You’re watching them question everything you taught them.
And part of you wonders if anything you said landed. If the prayers mattered. If the conversations that felt meaningful at the time left any mark at all.
Something shifted in how young people approach faith. And honestly? A lot of it makes sense. They’ve watched institutions fail. They’ve seen hypocrisy amplified on social media before they even finished middle school. They’ve been told to accept things without being given space to question. Of course they started questioning.
If you’re a parent, a youth pastor, a small group leader, or someone who cares about a young person navigating spiritual questions, you’ve probably noticed the sharpness of their critiques. They want evidence for the resurrection. They want to know how we can trust a book compiled by councils centuries after Jesus lived. They point out every failure, every scandal, every way the institutional church has hurt people. They demand logical consistency, archaeological backing, answers to the hard questions about suffering and exclusivity.
Those are legitimate questions. They deserve real engagement, not deflection.
But you might also be noticing something else: they’re not applying any of that same rigor to the beliefs they’re replacing Christianity with.
You’ve Already Been Trying
Before we go further, I want to name this.
If you’re reading this, you probably already care deeply. You’ve prayed for them. You’ve tried to have conversations that didn’t turn into arguments. You’ve wondered what you could have done differently, what you might have missed, whether there was some moment where you could have said the right thing.
This isn’t about what you did wrong. It’s not about finding the magic words you should have used. What’s happening to the young people in your life is happening to almost everyone right now. It’s bigger than any one conversation or any one relationship. And understanding the pattern might help you know how to respond going forward.
The Asymmetry You’re Not Imagining
If you’ve watched this play out and felt confused by the double standard, you’re not imagining it. It’s real.
They’ll ask devastatingly sharp questions about Christianity. Questions that make you realize they’ve been thinking hard, reading things online, wrestling with stuff you didn’t wrestle with until much later in life (if ever). They want to know why a loving God allows suffering. They want evidence for the resurrection. They want to understand how the Bible was compiled and whether we can trust it.
Those questions deserve answers. They’re not evidence of rebellion. They’re actually evidence of a mind that’s engaging.
But when it comes to whatever they’re replacing Christianity with (or supplementing it with), the skepticism vanishes.
“It resonates with me” becomes a complete argument.
“I trust my gut feeling” becomes their whole way of deciding what’s true.
“I’m taking what works for me from different traditions” becomes a methodology that somehow doesn’t require the same justification.
There’s a reason for this. And understanding it changes how you respond.
Why This Asymmetry Exists (And Why It’s Not Hypocrisy)
What I’ve learned, both from living this myself and from spending years understanding how modern seekers construct their beliefs: this isn’t intellectual dishonesty. At least not conscious intellectual dishonesty.
It’s the water they’re swimming in.
The cultural default right now operates on what I’ve come to think of as the “resonance principle.” The guiding question isn’t “Is this true?” but “Does this work for me? Does this feel right?” Beliefs get adopted or discarded based on whether they feel empowering, calming, personally meaningful. Not based on whether they correspond to reality.
And the crucial piece: this feels like sophistication. It feels like maturity. Because they’ve been told (by the culture, by social media, by peers) that picking and choosing what “feels true” is the enlightened approach. That forcing yourself to accept an entire system is close-minded. That the truly evolved person curates their own spiritual path, taking what works and leaving what doesn’t.
Meanwhile, Christianity has been publicly scrutinized for decades. Every scandal gets amplified. Every historical failure gets documented. Every uncomfortable doctrine gets highlighted. So when a young person approaches Christianity, they’ve already absorbed a cultural posture of skepticism toward it. The critical lens is pre-installed.
But the alternatives? Those are positioned as personal. Private. “My truth.” And somehow, questioning someone’s personal spiritual path feels rude in a way that questioning Christianity doesn’t.
The asymmetry isn’t because they’re being hypocritical on purpose. It’s because the culture has trained them to scrutinize some claims and accept others based on completely different criteria, without ever naming what’s happening.
What Makes This Personal for Me
I need to tell you this, because it’s the only reason I feel qualified to write about any of it.
