What does it mean to say that someone is deconstructing their faith? Can that be a good thing, or is it the first step in someone eventually abandoning their faith? How do you help someone to re-examine their faith in a constructive way? Join us as Scott interviews his co-host Sean McDowell and his co-author Dr. John Marriott, of the new book, Set Adrift.


Dr. John Marriott serves at Biola University as the Research and Program Coordinator for the Biola University Center for Christian Thought and teaches in the Department of Philosophy. A former pastor, he holds a Ph.D. degree from The Cook School of Intercultural Studies. His dissertation focused on deconversion from Christianity to atheism.

He is the author of five books on deconversion, A Recipe For Disaster: How the Church Contributes to the Deconversion Crisis (Wipf & Stock, 2018), The Anatomy of Deconversion: Keys to a Lifelong Faith in a Culture Abandoning Christianity (ACUP, 2021), Going... Going... Gone..! Why Believers Lose Their Faith and What Can be Done to Guard Against it (Renaissance Publishers, 2020), Before You Go: Uncovering Hidden Factors in Faith Loss (Leafwood Publishers, 2022) in addition to his new one, Set Adrift.



Episode Transcript

Scott Rae: What does it mean to say that someone is deconstructing their faith? Can that be a good thing? Or is it the first step towards someone eventually abandoning their faith? How do you help someone re-examine their faith, but to do it in a constructive way? I'm gonna answer these questions and more with my co-host, Sean McDowell, whose co-author, Dr. John Marriott, of a new book called, “Set Adrift.” I'm your host, Scott Rae, and this is Think Biblically from Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. So, Sean, you're sort of my guest today.

Sean McDowell: Yeah, this is kind of fun.

Scott: This will be great. I need to put you on the hot seat like I don't always get to do.

Sean: Well, when you said host, I almost jumped in and said, "and co-host.” I had to restrain myself.

Scott: Appreciate you doing that. Sean, welcome, great to have you with us. Sean’s been a colleague at Talbot for many, many years. He's taught apologetics in our philosophy program for a long time, and taught Church Society for me on several occasions. The author of five books on this subject of people deconstructing their faith. So, Sean, why don't you start with you? Why did you and John set out to write this book and why is this issue so important to you?

Sean: Well, I gotta give John the credit for the idea for this book. He's written four other books on deconstruction that I've read and we've talked about. On deconstruction and deconversion I consider him the expert. He's done a lot of the hard work, five, six, seven years just researching this as a scholar.

Scott: So, you're just writing his coattails.

Sean: Well, yeah, there you go. That's one way to look at it. [all laugh] He said, "I got this idea for kind of a popular level book. "There's not one written in this lane for young Christians." So, probably on the younger end would be high school, but even in a college and maybe young adults who want to stay with their Christian faith, but have doubts, but have questions, are just not sure how to navigate owning their faith, so to speak, in this deconstruction space. And having gone through that in my life—now I wouldn't have used the word deconstruction at that point because people weren't describing it that way. But, especially even here as a student at Biola, going through a real period of questioning and coming across atheists online and having a conversation with my Dad about how I'm not even sure if I believe this or not, and then just questioning things. And a lot of people like professors here, William Lane Craig and JP Moreland and yourself, were just huge in my faith journey. Basically, it's the book I wish somebody could have handed to me when I was questioning and said, read this.

Scott: So, I think this is really helpful for our viewers to hear this, that you had a pretty significant period when you were a college student where you called into question a lot of things and you had a lot of conversation with your dad about this. And your dad, I think, was really helpful in how he approached you on this.

Sean: Oh yeah, and my dad, I'm sure a lot of people understand, is one of the most influential apologists in the past half century. The tagline on his ministry is “telling the world the truth.” And so, we had a conversation. I was like, "Dad, I'm just not sure I'm convinced this is true." I didn't want to chuck my Christian faith, but I had to know how to navigate emotional questions, relational questions, intellectual questions. And his response was gold. His response, he didn't freak out. He just said, "I love you no matter what. It's good that you're asking these questions. Seek after truth." And just gave me the kind of space that I needed. And in a sense, John and I kind of frame this book in the sense that we've had so many conversations with other young people. We invite them to kind of allow us to just speak from our experience, from our research and our wisdom here, to guide you through this process in the way my dad and others did for me. And you have a story. It's similar.

Scott: Yeah, you've got your own account of this that happened around the same general time period, right?

