Before You Tear Down the House, Check the Foundation
For those in the middle of Christian deconstruction, from someone who gets it
I’m not writing this to argue with you. If you’re in the middle of pulling apart everything you thought you believed, the last thing you need is another Christian lobbing proof texts at your head while you’re trying to figure out whether the ground under your feet is solid.
So let me start somewhere honest.
A lot of what you’re deconstructing probably should be deconstructed. Cultural Christianity, performative piety, political tribalism wrapped in a Jesus fish, leaders who weaponize authority and then quote Romans 13 when you push back. If that’s what you’re tearing down, I’m not going to stop you. I might even hand you a crowbar.
But I want to ask you something, and I mean it as a genuine question, not a trap: Are you sure you’re dismantling the right building?
There’s a version of Christianity that deserves to be questioned. It’s the version where doubt gets you shamed in a small group, where asking hard questions is treated as the first step toward apostasy, where the Christ of Scripture gets buried under layers of cultural expectation and institutional self-preservation. If that’s what broke your trust, I understand. I’ve watched it happen to people I love.
But here’s what I’ve come to realize after years of engaging skeptics, atheists, and fellow believers in crisis: most people who deconstruct aren’t actually rejecting Christianity. They’re rejecting a Christ-less Christ. They’re walking away from a Christ built out of political talking points, social conformity, and emotional manipulation. They never got the real thing. And the tragedy is that many of them don’t know the difference.
The real thing is sturdier than you’ve been told. And it answers the questions you’re carrying better than the alternatives you’re being offered.
I know, because I’ve been where you are.
I need to tell you something about myself, because I think it changes how you hear everything else in this article.
I was raised in the same kind of background many deconstructors come from. Church every Sunday. Bible drills. Youth group. The works. And like many of you, I hit a wall where the answers I’d been given couldn’t hold the weight of the questions I was carrying.
But here’s where my story diverges from the typical deconstruction narrative: instead of drifting into a community that validated my doubts without answering them, I walked straight into the lions’ den.
In the late ‘90s, as an early adopter of the Internet, I found the Internet Infidels Discussion Board, one of the premier gathering places for serious atheistic skepticism online. This wasn’t Reddit snark. These were lawyers, literal rocket scientists, evolutionary biologists, physicists, and philosophers who frequently had a better command of the original biblical languages than I did. They knew the textual variants. They could cite the Dead Sea Scrolls. They had read Wellhausen and Ehrman and the higher critics in ways my Sunday school teachers never had.
It shook me. I won’t pretend it didn’t.
But instead of walking away, I did something that I think too few people in the deconstruction movement are willing to do: I stayed and examined my presuppositions. I didn’t retreat into emotional comfort or surround myself with people who would tell me my doubts were brave. I sat with the hardest objections the best skeptical minds could produce, and I investigated whether Christianity could answer them.
It could. It can. It does.
After several years sharpening my apologetics against the best atheistic arguments available, I spent several years on the Puritan Board, one of the most rigorous Reformed theological communities online, refining my theology and philosophy. The skeptics forced me to go deeper into the evidence. The theologians forced me to go deeper into the text. Between those two communities, my faith didn’t get dismantled. It got rebuilt on bedrock.
That journey is why I write what I write. It’s why I can engage the best objections with confidence rather than anxiety. And it’s why I want to offer you something better than the deconstruction culture provides. Not a return to shallow faith, but a path through the hard questions to something deeper on the other side.
The people who leave Christianity almost never leave because they found better answers. They leave because they found better questions than their church gave them, and no one in their community could engage those questions with honesty and intellectual substance. So they went looking elsewhere, and what they found was a culture that seemed to take their questions seriously, even if it couldn’t actually answer them.
That’s an important distinction. Naturalism, secular humanism, vague spiritual-but-not-religious agnosticism: these worldviews are very good at asking questions. They’re remarkably poor at answering the ones that matter most.
Here’s what I mean. I’ll walk through a few of the big ones, because if you’re deconstructing, you’re almost certainly wrestling with some version of these.
