In the late 1990s, I (Don) was asked by a professor at a local community college to teach a class on Christianity in their Religion 101 course. I agreed and spent nearly an hour explaining the Bible’s reliability and describing evidence for the existence of Jesus, His life, death, and physical resurrection. Of course, it was just an overview, as only so much can be done in an hour. At the end of my teaching, I invited questions from the students. An adventurous student raised his hand eagerly; certain he was going to stump me with something I had never heard. He began by confidently asserting, “You can’t trust the Bible. It has been translated over and over, and it is full of mistakes and contradictions.” I thanked him for expressing his concerns and handed him my Bible, asking him to provide us with a few examples of the errors. He was caught off guard a bit and sheepishly responded that he personally hadn’t actually read the Bible. I asked how it was, then, that he was so sure it was full of mistakes? He replied that he had heard that was the case. I pressed a bit more for the source of his knowledge on this topic. He didn’t know. I followed up, wondering who he had heard it from. Again, he had no recollection. I then posed a different question.

“Doesn’t it concern you that you are gambling your eternal destiny based on information that you picked up from a source you can’t recall, and from someone who therefore may or may not be reliable? Doesn’t that bother you even a little bit?”

He and the group became more animated as I began pointing to very popular seeming inconsistencies in the Bible and demonstrated how the context of each “inconsistency” actually resolves the alleged contradictions. I don’t know if any of those students have come to the faith since those days, but it was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that asking questions is a good thing – and that there are solid answers for those who will take the time to investigate honestly. We have recalled that opportunity many times over the years when interacting with those who know little about the Christian faith, as well as with many who were raised in the church but subsequently walked away from the faith. There are various reasons why some walk away. Perhaps they had been in an authoritarian group led by a false teacher like Bill Gothard, and their view of Christianity was skewed. Many times, when we have interacted with “Gothardites” who have left the faith, we have had to start with, “Just because God and Gothard both begin with “GO” and end with “D,” that doesn’t mean they are the same person. In many of these cases, people are unwittingly rejecting a caricature of Christianity – and not truly the biblical faith itself.

Some, like Joshua Harris, author of the 1997 best-seller, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, announced he was kissing his faith goodbye, and not long after, he also kissed his wife goodbye. We wrote about his transition in 2019 with “Joshua Harris – Kissing WHAT Faith Goodbye?” In 2021, he launched a deconstruction course, offering for a mere $275.00 to allegedly help others “reframe their story.” Harris’s ex-wife, Shannon, went on to deconstruct as well, and in 2023 released her autobiography, The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife. One of our associates and occasional contributors reviewed the book, and we posted their review: “Shannon Harris Kissed Truth Goodbye.”

“Deconstructing” has become a sort of growth industry. Today there is an entire online ecosystem dedicated to deconstruction. A person questioning the faith no longer finds only a few skeptical websites; they are immediately connected to hundreds of videos, podcasts, blogs, and online communities reinforcing similar themes, and they have come up with new “cool” names for those who have abandoned the church and left the faith. They are presently “deconstructing” the Evangelical Christian faith – and call themselves “#exvangelicals” among other things. But what exactly are they “deconstructing” from? That is unclear. Even answering that question is difficult because, as Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett point out in their 2024 book, The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond, it could mean anything from someone trying to sort out the true from the false to those who reject the Scriptures entirely and look for a “personalized” faith separate from the Bible. The way Childers and Barnett describe it is:

Faith deconstruction is a postmodern process of rethinking your faith without regarding Scripture as a standard.¹Childers, Alisa; Barnett, Tim. The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond (p. 26). Tyndale House Publishers. Kindle Edition.

While some who speak of “deconstruction” are sincerely trying to separate biblical Christianity from the distortions of abusive churches or false teachers, the movement has increasingly come to describe something much broader: the rejection of biblical authority itself.

In “Why Are So Many Christians Deconstructing Their Faith?,” Danne Cole notes:

The term has moved rapidly from academic theology into mainstream culture. Podcasts, memoirs, and online communities devoted to the subject have proliferated. For some believers, deconstruction is a spiritual reckoning that leads them away from the church entirely. For others, it becomes a pathway to a reimagined faith. Or, as we prefer to call it, “an imaginary faith,” since that it is what it truly is. Either way, the numbers suggest this is not a fringe phenomenon. According to research from the Barna Group, 42 percent of U.S. adults say they have deconstructed the faith of their youth, including 37 percent of practicing Christians who remain in church today. (Barna Group)

That statistic alone tells a revealing story: deconstruction is not merely about people abandoning Christianity. It is often happening within the church itself.

