I used to think I could spot it a mile away.
That moment when someone starts pulling apart everything they were taught about faith, examining each piece, deciding what stays and what goes. The teen who suddenly questions everything. The college student who comes home with new opinions about the Bible. The young adult who says church doesn’t feel “authentic” anymore. I’d mentally file them under “drifting” and pray they’d come back around.
What I didn’t realize was that I was mixing up two very different things. One of them can lead to deeper, more rooted faith. The other leads… somewhere else entirely. And the difference isn’t in the questions being asked. It’s in what those questions are reaching toward.
Here’s what I’ve learned from sitting with people (and from my own wandering through spiritual confusion back to grounded, biblical faith): you cannot diagnose the path by the doubts. Both healthy reformation and destructive deconstruction look like questioning. Both involve wrestling with inherited beliefs. Both push back against the status quo.
But they’re heading in opposite directions.
The One Question That Changes Everything
When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door, he wasn’t rejecting Scripture. He was running back to it. He’d studied the Bible in the original languages and found that the institutional church had drifted from what the text said. His protest wasn’t “I’ve decided this doesn’t feel right to me personally.” It was “We’ve strayed from the authority we claim to follow.”
That’s the essential distinction: Where does ultimate authority rest?
Reformation holds tightly to Scripture’s authority while questioning systems that have obscured it. The goal is to return to the foundation.
Modern deconstruction often does the opposite. It doesn’t question whether the church got the Bible right. It questions whether the Bible gets to be the final word at all. Personal experience, intuition, “what feels true to me”… these become the measuring sticks. Scripture shifts from being the standard to being one voice among many.
Paul put it this way: “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right” (2 Timothy 3:16, NLT).
The reformer reads that and says, “Yes. That’s why I’m questioning whether our traditions align with it.”
The deconstructionist might read it and think, “But who decides which interpretations are correct? Ultimately, I have to trust my own discernment.”
Same Bible. Same verse. Completely different relationship to its authority.
What It Looks Like in Practice
So how do you tell the difference in a real conversation?
Signs someone might be running toward (reformation):
They’re wrestling with how Scripture was applied, not whether it has authority. Their questions lead them deeper into the text, not away from it. They’re frustrated by the gap between what the Bible says and what they were taught… which means they’re still reading it, still caring what it says.
Signs someone might be running from (relocation of authority):
Their questions lead away from Scripture toward “what feels true to me.” They’re collecting beliefs from multiple sources and evaluating them by personal comfort. Scripture has become “one voice among many.” They talk about “outgrowing” Christianity like they’ve graduated to a more sophisticated stage. They’ve started using phrases like “my truth” as final arbiters.
The tricky part is that both people might say similar things early on. Both might say “I’m asking questions.” Both might say “The church hurt me.”
The question is: where are those questions leading them?
Why This Shift Is Happening
Here’s where I need to ask you to hold two things at once. The shift from external authority to personal intuition is genuinely dangerous. And the reasons people make that shift are often deeply understandable.
The exodus from institutional Christianity isn’t primarily driven by theological disagreements. It’s driven by pain. Hypocrisy. Control. The feeling that “if I ask the wrong questions here, I’ll be labeled a bad Christian.”
Over a third of young Christians report feeling unable to ask their most pressing life questions within the church. That’s not a fringe statistic. That’s a systemic failure.
So when a young person decides to “trust my own intuition” over external religious authority, they’re often not being arrogant. They’re being adaptive. They’ve concluded (sometimes correctly) that the institution claiming to represent God has failed them.
The problem isn’t that their pain is invalid. The problem is that relocating authority to the self doesn’t solve the underlying issue. It trades one set of problems for another.
The Exhaustion Nobody Talks About
Being your own spiritual authority sounds freeing. For a while, it is.
You get to curate your beliefs. Take what fits. Leave what doesn’t. No one telling you what to think. You’re finally free to follow your own path, trust your own inner voice, find your own truth.
