A lot of my deconstruction from Christianity took place in private. I didn’t seek out help from others, didn’t talk to others, and didn’t seek their understanding. The reason for this was simple: I was questioning the entire structure of my faith. To then use the structure of my faith to investigate it would have been circular.
My experience isn’t unique, but it also isn’t universal. Everyone’s path to deconstructing their faith is different. What I’ve noticed, however, is that quite a few evangelicals have no clue what they’re talking about when it comes to those of us who have deconstructed, but certainly feel as though they’re authorized.
One of the greater offenders, in my opinion, is the Gospel Coalition’s Alisa Childers. She’s posted quite a few articles over the years about deconstruction and progressive Christianity. She’s even written a book on the issue.
Whereas the Emergent Church of the early 2000s was viewed as a threat to everything Christian, deconstruction has brought about somewhat of an existential crisis within the conservative evangelical Protestant American church. People leaving the church isn’t anything new. But the people who’ve deconstructed their faith since 2016 do pose an existential threat to modern evangelical American Protestant Christianity.
The evangelical responses are varied:
· They equate it with apostasy, claiming that the mere act of taking your faith apart to look at it is an act of infidelity to God. As the linked article says, “… deconstructionism is rooted in doubt, not in faith. We are encouraged to doubt everything that we have ever known. Doubt, not faith, is encouraged and praised.” In other words, exploring doubts, beginning with doubts, having doubts, is the problem. The implicit argument here is that faith, not reason, ought to overpower your doubts.
· They say it’s a desire to sin, with Josh Butler saying that some people deconstruct, but “So many times, it later comes out they’d been having an affair that started well before their deconstruction began.” The point being, you’re not really intellectually involved in this process, you’re just looking for an excuse to sin.
· They argue that these people are rejecting Biblical authority, that by rejecting the Bible they’re losing any hope of finding answers.
· Ultimately, they view it as dangerous.
Understanding Deconstruction
Many prominent anti-deconstruction writers misunderstand the phenomenon because their theological commitments constrain the range of explanations they are willing to consider.
Alisa Childers defines deconstruction as:
In the context of faith, deconstruction is the process of systematically dissecting and often rejecting the beliefs you grew up with. Sometimes the Christian will deconstruct all the way into atheism. Some remain there, but others experience a reconstruction. But the type of faith they end up embracing almost never resembles the Christianity they formerly knew.
This is a bad definition that loads the premise of her argument. My contention centers around her use of “systematic.” Deconstruction is a lot of things, and while it can be systematic, it’s not always systematic.
If anything, after discussing this with others who have deconstructed, deconstruction is a messy, often convoluted process. During the process, you end up with contradictory views of the world, contradictory beliefs that can’t be meshed. You’re faced with constant tension. And the reason for this is that there is no systematic method for deconstruction.
When I began the process, there were no books, no articles, no curriculum for me to follow. There wasn’t any “thought leader” that made me go, “Oh, let me embark on this study.” It took place over years, with different parts of the faith getting chipped away because the answers were unsatisfactory. By saying it’s “systematic,” that puts it into a category that can then be attacked, examined, and viewed.
Childers’ definition frames deconstruction primarily as something the deconstructor does to Christianity, rather than something that may occur because of Christianity—or a particular form of Christianity—has failed to resolve the problems the person encountered.
At no point does it occur to the authors of the various anti-deconstruction articles that the problem itself could be the modern evangelical doctrine, or historical Christianity itself.
Treating it as systematic means assuming that people who deconstruct sit down and begin at Chapter One. That’s just not how it works.
No one wakes up Tuesday morning and goes, “You know what sounds fun? Destroying my entire conception of God, my relationship with my family, my social community, my understanding of death, my moral framework, and possibly my marriage.”
Usually, there’s a problem or problems underneath all that. Maybe Christianity survives the problem. Maybe it doesn’t. But you can’t understand deconstruction while defining the precipitating problem out of existence.
