When Living Truth Feels Like Treason

Deconstruction isn’t rebellion. It’s refusing to keep pretending.

I wasn’t planning on reading Václav Havel.¹

But then Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney referenced The Power of the Powerless² in his 2026 World Economic Forum speech—of all places. A provocative political moment, for sure. Not exactly a morning devotional. And still, something in the way he said it stirred me.

Havel’s essay wasn’t written for people like me—or maybe it was written exactly for people like me. People who’ve felt the quiet ache of knowing something isn’t right anymore, but who aren’t interested in flipping tables just for the thrill of it. People who’ve grown weary of slogans, scripts, and required affirmations that no longer ring true.

Havel was writing under a dictatorship. I’m not.

And still… as I read, I kept thinking: systems of power don’t always rely on brute force. Often, they rely on participation. On people repeating words they no longer believe. On rituals performed not because they are meaningful, but because… well… that’s just what you do.

Havel tells the story of a greengrocer who places a political slogan in his shop window—not because he believes it, but because it’s safer that way. It keeps him out of trouble. It signals compliance. He’s “just doing his job.” He’s being a good citizen.

Then Havel drops the line that doesn’t politely stay on the page:

The system survives not because everyone believes the story is true, but because most people live as though it is.

That line landed hard.

Because I’ve seen the same dynamic play out in faith communities for years. When I share Teilhard’s vision of a cosmos becoming love, or Tom Oord’s understanding of God as essentially kenotic—uncontrolling, relational, amipotent love—people often nod and say, “Yeah… you know… I think I’ve always believed that.”

Which is both beautiful and telling.

On our best days, we carry truer instincts than the signs we’ve been taught to keep in the window. I keep wondering how many of us trusted love long before we had permission to name it.

That’s where Havel started to feel spiritually decentring.

Because many of us didn’t leave faith—we left performative faith. We left the subtle pressure to smile, nod, and sing along to ideas about God that felt increasingly disconnected from love… from what we know to be true about the world… from our lived experience… and from our own bodies.

We didn’t wake up planning to become rebels, heretics, or Jezebels. 🙄
We woke up wanting to be honest.

Havel calls this living in truth. Not shouting. Not overthrowing. Just… refusing to keep the sign in the window. Refusing to keep pretending. Refusing to prop up and participate in unhealthy systems with their stories.

And here’s the thing: living in truth often looks like betrayal to the system that benefits from the performance.

Which helps explain why deconstruction—with its honest, often tender questions—can feel so risky, even when it’s gentle. Why asking real questions can feel like treason. Why love—real, wide, non-coercive love—can suddenly feel dangerous.

Because there are stories—bad stories, incomplete stories, inherited stories—that many of us were taught to live as though they were the whole truth.

I want to say this gently: most people who tell these stories aren’t trying to harm anyone. They’re often doing exactly what Havel’s greengrocer did—keeping the sign in the window because that’s what faithful people do. They learned it. They inherited it. They were praised for defending it. Some have built their whole identity—and sometimes their livelihood—around it. And they were warned that questioning it was dangerous.

This isn’t about villains and heroes. It’s about waking up inside stories we didn’t choose.

And still… a story can be sincerely believed and still be abusive. A system can be upheld by well-meaning people and still do damage. Harm doesn’t require malice—sometimes it only requires unquestioned certainty, fear, and a sense that “the ends justify the means.”

That last part matters.

If you believe God is coercive, you’ll start to believe coercion is holy. If you believe people must be controlled “for their own good,” you can end up doing real damage while telling yourself you’re being faithful—using God-language as cover for behaviour that is anything but life-giving.

In other words: we can take what is tragic and call it “truth.” We can take what is controlling and call it “good news.” We can take what is harmful and call it “love.”

I keep hearing Jesus on the cross: Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing. Not as a free pass. More like a tragic diagnosis: people can be profoundly sincere… and profoundly mistaken.

Bad stories? Here’s a couple. This may pinch—but I’m not saying this with a smirk. I’m saying it with a lump in my throat.

• God as control: “in charge” in a way that makes God complicit in evil, then labelled “mysterious” to avoid culpability.

• Justice as punishment: eternal conscious torment somehow folded into “good news.”

• Original badness: the belief that shame is the truest thing about us.

• Salvation as violence: forgiveness requiring the death of an innocent son so the books can be balanced.

• Scripture as rulebook: faith as certainty, doubt as failure, loyalty over integrity.

And underneath it all: a courtroom God, where all controlling power gets dressed up as “God’s sovereignty,” and love becomes the candy coating on something too bitter to swallow.

Many leaders are trying to be faithful inside the only framework they’ve been given. And still—when certainty gets confused with holiness, faith can start policing belonging, shaming questions, and calling fear “truth.”

This guts me: when people in the pews never hear a better story, they often defend the only one they’ve been given. They absorb the fear and shame. They normalise the anxiety. They call it devotion. And still—quietly, privately—many sense there must be something more beautiful than this.

The measure of any spirituality isn’t its certainty—it’s the kind of people it makes us. Good spirituality should make us more human, not less. More tender. More truthful. More able to love without controlling. More willing to carry another’s dignity—not manage it. If what we’re calling “faith” is making us harder, smaller, meaner, or more fearful than compassionate, then whatever it is, it isn’t yet shaped like Jesus.

This is the moment the greengrocer reaches for the window. The sign has been there so long it feels like part of the glass. Taking it down isn’t dramatic—but it is disruptive to any story that depends on performance more than truth, and fear more than love.

Havel might say: of course living in truth feels dangerous. Truth always destabilises what depends on illusion.

And love—genuine love—has a way of pulling the curtain back.

Sola Caritas,

𝞃Michael

1. Václav Havel: Havel (1936–2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, and dissident whose writing helped inspire nonviolent resistance to communist rule in Czechoslovakia. After the Velvet Revolution, he became the country’s president.

2. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/1979/01/the-power-of-the-powerless.pdf

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