Dr. John Marriot: Yeah. It was around the same time as Sean's. And it really makes me think that, you know, sometimes Christian kids need to get saved. And I use that term in quotes about three times. I got saved when I was about five or six years old. And I think I really believed it. I think I was really born again at that point in time. But when I was 14 years old, I went to a Bible camp and I heard the preacher there say, you know, God has no grandchildren and you need to make your faith your own. You can't just believe it because of your parents. So I did the, you know, the classic, I think it was probably a classic 1980’s move, of rededication. I rededicated my life because I wanted to make it mine. I didn't want it to just be my parents. But then at about, you know, my early 20s, I looked back and said, so I rededicated, but do I actually think that this is true? Once you get a little bit of experience out in the world and you start to realize that maybe the things that you've believed don't always line up with the experience of life. And there were a number of things that happened in my life that caused me to say, I've been committed to this for a really long time, but I committed to it well before I asked if it was really true, and then what's the content of this body of truth that I'm supposed to affirm? And it was going through some of those difficult experiences that caused me to sort of pull back and say, all right, what is it that I think is true? And, if I'm going to be a Christian, what do I think that real Christianity is supposed to look like?

Scott: All right. So, let's sort of put the backstory aside for the moment and let's talk about what we mean by the term deconstruction, because that's kind of a new term that's been used to describe, I think, Sean, what you, what you refer to as just this sort of general re-examining the contours of your faith. So what, what do you mean by that technical term deconstructing your faith? And maybe, maybe it'd be helpful for our viewers too, for you to clarify what you don't mean by that.

John: Yes, and I appreciate the question. This is a really, really important question. I mean, for the overall discussion that's going on in culture and within the evangelical church and specifically for the book. So, Sean and I really want to be clear that when we talk about deconstructing, we're not talking about it in the term, in the way that it comes out of a French postmodern philosophy. That term has been kind of co-opted and now it's become very loose—

Scott: Okay, just so our viewers understand what you mean by that, just spell out a little bit the whole, you know, the postmodern sense of what deconstruction is.

John: Sure. So, the term traces itself back to a French philosopher by the name of Jacques Derrida. Derrida, for some ethical reasons and concerns that he had with illegitimate authority, wanted to show that when it comes to one true interpretation of a story about the world, or particularly about texts, that there really is no clear one interpretation that out-rules all the others and then forces all those out to those other interpretations out to be marginalized and disenfranchised. And he went about deconstructing texts by reading them closely and trying to show that there were seeds of inconsistencies and contradictions in the text. And if you can uproot the assumption that you can determine the actual meaning of a text, that opens it up to a play of possible interpretations and you have to let people hold their own interpretation, whether that's a text or that's a gender identity, whatever that is.

Scott: So, it calls the whole concept of truth into question.

John: The entire concept is in question, correct. And so, that's what Derrida was doing. When young people use the term today, and this is why Sean and I chose to use the term deconstruct, they're not using it in that kind of technical way. It's really lost that technical edge. What most of them are saying, or at least the ones that we wrote the book for, are those who say, "I do want to be a follower of Jesus. I do think that it's true, but I'm not really quite sure about what the way of Jesus is supposed to look like anymore because I have lots of questions about what I see going around me and maybe in my church environment." Those are the people that we're talking to. And when we talk about deconstruction, what we mean is kind of a critical reexamination of the faith that you've been passed on and asking whether it lines up with the text of the Bible. So taking it apart, taking a look at it and seeing whether or not it's faithful to what the Bible teaches and then reassembling it in a way that matches what you think the Bible says a follower of Jesus should be living and what they should be believing.

Sean: And you can almost say it's two words like destroy and reconstruct. It's to break down and build back up. So oftentimes “deconstruct” is purely just negative breaking down and sometimes that happens. We’re framing it in the way that John did, that it's re-examining, it's reconsidering, but we're constructing something on solid ground, so to speak.

Scott: Okay. And I could see where part of the concern would be that if students or young adults don't have someone helpful to guide them in this, it could end up being entirely destructive, which is something we wanted to avoid. So, Sean, think about your own experience too on this one. Why do young college students, young adults, why do they enter into this phase of deconstruction in the first place?

