You’ve watched it happen.
Maybe it was gradual. The eye rolls during prayer got longer. The excuses for skipping church got more creative. The questions that used to feel curious started sounding hostile. Or maybe it happened all at once. One conversation where everything you thought you’d built together seemed to evaporate.
Your kid (or student, or mentee) who once sang worship songs is now posting about trauma healing and astrology. The teen who memorized Bible verses can’t seem to sit through a sermon without checking out. The young adult who once led youth group now says they’re “deconstructing.”
It’s terrifying. Because you didn’t just hand them a religion. You handed them something you believe, deeply, is life itself. Watching them set it down feels like watching them walk toward a cliff.
I need you to hear something before we go any further: your grief is real too. This isn’t just theological concern. It’s loss. It’s watching someone you love reject something that anchors your entire existence. You’re allowed to mourn that. (Just don’t let that grief turn into pressure that accelerates their departure. More on that later.)
But I want to offer something else: this might not be what you think it is.
The Sweater That Stopped Fitting
A metaphor won’t leave me alone when I think about what’s happening in young people’s spiritual lives: the faith they inherited can feel like a tight, uncomfortable sweater in a room that keeps getting hotter.
The sweater was a gift. Given with love. It fit once. It was warm and comforting and exactly what they needed.
But somewhere along the way, the room got hotter. And the sweater didn’t change.
What does “hotter” look like? It looks like watching church leaders fall into scandal and wondering if anyone believes what they preach. It looks like hearing “just trust God” when their anxiety is screaming and no one seems to notice. It looks like having real questions dismissed because the questions themselves feel threatening to the adults around them. It looks like being told God loves everyone, then hearing the same community say things that don’t sound loving at all about people they know and care about.
The room got hotter. And telling someone to “just keep wearing the sweater” doesn’t cool the room down.
This part might sting a little: sometimes we’re so focused on the sweater (the beliefs, the practices, the traditions) that we don’t even notice the temperature changed. We’re comfortable. The sweater still fits us fine. So when they start pulling at the collar, we assume the problem is their commitment rather than their context.
And sometimes the room gets hotter through no one’s fault. Culture shifts. Peer influence intensifies. Questions emerge naturally as part of growing up. This isn’t always about church failure or parenting mistakes. Sometimes kids from the healthiest, most loving communities still pull at the collar. That doesn’t mean you did something wrong. It means they’re human, living in a complicated world, trying to figure out what they believe.
But here’s the thing about sweaters: they also keep you warm when the night gets cold.
And the night will get cold. The same faith that feels suffocating at eighteen has a way of becoming the only anchor at thirty-five when the marriage is crumbling or the diagnosis comes back positive or the existential questions stop being theoretical. The question isn’t whether they’ll need that sweater again. It’s whether it’ll still be there when they do.
Discomfort, Not Rebellion
This is the shift that might reshape how you respond: deconstruction almost never begins with rebellion. It begins with discomfort.
Research keeps me up at night sometimes. Thirty-six percent of young Christians feel they are unable to ask their most pressing life questions or express doubts within the church. Let that land for a second. More than a third of our young people don’t feel safe enough to be honest about what they’re wrestling with.
That’s not rebellion. That’s suffocation.
The young person drifting from faith often isn’t rejecting Jesus. They’re rejecting what they’ve experienced in His name. A phrase keeps showing up in online spiritual communities that reveals something important: they’ll say they still admire Jesus, still feel drawn to His teachings, but they can’t stomach the disconnect between what they heard about love and what they’ve seen in practice.
I’ve heard versions of this over and over: “I didn’t want to abandon Jesus, but I felt trapped. Unsure how to stay without being dishonest with myself.”
Trapped. That’s the word that appears again and again. Not angry. Not defiant. Trapped.
And if I’m honest, I know that feeling. I was raised in the faith by my mother, who taught me about God and Jesus and the Bible from an early age. She gave me something precious: a foundation. But somewhere along the way, that foundation became something I took for granted rather than something I actively built upon. I knew enough about God to feel spiritually informed, but not enough to stay grounded in humility and dependence on Him.
