Author: Jen Hatmaker

In recent years, terms like “deconstruction of faith” and “religious deconstruction” have become more prominent in spiritual conversations. But what does it mean to deconstruct your faith, and why are so many people drawn to this process? If you’re asking these questions, you’re not alone — you’re actually in very good company.

Deconstruction is not about losing faith; it’s about finding it again in a deeper, more meaningful way. For many, this journey is sparked by a disconnect with traditional religious practices, harmful teachings, or life experiences that shake the foundation of long-held beliefs. It’s not the end of faith, it’s the beginning of something new.

What Does Deconstructing Faith Mean?

At its heart, deconstruction of faith involves critically examining your beliefs, practices, and traditions to discern what feels authentic and what doesn’t. It’s about asking the hard questions, wrestling with doubts, and being honest about what no longer serves you.

This process can feel messy and isolating, but it’s also a deeply liberating act. Remember: You can’t out-wonder or out-wander God’s love. God is never threatened by our questions.

Why Deconstruction Is a Natural Part of Faith

Faith deconstruction is not a modern fad; it’s a natural step in spiritual growth. Historically, religious reformers, mystics, and theologians have gone through similar processes to challenge the status quo and rediscover a richer connection to God.

Here are a few reasons why people embark on this journey:

• Cultural Shifts: Navigating the intersection of faith, politics, and social justice.
• Church Wounds: Healing from experiences of exclusion, judgment, or abuse within religious communities.
• The Bible: Struggling to reconcile contradictions in scripture or outdated interpretations.
• Personal Growth: Feeling the need to evolve spiritually as life circumstances change.

The stages of faith deconstruction often begin with doubt and questioning but lead to reimagining and rebuilding.

Deconstruction and the Bible: A Fresh Perspective

One of the most challenging aspects of religious deconstruction is grappling with the Bible. Many of us grew up seeing scripture as a rigid rulebook, but there is room for a more nuanced approach — honoring it as a source of wisdom rather than a set of ancient instructions to follow word-for-word.

Through the lens of Jesus and the deconstruction of faith, we see a pattern of love-centered, people-focused interpretation. Jesus himself challenged oppressive systems and reframed scripture to prioritize compassion, justice, and liberation. 

Following his example, we can embrace a relationship with the Bible that is dynamic, healing, and life-giving.

Reconstruction: Building a Faith That Heals

While deconstruction focuses on breaking down harmful or outdated beliefs, reconstruction is about building something new. It’s the process of rediscovering your relationship with God, scripture, and community in ways that align with your values and experiences.

Reconstruction includes:

• Naming What You’re For: Instead of just rejecting what no longer works, define the principles, practices, and relationships you want to cultivate.
• Curiosity and Wonder: Embrace the spiritual discipline of curiosity by exploring nature, art, music, and other sources of joy and connection.
• Setting Boundaries: Protect your energy by creating healthy boundaries with people or systems that are not safe for your spiritual growth.
• Practicing Patience: Faith is an evolving process. There’s no rush to find all the answers.

Deconstructing Faith Doesn’t Mean Abandoning It

One of the biggest misconceptions about deconstruction is that it leads to abandoning faith altogether. In reality, many people find that deconstruction strengthens their connection to Jesus and opens the door to a more authentic spirituality.

You may feel like you are in the wilderness during this process, but this is not a sign of failure, it’s an invitation into deeper love and grace.

Practical Steps for Your Faith Journey

If you’re in the midst of deconstruction and reconstruction, here are some actionable steps to navigate this transformative process:

1. Reflect on Your Relationship with the Bible: Instead of reading scripture as a rulebook, explore it as a source of inspiration and context for today’s challenges.
2. Find Community: Seek out safe spaces like Evolving Faith or supportive groups where your questions and doubts are welcomed with grace.
3. Lean Into Curiosity: Let your questions guide you. Unlearning is just as important as relearning.
4. Embrace Healing Resources: Consider therapy or spiritual coaching to process religious trauma or church wounds.
5. Take Your Time: There’s no timeline for this journey. Allow yourself the space to explore without pressure.

Faith Deconstruction: A Path Toward Wholeness

Whether you’re rethinking scripture, questioning church traditions, or redefining your relationship with Jesus, the process of faith deconstruction can be both challenging and transformative. It’s a journey marked by grief, discovery, and, ultimately, renewal.

Remember: You are loved, no matter where you are on your spiritual path. There’s no wrong way to seek truth, and every step of your journey is valuable.

If you are on this journey and need a friend to walk with, explore my Me Course on Faith Deconstruction & Reconstruction with special guest, Sarah Bessey. This is an on-demand, guided course that will tenderly take you by the hand as you walk through this process. If you’ve been wondering, “What does it mean to deconstruct your faith?”, take heart: this process is not about losing God but discovering God anew — in ways that feel real, liberating, and life-giving.

Additional Resources

• Read books like How the Bible Actually Works by Pete Enns.
• Follow podcasts that normalize questioning and curiosity in faith. Check out this podcast episode I did with Sarah Bessey on deconstruction
  
• Is the Church Dead? A Millennial’s Perspective on Religion with Casper Ter Kuile.

Ask any member of my original family and they will tell you: I was the can’t-freaking-wait-until-Christmas kid.

I was all Christmas cheer, zero Grinch. I am not kidding. In my 20s, visiting home for Christmas, I would still wake every single person up on December 25th by 6:00 a.m. — including my own toddlers.

Growing up, my dad would make us wait for gifts until he read the Bethlehem story from the Bible, and listen, I love Baby Jesus, I do, but no man has ever read slower in the history of literacy than my dad, Larry King, slogging his way through Luke 2 at 6:13 a.m. on Christmas morn. Make it stop, Holy Spirit. 

