Disillusioned with Faith: Finding Hope in Our Scars / Aimee Byrd

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

We live in a time of disillusionment. Trust is waning in the public sphere, religious affiliation is on decline, and some feel a deep tension or ambivalence about their community—whether that’s a region, family, political party, or spiritual tradition.

How should we think about the experience of disillusionment, particularly the threat of becoming disillusioned with faith?

Aimee Byrd, author of several books on contemporary issues facing Christianity. And after her own experience becoming disillusioned with the church, she wrote her most recent offering: The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment.

In this conversation, Aimee Byrd joins Evan Rosa to discuss: how to diagnose and understand disillusionment—particularly disillusionment with church and the trappings of Christian faith & culture; as well as the problem of spiritual abuse and the broken forms of faith that allow it to persist. She explores the Old Testament’s Song of Songs—exploring how it honors the depth of human longing and desire. She considers how beauty validates our yearnings and invites us toward a lasting faith and gives us new sight and recognition, and ultimately takes a hard look at what it means to explore our wounds and scars in search of hope and faith.

About Aimee Byrd

Aimee Byrd is the author of many books, including her latest, The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment (2024).

Show Notes

• The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment by Aimee Byrd (https://zondervanacademic.com/products/the-hope-in-our-scars)
• Steven Heighton’s The Virtues of Disillusionment (free PDF download)
• Unpacking disillusionment. You spend some time thinking about disillusionment. Where do you begin to think about that?
• Experiencing disillusionment as we mature and try to figure out the meaningfulness of life
• The hustle; pursuing what we think goodness is supposed to look like
• A disrupting takes place
• Spiritual maturity; writing into a neglect in women’s discipleship
• The rejection and harassment experienced by women acting as theologians - spiritual abuse
• Help set some parameters for how you conceptualize spiritual abuse and how you came to understand and integrate with your story?
• “And yet these feelings of unsafety in the very place where you’re supposed to be shepherded.”
• Carefully using the word abuse
• Abuse: when people are okay with harming you for their own gain and power, where you are the cost
• Limiting feelings of possibility; a shrinking of the person and questioning of their belonging
• Diane Langberg on the elements of personhood (https://www.dianelangberg.com/shop-books/)
• Agency, voice, and sense of self
• Diagnosing disillusionment; a lot of dull signs leading up to it, somethings just not right
• Desperation, loss, depression, fight, panic, pretending or rejecting/deconstructing to move on
• Naming our wounds is an action of hope
• “Jesus’ wounds are a testimony.”
• Our scars are a remembering, a telling of our story.
• John 12:24 - grain of wheat falling to the ground (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John 12%3A24&version=NIV)
• Being a good witness to God, justing handing it over to him.
• “Unless a grain of wheat falls to into the ground” by Malcom Guite (https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/unless-a-grain-of-wheat-falls-into-the-ground/)
• Holding onto these resentments leaves us further alone; we must let go.
• We don’t need reform, we need resurrection.
• Maintaining a false sense of belonging through facades
• Sanctified imagination and community
• We need to recapture our imagination as a way to combat disillusionment
• Walter Brueggemann - the riddle and insight of Biblical faith is that anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy (https://www.walterbrueggemann.com/resources/books/textonly/)
• Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God by Malcom Guite (https://www.squarehalobooks.com/lifting-the-veil)
• “Scripture is a story. It’s all kind of story of people who screw up.”
• “God is bigger than all the ways we screw up our lives.”
• Open wounds, healing, scarring
• Song of Songs and unlocking the imagination and intimate love of God
• Scripture in which a women’s voice and experiences are given center stage
• Song of Songs, chapters three (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song of Songs 3&version=NIV) and five (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song+of+Songs+5&version=NIV)
• Love calls to us
• Vulnerability in the position and in the naming of our experiences
• Beholding the face of Christ, and Christ looking back at us - the beauty Christ sees in us, as Christ beautifies us.
• “Beauty is an invitation into goodness.”
• The natural world develops our taste for beauty.
• A desire to feed our allusion of security, yet our hearts remain uncaptured.
• Beauty engages will and involves all of our senses; a hyper-fixation on the brain that is not holistic
• Awe and wonder; the role of the poets and the artists as the reveal what we try to hustle over the top of - they leave us feeling seen and maybe exposed.
• Speaking from a place of knowing our own value, a confidence and strength.
• Looking for the personhood that Christ is fostering in each of us.
• Being a community that beholds; our longing to be seen, known, and loved should be met by our churches as we see Christ in one another.
• We must go to Christ; yet disillusionment makes it difficult; all the disciples experienced disillusionment
• Hope is disruptive and subversive, but gloriously so.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Aimee Byrd
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give