“How can I trust the Bible?”
This is usually the first domino. Maybe you learned about textual variants, or someone told you the Bible has been “changed” over thousands of years, or you read Bart Ehrman and felt the ground shift. Fair enough. Those are real concerns and they deserve real engagement.
But here’s what the “Bible is unreliable” narrative leaves out: we have over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, plus more than 10,000 in other ancient languages. The earliest fragments date within 25 to 75 years of composition. For comparison, we have 10 copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars with a 950-year gap, and no one questions their reliability. We have 20 copies of Tacitus with a 1,000-year gap. The New Testament manuscript tradition is, by any standard applied to ancient documents, the best-attested collection in existence.
Textual critics across the theological spectrum, including Ehrman himself, agree on roughly 99.5% textual certainty. The remaining variants are documented and understood: spelling differences, word order variations, copyist notes. No core Christian doctrine depends on a disputed passage. This is a strength the evidence demands we acknowledge, not a weakness to be papered over.
If you’re interested in going deeper, I’ve laid out the manuscript evidence, the archaeological confirmations, and the comparative standards in detail. Sir William Ramsay set out to disprove the Book of Acts through archaeology and ended up becoming one of its most vocal defenders after 35 years of excavation confirmed Luke’s precision on 84 verifiable details. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t get mentioned in most deconstruction podcasts. (Examining the Evidence for God)
“How can a good God allow suffering?”
This one cuts deep, and I refuse to treat it as a mere intellectual exercise. Some of you are deconstructing because of real pain. The church hurt you. Leaders failed you. Life dealt you something that felt incompatible with the God you were told about.
I won’t minimize that. But I will point out something the suffering objection assumes: that suffering is genuinely wrong. That what happened to you was objectively evil, not merely unpleasant in a universe of indifferent particles.
The moment you say “this shouldn’t have happened,” you’re operating on borrowed capital. You’re invoking a moral standard that requires grounding. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the worldview most deconstructors are moving toward can’t fund that claim. If naturalism is true, suffering is just chemistry. Your pain is neural firing patterns responding to environmental stimuli. There’s no “should” or “shouldn’t” in a purely material universe.
Christianity doesn’t just allow you to say suffering is genuinely wrong. It explains why it’s wrong. And it goes further than most people realize.
I’ve written at length about what I call the logical necessity of evil within a Christian framework. The short version: if God creates free, self-reliant beings who are not God, their finite nature makes rebellion a metaphysical certainty apart from sustaining grace. This isn’t a defect in the design. It’s an entailment of creating genuine imago Dei, beings with real moral agency and real capacity for relationship. Only a being who is both the image of God and God Himself, Jesus Christ, could possess free will without the necessity of rebellion.
That necessary fall creates the necessary context for the full display of God’s character: His justice in judging evil and His love in redeeming from it. Evil doesn’t challenge God’s goodness. It becomes the stage on which that goodness is most fully revealed. The cross isn’t God watching from a distance. It’s God entering into the suffering His creatures brought upon themselves, absorbing it in His own body, and opening a way through it. (On the Logical Necessity of Evil and Grace)
If you’re deconstructing over the problem of evil, I understand the weight of it. But ask yourself: does the worldview you’re moving toward handle it better? Naturalism can’t even call evil “evil.” It can describe suffering, but it can’t condemn it. Christianity names it, explains its origin, enters into it, and promises to end it. That’s not a weakness in the Christian account. That’s the strongest possible response.
“Science has disproven God” or “Faith means ignoring evidence”
This one is almost always a category error, and it’s worth untangling carefully.
Science is a method for investigating the natural world. It brackets questions of ultimate origin, purpose, and meaning by design. That’s methodological naturalism, and it’s a perfectly useful tool. The problem comes when people slide from “science doesn’t invoke God in its method” to “science has shown God doesn’t exist.” That’s a philosophical leap disguised as a scientific conclusion.
