Michael Gungor, of Beautiful Things fame, is creating a new religion in his likeness, but he won’t admit it.
If you read between the lines in the early 2010s, you might have predicted Michael’s* eventual exit from Christianity. The 2014 release of I Am Mountain, an album he and his wife Lisa recorded under their eponymous band Gungor, coincided with blog posts and interviews regarding what he now believed—or more accurately put—what he now didn’t believe.
In two since-removed posts, Michael rejected the historicity of Adam and Noah, instead adopting a belief that the creation and flood narratives are myths. He also wrote, "NO REASONABLE PERSON takes the entire Bible completely literally." And Lisa shared that he told her, "I don’t believe in God anymore."
Unsurprisingly, he received criticism for these statements. But nasty name-calling like "twofold son of hell," "heretic," and "false teacher" seems to have deafened his ears and hardened his heart to the Bible he once presumably treasured. These hateful responses were evidence to him of a divided, unloving church body, one where different eisegeses aren’t allowed.
Michael may indeed have been unconvinced by such academic persuasions as evolution and geological records, but rejecting one’s faith rarely begins with a pedantic disagreement. During one interview, Lisa said, "I knew the leaders who failed [Michael]", revealing more than she probably intended.
Talking of those who deconstruct (a common term to describe the spiritual journey Michael has publicly and privately traveled)**, Greg Pinkner of Fellowship Church in Knoxville, TN said,
Co-pastor R.D. McClenagan affirmed this saying,
“9 out of 10 times, it is someone that has changed the trajectory of your faith, because it becomes personal or relational.”
To go from a "professional Christian" to someone who no longer believes in God isn’t a shift that occurs in a vacuum. It happens when you’ve met new people who have beliefs to which you’ve never heard a counterclaim.
This is what happened to me. Though a cliche, I met a girl in college who taught me everything I didn’t know existed. That’s how I saw it at the time, anyway.
She, now independent from her parents’ imperious wings, could live by the rules on paper without doing so in practice. I obeyed the rules without thinking to question them. I learned from her, though not her entirely nor even explicitly, that Christians were hypocritical and holier-than-thou. They were narrow-minded and stuffy. Latching onto this view, unconsciously at first, I extended and appropriated her thinking onto my philosophies.
The worldview I developed seemed to provide universal answers. In actuality, they cephalized around two things: (1) nature and, as Michael has done with The Liturgists, (2) whatever was antithetical to what I thought Christians purported.
The Liturgists is a non-profit that Michael began with Mike McHargue after discovering like-mindedness in their loss of faith and frustrations they had over tenets of American Christianity. Their work began recording worship experiences and then a podcast. They claim their audience grew from thousands to millions in their first year.
The following explains what they make of this demand and their mission in meeting it.
“The explosive growth of The Liturgist Podcast makes a statement: millions worldwide are frustrated by the culture wars of institutional Christianity, but long for spiritual transformation that enacts positive action and reform in the world. To aid in that transformation, The Liturgists has grown into a global movement of people united by a single idea: there is room at the table for all who are hungry.”
A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing
My invented worldview led me to a mild form of deconstruction, but God brought about my reconstruction to a belief in him as the author of life and the Bible and his Son as my personal Lord and Savior.
I discovered The Liturgists and thought I could speak to them empathetically, since I had recently exited a state of deconstruction, where many of them were currently embroiled. I joined their online forum where people are encouraged to identify themselves, post questions, and converse about podcast episodes or other relevant topics. Peace, kindness, and a dash of conformity are ensured by active moderators.
I soon found there was a difference between many and myself: I had never been hurt by the church. I was never knowingly lied to by an elder or a parent. I hadn’t been abused in any sense and wasn’t taught false doctrine.
The Liturgists, generally, are a community of people who have had one or any of these traumas occur to them. In their methods of recovery, they develop a new doctrine for themselves, one that scapegoats Christianity as a whole to explain their individual instances of harm. Treating Richard Rohr as a papal figure, they discuss spirituality without the Spirit. As John Mark Comer said of post-Christian culture, The Liturgists are seeking the “kingdom without the King.”
The conversations in the online forum appeared to be philosophical, thought-provoking, and open-minded. I consider myself a critical and deep thinker, spending so much time mulling absolutes in my head that I needed conversations with real people, albeit virtually.
Regretfully, I didn’t always log in following prayer. I was battle-ready, feeling clairvoyant and able to type convincing arguments. I called out double standards and asked questions earnestly, showing my desire to talk deep. I pontificated and posted my personal story. I was urgent but not aggressively so. The response I received was frustrating overall, but I kept returning, convinced that if they just listened to me, they’d start to think differently.