My drift wasn’t rebellion either. It was restlessness, I guess. A hunger that felt unmet. Questions that felt unwelcome. And when the church didn’t feel like a safe place to wrestle with those questions, I found other places that were.
What Made the Room Hotter
When I look at the cultural and spiritual forces shaping young people’s faith today, I see a few things that simply weren’t factors (or weren’t factors in the same way) when most of us were their age.
First: the wounds are real. Spiritual abuse, hypocrisy witnessed up close, leaders who failed publicly. These aren’t excuses. They’re catalysts. When the people who claim to speak for God turn out to be deeply flawed (or worse, harmful), it doesn’t just damage trust in those individuals. It damages trust in the entire structure.
(And before you think “that’s not my church,” it might not be. Plenty of communities are healthy and loving. But the headlines still shape the landscape. Your teen has seen the scandals even if they haven’t lived them.)
Second: the silence is louder than you think. Questions dismissed. Hard topics skipped. “Just have faith” offered as a response to real intellectual struggle. I cannot overstate how much this accelerates drift. When the church won’t engage their real questions, they will find someone who will. And right now, the algorithm is ready to answer 24/7.
Third: digital discipleship is happening whether we acknowledge it or not. The same teen who sits passively through Sunday school is actively engaged with spiritual content all week. Just not ours. TikTok theologians and Instagram mystics are shaping their categories for what “authentic spirituality” even looks like.
And this is the uncomfortable part: some of that content feels more compelling to them. I’m not saying it’s true. I’m saying it feels kinder, more curious, more intellectually honest. The algorithm knows how to validate without requiring vulnerability. It offers community without commitment. Spirituality without surrender.
(Of course, the algorithm can also be brutal. Anyone who’s read the comments section knows that online spirituality can be just as judgmental as any church environment. But it’s their algorithm. It feels chosen. And that makes all the difference.)
The Authority Shift You Might Have Missed
Something that might reframe the whole conversation: many young people have already shifted where they locate spiritual authority. And we often don’t realize it until we’re talking past each other.
Ninety-one percent of people in the “spiritual but not religious” space believe their spiritual path must be found on their own. And sixty percent equate the Holy Spirit with their personal intuition.
Read those numbers again.
This isn’t just theological disagreement. It’s an entirely different framework for how truth is discovered. They’ve moved from external authority (the Bible, church, tradition) to internal authority (experience, intuition, personal resonance). And they often don’t even know they’ve made this shift. It just feels like “growing up” spiritually. Like graduating from the kindergarten of religion into the university of spirituality.
(That’s language they use. Religion as kindergarten. Spirituality as graduation. The linguistic assumptions reveal everything about the worldview.)
Which means: you cannot argue someone back to an authority structure they no longer trust. You have to rebuild trust first. And that takes patience, presence, and a willingness to listen before you lecture.
A verse in Proverbs surfaces again and again for me: “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out” (Proverbs 20:5, NLT). Notice it doesn’t say “one who has answers demands them out.” It says insight. Drawing. Patience. Going deep rather than staying surface.
What They Need From Us
So what does this mean practically? A few things keep emerging from both research and real conversations:
Listen before you lecture. When someone you love starts expressing doubt, the first question should not be “How do I fix this?” The first question should be: “What happened? When did this doubt first show up? What experience is underneath this?”
Often, the real issue isn’t intellectual at all. It’s relational. Someone hurt them. Someone dismissed them. Someone who claimed to speak for God failed them.
Try this: Next time they bring up a hard question, don’t answer immediately. Say, “That’s a really good question. Can you tell me more about what’s making you wonder about that?” Give them thirty seconds of silence after they answer. What they say next is usually the real question.
You can honor the pain without endorsing every conclusion. This is so important. Validating that something genuinely hurt them doesn’t mean agreeing with whatever theological conclusions they’ve drawn from that hurt. But they need to feel heard before they’ll hear you.
