Theological Deconstruction Among Young Adults

Anyone who has been awake in youth ministry over the last 10-20 years has heard the alarms being sounded: statistics show that up to 70% of young adults in evangelical churches across our country leave the Church (often for good) after high school graduation. While opinions vary on the accuracy of that statistic, talk to any youth pastor—he’ll confirm that kids often leave the church after graduation, and many don’t come back. Over the last year, I’ve been the youth leader at Woodside Baptist—one of RC’s Recommission Network partners. But for 16 years now, somebody has called me their youth pastor, and I can personally attest to the severity of the problem.

While kids are leaving for multiple reasons, talking with them reveals a common theme: the idea of deconstruction. According to one writer, “Deconstruction is the process of systematically dissecting and often rejecting the beliefs you grew up with. Sometimes the Christian will deconstruct all the way to atheism. Some remain there, but others experience a reconstruction. Either way, the type of faith they end up embracing almost never resembles the Christianity they formerly knew.”

To a younger generation, deconstructing one’s faith is often seen as the intellectual, sophisticated thing to do. People who deconstruct look closely at the faith tenets they grew up with and consider their validity based on personal experience, questioning the convictions they were raised with. It’s a way of “finding oneself” and asking if one’s beliefs line up with the real world.

At the root of the deconstruction movement lie two philosophical ideologies that have rapidly shaped our culture: postmodernism and expressive individualism.

For the Church, the most concerning belief in postmodern philosophy is that truth is subjective—the idea that something can be true in one time and place and untrue later. It’s easy to see, then, how a postmodernist may approach the Bible—viewing the Bible as antiquated and out of touch with contemporary times, and therefore irrelevant.

And if one views truth as subjective—something one invents for oneself—our culture inundates us with ideas that encourage us to search within ourselves for meaning. Truth is found from within—not handed down by a Creator. One writer describes the defining slogans of “expressive individualism” with the popular statements: “You be you / Be true to yourself / Follow your heart / Find yourself.” Such slogans turn us away from traditional, time-honored views of the nature of God and man, arguing that all we need to live a fulfilling life can be found from within. Yet, for most of human history, people looked outside of themselves, perhaps to a God or philosophical system, to understand truth. In our culture today, we look inside ourselves, having rejected the wisdom handed down from virtually all of history.

Together, postmodernism and expressive individualism tell people what they want to hear: anything goes. You are free to follow your feelings and do as you please up until you interfere with another person’s desire to do the same.

To a high schooler setting out for college or into the workforce, a new sense of freedom accompanied by a culture inundating them with this new view on morality is highly alluring. So, young adults begin questioning their Christian upbringing in light of postmodernism and expressive individualism, deconstructing their faith to see if there’s really any faith there at all. Many choose to remain in the space of indifference or “not knowing” as it pertains to faith and live in the dissonance between Christianity and secularism—the religious “none’s” we’ve all heard about.

So, how does the Church respond? What do parents need to do to prepare their kids for cultural aphorisms that, if they buy into them, will leave them bankrupt?

Stay tuned! Over the next few weeks, I'll write about young adults and deconstruction. My aim is to help equip parents to get ahead of issues their kids encounter when they step out on their own. If we can prepare our kids for the freedom and ideas that come with young adulthood, perhaps we can reduce many of the belief crises they experience when they're no longer under our roof. After all, it’s never too late to start discipling our families.