Threads of a sweater: What are we to make of yet another famous Christian’s deconversion story?
Just a week or two ago, I mentioned the increasing prevalence of the “deconversion story” in popular media. A few days ago, yet another former Christian’s story started to make the rounds in every major media outlet. Jon Steingard, former lead singer of the Christian rock band Hawk Nelson, has declared he no longer believes in God.
In Christian circles, Hawk Nelson is a popular band. If you were in a youth group during the 2000s, you were likely to hear Hawk Nelson songs playing over the speakers. Steingard’s Instagram account, where he wrote about his “deconversion,” has over 41,000 followers, and the post has received nearly 25,000 likes. His story is going to strike a personal chord with many Christians—especially, I would imagine, millennials who grew up listening to Hawk Nelson.
In telling his story, Steingard seems very genuine. He’s not trying to gain attention for himself, and he’s not trying to tear down Christians or even Christianity. He’s simply opening up and sharing his personal journey.
In that light, some might think it insensitive for me to publicly scrutinize it. But although Steingard is not famous to the degree of Katy Perry or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he is still a public figure and an influencer. He certainly knows that sharing his story is going to have an impact on thousands of people’s faith journeys. Since it’s made national news, millions have either read or heard about it. So I think scrutiny of his story is not only justified, but necessary.
The threads of Steingard’s sweater
Steingard aptly compares his journey away from faith to pulling threads off a sweater one by one until there is no sweater left. By this he means his journey was not precipitated by one catastrophic event that collapsed his faith. Rather, it was his increasing disillusionment with various aspects of his belief system, one by one. This is a nearly universal theme in deconversion stories, and usually you can pick up on just what kind of threads are being pulled that led the storyteller to change his or her worldview. For Steingard, the threads are woven around tough questions about God.
In his post, he cites a number of questions he feels are unanswered: “If God is all loving, and all powerful, why is there evil in the world?” “If God is loving, why does he send people to hell?” “Why does God seem so pissed off in most of the Old Testament, and then all of a sudden he’s a loving father in the New Testament?” “Why does Jesus have to die for our sins? If God can do anything, can’t he forgive without someone dying?”
These are Apologetics 101-type questions. Not that these questions have easy answers—they don’t—but most Christians who have given their faith serious thought have wrestled with them. The writers of Scripture themselves wrestle with them. No one has come up with a completely satisfying answer to any of them, but Steingard is certainly not alone in his struggle. I would say that if any Christian hasn’t grappled with these questions to some degree, they can’t have a deep knowledge of their faith.
It’s here that I take issue with the way Steingard expresses himself. He says that, when he presented these questions to people, he was told, “You just have to read the Bible.” He makes it sound as though this was the best attempt at an answer he received, which I find very hard to believe. In fact, I know it’s not the case, because in a follow-up post, he says that he has “spent the last couple years devouring books from a wide range of views on these things.” So there is no way that he hasn’t heard pastors, teachers, and apologists respond to these extremely common objections that virtually every Christian has wrestled with.
It’s not as though Steingard simply couldn’t find substantive responses to his questions from the Bible and Christian theology. The writers of Scripture and subsequent Christian theologians have tackled and interacted with his questions in astounding depth. Steingard simply disagrees with the Bible. He disagrees with Christian theology. And I wish he would simply be forthright about that.
Not abandonment, but substitution
What, then, led Steingard to pull the threads out of his sweater, one by one? Reading Steingard’s story reminds me of many other deconversion stories, where the storyteller portrays himself as walking away from the constraints of dogmatic belief to venture out into the open waters of uncertainty and free exploration. But no one walks away from Christianity in a vacuum. No one simply abandons a worldview without substituting another in its place.
Steingard did not walk away from Christianity because he was merely dissatisfied with Christian doctrine. No one does. When people walk away from Christianity, it’s invariably because they have come to believe some other set of doctrines that leads them to reject Christian doctrine. Based on the questions he cited as contributing to his disillusionment with Christianity, maybe he subscribes to the doctrine that a loving God should ensure the world is free of suffering. Perhaps he holds as doctrinal truth the idea that evil should be disregarded and dismissed by God rather than a price being paid.
Regardless of which doctrines Steingard has come to hold, there is a common myth in our society that Christianity is dogmatic and agnosticism is open-minded. This is why Steingard perceives himself to be “free.” But this couldn’t be more false. No one is void of dogmatic beliefs about the nature of reality. Steingard hasn’t cast off the constraints of Christian doctrine for freedom. He has just traded one set of beliefs for another.
