Have you ever pronounced a word wrong and not known you were wrong until you were corrected? Have you ever ‘filled in’ the words to a song without actually knowing what was being said? Words are important. Using and understanding words are important.
In this episode, Leo Winegar joins us to talk about a specific, important word: Deconstruction. Destruction is a neutral term and is a way to describe the breaking down and evaluating of one’s religion (or faith). Unfortunately, often when we see someone who is going through destruction, we assume they are crossing over a metaphorical bridge that is ‘against’ us, as faithful members. Also, when someone is experiencing deconstruction, they might assume their life is crumbling rather than evaluating and being able to move forward.
Transcript:
Leo:
Not to put any blame on my leaders or my parents or whatever, but that’s how we grew up in the church. It’s about us versus the world. We have hymns we sing about being on the right side and fighting the battles.
Justin:
Right.
Kaitlyn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leo:
We have all this battle language in the scriptures. And so whenever we have someone who begins to question or doubt, or even if they’ve been doubting, or if they even left the church, it’s kind of like they’re crossing onto this other side where we see them as an enemy.
Justin:
Hey guys. Welcome to another episode of Saints Unscripted. Today, we have a guest that you might recognize from these episodes, [inaudible 00:18:37]. But this is Leo. Leo described himself as a father of three who was tired.
Leo:
Tired.
Justin:
Leo, tell us about that.
Leo:
I’m very tired.
Speaker 4:
I’m so tired! No, Todd, not now!
Leo:
Only three kids and I’m tired. That tells you.
Justin:
Yeah, I mean-
Leo:
I got three good kids, but they all…
Justin:
My two cats and I’m done.
Kaitlyn:
Yeah. They say that if you can do three kids, you can do any number of kids.
Justin:
I don’t know if that’s…
Kaitlyn:
Well, that’s what I’ve heard. But…
Justin:
In the comments, if you have more than three kids, let us know.
Kaitlyn:
You guys have kids?
Justin:
But, yeah. So, Leo, because you’ve talked on our show about philosophically… It’s been very, like, I’m trying to… Philosophy comes to mind, but like concepts that are things we don’t think about, but are part of our daily lives. Right?
Leo:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Justin:
And today you want to talk about a healthier way of discussing when you have doubts or questions about the church, or not even the church, but just any belief. Right?
Leo:
So yeah. I’m here to talk about vocabulary. Very interesting topic, right?
Justin:
Yeah. See, that’s what I told you, philosophizing.
Leo:
And I’m not a linguist, I don’t have a degree in writing or anything, but I do find vocabulary very interesting. And especially when we develop new words, we learn about new words that help us to describe our own lives and the environment we see around us. And so I want to ask a couple of questions to see if you guys have any real life examples of this. So growing up, did you ever listen to a song on the radio where you kind of filled in the gaps with words that were actually wrong? Did you ever do that?
Justin:
Oh, sure.
Kaitlyn:
Yes.
Justin:
Or not even words where I would like… Fleetwood Mac and she’s like, “something on the hillside,” and I only got the hillside part. So then I’m just imagining like, “oh yeah, snow’s on a hillside. Probably. She’s probably talking about just trying to fill it in.” Yeah.
Kaitlyn:
Sometimes you would make up your own. Like I would just be like, ” [inaudible 00:02:58] on the hillside.” You sing the same gibberish, even though it’s not even a word.
Justin:
One of them is Bruno Mars, his song, and he says, “juice,” I think, and I swear he was saying, “Jews,” dancing Jews. Yeah, but it’s, “dancing juice.” And I wasn’t even the kid, I was pretty recent.
Leo:
So David did a video recently.
Justin:
Oh yeah.
Leo:
You guys saw this, I’m sure.
Justin:
He did a TikTok.
Leo:
Yeah, he did a TikTok where he said this is a new way of hearing this song. I don’t remember what song it was.
Kaitlyn:
Oh, yes.
Justin:
It was also Jason… Bruno Mars?
Speaker 10:
Yeah it was like, “listen to the music of the Mormon people.”
Speaker 11:
[Singing 00:08:05]
Leo:
So there’s a good recent example. So that’s one example. There’s also… Have you ever pronounced a word wrong? And then later found out that it’s… The one, the classic for me, is especially. Sorry for breaking your [inaudible 00:03:51] hearts out there, But if you say, “ex-specially,” and I hear you say it, I’m going to be like, “Don’t say ex-specially, say especially.” It’s a silent C.
Justin:
Yeah.
Kaitlyn:
Yeah.
Leo:
That’s just one example.
Kaitlyn:
My cute husband said, he’s going to kill me for saying this, he said, “lie-berry” until he was 15.