I was the young person applying rigorous skepticism to Christianity while accepting everything else that “felt true” to me. I had enough foundation in the faith (my mother raised me knowing the stories, understanding Christian doctrine, having a framework for the spiritual realm) to sound credible. But somewhere along the way, that foundation became something I took for granted rather than built upon.
And when life didn’t go the way I thought it should, when I felt overlooked and passed over and frustrated with a God who seemed to be ignoring my prayers, I started looking for alternatives. New Age spirituality told me I could trust my own inner wisdom. It told me I was divine, powerful, capable of manifesting what I wanted without having to submit to a God who seemed arbitrary in His favor.
I didn’t apply a single critical question to any of it. Manifestation felt empowering, so I accepted it. “Trust your intuition” felt liberating, so I embraced it. The idea that all spiritual paths lead to the same destination seemed more loving than what I grew up with, so I adopted it without a moment’s hesitation.
I was selectively skeptical. And I had absolutely no idea.
It took years of the Holy Spirit’s persistent, gentle conviction for me to finally ask myself the question I’d been avoiding: Am I testing everything? Or only the things I already wanted to reject?
That question wrecked me. In the best possible way.
What This Means for Your Conversations
So what do you do with this?
You don’t start lecturing. (That almost never works, and I say this as someone who experienced firsthand how lecturing pushes people further away. When my mom tried to correct my drift, all it did was make me more defensive.)
You don’t demand they prove their new beliefs while defending yours without evidence.
And you definitely don’t treat their questions as threats to be neutralized.
Instead, you get curious.
The goal isn’t to win. The goal is to invite consistent intellectual honesty. Because if Christianity is true, it can handle scrutiny. And if their alternative beliefs are true, they can handle scrutiny too.
The question becomes: Are they willing to apply the same standard to everything?
This is where Socratic questions become powerful. Not as gotcha traps, but as genuine invitations to think more carefully. Questions like:
“That’s interesting. How did you test whether that belief is true?”
“When you say something ‘resonates,’ what does that mean exactly? How do you know the difference between something being true and something feeling good?”
“You’ve thought critically about Christianity. Have you applied the same critical thinking to (whatever alternative they’re drawn to)?”
“What would it take for you to question that idea?”
These aren’t trick questions. They’re honest ones. And they often expose something the person hasn’t noticed about their own process.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A young woman told me recently she’d been reading tarot for guidance. Instead of correcting her, I asked: “What are you hoping to find when you pull a card?”
She paused. “I guess… certainty? I want to know I’m making the right choice.”
I didn’t argue about tarot. I asked a follow-up: “Has it been giving you that certainty?”
Another pause. Longer this time. “Not really. I usually pull another card if I don’t like the first answer.”
That’s the moment. Not when I convinced her tarot was wrong, but when she noticed it wasn’t delivering what she was hoping it would. My job wasn’t to win. It was to ask the question that let her see what she hadn’t noticed yet.
A question that often opens space: “If this turned out not to be true, how would you know? What would change your mind?”
If they can’t answer that, you’re not dealing with a conclusion they’ve reached. You’re dealing with a preference they’ve adopted. And preferences don’t require evidence, which is exactly why they feel so unassailable.
Naming that difference (gently) is sometimes the first crack in the armor.
The Question Underneath the Questions
There’s something else worth naming. Something that Paul writes about in his letter to the Colossians: “Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ” (Colossians 2:8, NLT).
What catches me about that verse isn’t the warning. It’s the description. “High-sounding nonsense.” Ideas that sound sophisticated. That feel intellectually elevated. That present themselves as wisdom.
You know the kind. “Everything happens for a reason.” “The universe is testing you.” “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.” “Trust the process.” Statements that feel profound but don’t say anything. They sound wise without being true. And because they’re vague enough to mean anything, they can’t be questioned.
Paul knew this wasn’t a new problem. People have always been drawn to things that sound profound, especially when those things don’t demand anything of them. The test isn’t whether something sounds wise. The test is whether it’s true.
Which brings us to what might be the most important verse for this whole conversation. Paul again, this time to the Thessalonians: “But test everything that is said. Hold on to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, NLT).
Test everything.
Not “test Christianity and accept everything else.” Not “test institutional religion and trust your feelings for the rest.” Everything.