Except… eventually you have to make decisions. Big ones. And when your primary tool is your own intuition, you discover an uncomfortable reality: you can’t always tell if your inner voice is divine guidance, your own anxiety, or a wound talking.
I know this from the inside. During my years of blending Christianity with other spiritual practices (calling it “progressive” faith, calling it “authentic” spirituality), I believed I was building a real relationship with God. What I didn’t see was that I’d made myself the final judge of spiritual truth. And being my own judge was exhausting in ways I couldn’t articulate until I stopped doing it.
The people I’ve talked with who’ve walked this path describe it the same way. “My own thoughts deceive me,” one person wrote. “How do I know if this feeling is God, or is it my trauma talking?” asked another. They’ve built their entire spiritual framework on an inner compass… and they’re starting to suspect the compass might be broken.
Jeremiah saw this clearly: “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” (Jeremiah 17:9, NLT).
That’s not an insult. It’s a warning. And it’s also, paradoxically, an invitation. The answer to a deceitful heart isn’t to double down on trusting it harder. It’s to anchor yourself to a standard outside yourself that doesn’t shift based on your mood.
What This Means for Your Conversations
So how does any of this help when your teenager comes home questioning everything?
First: don’t panic. Questions aren’t the enemy. Scripture itself models honest wrestling. Job argued with God. David cried out in despair. The Psalms are full of “How long, O Lord?” That’s not weak faith. That’s real faith under pressure.
Second: listen before you diagnose. Often the real issue isn’t intellectual at all. It’s relational. “I was hurt by someone who claimed to speak for God.” Rushing in with apologetics before you’ve honored the wound will get you nowhere.
(And honestly? Sometimes sitting with someone in the rubble of what they’re leaving is the most pastoral thing you can do. Before you point toward where they might go, you might need to be there first. In the mess. Without an agenda.)
But third: gently introduce the authority question.
Try: “When you’re sorting through all of this, what’s your standard for deciding what’s true? When two things contradict each other, how do you choose?”
Or: “You keep mentioning what ‘feels right’ to you. What happens when truth doesn’t feel right?”
These aren’t trick questions. They’re invitations to examine an assumption operating beneath the surface.
The Harder Conversation
Sometimes the person deconstructing has legitimate critiques. Sometimes the “Christianity” they’re rejecting deserves to be rejected.
If someone was taught that faith means never questioning, that’s not biblical Christianity. If they experienced leaders who used Scripture as a weapon of control, their suspicion of religious authority isn’t paranoia. It’s wisdom.
Some church communities are toxic. If that’s been their experience, the call isn’t “go back to the place that wounded you.” The call is toward healthy community. Those are different things.
I’m not minimizing the damage. I’m saying the damage done by toxic churches doesn’t mean the design is wrong. It means those churches failed the design.
The goal isn’t to defend every version of Christianity they’ve encountered. It’s to help them see that the answer to bad authority isn’t no authority. It’s right authority. The answer to leaders who misused Scripture isn’t to abandon Scripture. It’s to return to it more honestly than the people who hurt them ever did.
That was Luther’s move. That can be theirs too.
What You’re Offering
Scripture isn’t a cage. It’s an anchor. And for someone who’s been adrift in the exhausting work of being their own spiritual authority, an anchor sounds less like control and more like… relief.
Proverbs captures it: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take” (Proverbs 3:5-6, NLT).
That’s not a threat. It’s a promise. And for the person who’s tired of navigating by a compass they’re starting to suspect might be broken… it might be exactly what they need to hear.
If they’re open, ask them: “What would it feel like to not have to figure all of this out alone?”
And then give them space to answer.
I keep thinking about that exhaustion. The kind nobody talks about until they’re in the middle of it. There’s a thread in Paul’s letters about the mind of Christ that I want to explore more… the idea that we’re not left to our own discernment, that there’s wisdom available beyond what we can generate ourselves.
But for now, here’s what I’m holding: the difference between reformation and deconstruction isn’t the questions. It’s the direction. One runs toward an authority outside the self. The other runs toward making the self its own authority.
Only one of those directions leads somewhere you want to end up.