Leo:
Oh, okay.
Justin:
Wow.
Kaitlyn:
Or maybe it was 13, I don’t know. He’s going to be like, “That was wrong, I was 10”. But I don’t know, he thought it was lie-berry instead of library for so long.
Justin:
There’s one I say, now obviously I can’t remember now that we’re filming, but my wife every day is like, “That’s not how you say it.” And I’m like, “[inaudible 00:04:26].”
Leo:
Yeah like the police, we’re going to police people, but yeah.
Justin:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo:
I’m not going to beat you up.
Justin:
But it is, but it happens.
Leo:
But we all say we all learn things, so we learn new words and it helps to explain, like I said, our environment, feel better about life. Because if you don’t have the words to explain what’s happening to you or to other people it can be very difficult.
Justin:
Or you don’t understand the words that people are using. And then you put your pretend definition and a misunderstanding.
Leo:
So the thing we want to say is words are powerful. Words are important. I think it’s good for us to learn the correct definition of words and use them appropriately. And so that we understand each other.
Justin:
Yeah, totally.
Leo:
There’s proper context.
With more powerful vocabulary we can better describe complex or abstract subjects.
Justin:
Right.
Leo:
That’s why college is so great. You go to college for the first time, you hear all these new words and you’re like, “Oh, that’s what that means?” It’s why it’s mind blowing and why it’s so empowering to learn new words.
Justin:
Well, and one thing… My wife is studying English, doing her masters right now. And she’ll take these classes that will focus completely on one idea, right? So spend all three months just talking about one concept and I’m like, “That’s got to be so boring.”
Speaker 11:
He’s complacent, he’s predictable, he’s boring.
Justin:
But every day she’ll come home and she’ll explain an idea to me, and it’s very powerful because I’m like, “Oh, that’s a concept that I never would have even thought existed, but now I see the world differently because you took the time to learn it, and then learn how to teach it to me.” And I think in the gospel, there’s a lot of things we talk about, or we’re like, “Oh yes, the spirit.” We just throw it out there, like this word that kind of fills in a lot of roles, but that doesn’t really… We don’t really know what the spirit is in a lot of ways. And if we had the words for it, then that would help us understand it better.
Kaitlyn:
Yeah, we do have a lot of that, kind of like jargon, I guess you could say.
Justin:
Yeah, exactly.
Kaitlyn:
Kind of like church jargon, or just jargon really in anything we do.
Leo:
So I like people who make up new words. So there’s this guy who developed a new word years ago. It’s not a new word now,
Justin:
But it was.
Leo:
It’s not like an ancient word that we’ve…
Justin:
Years ago meaning like five years ago or like…
Leo:
I think it’s maybe 10, 15 years ago.
Justin:
Okay, that’s still in our lifetime.
Leo:
So he has a bunch of words that he’s developed, but there’s this one that I really like, it’s called sonder. It’s S-O-N-D-E-R. It’s the realization that a random passer-by has life experiences that are just as vivid and complex as your own. So if you’re on a bus, or just on the street, like in New York, when I was in New York a few years ago and just looking around on the street and seeing some person just walk past me, that person has a wealth of experiences.
Justin:
Right.
Leo:
Their life is just as real as mine, and that’s a mind blowing experience when you realize all these people around you. And so it’s kind of an empathy, but it’s also just kind of a cool experience to be on vacation and people watching.
Kaitlyn:
Yeah, totally.
Leo:
And all these people have just as real and vivid experiences as me, and memories, and they had an experience last week where they had a problem. And so it’s just kind of mind blowing to have… So it’s called sonder.
Kaitlyn:
So how do I use it in a sentence? Is it like a verb? [crosstalk 00:07:42] Like I sondered?
Justin:
I’m sondering?
Leo:
Yeah, maybe I guess it’s-
Kaitlyn:
Or like they were, well…
Leo:
It’s describing experience.
Kaitlyn:
Or it more like a noun?
Leo:
It’s like I experienced sonder.
Kaitlyn:
Okay.
Justin:
Experienced sonder, gotcha.
Kaitlyn:
Like a noun.
Leo:
So anyway, that’s just an example of a word.
Kaitlyn:
Or not a noun, an adjective.
Leo:
Now that you have this, you can- [crosstalk 00:08:01].
Justin:
Excuse her, please.
Kaitlyn:
Like a noun describes something.
Speaker 9:
[Singing 00:08:05]
Leo:
So now that you have this word in your vocabulary, next time you go on the bus or whatever, you visit someplace new. Now with COVID going away, you can actually see people in the face.
Justin:
Yeah you can actually see people.
