Christian deconstruction is easy when your faith is a house of cards
Rhett McLaughlin as a case study
I’ve watched dozens of deconstruction stories play out online over the past few years. Former worship leaders. Former youth pastors. Former seminary students. The testimonies follow a pattern so predictable you could set your watch by it.
They encountered a challenge they’d never heard before. Maybe it was Bart Ehrman on textual variants. Maybe it was the problem of evil, stated with real force for the first time. Maybe it was a biology class that made evolution feel undeniable. Maybe it was just the slow realization that the people around them didn’t actually live like any of this was true.
And the whole thing collapsed. Not gradually, like erosion. Suddenly, like a house of cards.
Here’s my question: why was it a house of cards in the first place?
I don’t ask that to be cruel. I ask it because the answer matters, and getting it right is the difference between watching more people walk away and actually doing something about it.
Consider Rhett McLaughlin. If you’re under forty, you probably know him as one half of Rhett and Link, the comedy duo behind Good Mythical Morning, one of the most-watched daily shows on the internet. What you might not know is that Rhett was a committed evangelical Christian. He and Link served with Campus Crusade for Christ. They led worship. They did evangelism. They weren’t nominal Christians coasting on cultural momentum. By all accounts, including his own, the faith was real to him.
Then the dominos fell.
It started with evolution. Rhett grew up young-earth creationist in North Carolina, surrounded by a community that told him there was no real evidence for evolution. When he finally looked at the evidence for himself, after years of reading only books by people who rejected it, he found it more compelling than he’d been led to believe. Francis Collins’ The Language of God was one of the first cracks. The realization that the “experts” he’d trusted could be so confidently wrong on a scientific question opened a deeper wound: if they were wrong about this, what else were they wrong about?
Here’s the irony. Francis Collins is a devout Christian. He didn’t write The Language of God as a case against faith. He wrote it as a case for faith, arguing that evolutionary biology reveals the grandeur of God’s creative work. Collins looked at the same evidence Rhett found so destabilizing and concluded it pointed toward God, not away from Him. Rhett took Collins’ science and left Collins’ theology on the table. The evidence wasn’t what drove the deconversion. The architecture was. Rhett’s faith structure simply couldn’t accommodate any flexibility on Genesis without the whole thing coming apart.
From there, the progression was almost mechanical. If Genesis isn’t literal history, the Old Testament becomes questionable. If the Old Testament is questionable, inerrancy collapses. If inerrancy collapses, the Bible loses its authority on morality. If the Bible loses moral authority, the sexual ethic goes. If the sexual ethic goes, the Jesus who taught it becomes merely historical, and then optional, and then implausible.
Card after card after card.
Today Rhett calls himself a “hopeful agnostic.” In a 2025 interview with atheist Alex O’Connor, he said he follows a “secular humanist moral philosophy” and that his moral compass is “essentially the same” as when he was a Christian, grounded in “moral intuition.” He describes hell as a human construct, a mechanism to keep people in the religion. He’s not angry. He’s not bitter. He’s just done.
Now, I want to be careful here. I’m not interested in using Rhett as a punching bag. His pain was real. His questions were legitimate. And he’s right about at least one thing: the community he grew up in failed him. A Bible Belt culture that told him there was “no real evidence for evolution,” that discouraged hard questions, that conflated southern cultural Christianity with the gospel itself, did not prepare him for what he’d encounter outside the bubble.
But here’s what I notice about the domino chain. Every card depended on the card before it. Evolution toppled Genesis. Genesis toppled the Old Testament. The Old Testament toppled inerrancy. Inerrancy toppled moral authority. Moral authority toppled Jesus. The entire structure was sequential, and removing one piece near the bottom brought everything above it crashing down.
That’s a house of cards. And I want to suggest, as respectfully as I can, that the faith Rhett deconstructed was never built to carry weight. Not because it wasn’t sincere, but because it was architecturally fragile.
Here’s what I mean. Rhett’s faith, as he describes it, was built on a particular package: young-earth creationism, biblical inerrancy as a single load-bearing wall, a community that discouraged questioning, and the assumption that if any piece failed, the whole system was compromised. Once one domino fell, the rest had to follow because there were no independent supports. Nothing else was holding the structure up.
But notice something else. The first domino, the one that started the whole chain, deserved more scrutiny than Rhett gave it. He swapped one set of uncritically accepted authorities for another. His community told him evolution was settled nonsense; Francis Collins told him it was settled science. In both cases, Rhett trusted confident voices rather than interrogating the actual foundations.
