There are two conversations I recall with clarity. The first happens on a hot August day, with my oldest son and me sitting together in the car, in the driveway. The engine cools, but we linger. The second takes place the following month, in the evening. This same son, who has just entered his senior year of high school, leans against the doorframe of our bedroom. He talks, and his father and I, dressed for bed, put down our books to listen.
In both conversations, our son explains that doubt has found him. His childhood faith is shaken. He may no longer be a Christian, given the intellectual ferocity of his questions about human suffering, the Bible’s reliability, and God’s hiddenness. Having gone searching online, months earlier, for answers to his atheist and agnostic classmates’ questions, our son encountered debates where the case against faith seemed stronger than the case for it. According to some cosmic irony, searching for truth had led him to doubt.
In this story, as in many others about deconstructing faith, before is a mythical land of certainty, where belief is easy and God is very, very real. It’s the kind of land you assume you’ll live in forever—until you don’t.
The crisis of interrogating one’s faith, as author Ian Harber has capably argued in Walking Through Deconstruction: How to Be a Companion in a Crisis of Faith, is a stress test for all involved. Harber hopes his survivor story, written “to the church and for the church,” might provide some handholds in the land of after. Harber is now on the other side of deconstruction, and though many of his questions have never been fully answered, he’s arrived at a “settled trust in the Lord.”
While the term deconstruction describes a more recent evangelical trend, its origins lie in academic philosophy. It suggests that a house of belief has been built on a shaky foundation. In the dismantling mode of Christian deconstruction, once-standard commitments and convictions are taken down to the studs.
This happened with Harber’s friend Jenny. As he recalls in the book, “She was asking questions about the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible. She was asking questions about the church’s treatment of women and their role in ministry. She was questioning whether God even exists or if this whole thing we call Christianity is just a sham.” Although one imagines the typical deconstructor to be young, Harber cites research from a recent book, The Great Dechurching, indicating she is, generally, a white Gen X woman, disconnected from and disillusioned with the church.
The current wave of deconstruction—an offspring of the emergent movement of the early 2000s, according to Harber—involves “the questioning of core doctrines” and an “untangling of cultural ideologies.” Harber’s definition suggests both what is old and what is (possibly) new about this phenomenon. In some ways, it might be as ancient as Augustine’s flight from Africa and from the primitive Punic faith of his mother. In others, it might be as novel as celebrity deconstructors like Michael Gungor, Joshua Harris, and Audrey Assad.
One critical difference between Augustine’s world and our own is the digital media environment, which affords access to varying faith perspectives. “Deconstruction is in the digital air,” Harber writes, noting that podcasters, not pastors, have the mic today. What’s more, the church’s failures have never been more public than in our internet age. In the wake of church scandals and glaring political hypocrisies and idolatries, the typical exvangelical is no longer convinced of the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Christian story. As one friend recently told me, when many of her Liberty University classmates faced the choice between association with religious “nones” and the Trump-Falwell bromance, they didn’t have to think hard.
Doubters throughout the centuries have questioned their faith for any number of reasons. Likewise, no contemporary deconstruction experience is exactly the same, even if stories typically center on church trauma, changing views on human sexuality, and disillusionment about evangelicalism’s political commitments.
Harber rightly counsels against ascribing morally suspect motives to anyone fleeing thou shalts and thou shalt nots. This is a characteristic misstep among companions who long to see a deconstructor’s faith restored (as well as larger institutions seeking to understand the trend). “By and large,” Harber writes, “when someone begins deconstructing, they aren’t looking for a way to leave the faith; they are looking for a way to stay.”
We must not condemn genuine doubt as sin, Harber says, as this is something Jesus never did. Come and see, Jesus said. Touch and believe, Jesus invited. Perhaps in God’s radical identification with human beings, he sympathizes with how difficult it can be to trust in the invisible and eternal more.
Nevertheless, when the thud of the mallet is strongest, tearing at load-bearing walls of core Christian doctrines, companions of the doubting can struggle to decipher goodness in a process that furthers estrangement from believing communities and from God himself. We want to solve and to fix, to make sure God loses none of his sheep.
But our anxieties can obscure the real grief of those deconstructing. As Harber reminds us, these people are losing not simply their faith but also their framework for reality, their communities of belonging, and their convictions about meaning and purpose. Yes, they’re tearing down the house, but for many, the collapse is suffocating and terrifying.
