Apologist lists three common reasons why Christians “deconstruct” their faith

The apologist gives three main reasons Christians “deconstruct” their religion.

Some Christians dismantle their religion for many reasons, including academic problems, disagreements over theology, and emotionally bad encounters with Christians and Christians.

This month’s edition of “Challenging Conversations” features a conversation between Pastor Jason Jimenez and apologist, author, and speaker Brett Kunkle. Deconstruction, a phrase for Christians who have doubts about their religion, was one of the topics they discussed.

Jimenez, founder of STAND STRONG Ministries and faculty member at Summit Ministries, said that many Evangelicals use deconstruction as “a process of stripping what you were raised to believe, with the intention to hopefully reconstruct your faith into a better and stronger version than before.” However, Jimenez questioned if deconstruction is necessary.

According to Kunkle, president and creator of the MAVEN movement to empower the next generation to seek kindness and truth, deconstruction is grounded on postmodern philosophy, which contends that individuals’ intellectual and cultural prejudices prevent them from correctly interpreting a book.

Some Christians, in his opinion, have taken the postmodern concept of deconstructing and used it “to tear things down,” such as one’s own ideas, rather than to rebuild them.

Kunkle observed that there is “a plethora of reasons” why individuals “deconstruct” or abandon conventional Christian and god-centered views.

According to Kunkle, there are “kind of condensed down into one of three causes” for why people deconstruct.

“There are some real honest questions, and we don’t want to minimize that,” the authors write. “They have intellectual reasons. So they’re really wrestling with maybe some doctrine of Christianity that they grew up with that now they find that it’s incoherent, or it doesn’t make sense, or it doesn’t maybe fit with the surrounding culture.”

According to Kunkle, individuals frequently give the impression that their disagreement with Christian ideas is the primary reason they are deconstructing their religion. A majority of individuals, he said, break away from the religion for two “deeper and [more] basic” reasons.

When asked why individuals deconstruct, Kunkle said, “a lot of cases, it’s because they’ve been injured by the church, been harmed by someone in the church, or maybe they believe they’ve been hurt.”

“I don’t want to downplay anyone’s pain, but they attribute it to a specific teaching. This is where members of the deconstruction movement, for instance, will speak at length about purity culture.”

Specifically, “God’s purpose for abstinence [from sex] before marriage,” which Kunkle explained as “relating to the church’s conservative teaching on human sexuality.”

He acknowledged that there may have been abuses within the “purity culture” that has become a pejorative phrase. I believe there are plenty of individuals who grew up in the church in the 1980s and 1990s, at the height of this claimed purity culture, and who had a really good experience of it, so I think sometimes things are overstated.

“And then there are people who will tell about their pain from it,” Kunkle concluded. “Or they’re dismantling things because they were raised in a family where, for example, both parents were really legalistic, and the kid felt guilty and ashamed all the time.”

Kunkle says it is “the hurt and suffering in the woundedness that they may put at the feet of the church or at the feet of Christians.”

Some individuals, he added, deconstruct not only because they are “church-hurt” or “disagree with the theology inside the Gospels,” but also because they actively choose to disobey God’s Word in their daily lives.

The third, according to Kunkle, is moral considerations. “This is not specific to the deconstruction movement; this is all mankind from the beginning of time; this goes back to the garden, where Adam and Eve do what? They conceal the truth in unrighteousness,” Romans 1:18 says.

Throughout history, Kunkle said, “there are really a plethora of ways that human people have been repressing God’s moral rule through our sin.”

Kunkle suggested that Christians “simply spend time getting to know them and their own unique experience” if they know someone who is questioning their religion.

Lecrae, a popular Christian musician, made headlines and faced intense scrutiny last year when he publicly revealed his choice to abandon his religion. The rapper said it was a pivotal moment in his journey to rediscover the Gospel.

In an interview with NGEN Radio, he said, “I underwent a lot of spiritual deconstruction over the previous several years, and now I’ve been rebuilding.” As cliche as it sounds, “God has truly been connecting me in new places and settings that I never really envisioned,” this is exactly what has been happening for me.