my tribe. One where being a smart woman wasn’t mocked or denigrated, one where others were going through deconstruction. I knew I was home, even though home meant people I might not ever know in person. The love and acceptance, the camaraderie of shared experiences, the knowledge of knowing that God is bigger than we know – those were the ties that bound me to others. 

For me, deconstruction is a journey out of destructive belief systems and into a healthy relationship with a God that isn’t boxed in. Rachel Held Evans’s writings spoke to me about a more loving and kinder God. I could now see this God, even though I still question where He is in things like the Holocaust. But I know now that God is big enough to question, big enough to still be there when you waver, big enough to share His table with more people.  

Deconstruction has also allowed me to blossom into the woman God intended me to be, a woman of fire, ice, and salt. I did not have to remain quiet when I see abuse of any kind. I did not have to hide my own stories. I did not have to fear the judgment of others. I could be the bold one, the Deborah/Jael/Proverbs 31/Woman at the Well that was all inside me. I could let her out and I could stop hiding. I could be the voice for the voiceless as we are called to be in Proverbs 31:8-9. For me, it was a way back to a far more solid belief based on Jesus and not men’s interpretation of the bible. I am still that woman that remembers my father’s advice. I just know now that the church left me, and the last straw was spending decades telling me character matters, only to show me by their actions that character doesn’t matter if there’s some white guy who hates the same people they do.

The crucial thing about deconstruction is that it reveals who you are in times of oppression and adversity, and while there are people who claim that those who deconstruction “hate God” and “want to sin,” it’s not that simple or clean cut. There are people who have left God entirely, and that is their right to do so. But there are so many more who found Jesus in deconstruction, not the Jesus of men, but the Jesus of John 1:1, the WORD made flesh. 

The resources which supported me were finding authors like Rachel Held Evans and Twitter. Twitter has been a vital resource to me because it has allowed me to find my place at God’s table, a place long denied me in church because I am a woman. I found a Jesus that loved women and trusted them with sharing the Gospel. I try to support the people who are deconstructing by sharing bits of my story. I want them to know they are not alone, that their stories matter, and that I will amplify their stories and I will go to bat for their stories to be heard. They DM and email me. They call me and meet with me in person, and I do not care if their journey of deconstruction sent them away from God because I understand that story, too. I support them by offering them hugs and humor when they are having a bad day or the trolls pile on. I support them by offering my ears, I think. And they have offered the same in return. I have learned so much from so many people on Twitter. There is such a wealth of resources, knowledge, and love on Twitter, despite how awful it seems at times, and I try to connect people so they, too, can build a stronger support system. Love isn’t a piece of pie; it can grow and expand to include so many more people, and that’s how I intend to live my life from here on out. 

For me, deconstruction was a long and winding road as I tried to fit into a church that had morphed into something unrecognizable, something so unChristlike that Jesus wouldn’t recognize it if He returned today. But my faith is no longer based on things unseen, but on seeing where God is working and joining Him there (“Experiencing God”), albeit without a church behind me. I am free now, and while I would not wish the pain I felt during deconstruction on anyone, I think God has turned it all into gold from a fire purification that cleared out the dross, the noisy gongs and clanging cymbals of my church experiences. 

~Lily Taylor

---

I am honored to share your stories. If you would like to share your story, you can contact me at ournomadicsouls@gmail.com.

All my heart, Meg.