Her definition and approach require that:
1. Christianity is true
2. Scripture properly understood cannot be wrong
3. God’s moral commands cannot be unjust
If those are three premises that must always remain true, then when somebody encounters a contradiction, there are only so many variables you’re allowed to blame.
I want to offer what I believe is a more precise definition from the perspective of someone who has deconstructed. And for the nerds here, understand that I’m using “deconstruction” in its contemporary religious sense, not as a synonym for Derrida’s philosophical project from which the term ultimately derives.
Faith deconstruction is an open-ended, often nonlinear process of critically re-examining previously accepted religious beliefs, practices, authorities, and interpretive assumptions when one or more tensions—intellectual, moral, historical, experiential, or existential—can no longer be satisfactorily resolved within the existing framework. It may result in reaffirmation, revision, reconstruction, or abandonment of some or all of that framework.
Now, I’m a philosopher by trade—though it’s been over a decade since I dabbled—so let’s break that definition down.
First, “open-ended.” This is hugely important. Deconstruction does not contain its conclusions inside its premise. You don’t begin deconstructing and therefore become an atheist. Somebody can come out Catholic, Episcopalian, progressive Christian, evangelical-but-different, agnostic, atheist, fundamentalist, conservative Christian, or something much harder to categorize. Even some conservative commentators have noted, correctly, that deconstruction is a process; deconversion is one possible result.
Second, “often nonlinear.” What this means is that systematically dissecting beliefs, starting from Chapter One, going through a whole process and system can happen.
But it doesn’t describe the process very well as a category. Somebody might systematically revisit the doctrine of hell. But then hell raises questions about biblical inspiration, which raises questions about historical criticism, which raises questions about Jesus, which suddenly intersects with something completely unrelated that happened at church ten years ago. Meanwhile, they still pray. They still believe in the resurrection. They don’t believe homosexuality is sinful anymore. They still believe Paul is inspired. Then six months later, they don’t even know what “inspired” means.
That’s deconstruction.
Even attempting to be systematic, it refuses to play by the rules, interacts with human psychology, and then it’s off to the races. Where it ends, no one knows.
To explain the definition through an example, imagine someone starts with the question, “Why can’t two men get married?” The church says, “Because Scripture says homosexuality is sinful.”
Fine. Easy enough. But now the question becomes, “Why does Scripture say that?”
Then “what exactly do those passages mean?”
Then it becomes “how do we determine what biblical commands remain normative?”
Then you’re unpacking “why don’t we follow other sexual and social regulations of the biblical world?”
Then you’re questioning what inspiration means, then you’re asking who wrote the texts, and before long you’re asking, “Wait, Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch?”
And suddenly somebody who began with just one ethical question is reading about the Documentary Hypothesis at 1:30 in the morning. That’s not systematic, but there is a logic to it. I’d describe it as recursive.
One belief depends upon another belief, which depends upon another belief. Once a person can no longer accept one premise, they naturally begin examining the premise supporting it.
Another Example
In the 1970s, the Citicorp Center (now 601 Lexington Avenue) was constructed in New York as a modern marvel of engineering. Even today, walking by the building, you sometimes have to stop and stare at it and wonder, “How the hell is this thing still standing?”
A giant of a building that’s standing on stilts. How?
Well, turns out it almost didn’t work. The engineer, William LeMessurier, had a unique problem of having to build around St. Peter’s Lutheran Church. Instead of putting columns at the four corners, LeMessurier supported the tower on the four nine-story columns centered on each face, then used enormous chevron-shaped diagonal braces inside the building to transfer wind loads down to them. It was genuinely ingenious.
Then in 1978, after questions arose about winds hitting the building diagonally, LeMessurier recalculated the loads. His response, in engineering terms, was, “Oh, shit.”
Those winds could put substantially more stress on the structure than he’d originally accounted for. Then he discovered something worse: his original design called for welded joints in the critical bracing, but during construction they had been changed to bolted joints as a cost-saving measure. The bolted connections were significantly more vulnerable to those loads.