In fact, the more we discover, the harder naturalism has to work to keep up. The universe began, and whatever caused spacetime can’t itself be spatial or temporal. The fine-tuning of physical constants is so precise that altering gravity by 1 part in 10^60 eliminates stars. Every cell contains 3 billion base pairs of functional, specified information, and we’ve never observed instructions write themselves. Consciousness remains completely unexplained by physical processes; no arrangement of matter produces first-person subjective experience.
These aren’t gaps waiting for science to fill. They’re features of reality demanding explanation. And naturalism’s best response across the board has been promissory notes: “we’ll figure it out eventually.” That’s faith in future discovery, not evidence.
I want to press on this, because it matters for your deconstruction journey. The cultural narrative says science is on one side and faith is on the other. But that framing is itself a philosophical claim, not a scientific finding. The actual discoveries of modern science, the beginning of the universe, the mathematical elegance underlying physical law, the information density of biological systems, all of these point toward mind, not away from it. Theism makes one core claim: mind precedes matter. Christianity adds one specific claim: that Mind entered matter. The evidence across multiple independent domains converges on exactly this picture.
When someone tells you that science has made God unnecessary, ask a simple question: which science? Physics, which discovered that the universe had a beginning and can’t explain why? Biology, which can’t account for the origin of the first self-replicating cell? Neuroscience, which has no explanation for why subjective experience exists at all? The honest scientific picture is not “we’ve explained everything and God isn’t needed.” The honest picture is “the more we discover, the deeper the mystery gets.” (Examining the Evidence for God)
And this is worth saying directly: Christianity doesn’t require you to ignore science. It requires you to think more carefully about what science actually reveals. I’ve developed a framework I call Literal Programmatic Intervention (LPI) that takes both Scripture and physical evidence seriously. The core idea is straightforward: God designed law-governed processes and intervenes at specific historical points, the way a master architect designs systems that operate according to discoverable principles while retaining the authority to act within them. Creation events establish boundary conditions. Between interventions, the system runs according to physical law, open to investigation and even falsification.
This means origins science isn’t off-limits for the Christian. It means we can engage geology, cosmology, and biology on their own terms while recognizing that the initial conditions and key inflection points in history reflect purposeful design. It’s methodologically parallel to how cosmological models accept Big Bang initial conditions while modeling everything that follows through natural law. The difference is that Christianity identifies the source of those initial conditions, and it doesn’t pretend the question is unaskable.
If you’ve been told that taking the Bible seriously means you have to abandon science, or that taking science seriously means you have to abandon the Bible, you’ve been given a false choice. The real question is which framework makes better sense of what we actually discover. (Literal Programmatic Intervention)
“Christians are hypocrites”
Yes. Many are. Including me, on my worst days.
But hypocrisy is only a meaningful charge if the standard being violated is real. If there’s no objective moral standard, then “hypocrite” just means “person whose behavior I don’t prefer.” The fact that hypocrisy bothers you is actually evidence that the moral framework Christianity claims to ground is real. You’re not angry that Christians fail to live up to arbitrary social conventions. You’re angry because they fail to live up to something genuinely binding, something that exists whether they honor it or not.
Christianity predicts hypocrisy. It teaches that humans are broken, self-deceiving, prone to autonomy over obedience. The doctrine of sin isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the system’s diagnosis of the problem. The gospel doesn’t say “follow Christians.” It says “follow Christ.” And the character of Christ, displayed concretely in a historical life, gives you something no other worldview offers: a visible, investigable standard of what “good” actually looks like. (I and the Father Are One)
Now let me address something that rarely gets said in these conversations.
Deconstruction has its own orthodoxy. It has its own set of unexamined assumptions that get treated as obvious truths. And most people in the middle of it never think to question them.
Here are a few:
“Doubt is more honest than belief.” Why? Doubt is a posture, not a conclusion. It can be just as intellectually lazy as blind faith if it never actually investigates what it’s doubting. Genuine intellectual honesty doesn’t just ask hard questions of Christianity. It asks equally hard questions of the alternatives. Have you subjected naturalism or secular humanism to the same scrutiny you’ve applied to your faith? Have you asked whether atheism can ground the moral outrage, the desire for meaning, the sense that love and beauty are real rather than useful illusions?