What kind of grounding does Steingard have for his new set of beliefs? What justification does he have for adopting them, and why are they superior to Christianity? Has he subjected his new set of beliefs to the same kind of scrutiny that he subjected his former Christianity? I can’t know, but I see no indication in his post that he has.
What threads hold your faith together?
The other thing that jumps out at me from Steingard’s post is the nature of the threads that had been holding his faith together. One of the biggest sticking points for him seems to have been biblical inerrancy.
He tells a story about his struggles with reading 1 Timothy 2:11-15, a passage that many interpret to mean women are universally forbidden from teaching or holding authority in the church. He had already adopted a view of egalitarianism, the belief that the roles of men and women are fully interchangeable, when he approached this passage. Because of that, he ultimately concluded that the Bible’s instructions as he interpreted them were just the product of a flawed patriarchal belief system. Then he deduced that if one passage of Scripture is flawed, then so are the rest. He writes, “Suffice it to say that when I began to believe that the Bible was simply a book written by people as flawed and imperfect as I am—that was when my belief in God truly began to unravel.”
It’s unfortunate that this was the breaking point for Steingard. At the same time, it’s not surprising to me, because in some Christian circles, biblical inerrancy is not just an essential doctrine, but the foundational doctrine on which every truth of the gospel stands or falls. On Bible.com, for example, Pastor J. Hampton Keathley writes, “If we can’t trust Scripture in things like geography, chronology, and history, then how can we be sure we can trust it in its message of salvation and sanctification?”
Make no mistake, the trustworthiness of Scripture is of paramount importance. The Scriptures are God’s revelation of himself to us. I fully believe the Scriptures are without error in all that they teach. But do you see how statements like Keathley’s make the perfect historical accuracy of Scripture the foundation for our faith–the thread that holds the entire sweater together?
For one thing, it doesn’t logically follow that the presence of one error in Scripture means we can’t trust its core claims–such as its claim that Jesus is risen from the dead. Imagine you see two reports about Donald Trump’s latest press conference, one by CNN and one by Fox News. They agree on most of the facts. CNN, however, notes that Donald Trump’s home state is New York and describes his tone as angry, while Fox News identifies his home state as Florida and describes his tone as jovial. Based on this contradictory information, should you then conclude that the press conference never happened? Of course not! But that’s the way Keathley and many others tell us we should treat Scripture. In other words, we should be quicker to abandon our trust in Scripture than in CNN. This seems rather backwards.
With this kind of understanding of Scripture, it’s no surprise that this is the thread that starts to unravel some people’s faith. Again, I think Scripture is completely trustworthy, without error in all that it teaches. But at no point in Scripture are we told to rest our faith on the foundation of its inerrancy. Rather, we are told repeatedly that our proper foundation is Christ himself (e.g. Eph 2:20, 1 Cor 3:11).
Christianity ultimately depends on one foundational, reality-defining truth: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That was the pivotal event that Jesus’ followers spent their lives proclaiming, defending, and promulgating throughout the known world. The resurrection is the reason we have hope. It’s why we commit our lives to Christ to be transformed by him. Because Jesus has risen from the dead, we can know that death is defeated. And if we believe that the risen Jesus is worth trusting, then we can have the hope of being gifted eternal life ourselves.
The only thread that is intended to reliably hold our faith together is the resurrection of Christ. That’s not just a historical event, but a continual, constant truth that experientially transforms our lives each day. It holds true even if the rest of the structure falls apart. Even if it could somehow be proven that Paul was wrong in his beliefs about women, Jesus is still risen from the dead. Even if the theory of evolution is true in its entirety, Jesus is still risen from the dead. Even if there is no answer to the problem of evil that we find adequate, Jesus is still risen from the dead. If Jesus is risen from the dead, then everything else—every unanswered question and painful experience—can fall back on faithful trust in the One who defeated death. If the resurrection of Christ is not the thread holding your faith together, then I would suggest you need to look for a new sweater.
Steingard is honest about his doubts, and he is not pretending to believe something he doesn’t. No one should fault him for that. But I wonder if he may have been holding on to a sweater constructed out of the wrong threads. Hopefully we Christians can learn from his story and ensure that our “sweater” is constructed out of threads strong enough to withstand any strain.
