Faith Deconstruction: What It Is, Why It Happens, and What Scholars Actually Found

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Religious beliefs, moral assumptions, interpretations of sacred texts, and ideas about what it means to live a good life are often shaped by family, community, culture, and religious institutions long before they become consciously chosen convictions. But what happens when those inherited beliefs no longer seem to fit? While for some, the resulting questions are temporary, for others they become the beginning of a much deeper process, commonly called faith deconstruction.

Deconstruction in Christianity involves critically examining the beliefs, assumptions, traditions, and authorities that have shaped one’s religious worldview. It can involve questioning doctrines, reexamining sacred texts, confronting contradictions, reconsidering moral teachings, or asking whether the faith one received is actually a faith one still believes and wants to claim as one’s own.

In this article, I’ll explore faith deconstruction, looking at what the term means, and why people deconstruct their faith. Ultimately, faith deconstruction is less about reaching one predetermined conclusion than about examining the foundations of a worldview that may once have been taken for granted. It is a process of asking difficult questions—and discovering where those questions lead.

What Is Deconstruction in Christianity?

Faith deconstruction refers to the process through which religious believers critically examine, reassess, and question the beliefs and assumptions underlying their faith. While it initially became publicized in the context of American evangelical Christianity, religious deconstruction has also been applied to other faith traditions.

An article by sociologist of religion Priscilla Ziegler suggests that faith deconstruction is a process which often involves three phases:

1. Reflection on Faith Construction, in which the rigid socialization and moral boundaries of one’s faith tradition are questioned.

2. Minimization and Deconstruction, often experienced as community disruption and identity grief.

3. Reconstruction, in which the person of faith attempts to rebuild a functional personal framework or meaning-making system.

While some who undergo this process emerge as atheists or agnostics, many others simply discover a more enduring faith, rather than something merely inherited. In his book A Churchless Faith: Faith Journeys Beyond the Churches, Alan Jamieson writes of how this renewed faith is often the result of deconstructing Christianity:

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The contemporary Christian use of “deconstruction” draws on Jacques Derrida’s philosophical concept of deconstruction, although its popular religious usage differs substantially from Derrida’s philosophical project.

Since the majority of popular work on faith deconstruction comes from the evangelical tradition, let’s look at a common popular term within deconstruction movements: exvangelical.

What Does "Exvangelical" Mean?

The term “exvangelical” refers to individuals who grew up in evangelical churches but no longer identify as evangelical, particularly in the United States. Blake Chastain, an American podcaster, writer, and author coined the hashtag "#exvangelical" in July 2016, and the term has become a movement of sorts. Exvangelicals can be broadly described as people originally associated with conservative American evangelical culture who have voluntarily left this type of faith.

According to a 2025 study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) about half of exvangelicals leave the Christian faith entirely, while the other half transition to other Christian traditions or progressive expressions of faith. Specifically, the study found that of those exvangelicals who remain Christian,

While there are many reasons exvangelicals leave their churches, PRRI did find a limited number of broad trends in their motivations including the following:

Doctrinal Disbelief: Roughly 80% of unaffiliated exvangelicals cite a fundamental disbelief in traditional religious teachings.

Exclusion of LGBTQ+ People: Many leave evangelicalism because of the negative treatment, judgment, and theology regarding gay and queer individuals.

Mental Health Harm: Purity culture—which treats sexual abstinence before marriage as the ultimate measure of an individual's spiritual identity—intense fear of hell, and rigid behavioral expectations led to emotional distress and trauma.

Political Entanglement: The heavy alignment of white evangelicalism with right-wing nationalism and partisan politics alienated members who felt that the church had strayed from its spiritual mission into nationalist loyalty.

Institutional Mishandling of Abuse: Others felt disillusioned by inadequate responses to systemic power dynamics, cover-ups, and clergy sexual abuse scandals within their churches.

Why Other Religious People Deconstruct

While the above dealt specifically with the deconstruction of Christianity by exvangelicals, we know that people of many different faiths go through this process. What, then, are the broader reasons anyone might deconstruct their faith? Similar processes of questioning inherited beliefs, religious authority, community norms, and practices occur in other religious traditions, although researchers may use different terminology for them.

Some have experienced spiritual abuse, judgment, hypocrisy, or exclusion by religious leaders and communities. Others find themselves facing cognitive dissonance when trying to reconcile contradictions in religious texts or narrow views on science and human sexuality with the real world and modern culture. Many have also found that traditional communities demand rigid certainty and dismiss deep moral, emotional, or existential questions with superficial platitudes.

While all of these can apply to Christianity, other faith traditions experience these issues along with others specific to their traditions. For example, within Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, individuals often question rigid rabbinic authority, halachic (legal) inflexibility, and narrow community standards, leading to movements like Off the Derech (OTD), where people leave or renegotiate their ultra-Orthodox lifestyle while navigating complex family breakups.

Similarly, Many Muslim-born individuals or converts undergo deconstruction regarding patriarchal family structures, literalist interpretations of hadith or sharia, or cultural nationalism. This rethinking of their tradition often results in progressive Islamic reform or secular ex-Muslim networks.

Finally, within Eastern traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism, both Western and heritage practitioners deconstruct toxic guru dynamics, caste-based social hierarchies, or commercialized wellness yoga, seeking to separate philosophical teachings from institutional corruption.