Sean: Luke 2:52 says, "Jesus grew in wisdom and in strength, favored with God and in favor with man. He grew intellectually, physically, spiritually, and relationally. He was a whole being that was multifaceted." That's absolutely true for us. Now, I bring that up because we tend to think when somebody starts to lose their faith or enters into a deconstruction period, that it's just intellectual, they just have questions. That's a piece of it, that can trigger it, sometimes that can be a large piece of it. But there's also sometimes emotional hurt that takes place for so many people that enter into a period of deconstruction, if you just probe deeply enough, you're gonna find disillusionment with the church, you're gonna find a broken relationship with the leader, you'll find things like legalism are so frequent, you'll just find so many other factors. So the bottom line is it can be relational, it can be emotional, it can be moral. I mean, I had a young man tell me to my face, he basically left the faith that he grew up in because he wanted to go to college and just have fun for a while and be really free and join a fraternity. He told me straight up, I said, "Okay, so he wasn't just deconstructing his faith, he had gone to the place of rejecting it, but what started it for him was these moral questions." Now he came at me with all these intellectual questions, and as I probed enough, I realized there's a story beneath the story. So, I think one of the great values in this book is that some people don't really even realize why they've entered into a period of deconstruction. I don't think I realized it really at the time what was going on. There were pieces of my identity, pieces of my future, my relationship with my father, and there were deep intellectual questions that I was asking. Now I look back and I see that, so I'm trying to help young people say there could be a relationship piece that's at play here, there could be some emotional hurt, it could be intellectual, it could be moral. That's the approach we're trying to take to help young people think through and deconstruct well.

Scott: I don't know if you can put a number to this or a percentage to this, but in your experience, both of you guys dealing with students and young adults, how much of what motivates this deconstruction is intellectual and how much of it is experiential?

Sean: If I had to guess, I would say probably 75% experiential off the top of my head, certainly well more than half. That's not to say the intellectual questions aren't important. No, sometimes the intellectual questions trigger it and they overlap it, but in almost every case. There's a proverb that talks about how the wise person plumbs the depths of a person's heart. that helps to go deep into the well. Every single conversation I've had, if I probe far enough, there's something else going on driving this. What's your experience?

John: Oh yeah, you know, my area of interest is deconversion. So, not just people rethinking their faith, but people just rejecting their faith. And one of the books that I wrote was, "Before You Go," discovering the hidden factors in faith loss, which was when I listen to enough people tell their stories and read hundreds of narratives, there's always the same reason why they say, I don't believe anymore. And it's because it's not true, but how they get there, there's a certain percentage of people for whom it's intellectual, but the vast majority, it will be experiential, it will be values, it will be expectations and assumptions about God, Him not living up to those. And sometimes it's just straight up the heart. And intellectual reasons will often be the caboose, not the engine on those. Now, as Sean said, there are some people who say, "Mine started and I have serious problems with just, "I think that there's some real intellectual issues here." But the vast majority of people that I encounter who are going through a loss of faith, and I think the people who are rethinking their faith, the catalyst was probably something other than just pure intellect.

Scott: So, you used the term deconversion to describe a lot of the work that you've been involved in. And I think a lot of people equate deconstruction and deconversion. And I think the fear is that when some people enter this process of deconstruction, it will inevitably and sort of necessarily lead to a deconversion. But I take it that's not true. And if not, if that's not true, then what are the possible outcomes for somebody who deconstructs their faith, where along the continuum do people tend to end up?

John: Sure, and that's a great question. I think the answer, the very simple answer to the question is what is the state of your heart at the beginning of the deconstruction? If you're looking for a way to rationalize something that you want to believe, if you're looking for a way to rationalize why Christianity is not true, then you will deconstruct right into a deconversion or you will deconstruct into some sort of version of Christianity that does not look like historic Orthodox Christianity, but maybe looks a lot more like the culture around it. If your intent is to sincerely follow Jesus and really rethink in a way your faith so that you can align it with his Lordship, then I think that deconstruction can be very productive. And so I think that it can end in a more mature faith, a faith that's more one's own, that they can really identify with and say, this is why I really believe this, I've really thought through this. I don't believe it just because my parents or my church taught it to me. In fact, I've changed my views on some of those things. I think that it can end in a, almost a heretical kind of faith where you are willing to compromise and compromise and move and can—

Scott: Pick and choose.

John: Yes, a salad bar approach to the faith. But I think that doesn't necessarily have to be the case, but it will always be determined, I think, by the set of the saw. You set your circular saw on an angle and it will go on that angle and get across to the other side of the table based on the destination already determined by the start.

Scott: I wonder if there's a fourth outcome in this that people decide after going through this process that they still believe, but just their faith is just not that important to them. They just don't do, they just don't do anything with it. What do you think about that?

John: Yeah, and I think that the term that we often use for those are the "dones." The people who say, "You know, I'm spiritual."

Scott: Not a none, but a done.

John: Yes, not a none, but a done. I'm done with the religious aspect of it. I still mentally affirm it. I think it's generally true, but I really don't have much use for being involved in a church and being committed to that, the bureaucracy, all of that. It's like you said, it's not that important to me. So, I might affirm it, But much more than that, I'm not going to go–

Scott: I wouldn't call that a lost faith or a radical faith, but I wouldn't call it a renewed faith either.

John: No, and it just, it might not be any faith at all.

