After Deconstruction, What?
A story of faith, deconstruction, discovery, renovation, and renewal.
I recently received an encouraging email from Nate Hanson, one of the hosts of the Almost Heretical podcast, which was launched back in 2017. According to the program description, this podcast was born out of a desire “to invite others into their own journeys of deconstructing and reimagining their faith,” and over the past eight years, it has generated over 2 million downloads. However, as Nate explains in his letter (reproduced below with his permission), he has recently started questioning his involvement with the deconstruction movement.
Shane,
I wanted to reach out because your work has had a significant impact on me, and I thought it might be helpful to share a bit of my story. I spent several years [working in Christian radio in Los Angeles and later] I moved to the Bay Area to work with my friend Francis Chan. We planted churches and served in some of the most challenging neighborhoods in San Francisco. For a long time, faith and ministry were the center of my life.
About ten years ago, everything shifted. I began seriously questioning the foundations of Christianity. I struggled with the relationship between science and faith. I wrestled with the problem of evil and the portrayal of God in the Old Testament. I questioned the historical reliability of the resurrection and the authorship issues raised by scholars like Bart Ehrman. I eventually reached a point where I simply could not make myself believe anymore, and it felt like losing my identity.
Eight years ago, I started a podcast called Almost Heretical as a way to process these questions publicly. It grew quickly because so many people were walking a similar road. We produced more than two hundred episodes and reached more than two million downloads. The audience was largely made up of people who wanted Christianity to be true but no longer knew how to make sense of it.
A few years ago, something started to change in me. I found myself wanting the Christian story to be true again, which surprised me. Two years ago, my wife and I began attending a normal evangelical church. About a year ago, I decided to take a deep dive into the best scholarship on the historical and evidential case for Christianity. That led me to Richard Bauckham, Peter Williams, and eventually to your show.
Hearing you explain that faith is not blind belief but belief grounded in evidence was completely new for me. The way you frame the relationship between doubt, reason, and trust has been one of the most important influences on my own return to Christianity. Your show has helped rebuild a thoughtful and reasonable confidence in the Christian story. It came at exactly the right moment in my life.
Because of this shift, we have paused Almost Heretical and will be relaunching under a new name with a new focus. The goal now is to bring on scholars and let them present their strongest case for Christianity and to test those claims openly and honestly. I want to help others see what I am now seeing, which is that Christianity can withstand scrutiny and that belief can be rooted in evidence rather than sentiment.
I simply wanted to thank you for the work you are doing. It has meant more than you know. And if you ever want to connect or explore any ways our work might intersect in the future, I would love that.
Gratefully,
Nate Hanson
Yesterday, Nate released a short video titled “My Deconstruction Led Me Back to Christianity,” which you can watch on YouTube or listen to via Apple or Spotify.
In this video, Nate gave his followers a brief update about the new direction his program will be taking moving forward, and he also announced that the title of his podcast has been changed from Almost Heretical to FaithLab.
Though deconstruction is “often framed as rebellion, bitterness, or a desire to tear everything down,” Nate explains in this video that this was never his story. For him, “deconstruction was an honest process driven by a desire to understand what I actually believed. It’s what happens when inherited answers stop working. When the explanations you were handed no longer match your experience of reality.”
In many ways, Almost Heretical was me deconstructing in public. And I think it helped a lot of people feel less alone. If you’ve been through deconstruction, you probably recognize the pattern. You pull on one thread, and suddenly the whole system starts to wobble. Things that once felt solid begin to collapse. Often, what you’re actually losing aren’t the core claims of Christianity, but later interpretations. Confident explanations. Cultural add-ons. Assumptions you didn’t even realize were there…
For me, that unraveling was slow, honest, and sometimes painful. Eventually, I reached a point where I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore…I still admired Jesus. I still valued the ethics and the community. But I no longer believed the central claim that Jesus had actually risen from the dead. And at the time, I honestly thought that was the end of Christianity for me.
