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!
To all my paid subscribers and donors, thank you for making this work possible! If you are not yet a supporter, please consider making a year-end gift to continue this important work. If you’d like a tax-deductible receipt, use this link. To subscribe via Substack, click here.
