Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.

My name is Brad O'Nishi, faculty and religions, good more college.

And today I want to do a special episode to talk about deconstruction and this idea of

evangelical that continues to pop up in various corners of the evangelical universe.

Some of you might have seen me on social media recently, it was pretty fired up about

this stuff the other day.

I promised I'd share some thoughts so I'm going to do that.

I'm not going to lie, it is a crazy, busy week and there's just so much going on so I would

have loved to have spent a whole day just organizing my thoughts, outlining things and being

able to kind of present my case here with an airtight, cogent approach but that's not

possible honestly just because there's a million things going on but this is too important

to talk about so I'm going to do my best and lay out some of my thoughts.

So I want to first start talking about deconstruction.

As many of you know, deconstruction is a very open-ended word and it refers to the process

of one deconstructing their worldview specifically in the context of a fundamentalist religion

and sort of reconsidering every aspect of their faith, their spirituality, their social

commitments, their political commitments, their culture and so on and so forth.

There are so many great folks who talk about what deconstruction is and how the process

works and that includes so many people that I've come into contact with who have helped

to me understand these things and those people are Blake Chastain and Chrissy Strupp,

their Tori Douglas, their Mason-Banenga, their Justin Gentry, they are Joluman, they are

Linnike Klein, Laura and the folks working at the Religious Trauma Institute and so on

...