Every doubt is actually a series of alternative beliefs. When you doubt the resurrection, you’re implicitly believing that dead people stay dead, that the disciples were deluded or dishonest, that the early church exploded for no adequate historical cause. When you doubt God’s goodness, you’re implicitly believing that suffering has no redemptive purpose and that the universe owes you something better, which is itself a theological claim about how reality ought to work. If you’re going to be honest, you have to interrogate those background beliefs with the same rigor you bring to the ones you’re tearing down.
“I need to find my own truth.” This sounds liberating until you press on it. If truth is something you find or constructrather than something that exists independently and finds you, then it isn’t truth at all. It’s preference. And preference can’t bear the weight you’re asking it to carry. It can’t ground human dignity, or moral obligation, or the conviction that some things are genuinely evil regardless of what any culture decides.
I wrote recently about how every worldview operates from inescapable theological commitments, whether acknowledged or not. Even “no God” is a theological position. It determines your philosophical framework, which in turn determines everything else. The person who says “I’m just following the evidence” has already made a decision about what counts as evidence, what methods are trustworthy, and what conclusions are permissible. Those are philosophical commitments, not neutral observations. The question is whether your commitments are self-aware and defensible, or unconscious and borrowed.
Christianity claims that truth is a Person, not a proposition. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). That’s either the most arrogant claim in human history or the answer to the deepest question you’re carrying. But it’s worth investigating before you walk away from it.
“The church failed me, so Christianity must be false.” The logic here doesn’t hold, and I think you know that, even if the pain makes it hard to separate the two. Institutions fail. People fail. Leaders betray trust. None of that tells you whether the resurrection happened. None of that tells you whether the universe demands a necessary, transcendent cause. None of that tells you whether consciousness is more than neurons firing.
The church’s failure is a moral indictment of the church. It’s not an epistemological argument against the truth claims of Christianity. Conflating the two is understandable. It may even be unavoidable in the moment. But at some point, if you care about truth and not just therapy, you have to ask the question on its own terms: is Christianity true? Not “did Christians treat me well?” Not “does the church feel safe?” Those are important questions, but they’re different questions. And the answer to “is Christianity true?” has to be decided on evidence, not emotion.
I want to talk to you about something I’ve built over the past several years, not because I want to sell you anything, but because I think it addresses the gap that deconstruction exposes.
The biggest problem I’ve seen in the church’s response to doubt is that most Christians don’t know why they believe what they believe. They inherited a faith, were told it was true, and were never given the intellectual tools to examine it or defend it. When the hard questions came, all they had were emotional appeals and authority claims. So when those failed, the whole structure collapsed.
That collapse isn’t a failure of Christianity. It’s a failure of discipleship.
What I’ve developed is a convergence approach, a way of looking at the evidence across multiple domains and seeing how the lines point in the same direction. Not isolated arguments that can be picked off one by one, but a pattern of converging evidence. I’ve laid out the full framework in a systematic declaration of faith and reason that traces every claim back to its foundational commitments, two axioms and thirteen theorems, fully auditable, so you can see exactly where the reasoning leads and identify precisely where you’d disagree. That kind of transparency is what the church owes people who are asking hard questions.
The universe began. Fine-tuning defies probability. Mathematics predicts reality with eerie precision. DNA contains specified, functional information. Consciousness can’t be computed from matter. Moral facts exist and demand grounding. Reason itself requires a foundation that evolution can’t provide.
Each of these is significant on its own. Together, they form a pattern that naturalism systematically fails to explain, and that Christianity not only explains but predicts.
This is the convergence case, and it’s the thing that separates serious Christian apologetics from the “just have faith” approach that failed you. When cosmology, physics, biology, philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy all independently point in the same direction, that’s not cherry-picking. That’s a signal. It’s the same logic scientists use when multiple independent lines of evidence converge on a single conclusion. You wouldn’t dismiss that convergence in any other domain. Don’t dismiss it here because you’re angry at the church.
