When Deconstruction Becomes a Brand

Once any spiritual movement becomes a hashtag #spiritualmovement, it can lose its power, and start to feel like the very thing it set out to repudiate.

When Roxy Stone and I launched our podcast in 2021, we had a lot of to say about our evangelical upbringings. In several episodes of Saved by the City, we critique teachings we heard growing up about purity, gender, and why our teenage selves needed to prevent the goth kids in youth group from going to hell.

Image: PrettyToxicStickers, Etsy.

An early episode, “How We Survived the Great Evangelical Betrayal,” one of our most popular, covered the disorientation and sadness we felt upon seeing so many evangelicals embrace a political leader who embodies the opposite of what we had been taught about Christianity. Several of our guests over the years are popular among folks who are deconstructing or have deconstructed, some still within the faith, some beyond it.

But after a season or two, Roxy and I realized we didn’t want to be another “deconstruction podcast.”

First, that’s a crowded market, with niche interests in politics, gender, race, theology, youth group culture, and more. (Here are two lists of popular deconstruction or deconstruction-adjacent podcasts.) For every media account tailored to mainstream evangelicals — i.e., about the Bible, marriage and family, leadership, and an overt or covert social and political conservatism — it seems there are now just as many media options for people who are examining or rejecting aspects of that world.

On a human level, beyond the gaze of the algo, deconstruction is a personal, often painful process of re-examining elements of Christian teaching and upbringing. That process leads different people to different relationships with the faith. Some leave one church or denomination for another; some leave the institutional church altogether but still love Jesus and (although usually with a more complicated love) the Bible; and some move into a post-Christian spirituality.

As someone who receives book proposals from people working in this space, I’ve started to feel in the past few years that deconstruction has become a brand. In a crowded digital media market, it’s a way for content creators to clearly identify their niche and reach a growing audience (according to a 2024 Barna survey, 2 in 5 Americans Christians say they have deconstructed). Look up the hashtags #deconstruction or #exvangelical, and you’ll get a feel for what I’m trying to describe.

In 2020, in a highly popular episode of their video-recorded podcast, Ear Biscuits, Rhett and Link (Rhett MacLaughlin and Charles ‘Link’ Neal) shared their stories of leaving Christianity. This February, they shared a 5-year update. (Image: YouTube screenshot)

When I say “brand,” I don’t mean to say that people writing or talking about deconstruction haven’t genuinely done the work. Many of them have, at great cost. Nor am I saying that people working in this world are only or primarily in it for a platform boost and financial gain.

But I am saying that Internet culture and consumer culture undeniably shape, and misshape, how religion and spirituality are practiced today. And just as evangelicalism has become a brand — a media matrix of books, podcasts, conferences, and TikTok reels meant to be consumed to provide clear answers or shore up a consumer’s spiritual identity — so has much of the exvangelical world.

Daniel Vaca, a religious historian at Brown University, wrote a great book on this called Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America that I found helpful in researching my book on celebrity. He writes,

“Evangelicalism exemplifies what I describe as ‘commercial religion.’ Religion that takes shape through the ideas, activities, and strategies that typify commercial capitalism.”

That is, one way we can understand evangelicalism is as a consumer marketplace. One way evangelicals practice faith is through buying, selling, and consuming content tailored to their felt needs.

In this way, it seems to me that the deconstruction world is at risk of becoming like the very thing it’s rejecting. The content may be different, but in many cases, the form — easy, and easily shareable, answers from experts (some credentialed, others less so) — remain the same. (Side note: I’d be fascinated to hear from people inside the deconstruction world about how gender and race play into this dynamic.)

Beyond Slogan Spirituality

This is perhaps the second reason Roxy and I steered away from the deconstruction branding.

When genuine faith experiences are translated into the world of hashtags, search engine optimization, and soundbites, it can end up feeling a bit cheap and two-dimensional. Writing starts to sound like marketing copy. And for those of us who care about good writing, we might start seeing ourselves rely on shorthands and easy answers — because they “work” to retain an audience in a crowded space.

I don’t know if others feel this way, but these days when I scroll social media, I feel like I know what most of the people I follow are going to say.

Let’s say another horrible thing happens within the Trump administration (not a stretch of the imagination here) or a MAGA-fried (I literally just came up with that) pastor somewhere outside Dallas posts a video saying something awful about immigrants or trans people (sadly, same), and the responses start coming in:

The Bible doesn’t justify hate.

Jesus identified with the powerless, not the power-hungry.

If your faith causes you to hate your neighbor, you’re doing it wrong.

Jesus was a Jewish socialist from Palestine.

And so on.

It’s not that these statements aren’t true (although the Jesus-was-basically-Bernie-Sanders one feels like a stretch to me, personally), but that the slogan-y form saps the statements of their power.

Image: Higher Vibes Shoppe, Etsy.

This feels like years ago now, but the night in June when we learned that the U.S. military had deployed strikes on three nuclear sites in Iran, and that the country may be going to war — a night of great uncertainty and fear for many — someone I follow on X shared a link to T-shirts and other wares that feature a slogan about peace. And while the slogan was true, and while the proceeds go to a peace-building organization and not to the creator, my first thought that night was, Too soon.

There should be moments, and experiences, that are off-limits to quickly produced Internet content. Yes, we need people speaking truth to power and calling out unrighteousness in high places and pointing out the hypocrisy of religious leaders. We need people naming the ways that bad teaching has harmed precious image bearers and created a mockery of the Christian faith.

And, we also need people who can be still and silent, who know when to speak and when to listen, who are working out their relationship to faith first and foremost in embodied relationship, in communities that both name the problems of evangelicalism and also work toward healing from them.

Building Beyond, Not Reacting To

I say none of this to undermine the essential goal of deconstruction content creators. I believe the majority are sharing their work because have experienced something painful and want others to know that they are not alone in their pain. That there is a better and more faithful way to relate to Jesus or God. The miracle (and also curse) of the Internet is that it lets us connect with people we never could have in person.

And, it’s the logic of the Internet to turn these good things into something to buy and sell as individual consumers.

The evangelical movement of my upbringing ran on slogan speak:

“What Would Jesus Do?”

“God doesn’t call the equipped, he equips the called.”

“Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

“We went to serve, but we received so much more.”

“I’m in a season …” (okay I still use this one; it’s helpful!)

“Amy Grant’s cross-over album is causing my daughter to backslide.”

Etc.

Many of us gag on this Christianese because they take something profound and reduce it to something cutesy, banal, and “insider.” Yet insofar as the deconstruction movement is reacting to rather than building beyond the evangelical movement, it seems to me it will mimic this problem.

So, I’ll end this by asking: Who are writers and content creators in the post-evangelical space who you think are doing this well? I’d love to hear. —KB