Disillusionment

Review: Mid-Faith Crisis

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Cover image of "Mid-Faith Crisis" by Catherine McNeil and Jason Hague

Mid-Faith Crisis

Mid-Faith Crisis, Catherine McNeil and Jason Hague. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514010365) 2025.

Summary: When the foundations of one’s faith are shaken, it appears an endpoint, but may be a transforming experience.

You are the daughter of a pastor in a small town. Church was a wonderful place until it wasn’t, when dad was dismissed from his position and the family had to leave town on two week’s notice. Or you entered pastoral ministry after appearing on a national Christian television show and “stole the show.” But real life has been hard. A child with health difficulties, a bout with depression, and the untimely deaths of two friends. Combine that with disillusionment with the state of the church in your country. How does one write sermons when you are no longer sure of the things you are writing?

Those, in short, are the stories of the two authors of this book. Church hurt, disillusionment, existential doubt. While there are many paths, a number named in this book, to mid-faith crisis, the authors of this book write as fellow travelers. The question is, what does one do when the faith, once so central, no longer seems to address the challenges in one’s life? Or what does one do when that faith is a source of emotional pain, associated with hurtful experiences?

The authors begin by talking about stages of faith, that faith may grow and change as we do. The four they identify are inherited faith, confident faith, mid-faith crisis, and conscious faith. The latter emerges out of mid-faith crises, and usually at mid-life or later. It’s marked by a sense of coming home, finding peace, living with mystery and complexity.

But how does one move through the darkness of mid-faith crisis? Is it possible to emerge from this, not with a lost faith but a deeper one? Part Two of this book, “The Crisis” addresses the different forms of crises people most commonly experience. They address doubt, moving from intellectual uncertainty to relational trust and faithfulness. They address church hurt and stress the importance of naming the harms. But then the decision is one of courage, to trust even a few with these hurts, even if this doesn’t happen in a formal church structure. They explore when our heroes fall, betraying trust; when prayers fall silent; overwhelming suffering; the collapse of belief; the fading of feelings.

There are no glib answers. Often the question is moving from what one thought faith and the Christian life was like, beyond the tingles and the good feelings, to waiting, to trusting in the absence of feeling, to hanging on because the alternative is the abyss. The authors conclude with inviting us to exchange greatness for goodness. The crisis of faith really challenges our false conceptions of a great life, great church, great leaders, great experiences with God. Conscious faith is one without the illusions, where we recognize God’s quiet, hidden presence in a messed up world, and learn to walk in imperfect love, wandering steps and slow, in communities of flawed people like us slowly changing into the likeness of Jesus.

I appreciate the honesty of the authors throughout. We see how they are still on the way. For example, they offer no quick fixes to church hurt. Catherine still struggles with safety and acceptance in the church. But she still chooses community. She trusts friends with her struggle. Furthermore, the authors treat mid-faith crisis as a developmental step, not an aberration. They point to a faith for the second half of life, the opportunity to grow deeper rather than drop out.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Losing Our Religion

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Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore. New York: Sentinal, 2023.

Summary: A call to repentance, to come to Jesus, for an evangelical church that has lost its credibility, authority, identity, integrity, and stability.

“The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigourous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings.”

Russell Moore, p. 44.

Russell Moore has experienced first hand shattering disillusionment with a church that no longer seems to believe its own message. He was at one time the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a popular author and has spoken trenchantly on the moral issues of the day, grounded in his belief in the authority of the Bible. That all changed when, seeing the immoral behavior of our former president in his candidacy, he refused to endorse him. Added to that, when an investigative report uncovered hundreds of cases of sexual abuse in his denomination, he advocated for the survivors of abuse when denominational leaders were stonewalling the issue. For the first offense, there was a popular backlash that included withholding of contributions. For the second, he was called on the carpet for being divisive and jeopardizing the support of church mission programs. He was attacked and demonized. At the end of his term as president of the ERLC, he resigned and joined a nondenominational congregation, leaving the body he had been a part of since he first walked down the aisle in response to an altar call.

Moore has wrestled with the parlous state of an American evangelicalism being abandoned by those who no longer think the church believes its own message, that has embraced political rather than spiritual power, that has justified the immoral for the end of “winning” a culture war, that has jettisoned a belief in truth, and turned to a nostalgic wish to return to some unspecified past greatness rather than to trust and walk with Christ into his future for his people. He sees the crumbling of such a “religion” to be a good thing. We ought to lose such a religion. Moore recurs to the practice of the altar call, a time of decision and turning from all these illusions and returning to our first love for Christ who alone can save us.