Scott: Yeah. That may be true. Okay. So, we're all parents. I suspect at some point our kids may ask us, you know, some of these tough questions about our experience, and about how we reconciled some hard things that they're wrestling with. But, we've all known several sets of parents whose kids start down this deconstructing road. And it's like, they're just on this roller coaster, that's a white knuckle ride. And it's all you can do to keep mom and dad from flipping out, feeling like dismal failures that, you know, the most important thing they could do with their kids they failed at. How do you keep parents from just flipping out when their kids start going down this road?

Sean: One of the wisest things I learned from my dad is he had mentally prepared ahead of time all the scenarios he could think of that myself and my three sisters might say to him and how he would respond. So if one of my sisters said, "Dad, I'm pregnant." If I said, "Dad, I'm dropping out of school, I'm smoking pot," whatever scenario you can think of. And so what that does is that gives you confidence to answer well, because if we don't prepare ahead of time, all that weight on us, we're just gonna say stuff we regret, we're gonna respond in the flesh, probably instead of the Spirit. So thinking through ahead of time. So, I've thought through in my mind, if my son said to me, similarly as I did to my dad, he said, "Dad, I just, I don't know that I believe this. I don't think I'm a Christian anymore.” How would I respond to that? And I've practiced that, I've had it in my mind. So the first thing is to prepare ahead of time. The second thing that's hard for parents, especially where we live in Orange County, is to just realize and separate our kids' success and lives from our job as a parent. You can be a great, perfect parent—whatever that means—and your kids can walk away. And your data shows that that happens sometimes. You can be a less than average parent, and sometimes your kids will just fall in love with the Lord. Now there's correlations and connections here, but we've gotta be able to separate ourselves, that it's not about us. How are people gonna view me? What are they gonna say about me?

Scott: It is a little bit narcissistic, isn't it?

Sean: It is, but that's our default position. I remember I asked my dad when he was doing the Why Wait campaign, he was probably the most recognizable Christian in the world speaking out for sexual purity. Said, "What would happen if I got a girl pregnant?" And he goes, "I don't care what the world would say. You and I would work it through together.” And I thought, wow, like he's able to separate himself. Now, I realize that's easier said than done. Number one, prepare. Number two, is to just separate and focus on what is best for this kid. And then three, I would just lean into the relationship, lean into the relationship. A good friend of mine has a daughter–a good friend of ours, he's an outspoken Christian leader—and his daughter has essentially rejected the faith. And he said, "Sean, the switch came for me when I realized I didn't have to convince her of a position. I had to convince her of my love.” He said, “I'm in this for the long haul, and I'm gonna lean in and build this relationship and trust that God cares more about the outcome of my child than even you or I do.” That would be my encouragement to parents.

Scott: One of the things that some friends of ours shared with us was that when you raise kids in Christian homes, there's a dynamic that takes place that doesn't exist for kids that come out of homes that are not particularly spiritually oriented. So, in my family, when I came to faith my folks were, I think, nominally Presbyterian. We went to church, but the first time I heard the gospel was when I was in high school and young life and kind of coming to faith and my siblings and sister also came to faith shortly after that, my folks later on. But coming to faith was my way of separating myself and sort of forming, you know, my own sort of distinct identity from my, from my parents. And, we've all had teenagers, it's not something that they do particularly gracefully, but neither do we when parenting teenagers too. But I wonder sometimes if raising kids in overtly and distinctly Christian homes, we remove that opportunity for them to separate themselves from us by nurturing their faith, because that's so much a part of who we are. What, what do you, what do you make of that? And how does that contribute to this conversation?

John: You know, I think that it's really relevant. When I think of people who have left their faith, one of the things I discovered is that there's a term that psychologists use called a false self and the false self is not an immoral self. It's not like someone is projecting a false self. It's just that as children grow, they want to please parents and they want to please their authority figures and so they will naturally adopt the beliefs around them and they're passionately convinced of them until they get to a point in life when they come of age, They mature intellectually and morally and socially and they start to say, but is this really who I am? And it's very hard for parents to say, how could my child who looked a certain way and believed all of these things and affirmed all of the things that I affirmed and were pretty passionate about it. Now, it looks as though they're just letting all of those things go. And partially it's because of exactly what you've just said. We've tried to do a really good job in nurturing them and bringing them up in this environment, but there's going to come a point in time when they are going to have to kind of figure out, but is this really who I am? And part of the deconstruction process, I think, is exactly that.

