Deconstruction: Why People Leave Evangelicalism, and Where They Can Go

Many people who grew up in evangelical churches now describe themselves as "deconstructing." Some mean that they are asking hard questions about what they were taught; others, that they have stopped believing in God. Parents and pastors are often unsure whether the word describes a crisis, a phase or a departure.

Some evangelical cultures did real harm, and people who were hurt deserve to be heard rather than lectured. But deconstruction is not a neutral process with a neutral destination. The question is not only what a person is leaving, but where they are going.

In brief

"Deconstruction," a word borrowed from the philosopher Jacques Derrida, now loosely means taking apart the faith one was raised with. A 2023 Barna survey found that 42 percent of American adults, including 37 percent of current Christians, say they have "deconstructed the faith of their youth." Common triggers include purity culture, abuse and cover-ups, faith fused with partisan politics, fights over the age of the earth, fear of hell, and reading the Bible as a rulebook detached from the Church. Many of these complaints target features of modern evangelical culture, not the historic Christian faith. The Orthodox response is pastoral and firm: the harm was real and must be named, but the remedy is neither unbelief nor a faith rebuilt to personal taste. It is return to the Church of the apostles, where Scripture is read within the living Tradition and repentance and healing are offered to all.

Thesis: Much of what people deconstruct is a recent and local form of Protestant Christianity, and the honest way through is not toward atheism or a revised religion but toward the historic apostolic faith kept in the Orthodox Church.

What "deconstruction" means

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) as "the founder of 'deconstruction,'" a way of criticizing texts and institutions, a term he used in three books published in 1967.¹ In church circles it usually means examining, one by one, the beliefs a person absorbed growing up, and deciding which to keep.

Barna Group, an evangelical research firm, notes that as Christian and formerly Christian influencers share their process on social media, the term has become "mainstreamed," and that groups such as "exvangelicals" have growing ranks. Barna also stresses that "faith deconstruction is not a new concept in itself."² What is new is the name, the public sharing, and the assumption that the process should end somewhere other than the Church.

Questioning a church culture is not abandoning God. Barna's 2011 research on young adults who had been active in church as teenagers described "prodigals," who say they have lost their faith, as one out of nine young people with a Christian background; "nomads," who still call themselves Christians but have drifted from church, as roughly four in ten; and "exiles," who feel lost between church and culture, as another two in ten.³ Many who deconstruct are leaving something smaller than Christ.

What the numbers show

Barna's 2023 survey of 2,003 American adults found that among Christians there was "little difference whether they're practicing (36%) or nonpracticing (37%) Christians." Of those who deconstructed and left Christianity, similar shares moved toward "atheism / agnosticism or having no faith (two in five each)."² Barna chose that phrase because it "more narrowly categorizes those who identify with the oft-debated term itself," so the numbers measure how many people identify with the word, not one agreed process.

Pew Research Center's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, published in February 2025, found that "62% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Christians," a share that, by this and other Pew polling, "has been relatively stable since 2019" after years of decline, and that "35% of U.S. adults have switched religions since childhood," with net losses for Christianity. "Evangelical Protestants now make up 23% of U.S. adults, down from 26%" in 2007.⁴

{{strong: A large share of American adults say they have deconstructed the faith of their youth, but many who say so still identify as Christians.}}

Common triggers

No single cause explains every story, and no one's motives should be guessed at. But certain themes recur.

Purity culture

Evangelical purity culture promoted abstinence through pledges, rings and bestselling books, the best known being Joshua Harris's I Kissed Dating Goodbye, published in 1997 when he was 21. In 2018 Harris announced that it would no longer be printed, writing: "In light of the flaws I now see in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, I think it's best to discontinue its publication." He wrote that the book "instilled fear for some," and gave some readers "the impression that a certain methodology of relationships would deliver a happy ever-after ending," although "this is not promised by scripture."⁵

The Orthodox Church does not lower the moral teaching: sexual union belongs only within the marriage of a man and a woman. But she frames it differently. Marriage is a holy mystery, and chastity is wholeness, not a transaction that earns a reward. St John Chrysostom wrote that "there is nothing which so welds our life together as the love of man and wife."⁶ And no sin places a person beyond repentance. The Church holds up St Mary of Egypt, a woman who lived for years in sexual sin and became a model of holiness, every Lent (see St Mary of Egypt: Repentance, Holiness, and the Historical Evidence).