In five chapters, Moore outlines what he sees evangelicalism has lost. There is lost credibility, the growing gap between professed belief and actual behavior. There is lost authority as churches have embraced the tribal narratives of different political groups rather the truths they profess together in the creeds. There is a loss of identity in the embrace of a Christian nationalism of blood and soil rather than the multiethnic pilgrim exile community who follow Jesus. There is a loss of integrity in the acceptance of moral compromise to “win” battles–a far cry from Christian faithfulness that prioritizes trusting obedience over “results.” And we have lost the stability of nostalgia that fails to face the traumas we have endured in the recent past, where we end up repeating what has not been repaired.

Each chapter not only addresses the losses both of our failings and our crumbling illusions. Moore addresses how the faithful live when the ruins are falling. He urges us to embrace rather than resist disillusionment, to face rather than deny judgment. He calls us to tell the truth and avoid foolish controversies. A telling challenge for me was that he urges us to not “self-censor.” Most of extremist lies come from a very small but vigorous group who persuade truthtellers to go to ground. He urges us to refuse secularization and false framings of warfare that target people rather than spiritual powers. He urges the cultivation of intergenerational community. He challenges “whataboutism” that justifies immoral acts by the immorality of the “other” side, calling us to long-term integrity rather than short-term success. He movingly describes his growing friendship with Beth Moore, of whom he once spoke critically as he urges us to new communities and friendships with those whose gospel faithfulness transcends other differences.

As he concludes, he speaks of revival in very different terms. A reviving of American moral and religious greatness might actually be a bad thing without repentance and the hard work of the deep healing of our spiritual woundedness. Nostalgia seems so much safer and yet this is like going back to slavery in Egypt rather than following God in the uncertainties of the wilderness. His final words recur to his title: “Maybe only when we lose our religion will we be, once again, amazed by grace.”

This is both a hard and hopeful book. Moore unflinchingly names the failures of evangelicalism. He doesn’t offer any glowing promises but simply, for those who will hear, a call to press through our disillusionment to repentance, through our cynicism to belief in Christ, through our culture warring divisions to engaging local communities, and through the fog of a post-truth and post-morality world to integrity of belief and behavior. There are no promises here that these things will save evangelicalism or America. Rather, the only hope offered is that come what may, we will be saved, along with those drawn by gospel faithfulness. That is the hope we all find at the altar.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Night is Normal

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The Night is Normal, Alicia Britt Chole. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Refresh, 2023.

Summary: A study of spiritual disillusionment, proposing that this “night faith” in times of pain may root us more deeply in God and ground us more firmly in reality.

There are few things more emotionally painful than disillusionment with God, others, or even ourselves. A pursuit of what seemed a clear calling of God ends up as an abject failure; a community that began with such warmth and vision becomes toxic; or we realize how flawed our notions of our spiritual progress are when we discover how hard others find it to abide our presence. Sometimes it is simply the profound absence of God after years of a warm sense of his presence, for no reason we can discern.

Alicia Britt Chole proposes that such “night” experiences, as distressing as they may be to us, are not the enemy. In a book that is uncompromisingly honest about the painfulness of such experiences, Chole urges us not to bail on God, others, or our lives. Disillusionment, surprisingly, is a friend. After an extensive study of the word, she personally defines disillusionment as “the painful gaining of reality.”

That’s right. Disillusionment opens our eyes to reality by puncturing illusions we have about God, the world, others, and ourselves–all the ways we have been living in unreality that prevent us from growing into the people God intends us to be, growing in a faith that is resilient, that trusts when it can’t see in the night. When we refuse to bail and believe when we don’t see, we discover love, both that of God for us, and us for God that goes beyond what God does for us.

Having explored the nature of and opportunity within disillusionment, she goes on to explore three forms of disillusionment and how we might respond:

  1. With God. Believing that God is not disillusioned with us. Soaking in scripture (as she does in several chapters). That it consists in honesty and grief. It means exposing the false “if-then” equations in our faith. Tending to our physical health…. And plodding on.
  2. With ourselves. Allow God to be our mentor. Assess our signs for spiritual growth–are they spiritual? View our lives as not a line but a spiral where we come around again and again to the same issues at different points of maturing. Realize that all failures are not sin. Remember that the life of faith is a pilgrimage and not a performance.
  3. With others. Don’t assume that sin is the source. Recognize that our strengths come with shadows. Listen generously. Know when it is not your cow (I loved this one–not all problems are our problems to address). Resist revisionism to explain the pain and love in reality.

Chole enunciates these and other truths in short chapters liberally filled with illustrations. In all of this, her invitation is one to follow Jesus in the night, to not give up but to keep plodding on, allowing the lessons and insights to come as they will.