Yes, today, whole churches and even some denominations are engaged in deconstructing the “faith once delivered to the saints,” in fact creating a whole new God who is more to their liking, and a gospel that suits their modern sensibilities.

This “deconstruction/reconstruction” push is not entirely a new phenomenon, of course. Jude writes:

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our own Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. (Jude 1:3-5 ESV)

For those with genuine questions about the faith, we heartily encourage them to seek answers. God has never opposed the idea of people asking questions. Abraham negotiated with God. (Genesis 18:16-33) Gideon asked God for a sign to convince him of God’s veracity (Judges 6:36-40), and to Isaiah, God said:

Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. (Isaiah 1:18)

Asking legitimate questions, though, is very different than rejecting biblical teaching because you just don’t like what the text says. As we read or listen to the narratives of #exvangelicals, the theme is often the same. They do not like it that the Bible teaches that God holds humans responsible for their rebellion against Him. Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett provide us with a few examples of “angry portrayals” of God from #exvangelicals:

“I’m not going to derive my cosmology from four-thousand-year-old legends of a jealous, bloodthirsty demigod.” #exvangelical

“If abortion is terminating a living thing you created that’s still in formation stages, doesn’t that mean god aborted an entire planet with the ‘great flood’?” #exchristian #exvangelical²Childers, Alisa; Barnett, Tim. The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond (p. 29). Tyndale House Publishers. Kindle Edition

Childers and Barnett quote another exvangelical as saying:

“In abusive relationships, one person convinces another person that they are worthless and no one else could ever love them. That’s why people stay. This is also how the church operates.” #exvangelical³Childers, Alisa; Barnett, Tim. The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond (p. 29). Tyndale House Publishers. Kindle Edition

We would like to offer a solution that could restore the deconstructors who have wandered, if they will only accept it. They should put aside their rage, ask God’s forgiveness, and call on the One who purchased and provided redemption for all of us at His own great expense.

Deconstructionism is not really new; it is just another version of an age-old story. It’s really the same angry conclusion that many ancient Israelites and Judeans followed:

Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, “Turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, in accordance with all the Law that I commanded your fathers, and that I sent to you by my servants the prophets.” 

But they would not listen, but were stubborn, as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God. They despised his statutes and his covenant that he made with their fathers and the warnings that he gave them. They went after false idols and became false, and they followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do like them. (2 Kings 17:13-15)

They would not listen… were stubborn…did not believe…despised His statutes…went after false idols. The difficulty for us as parents, relatives, friends, and even church leaders is one of expectation. Our friend and Advisory Board member, the late Jhan Moskowitz would sometimes point out to apologists:

You might think that if you give the “right” answer, they will believe. But faith is an act of the will, not a function of information.

Many faithful Christians suffer from this same expectation when they attempt to bring the rebellious young back to belief. In our own ancient “cool” generation of the 1960s, the problem was the same. Sadly, many of the “cool people” likewise refused to take God, their creator – and the one who seeks to gather them to Himself and save them from their angry rejection of Him – on His own terms. No one is forced to put aside their petulant hatred and acknowledge and accept God’s forgiveness, but it is so important to their own lives to do that very thing! Information is important, but it is up to each individual in each new generation to actually believe what the Scriptures teach. However much we as parents and loved ones may wish it to be so, we cannot believe for those we love.

Over the years, God has given us the opportunity to help parents and others who have had someone they care about leave the church and embrace a cult, a non-Christian religion, or no religion at all. In some cases, like the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-31), the one who has abandoned the faith has also cut off their Christian family and friends. First, we advise those who contact us to keep the door open. The one who has left may not respond, at least immediately, but God uses the knowledge that you love them and stand waiting to embrace them. We have seen God draw a son or daughter back to his or her family, and in many cases, He has also drawn them back to the faith and the God they left behind. But God forces no one, and we can’t either. We pray and seek to learn how to ask questions of them and give answers to their questions when opportunities arise. And to comfort ourselves, we can remind ourselves how many of our own rebellious generations left their angry doubts behind and returned to God. We pray that will be true of many exvangelists as well.Ω

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