Why am I deconstructing my faith?

Deconstruction is one of those words that means very different things to different people. To some it sounds like apostasy; to others like therapy; to others like the most honest thing they have done in years. This page takes the word at face value — that something you were given is not holding up the way you were told it would, and you are trying to figure out what is actually true.

A short, honest answer

Most deconstruction is not a problem of belief. It is a problem of the package — the cultural and political and behavioral commitments that got bundled into "Christianity" where you grew up. Pulling that bundle apart is not the same thing as walking away from Jesus, even though the people inside the bundle often act like it is.

The reasons this usually starts

A few patterns that show up over and over in stories like yours:

You found out something was not what they told you it was. A leader you trusted turned out to be different. A history was sanitized. A teaching that was treated as obvious turned out to be one position among several. The thing that breaks first is usually trust, not theology — and trust, once broken, does not unbreak quickly.

You started encountering people the system told you were not okay, and they were okay. Most deconstruction stories include a moment like this: a person from a category you were warned about turned out to be more honest, more thoughtful, more kind than the people doing the warning. You cannot un-have it.

The behavioral demands stopped tracking with anything in scripture. You looked at what your church or community required and went looking for it in the Bible, and a lot of it was not there. Some of it was the opposite of what was there. Once you start noticing this, you cannot stop noticing it.

Something happened that should not have happened. Abuse, coverup, neglect, manipulation. The harder version of this story is when the harm came from inside the system, and the system protected itself instead of you.

You grew up. Faith taught to a child has a shape suited to a child. Some of that shape needs to come apart for an adult's faith to take its place. Paul (an early Christian writer who wrote about a third of the New Testament — the second part of the Christian Bible), in a letter to Christians in Corinth, put it this way: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me." Some deconstruction is exactly this process, mid-flight.

If one or more of these is what is happening to you, it is not a malfunction. It is a specific, namable thing.

What Christianity actually allows for

1. The Bible itself runs a kind of deconstruction.

Jesus' clearest extended speech against religion (in Matthew 23, one of the four short biographies of his life called the gospels) is aimed at the religious authorities of his own community. His complaint is not that they were too religious. It was that the system they built kept ordinary people out, and that was a betrayal of what religion was for. The harshest line in that chapter — "you shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces" — is the kind of line that, if you said it about your old church today, you would probably be told you were in rebellion. Jesus said it about his.

2. Honest investigation is treated as a higher form of faith, not a lower one.

When the early Christian traveling teacher Paul came to a town called Berea and preached his message, the book of Acts (an early history of the Christian movement, in the New Testament) records that the people there "received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." That is what gets them commended — they did not just trust Paul. They checked. The Bible reads that as faith doing real work.

3. The prophets did not look like the people of God to the people of God.

The Old Testament prophet Habakkuk (writing around 600 BC) opens his book by demanding to know how long God will let injustice win. Jeremiah (another Old Testament prophet) accused God of misleading him. The Old Testament book of Job spends most of its pages refusing his friends' tidy answers. The category of "person of God in active protest against the religion of his day" is not new. It is one of the most common shapes a Bible character takes.

4. Mixed-up faith is treated as faith.

A father, in one of the gospel accounts, brings his sick son to Jesus and admits openly: "I do believe; help my unbelief!" Jesus answers him by giving the man exactly what he asked for. If your faith right now is more questions than answers, the New Testament has a category for it. It is not "almost-faith." It is faith.

What deconstruction is not (in this tradition)

It is worth being precise:

• It is not, by itself, leaving Jesus. Some people who deconstruct end up far from any faith. Others end up closer to Jesus than they were before, because they finally have a Jesus who is not entangled with a particular political party, leader, or subculture. Both happen.
• It is not rebellion. That is what people who built the system you are leaving will often call it. The Bible itself uses harsher words for the system than for the people walking away from it.
• It is not unique to you. A lot of people are doing this. Some of the most well-known Christians of the last century — the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the British writer C. S. Lewis, the American pastor Eugene Peterson — describe long stretches of this in their own stories.

What about right now

If you are inside this and trying to figure out what you actually believe — separate from what you were told to believe — that is a real and necessary piece of work. Our chat is free, private, and in your language if you want to talk it through.

Where this comes from in the Bible

• 1 Corinthians 13:11 — childhood things are supposed to be put down
• Matthew 23:13 — Jesus' own indictment of religion that keeps people out
• Habakkuk 1:2–4 — protest as legitimate prayer
• Acts 17:11 — the Bereans, commended for examining
• Mark 9:24 — mixed-up faith as the real thing