Rather than ignoring the problem, they fixed it. They fixed the building from the inside rather than pretending the problem wasn’t there. Workers went in at night and welded heavy steel plates over roughly 200 of the bolted joints, reinforcing the existing structural system without tearing the skyscraper down.
The engineer didn’t say, “Well, the building is standing, therefore the design must be sound.” He didn’t treat discovering the flaw as an act of disloyalty toward the building. He didn’t say, “The problem is that you’re asking questions about the structure.”
He investigated the structure because he cared whether it could bear the loads being placed upon it. And when one assumption failed, he didn’t immediately demolish the building either. He examined what depended upon it. Then he reinforced what could be reinforced.
A worldview is a structure. Most of the time, you live inside it without examining every connection holding it together. Then something puts an unexpected load on the system—historical evidence, sexuality, suffering, biblical criticism, unanswered prayer, abuse, the problem of hell, whatever. Suddenly one joint doesn’t behave the way you were told it would.
So you examine that joint. Then you discover that it supports another piece. Then another. And the question becomes: Can this structure actually withstand the loads reality places upon it?
Sometimes the answer is yes, but it needs reinforcement or redesign. Sometimes large sections need replacing. Sometimes the structure ultimately can’t be saved.
But saying, “don’t inspect the joints,” or “you can inspect them, but only in the way we demand,” isn’t structural integrity. It’s negligence.
Deconstruction isn’t so much “taking something apart,” because most people who deconstruct aren’t initially trying to tear anything down. They’re discovering that something isn’t carrying the weight it was supposed to carry.
Also important to understand: not everyone who deconstructs does so because they doubt, and not everyone who doubts will deconstruct. Deconstruction begins with something more consequential when the answer to X depends upon Y, so Y comes under examination too. And then Y depends on Z.
Visually:
Question --> attempted answer --> unsatisfactory answer --> examination of underlying assumption --> new question
Sometimes it stops. Sometimes it keeps going. But it’s not always doubt.
Why People Deconstruct
Now that we have a working definition of deconstruction in the modern religious context, it’s worth looking at what conservative evangelicals say causes it.
In fairness, many of the causes they identify are real. The problem is usually not the observation itself, but the way the observation is framed—and, more importantly, where responsibility is placed.
The Church Hurt Me
Josh Butler includes “church hurt” among the causes of deconstruction. On this point, he is almost certainly right. I’m not aware of reliable statistics tracking how often church experiences contribute to deconstruction or deconversion, but anyone who has spent time listening to people who have gone through the process will recognize the pattern.
Butler writes:
It’s easier to throw the baby out with the bathwater when you feel like you’ve been drowning.
Church hurt is real. But deconstruction is a false cure.
The gospel’s remedy is lament. The psalms often protest mistreatment at the hands of God’s people and petition for his justice. David—who wrote a majority of the psalms—experienced abusive leadership firsthand from King Saul. Yet he sought the Righteous Judge with lament, groans, and tears…
The solution to bad community isn’t abandoning community; it’s good community. A healthy treatment plan will eventually involve rebuilding a good church community with good boundaries and good leaders.
The argument is understandable: being harmed by Christians does not, by itself, demonstrate that Christianity is false.
And that is true.
A cruel pastor does not logically prove that God does not exist. A dysfunctional congregation does not disprove the resurrection. Someone gossiping about you at church is not evidence against the existence of Jesus.
But that is not always the question being asked.
What happens when the problem is not one congregation, but a pattern?
What if someone spends decades moving through churches, Christian schools, ministries, seminaries, or other Christian institutions and repeatedly encounters the same dysfunction? What if the promised distinction between Christian and secular communities becomes increasingly difficult to see? What if, in the institutions explicitly formed around the transforming power of Christ, the same patterns of manipulation, dishonesty, abuse, gossip, control, and self-protection continue appearing?
At some point, the question changes.
They begin asking, What difference is Christianity supposed to make?