If you can help the young person in your life hear that verse, really hear it, you’ve given them something the culture isn’t giving them. Permission to be consistently skeptical. An invitation to apply the same rigor everywhere, not only where the culture says it’s appropriate.
What Not to Do
A few things to avoid. Because I’ve seen these backfire, and I’ve had them backfire on me.
Don’t start with correction. Start with curiosity. Ask about their beliefs before you challenge them. Understand what drew them there before you point out the problems. People who feel heard are far more open than people who feel attacked.
Don’t assume they’re being hypocritical on purpose. They often don’t see the asymmetry. Pointing it out gently is different from accusing them of intellectual dishonesty.
Don’t demand they prove their beliefs while refusing to engage with their questions about yours. The invitation to consistent scrutiny works only if you’re modeling it yourself.And don’t expect one conversation to change everything. You’re planting seeds. The crisis that often comes (when the self-constructed spirituality stops delivering what it promised) might not happen for years.
When They’re Not Ready
And sometimes? They’re not ready. They’ll deflect the question. Change the subject. Get defensive and end the conversation.
That doesn’t mean you failed.
What I’ve learned (both from my own journey and from understanding how this works for most people) is that the cracks usually don’t show until something stops working. The anxiety that the manifestation practice was supposed to fix gets worse. The intuition they’ve been trusting leads them somewhere painful. The self-constructed spirituality starts demanding more than it delivers.
That crisis might be years away. When it comes, you want to be the person who was curious rather than combative. Who asked good questions rather than delivered lectures. Who made it clear there was still a seat at the table.
Your job in the meantime is to stay in relationship. Not to fix them on your timeline.
The Spirit is good at His job. Sometimes our job is to ask the questions and then… get out of the way.
The Long Game
I wish I could tell you there’s a script that works every time. There isn’t.
What I can tell you is this: the truth can handle scrutiny. And the people in your life who are questioning everything? They’re not lost causes. They’re people who are thinking, which is more than a lot of folks do.
Your job isn’t to argue them back into the faith. Your job is to invite them into intellectual honesty, the kind that applies the same standard to every claim, not only the ones they grew up with.
Sometimes that looks like asking a question and then… sitting with the silence that follows. Letting them wrestle with it instead of filling the space with more words.
Sometimes it looks like admitting you don’t have a perfect answer to their hard question, but you’re still in this faith because of what you’ve found to be true.
Sometimes it looks like being a calm, steady presence who isn’t threatened by their doubts. Who treats their questions as legitimate rather than dangerous. Who makes it clear that there’s room for wrestling here.
I think about what I needed back when I was selectively skeptical, back when I was applying rigor to Christianity and resonance to everything else. I didn’t need someone to win the argument. I needed someone to ask me the question I wasn’t asking myself:
“Are you testing everything? Or only some things?”
That question eventually caught up with me. It might catch up with them too.
And when it does, you want to have been the person who planted it, gently, with genuine curiosity, without demanding they reach your conclusions on your timeline.
If You’re the Young Person Reading This
And if you’re the young person someone sent this to, or you stumbled on it some other way, I get it. Reading about yourself in the third person is uncomfortable. All I’d ask is this: the questions in this piece aren’t traps. They’re invitations. What if you applied them to yourself before deciding whether to be offended?
There’s a section in James about asking God for wisdom without doubting, about being willing to hear an answer you might not want. I’m still sitting with what that looks like practically. Maybe that’s worth exploring together.
One Thing to Try This Week
Not a strategy overhaul. Not a new approach to every conversation. One thing.
The next time they mention a belief or practice they’ve been drawn to, ask one genuine question about it. Not to correct. Not to set up an argument. To understand.
Then wait.
Don’t fill the silence. Don’t jump in with your perspective. Let them sit with their own answer for a moment.
That’s it. One question. One silence. See what happens when you give them space to hear themselves think.
Where I’m Still Sitting
I don’t have this figured out. I’m still learning how to have these conversations without slipping into lecture mode (my natural tendency). Still working on asking good questions and then waiting for answers instead of filling the silence.
But I know the young people in my life are worth the effort. And I know that the same God who patiently pursued me through my years of selective skepticism is patiently pursuing them too.
He’s not asking us to do His job. He’s asking us to stay in the conversation.
That’s something I can do.
