Into the Gray

The Mental and Emotional Aftermath of Spiritual Deconstruction

By: Michelle Collins

Narrated by: Alexandra Bitton-Bailey

What happens when you deconstruct your faith? Aside from all the theological messiness it brings, deconstruction brings with it a lot of personal trauma. Friends and family often distance themselves. Your church sometimes removes you from the pews. And often, you are left with nothing more than rubble where a seemingly unmovable building once stood.

Enter Michelle Collins' debut book, Into the Gray: The Mental and Emotional Aftermath of Spiritual Deconstruction. Far from a "how-to" guide, this book is much more "pastoral" in that it allows the listener to check in with a fellow spiritual sojourner so that, by the end, they can say, "me too."

©2021 Michelle Collins (P)2022 Michelle Collins

Potentially upsetting for the deconstructed

This book was rough for me. Michelle Collins is an obviously thoughtful and conscientious person with whom I can relate, and in my opinion she’s still in a pretty early stage of her deconstruction.

She often uses the terms “we” and even “you” when describing experiences that are antithetical to my deconstruction and the deconstructions of many.

She seems to have partially confronted important issues like eternal damnation, but she uses terms like “eternal conscious torment” (she calls it ECT), which suggests to me that she may still be playing with some kind of annihilation theory or “hell is just separation from God” theory of the afterlife.

For me, those kinds of positions are triggering and upsetting. She also seems to presume that all of us are trying to find a path back to Jesus.

All of this is absolutely fine as part of her journey, but despite a continual insistence that everyone’s journey is different, Collins nevertheless universalizes and didactizes many parts of her own path.

It was certainly a stressful read for me, and I would only recommend it to my deconstructing/deconstructed friends with a laundry list of trigger warnings.