When I was in sixth grade, I literally could not take the anticipation, and one night in mid-December under the cover of darkness, I carefully opened every single present of mine while my parents slept peacefully in their bed, assuming their square firstborn would never break rules (surprise, Larry and Jana! Your own personal Buddy the Elf committed a Christmas crime). I split the tape on one end with a steak knife, slid each box out of the wrapping with the precision of a surgeon, opened the present without messing up the interior tissue paper, and slid it back and re-taped it. Every. Single. Present. 

Unfortunately, it utterly ruined Christmas 1985 because I had nothing to look forward to and had to fake surprise. (I would tell my kids this story every year as a cautionary tale, which never stopped them from snooping once. If they want to ruin their own Christmas, it wasn’t because I didn’t warn them of my errant lawlessness.)

That year, I learned that anticipation is part of what makes the day beautiful. 

I didn’t grow up knowing what Advent meant. I’m not even sure I heard that word until I was an adult. Do not get me wrong: My family was all in on Christmas. In our Baptist church world, we had the Christmas cantata, the handbell choir, the children’s program, the Living Christmas Tree, the Bethlehem drama, O Holy Night by the uncontested soprano soloist, the one who always got the big songs (tip of the hat to Erin Wright!). So we handed all of December programming to Baby Jesus for sure, but it was only later I learned the word “Advent.”

Between definition and synonyms, Advent basically means: anticipating, coming, a new beginning, expecting, preparing, hoping, waiting. In different forms, it is like a child counting down the days until her birthday, the senior wild with readiness for graduation, the bride attending to final details the month before her wedding, the woman measuring life in weeks in her third trimester. Something big and important and wonderful is coming. There are preparations to be made, room to be cleared, hearts to be readied, because this big, important, wonderful thing will be the start of something new, something immensely desired, tremendously awaited for. It is the fulfillment of a great hope. 

With crazy anticipation, the special thing is finally coming. 

Advent starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas (December 1st this year in 2024) and ends on Christmas Eve. The church in Europe began celebrating four weeks of Advent somewhere in the fifth century, and mainline churches in the west use it as the beginning of the liturgical calendar. There are tons of practices and rituals associated with Advent that vary across traditions, denominations, and regions. Without a singular narrative, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned and why Advent means something special to me. 

As clearly demonstrated, anticipation is a very familiar emotion to me. How precious something impending feels dictates the level of excitement leading up to it. No one has to teach us how expectancy feels in our bodies: the giddiness, the hope, the can’t-freaking-waitness of it all. Which, in its origin story, takes us back to Israel all those years ago. Every generation was waiting for Jesus. His birth had been foretold by every family to each young set of ears. Jesus was coming, and he would be special. His arrival meant freedom; not that ancient hearers understood what kind of freedom He would bring, but the anticipation was all the same. 

I have always felt impossibly tender about Jesus’ birth story. I just can’t take it. The young unwed mother, the simple family, the baby born in a stable, the announcement only to shepherds, the outrageous ordinary placement of a king. This is how He came. What could ever be more precious than this? Like my friend Amy told me years ago: “I can’t believe that is how he did it.” 

I’ll be honest, if Jesus was born in the palace and his freedom enacted through positional power, that wouldn’t qualify as good news to me at all. The closer most leaders get to power, the further from the margins they become. Power protects power, power begets power, and power reinforces power. It is hierarchical in nature, vulnerable to corruption, self-protective at best and others-destructive at worst. Governmental power has been the source of suffering and misery for millennia. It is predictable and disappointing, and the greatest news about Jesus’ birth is that it happened in a barn.  

My all-time favorite sermon on Jesus’ birth story was by Charles Spurgeon in 1862: 

“By being in a manger he was declared to be the king of the poor…it is not a Caesar that is born today; he will never trample down our fields with his armies, or slaughter our flocks for his courtiers, he will be the poor man’s friend, the people’s monarch…In thus being laid in a manger, he did, as it were, give an invitation to the most humble to come to him. We might tremble to approach a throne, but we cannot fear to approach a manger. 

Never could there be a being more approachable than Christ. No rough guards pushed poor petitioners away; no array of officious friends were allowed to keep off the importunate widow or the man who clamored that his son might be made whole. The hem of his garment was always trailing where sick folk could reach it, and he himself had a hand always ready to touch the disease, an ear to catch the faintest accents of misery, a soul going forth everywhere in rays of mercy.”

“A soul going forth everywhere in rays of mercy.” This was who Jesus was and this is how He came, and this is why we look forward to the beginning of the story every year. Advent turns our eyes to the most subversive plot twist ever conceived. It is never not magnificent. It never gets old. It never leaves out the humble or excludes the poor. It never shifts into something shinier or fancier, no matter how many watching eyes are on it during this time of year. This story has no nefarious agenda once it reaches a popularity quota. It remains stubbornly anti-establishment and unwaveringly pro-justice. Jesus was, as foretold, good news for the poor, which as it turns out, is all of us. 

The way He came is everything. There was no other way for the story to begin. Everything about Jesus was authentic and true. He didn’t bookend his life with auspicious privileges; he was born in a manger and died on a cross. Jesus was altogether good, exactly who he claimed to be, proved to be, and is to this day. 

Advent remembers the beginning and helps us thrill yet again that this is how He did it. We gently close our eyes to the chaos and frenzy this month has become, and we let our minds wander back to that dark night in Bethlehem, the laboring young mother, the straw under her back, the baby’s arrival to us; Jesus, Lord at thy birth. We approach the manger because all are welcome there.  With adoration, we welcome hope as it enters the story. He came for us.

I invite you to watch my quick five-minute-ish “church” sessions each week on the pillars of Advent. I hope they bring you hope, peace, joy, and love — even amidst any noise, worry, sorrow, chaos we may be feeling.