Hypocrisy, Deconstruction, and Keeping the Faith

Mary Jo Sharp’s Book:  Why I Still Believe:  A Former Atheist’s Reckoning with the Bad Reputation Christian Give a Good God

Mary Jo Sharp’ Web Site: Confident Christianity    

Mikel Del Rosario:
Welcome to The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, cultural engagement manager here at The Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary and our topic on The Table Podcast today is hypocrisy, deconstruction and keeping the faith. I have a very special guest coming to us today via Zoom. She is Mary Jo Sharp. Mary Jo Sharp is the assistant professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University. Thanks so much for being on the show with us today.

Mary Jo Sharp:
Hey, it's good to be back, Mikel.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yes, we used to have you here in studio before COVID happened and one day we'll have you back in studio again Lord willing.

Mary Jo Sharp:
Yeah, that'd be great.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Next time you're back in Houston. Now, you're on the West Coast right now, yeah?

Mary Jo Sharp:
Yes, out in Portland, Oregon.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Well, Mary Jo, you are known very well for the work you do in apologetics and defending the faith and you also wrote this book called Why I Believe, and the subtitle is A Former Atheist's Reckoning with the Bad Reputation Christians Give a Good God. And, you described this book as kind of an anti-deconversion story of sorts. We hear of Christians, even high profile Christian ministry leaders, deconstructing, re-examining things that they believed, and then end up deconverting. But in your case, this wasn't the path that you took because you actually didn't start out believing in God. So, tell us a little bit about your journey to faith.

Mary Jo Sharp:
You're right, I grew up not only not believing in God, I wasn't in a family that went to church, but I was also in a part of the country that is not as culturally Christian as say the Bible Belt South, and I've lived in both. So, I see there is a definite difference, and so my background was that I grew up with a father who loved nature and science and the arts, and I developed such an awe and wonder at all the beauty that I saw in the world. For me, that was… I'm kind of making this big story short here, but the beauty that I saw in the world and what was it all for, what was also the truth and goodness in our pursuit of the sciences and those sorts of things, brought me to a point in my later years of my teenage years of wondering, what is this all for?

Mary Jo Sharp:
And wondering, is this grand beauty I see in the universe and through what humans can do in the arts, eventually it's just for nothing because the universe dies a heat death or something, and that's that. And, that didn't make sense of my experience to me, but I had a high school band director who was a Christian man who hadn't shared his faith, and specifically with a student in the public schools. He was very worried about that, but he was burdened for me, and in my senior year of high school when I was going to go off to college, he said, "Hey, when you go off to college, you're going to have hard questions."

Mary Jo Sharp:
And, he handed me a Bible and said, "I hope you'll turn to this." And what he did was he kind of hit me at the right time when I was having these questions of meaning and purpose, and what's all this beauty for? I had a really good high school music program, and so when I talk about being impacted by the arts, I was very personally impacted by the great beauty that we can achieve through the musical arts for instance.

Mary Jo Sharp:
So, he hit me at the right time when I started being able to formulate those thoughts, and when I went off to college, I started investigating church and faith on my own, and I found a church where the Gospel was clearly presented to me, and I understood… I had read the Bible, I didn't say that, I started reading that Bible that he gave me, and started coming around to, "Oh, this makes sense of all that I'm experiencing. It makes sense of the beauty I see in the world because there's an artist behind it." And, when I got to college and I started investigating on my own for the first time, I heard the Gospel just communicated very clearly about our need for a savior, and that made sense to me, and that's when I became a believer in God, was in college.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Well, when you decided to check out church and attend church for the first time, you tell a lot of very personal stories, I think, in your book and God bless Roger for allowing you to share a lot of these back and forth with him, and some of these really actually hurtful experiences that you had in the church, and some of the hypocrisy that you saw. Tell us a little bit about your church experience as an atheist convert now going into church.

Mary Jo Sharp:
It was hard sharing these stories with Roger because he had to walk back through all of them with me, and we had to choose which ones were more profitable to share, and one of the ones that I talk about I think epitomizes some of the others, and you could even say even the worst ones in that it was my very first day to go to church as a person who had just accepted Jesus. A brand new believer, I'm coming out of Pacific Northwest atheism, and I'm coming into church in the Bible Belt, into this Southern evangelical church. So, it's a very different culture for me, and I'm excited because I found God, and I found the church, and so I'm super excited to be a part of this. But then at the same time, I'm very nervous because it's intimidating to me.