Leo:
And you can kind of think about that person. Or if you look across at another building, you see someone in window, that person has life experiences just as… And you kind of connect that person even though you don’t know them. So that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. It took a long time to get to this point, sorry to disappoint. That’s a cool word, but we want to talk about a different word within a religious context. This is a religious show.
Justin:
Yeah, it is.
Leo:
So we want to talk about, the term is deconstruction. So deconstruction.
Justin:
So not buildings, I’m assuming?
Leo:
Could be. Deconstruction can mean anything that’s being torn down, right? Deconstructing, you’re tearing something down. But within a religious context, especially within the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, we want to talk about this term deconstruction. It’s an academic term. It means that it’s the tearing down of a belief system or a system of beliefs. So you have, for example, in the church, we grow up with some very basic, very simple, very black and white views of certain things like profits or revelation, or a bishop or the scriptures.
And we have a very basic understanding growing up. We talk about Noah and his worldwide flood. And then in college you learn about maybe there’s some different evidence about the flood. Maybe it didn’t cover the entire earth. And so we start to see things maybe change our perception or the way we originally believed in something. And so deconstruction is a way to describe someone’s, what a lot of people go through, is what we call a faith crisis, where they begin to doubt the church. They’re going through a process of deconstruction.
Justin:
And would you look at the word and/or process of deconstruction? Would you consider that negative or positive? Like…
Leo:
It’s a neutral term because sometimes we have false beliefs that need to be probably adjusted or torn down and then rebuilt.
Kaitlyn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Justin:
Yeah.
Kaitlyn:
Or like cultural stuff, or like things that maybe could be torn down. Yeah.
Leo:
Yeah.
Justin:
So you bring up this word and you’re telling us that words are important. How would you want this word to be used in a gospel context?
Leo:
So we struggle in the church, and it’s clear why, we struggle with what we call us versus them.
Justin:
Mentality, okay.
Leo:
Mentality. So we are on the good side in the church and everyone else in the world is bad.
Justin:
Right, the great horror of the earth, anyone who doesn’t believe what we believe-
Kaitlyn:
The great spacious… Yeah.
Justin:
If you were to interpret the scripture that way, which a lot of us have some points in our life.
Leo:
So that’s kind of how I grew up. My own experience was very insulated, not to put any blame on my leaders or my parents or whatever, but that’s how we grew up in the church. It’s about us versus the world. We have hymns we sing about being on the right side and fighting the battles. You know we have all this battle language in the scriptures. And so whenever we have someone who begins to question or doubt, or even if they’ve been doubting or they’ve even left the church, it’s kind of like they’re crossing onto this, the other side where we see them as an enemy.
Speaker 9:
If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy.
Leo:
[crosstalk 00:11:38] see them as enemies, or the people that are influencing them as enemies. And they could be very well enemies to Christ’s church. But when we talk to them and blame them or accuse them of jumping into what we call anti-Mormon literature and we start to kind of use that aggressive approach to someone who’s questioning, it can really push them further and faster away from the church.
We’re scared of information that’s new. Sometimes we’re scared of the unknown. Things that are foreign to us, we can be scary and we can fear feel fear. So when we talk with our loved ones, a family member, whoever it is that may be struggling with the church, with beliefs, or even if it’s our own selves, to understand this process of deconstruction and how it can be a negative thing. If you completely abandoned all your beliefs in the sacred, in Christ, himself, some people see that as a very positive thing. Like only my five senses matter, nothing spiritual can tell me the truth. Right?
Kaitlyn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leo:
There’s people that leave the church, or become agnostics or atheists, and they say, “My five senses is what I can trust,” right?
Justin:
Which is interesting though, because even that belief could be deconstructed.
Kaitlyn:
It could, yeah.
Justin:
Like any belief system can be deconstructed.
Leo:
Yes, I mean there’s people that think that we’re in a simulation.
Speaker 10:
Is he taking the simulation seriously?
Justin:
Yeah, exactly.
Kaitlyn:
Thinking in absolutes over here.
Leo:
Like Elon Musk. And he’s a smart guy, so you could go from I can’t trust anything, or I can trust all these things to an I can’t trust anything anymore.
Justin:
Right.
Leo:
But we need to be able to describe this process of tearing down beliefs that may be not be as accurate as they should be. So a couple of examples of deconstruction that I’ve gone through personally is around prophets, and how I see prophets. I think before I saw, for example, Joseph Smith, as the person nearest to God that has ever lived. And how if he made a mistake, it maybe like he like hurt someone while he was wrestling.
Justin:
Right. Nothing that would be morally… Like that wasn’t his fault.
