Deconstruction has been a buzzword in evangelical and post-evangelical circles for around ten years. 

The podcasts, the memoirs, the support groups, the hashtags — all of them circling the same moment: the moment a person looks at the belief system they inherited and decides they can no longer live inside it. The courage that takes is real. I will not minimize it.

But nobody talks about what comes after.

After the burning, you still have to live somewhere. After the demolition, you are still a person — with a body, a mind, a soul, a spirit — standing in the rubble of everything that used to explain you, trying to figure out what gets rebuilt and what stays ash.

I have been in that rubble for years.

This is my attempt to tell you what I am finding there.

Room One: The Body

The first thing I had to rebuild was my relationship with my body and its parts.

It was 2012, Austin, Texas. Gina and I had been together for over a year. We were not married. We were also, for the first time in both our lives, entirely unleashed — two people coming out of forty years of desert, starving and thirsty, reaching for each other with a hunger that had no bottom.

It was like a movie. Sexier than any movie I had ever seen. A torrid, unending, glorious year of… YES! Oh my God, YES!

And right in the middle of it, guilt would rear its head.

What am I doing? We’re not married. Is this fornication? Is this adultery? Never in a million years could I have pictured myself living in sin with a woman.

The words themselves — fornication, adultery — arrived in my father’s voice, my pastor’s voice, the accumulated screams of a thousand sermons delivered to a boy who learned before he could read that his body and certain of its parts were a problem to be managed.

I began to realize that guilt had nothing to do with Gina. It had nothing to do with what we were doing, which was exactly what two damaged, hungry, fully alive people would do after decades of deprivation.

The guilt was smoke. I had burned the old house, but the smoke kept choking me. Learning that my body and ALL its parts belong to me has been the longest reconstruction project of my life. 

It is happening slowly, in increments. A tantric massage in Barcelona at age 66, walking out two hours later having met my own flesh in ways I hadn’t known were possible. Years of nude birthday self-portraits on May 1st, each one a small act of repossession (and yes, a symbolic middle finger to my past). Nude beaches, virtual reality ethical porn shows, full body painting, and guilt-free sex with myself. 

Each act is a quiet declaration: these are mine now. We belong together.

Yes, the smoke still appears occasionally. But it no longer chokes off my pleasure.

Room Two: The Mind

In 2010, I read a book that washed through me like an orgasm.

The updated version of Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese. A history of sexual freedom in America — the communes, the Sandstone retreat, the slow dismantling of the puritanical structures that had governed American bodies and minds for centuries.

Sandstone. Where nude men and women gathered in the California hills and fucked each other freely, openly, without shame or secrecy. Where a woman named Diane Webber moved through rooms like a goddess from another world entirely.

I found her photographs. One look at her and fifty years of puritanical theology gets very hard to defend. 

Diane Webber was one of the most stunningly beautiful women I had ever seen — dark-haired, luminous, entirely at home in her own skin in a way that made everything I had been taught about the body feel like a lie told by withered people. Looking at her, I tried to imagine what Sandstone must have actually felt like, what it meant to be in a room where desire moved freely, where everyone was enjoying life.

The book read me as much as I read it. It unleashed questions that had been censored and squashed my entire life. It was my first introduction to the ideas that would eventually lead me to Sex at Dawn and The Ethical Slut, to the concept of ethical non-monogamy, to the thinking and writing I am doing right now.

Because when the censorship burns, you don’t just get ideas. You get the Holy fuck of everything that was kept from you.

Anaïs Nin. Henry Miller. D.H. Lawrence. John Fowles. Pauline Réage. Jean Genet. Carl Jung. Simone De Beauvoir. Each one was a door I hadn’t known existed, swinging open into a burning mind full of unused oxygen, creating a backdraft that rapidly ignited, releasing the dangerous energy of an uncensored thinker. 

Each forbidden book was like the dangerous ignition of oxygen rushing into a room that had been starved of it for fifty years.

In my reconstructed house, I have a new room, a library of forbidden books that feeds my mind. They refute certainties and pat answers, and promote free thinking and open-mindedness. They are creating a mind without barriers, without confinement, without the ability to stop. A brain finally eating what it was always hungry for doesn’t need to be told what to do next. It just keeps eating. 

Room Three: The Soul

I did the math for this post. I have attended over 8,400 church services in my life. That means I spent more than a year and a half of my life sitting in a church pew or standing on a church stage.

