They’d Rather Call You Rebellious
I was the kid who got in trouble in Sunday school for asking the questions nobody else in the room was willing to ask. One of the earliest was about the tree. If God already knew the future, why put the tree in the garden at all? What was the point of the test, if he’d already written how it was going to end? I was in a church that taught God knew in advance exactly who he would save, and nobody in that room wanted a kid pulling on that thread. I was also, by seven, the kid standing up in front of a congregation, and the kid memorizing scripture three and four nights a week because that’s how often we were in church. Those rooms had two ways of reading a boy, and they read me both ways. When I asked the question nobody wanted asked, I was rebellious. When I recited the verse, and later when I could tell you what a passage meant in the Greek, I was admired.
I’ve come to believe that split is no accident. When a map is inherited and unquestionable, the people inside it would rather call you rebellious than curious, because curious would mean the question was fair, and a fair question would mean the map could be wrong.
So I learned early what got a boy in trouble and what got him loved, and I became what the rooms admired. I didn’t see that until my own therapy, decades later. But the asking never stopped either. My whole road out of high-control religion was a series of steps toward something more open. An independent Baptist church, then a gentler Baptist church, then Methodist churches, then a church I planted myself and led for eight years, where my faith had been boiled down to the Apostles’ Creed and everything else had gone gray. All the while I kept asking my own tradition the questions I’d always been willing to ask everybody else’s. The question about the tree never went away. It just grew up. It became a God who, in the words of his own prophet Amos, asks “shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?” It became a God who sets up a game, knows every move before it’s played, and then holds the players responsible for losing a game he’d already rigged. A map like that can hold a child. There came a point where I couldn’t hold it anymore, and religion itself failed the test. So I moved toward science, toward evidence, toward a life without faith. For a long time I believed the leaving was the deconstruction. It wasn’t.
Before you read the rest: Most of the maps that run us were handed to us before we had words for them. The MAPSS Check is a tool I built for looking at one of them on purpose, built on the same five-layer descent I use in my practice. If there’s something you were raised to believe and have started to question, it’s a good place to begin. The tool walks you through it one layer at a time. It isn’t therapy, and what you write stays private and is never used to train any AI.
Start it here →
Jim Palmer made the same mistake and says so. Palmer stood behind a pulpit too, and he now writes about life after inherited belief in a publication called Deconstructionology. In a recent essay he describes thinking, for years, that deconstruction was something he was doing to Christianity, and that once the religious architecture came down the essential work was finished. What he found, and what I found, is that deconstructing religion is just one more thing to deconstruct in the long work of making a meaningful life. It’s also the more expensive kind. It cost me a career I’d been pointed toward since I was sixteen, a livelihood that depended on believing my own answers, a community, and the good opinion of people I loved, some of whom went from seeing a sound and wise mind to suspecting something had gone wrong with it. And it doesn’t settle. Years later it keeps unsettling you, and it’ll keep driving you a little wild, in places you’d have sworn had nothing to do with God.
The place it found me was a part of myself. In my own therapy I came to see a part of me that was simply, brilliantly adaptable. It could walk into any room, read what the audience wanted, and give it to them. The rooms I grew up in admired people who memorized scripture and could exegete it, so that’s what the part became. Underneath the believer was a performer, a highly adaptable survivor, and when the faith was gone the performer didn’t go anywhere. The rooms change and the part stays the same. The congregation becomes the boardroom, the family dinner, the feed. The memorized verse becomes the résumé. Admiration becomes approval, and approval becomes the evidence that you’re doing life correctly. Palmer traces the same handoff across the whole culture, with God giving way to the marketplace and blessing giving way to success, and he lands it in a sentence I haven’t been able to put down: “You can leave the church and still spend your life trying to prove that you are worthy. The altar has simply moved.” In January, at fifty-four, more than a decade after I left the ministry, I wrote myself a note that said I was done proving. The performer was still taking requests.
A performer can run a life for decades because the map it runs on never introduces itself as a map. It sounds like common sense. Of course the good kid is the one with the right answers. Of course the one asking questions is the problem. Of course a successful life is the one other people admire. Korzybski called this identification, the moment a map stops feeling like a map and starts feeling like the world. Jung named the cost in Aion, where he wrote that “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” Maxwell Maltz put the same mechanism into the language of self-image a decade later: “The man who conceives himself to be a “failure-type person” will find some way to fail, in spite of all his good intentions, or his will power, even if opportunity is literally dumped in his lap. The person who believes he was meant to suffer, Maltz goes on, will always find the circumstances to confirm it.” The map creates the territory it claims to be describing. A performer who learned that love has to be earned will find an audience to earn it from, anywhere, for as long as it takes.
