You don’t wake up one day and decide to question everything. It happens quietly. The worship songs that used to move you feel flat. The sermon sounds more like a sales pitch. You start noticing things you didn’t before—like who gets to speak, who gets silenced and what never gets said at all. You’re not trying to leave your faith. You’re just not sure it still fits.
That’s the uncomfortable, often unspoken moment where deconstruction begins—not with rebellion, but with unease.
And if you’ve been there, you’re not alone. Across the country, a growing number of Christians—especially young ones—are dismantling the belief systems they inherited in search of something more honest, more just, more real. Some leave the church. Some stay. Some lose their faith entirely. Others rediscover it on the other side. But in every case, the process is messy, personal and deeply misunderstood.
“Deconstruction is the process we go through to lay everything out and examine our beliefs and why we believe it and how we ended up here,” says spiritual director Nish Weiseth. “Sometimes that leads to deconversion. Sometimes it leads to rebuilding. But it’s not the same thing.”
The distinction matters. In some Christian circles, any kind of questioning is treated as a gateway to walking away from God entirely. But Weiseth sees that framing as both unhelpful and untrue. “Deconversion is the walking away,” she says. “But deconstruction? That’s just the honest work of asking hard questions. And for a lot of people, that work actually leads to a deeper connection with God.”
Weiseth compares the process to a game of Kerplunk. The marbles are your beliefs. The plastic straws that hold them up are your church experiences, theology, culture, expectations. You pull a straw—maybe a change in opinion, a discomfort with a doctrine—and the marbles shift a little. That’s minor deconstruction. But sometimes you pull one straw and everything collapses. The marbles fall. That’s the deeper, capital-D kind. And when that happens, there’s no putting it back the way it was.
There are endless reasons this collapse can begin. A betrayal in the church. A painful experience with purity culture. A deeper reckoning with white supremacy, Christian nationalism or the treatment of LGBTQ people. “I’ve seen people start the process because they felt a restlessness by the spirit of God that something wasn’t right,” Weiseth says. “They went to investigate that in good faith and ended up in a process of deconstruction.”
The timing isn’t a coincidence. Weiseth points to 2016 as a major turning point for many American Christians. That year didn’t just change politics; it exposed just how intertwined power, race, gender and faith had become in some evangelical spaces. For many, it forced a long-overdue reckoning. “There was this disillusionment with the evangelical system,” she says. “That was a huge catalyst.”
So was social media. For the first time, people could name their doubts in public—and realize others were asking the same questions. The internet made it harder to pretend everything was fine. And once the questions started, there was no going back.
But none of this is new. From the earliest pages of Scripture, faith has always involved wrestling. Job demanded answers from God. Thomas doubted the resurrection. Even Jesus, hanging on the cross, cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Throughout church history, believers have dismantled the status quo to follow God more faithfully. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses were a form of deconstruction. So was the early Church’s break from Jewish law. In 1 Thessalonians 5:21, Paul even commands believers to “test everything; hold fast to what is good.” Faith, it seems, was never meant to be static.
Still, when everything falls apart, it’s easy to feel alone. That’s why Weiseth urges anyone going through a season of spiritual deconstruction to seek connection—not answers. “It is deeply individual and personal,” she says, “but it should never be done in isolation.”
That connection doesn’t have to come from a church, especially if the church was part of the harm. But it should come from someone—a trusted friend, a mentor, a spiritual director—who can sit in the uncertainty with you. Not to solve it, but to honor it.
Eventually, Weiseth says, most people reach a point where they’re ready to rebuild. But that part of the journey is rarely glamorized. There are no viral tweets about reconstruction. No conferences. No hype. Just a quiet hunger for something real again.
So she asks her clients a question that can feel surprisingly radical: What do you want?
That question isn’t selfish. It’s spiritual. “When I do ask that question, most people respond with, ‘I want to feel a deep connection with God,’” Weiseth says. “That is a God-given desire.”
From there, the process begins again—only this time with intention. What kind of practices draw you closer to God now? What kind of faith community, if any, feels life-giving? What truths still hold? What new ones have you discovered?
Reconstruction doesn’t mean recreating the past. It means building something honest on the other side of loss. That’s what healing often looks like—not a return to normal, but a return to what matters most.
For those watching a friend go through deconstruction, Weiseth has one piece of advice: don’t lead with fear. Lead with curiosity. Ask, “How can I support you right now?” or “What do you need from me as your friend?” Simple questions can mean everything to someone who feels abandoned, confused or ashamed.
“You don’t have to understand this process to love someone well,” Weiseth says. “To feel seen and heard— isn’t that what we all want? To be seen, heard, known and loved for who we are.”
Maybe that’s what deconstruction is really about. Not tearing everything down for the sake of it. But making space to be honest. Making space for God to meet us in the rubble. And learning, piece by piece, what it means to believe again.