Forty-eight years of church. Many of those years included multiple services every week — four on Sunday, one Saturday, one Wednesday. I joke that I attended church subliminally in my mother’s womb, nine months before I was born, hearing Pentecostal fervor reverberate through her bones.

The first Sunday morning without it arrived in June 2006.

I sat in the silence of a house with no obligation, no schedule, no audience to dress for. I waited for something — guilt, I think, or lightning, or the alarm of a man who has stepped outside the only framework he has ever known.

Instead, I felt the most exhilarating freedom of my life.

I jumped up. I screamed. Yes. Yes. Yes. No lightning. Safe and secure from all alarm. More peace than I had felt inside any of those 8,400 services. More time. More space. More of my soul was available than the institution had ever left room for.

That first Easter without four services. That first Christmas Eve without seven. I would text a close friend — a man who had resigned from a massive megachurch around the same time I had — and we would ask each other: how does it feel? Would you go back?

His answer, every year, without variation:

There is no fucking way. Not a chance in hell.

Finding a label for what I am now took longer.

Reluctant agnostic first — honest but uncomfortable, a man standing in a doorway refusing to commit to either room. Then the slow reading through the options: atheist, pantheist, gaianist, humanist. Each one tried on like clothes in a store, examined in the mirror, put back on the rack.

Until Humanism fit: a person devoted to human welfare. Grounded in reason and ethics. Oriented toward the value of human life rather than the requirements of a supernatural authority.

I found a new room there.

And then Trump arrived and cemented everything.

Watching the evangelical church — the tradition that shaped me, that owned me, that built the framework I have spent the past two decades burning down — embrace this human being that defies every Christian principle has been the most clarifying experience of my reconstruction. There is no framework in which that embrace is spiritually coherent. There is no God I can construct who would recognize itself in it.

It confirmed what I had been slowly concluding for years.

The whole religious thing was never real. We have one life, and this is it. And that is okay. Everything is okay.

I mean that as a person, a humanist, who is reconstructing my soul, a fragment of assurance at a time. I choose a life of peace and enjoyment, not a life of guilt, anxiety, and fear. 

Room Four: The Spirit

The thing I am most proud of building in reconstruction is peace of mind.

Specifically: peace about death.

At 68, that is not an abstract question. I think about death with some regularity now — not with morbidity, but with the honest attention of a man who has done the math on his remaining years and decided to take them seriously.

For most of my life, death arrived wrapped in terror. The evangelical framework around it — heaven, hell, judgment, the accounting of every act and thought — had made death the ultimate consequence, the final exam, the moment everything would be revealed and settled. When everyone at the judgment seat of Christ would watch the giant video screen of my life, aghast as I masturbated in “secret.”

The psychedelics helped most with this reconstruction.

My intention going into my 2019 journey was direct: What is next? What does the future look like? The answer arrived in an experience so complete that it has not left me, seven years later.

It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.

There was a distinct awareness of what Carl Jung calls the collective unconscious — the sense of being a root, a shoot, in a rhizome that matters in a way that doesn’t require my individual continuation to remain true. I don’t know exactly what that means. I know exactly how it felt.

It felt like release.

The spirit I have rebuilt is not religious. It is not supernatural. It is grounded in the human being — in freedom: a sensual freedom, a curious freedom, a communal freedom, and a spiritual freedom.

It is a new room, a spiritual room that finds and enjoys freedom everywhere.

That is enough. After everything, that freedom, that peace of mind turns out to be more than enough.

The Closer

Deconstruction has a romance to it.

You are tearing something down. That feels like agency, like power, like finally being the one who decides. People write books about it. They start podcasts. They find community in the shared act of demolition.

Reconstruction is messier. It is much easier to tear something down than to build it back. You find yourself in the rubble, the ashes, deciding what to keep. And what to add.

I have been deciding for years.

I have kept the hunger for bodies and body parts, for books, for humanity, for freedom and peace, for the full range of what being human offers. I have kept the questions, which turned out to be worth more than the answers I was handed. I have kept Gina, and the life we are building in a city that feels, more than anywhere I have ever lived, like it was waiting for me to build my house anew.

The house I am building looks nothing like the one I burned.

It is smaller. Less certain. More honest.

But I live in it as myself. My true self. My whole self.

And that, after sixty-eight years, is the whole aim of reconstruction.