Abuse and cover-up

For many the breaking point was betrayal. In May 2022 a 288-page report by an independent firm, Guidepost Solutions, on the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee was issued which, as the Associated Press reported, found that survivors and concerned Southern Baptists repeatedly raised abuse allegations "only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC."⁷ In February 2021 the ministry of the late apologist Ravi Zacharias released an investigation by the law firm Miller & Martin. The ministry's board said that witnesses had described "sexting, unwanted touching, spiritual abuse, and rape," and admitted that its earlier trust in his denials "was severely misplaced."⁸

{{very-strong: Serious abuse and institutional cover-up occurred in prominent evangelical bodies, as independent investigations concluded.}}

Christ's own words on this are severe: "whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matthew 18:6, NKJV). Orthodox Christians have no reason to feel superior: abuse has occurred in Orthodox jurisdictions too, and the Church's holiness belongs to Christ, not to every bishop or priest. Obedience never requires submitting to abuse (see What Is a Spiritual Father? Guidance, Obedience, and Healthy Boundaries).

Faith fused with politics

Some leave because their church seemed to care more about a party or a nation than about the Gospel. Without taking sides in any election, it is enough to recall that Christ told Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36, NKJV), and that any church can be tempted to forget it. The Orthodox world has its own history here. A synod in Constantinople in 1872, called over the Greek-Bulgarian church dispute, condemned "phyletism," the organizing of the Church along ethnic or national lines, as contrary to the Gospel.⁹

The age of the earth and science

Many evangelicals were taught that a young earth is essential to believing the Bible, so that one fossil or one biology class could seem to bring the whole faith down. Orthodoxy has never bound its members to that claim. No Ecumenical Council has defined the age of the earth, and Orthodox Christians in good standing hold different views on it, while all confess God as "Maker of heaven and earth" (see Genesis and the Age of the Earth). A faith staked on one reading of Genesis 1 is fragile in a way the Church never asked it to be.

Hell

Others leave over hell, often pictured as an angry God torturing those who failed to pray the right prayer. The Orthodox Church does not abolish judgment to make the faith easier: Christ says that those who refused mercy to "the least of these" "will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (Matthew 25:46, NKJV), and universal salvation is not the Church's teaching. But the Church speaks of the same God whose love is life to those who love Him and torment to those who reject Him (see How Can a Loving God Judge People in Hell?). Judgment is real, and the Judge is the One who died for His enemies.

The Bible as a rulebook

Many stories begin with the Bible. A person is taught that Scripture alone is the final authority and that it is clear to any sincere reader. Then they find sincere believers reading the same verses in opposite ways. When the book was all they had, losing confidence in their reading feels like losing God.

About three years after the Council of Ephesus (431), St Vincent of Lerins asked why the Church's interpretation is needed if Scripture is complete, and answered: "owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters."¹⁰ His solution was to hold "that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."¹⁰ Christ Himself warned: "You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me" (John 5:39, NKJV).

Public stories, in their own words

In July 2019 Joshua Harris wrote on Instagram, as quoted by the Associated Press: "I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus," and "By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian."¹¹

In May 2020 Jon Steingard, the frontman of the Christian rock band Hawk Nelson, wrote: "After growing up in a Christian home, being a pastor's kid, playing and singing in a Christian band, and having the word 'Christian' in front of most of the things in my life - I am now finding that I no longer believe in God." He added that "the process of getting to that sentence has been several years in the making," and that he found his unbelief was shared by others who had grown up in church but feared "losing everything if they're open about it."¹²

Both men described their own experience in public and deserve sympathy; this article makes no claim about what lies in either man's heart or why he left. But many less public stories follow a common pattern: when the only Christianity a person has known is a particular evangelical culture, rejecting that culture can feel identical to rejecting Christ.

Where deconstruction goes wrong

Deconstruction often carries a hidden premise: that the church of one's childhood was Christianity in its pure form, so that whatever is wrong with it is wrong with the faith itself. That premise is false. Purity pledges, the modern young-earth movement, altar-call revivalism and the idea that each believer interprets the Bible alone all belong to the last five centuries of Protestant history, several of them to the last few decades. Evangelicals are fellow Christians, often deeply devoted to Christ. But where their churches have cut Scripture off from the Church, treated the sacraments as symbols, and left each believer to build a theology alone, they have departed from the apostolic faith, and many of the wounds people carry come from those departures.

The second error lies in the method. If the self is the final judge of which beliefs survive, the result will be a religion shaped like the self. That is not freedom from authority; it is a new authority, and a less reliable one.

Atheism is not neutral ground

Barna found that about two in five deconstructed ex-Christians moved toward atheism or agnosticism.² Unbelief is often presented as the default left once faith is subtracted. It is not. It is a claim about reality, and it is false. St Paul writes that God's "invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead" (Romans 1:20, NKJV). God's existence can be known by reason, and the resurrection of Jesus rests on strong historical evidence (see Does God Exist? The Strongest Arguments for Theism Explained). Atheism cannot heal the wounds of abuse; it only removes the Judge who will set them right.