Mary Jo Sharp:
I don't know anything about this culture. At this point, I'm married to Roger, and I'm trying to pick out a dress, and I own two because we were both poor college students. And so, he grew up in the church, so I'm trusting him. I'm like, "Okay, is this all right?"

Mary Jo Sharp:
And he's like, "Oh, you look great." So, we go off to church, and I'm about to walk into the sanctuary where… So, now this is a Southern evangelical church, so after you make a decision for Christ, you do this thing where you walk the aisle and you tell the whole church, you stand up there in front of the whole church and say that you've committed your life to Christ, and you ask them to vote on you for baptism. Even when I'm saying it now, I'm like, "Wow, that's really intimidating."

Mary Jo Sharp:
So, I'm coming into the church that Sunday to do that, that's the service that I'm going to be doing that at, and the gentleman who led me to the Lord, his wife, he's the pastor of the church, and his wife is standing out in front of the sanctuary greeting people as they're going in.

Mary Jo Sharp:
And so, Roger and I are walking up, and she's smiling and everything, greeting people, and then she sees me, she looks me up and down, and she says, "Oh honey, we need to find you better clothes." The very first thing that I hear on my way in, this excited, but nervous and intimidated person, coming into this new culture, and that's the first greeting I get by the pastor's wife is that I'm inappropriately dressed. So, I share that in that what that did for me was it sort of made me just… it planted seeds of distrust because it's the wrong thing.

Mary Jo Sharp:
That's not what you should have said to me. I'm a brand new believer. How about like, "Hey, I heard you came to know Christ." So, I was really shocked that the first thing that she was thinking of was how I looked, and it seemed very banal to me. It seemed very inappropriate, and I was immediately thrust into sort of a defensive position while I'm about to make this big commitment in my life.

Mikel Del Rosario:
So, how did not just this particular situation, but these kinds of hurtful, some judgmental experiences, and even some of the authoritarianism, which honestly, a lot of my friends who've walked away from church whose parents were even in ministry found that kind of thing where you can't question and these kinds of things that you've talked about, how did these things play into your doubts then?

Mary Jo Sharp:
So, after years of really thinking on this, I came to realize that I had started to distrust the authorities in the church, the people who set themselves up with authority saying they were going to teach me God's word, and that they had the authority to make decisions on structure and how church goes. I was starting to question them because you don't seem to hold yourself accountable to even basic scriptural truths. So, if you don't hold yourself accountable to live those things out in your life, then do you really… I started thinking of then, do you really believe in God? Because you say you believe in God, but I'm seeing a whole lot that's contradictory in your life to the Bible and to the teachings of Jesus and Paul.

Mary Jo Sharp:
So, I started thinking, "Okay, I can't trust you to be that authority that you set yourself up as," and that started to transfer to, does anybody believe in God at all? So, I started to distrust a lot of things going on at church, and then that eventually moves over to me distrusting God, and I realized how important that shift was because God has personhood, three persons of the Trinity. So, as I begin to greatly distrust persons, it makes sense to me now that that transferred over to God himself. And so, I… Sorry, go ahead.

Mikel Del Rosario:
You mentioned in your book that loss of faith is sometimes a loss of faith in people in the church, is that kind of where you were at that point?

Mary Jo Sharp:
Yeah, I think I didn't really know what all was going on, but I knew that I very much disliked what I was seeing in the church because I had expected so much better, and I do mention in my book that was a bit naive and idealistic that I expected them to be better humans than just human beings that I encountered anywhere else. And, I think that played heavily. It led into emotional doubt at first and that emotional doubt pushed me onto the sort of intellectual questions like, "Well, why do I see Jesus rose from the dead? Or, why do I believe that the Bible is God's word? Or, how do I even know God exists?" The emotional doubt that I was experiencing from my engagements with people, not just my personal engagement, but kind of watching how people behaved in the church in general transferred over and that caused that doubt to come on pretty strong.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Now, fast forward to when you began to study apologetics at Biola university, my alma mater, we shared the same program that we graduated from and right there in La Mirada, California, how did that play into this whole time in your life?

Mary Jo Sharp:
Oh, that was actually kind of like, I'll say a godsend, not meaning to be punny. Pun intended? I don't know. Is there a pun in there? There might be, but it was a godsend for me because as I was having these doubts about believers and whether or not they were really committed to what they said they professed, I found this degree in Christian apologetics, which I never meant to do. Actually, I meant to get a Master’s of Music Education, and I saw an advertisement for Biola and I was like, "Oh, I'm going to do that." And I usually don't do that. I usually over analyze everything. So going to Biola, I got there and while I was doing the study distance and in person because they have a hybrid, so when I finally got there in person, I looked around at who was there and I saw all these people who were giving up their time and money just to know God, literally just to know what it is they believed and why they believed it.

