The Morning My Worldview Disintegrated in London City Airport
I remember sitting in London City Airport at 5:00 AM, watching TV through a coffee-fueled haze as the 2016 U.S. presidential election returns scrolled across the chyron. My colleague and I were on a U.K. customer swing, and we were catching the first flight out to Glasgow.
It was supposed to be a good morning.
Only twenty-four hours earlier, my mood was jovial. I mean…FINALLY. We were going to be rid of Donald Trump, and we were going to have our first female president right after our first black president.
We’d run across some hilarious shit that morning in the Underground station near our office:
“It’s not lost on me that the connection here reinforced between Brexit and the ascension of Trump should have loomed ominously. Make no mistake - these aren’t isolated events. If it’s not clear by now that there exists a decentralized yet collaborative movement to restore facism across the globe, then my guess is you’re doing an excellent job staying away from any media of any kind. How then, my dear reader, did you get here?”
Checking in with all of the relevant news media polls confirmed what we’d believed for months.
Anyone other than Hillary Clinton becoming the next POTUS was impossible.
The impossible was now something I had to accept.
A world that I thought I knew. That I thought I understood, was no more.
A worldview that I had fortified for fifteen years, in an instant, had disintegrated.
A worldview that had been instilled in me by my parents and the church in which I grew up.
A worldview that I didn’t embrace, until at age 22 I did what “grownups” in the southeastern U.S. do: built my life around the church.
My time as a conservative, evangelical Christian was over.
Not that I’d really identified as a conservative, evangelical Christian for some time now. Life, circumstances, and a continual series of baffling events had steadily whittled away at my identity for months. Maybe even years. At that time I really didn’t know, nor did I consider, just how long I had been on this journey.
Nor did I know that others on this journey had collectively given it a name: Deconstruction.
Deconstruction is a philosophical method born from the work of Jacques Derrida. More recently, it has been embraced as an umbrella term to describe the experience of a global community trying to make sense of life before and after a worldview extinction level event.
While the majority are not attempting to apply the philosophical rigor of Derrida’s ideas to their faith (and I’ll be the first to argue that simply isn’t necessary - but I’m an amateur philosophy geek, so I’m kinda into it!), there are countless individuals trying to make sense of this world that according to their experience has radically changed.
Thomas Kuhn described a similar phenomenon in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a paradigm shift: a sometimes violent transition from one scientific system to another, occurring when the previous system is no longer fit to model reality.
For me, the election of Donald Trump was the catalyst that caused my paradigm - my mental model of reality - to violently implode.
Like the revolutionary events that Kuhn described, my life over the past 5-7 years (I honestly haven’t tried to pinpoint the beginning of this journey, and I really don’t think it matters. There probably isn’t one beginning…) had been marked by my intellectually and emotionally wandering through my mental models, desperately struggling to overcome their inability to make sense of a rapidly growing list of terrifying anomalies.
The paradigms that had governed my thought for the majority of my life simply no longer worked.
Those years of holding that tension were like living in a pressure cooker operating just shy of its specified limits.
Trump’s election — primarily by the people who had decried the character of one President William Jefferson Clinton during my teenage years — pushed that pressure cooker past its red line.
In the wake of that explosion I now found myself numb.
Floating in liminal space.
I was no longer sure what if anything was true…
which way was up…
if the world I knew was going to survive…
if anything I did really mattered anymore…
and I felt so incredibly alone.
At the time, I really didn’t have anyone with whom I could share this experience.
My marriage was a shambles, and my then spouse did not have any qualms with what was happening. My friends, as far as I knew, couldn’t really understand my experience (little did I know that the colleague sitting across from me that morning would end up being one of my biggest supports on my journey).
My kids were just too young and not even remotely ready to help me with that burden.
Everyone I still had a connection to at a church, as far as I knew, was also all-in on what was happening. I mean…they were going to get their judges now (little did we know…).
I definitely had no interest in getting on that flight. I did, and I can’t really tell you anything that happened that day in Glasgow. I mean, I have this hazy set of mental images of my sitting in an office talking to other humans, but that’s it.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about this journey, but also about formative events from my childhood and young adulthood in Southern Baptist churches. All of the stories I have queued up have in some way created the person I am today. Some of these stories represent real trauma for which I’ve sought therapy and the support of loving community. Writing them down is helping me to process. I hope that what I share is helpful to you in some way.
I’m also daily building a new contemplative faith practice and a new mental model of reality, and I’ve been using writing to clarify my thinking. I hope that you will gain value from my invitation to shadow me on this journey.