That question matters because evangelical Christianity makes claims not only about what Christians believe, but about what Christianity does. The Holy Spirit is supposed to transform people. Sanctification is supposed to make believers increasingly Christlike. Christian community is supposed to exhibit certain fruits.
Those claims do not require Christians to be perfect. Christianity itself insists that they will not be.
But if transformation is a central claim of the faith, it is reasonable to ask what observable difference that transformation produces.
This is where the familiar warning against “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” becomes less persuasive.
If the bathwater is dirty once, you replace the water.
If it keeps happening, you inspect the tub.
If it happens across different tubs, different houses, and different circumstances, eventually it becomes reasonable to ask whether something deeper is wrong with the system producing the same result.
That does not prove Christianity false. But neither is it irrational to begin questioning Christianity because of it. Repeated institutional failure can become evidence—not necessarily against the existence of God, but against claims made by a particular religious system about its ability to transform individuals and communities.
And this is where many evangelical responses to “church hurt” become inadequate. They answer the individual incident while avoiding the institutional question.
They say: Find a healthier church.
Sometimes that is exactly the right answer. But sometimes the person has already tried. Sometimes the deconstruction begins precisely because they have spent years giving Christianity another church, another leader, another ministry, another chance—and eventually find themselves asking why the promised transformation remains so difficult to see.
If conservative evangelicals want to answer that question seriously, telling people that Christians are imperfect is not enough. Everyone already knows Christians are imperfect. The harder question is this:
If the Holy Spirit transforms people, what difference should we reasonably expect that transformation to make?
And when the institutions most explicitly devoted to that transformation repeatedly fail to display it, why should questioning the system itself be considered unreasonable?
That is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It is inspecting the structure after noticing the same crack appearing again and again.
It’s a Sin Issue
Underneath a lot of the objections to those who deconvert is the belief that they’re doing it just to excuse their sin. They don’t really mix their words about it. Turning again to Butler:
Some deconstruct out of a desire to justify their sin. Many friends in ministry have suddenly had “big questions about God”—then proceeded to quickly deconstruct their faith. So many times, it later comes out they’d been having an affair that started well before their deconstruction began.
I minister in a college town (go ASU Sun Devils) where students regularly deconstruct when they’ve started sleeping with their girlfriend or boyfriend. Convenient timing. Others deconstruct while harboring an addiction (drugs, alcohol, porn), to release their guilt.
Deconstruction here is usually presented as an anguishing process of honest wrestling (“I just don’t understand why God won’t show up and answer me”). It casts the questioner as the hero grappling authentically with a God too distant to trust or too difficult to believe.
This masks what’s really going on. “What the heart wants, the mind justifies,” the old quip wisely observes.”
We can turn to Childers and see a similar argument:
While many deconstructors are captives of false ideas, some are simply rebels against God. Paul describes those “who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18). These people have the truth, but they actively suppress it. Later in the same letter, he says, “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law” (8:7).
For many, deconstruction is about self-rule. They refuse to bow their knees to the sovereign Lord. No one, including God, gets to tell them what to believe or how to live.
There is an obvious problem with their approach: You first have to establish that the disputed behavior is a sin. That is often the very question the person is asking.
Calling something “sin” does not settle the argument. It merely restates the conclusion. Saying it’s “convenient” that these questions arise when they’re in these situations is uncharitable and a wink and nod to the audience: “See, these people are just reprobates. Don’t take them seriously. They just want to fuck.”
Consider homosexuality. A Christian questioning traditional teaching is not necessarily saying, “I know God forbids this, but I want to do it anyway.” They may be asking something considerably more fundamental:
How do we know God forbids it at all?
Now the conversation has changed. You can cite passages of Scripture. But passages require interpretation. You have to determine what the authors meant, what circumstances they were addressing, how those commands relate to other biblical material, whether they remain normative, and why they should govern modern moral reasoning.
Those are not evasions from the question. Those are the question.
American Christianity should be particularly cautious pretending biblical interpretation is always obvious.