Sean: If I can add one thing to that, this is really interesting is that, in a lot of my conversations with people who have left the faith, you find a huge segment that have a very fundamentalist, controlling, legalistic background. And what happens is the parents control, you can't watch “the Smurfs.” I've literally heard that so many times. You can't listen to this music. You can't dress this way. They feel like their parents are controlling everything, but what they can't control is what they believe. So not believing is an act of identity, it's an act of separation, it's an act of rebellion, which is why, again, my dad always said to me, he said rules without relationships leads to rebellion. So, you've got to have rules as a parent. Number one, you have to die on the right hills, but if there's a relationship that is there, then it's a lot easier to separate in a healthy manner than in an unhealthy manner.

Scott: Yeah, I think some of the insight that this couple gave to my wife and I has been really helpful in keeping us from flipping out when our kids start asking some of those questions.

Sean: Yeah.

Scott: So John, you've walked with a lot of students through this. You've walked with a lot of young adults. You've read a lot of testimony. I mean, this was your kind of life's research for a long time. What is it like walking with students through this and how do we help them do this? Well, maybe the thing that'll trigger that is what kinds of things are you especially careful to avoid, right. To help them with that.

John: Right. I think the first thing that we want to do is avoid overreacting. I think—

Scott: Like don't flip out.

John: Yes, and I think that's really hard to do. My daughter told me last year, she said, "Dad, I don't think I believe in heaven." And everything in me, and this is right before she's going to bed, and everything in me wanted to jump on that and give her reasons why and confirm that, "Okay, you're okay, you do believe in heaven." But I took a deep breath—

Scott: But that's for your benefit.

John: It's totally for my benefit, that's right. That's right, and so we don't wanna overreact when we hear these things. The second thing I think that we wanna do is I think we wanna listen really well and ask questions again, not for our benefit, but for their benefit. And not questions that will say, not questions like, well, have you thought about this and have you thought about that? But questions such as, are you in a settled place at this point? Are you still in process? Are you interested in having others be part of this discussion? And that's so that they feel heard that you understand where they're coming from because you don't wanna jump in and start addressing issues that they're not really dealing with.

Scott: And they may not believe it when you say this, but I think it would be important to say, to preface your question, this is a no judgment question.

John: Yes.

Scott: And I suspect you might have to say that over and over again and mean it by not flipping out when they don't give you the answer that you're hoping for.

John: Yeah.

Sean: Oh, I think that's exactly how to respond. Listen, don't freak out, ask questions. And I think what this modeled was, are you settled? Are you not settled? In other words, I just wanna be a part of a conversation. How old did you say your daughter was? Did you say seven? Did I hear that right?

John: 11.

Sean: Okay, 11. You're hoping to have conversations with her for decades to come.

John: That's right. This is a long game you're in here.

Sean: That's exactly. So, the way you respond now is setting you up for when she's 21 and 31 and beyond.

John: Yes, you wanna stay in the conversation. That's what I think the ultimate goal is. And then the next thing I think that you need to do is exactly what your dad did, is to say, all right, so I've heard what you had to say, and here's what you need to hear from me, is that regardless of where you land on all of these questions, I will still love you, or I will still be your friend. I'm not going to reject you or cast you aside because you may be on the fringe of my tribe or not even part of my tribe anymore. And that is incredibly important for people to hear because I've heard so many people tell me the stories of how when they finally came out and told their family or friends that they didn't think—

Scott: They distanced.

John: And some of them distance in just a really angry, mean, aggressive way. And that was the last thing that they needed to hear.

Scott: Yeah, that's probably proof positive that it's more about the parents than about the kids.

John: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott: So, Sean, here's, I think, sometimes there are intellectual issues.

Sean: There are.

Scott: And there are, in particular, there are certain biblical doctrines and some passages of scripture that some folks who are in this deconstruction process, just they're just stuck with, and they're having trouble choking them down and they just can't get past them. I had a really close friend in high school who could not get past the idea of predestination. And it shipwrecked his faith. And I talked to him years later and he was still stuck on it. So, how do you help people work through, maybe doctrine of hell, maybe some of the passages that seem to suggest that God commanded genocide, some of the moral issues related to the character of God, things like that. How do you help them walk through those? Those are, I think, maybe some of the most challenging intellectual issues that come up.