Progressive revisionism is not neutral either

Others keep the name Christian while revising the faith, for example by treating the bodily resurrection as a metaphor or setting aside the Church's teaching on marriage and sexuality. This can feel gentler than unbelief, but it shares the same premise: the individual decides what Christianity is. St Jude urged believers "to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3, NKJV). A faith rebuilt to suit each generation is no longer that faith (see The Apostolic Faith: Why Christians Must Hold to the Faith Once for All Delivered).

A different road: the historic Church

Many deconstructing evangelicals have never been shown another option. Before there were denominations, before the Reformation and before the schism between East and West, there was the Church of the apostles, with bishops in succession, the Eucharist at its center, and the Scriptures read in the assembly. St Paul told the Thessalonians to "hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:15, NKJV), and called the Church "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15, NKJV).

The Fathers of the second century said the same. St Ignatius of Antioch wrote: "wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church."¹³ St Irenaeus of Lyons wrote that "the apostles, like a rich man [depositing his money] in a bank, lodged in her hands most copiously all things pertaining to the truth: so that every man, whosoever will, can draw from her the water of life."¹⁴ He pointed to "those who were by the apostles instituted bishops in the Churches" and their succession as the public guarantee of that teaching.¹⁵

{{strong: The second-century Church understood the apostolic faith as something received and guarded in a visible Church with bishops in succession, not as a private reading of Scripture.}}

The Orthodox Church is that Church, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church confessed in the Creed (see Which Church Is the One True Church, and How Would We Know?). She does not ask anyone to stop thinking, and many things deconstruction rightly rejects were never part of her life. She reads the Bible as the heart of Holy Tradition, centered on Christ and interpreted with the Fathers, not as a manual in which every sentence stands alone. She sees salvation as healing and union with God by grace through the Holy Mysteries, not a single moment of decision, and she does not tie the Gospel to a theory about the age of rocks or to a party.

Evangelicals who came home

This road is not theoretical. The Evangelical Orthodox Church grew out of a network of house churches formed in 1973 by Peter Gillquist and six other former Campus Crusade for Christ staff members. In early 1987 most of this body, then about 1,800 members, began to be received into the Antiochian Orthodox Church in North America. As Christianity Today reported, Gillquist said: "We were faced with a choice: either the entire ancient church and its fathers and apologists were wrong, or we had some tall repenting to do." He added: "We're delighted that our days of independence are ending."¹⁶

Objections and replies

"Orthodoxy is just another institution that will hurt me."

Orthodox clergy are sinners, and some have done real harm. The Church does not promise that her members will be holy; she promises Christ in her Mysteries and the apostolic faith in her teaching. Wounded people should come slowly, ask questions and look for a healthy parish.

"Isn't this just trading one certainty for another?"

The certainty deconstruction rejects is usually that of a private system. Orthodoxy offers a faith confessed by the whole Church for two thousand years, certain about Christ and the Creed and humble about much else.

"I can't believe in God anymore."

Then examine the evidence again, without the cultural package that made faith feel impossible. The question of God is not settled by a youth pastor's behavior but by what is true, and the case for God and for the resurrection remains strong.

"Can't I keep Jesus without the Church?"

The Jesus of the Gospels gave His Church apostles, commanded baptism and gave His Body and Blood to be received together. A Jesus without the Church soon becomes a Jesus made in our image.

What we can say confidently

• A 2023 Barna survey found 42 percent of American adults, and 37 percent of current Christians, say they have deconstructed the faith of their youth; about two in five who left Christianity moved toward atheism or agnosticism.
• Pew found 62 percent of Americans identify as Christian, a share stable since 2019; evangelical Protestants fell from 26 to 23 percent since 2007.
• Independent investigations documented serious abuse and cover-up in prominent evangelical institutions.
• Many common triggers, such as purity pledges, modern young-earth creationism and solitary Bible interpretation, are recent features of Protestant culture rather than of the historic faith.
• The early Church received Scripture within a visible Church with bishops, and the Orthodox Church continues that faith.

What remains disputed

• {{debated: How much of the recent wave of deconstruction is driven by abuse, politics and church culture rather than by intellectual doubt.}} Survey data do not settle this, and individual stories vary.
• How survey results on "deconstruction" should be read, since the word has no single agreed meaning.
• Whether the leveling off of Christian identification in the United States since 2019 will last; Pew itself treats it as possibly temporary.

Conclusion

When many of His disciples walked away, Christ asked the Twelve whether they would leave too. St Peter answered: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68, NKJV). That is still the question. Leaving a harmful church culture may be necessary; leaving Christ leads nowhere better.

The father in the parable of the prodigal son "saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him" (Luke 15:20, NKJV). The Orthodox Church offers the same welcome to the wounded and the doubting: the faith of the apostles, the Holy Mysteries, confession and healing, and the company of the saints. Those who are deconstructing need not start from nothing; they can come home to the Church that was there from the beginning. A first step can be as simple as attending a Divine Liturgy (see Your First Visit to an Orthodox Church).