For generations, Christians appealed to Scripture to defend slavery. Later, white Christians appealed to Scripture and supposedly divinely ordained separation of peoples to defend segregation. Women were told that their subordinate social position reflected God’s created order. All of these positions were defended not merely as cultural preferences, but as Christian convictions.
Today, most evangelicals look backward and say those Christians misread Scripture. Which, yeah, exactly. That admission matters. It demonstrates that Christians can sincerely read a text, inherit an interpretation from generations before them, believe they are defending the moral order established by God—and still be wrong.
That does not prove every inherited Christian sexual ethic is therefore wrong. But it does mean that “Christians have always believed this” is not sufficient evidence that they are right. History gives the deconstructor a very good reason to ask another question: “How do we know we are not doing it again?”
And once that question has been raised, accusing the person of wanting to sin becomes almost perfectly circular. The argument effectively becomes, “God says it’s sinful.”
How do we know God says that?
“Because Scripture says so.”
How do we know that is the correct interpretation of Scripture?
“Because Christians have historically understood it that way.”
But Christians have historically misunderstood Scripture before.
“Then perhaps you just want to disobey God.”
That isn’t an answer. It’s an accusation inserted where an argument should be.
There is another problem, of course.
During deconstruction, the authority of Scripture itself may be under examination. This is where many evangelical responses seem incapable of following the person any further. If I already accept biblical inspiration, then “because the Bible says so” carries considerable weight. But what happens when I am asking whether the Bible is inspired in the first place?
You cannot simply hand me the Bible again.
You first have to explain why this collection of ancient texts possesses the authority you are asking me to grant it. You have to explain what “inspiration” means, how we know it occurred, how inspiration relates to historical and moral problems within the text, and why biblical authority should override other forms of moral knowledge when the two appear to conflict. And before that, we need to define which Bible we’re using here. Protestant? Catholic? Orthodox? What translation? What manuscripts?
Those questions become particularly urgent when the issue is ethical. Take premarital sex.
“You just want to have sex with your girlfriend.”
Yeah, maybe I do. Human beings generally want sex. Pointing this out is not an argument. The question is why having consensual sex with her would be morally wrong. If the answer is simply, “Because God says so,” then several additional claims have been smuggled into four words:
· God exists
· God has communicated his prohibition
· Scripture accurately preserves this communication
· Relevant passages have been interpreted correctly
· Those passages apply to this particular relationship
· Biblical commands are morally authoritative simply because they are biblical commands
A person undergoing deconstruction may be questioning one, several, or every one of those propositions. Calling them horny doesn’t answer any of them. Nor does labeling their disagreement “rebellion.”
The accusation of rebellion works only after God’s command has been established. Otherwise, the argument assumes precisely what the deconstructor is asking you to demonstrate. That’s why the “you just want to sin” explanation so often fails and is, honestly, rather insulting.
It interprets disagreement as disobedience before establishing that there was an obligation to obey. And it allows the believer to avoid perhaps the most destabilizing question of all: “What if our moral interpretation is wrong?”
The possibility does not mean abandoning moral judgement. It does not mean every desire is good, every behavior harmless, or every traditional Christian teaching mistaken. It means moral claims require arguments. If you believe homosexuality is immoral, explain why. If you believe sex before marriage is immoral, explain why. If you believe a particular biblical command reflects a universal moral truth, explain why. And if the answer ultimately depends on the authority of Scripture, then be prepared to defend that authority rather than presuppose it.
Because once someone has begun questioning the structure itself, standing inside the structure and shouting its rules at them will no longer be enough. The accusation “you just want to sin” may preserve your confidence, but it does nothing to answer the question.
The deconstructor is asking, “How do you know?” You’re asking, “Why won’t you obey?” That’s how a parent approaches a child, not how an adult approaches another adult.
You Don’t Understand What You’re Rejecting
G. K. Chesterton has the famous quip, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” If you read the source where this came from, he goes on to talk about how people rarely actually reject Christianity, but instead reject a version of it.