Sean: So, I had a Biola student just a couple of weeks ago contact me, wasn't in my class that I teach, and just said, "I've got some questions. Would it be okay if I meet with you?" I said, "Sure, come by office hours." And we chatted and raised a handful of these issues. And whenever a student asks questions like this, I just want to know where they're coming from. How long have you been thinking about these issues? How much does this issue bother you? If you had to give an answer as a Christian that you think someone at Biola would hold, what answer would you give? Do you find that satisfying? I said, I'm gonna tell you, but I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from and how you make sense of this. That's number one. Number two is difficult passage. I said, "Okay, what if we couldn't answer this? What follows?" In her case, it was an apparent contradiction that she thought was in the Bible. I said, "If we couldn't answer this and there's really a contradiction, does that mean Christianity is false?" She kind of paused. I said, "I wouldn't chuck my faith if there was a contradiction." I said, "Now, I'd have to rethink certain things. Is the Bible the inspired, inerrant Word of God? And what does that mean? Can God allow heirs? Does he communicate with heirs?” I wouldn't chuck my faith if there was a contradiction. In fact, I don't even think a contradiction would mean a book is unreliable, generally speaking. That doesn't necessarily fall, depending on the nature of the contradiction and how many there are. I said, what would cause me to chuck my faith is if we found the body of Jesus, if the Trinity really was incoherent, if Jesus didn't live. There are certain essentials, and the Bible having a contradiction or not is not what I would consider an essential. And she just paused and it was like a relief to her. And she's like, I've never even thought about that. I said, okay, now with that said.

Scott: So, she's got one contradiction and game over.

Sean: Well, yeah, like this is what happens to a lot of different leaders. Their faith gets shipwrecked on secondary issues. And so trying to just, bottom line, trying to put it in perspective for students is what I do. And second, I said, okay, let's go to the context. What options do we have? Lay out different options and let's start to look at it. We could do that with hell. We could do that with genocide. Obviously not going to do that here, but there's a range of different positions people can take and why. And also given her permission, it's okay to wrestle with this. It's okay to live in a little bit of tension. And then I'll also say, so what's the alternative? If you give this up, what worldview better explains reality as a whole than Christianity, even if with Christianity, you have a few questions. So, I found, bottom line, when students come, I've just got to reframe it for them. I've got to calm them down. I've got to give them some basic tools. And for most students, that's sufficient, unless there's something deeper going on, I want to probe and find what that is.

Scott: So, John, let me follow up on this a bit. In the book, when you discuss the view of the Bible its authority. And when confronted with difficult texts, it seems like what you leave people with is if the Bible is authoritative at the end of the day, you've got to accept it no matter how hard it is to choke down. And I wonder if that's, if that, if that approach short circuits, the kind of wrestling that Sean's describing there help our viewers, I think, understand that, you know, you want people to be committed to biblical authority, But you also want them to have the freedom to wrestle honestly with texts that they may have trouble choking down.

John: For sure. And that's one of the things that we tried to make clear in the book is we want to say oftentimes the struggle begins when our moral intuition runs up against something in scripture and we say, "Boy, I don't understand how that fits with a God of grace or kindness or love. How does the annihilation of the Canaanites, how does predestination, how does hell, how do any of these things really fit well with what I think the Bible depicts God as being? And what we're not saying is, well, then you just need to, just like you said, choke it down and just accept it. But what we are saying is you should have the freedom in those moments to say, are there faithful ways that Christians have understood these passages differently throughout the history of the church? Is there a way that I can come to the text and have it line up more with the moral intuitions that I think that God has given me and that I think have a certain measure of authority, a sub authority in my life. And if so, if I can do that without twisting scripture into a pretzel to try and get it to say what I want it to say or jumping onto some aberrant doctor or some aberrant interpretation that has come out within the last 25 years that's clearly related to cultural issues. If I can do that, then I should be free to change my views on some of these passages that have really given me a difficulty so that I can have a coherence between what I think the Bible is teaching and what I think God's gift of moral intuition has, you know, aligns with. Having said that though, if at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that the lake of fire is a literal lake of fire that's burning with sulfur and pitch. I still am left with the choice of what is going to be my ultimate authority. Is it going to be my moral intuition or is it going to be the scriptures? And so we want to say that there really is lots of room to wrestle and to think and to find like-minded Christians who have found, who think the way that you do within the bounds of orthodoxy. And yet at the same time, there are some limits. If you can't get past what the Bible seems to teach, if you're coming at it with a sincere heart, wanting to be faithful, then you need to submit to the teaching of the text.

Scott: So, Sean, I think one of the things I suspect takes place as people deconstruct and re-examine their faith is that they discover that they still hold to the same things theologically, but their political views really change. I mean, they either might, they might move farther to the right or move to, you know, significantly to the left of center. So, and I could see where some, you know, some parents would actually flip out if their kids' political views change too. And I think, you know, in our polarized culture, where the political views may be more identity forming for some people than their theological convictions, that would, that might carry a lot of weight. So, what would you say to someone who, as a result, they move politically? Say they move really far to the left politically, just for example, but their theological convictions haven't changed.