Kaitlyn:
Accidental, or…
Leo:
Yes, but for him to ever teach something that may be not true, or to instruct someone to do something that maybe didn’t work out, maybe provided a prophecy that maybe sounds unconditional, but it’s actually conditional prophecy.
Justin:
Or giving someone a calling they shouldn’t have got, or something like that, yeah.
Leo:
Yeah, or excommunicating someone and maybe he shouldn’t have.
Justin:
Yeah.
Leo:
So there’s all these things that we can learn about in the life of our leaders, prophets, that maybe deconstruct our previous beliefs of like very high standards. So that’s just one example. And now I see prophets. I still believe they are called of God. I still believe they receive priesthood keys, and that they have the power and authority to bring ordinances into the church and be able to help people to receive exaltation. But I also see them now as very human, and more realistic view of who they are. So my previous belief has been deconstructed, but I’ve reconstructed it with something more healthy and flexible.
Justin:
So how would you in a conversation with somebody, like let’s say you’re somebody who has never had a doubt in their entire life, minimal empathy, for lack of a better term, and then somebody comes to you and is like, “Hey, I’m…” Maybe this exact conversation with the prophets. Like, “I noticed that the profits aren’t perfect and I thought they were.” How would you would bring this conversation of deconstruction to make a safe place for that person?
Leo:
Yeah, being able to understand what the process is, that it can be a healthy thing to be able to adjust some of your views, some of your assumptions, some of your expectations. So, talking to someone say, “Well, you’re going through a process of deconstruction.” It’s kind of a nerdy term.
Justin:
Sure, [crosstalk 00:15:32] but nerdy is better than aggressive or mean, you know?
Leo:
Yeah, but you’d be able to say, let’s talk about what’s this process called deconstruction, which can be a very healthy thing. And some of us go through incremental, deconstruction where it’s like, “Oh, I learned a little something about church history. Now I have to kind of readjust the way I see this in the church.” But sometimes people are so insulated growing up in the church or as converts, sometimes, they don’t go through all of the nitty gritty of church history, or like current issues in the church, like women in the church, equality-
Justin:
Women are an issue.
Leo:
LGBTQ, women in the priesthood, that stuff.
Justin:
I’m just kidding, they’re not an issue.
Leo:
There are some current events in the church that people struggle with. But if you go from like this very black and white view of the church, to all of a sudden you’re piled on with a bunch of questions or accusations-
Justin:
Nuances, yeah.
Leo:
It can feel like your entire system has been deconstructed and you have nothing to rebuild with. So it’s a better process for people to be able to go through if it’s maybe incremental.
Speaker 11:
One tiny step at a time.
Speaker 12:
Baby steps.
Justin:
Gotcha.
Kaitlyn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leo:
From an earlier age, you can learn about things that are complex and more difficult.
Kaitlyn:
So moral of the story, it’s important to learn about these words as we grow up, just try our best to understand what does this really mean? And you may even be in a situation where maybe you’ve had… I mean all of us will, like you said, have some form of deconstruction in our life for certain words or church terms or whatever that be. But it could be that you might think that people in your family are all just totally doing fine, and you might say something that’s one of those words or something, and maybe you don’t realize that they’re going through something. Maybe they’re going through their own little faith crisis and they just haven’t told anybody. It’s helpful to just be aware and just kind of know what this means and how it effects people, and how we can have better conversations based on this knowledge because I think that’s super helpful to know.
Justin:
Yeah.
Leo:
Amen. That’s really well said.
Justin:
So if you guys have any questions about this, more about this word in particular, you can reach out to Leo, right?
Leo:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep.
Justin:
Or leave the comments below and we’ll be watching out for those. I think we’ll just continually try and do episodes like this. We’re just always talking about how it can be more like the savior, right? In conversation, and action, and everything. Thank you for watching. Thank you, Leo, for being on the show.
Kaitlyn:
This has been super-
Justin:
Do you want us to plug any social media?
Kaitlyn:
Helpful.
Leo:
Yeah, if you need a community of people to talk to, just Uplift Community of Faith.
Kaitlyn:
Yeah.
Justin:
Community… Wait, is it Uplift?
Kaitlyn:
Uplift, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leo:
Yes, Uplift Community of Faith. It’s a Facebook group.
Justin:
Okay, perfect.
Leo:
You can join that.
Justin:
Okay, perfect.
Leo:
If you’d like some additional support.
Justin:
Then Uplift community of Faith. Because there’s just these conversations that need to be had, and there’s a safe place to have them. Thank you, Leo, for jumping on the show, even with your three kids, and you’re tired, we really appreciate you coming here, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.
Kaitlyn:
Bye guys.