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How To ‘Deconstruct’ And Rebuild Your Christianity Without Losing It

Far from demanding blind faith, the world-altering events at the heart of Christianity actually invite our investigation and lifelong reflection.

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For the past eight years, Nate Hanson served as the host of a podcast called Almost Heretical. The show generated millions of downloads and rose to become one of the most successful “deconstructionist” podcasts on the market. On Wikipedia, it’s listed among the top three podcasts of the “Exvangelical” movement.

According to a 2024 Barna survey, a surprising 37 percent of today’s Christians have to some extent “deconstructed the faith of their youth,” but this process of reassessment doesn’t always translate into a total break from the faith. In Hanson’s case, however, it did. 

Before his involvement with the program, Hanson spent several years in ministry, working closely with Francis Chan to plant churches throughout the San Francisco Bay area. But somewhere along the way, something changed. Burned out, he began having doubts about many of the things he’d grown up believing. He wrestled with the “problem of evil,” how God is presented in the Old Testament, and, with the help of liberal scholars like Bart Ehrman, he eventually lost faith in Jesus’ resurrection.

“I reached a point,” Hanson told me in an email, “where I simply could not make myself believe anymore, and it felt like losing my identity.”

While in ministry, Hanson assumed that serving God full-time would cause him to feel closer to God and more grounded in his faith. His experience, however, was almost the opposite. He felt tired, confused, and unsure of what he even believed.

“I still admired Jesus,” he said. “I still valued the ethics and the community. But I no longer believed the central claim that Jesus had actually risen from the dead.”

Though Hanson notes that deconstruction is often framed as “rebellion, bitterness, or a desire to just tear everything down,” this was never his story. “For me, deconstruction was an honest process driven by a desire to understand. It’s what happens when inherited answers stop working for you.” In some ways, Almost Heretical became a vehicle for Hanson to publicly process his own experience of deconstruction. But as he later discovered, replacing Christianity with a more secular outlook didn’t end up resolving all his questions. In fact, over time, it only generated more.

A little over a year ago, however, something unexpected happened. Though Ehrman had radically transformed his view of the origins of Christianity, Hanson recently revealed that “his explanations started to feel less compelling.” So he decided to dive headfirst into the best scholarship on the other side of the fence. And when he encountered the work of scholars such as Richard Bauckham, Peter J. Williams, Lydia McGrew, John Lennox, and others, he was shocked by what he discovered. After wrestling with their insights, Hanson concluded:

There was far more evidence and reason behind the Christian story, and the life, death, and, yes, resurrection of Jesus, than I had ever been taught or had put together before. It was not one argument that changed everything. It was the cumulative weight of the evidence.

There was far more evidence and reason behind the Christian story, and the life, death, and, yes, resurrection of Jesus, than I had ever been taught or had put together before. It was not one argument that changed everything. It was the cumulative weight of the evidence.

Since I had interviewed all the above scholars on my own podcast, Hanson sent me an email letting me know he had listened to those conversations and that they helped him to “rebuild a thoughtful and reasonable confidence in the Christian story.” When it finally sank in that the faith he left behind was grounded in far more evidence than he had ever realized, he decided to release a video to his followers announcing his return to Christianity:

[T]he more I studied the New Testament historically, the more it read like people doing their best to describe something they believed they had actually witnessed. Not polished myths or abstract theology but accounts rooted in real places, real people, and public events told with the kinds of awkward and inconvenient details you probably wouldn’t invent if you were trying to create a legend. So many details and distances, and elevations, and naming statistics, and so much more that other ancient texts and other religions just don’t have…

[T]he more I studied the New Testament historically, the more it read like people doing their best to describe something they believed they had actually witnessed. Not polished myths or abstract theology but accounts rooted in real places, real people, and public events told with the kinds of awkward and inconvenient details you probably wouldn’t invent if you were trying to create a legend. So many details and distances, and elevations, and naming statistics, and so much more that other ancient texts and other religions just don’t have…

Throughout this process, Hanson continued to explore skeptical explanations as well, but “over time,” he said, they “stopped making the most sense of the data for me.”

Toward the end of his announcement, Hanson explained that, for him, deconstruction “was always trying to get to the core.” When he began his journey eight years ago, he thought this would end up leading him away from Christianity, but once he began deconstructing bad arguments in support of Christianity as well as bad arguments against it, that’s when the lights came on. In fact, Hanson now confidently asserts that deconstruction “led me back” to Christianity.

Hanson also informed his followers that, moving forward, his show would be called Faith Lab. On this new podcast, he’ll spend time talking with scholars and experts who will help him to regain “a version of Christianity that understands faith, not as a blind leap, but as a trust grounded in evidence.” Shortly after this, I was honored to join Hanson and his wife, Shelby, for a discussion of “blind faith” on their first official episode.

“So if you’re still deconstructing, and things are still falling apart for you right now, you’re totally welcome here,” Hanson concluded. “If you’re the person who goes to church every week … but privately you’re carrying doubts, and you don’t feel safe asking them out loud, I see you. … I hope this is a helpful place for you to get more confidence in your trust in the Christian story. And if you’ve been in church your whole life, you know, you’re fully committed, but you’re starting to realize that maybe you don’t have the solid foundations for why you believe this … I’m really glad you’re here, and I’m making this show for you.”

The comments above are worthy of deeper reflection. How can people spend their lives in church without knowing why they believe what they believe? In my opinion, this is due in part to the triumph of Christianity in Western culture. Precisely because of its great success, over the centuries, it became part of our collective mental furniture — something people took for granted. No one needed an argument for Christianity; it was just a religion people were born into.

Tragically, in my own informal polls taken at Christian churches, conferences, and concerts in recent years, too many believers today end up equating faith with their own subjective feelings and personal experiences — the same criteria used by Mormons and people from many other religious backgrounds. Hanson describes his own church experience in similar terms, saying that for most of his life, he primarily “focused on trying to live radically for Jesus,” and never really bothered to examine any of the foundational claims at the heart of Christianity.

Over a century ago, Princeton scholar J. Gresham Machen wisely observed, “There can be no applied Christianity, unless there be ‘a Christianity to apply.’” In other words, if the good news about Jesus (1Cor. 15:1–6) isn’t rooted in something concrete and real, then as Paul says, “our preaching is worthless” (1Cor. 15:14).

Since we now live in a culture that no longer takes the Bible for granted, and in some cases is downright hostile to Christianity, is it any wonder that many people raised in the faith end up deconstructing? When believers are given coffee mug platitudes in response to their important questions, perhaps we should wonder instead why people bother to stay.

After years of deconstruction, Hanson returned to the Christian faith not because of a profound religious experience, a desire to raise positive kids in a negative world, or anything of the sort. No, he regained his faith after becoming convinced that Christianity was and is “a true and reasonable thing” (Acts 26:25). In fact, far from demanding blind faith, the world-altering events at the heart of this ancient movement actually invite our investigation and lifelong reflection (Luke 1:1-4, 1 Thes. 5:21). 

In the end, it appears that Hanson’s eight-year deconstruction project helped him to gain a new appreciation for Christianity’s strong foundation. It wasn’t an end in itself, just the preliminary work that ultimately led to renovation and renewal.

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