Because the evolutionary narrative has its own load-bearing problems that rarely get discussed in popular accounts. Yes, we observe adaptation, natural selection, genetic variation. Nobody serious disputes that organisms change over time in response to selective pressures. But the grand narrative asks us to accept far more than that. It asks us to believe that unguided natural processes generated the staggering novelty and specified complexity we see in living systems, from the first self-replicating cell to the human brain. And the foundation of that narrative, the origin of life itself, is in serious trouble.
After seventy years of research and billions in funding, there is no demonstrated mechanism for getting from chemistry to the first living cell. The problem hasn’t gotten easier with more discovery. It’s gotten harder. Every new layer of cellular complexity we uncover, the information content of DNA, the chirality requirements, the chicken-and-egg dependencies between proteins and nucleic acids, makes the gap wider, not narrower. James Tour, one of the most decorated synthetic chemists alive, puts it bluntly: the proposals we have for the origin of life aren’t even in the right ballpark.
Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA’s structure and a committed materialist, concluded that undirected chemistry on Earth was so implausible that he proposed aliens must have seeded our planet deliberately. Read that again. The man who understood DNA’s structure better than almost anyone chose to invoke intelligent agency rather than accept that chemistry alone could produce what he was looking at. He just wouldn’t call that intelligence God.
Rhett never encountered any of this. He went from “my church says evolution is false” to “Francis Collins says evolution is true” without ever asking the harder question: even granting that organisms adapt and diversify, where did the information-rich, functionally specified systems come from in the first place? That question doesn’t go away by accepting common descent. It gets sharper.
The first domino didn’t just knock over Rhett’s faith. It replaced one set of unexamined assumptions with another. And because his faith structure was sequential rather than convergent, he never had reason to press the question further. The chain had already started falling.
But a faith built on converging lines of evidence across multiple independent domains doesn’t work that way. Let me show you why.
Suppose you grant the full evolutionary narrative for the sake of argument. Fine. That tells you something about biological mechanisms. Does it tell you why there’s a universe at all? No. Does it explain the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant to one part in 10^120? No. Does it explain why we have conscious experience rather than biological machinery running in the dark? No. Does it ground moral obligations as real rather than useful fictions? No. Does it explain why the earliest Christians, including hostile witnesses like Paul and James, were willing to die for claims about a bodily resurrection they could have easily disproven if false? No.
And even within biology, accepting adaptation and natural selection doesn’t resolve the information problem. In every other context where we encounter specified functional information, whether in computer code, written language, cryptography, or forensic evidence, we infer intelligence. DNA is specified functional information. The inference to intelligence isn’t a gap argument. It’s pattern recognition, the same methodology used in archaeology, SETI, and criminal investigation. The only reason to resist the inference in biology is a prior commitment to excluding the conclusion.
A faith built on convergence doesn’t collapse when one line of evidence gets challenged, because the other lines still hold. The structure is reinforced from multiple directions.
Rhett’s structure wasn’t. It was a single stack of sequential dependencies. Pull the bottom card and everything falls.
And this is where the diagnosis turns pastoral. Because Rhett’s story isn’t unusual. It’s the norm. The American church has spent decades building houses of cards and calling it discipleship.
We substituted emotional experience for theological depth. We replaced catechesis with entertainment. We treated hard questions as threats to faith rather than invitations to think more carefully. We told people “just believe” when they needed reasons. We gave them feelings when they needed foundations.
Rhett himself noted, with some self-awareness, that his time with Campus Crusade was focused on entertainment and leading worship, not on substantive theological engagement. “We were embarrassed about it,” he said of evangelism and the harder claims of the gospel. Their priority was to make people laugh without offending anyone.
I don’t say that to indict him. I say it because it reveals something about the ecosystem. When the most committed young Christians in the room are being trained in performance rather than substance, the system is producing houses of cards at scale. Then we act surprised when a single semester of college philosophy, or a single Francis Collins book, brings the whole thing down.
So what does load-bearing faith actually look like?
It looks like a faith where you’ve already heard the best objections and wrestled with them honestly. Where you know the difference between what Scripture actually claims and what your church culture assumed. Where your confidence doesn’t rest on a single argument or a single leader or a single experience, but on multiple independent lines of evidence that all point the same direction.
Rhett said in 2025 that his moral compass is “the same” without Christianity, grounded in moral intuition. But he never seems to have been confronted with the hard question: What grounds moral intuition on naturalism? If we’re the product of blind evolutionary processes selecting for survival rather than truth, why should our moral intuitions track anything real? Moral intuitions feel authoritative. But on naturalism, feelings don’t create obligations. The conviction that torturing children is objectively wrong isn’t explained by “that’s just how evolution wired us.” That explains why we feel it’s wrong. It doesn’t explain why it actually is wrong. And Rhett clearly believes it is, because he still lives as though moral reality is binding. He just lost the foundation for saying so.