Mary Jo Sharp:
And, they were willing to spend of their resources just to know God at a very deep level and to understand why they thought that and it just so impressed me. I remember saying to my husband, I was like, "Honey, I found the church. They're hiding out in La Mirada, California." Because I had never experienced anything like this, and I don't mean to shame everybody else because that's not everybody's thing. Apologetics isn't everybody's thing, but it just felt so welcoming, and I'll use some of the deconversion terms, it felt very liberating to be around people that were serious about understanding why they believed what they did. That was such a huge turnaround for me, and then I met some amazing people while I was there who really influenced my own Christian walk.

Mikel Del Rosario:
So at this point, anyone working in this space, in helping to help people defend the faith and to think through the tough questions about Christianity, you get a lot of flak that just comes with the territory, right?

Mary Jo Sharp:
Yeah.

Mikel Del Rosario:
How did you start to make sense of the hypocrisy you experienced in the church on the church side and then the flack that you got on the atheist side?

Mary Jo Sharp:
That's a fun question. I think for me, that would go back to my understanding of the problem of evil. Through apologetics, I was exposed to this philosophical and theological argument about… That experientially taught me that everybody is going to do wrong things, they're going to make wrong choices. And so, I started to see that no matter what I do, somebody is always going to be on the attack, and it was the problem of evil that made me really like, okay, breathe that in and really take that into consideration that that's going to happen because I don't know where every individual is at in their own walk in their own spiritual journey. And so, some of them are very not believing. They don't believe in God, they're on the other side of things, and some of those people, not all of them, are very angry with their experiences in the church.

Mary Jo Sharp:
And so, they dealt with hypocrisy in the church, they dealt with psychological abuses or traumas or things that happened in the church, and now there are some people out there that were engaging with me that were very angry about the church and the way that she had behaved in their own life. And so, I considered, I don't know who I'm encountering out there. Sometimes they're real friendly, and every once in a while I get a real intellectual person that would just want to engage me as I was online, but sometimes I get people who are very angry and dealing with my own situation, the hypocrisy that I saw amongst leaders in the church, I get that. I understand that, I understand where they're coming from. It's not intimidating to me.

Mary Jo Sharp:
I'd rather find out, I'd rather get past the ad hominems that come as a result and figure out where they're coming from. Now, you also asked about how that affected my view of the hypocrisy in the church and, what do I do with that? And, what that did for me was… I'm going to nerd out a little bit. So, it made me go into sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi mode after many years studying the problem of evil and then understand how that applied to the fact that a lot of people were doing things in the church that they would ultimately say that is wrong according to their belief in Jesus and a lot of things are going to be like unloving, quick to anger, vicious with their tongues, all sorts of stuff, backstabbing.

Mary Jo Sharp:
The Obi-Wan Kenobi thing, when I studied the problem of evil and I saw how it related to Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, I saw that he said you have to love your enemies and do good to those who basically aren't doing good to you, which Chesterton says he believes that we're taught to love our neighbors and love our enemies because so often they're the same person.

Mary Jo Sharp:
I was like, "Yes, that's right." So, I started to see through the problem of evil that everybody around me was going to fail me and not just in small ways, but in the worst ways. So, there's my Obi-Wan Kenobi. The people that I love the most, like Anakin Skywalker, are going to fail me and sometimes they're going to fail me in just the worst ways possible. And so, what do I do with that situation? Well, what would did Obi-Wan do? He doesn't fall to the dark side along with Anakin, he doesn't give up the Jedi ways.

Mary Jo Sharp:
He actually says he'll do what he must. He has to stay committed to what he knows is true and to the teachings from his own master. Boy, we combined a lot of stuff there, didn't we? We combined Star Wars and Sermon on the Mount and the problem of evil, but that's kind of how I saw things now about the hypocrisy of believers is yeah, they are capable of some of the most beautiful things because they're humans, they can do great good. And at the same time, those same people can do some of the worst and most inhumane things, and that's part of this problem that we have as humans and that sin nature and having this fallen status is that we are prone to do the worst kinds of things.

Mikel Del Rosario:
I like how in your book you actually encourage people as they are comfortable to do so to share some of these kinds of experiences, especially those of us who have been doing some of these re-examining of things that we thought about the church and Christianity, and yet have not left the faith, even though we've been hurt by the church, and sometimes when I share with people and I'm being honest with them, they go, "Well, I'm glad you're still a Christian."