Don’t stop reading this book at the conclusion. Read the appendices. The first deals with objections based on questions raised to the dissertation version of this book. The second is a table of the times disillusioned appears in translations of the Bible. The third covers related concerns and concepts discussed by a number of contemporary thinkers. This last concludes with these words, as compelling as any in the book:

“Wisdom invites us to recall deeper voices that receive resonance from Eternity. Through history, great thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysius, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, and Philip Yancey agree: the purpose of the darkness, the dark night, the absence, and the disappointment is to purify and empower the soul to know a new dimension of intimacy with God.”

Alicia Britt Chole is too modest to add herself to this list but in this well-researched and approachably-written work, she joins these others in inviting us not to “bail” but to believe, to lean into the pain of disillusionment, allowing God to shatter our illusions and lead us into the deeper realities of his substantive, gritty love for us that does not let us go.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War

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a-hobbit-a-wardrobe-and-a-great-war

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, Joseph Loconte. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015.

Summary: A study of why Lewis and Tolkien, contrary to a disillusioned post-war generation, went deeper into their faith and allowed both war experience and that faith to shape their greatest works.

In one sense, Joseph Loconte covers ground that others have covered in exploring the lives and work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. What Loconte uniquely does are two things. For one, he explores why Lewis and Tolkien defied the trajectory into disillusionment of so many in the post-World War I generation, and went on to embrace and espouse a vibrant Christian faith. As for the second, Loconte reads the works of these two men, exploring how war experiences shaped the imaginary worlds of Narnia, the Space Trilogy, and Middle Earth. He articulates his particular theses as follows:

     “Indeed, it was the experience of war that provided much of the raw material for the characters and themes of their imaginative works. In a talk called ‘Learning in War Time,’ Lewis explained how war exposes the folly in placing our happiness in utopian schemes to transform society. ‘If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.’ As we’ll see, unlike the disillusionment that overwhelmed much of his generation, Lewis would use the experience of war–its horror as well as its nobility–as a guidepost to moral clarity.”

For Loconte then, the beginning point is to discuss the “Myth of Progress” that preceded the war as it viewed humans, society, and technology evolving to ever more enlightened forms by which humanity would cast off the darkness of ignorance that had contributed to so much suffering in the past. With the onset of the war and the horrors of the trench warfare (perhaps Tolkien’s inspiration for his vision of Mordor), these illusions were shattered for many. Both were casualties of war through illness or wounds. In Lewis’ case, a journey through the country to a hospital to convalesce may have sparked a vision of Narnia. It was during Lewis’s war years that he came across George McDonald’s Phantastes, that certainly contributed to the conversion of his imagination.

War’s end brought the massive disillusionment of much of the intellectual class. While Tolkien devoted himself to work and to his Catholic faith, and began to sketch the outlines of the great myth that would be the foundation of Lord of the Rings, Lewis struggled with doubt. Lewis and Tolkien first met in 1926, recognizing their common interest in languages. But they had a profound disagreement about myth that culminated in a long conversation between Lewis, Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson in which Lewis recognized the story of Christ dying and rising to be a true myth, a crucial step for Lewis in coming to Christian faith. In the years ahead, they would collaborate as two key figures in a larger group knowing as the Inklings in a host of writing projects that birthed the Space Trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings, as well as many of Lewis’s apologetic works. Through the mutual encouragement they gave each other and their vibrant faith, they provide a counter for the outpouring of disillusioned, despairing writing of the post-war period.

What is more, they envisioned in their work, shaped by their experience of a brutally efficient technology unhinged from a larger theological framework, the ways bureaucracy and technology might interweave to obliterate the human image in books like That Hideous Strength, or in the idea of a Ring of Power that could subject all manner of beings to its owner’s bidding. Seeing the machines of war in their own experience, and the more sinister regimes of Hitler and Stalin, they could write of the evil power that, as Screwtape desires, would devour the other.

Yet Loconte shows how this bracing grasp of the nature of evil did not discourage them. Their works were infused with Christian hope–an Aslan that rises, a hobbit who, against all hopes, fulfills his mission with the help of tragic Gollum, the crowning of Aragorn as the long-awaited great king, and the Christ-like figure of Ransom, who summons both Merlin and the angels to subvert the villainies of the N.I.C.E. Like the foot soldiers in the war, many of the most significant turns of events come from the actions of children and hobbits doing their duty.

This, as I said, is not a book that covers new ground, but I found myself as I read making new connections, the “I hadn’t thought of it that way” moments when you see something you know in a new way. Loconte concludes the book with a tribute to grandfather, Michele Loconte, who fought with the American forces, and only after the war became a U.S. citizen. Loconte says his research helped him understand more how the war had an impact on so many ordinary families including his own. Fitting that an Inklings scholar should make this connection between his own history and that of the Inklings!