Notes

1. Leonard Lawlor, "Jacques Derrida," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2006; substantive revision 27 August 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/.
2. Barna Group, "Ex-Christians Aren't the Only Ones Deconstructing Faith" (9 October 2024), State of the Church initiative with Gloo; survey of 2,003 U.S. adults conducted online 3-8 November 2023, https://www.barna.com/trends/ex-christians-deconstructing/.
3. Barna Group, "Five Myths about Young Adult Church Dropouts" (15 November 2011), based on 1,296 interviews with 18- to 29-year-olds who had been active in a Christian church as teens, https://www.barna.com/research/five-myths-about-young-adult-church-dropouts/.
4. Pew Research Center, "Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off," executive summary of the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (26 February 2025), https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-executive-summary/.
5. Joshua Harris, statement on I Kissed Dating Goodbye (23 October 2018), as published in full by ChurchLeaders, https://churchleaders.com/news/336098-joshua-harris-statement-i-kissed-dating-goodbye.html.
6. John Chrysostom, Homily 20 on Ephesians, trans. Gross Alexander, NPNF1 vol. 13, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/230120.htm.
7. Associated Press, "Top Southern Baptists stonewalled and denigrated sex abuse victims, report says," via NPR (22 May 2022), https://www.npr.org/2022/05/22/1100616952/southern-baptists-sex-abuse.
8. "RZIM apologises after investigation finds Ravi Zacharias engaged in sexual misconduct, including rape," Christian Today (12 February 2021), https://www.christiantoday.com/news/rzim-apologises-after-investigation-finds-ravi-zacharias-engaged-in-sexual-misconduct-including-rape.
9. Matthew Namee, "The 'Bulgarian Schism' Began 150 Years Ago," Orthodox History (18 February 2020), reprinting the synod's decision of September 1872 in the contemporary English translation of the Methodist Quarterly Review (January 1873), art. 1: "We censure, condemn, and declare contrary to the teachings of the Gospel and the sacred canons of the holy Fathers the doctrine of phyletism," https://www.orthodoxhistory.org/?p=7644; see also "Phyletism," OrthodoxWiki, https://orthodoxwiki.org/Phyletism.
10. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory 2.5-6, trans. C. A. Heurtley, NPNF2 vol. 11, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3506.htm.
11. Associated Press, "Christian couples guru, now divorcing, is sorry for 'bigotry,'" via KSBY (30 July 2019), https://ksby.com/ap-national-news/2019/07/30/christian-couples-guru-now-divorcing-is-sorry-for-bigotry.
12. Lisa Respers France, "Jonathan Steingard, Christian singer, reveals he no longer believes in God," CNN (27 May 2020), https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/27/entertainment/jonathan-steingard-atheist.
13. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, ANF vol. 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm.
14. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.4.1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ANF vol. 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103304.htm.
15. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.1, same translation, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103303.htm.
16. "Evangelical Denomination Gains Official Acceptance into the Orthodox Church," Christianity Today (6 February 1987), https://www.christianitytoday.com/1987/02/evangelical-denomination-gains-official-acceptance-into/.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1: Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans (trans. Roberts and Donaldson); Irenaeus, Against Heresies (trans. Roberts and Rambaut). Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.
• Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians, trans. Gross Alexander (1889). Second Series, vol. 11: Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory, trans. C. A. Heurtley (1894).

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Namee, Matthew. "The 'Bulgarian Schism' Began 150 Years Ago." Orthodox History, 18 February 2020 (reprints the 1872 synod's decision from the Methodist Quarterly Review, January 1873).
• "Phyletism." OrthodoxWiki (on the synod of Constantinople, 1872).
• "Evangelical Denomination Gains Official Acceptance into the Orthodox Church." Christianity Today, 6 February 1987.

Other scholarship, research and reporting

• Lawlor, Leonard. "Jacques Derrida." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, rev. 2021.
• Barna Group. "Ex-Christians Aren't the Only Ones Deconstructing Faith." 2024.
• Barna Group. "Five Myths about Young Adult Church Dropouts." 2011.
• Pew Research Center. "Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off" (2023-24 Religious Landscape Study). 2025.
• Associated Press. "Top Southern Baptists stonewalled and denigrated sex abuse victims, report says." 22 May 2022.
• "RZIM apologises after investigation finds Ravi Zacharias engaged in sexual misconduct, including rape." Christian Today, 12 February 2021.

Sources from those who left

• Harris, Joshua. Statement on I Kissed Dating Goodbye. 23 October 2018.
• Associated Press. Report quoting Joshua Harris's Instagram post. 30 July 2019.
• France, Lisa Respers. "Jonathan Steingard, Christian singer, reveals he no longer believes in God." CNN, 27 May 2020.