Sean: So, the first thing I would do is I would just say, "Tell me your story. Like, how did this happen?" I would be curious to hear anybody's journey. And that also communicates the message, "I'm not threatened by this. I'm your friend. I'm listening. I'm curious. That's gonna help me piece together what happened. I think these are in-house debates amongst Christians. It's an important issue where we land on certain political issues. If somebody moves far to the left and starts embracing socialism, I'm certainly not gonna question their salvation. I'm not gonna question my love for that person. But socialism has had very big consequences, and a lot of people have gotten hurt by it. So, in the right way and at the right time, I'm gonna push back on those ideas and challenge them, but they're obviously still within the body of Christ if they believe in the person of Jesus. I'm not gonna let that divide us as friends. So, there's a lot of room politically for Christians across issues, some are more central than others, right? Certain, yeah, whatever it is, we don't have to go into those particulars, but some issues like the issue of, we mentioned socialism, issue of life. If somebody moves to the far left of life, I'm not gonna say that person can't be a Christian, but I would have serious concerns with why they hold that position, how they reconcile it with scripture. That would be a huge red flag for me. So, that's where you've just gotta figure out how to navigate this relationally without questioning the person's faith? But since you said the far left, since a lot is at stake with issues like that, I, in the right way, in the right time, would want to have that conversation if the person is open to it and willing to have that dialogue.

Scott: Yeah, I think one thing I'd want to emphasize is that no, we've said this before, no political platform was written with biblical fidelity as its goal. And so all of them are going to be flawed in one way or another. All of them are going to be, are going to have points of consistency and inconsistency with biblical teaching. And so, I think there, your point about recognizing, what hill am I going to die on here is really important. Because I think, yeah, I think there's some political issues where we can, where we can agree to disagree within the bounds of what the Bible allows others, not so much. So, John, I think one of the things I love the phrase you all use in the book, you talk about the free range Christian. Explain what you mean by that. And then what fences would you recommend to sort of put some boundaries around that?

John: Sure. Yeah, to be a Christian, there are certain things that you need to affirm, certain beliefs that you have to affirm. And by that, I mean, to be born again, to be within the family of God, there are certain beliefs that you have to affirm. To be Orthodox in a theological way, to be historically Christian, in line with the teaching of the church, there are some broader beliefs that you have to hold. So, to be saved, we would say you have to believe, you know, Jesus, Son of God, and that his death, burial and resurrection somehow takes away your sin. Like those would be the core essential beliefs. You might be able to move out a little bit further and then say, then you could be a Christian and have some heretical beliefs. You can be a Christian and have some aberrant theology. But if you're going to be historically Orthodox, and that's very important to be, then there are some big truths that you still need to hold. And we would point to things like Nicene Creed, Apostles Creed, the early statements of the church that lay out the broad definition of what it means to be a Christian. And those would be the fence posts that we would want to say if you're going to identify as a Christian, that you need to stay within these parameters. Otherwise you are no longer theologically Christian and you may not even be a Christian in terms of being saved and born again at some point when you continually move away from those statements. Not that you have to affirm every statement, but certainly there are some that you cannot deny and remain a believer. But within those boundaries, there would be secondary issues and sort of tertiary third level doctrines that we would want to say that you have freedom before the Lord to go to His word and to think really well about—

Scott: Where people of good faith within the Christian community take different views.

John: Correct, modes of baptism, end times issues, maybe, what does the first three chapters of Genesis look like? How do we understand those? Complementarianism, those would be all sorts of the secondary level views that good Christians—

Scott: Not hills to die on.

John: Not hills to die on, that's right, yeah. Yeah, and so that's where we think that you have free range to be a believer and there is a lot of room to roam in that pasture of doctrine and belief.

Scott: Now, Sean, sometimes there's a cultural backstory to some of this that is the cultural air that a lot of our students and young adults are breathing when they come to this notion of deconstructing their faith. And that is, you be you and sorts of you do you. And sort of the ultimate thing is to be your authentic self. And that, you know, we've heard it said that deconstructing your faith is sort of the ultimate act of authenticity or the ultimate act of being your true self. How would you respond to that?

Sean: I think Carl Truman laid this out well in his book and the triumph of the modern, what is the title of that book?

John and Scott: “Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.”

Sean: Thank you, “Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” actually read it twice and he lays that out at the heart.