Although I might wish for more artfully told stories in his book, Harber helpfully gathers much collective wisdom about the deconstruction experience. Readers get a clear picture of how deconstructors remix, replace, and rebuild their faith. Walking Through Deconstruction is a valuable read for companions like me, if simply to gain sympathy, compassion, and patience for the journey of the wanderer.
At first, my husband and I imagined easy solutions to our son’s doubts: diligent prayer with and for him, a chat with a church leader, a couple of apologetic books, and expertly chosen and explicated Bible passages. I can remember the night I waited for Nathan to return from coffee with Dan, our whip-smart pastor who had converted to Christianity in law school. If Nathan’s questions were locks with perfectly fitted keys, then Dan would know which key to try. Doors would fly open, faith would flood in again, and when it did, I would yet believe in the goodness of God.
There was no key, of course. There rarely is.
After four years of wilderness wandering, our son returned home, if not exactly to the golden plains of unqualified belief. There would be no objective proving of God’s existence, much less of God’s loving self-revelation through Jesus Christ. Faith, recovered in the after, did not mean ironclad intellectual certainty, though it did mean returning to the old, old story of God’s persistent, self-sacrificing love for his children.
Nathan experienced this Good News in a fresh, emotionally resonant way when he began attending a church in a different tradition with a college friend. He became convinced that agnosticism was at least an invitation to consider that God was real and that a real relationship with him was possible. He began to pray again, to read the Bible again, to offer a kind of conditional worship: If God existed, then he deserved praise for the beauty of creation. As he described it to me at the time, he was finally ready to “surrender to the mystery.”
Deconstruction is scary for all involved. Still, says Harber, by the power of the Spirit, faithful companions can exercise a patient, nonanxious hospitality toward the doubting. As Nathan reminded me recently when we talked about his deconstruction experience, the honest search for truth is virtue, not vice.
Harber’s own reconstruction process took the better part of a decade. Ultimately, his faith was rehabilitated at church, where “questions were accepted, the Bible was opened, the riches of church history were taught, and genuine discipleship was modeled.” His experience of church had taken down his house of belief—and by God’s grace, a better experience of church raised it up again.
I can’t help but think of the radical hospitality to doubt practiced in our church community in Toronto, where we raised our children. It was a rare environment, one Nathan credits for his courage to pursue truth wherever it led. At the end of every sermon, time was made—in a large sanctuary, crowded with hundreds of people—for an open question-and-answer period.
Well-intentioned people sought clarity. Rabble-rousers occasionally shouted. Though today’s Q and A is moderated more carefully than it used to be (questions come by text, allowing for more judicious selection), no seeker is ultimately turned away. The pastors always answer the questions, if only privately.
Such a moment, carved into the church’s weekly liturgy, suggests that the Word of God, preached as good and wise and eternally reliable, can bear the load of human scrutiny. The answers given can never fully satisfy on their own, of course. God’s ways are not our ways, and his wisdom is not our wisdom. Anyone who thinks the Christian faith will conform to their list of personal preferences has not heard Jesus speak his many hard truths.
Still, real faith is demonstrated on that stage week after week. In fact, sometimes that faith says, “I don’t know” or “This is difficult to understand” or even “I might wish it weren’t so.”
Though everyone reconstructs after their deconstruction experience, according to Harber, doubt isn’t always replaced with faith. This is the aching reality of those left to grieve the leaving.
We can’t force people to stay—but we can endeavor to lead holy lives and seek to faithfully communicate the gospel so that less deconstruction work will be required. This might explain why I bristled recently at a formulation of the Christian faith I heard preached to a crowd of high schoolers. As the well-meaning speaker called them to trust the Word of God, he reassured them, in practical terms, that faith “works.”
I wondered if that’s the kind of sloppy phrasing that can inadvertently push people, like Harber, toward deconstruction. In Harber’s story—which included grief, loss, and abuse—faith clearly didn’t work in ways he might have preferred. Tragically, when he raised genuine questions and doubts, members of his church responded with hostility and betrayal. Imagine if, instead, someone had led him to the Book of Job and showed him how it teaches what Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis calls not a theology of suffering but “the theology of a sufferer.”
If faith only works when we, the people of God, are immune to the cruelties of the world, then the house of belief will crumble and fall. If “faith works” teaches that Christians and their leaders will consistently resist the temptations of idolatry and power, lust and greed, deconstruction is at hand. A working faith never denies these groaning realities.
In my view and Harber’s, a faith that holds firm amid tides of deconstruction may be less triumphal. But realism is no affront to hope. Maybe it’s one requirement for it.
Jen Pollock Michel is a writer and speaker. Her books include In Good Time: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace.
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