Mary Jo Sharp:
I feel that.

Mikel Del Rosario:
But, it's a special grace of God, at least for me, to think that at those points in my life I was able to make a distinction from people who were not God, who were not representing God well, and who God actually is.

Mikel Del Rosario:
There's this part in your book where you say, "It's hard to see the good that's actually there when you're so alert to the bad". But then you also say, "What I'm going to do is still believe in God, but with a caveat: that the answers of the Christian worldview are sometimes messy and that the faith can't be turned into a recipe for happiness." Unpack that a little for us and tell us about the reasons why you say that's true.

Mary Jo Sharp:
One of the things I say is that the litmus test for the truth of Christianity can't be the behaviors of Christians, and that would be true for any worldview, and I say that with a caveat that Jesus actually taught… He didn't teach, he was praying. It was so important, he's praying about it in the garden, John 17, that the way that we treat one another, basically our unity, is how the world will know that he's God son. I think that's sort of lost on a lot of Christians is that the way that we treat one another is a testimony to whether or not Jesus is the real deal. So for me, if you want me to unpack it, where am I at kind of thing on this?

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mary Jo Sharp:
Again, I know that people are going to fail me and fail me hard. And so, what I have to do… I may have gotten off topic here. You can steer me back around, Mikel, but what I have to do is I have to make sure that in the church that I'm treating other people the way that I would want to be treated because I'm responsible for the John 17 passage. I'm responsible for trying to bring about the unity of believers, this idea that we can disagree, or we can have differences of opinion, but I'm still responsible for excellence in relationship with others, and that part actually testifies to the truth of Jesus as God's son. So, a lot of times I have this feeling that people believe that their commitment stops at rational propositions and the truth of those, but they need to take it into consideration, well what does that mean about how you should live your life and how you should treat other people, because there's an objective truth to be found there as well.

Mary Jo Sharp:
There's this idea of being objectively loving and Jesus teaches us both, that they go together. So for me personally, and I really do think I've gotten far off from your question, like I said, steer me back around if we need to, but I try to make sure that what I'm doing in my daily walk, no matter what anybody else in the church is doing, no matter how they've hurt me, my responsibility…and, it's not just a responsibility, it's ministering to my own soul, is to be in right relationship with Jesus, and for me to do what's right and not worry about, are other people going to treat me well. Because I know they're not. This is the reality of living in the fallen world. So, it comes across a lot though as a glass half empty type situation, and it's not really. It allows me space to enter back into the church with a little more wisdom about what I should encounter there. So, now bring me back around. Did I answer the question or did I take it off somewhere else?

Mikel Del Rosario:
You said that faith can't be turned into a recipe for happiness. So-

Mary Jo Sharp:
That's what it was, thank you. It's really odd that we don't teach more on the suffering of Job or on the suffering of Christ, or when Paul says he counts it all joy in his suffering. I think it's tough for us living in a country where we don't really suffer as much sometimes in physical ways. We don't have to worry as much about where food's coming from or shelter or things like that. When we live in sort of a wealthy society, we don't really suffer like we see some of the early Christian suffering where they were heavily persecuted to death in the worst ways, until where we see people across the world who don't eat tonight or whatever, those kinds of things. So to me, we don't really understand suffering as well.

Mary Jo Sharp:
And so, we make Christianity into sort of it should make us happy and happiness is sort of a fleeting idea because you go through stages throughout your day… It's like sort of emotional connected where you can be happy or you can be sad and those things can happen. Even within a day, you can just rifle through different emotions. I think what we need to teach in the church is, what is joy, and where do you get joy and peace from? And, I think faith has a lot to do with grounding joy, and grounding our peace in any kind of circumstance. Even when you're not happy, you can have that joy of the Lord that is persistent through suffering and it's not a happiness. It's an understanding of your relationship with God that he is present with you through these kinds of sufferings.

Mary Jo Sharp:
So, it kind of builds for you a steady place to encounter some of these more difficult things that are going to happen in the church with other believers, with the hypocrisy, with the problem of evil going on. This stance that Paul takes that there is great joy just in knowing the Lord is really important for Christians to grasp, and I think it's hard… I don't think I'm all the way there. I think it's a maturing process. Becoming Christ-like is seeing what is good and true and beautiful in the world in the midst of suffering.