At some point in his deconstruction project, Nate realized that he was not only dismantling naive versions of Christianity but also simplistic secular explanations as to why we should reject it. Over time, he began to realize that many of these naturalistic theories about the origins of Christianity “required their own kind of blind faith.” Since these alternative stories “weren’t actually grounded in much evidence at all,” he kept digging.
I started listening to historians, philosophers, scientists, and biblical scholars who weren’t asking me to turn my brain off. What surprised me wasn’t that this material existed, it was that I had barely engaged it before. For most of my life, I had focused on living Christianity, not examining whether its foundational claims were actually true. I had assumed that people who needed evidence were somehow weaker in faith. That assumption didn’t survive scrutiny.
As I dug into the New Testament historically, it didn’t read like polished mythology. It read like people trying to describe something they believed they had actually witnessed. Real places. Real names. Awkward, inconvenient details you wouldn’t invent if you were creating a legend…I explored skeptical explanations too. I took them seriously. But over time, they stopped making the best sense of the data.
Toward the end of his video, Nate relates the following:
Christianity didn’t begin as a feeling-based belief system. It began as a claim about history. From the start, it presented itself as something that either happened in the real world or didn’t. The earliest Christian writings name people you could check, cities you could visit, events that were public enough to be disputed. Paul goes so far as to say that if Jesus wasn’t raised, the entire thing collapses. That’s not blind faith. That’s a claim that invites testing. And that realization changed everything.
In case you’re interested, I was recently invited to join Nate and his wife, Shelby, for an episode of FaithLab, and I’ll send a link to that conversation as soon as it becomes available!
Have Archaeologists Discovered Biblical Bethsaida? Watch the new Humble Skeptic video featuring interviews with Steven Notely and others at the dig site. Click here.
RELATED RESOURCES
Episodes of The Humble Skeptic Podcast
Who is Theophilus? #79 with Peter Bolt
Luke, Theophilus & Joanna, #80 with Jim Sibley
A Forensic Approach to the Gospels, #81 with J. Warner Wallace
Did Josephus Ever Mention Jesus? #78 with T.C. Schmidt
Faith Founded on Facts, #15 with Richard Bauckham, Peter Williams & John Lennox
Stories of Jesus: Can They Be Trusted? #61 with Peter J. Williams
Are the Gospels History or Fiction? #52 with John Dickson
The Sinai Inscriptions, Michael S. Bar-Ron
Did The Exodus Ever Happen? #69 with David Rohl
The Jesus of History, Humble Skeptic #12
Articles
A Pre-70 Date for the Gospels & Acts, Shane Rosenthal
The Implications of 70 AD on the Date of the Gospels & Acts, Shane Rosenthal
The Date of John’s Gospel, Revisited, Shane Rosenthal
New Evidence for a Historical Moses, Shane Rosenthal
A Cuneiform Cylinder of Nebuchadnezzar II, Shane Rosenthal
Simon of Cyrene: An Archaeological Discovery, Shane Rosenthal
Water Into Wine: An Archaeological Assessment, Shane Rosenthal
A deserved praise for your most honest and intelligent and - even aesthetically - brilliant work.
Thanks for sharing this. I've been in the same boat my entire Christian life. And for the reasons stated, I too find validation in the Humble Skeptic. And because of that, I intend to keep supporting the Humble Skeptic.
I didn't know there was a name for deconstructing. Maybe I didn't know there was a name for it because there isn't. Maybe. Maybe it's just reasonable doubt repackaged.
One of the reasons (and I'm not asking for absolution) that I can't abide church -- and haven't been able to attend (much less belong) for decades -- is that the church's solution to reasonable doubts is and always will be to invalidate them, or pretend that they don't exist. Or that having them is a sign of weak faith.
And I don't blame them. Church is a haven. Church is where like-minded go to share belief, not question it.
There is no church for doubters -- even us doubters who believe BECAUSE we are capable of doubt.
Being able to ask questions isn't a characteristic of no, little, or weak faith. It's the manifestation of the greatest faith. True faith isn't protectionist of its object. It is endlessly exploratory because it believes in the transcendent reality of its object.