Scott: Forgot to read the title, but that's okay. [all laugh]

Sean: It didn't stick, the title didn't stick, the content did. His argument is basically that we've shifted towards the most authentic thing that you can do is like you said, you be you. Meaning and identity comes from looking within at how I feel. Now, when that's the case and you add social media to the mix, now what happens? You've got to be yourself and you've got to express it to the world. That's what it means to be an authentic person. So, I had a conversation, interestingly enough, with another son of a famous evangelist who went the atheist route. And he kind of said, he kind of dismissed my story a little bit. I said, "Okay, wait a minute. We both went through periods of questioning. You rejected it, so your story counts. I didn't, so my story doesn't count? Like why, that doesn't make sense. That's not being consistent.” But it's this idea that if you express yourself and you reject authority and you be you, proclaim it to the world on social media, there's all this emphasis that's added to this period of questioning that I think does damage on so many levels. It makes it harder for a young person to just say, I need space to work this out. I don't quite know yet who I am. That's one issue with it. So, I would push back on you be you. And I would say the first thing is to discover what is true, follow after that. And then like Jesus said, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God as righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you." It's not about finding yourself looking within, it's for finding who God made you to be. And if somebody can follow that, I think they're gonna have a very different trajectory.

Scott: Yeah, it's like using a compass looking for directions, but always pointing at yourself.

John: Yeah, we should use that.

Sean: That's a good way to think about it.

John: So, one question for each of you before we close here. John, you mentioned in the book that there are some things that are part of our evangelical tradition that are worth retaining and some that are not. What are some of those things that you think could be thrown out of our evangelical tradition without losing very much. Or maybe we'd be gaining by doing that.

John: In the book, we make a distinction between “big E” evangelicalism and “little e” evangelicalism. And I think when it comes to “little e” evangelicalism, I wouldn't wanna throw anything out. I think that the history of evangelicalism sort of defined with the Bevington quadrilateral, the historian David Bevington who says that evangelical really means someone who highly values conversion experience who really thinks that the Bible has a high view of scripture, someone who is involved in activism and the centrality of the cross. Those are the four things that he says identify evangelicals. I think that those are all things that are really worth retaining. And the history of the evangelical movement is a history of one where people who left comfort and security and finances and did really amazing things in the name of Jesus around the world. There's this long history of us being involved in caring for the world and being the hands and the feet of Jesus. Those would be things I would think that we would not want to get rid of.

The “big E” evangelicalism though, would be things like we have a serious integrity issue these days, right? When you look at just over the last four to five years, there have been so many major evangelical leaders who have had high profiles and written lots of books and had mega churches and amazing ministries and who internally had serious moral rot going on. And that would be something I think that we need to get rid of. We need to stop thinking that, you know, looking at sort of having a sort of celebrity driven ministry. Worship needs to be less perhaps of a performance and more of a corporate gathering where we come together. And it's no surprise that, when I read, and I think it was in Christianity today, that the vast majority of worship songs that the church is singing now today comes out of four individual mega churches, all of whose theology is quite questionable.

Sean: Interesting.

John: Right? And yet, they're putting up—

Scott: Lord help us.

John: The majority of the music industry. I think that this will be sort of controversial, perhaps, and I'm not sure how it will sit with some viewers. I'm a Canadian, and so I see the United States from a different perspective than someone who was born here, And I think that one thing that may be helpful is to recognize that I don't think that we're going to be able to reform as an evangelical movement, as a Christian movement. I don't think we're going to be able to reform America back to some sort of Christian country by either legislating it or through the political, the halls of power. I think that that is a serious turnoff to young people. Doesn't mean we can't be involved in politics. Doesn’t mean that there's not a place for the courts, but there is such an identity between partisan politics, power and evangelicals. And some of that is warranted and some of that is a caricature that I think the media has portrayed and that young people have imbibed. But I think those would be some of the things that maybe we would want to let go of.

Scott: That's helpful. And then, Sean, one last question. Boil it down to one. What's the most important one? I'm gonna hold you to one single thing.

Sean: Oh, man.

Scott: The most important bit of advice you can give to a person who's in the midst of re-examining their faith.

Sean: I would say find the right mentor to walk through this process with you. If I could do one thing, I'd look back—and one is pretty tough that you're holding me to this, Scott—but I think of the people in my life in particular, people like Rob Lone, who listened to me, who gave me space to raise certain questions, gave me wisdom, just mentored and guided me through this process, that's probably the single most important factor. Now I realize some people are going, "I don't know how to find that person." That is what we try to do in the book. And now that I think about it, it came out of me thinking, "What's the most important thing I could do to help a young person that I can't sit down over coffee with as well, to try to guide them with the book that I wish that I had. So, ideally, finding a person who will listen to you, who will talk with you, process the very things that we talked about here, give you wisdom and care for you through it, would be the single most important thing to do.

Scott: That's super helpful. Well, thanks to both of you. You guys have done a great job with this book. It's such a helpful resource. I wanna commend to our viewers, to our podcast listeners, the book called, “Set Adrift” by John Marriot, Sean McDowell. Thanks so much for being part of this. If you're listening by audio on our podcast, be sure and give us a rating on your podcast app and share this with a friend. This has been Think Biblically. Thanks for being with us. Hope you've enjoyed the time.