Mikel Del Rosario:
I think it was William Lane Craig who said that what brings lasting human fulfillment is really the knowledge of God and relationship with him. And so, that's lasting human fulfillment, and yet we're not always happy and the world is messy and the church is messy, but that's just reality, and one day God will right all wrongs, but until then, here we are.

Mary Jo Sharp:
On that note, Mikel, it's not just in the end. Jesus did say that the kingdom of heaven is upon you. If he is who he said he was, he's brought it to us. So, he's repent… Not repents, redemption is already, but not yet. So, we already have that ability to live in the redemptive love of God and to live in that redemption for the sake of others, right?

Mikel Del Rosario:
That's right.

Mary Jo Sharp:
As well as waiting for it to come in its fullness.

Mikel Del Rosario:
We have enablement from the Holy Spirit to live the Christian life and the church needs to be this outpost of God's kingdom on Earth so that people can see this kingdom breaking through more and more. Well, what would you say to somebody who is where you were back in the day and struggling with the hypocrisy in the church? What's the word? Not deconverting yet, deconstructing-

Mary Jo Sharp:
Deconstructing.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Just kind of looking at what they've been taught and wrestling with their doubts, what piece of advice would you give to somebody like that?

Mary Jo Sharp:
Well, the first thing I'm going to tell them is it's absolutely okay to go through that. What I dealt with, what caused me to go into such a sort of visceral doubt is that I never encountered anybody going through it in the church or telling me it was okay to go through it. The church always stood assumed the truth of everything they believed and then taught on that. So, anybody who was doubting was sort of marginalized because either it wasn't talked about, or it made everybody else uncomfortable in the room. I want to give a person who is going through a time of doubt sort of an encouragement that it's okay, and you can see that in Luke seven if you'll read through the passion passage on John the Baptist sending his disciples to Jesus to say, "Hey, are you the one who is to come? Are you the Messiah, or should we look for another?"

Mary Jo Sharp:
And, it's really important passage for us because he's the prophesied messenger of the Messiah, and he's asking him, "Are you the Messiah?" If he can have a doubt, so can we. So, I want to encourage that, and then I want to say just in short, there's a lot of stuff I want to say, but I'll give one, which is always consider what you're going to. So, deconstruction is all about picking apart the Christian faith if you're a Christian. So, you pick apart the Christian faith and people will say this is a problem for me or this part of… Maybe it's the problem of evil, maybe it's the science or religion or whatever they're trying to work through, but then they don't talk about, so if I don't believe in Christianity, then what am I going to believe?

Mary Jo Sharp:
And, really work through that, deconstruct that worldview as well. What are you going to? So, I asked this because I think what's happening is a lot of the Christian philosophical framework is actually coming along into that new belief, but they're saying they reject it. So, like a basis for good and evil, justice, injustice, things like that are seeping along or creeping into like an atheism where at the base of the universe, the universe is void of good and evil or those kinds of notions of justice and injustice. That's not in that framework, so if you are a person who is very much committed maybe to this idea that there is justice in the world, then you need to ground that, and if you're deconstructing Christianity, which provides a solid basis for things like that, or for an idea like hope or human rights, you got to say to yourself, what am I stepping into, because that's so important. You're not walking into a void, you're walking into another philosophical framework, and what does that entail for you?

Mikel Del Rosario:
Now, you got an image of somebody who takes apart a computer or something to learn how it works and to re-examine it, and maybe some people are kinesthetic learners in terms of their spiritual and philosophical views as well and they need to re-examine, but if faith deconstruction is a kind of pulling apart of your belief system and church experiences to really examine each part of it, and I think one thing that your story shows us is that deconstruction doesn't always have to lead to deconversion. I think you tweeted that once and I really liked that.

Mary Jo Sharp:
Yeah, I did. I don't think it ends up there… Sometimes when you deconstruct something, it just ends up in you really understanding it better.

Mikel Del Rosario:
So, it's okay to doubt and doubt sometimes leads us to better places and better spiritual growth as well.

Mary Jo Sharp:
That's a good way to put it. You can grow to understand your God. You can grow to have a stronger relationship with him in knowing who he is.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Well, thanks so much for spending time with us. Mary Jo Sharp's book is Why I Still Believe. Thanks for being on the show, MJ.

Mary Jo Sharp:
Thanks for having me. Good to see you again.

Mikel Del Rosario:
You're welcome and good to see you too, and we hope that you will stay with us on The Table as we continue to discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, please do subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps out the show, helps other people discover our content, and we hope we'll see you next time as we continue to discuss issues of God and culture.