(RNS) — On our podcast “Saved by the City,” launched back in 2021, my co-host Roxanne Stone and I had a lot to say about our evangelical Christian upbringings. We critiqued teachings we had heard growing up about purity and gender, and laughed about our teenage selves feeling compelled to prevent the goth kids in our youth group from going to hell.
Our memories, and our process, which in evangelical circles is known as “deconstruction,” struck a chord. An early episode, “How We Survived the Great Evangelical Betrayal,” which was one of our most popular, covered the disorientation and sadness we felt on seeing much of the U.S. evangelical movement embrace a political leader who embodies the opposite of what we had been taught about Christianity. We interviewed popular former evangelicals who were deconstructing, some still within the faith, some beyond it.
But after a season or two, Roxy and I realized we didn’t want to be another “deconstruction podcast.”
First, that’s a crowded market. According to a 2024 Barna survey, 2 in 5 American Christians say they have deconstructed, and to serve them there are deconstruction podcasts for every niche interest: politics, gender, race, theology, youth group culture and more. (Here are two lists of deconstruction or deconstruction-adjacent podcasts.) It sometimes seems as if for every media option tailored to mainstream evangelicals — about the Bible, marriage and family, leadership or an overt or covert social and political conservatism — five others examine or reject aspects of that world.
Beyond the gaze of the algorithm, deconstruction is a personal, often painful, process of re-examining elements of Christian teaching and upbringing. The process leads different people to different relationships with the faith. Some leave one church or denomination for another; some leave the institutional church altogether but still love Jesus and (although usually with a more complicated love) the Bible; and some move into a post-Christian spirituality.
In the past few years, though, deconstruction has become more than a personal process: it’s a brand. In a crowded digital media market, it’s a way for content creators to identify their niche and reach a growing audience. Look up the hashtags #deconstruction or #exvangelical, and you’ll get a feel for what I’m trying to describe.
In 2020, in a highly popular episode of their video-recorded podcast, “Ear Biscuits,” Rhett and Link (Rhett MacLaughlin and Charles ‘Link’ Neal) shared their stories of leaving Christianity. This February, they shared a five-year update.
When I say “brand,” I don’t mean to say that people writing or talking about deconstruction haven’t genuinely done the work. Many of them have, at great cost. Nor am I saying that people working in this world are only or primarily in it for a platform boost and financial gain.
But I am saying that internet culture and consumer culture undeniably shape, and misshape, how religion and spirituality are practiced today. Just as evangelicalism has become a brand — a media matrix of books, podcasts, conferences and TikTok reels meant to be consumed to provide clear answers or shore up a consumer’s evangelical identity — so has much of the exvangelical world.
Daniel Vaca, a religious historian at Brown, wrote a great book on this, called “Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America,” that I found helpful for my own book on celebrity. “Evangelicalism exemplifies what I describe as ‘commercial religion,’” he writes. “Religion that takes shape through the ideas, activities, and strategies that typify commercial capitalism.”
That is, one way we can understand evangelicalism is as a consumer marketplace. One way evangelicals practice faith is through buying, selling and consuming content tailored to their felt needs.
In this way, it seems to me that the deconstruction world is at risk of becoming like the very thing it’s rejecting. The content may be different, but in many cases, the form — easy, and easily shareable, answers from experts (some credentialed, others less so) — remain the same.
When genuine faith experiences are translated into the world of hashtags, search engine optimization and soundbites, it can cheapen the experience of deconstruction, or any spiritual pursuit. Writing starts to sound like marketing copy. And for those of us who care about good writing and thinking, we might start seeing ourselves rely on shorthands and easy answers — because they “work” to retain an audience in a crowded space.
Let’s say a MAGA-fried (a term I just came up with) pastor somewhere outside Dallas posts a video saying something awful about immigrants or trans people, and the responses start coming in:
The Bible doesn’t justify hate.
Jesus identified with the powerless, not the power-hungry.
If your faith causes you to hate your neighbor, you’re doing it wrong.
Jesus was a Jewish socialist from Palestine.
And so on.
It’s not that these statements aren’t true (although the Jesus-was-basically-Bernie-Sanders one feels like a stretch to me), but their slogan-y form saps the statements of their power.
This feels like years ago now, but the night in June when we learned that the U.S. military had deployed strikes on three nuclear sites in Iran and that the country may be going to war — a night of great uncertainty and fear for many — someone I follow on X shared a link to T-shirts and other wares that feature a slogan about peace. And while the slogan was true, and while the proceeds go to a peace-building organization and not to the creator, my first thought that night was, Too soon.
There should be moments, and experiences, that are off-limits to quickly produced Internet content. Yes, we do need people speaking truth to power and calling out unrighteousness in high places and pointing out the hypocrisy of religious leaders. We need people naming the ways that bad teaching has harmed precious image bearers and created a mockery of the Christian faith.
We also need people who can be still and silent, who know when to speak and when to listen, who are working out their relationship to faith first and foremost in embodied relationship, in communities that both name the problems of evangelicalism and also work toward healing from them.
I say none of this to undermine the essential goal of deconstruction writers or other content creators. I believe the majority are out there sharing content because they have experienced something painful and want others to know that they are not alone in their pain — that there is another, better and more faithful way to relate to Jesus or to God. The miracle (and also curse) of the internet is that it lets us connect with people we never could have in person.
But it’s also the logic of the internet to turn these good things into something to buy and sell as individual consumers.
The evangelical movement of my upbringing ran on slogan speak:
“What Would Jesus Do?”
“God doesn’t call the equipped, he equips the called.”
“Love the sinner, hate the sin.”
“We went to serve, but we received so much more.”
“I’m in a season …” (okay I still use this one; it’s helpful!)
“Amy Grant’s cross-over album is causing my teen daughter to backslide.”
Many of us gag on these Christianese phrases because they take something profound and reduce it to something cutesy, banal and “insider.” If the deconstruction movement merely mimics this tendency, it’s not building beyond the evangelical movement but continues to live within it.