And this is where presuppositional thinking comes in, though not in the way you might expect. Every worldview starts with presuppositions, basic commitments that can’t be proven by neutral evidence. Rationality, morality, the uniformity of nature, even language itself, all rest on assumptions that must be accepted before reasoning can begin. The question is not whether you use presuppositions but whether your presuppositions are coherent. When finite minds ground themselves in finite foundations, they create closed loops. Reason proves reason. Science validates science. Morality is binding because... we say so. Christianity breaks out of that by grounding knowledge, existence, and purpose in an infinite, self-sufficient source. That’s not circular. It’s the only foundation that doesn’t hold itself up in mid-air. (No Circles Here)
And Christianity does something no other worldview does: it offers a falsification condition. Paul says it plainly. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Christianity stakes everything on a historical claim that can be investigated. It invites scrutiny. It doesn’t hide behind unfalsifiable assertions or retreat into subjective experience.
The resurrection either happened or it didn’t. The tomb was either empty or it wasn’t. The disciples either saw something that transformed cowards into martyrs or they didn’t. And 2,000 years of investigation haven’t produced a naturalistic alternative that accounts for all the evidence: the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15 dating within 2 to 5 years of the crucifixion, the transformation of the disciples, the conversion of hostile witnesses like Paul and James, the explosion of a movement that had every reason to die in the first century.
If you’re deconstructing, I want to offer you a different path than the one most deconstruction spaces provide. Not back to the shallow Christianity that failed you. Forward, into something deeper.
Real Christianity, the kind rooted in Scripture and tested against history, philosophy, and evidence, can hold your hardest questions. It held mine through years of direct engagement with the best skeptical minds the Internet had to offer. The foundation didn’t crack. The questions made it stronger.
Here’s what I’d ask of you before you walk away:
Don’t just deconstruct. Investigate. There’s a difference. Deconstruction as most people practice it is a one-directional process of tearing things down. Investigation is honest inquiry that’s willing to rebuild if the evidence demands it. Be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it leads back to Christ.
Subject your doubts to the same scrutiny as your faith. If you’re questioning the resurrection, also question what naturalism offers in its place. If you’re troubled by suffering, ask whether the worldview you’re considering moving to can even call suffering “wrong.” If you’re rejecting biblical reliability, compare the evidence to what you accept without question in every other domain of ancient history.
Distinguish between the Christ and the culture. The failures of the American evangelical subculture are not the failures of the Jesus who touched lepers, spoke truth to power, wept over Jerusalem, and went to the cross. Those are separable things. The culture may have wounded you. Christ hasn’t.
I keep coming back to Peter’s words in John 6. After many of Jesus’ followers had left, Jesus turned to the twelve and asked, “Do you want to go away as well?” Peter answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
Peter wasn’t saying, “I have no doubts.” He was saying, “I’ve looked at the alternatives, and nothing else holds.” That’s not blind faith. That’s the most intellectually honest position available when you’ve done the work of comparison. The question isn’t whether Christianity has hard questions. Of course it does. The question is whether any alternative answers them better. And after years of engaging the best secular thought has to offer, I can tell you plainly: nothing else comes close.
Take the evidence seriously. Not the emotional appeals or the authority claims or the “just have faith” brush-offs that failed you. The actual evidence. The manuscript tradition. The archaeological record. The philosophical arguments for a necessary, transcendent, intelligent, conscious, moral being. The historical case for the resurrection. The explanatory poverty of naturalism across every domain that matters.
It’s there. Mountains of it.
If you want to go deeper, here are the people I’d point you to. These aren’t dusty academics hiding in ivory towers. They’re scholars and scientists who engage the hardest questions head-on, and several of them have debated the most prominent skeptics in the world. Start wherever your questions are sharpest.
On biblical reliability and manuscript evidence: Wesley Huff. Huff is a New Testament textual critic who specializes in exactly the questions deconstructors raise about whether the Bible has been “corrupted” or “changed.” He’s debated prominent skeptics and demonstrates, with precision, that the manuscript tradition actually increases our confidence rather than undermining it. His YouTube debates and lectures are a good starting point if you’re wrestling with whether you can trust the text.