The Bible and Deconstruction

Within the Bible, there are a host of inherited ideas, theological frameworks, cultural biases, and traditions passed down through generations. Modern readers thus have to decide which of these is tied to a more universally applicable faith and which are simply outmoded traditions of the ancient cultures in which the Bible was produced. Deconstruction therefore isolates these layers to examine them.

For example, modern readers of the Bible often project 21st-century Western values onto an ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman text. Deconstruction forces an examination of the original historical, political, and cultural settings. One example might be the frequent references to slavery in the Bible. Slavery was a ubiquitous institution in the ancient world and is thus never condemned in the Bible.

Many who undergo deconstruction also question the inherited doctrine of strict biblical inerrancy common in evangelical churches (although not common in every Christian tradition). They often shift instead toward viewing the text as a complex, divine-human library. Likewise, deconstruction challenges the idea that the Bible speaks with a single, uniform voice on every topic (for more on this, see Bart Ehrman). Those who are deconstructing their faith resist the urge to "flatten" the text into a neat, systematic checklist of dogmas. It’s important to note, for example, that while Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians view the Bible as teaching the truth regarding salvation and faith, they do not subscribe to modern fundamentalist definitions of absolute factual or scientific inerrancy.

All of this means that unlike apologists—those who defend the faith—those who engage in deconstruction attempt to lean into the tensions, paradoxes, and outright contradictions within the biblical canon rather than trying to harmonize them away. 

For some, deconstructing the Bible leads away from faith entirely. However, for many within the "exvangelical" or progressive Christian movements, the process functions as a clearing of debris. By identifying contradictions, they acknowledge the Bible as a record of an evolving human relationship with the divine. By dismantling inherited ideas, they also attempt to rescue Jesus's core teachings from historical or political co-optation.

One well-known author who went through this process is the biblical scholar Bart Ehrman. Let’s look at his experience.

Bart Ehrman's Deconstruction

Bart Ehrman went from being a devout, fundamentalist, evangelical Christian to an agnostic atheist. How did this happen?

Ehrman attended Wheaton College, an evangelical school, and the Moody Bible Institute, initially believing in the absolute inerrancy of the original biblical manuscripts. However, his deep dive into textual criticism, studying ancient Greek manuscripts and realizing how many variations there are in the surviving texts, began to crack his view of an inerrant Bible. Rather than viewing the Bible as inspired truth, therefore, Ehrman's academic deconstruction led him to see the Bible as a purely human collection of ancient writings reflecting diverse, and often conflicting, human perspectives on God and history. In his case (but not in all cases, as we’ll see), the academic study of the Bible both caused and fueled his doubts.

However, as Ehrman details in his book God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer, it was ultimately the stark contradiction between the traditional belief in a sovereign, loving God and the profound, unmitigated suffering in the world that led to the complete collapse of his Christian faith. In other words, he progressed from evangelical belief to agnostic atheism, identifying the problem of suffering as decisive for him.

In a 2008 interview, Ehrman said that beginning around 2000, he had realized that he

He also calls himself an agnostic atheist, a rare self-identification since agnostics acknowledge that they don’t know if God exists and atheists argue definitively that God does not exist. However, he notes in a blog post  that both terms apply, since he doesn’t know if there is a God but also doesn’t believe there is. As he puts it, "Atheism is a statement about faith and agnosticism is a statement about epistemology," (epistemology is the study of what knowledge is and how we know if it is true).

Since Ehrman is an example of a person for whom doing biblical scholarship began the process of his departure from the faith, is it necessary to abandon one’s faith in order to do biblical scholarship?

Does Critical Scholarship Require Leaving the Faith?

In a guest post on Bart Ehrman’s blog, scholar Jeffrey S. Siker answers no. He is both a critical scholar and an ordained Presbyterian minister. How does he reconcile the tension between these two roles? Siker explains them as two institutions he is constantly keeping in balance:

In other words, church and academy keep each other in check:

Nevertheless, Siker also says

Ultimately, Siker also notes that while the church and the academy are his two primary conversation partners in scholarship, there are many other sources involved as well, both critical and theological. He thus feels comfortable honoring both his ideological commitment to Christianity and his intellectual commitment to scholarship. He is, by the way, far from the only critical scholar who is also a Christian.

Conclusion

Faith deconstruction is not a single experience with a predetermined destination. For some people, questioning inherited beliefs ultimately leads to agnosticism, atheism, or departure from organized religion. For others, it becomes a process of reconstructing a faith that is more consciously chosen, intellectually honest, and personally meaningful. Still others remain within their original religious tradition while revising how they understand its doctrines, texts, and practices.

The stories of exvangelicals, biblical scholars, and people navigating deconstruction in other religious traditions demonstrate that the deconstruction of Christianity can involve much more than simply deciding whether or not to believe in God. It can involve examining the communities that shaped us, the assumptions we inherited, the ways religious texts have been interpreted, and the relationship between faith, culture, morality, politics, and personal identity. It can also involve grief: losing a community, an identity, or a previously certain understanding of the world.

Ultimately, deconstruction asks people to distinguish inherited assumptions from convictions they genuinely hold, to confront contradictions rather than automatically explain them away, and to consider whether their religious commitments can withstand honest inquiry. Whether the result is renewed faith, a different religious tradition, uncertainty, or no religious belief at all, the process can represent a significant attempt to live with greater intellectual and personal integrity.

If this topic interests you, check out Bart Ehrman’s free course “Why I am not a Christian.”