You Were Never a Christian At All

There are many phrases used by evangelicals and fundamentalists against people deconstructing their faith, but I think there’s a method to the madness.

It starts out with “you’re falling away,” “you’re on a slippery slope,” “you’re being tempted by the enemy,” “you’re listening to false teachers,” and the like. Intentional or not, these are scare tactics, and honestly I think they scare the person saying them perhaps as much as they may scare the person on the receiving end. Evangelicalism teaches people to fear change and to fear God, so changes about faith(!) are particularly terrifying. “Come back, over here, where it’s safe...”

This is often well-meaning when it comes from concerned family and friends (from strangers on the internet, well...). They see us careening off a cliff, and on the other side of the cliff is presumably Hell! Of course they want to draw us back to safety.

Then we fall. Right off the edge. And when our bravest evangelical loved ones watch us go, they come up to the precipice and lean over the side and look for us. They are certainly petrified, but they care. They want to see us and know what’s happening: are we clinging to rock or free-falling through the sky? And, understandably, they also don’t want to fall.

But others don’t dare look. They see that we are gone from view, from the safe place at the top of the mountain. They don’t want to scoot up to the perimeter on their bellies and glance down to see if we are hurt or still alive. To investigate our well-being would be to consider that there is more to know than what can be glimpsed from the heights, a very disturbing proposition.

So when a Christian goes from “falling away” to FALLEN, when no amount of apologetics will reverse gravity, many evangelicals default to a no true Scotsman fallacy: “you were never a Christian at all.”

This is a self-preservation technique & a protection against cognitive dissonance. Because “real” Christians DON’T fall. Once saved, always saved. And “saved” can only mean *one* thing. So, obviously, that poor heretic down there was never one of us.

Because if a truly legitimate Christian can fall off the cliff of deconstruction...then it could happen to me too.