On science, faith, and intellectual credibility: John Lennox. Oxford mathematician who has debated Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Singer. Lennox models what it looks like to be a world-class scientist and a serious Christian without the slightest tension between the two. His books God’s Undertaker and Can Science Explain Everything? are written for exactly the person who’s been told that science and faith are incompatible. If that’s your sticking point, start here.
On the positive case for Christianity: Frank Turek. Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (co-authored with Norman Geisler) walks through the cumulative case from cosmology to Christ in accessible, conversational prose. His cross-examination style in debates and campus Q&As models how to press questions back onto naturalism rather than playing defense. If you need a broad overview before diving into specifics, this is the entry point.
On the philosophical and historical case: William Lane Craig. Craig is arguably the most formidable debater in modern apologetics, having faced nearly every major atheist philosopher and scientist of the last three decades. His Reasonable Faith is the standard text for systematic natural theology, covering the cosmological argument, fine-tuning, the moral argument, and the historical evidence for the resurrection with philosophical precision. His On Guard is a more accessible version of the same material. If you’re the kind of person who needs to see the logical structure laid bare, premise by premise, Craig is the thinker who will either convince you or force you to identify exactly where you disagree. Either outcome is progress.
On the origin of life and the limits of chemistry: Dr. James Tour. Tour is one of the world’s leading synthetic organic chemists, a professor at Rice University with over 700 publications. He has been vocal and specific about what origin-of-life research has and has not demonstrated, and he has publicly challenged the field to be honest about the gap between press releases and actual results. If you’ve been told that science has “basically figured out” how life began, watch Tour’s lectures before you accept that claim. He knows the chemistry, and the chemistry doesn’t support the narrative.
On information, design, and the philosophy of science: Stephen Meyer. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell and Return of the God Hypothesis lay out the information-theoretic argument and the broader convergence case with scholarly rigor. Return of the God Hypothesis in particular does what this article has been describing: it shows how multiple independent lines of scientific evidence converge on a theistic conclusion. If you want to see the convergence methodology worked out in full-length form by a Cambridge-trained philosopher of science, Meyer is your resource.
On presuppositional foundations and worldview critique: Greg Bahnsen. Bahnsen’s famous 1985 debate with atheist philosopher Gordon Stein remains one of the most powerful demonstrations of the transcendental argument for God’s existence. His approach is the intellectual ancestor of the presuppositional framework I use: showing that the very tools the skeptic employs (logic, reason, moral categories) presuppose the God the skeptic is trying to deny. His lectures are widely available on YouTube. Start with the Bahnsen-Stein debate and see if you can find a flaw in the central argument. Thousands have tried.
These voices represent different angles on the same reality. Huff on the text. Lennox on science and faith. Turek on the broad case. Craig on the philosophical structure. Tour on the chemistry. Meyer on information and convergence. Bahnsen on the foundations of knowledge itself. Together they cover the territory most deconstructors are crossing, and they do it with substance, not sentimentality.
There are plenty of other strong apologists out there for those seeking. These are simply the ones who have shaped my own thinking most directly and whose work I return to consistently. Your starting point may be different, and that’s fine. The point is to start.
I’ll close with this.
Our minds are finite, but they’re not temporary. Scripture teaches that consciousness doesn’t dissolve at death; it continues, clarified and unmasked. For the believer, that continuation becomes communion with the eternal Source Himself. What we once grasped in fragments, we experience in fullness. The mind no longer struggles to understand the truth; it abides in the Truth. (Eternal Minds in an Eternal Story)
The gospel doesn’t promise less reality. It promises more of it. The question isn’t whether your mind will continue. It’s where that continuation will lead.
Before you tear down the house, check the foundation.
It might be the only thing that was never broken.
JD Longmire oddXian.com | Challenge the Consensus Working out the harmony of God’s Word and God’s World