White Deconstruction Bros Can’t Free Us

 If I had to summarize what these times feel like, they feel foggy. 2016 and 2020 were clarifying, but now in 2026, we're exhausted, and we feel stuck between going back to places that we expended a lot of energy to leave and feeling too tired to figure out how to move forward. And so I want do a series that hopefully, will be clarifying and helpful to us in a foggy season   

A lot of our journeys were started from crisis. George Floyd, Christian Nationalism, the first Trump presidency, all the un-affirming theology in the churches that we were at. You remember, right? You remember the trauma, shelter in place, the gaslighting? 

The analogy I use for this season is that it was like a space shuttle launching into space. 

If you've ever looked at a shuttle launching into space, the shuttle itself is actually relatively small, but the fuel it takes to get it out of Earth's atmosphere is in a tank larger than the little shuttle itself. And that was a lot of us in 2020. All the emotional energy, the emotional labor, the conversations that we had, the DEI teams we were a part of, the work we did to articulate things about our theology that we shouldn’t have had to- all that energy was to launch us out of the gravitational pull of the toxic theologies that has raised us. It was all the work that it took to wake up to the anti-Blackness and white supremacy that was within our communities. 

But here is what worries me. After expending all of that energy to leave these churches and organizations, we’ve gotten stuck. 

I think of all the work that we as women of color and non-binary folks did to launch out of the gravitational pull of these toxic spaces. But instead of going on and exploring new worlds, we got re-trapped. 

The re-trap is that after launching from that world, we've remained orbiting it. White guy deconstruction bros have looped us into another version of white male centered theology.  These white guys who

• didn't do any work to interrogate the harm that they had done

• didn't consider the ways they benefited from a system that they led

• platformed themselves as experts in critiquing it

  • without ever being in people of color-led communities,

  • without ever being in women-led communities, 

  • without ever being in queer-led communities

Deconstruction is a stepping stone, it's not a destination. These deconstruction “experts” cannot get us to new places because they only know the world we are trying to leave. Forever critiquing white evangelicalism and white Christianity is like breaking up with someone and five years later you're still talking about them. The whole point of expending all that energy to launch, was so that we could explore new worlds, not linger around the old one. Our focus needs to be on finding new ways of being, new ways of being in community, new theologies, new (to us) spiritual practices, and new  (to us) cultural practices 

Part of why some of us feel foggy is because we're stuck orbiting a world we worked hard to get out of. It's time for us to explore new worlds together.