Seeing all of this didn’t sit the performer down. Insight is a map too, and a satisfying one, because the moment you understand a pattern your body pays you a little relief, and the relief feels like movement. Palmer describes deconstruction as “not a stage we graduate from but an ongoing practice of reality contact,” and in my language that practice is the descent. You catch the part while it’s performing. You notice what it’s scanning the room for, the meaning it assigns the second the room goes quiet, the job it took on a long time ago to keep you safe, the fear sitting in your body underneath the job, and the oldest story at the bottom, about what you had to be in order to be loved.
The work, for me, has been learning how to let the performer sit down so the more authentic versions of me could come forward. You can’t argue a part like that into its chair. It was never built out of arguments. It lives in the body, and the body updates on experience rather than explanation. So the practice is small and it repeats. You’re in a room where the part would normally take over, and you let the pull to perform come, and you don’t follow it. You stay, a little less impressive than usual, long enough for your body to register that nobody left. Then you do it again in the next room. One room is an anecdote. Forty rooms is evidence. I’m still practicing this.
What religion gave me underneath the doctrine was real. The worth, the belonging, the sense that my life meant something. But the source of it was never out there in God, or faith, or doctrine and dogma. Wisdom, wherever I’ve found it, seems to say the same thing: it has to be found within, and we become the authors and the narrators of our own meaning. Palmer is careful to say this isn’t a case for living without conviction. We’re meaning-making creatures and we’ll always live through some story. His word for the work is dethroning, refusing to be governed by inherited authorities we never examined or chose, and choosing on purpose what gets to govern us instead.
I’ve also come to believe that wisdom always arrives with humility, and that humility looks a lot like making peace with uncertainty. When you walk out of a map of certainty you expect to trade your questions for answers. The answers do come into focus, or maybe more accurately a life comes into focus, but there’s always an equal number of questions standing right behind them. The curiosity that got a boy in trouble in Sunday school turns out to be the practice itself. Palmer has a line about this that I keep returning to: “we may not need another world to make this one matter. What we need is a greater capacity to inhabit this one.” The first half of my life was organized around another world. A good part of the second half was organized around an audience. Neither one let me simply live in this one.
I’m still the kid with his hand up, asking about the tree of life. I ask more questions now, not less. I practice curiosity about all our inherited maps.
Maps of certainty block intimacy and increase suffering.
Unexamined maps are not worth living.
I think curiosity is the cure.
I think certainty is the disease.
Stay Curious.
The Map Is Not the Territory is reader-supported.
I’m Christian J. Charette. I practice curiosity about the maps we inherit, the ones handed to us before we had words for them. Unexamined, they block intimacy and increase suffering. I know that from the inside. I deconstructed and left a high-control religion, and I’ve spent twenty years and more than five thousand couples watching what happens when people finally look at theirs. Thirty-two years married, three daughters, still in the work. I think curiosity is the cure, and this is where I practice it out loud.
Every essay is free. Paid subscribers also get the book, chapter by chapter, as I finish it. If the work is doing something for you, if it’s keeping you curious, that’s how you keep it coming, and how you read the book first. Either way, subscribe, and stay curious.
References
Palmer, J. (2026, September 7). The Religion We Forgot to Deconstruct. *Deconstructionology with Jim Palmer.* https://jimpalmerauthor.substack.com/p/the-religion-we-forgot-to-deconstruct
Palmer, J. (2026, September 12). What is a Life Worth (and who decides). *Deconstructionology with Jim Palmer.* https://jimpalmerauthor.substack.com/p/what-is-a-life-worth-and-who-decides
Palmer, J. (2026, September 13). The Practice of Being Alive Is Finished. *Deconstructionology with Jim Palmer.* https://jimpalmerauthor.substack.com/p/the-practice-of-being-alive-is-finished
Amos 3:6, King James Version.
Jung, C. G. (1951). *Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.* Collected Works 9ii, para. 126.
Maltz, M. (1960). *Psycho-Cybernetics.*
Korzybski, A. (1933). *Science and Sanity.*
Charette, C. J. (2013, February 24). My Story (From Fundamentalism to Freedom). *Chasing Black Swans.*