This is an accusation that is leveled against people who have deconstructed and left Christianity. Turning to Childers again, we read:
For example, one deconstructionist posted, “#EvangelicalismIsUnreformable because any way you slice it, the primary belief is that child sacrifice saved the world.” Whether intentionally or not, this completely mischaracterizes Christianity. When our loved ones are held captive to false ideas, we respond with truth. We must “put on the whole armor of God,” which begins with “the belt of truth
Butler is more precise with the accusation when he writes:
Some Christians have been led to believe they must choose between faith and science, because of poor teaching on Genesis 1. Others have been led to believe God is a vindictive sadist, from a popular caricature of hell. Best abandon Christian faith entirely on account of some dubious or sloppy teaching, right?
But if the problem is bad teaching, the solution is good teaching. There are great resources out there (such as TGC’s recent book, Before You Lose Your Faith, and video series “Gen Z’s Questions About Christianity”) and many wise pastors are walking patiently with those who wrestle with hard questions. Good teaching and good teachers exist.
In other words, the reason you’re deconstructing is that you don’t really understand the Christian faith. If you used the right resources, looked at the right teachers, then you’d be fine.
I’m actually willing to grant this to a certain degree in some cases of deconstruction. I’ve run into fellow agnostics and atheists who describe their understanding of Christianity. It’s drastically insufficient compared to the knowledge that other peers in seminary or I held. In many cases, they truly didn’t understand the doctrines, but instead understood the doctrines through what they saw lived in the church.
And let me say—that’s legitimate. If someone doesn’t understand substitutionary atonement or Trinitarian doctrine and still rejects Christianity, that is a rational decision. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs. After all, Christians routinely reject Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and countless other religious traditions without first becoming experts in their theology. We generally accept that as rational. Christianity cannot demand an evidentiary standard for its rejection that Christians themselves do not apply to every competing religion.
They’ll say, “But it’s because we’ve found truth.” And the deconstructor will say, “Good for you, I haven’t.” To us, Christianity is on par with Islam and other faiths that we routinely reject without investigating. That is a fair thing to do if the initial claims of a faith don’t pass the smell test. For them, there’s no reason to dig further, and I don’t blame them.
But it also ignores that some heavy-hitting Christians have left the faith after deconstructing. The bane of my existence when I was in seminary, Bart Ehrman, is a former evangelical Christian. It’s difficult to argue that an expert in Biblical studies doesn’t understand Christianity.
Or look at myself. My CV on Christianity would be:
· Started preaching at the age of 12
· Attended Dallas Baptist University and the undergraduate programs at Southwestern and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminaries
· Studied Greek and Biblical history
· By the time I was 30, I had read most of the Church Fathers and their major works
· I read the entire works of C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Francis Schaeffer, and constantly read other Christian thinkers
I say this with as much arrogance as I can possibly muster: I’ve forgotten more about Christianity than many Christians in the pews have ever known about their own faith. I can speak to concepts such as theonomy, the Imago Dei, theosis, and other deep theological and philosophical concepts.
To say that I had bad teaching is, frankly, laughable.
And I’m not alone. I can look at quite a few other seminarians who survived that experience with me who have evolved their faith into something different or left it entirely.
The point is, treating people leaving the faith as though they’ve had one bad teacher ignores that many people leaving the faith are doing so after having experienced teachings under multiple people. Many people, by the time they get to the end of their deconstruction journey and have no faith left to explore, have truly done a proper investigation into their faith. They may not have understood it initially, but they do now.
Finally, I would point out that sometimes people understand Christianity perfectly well and still conclude that it is wrong.
Childers treats the phrase “child sacrifice” as evidence that the writer does not understand Christianity. But that doesn't follow. The writer may understand substitutionary atonement perfectly well and be making a moral judgment about it.
Penal substitution teaches that human sin incurs a penalty humanity cannot satisfy; that Christ bears that penalty in humanity's place; and that his death is necessary to satisfy divine justice and accomplish reconciliation. A critic can understand all of that and still look at a system in which God wills the sacrificial death of his Son as the means of dealing with human sin and say, “I find that morally horrifying.”
