Creativity After Deconstruction
Finding new inspiration with Jayne Sugg
On today’s episode of You Have Permission, I had the pleasure of interviewing musician Jayne Sugg about how her faith deconstruction impacted her artistic expression.
Like many guests on my show, Jayne grew up in a deeply religious environment. In her case, it was a charismatic, non-denominational Christian setting where she was part of the "family band," where music and worship intertwined with her spirituality and relationships. After being taught that “worship is a weapon,” she shared candidly about the crisis of faith she faced when confronted with unanswered prayers and the death of a loved one.
With her artistic expression so connected to her faith, she found herself in a creative block while deconstructing. She became disillusioned with worship music, feeling cognitive dissonance when trying to perform lyrics and theological concepts that no longer aligned with her evolving beliefs. She describes feeling "stunted" and unable to write or play music as she had before, requiring her to deconstruct her understanding of creativity as well as her understanding of God. She also had to deal with an “infinity hangover” and the sense of losing the perception of eternal significance of her art. Jayne had to find new ways to value and validate her creative expression without the framework of creating for God or for the sake of eternity.
Jayne's experience highlights how faith deconstruction can disrupt artistic expression, especially for those whose creativity was closely tied to their religious beliefs. However, her story also shows how this process can lead to a more authentic and diverse creative output, as artists find new ways to express themselves beyond the constraints of their former belief systems.
My chat with Jayne was a nuanced, honest exploration of faith, doubt, and creativity that didn't shy away from the complexities of these topics… with a little bit of music geekery thrown in as well (my favorite).
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I'll get to it . . . maybe in the next life, together with so much else I've downloaded from you guys. But I can't help saying, now, how deeply sympathetic I am with those whose rigid religious upbringing or environment has caused so much pain. I'm an "Evangelical Catholic" aka Lutheran and originally Missouri Synod to boot. Fortuitously, the offshoot of the latter lead to the AELCA and then the ELCA. Unfortunately, I am now adrift as a "die-hard" Evangelical Catholic. Like Luther, I've never sought to dump the baby with the bathwater. I'm really pretty conservative, theologically, which is for me orthodox. I've no voice nor a place to go. Maybe that's just because I moved to Pennsylvania, where "Evangelism" is a bad word, the call to renewal is threatening, a balance between embracing the church's heritage and being relevant is a non sequitur, actually learning all about the Christian Faith is a burden, fellow brothers and sisters in Christ will bear animus, conformity is the law of the place, and retired pastors are to shut up and never question what is going on. I am concerned, tho', that disillusionment due to bad experiences can move people to create a 'new' faith in their own image, so to speak, jettisoning whatever makes one uncomfortable or is not understood or has been poorly taught. I can only hope that "deconstructionists" are not "dismantlists" who confuse what is self-satisfying with what is Divine Truth outside of ourselves and yet for us.