Catholicism and Deconstruction: How I Learned to Unlearn
By: Tim Redfern
Tags: Personal, Catholicism, Religion, Deconstruction, Christianity

That altar server in white, to the right of those priests, is me… nine years ago.



From 2010 to 2013 I was involved in the traditional Catholic movement, and when I say “involved,” I mean about as involved as one could get without joining a seminary. I served Mass in Latin nearly every week, went to confession weekly, based most of my social life around the church, and fully bought into the ultra-conservative traditionalist ideology. Searching for clear moral answers, I sought refuge in the absolutism of a system that claimed an authority beyond the whims of personal judgement.



Those years weren’t all bad (I made some great and lasting friendships, for instance), but in many ways, my time in this conservative branch of Catholicism was among the biggest mistakes of my life. The sexual repression was insane and took me years to work through. It was like a constant psychological war with myself. I also bought into a conservative ideology and became active in conservative political causes, even taking up a job for a right-wing Christian politician (that is perhaps THE most embarrassing mistake of my 20s, by the way). I didn’t tell my school friends about my conversion, which led to me living a compartmentalised double life that only made me more confused. I completely lost every sense of who I was, and found myself alienated not only from my own identity but from my friends, family and the society around me.

Catholicism does not shy away from suffering: that is part of what makes it attractive to many. It is not comfortable or bourgeoise. It demands everything you have, even unto death. The Catholic Church celebrates its martyrs, and Catholics who are staring down the barrel of a lifetime of misery (or loneliness, or reproductive servitude, or an unhappy marriage they cannot exit) out of fidelity to Church doctrine are told that suffering is the royal road of salvation. Christ suffered, and to suffer for God is the way of the Cross. After all, Jesus said, “deny thyself, and take up thy cross and follow me.”

For a long time I tried to see this as necessary, or even as a good thing. A religious system that embraced suffering seemed like an attractive counterpoint to a hedonistic society. At a certain point, however, its absurdity became unsustainable. By and large, the suffering caused by Catholicism is completely unnecessary, and leads to no improvement in the world or the quality of life of its adherents. “You shall judge them by their fruits.”



Even the most faithful of religious believers must eventually admit that there is little hard evidence for religious claims beyond the witness of Scriptures and the communities of faith that proclaim their message. People become religious for different reasons, but most people adopt religious faith because it gives them something they cannot find elsewhere: meaning, hope, or the richness of a life lived in dialogue with a higher power who challenges and surprises.



A religious system that brings suffering, however, needs enormous evidence of its veracity for it to be worth practicing. In the case of Catholicism, I began to be less and less convinced.

When my rigid religious worldview came crashing down, I felt completely lost. I was depressed for a long time, and began to smoke weed every day. I couldn’t bring myself to attend church for over a year. That was back in late 2013.



It wasn’t just the loss of religion that affected me. When I left the world of traditional Catholicism, I lost my identity and sense of purpose. I had been active in a movement that I suddenly no longer identified with. I was surrounded by networks of homophobes, anti-feminists, and monarchists. When the enchantment wore off, I found myself asking: what the hell am I doing here with these people?



I stayed away from religion for a long time after that, but by early 2016 I felt that something was missing. I began searching for a way to plug back into Catholicism, into the secure religious home I had once enjoyed.

Of course, it didn’t work. I could sit in the pews of a Catholic church easily enough, but could never shake the feeling that I didn’t belong there, that I was supporting something that was offensive. I felt like I was betraying people I loved, or even my own values. How could I support a church that calls so many of my best friends “intrinsically disordered,” or whose teachings continue to cause so much suffering, or that refuses to take responsibility for the abuse that it enabled?

Moving on from Catholicism, however, is not easy. There’s a reason why Catholic guilt is a cultural trope.



The Catholic Church presents itself as the “One True Church.” It allows for no alternative — everything else is either schismatic, heretical or a cheap imitation. It also claims an epistemic authority grounded in divine revelation, natural law, and two thousand years of unbroken tradition. In the logic of Catholicism, the individual intellect cannot hold a candle to the weight of such a large and ancient authority.

For a long time, these habits of thought kept me attached to Catholicism even after I rejected its teachings on the intellectual level. What makes me think I know better than men like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas? Those men were geniuses of immense intellect and erudition — I’m just an average guy in my 20s. How could I consider my own private judgement superior to those of the world’s largest religion and its intellectual champions?



Unlearning this mental conditioning has taken a lot of effort. I had to do a lot of deconstruction, looking critically at everything. Each claim to authority had to be re-examined, every historical genius was re-contextualised and looked at in the context of their age. Every feeling of guilt, or every temptation to dismiss my own rational conclusions in favour of a higher authority had to be taken apart and critically examined. Finding a good therapist was a huge help here. For a while, I was so trapped in cognitive circles that I needed someone else to help me work through these beliefs, calling me out and confronting me with my irrationality where needed.

I also had to re-learn to trust my own powers of reason again. That was perhaps the hardest part. After having gone through a series of conversions (first to Catholicism as a teenager, then away from it years later) I realised that there’s always a chance that I will change my mind, that my current beliefs are only provisional and always subject to revision or change. This is perhaps just good intellectual humility, but it undermined my confidence in my ability to reach valid conclusions by my own powers of discernment. It took me a long time to accept that I am smart enough to place some confidence my own convictions, even if only provisionally. This is really my only option, since I have to live with integrity according to whatever convictions I have. Doubting myself at every corner is just a pointless downward spiral.

My efforts to move on from Catholicism have been a work in progress since the middle of 2019. This process has been fruitful: now, at the end of 2020, I am happy with where I am spiritually and theologically for the first time in seven years. I have found a comfortable home in the Anglican Communion, with a Christianity that is inclusive and other-affirming, that respects diversity and the freedom to doubt, to question, to criticise or think differently.



I am convinced that deconstruction doesn’t have to lead to atheism or post-religious agnosticism. We can unlearn oppressive habits of thought and break free of high-control structures while discovering that a positive, life-giving experience of religious faith can be found elsewhere. Deconstruction is not the same as destruction: it can be creative, enabling us to rebuild more critically, more cautiously.

After casting off the oppressive and controlling aspects of Christianity — or Judaism, or Islam, or any other tradition — it becomes easier to fully grasp the power of the essentials: the central message of God’s liberating and reconciling love, of a God who desires justice and peace for all creation, of eschatological hope. For sure, after leaving a high-control tradition, most people feel burnt out and want nothing to do with religion at all for a while. This was definitely the case for me. But once the process of deconstruction and healing has taken place, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. For me, at least, it has been worthwhile to continue searching.