You can argue that child sacrifice is an unfair description. What you cannot do is assume that an unflattering description demonstrates ignorance.
Sometimes people reject Christianity because they misunderstand it. Sometimes they reject a shallow caricature they were taught from childhood. But sometimes they understand the doctrine, understand the best arguments for it, understand the sophisticated qualifications surrounding it—and reject it anyway.
Understanding your position does not require reaching your conclusion.
And treating disagreement as evidence of ignorance merely ensures that you will never understand why the person left.
Deal With Us, or Leave Us in Peace
At this point, I have a plea for conservative evangelicals watching people question their faith or leave it entirely:
Leave us alone.
If your goal is not to understand us, but to diagnose us—if you are only looking for the right apologetic jiu-jitsu move that will maneuver us back into the fold—then kindly fuck off.
I know that is not particularly charitable. Most of this essay has tried to be. But there comes a point when anger is appropriate.
I am tired of reading explanations of people like me written by people who rarely seem interested in listening to us. I am tired of being told about our hidden motives: that we wanted to sin, wanted approval from the world, were wounded by a bad church, received bad teaching, never understood Christianity, or simply wanted to rebel against God.
I am especially tired of watching those explanations offered without the corresponding possibility ever being seriously considered:
What if we encountered real problems in Christianity and found the answers insufficient?
Before diagnosing our presuppositions, you might examine your own.
If Christianity is true, and if God is truth, then honest examination should not threaten either one. I am not saying every Christian needs to deconstruct their faith. But if you intend to write about people who have, you should at least understand what the process demands.
And no, simply studying more theology is not necessarily deconstruction. Taking another seminary course is not deconstruction. Reading another apologetics book is not deconstruction. Learning a more sophisticated version of a doctrine is not deconstruction. Those things may become part of the process, but deconstruction asks a more fundamental question:
Why do I believe this in the first place?
Why do I believe Scripture is inspired? Why do I believe this interpretation is correct? Why do I believe this particular moral command came from God? Why do I trust this institution? Why do I believe this doctrine corresponds to reality?
And perhaps the answers will hold.
Sometimes they do. Perhaps deeper study will strengthen someone's Christianity. Perhaps a doctrine will survive examination and become more compelling than it was before.
But sometimes it won't.
And you have to allow for that possibility if you intend to understand the people going through it.
More than anything, stop demeaning us.
Stop assuming that someone who reaches a conclusion you dislike must have arrived there dishonestly. Stop reducing years of intellectual, moral, emotional, and existential upheaval to rebellion, sex, politics, bad teachers, or hurt feelings.
Leaving a faith can mean rebuilding an entire identity.
It can change how you understand morality, death, family, community, purpose, marriage, politics, sexuality, the universe, and yourself. For people raised inside Christianity, it can mean questioning ideas that were woven into them before they were old enough to know they were ideas at all. That is not something most people do casually.
And no single explanation can account for everyone who does it.
Some people leave because they were hurt. Some because they encounter historical problems. Some because Christian morality no longer makes sense to them. Some because they stop believing Scripture is authoritative. Some because the philosophical arguments no longer persuade them. Some because they examine Christianity carefully and simply conclude that it is not true.
Often several of these happen at once.
There is no universal path through deconstruction because there is no universal deconstructor. So if you want to understand us, then deal with us.
Listen to what we actually say. Take our arguments seriously. Allow our stated reasons to be our reasons.
Admit that Christianity itself is allowed to become one of the possible explanations for why someone stopped believing Christianity.
You may still think we're wrong. That's fine. Argue that we're wrong.
But argue with us, not with the version of us you've constructed to make our departure easier to explain.
Because when you turn us into cautionary tales, diagnoses, ministry problems, or examples in an apologetics book, you are no longer talking to human beings. You're talking about us.
And if that's all you're interested in doing, then leave us in peace.