My wife dubbed my approach “Christian trolling.” I had encroached on an online community of unstructured group therapy. They were not there to analyze their beliefs and reconstruct. They had found a misery-loves-company collection of people and wanted only what Michael and his colleagues were preaching, that is, to deconstruct and deride aspects of American Christianity they equated with the world religion.
The Founding Father
As I found out, you can’t sit in perpetual deconstruction. Congeries of opinions don’t support a coherent purpose and a life without purpose isn’t logical, sensible, nor worth living. You must reconstruct something sometime.
In his January 28 episode “Is Christianity Worth Saving?”, Michael announced there would be a shift in format and function. The Liturgists were going to set about reforming Christianity.
What would this mean? Did Michael consider himself a modern Martin Luther? Who was he to do this?
In the episode, he told of a time he was visiting a building in New Zealand whose interior walls were adorned with swastikas. A plaque indicated that these were not related to Nazism. Rather, they came from a longer history where it meant something quite different. It made Michael consider that just as this inert symbol was now irredeemable because of Hitler, perhaps Christianity was beyond repair.
Michael established three persuasive facts, four that are overwhelming, that led him to justify having a conversation about why and how to reform Christianity.
“We are already swimming in Christianity, whether we are Christian or not.”
“Christianity actually has some valuable ideas and practices worth keeping around.”
“A lot of trauma-on-trauma happens when people feel the need to abandon their religion in order to keep growing and that trauma could possibly be avoided with some meaningful and accessible reformation.”
(“Trauma-on-trauma” is the experience that happens to those who experience a social or emotional loss when they leave a faith community because of a church hurt, the initial trauma.)
“There’s [an] incredible amount of groundwork and foundation that has already been laid by our ancestors and isn’t repeatable. To start from scratch really isn’t possible...”
Due to timely but unrelated circumstances, Michael’s role in The Liturgists changed and he learned what I read on the forum: personal accounts of people’s church hurt. People now at his fingertips in droves were looking for guidance on how to reconcile the harm they experienced and untruths they were told with what they believed about God.
The next podcast episode, Reformation, included testimonies from a handful of these people who shared what about Christianity worked for them and what about it didn’t work.
Many spoke of appreciating the shared community that comes within a church, of the notion of a love for all people, the narrative thread of redemption, cultivating a relationship with the divine, and showing people love and catering to individual needs.
In telling nakedness, the things about Christianity that didn’t work for them was the rigidity of rules, believers’ claims of knowing what’s right and wrong, congregational divisions, a fear-based theology, and having to maintain societal standing based on works.
Michael summarized the two. “The things that don’t work for us are the things that tear us apart. The things that do work for us are the things that mend us back together.” It is upon this hacked generalization and the unstated assumptions that discord is a vice and unconditional acceptance of others a virtue that he began his discussion of reframing Christianity.
Building on Sand
The heart of the matter is that The Liturgists are nursing a hurt they experienced by people or wrong beliefs they associate with Christianity. Yet, because many will cry “Lord, Lord,” because the Galatians so quickly believed another gospel, and because people have itching ears for teachers to suit their own passions, I want to briefly discuss some double standards and intellectual dishonesties in The Liturgists’ approach to reforming Christianity.
One of their foundational presuppositions is the authority of personal autonomy. In this, everyone has their own concept of truth because we each come from a unique past. We are unable to fully comprehend our neighbor’s experiences and therefore have no standing from which to correct them. As guest Rev. Briana Lynn laughed in Reformation, it’s admitting “we don’t know s---.”
The logic flows thus: we can’t know everyone’s experience, so we don’t know the endless possibilities of what could be true, therefore we can’t say anything for certain, so it’s wrong to declare what’s right or wrong because it may deny someone’s personally established conjectures.
The obvious canards and paradoxes are ignored as Michael and members of the Symposium*** navigate their reformation within the boundaries they’ve unintentionally defined.
Paired with this commitment to postmodernism, podcast speakers talk as though listeners are each entrenched in their respective worldview. It's assumed that we can’t think outside of ourselves, that the only way I can read and study the Bible is with the biases of a white Western male in the American South. People aren’t given the benefit of the doubt to be able to reshape their understanding of the world after hearing others’. Though The Liturgists speak as if people can’t be corrected, they don’t believe it, else they wouldn’t continue to publish content.
