When Truth and Faith Collide

Deconstruction wasn’t something I went looking for. It wasn’t fashionable or philosophical. It wasn’t about swapping one set of beliefs for another.

For me, it came like an earthquake—sudden, devastating, and utterly unavoidable.

The tremors began when my straight brother died of AIDS. At the time, I was an Evangelical pastor, a husband, and a father. My entire identity was built on the scaffolding of faith I’d inherited:

• that God required silent surrender

• that truth could be bent for the sake of obedience

• that anything in me that didn’t align with the Bible’s commands had to be buried

  
  

But standing at my brother’s hospital bed, and later preaching at his funeral, that scaffolding collapsed.

His death was not just a family tragedy—it was the moment my two worlds collided.

On one side stood the rigid, absolute faith that told me who I was allowed to be. On the other stood an unshakable truth: I was gay.

And no amount of prayer, fasting, or self-denial could erase that reality.

That collision was catastrophic.

I lost my faith and everything I had built on it: my dignity, my marriage, my family, my ministry, and the community I had given my life to serve. I was cast out of the only world I had ever known. Labeled a backslider. A reprobate. An outcast.

For a long time, I believed I'd lost everything. That I was an utterly worthless human being.

The Rubble

In hindsight, I see now that what looked like destruction was actually deconstruction.

Deconstruction is not about tearing faith down for the sake of rebellion. It’s about daring to look honestly at the beliefs that shaped you and asking:

• Which of these brings life, and which brings harm?

• Which were handed to me in love, and which were handed to me in fear?

• Which are true, and which were only ever chains?

  
  

When the old structures collapsed, what remained looked like rubble—sharp, messy, painful to touch.

But rubble is not the end of the story. Rubble is what’s left when illusions fall away. It is the raw material of a new life—if you’re willing to pick it up and examine it.

For me, deconstruction meant sifting through the ashes of a collapsed faith and holding each fragment up to the light.

Some pieces I kept:

• the conviction that love is the highest calling

• the belief that compassion matters more than doctrine

• the certainty that grace should never come with fine print

  
  

Other fragments I laid down:

• the fear that masqueraded as holiness

• the shame that paraded as humility

• the lie that love had to be conditional

  
  

Those weren’t sacred truths; they were weapons. And they had cut me for too long.

Deconstruction is the painstaking work of separating what is holy from what is harmful, what is life-giving from what is life-stealing.

Only then can you begin to build again.

The Wilderness

It was not an easy process. In fact, it nearly destroyed me.

Deconstruction feels like exile, because it is exile. You lose not only your community, but also the sense of certainty that once anchored you. You find yourself standing in the wilderness, stripped of answers, left with only questions.

And yet—questions can be holy.

Why?

Because questions are honest. They strip away performance and pretense. They refuse to settle for borrowed certainties.

A question admits our limits but also opens us to discovery. In that way, a question is a kind of prayer—an act of reaching, of refusing to accept that what we’ve been handed is all there is.

For years, I believed that doubt was sin, that curiosity was rebellion, that silence was safer than asking “Why?”

But in the wilderness, I learned that questions can sanctify.

They may not give easy answers, but they keep us alive, moving, searching, breathing. Over time, those questions became my companions. They guided me deeper into truth, even when the answers were slow to come.

And in time, I discovered that deconstruction is not an ending but a beginning.

It cleared space for something more authentic to emerge—a way of living that no longer required me to fracture myself in two.

It gave me back my integrity. It gave me back my voice. Most of all, it gave me back to myself.

The Beginning

The truth is, when faith and truth collide, the truth will always win—eventually.

It may cost you everything you thought you couldn’t live without, but in the end, it will give you back the one thing you cannot live without: your selfhood, your wholeness, your freedom.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers now. What I have is a story—a case study, if you will—of what happens when the scaffolding falls, when the God you thought you knew disappears, when you are forced to face yourself without the armor of certainty.

My story is not just about loss. It’s about the painful, sacred work of rebuilding.

Deconstruction is not about abandoning faith. It’s about refusing to live a lie.

It’s about finding the courage to stop performing, to stop pretending, to stop living in exile from your own soul.

If you are walking through your own deconstruction, know this: you are not alone.

The wilderness feels endless, but it is also fertile ground. The collapse you fear is not your undoing—it is the clearing that makes way for something truer, freer, and more beautiful to grow.

Sometimes truth costs you everything.

But in the end, truth gives you back yourself.

A Story Shared

This is the story I tell in my memoir, Straight to Hell: Memoir of an Ex-Evangelical Pastor—a journey through loss, exile, and ultimately, freedom.

My hope is that in reading it, others walking the path of deconstruction will find courage, companionship, and maybe even a little light for their own way forward.

Your Brother,

John the Exile