Paul Maxwell, Deconstruction, and Evangelicals
Paul Maxwell was a "rising young star" in the neo-Calvinist circles: he sometimes wrote for John Piper's outfit (Desiring God) and Tim Keller's outfit (The Gospel Coalition). I was not that familiar with him until right before he announced his deconstruction in 2021.
Before that, there were red flags: while he was advocating for some victims, Valerie Hobbs had called him out for some of his own public statements, and others called him out for heavyhanded tactics/bullying in his spheres of leadership. And he was clearly using triangulation: he was having other people do his dirty work. I remember getting attacked viciously just for asking an otherwise innocuous question.
But within a week of that dustup, on Instagram, he announced that he is no longer a Christian. Not only is he not a Christian; he now identifies as atheist.
Attached is Anthony Bradley’s interview of Maxwell regarding his backstory, including his deconstruction.
Quite frankly, his backstory explains a lot of things.
For a lot of hardcore Calvinistas and/or fundamentalist types, being Christian is more about choosing a side and buying into a "system". It's not so much about loving Jesus and loving His people, as much as it is about choosing a side to fight on. And Maxwell was all about being God's soldier. For him, it was an intellectual exercise (or so it seemed as I listened to his story).
In those types of circles, the "system"--whether it's a fundamentalist one or a Calvinist one--is everything.
The problem with that: systems have their limitations. And Christian faith is a LOT more than an intellectual, academic exercise. In my worst crisis, I revisited everything I thought I believed, and my bases for believing them. While the intellectual reasons were themselves solid—I had concluded that there was a preponderance of evidence for not just a God, but the God of the Bible—I concluded that I had not merely bought into a "system"; I had received Jesus. That small, still voice, I didn't make that up. That was the Holy Spirit. Too many things had lined up. I could not write those off as coincidences.
Yes, I can make an intellectual case for this and that, but I can’t dismiss my experiences. As I often say, “I can't unsee what I've seen.” That goes for the bad. But it also goes for the good. And I’ve tasted and seen that the Lord is good, even as I have experienced my share of profound loss, trauma, and tragedy.
Last year, my church did a study of Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. That was prescient in a lot of ways for me: in my undergraduate studies, I took a philosophy class. The professor happened to be the Protestant chaplain for the university. He was finishing up his SECOND PhD. He assigned me Mere Christianity for reading. What I appreciated about Lewis' take: he was making a reasonable case FOR Christian faith. He was not dunking on atheists, as he was once one himself.
Also, during my undergrad engineering studies, there were classes that rang theological bells: control systems analysis, airplane stability and control, thermodynamics, and modern physics. Compare automated control systems with the homeostatic control systems that every organism has; compare the aerodynamics and flight stability of airplanes and helicopters with birds and bees. If mechanical control systems are products of intelligent design, then a reasonable person can conclude that biological control systems are.
In modern physics class, when we studied relativity and learned about "time dilation" that occurs when you start getting close to the speed of light, I kid you not: every Christian in that room lit up. We got it: a thousand years for us really CAN be a day in a different frame of reference. The Biblical writers nailed it thousands of years before Einstein did the math and proved it.
(That, BTW, is a big reason why, in spite of being otherwise conservative on many fronts, I see no issue with evolution. I've been an old-earth Creationist since that light went off in that physics class.)
Did any of those things make me a Christian? No. I was already there. Did those, on some level, bolster a reasonable case FOR that faith? Yes. I also understand that someone can look at those things and conclude that it isn't sufficient to convince him or her that there is a God, let alone that the Christian faith is a valid faith.
I explained that to someone in our class at church: "I CANNOT "prove" that there is a God; I CAN give you a reasonable case from science and engineering for why a reasonable person can accept that there is a God, that that God is the God we read about in Scripture, that we are made in the image of that God. And from there, I can make the case for the human condition and why we need a deliverer, and why I believe that deliverer was and is Jesus. But what I CAN'T do: I can’t MAKE you have faith. And at every level where I can make a case FOR a God, there is always going to be a reason NOT to believe. You have to look at the case and the evidence, and you need to decide what that means to you. But even then, believing the evidence for God is NOT the same thing as having faith in God. This is because the Christian faith is a lot more than an academic exercise."
And guys like Maxwell, they're stuck on the academic side of it. Maxwell is a lot of things; he's not stupid. But even if he accepted the case for God on the academic side, that alone isn't Christian faith. After all, paraphrasing James, even the demons accept that case.
That's also why I loathe folks like Matt Chandler, who dismiss deconstruction as "sexy".
I've seen more deconstruction carnage in the last six years than I saw in my previous 51. Contrary to the Narrative, most of them aren't setting out to be sexually licentious. Most of them aren’t waking up and saying, “I just want to go out have all the sex I want.” I’ve seen a few of those, but they’re the minority.
Most of the ones I’ve seen who’ve walked away?
They've seen the rot in the Church, and decided that either that there is no God, or that God simply is not good.
Many were abused in the Church—up to and including sexual abuse—and the Church covered for their abusers.
Others had children who were sexually abused, and the pastors covered it up.
Others have seen the duplicity in their own homes: their parents were ostensibly Christian—sometimes even leaders in their churches—but they were cruel, hateful, and sometimes adulterous or even abusive. And their church communities were insensitive to that, oftentimes complicit.
The Calvinistas often say, in so many words, "screw them...they were never among us anyways."
I'd say if you were preached a Jesus who holds that the institution is more important than the people in them, and that abusive leaders deserve a pass on account of their charisma, then your leaders were preaching a false gospel.
The Jesus I read about in Scripture? He didn't heap anything on people who stumbled; he DID, however, have a few things to say about those who CAUSED the stumbling. That Jesus is competent to judge the woulda-coulda-shouldas (he said as much). So I’m not in the business of arrogating myself and deciding who was and is and isn’t in the fold. The Final Analysis, that’s a few levels above my pay grade. I trust that God will do the right thing, and I make no presumptions as to what that is in this case or that case.
But Maxwell makes a great point about evangelicals as a group: a lot of them are quick to dunk on him and give him all kinds of advice about why to believe and so forth. It's like he's a project.
(Pro-tip: he’s got a better education than the average bear; he already has a handle on the standard Christian arguments. You probably aren’t going to tell him something he hasn’t considered already.)
Personally, I feel terrible for him. As brilliant as he is—and he is brilliant—he has a terrible dilemma.
Having said that, his biggest challenge is not intellectual, although he seems to be looking for an answer there. As I have said, the Christian faith is not just a "mind" exercise.
But the part that is challenging him, that's not something I think you can just teach. It’s more than reading an article here or a book there. At some point, believing is seeing. As a professor of mine once put it: "A child can wade and an elephant can drown."
But it's also why evangelicals need to be careful about how they discuss these things with those who are deconstructing.
The world of Christian apologetics is a disaster: it has devolved into a game of "let's dunk on the atheists" rather than "let's make a reasonable case for the Christian faith".