Another critical piece of this new reformation is the determination to be non-dualistic. The goal is to be open to anything, to be told what someone wants to believe and why is totally dependent on that individual and is wholly feasible.
But, risking literalism, if you choose to be non-dualistic, are you not rejecting one of only two possible options in saying "No" to dualism? Is it not also a truth-claim to call someone wrong for telling someone they're wrong? Simply put, it’s untenable to resolve to be non-dualistic.
For certain members of The Liturgists, there is an emphasis against a past experience in a church of a requirement to know things to be assured of a right standing with God. They see traditions like The Nicene Creed as a commanding demand to be correct. These members now hate the idea that they should be required to assent to a list of beliefs, to have to say or do the right thing to prove they are doing what they should. Theirs is simply a gross misunderstanding of how faith, belief, and works interact.
Lastly, The Liturgists’ approach to understanding Christianity in order to reform it seems to necessitate subjective research. According to Michael, the beliefs we have are nothing more than stories we’ve been told by leaders perpetuating these stories in order to stay in control. To combat this systemic oppression, The Liturgists deliberately reference alternative authorities on church history, theology, and spirituality.
This intentional bias in listening exclusively to criticism of Christianity necessarily justifies a need to correct it. To swap the traditional understanding of their rejected religion, The Liturgists welcome only those who have a dissenting story to present, rather than considering a comprehensive history.
For example, Rev. Lynn began by demoting the deity of Jesus. She elucidated that his name, Yeshua, is a centuries-later mispronunciation of Joshua, so his name is “actually Josh.” The purpose of this factoid isn’t stated, but it’s obvious; it lowers the historic Jesus to your contemporary friendly neighborhood white-washed guy named Josh. Her sacrilegious and inaccurate nickname is used throughout Reformation and following episodes. Rev. Lynn continued with a rushed summary of the checkered history of Christianity.
It’s on these divergent facts that Christianity is established as problematic and the reformation is furthered.
How Can We Help?
We shouldn’t be surprised at the heresies Michael sponsors in his work with The Liturgists. For after initial concessions, anything else automatically flows in the wrong direction. Discussions following Rev. Lynn’s church history have been dissections beyond recognition of core, historic Christian doctrines. However, as I learned in the forum, it’s often wasted time to parse scientific or apologetic disagreements when the root of the errancy is a spiritual and emotional harm on a personal level.
So, it’s imperative that those adopting the teachings of The Liturgists recognize they are rejecting a distorted form of Christianity; a religion where God’s chosen people are Americans or where faithful trust includes holding secrets of sexual abuse or where salvation is work-based. These are not biblical Christianity.
I believe there is an element of groupthink among The Liturgists. People eager to disparage Christians rewrite their personal histories using accusatory sentences like I was raised to believe… and We weren’t allowed to… In these, they admit they hold their current beliefs only because it’s the antithesis of what they used to believe. Michael’s guidance leads vulnerable listeners with malleable memories to accept anything that spurns the faith their once-trusted leaders ostensibly preached.
Because I've never experienced it myself, it was hard for me to imagine so many people had been hurt by the church so severely that they rejected the faith altogether. Therefore, I joined the online forum assuming members' presence meant a willful brainwashing to all things non-Christian. All it would take to deprogram them was an intentional and nonabrasive series of philosophical discussions. But once I spent enough time in the online community, I saw in greater scope how it is that people who grew up in church traditions different from my own very well may have been taught some problematic theology.
So, I’ve found it unproductive to consider that each person is a victim of groupthink. Instead, it puts me in a position of earnest love to assume that each person I listen to, pray for, think about, or talk to has been hurt to a significant degree. My urgency shifts from scholastic apologetics to showing them how God can satisfy their deficiencies.
Befriend those who declare deconstruction. Listen to their hurts from harmful teachers and teachings and speak to the reality of what God says.
Apostatic testimonies, such as are sadly too common in The Liturgists, regularly reference that doubt wasn’t allowed in the church they were raised in. We need to welcome doubt and questions in the church. Not only will the Thomases feel welcome, we defenders will more fully understand the faith ourselves.
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* I use Michael's first name to differentiate the man from the band.
** ‘Deconstruction’ can mean many things but for the purposes of this article (since it’s the usage most familiar to The Liturgists), its closest synonym is apostasy. To learn more about apostate deconstruction, listen to this interview with After Doubt author A.J. Swoboda and watch this video with Bridgetown Church pastor John Mark Comer.
*** "Symposium" is the name for the group of people formed and forming within The Liturgists who are having discussions and coming up with ideas.