Practice this phrase: “I believe you. That sounds really painful. And I’m still here.” You don’t have to agree with their theological conclusions to validate that something truly wounded them.
Create space for questions you don’t have answers to. Model what it looks like to say “I don’t know, but I’m still here. Still believing. Still wrestling.” The Bible is full of this. Job screamed at God. The Psalms are littered with complaint. David demanded to know why God had forgotten him: “O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way?” (Psalm 13:1, NLT).
That’s not unfaithfulness. That’s honest faith. And it’s exactly what we need to model for young people who think doubt means disqualification.
Remember: God isn’t afraid of hard questions. The Bible itself invites us to “test everything” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, NLT). If we’re more protective of our faith than God is, we might be protecting something other than the truth.Know what doesn’t help: “You just need to read your Bible more.” “It’s just a phase.” “You’ll come back eventually.” Each of these, however true they might be, communicates that you’re more interested in fixing them than understanding them. The sweater doesn’t feel any less suffocating when someone’s telling you to just put it back on.
The Hope We’re Holding
What I want to leave you with: not every unraveling is permanent.
There’s a difference between healthy questioning (pulling weeds so the real fruit can flourish) and harmful uprooting (destroying the soil entirely). Many young people who deconstruct eventually reconstruct. The question is whether we’ll be part of that process or whether we’ll have burned the bridge during the questioning.
The algorithm can answer questions instantly. It can offer validation without vulnerability, community without commitment, spirituality without surrender. What it cannot offer is presence. It cannot sit with someone in their doubt and simply be there. It cannot love someone through the mess without trying to fix them. It cannot model faith that holds firm even when the answers don’t come.
That’s what you have that they can’t get anywhere else.
Your calm presence. Your confidence in a God who’s big enough to handle the questions. Your willingness to keep showing up even when they’re pulling away. Your refusal to make their doubt about your failure.
When I finally returned to church after years of wandering, I was terrified. I worried about judgment, about whether I would be accepted with my complicated past. I struggled with what I now understand as a deep wound toward myself. I felt I deserved condemnation.
But I went anyway. And what I found was people who didn’t try to fix me. They just stayed. Present. Patient. The door had been left open.
I think about what it must have been like for the father in the prodigal son story. Watching his son walk away. Not chasing him down. Not demanding he stay. Just keeping the door open. Watching the horizon. Ready to run toward him the moment he turned around.
That’s the posture. That’s the hope.
Perhaps the sweater can be loosened. You might be able to help cool the room. Or you could simply sit with them while they figure out what still fits and what needs to be tailored differently. The faith they inherited might become faith they own. Not because you forced it, but because you loved them through the questioning until they found their way back to the truth that was there all along.
That story is still being written. For them. And for all of us.
If You Need Help Taking a Practical First Step
If a conversation feels possible: The next time they say something that makes you want to correct them, pause. Ask one follow-up question before you respond. Just one. “Can you tell me more about that?” or “When did you start feeling that way?” See what happens when you draw out rather than push back. That’s it. One question. One pause. Under five minutes.
If conversation feels impossible right now: Write down three things you admire about them that have nothing to do with their faith. Not “they used to love worship” but who they are as a person. Their humor. Their creativity. Their loyalty to friends. Keep that list somewhere you’ll see it. It’s easier to stay connected to someone when you remember why you love them beyond their beliefs.
If you need something to ground you: Read Luke 15:11-24 slowly. Not for answers, but for posture. Notice how the father responds when the son finally comes home. Notice what he doesn’t say. Something in that story about waiting without grasping might help you know how to hold this season.
You don’t have to have it all figured out. You don’t have to know exactly what to say. You just have to keep the door open.
And if you’re wondering what “loosening the sweater” looks like in practice, there’s this whole section in 1 Corinthians about becoming all things to all people. Paul understood something about meeting people where they are that we might have forgotten. Worth exploring.