At least, that's what I believe.
I don't think faith is what anyone wants -- religious prayers for more of same notwithstanding (I don't think that's even what such prayers mean). The Humble Skeptic is right, even if it is a lone voice shouting in the wilderness that we don't believe by faith. We demonstrate faith in what we believe.
No, I think faith is what we who suffer the common human condition of ignorance are left with. We've got to believe in something by which to map our course through our ignorance.
I don't think (again, counter to what prayers might indicate) that faith is measured in "more" or "less" -- except insofar as it might measure the distance between what one knows and what one has to act on for survival, sanity, or actualization.
And to a very real extent, I don't think faith operates in the hypothetical. I'm pretty sure faith is the evidence of things not seen. In other words, if one wants to guess what a person has faith in, how he lives would be among the best indicators.
So, I don't accept that faith is a religious proposition. Faith is a human proposition.
Faith may also operate most like what we currently think of as "bias". Faith, like bias, determines how we ultimately act, or what we act on after we've consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously analyzed our environment, our communities, our world, and our universe.
I believe Jesus is alive.
The only evidence I have of that comes from the Bible, not experience.
If Jesus is not alive, I agree with the Apostles Peter and Paul when they said that if Jesus was not resurrected, then Christians then, as now, are sadly deluded.
I think Christianity makes a better than average religion too. But I'm pretty sure that what Jesus demanded is WAY harder than religion, except for the fact that I also believe in redemption. So, Jesus' demands, minus Jesus' grace would be the most unkind universe imaginable, and a burden I can't imagine carrying, much less believing it easy.
I've said it before, but if I thought God was imaginary, I would be an atheist. If I thought God was a myth, I'd be an atheist. I believe in a proposition to the extent that I think it is true. I exhibit faith in any proposition to the extent that I believe it to be true -- not the other way around. I don't believe that faith makes anything true. I do understand the squishy nature of evidence.
Try to explain that in church. Try, even, to have that discussion with your pastor ... as you can see in his eyes that he is already formulating an answer to the question you didn't ask.
When I contemplate the larger issue of questioning the barbed and uncomfortable issues of our ... (I was going to say "our faith", but, of course, "faith" is the very confusing nomenclature at the center of it all, isn't it? ....and "our religion" is equally sticky. ... so, what I'm talking about is the collective belief system of the orthodox believer) ... I often think about the now famous (because it was unintentionally and unconsciously both comical and revealing) "What is WRONG with you people?!" rebuff from R.C. Sproul. I can't believe nobody in the audience stood up and responded "What is wrong with YOU?!" That Sproul made a career of debunking what he couldn't steelman was evidenced in his strange rebuff.
Here's what's wrong with me, Dr Sproul. You're describing a paradox, and I -- like billions of other humans throughout time and history -- cannot simply ignore one side of that paradox to the exclusion of the other side. You display two audacities: 1. That your explanation of the unexplainable should be accepted without question, and 2. That you are in a unique position to speak for God.
All that said, I equally don't go to church because church is happier without my questions. It's how they are tentatively holding on in a world that makes no sense. In a world with so many unanswerable questions, they are more comfortable with any answers.
May I have it both ways too, and seem as squishy in my complaint as I am criticizing others for being? May I appear totally hypocritical and observe that I, too, dislike the doubters? I find their questions generally falling into the categories of:
1. Asked and answered so many times through history that no wonder we roll our eyes when asked yet again.
2. Not even well thought out. Like the old Monty Python argument sketch -- you're not arguing, you're just being contrary.
3. Categorically answerable within the question. It should be easy enough to answer yourself.
4. Asked about claims that Christianity doesn't even make of or for itself.,
So, I guess I deconstruct. But I don't think it's like taking down a tower of blocks. I think it's more like realizing that life never stops handing me more blocks and I never get to simply ignore the blocks as they come. I have to decide if they belong in the ongoing tower project, or if they can be discarded. Humble Skeptic is a key source for helping sort the blocks.