Jinger Duggar Vuolo still remembers how heavy it felt. She was standing in her kitchen, trying to convince herself to hit “send” on a text message — a simple note to turn down an invitation for coffee.
Her heart pounded. Her fingers hovered over the phone. She wasn’t saying no because she was mad or busy. She just didn’t want to go. But in her world, “no” could feel like sin.
“I wanted everybody to be happy with me all the time,” she said recently. “I didn’t want to ruffle anyone’s feathers.”
It sounds small, but that’s what years of fear-based teaching had done: even declining a casual get-together felt spiritually dangerous. Duggar Vuolo was raised to believe that disappointing someone could disappoint God.
Her story isn’t unique. Over the last decade, countless Christians — many of them raised in tight-knit church environments — have started reevaluating the theology they inherited. But here’s the thing: not all of them are walking away.
There’s a difference between tearing your faith down and untangling it. And that difference matters.
For a while, “deconstruction” became the word we used for any kind of faith shift. It showed up in blogs, podcasts and Instagram bios. It was the buzzword of the 2010s, shorthand for dismantling the beliefs that no longer made sense. Sometimes deconstruction really was about leaving faith behind. But often it wasn’t.
Many people weren’t burning their faith to the ground. They were trying to sort out what was actually true from the noise they grew up with. That’s not deconstruction. That’s something else: disentanglement.
Disentanglement isn’t about abandoning belief. It’s about separating your faith in Jesus from the baggage that’s been attached to it — cultural expectations, bad theology, family pressure, fear. If deconstruction is demolition, disentanglement is renovation. You’re keeping the foundation. You’re just knocking down some of the walls that never should have been there in the first place.
Duggar Vuolo has lived this process publicly. Growing up, she was part of Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, a system of teaching that left her constantly terrified of stepping out of line.
“When I wrote my last book, I realized just how trapped I was by people-pleasing,” she told RELEVANT. “It was terrifying to speak up because I was so afraid of breaking relationships.”
Her book, Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear, wasn’t about leaving Christianity behind. In fact, she’s clear she’s holding onto it. But she’s letting go of the parts that misrepresented God.
That’s what disentanglement looks like in practice: you don’t discard Jesus, but you stop confusing Him with the voices that twisted His words.
And here’s why naming this matters: when we call every spiritual shift “deconstruction,” we lose nuance. We make it sound like every question is a crisis, when in reality, questions are often the thing that keep faith alive.
Disentanglement gives space for that. It makes room for the people who still go to church and pray but can’t blindly swallow everything they were taught as kids. It validates the Christian who believes in the resurrection but isn’t sure about their denomination’s take on gender roles. It makes it possible to say, “I’m still here. I just believe differently now.”
That process isn’t flashy. It rarely goes viral. But it might be the most common faith shift happening right now.
And yes, it can be painful. It’s not easy to admit you’re letting go of beliefs your family or church still hold dear. But as Duggar Vuolo has discovered, it’s also freeing. “True freedom comes when you stop trying to gain approval from others and start loving and serving them as Christ did,” she said.
That doesn’t sound like someone who’s lost her faith. That sounds like someone who’s finally making it her own.
So if you’re pulling on theological threads and wondering what will hold, you’re not alone. You’re not a heretic. And you’re not necessarily deconstructing.
You might just be disentangling.
And maybe that’s exactly what faith is supposed to do: grow, change, get lighter, get clearer. Not because you’re tearing it down — but because you’ve finally stopped carrying what was never yours to begin with.