He said hell is a “human construct, not a biblical one.” But that’s a claim about biblical content, and it requires engagement with the actual text rather than a dismissal. The Hebrew concept of Sheol, Jesus’ teaching on Gehenna, the Pauline language of destruction and separation, Paul’s doctrine of wrath, the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation: these are complex textual questions with serious scholarly treatment on multiple sides. Waving it away as a “mechanism to keep people in the religion” is a sociological claim, not an exegetical one. It might explain why some churches emphasize hell. It doesn’t tell you whether the texts are making a real claim about real consequences.
He said nobody has “figured it out” in hundreds of thousands of years of human history. But that’s a curious claim from someone who grew up in a tradition that claims precisely to have received revelation from the God who made us. The question isn’t whether humans have figured God out by their own efforts. The question is whether God has spoken. That’s a different category entirely, and it can’t be settled by gesturing at the diversity of human religious opinion.
These aren’t gotcha points. They’re the kinds of questions a convergence-built faith would have already engaged. And they’re the kinds of questions that, had Rhett encountered them in a serious way before the dominos started falling, might have given the structure some independent support.
If you’re watching someone you love go through deconstruction, don’t panic. Don’t argue. Don’t guilt them. But do ask one question: what exactly are you deconstructing?
Because most of the time, they’re deconstructing things that deserved to be deconstructed. Cultural Christianity that was never Christ-centered. Authority structures built on personality rather than truth. Shallow theology that couldn’t survive contact with reality. Moral hypocrisy that made the whole enterprise feel like a performance.
Those things should be torn down. The question is whether they’re tearing down the scaffolding or the building itself.
If someone deconstructs their way out of a faith that was built on “my pastor said so” and “I felt something during worship” and “my parents would be devastated if I left,” they haven’t disproven Christianity. They’ve outgrown a particular construction of it. The foundation was never tested because there wasn’t one to test.
If you’re in the middle of this yourself, here’s what I’d say. You’re probably right that what you had wasn’t working. You’re probably right that some of what you were taught doesn’t hold up. But before you throw out the whole thing, make sure you’ve engaged the strongest version of what you’re rejecting.
Have you looked at the fine-tuning data yourself, or just heard it dismissed as “God of the gaps”? Have you seriously engaged the hard problem of consciousness, or did you accept the “emergence” hand-wave because it sounded scientific? Have you examined the textual evidence for the New Testament on its own terms, 5,800 Greek manuscripts with 99.5% agreement on all doctrinal content, or did you take Ehrman’s framing without checking what Ehrman himself admits about the tradition’s reliability? Have you pressed the question of where biological information comes from, or did you stop at “evolution explains it” without asking what evolution itself presupposes? Have you asked what grounds your moral intuitions if naturalism is true, or did you just assume the intuitions would survive the worldview shift?
Deconstruction that only encounters the weakest version of faith is just knocking over a scarecrow and feeling brave about it.
Here’s what I’m actually arguing. Christian deconstruction is easy when you have a house of cards. The solution isn’t to prevent people from asking hard questions. It’s to stop building houses of cards.
Teach theology, not just feelings. Teach apologetics, not just worship choruses. Teach people that Christianity makes testable claims about reality that can be examined and compared against the alternatives. Teach them that the universe began to exist and that this is a philosophical problem naturalism has never solved. Teach them that the fine-tuning of the cosmos isn’t a theological assertion but a scientific observation that demands explanation. Teach them that the origin of biological information is a problem that gets worse with every new discovery, not better. Teach them that consciousness is a problem materialism has not solved and shows no signs of solving. Teach them that moral realism, the stubborn human conviction that some things are actually wrong, makes far more sense on Christian presuppositions than on naturalistic ones.
Build load-bearing walls, not card towers. Build something that can take a hit. Build something where one challenged belief doesn’t bring down the entire structure because there are six other independently grounded supports holding the weight.
Rhett McLaughlin is a smart, thoughtful, sincere man who lost a faith that was architecturally fragile. I wish someone had helped him build something stronger before the first domino fell. I don’t say that with condescension. I say it with grief, because his story didn’t have to end this way.
A faith that survives scrutiny is worth having. And a faith that can’t was never really built to last. It was just a house of cards waiting for a breeze.
JD Longmire is a Northrop Grumman Fellow and ordained minister who writes at oddXian.com - “Challenge the Consensus: Working out the harmony of God’s Word and God’s World.” His work focuses on demonstrating Christianity’s explanatory superiority across multiple domains using convergence methodology.