Deconstruction has two public faces. One is triumphant — the Instagram post, the podcast episode, the memoir deal. The other is silent — a person who stops showing up to church and never quite explains why. What neither face shows is grief. And for most people going through it, grief is most of what it is.
Deconstruction — the process of critically examining and often dismantling one’s inherited religious beliefs — has become one of the defining cultural conversations of the past decade. It has a vocabulary now, a genre of memoir, a playlist on Spotify. Exvangelical is a hashtag with millions of posts. But for all the language we’ve developed to describe the theological unraveling, we’ve built almost nothing to describe the loss.
And it is a loss. Sometimes it’s the most significant loss a person has ever experienced.
Chuck DeGroat has spent more than 25 years working at that intersection — first as a pastor, now as a professor of pastoral care and Christian spirituality at Western Theological Seminary, and as a practicing therapist. He has watched the Church’s response to suffering up close for a long time, and his diagnosis is blunt.
“Our churches acknowledge suffering only as something true faith can mitigate,” DeGroat said. “We deny its reality, and in doing so evade the possibility that we might have to dive in to uncivilized grief, grief with tears that cannot be quenched.”
He calls it “Kleenex theology” — the need to wipe suffering clean before it gets messy. Deconstruction, in his framework, is exactly the kind of suffering that gets wiped clean fastest.
When someone leaves the faith they were raised in, or even just the version of it they once held, they don’t only lose a set of beliefs. They lose a community — often the primary community they’ve ever had. They lose a framework for understanding suffering, death and meaning. They lose language they used to reach for in hard moments. They lose the version of themselves that knew exactly where they stood in the universe. Depending on how deeply embedded their faith was, they may lose a career, a marriage, a family’s approval or a sense of home they’ve never been able to replicate since.
None of this is a theological shift. It’s a death.
The psychological literature is clear enough on this. Researchers who study religious disaffiliation have found that the experience maps onto grief clinically, not just metaphorically. Studies from the past decade have documented elevated rates of depression, anxiety and what one researcher called “spiritual homesickness” among people who’ve left high-demand religious environments. Marlene Winell, a psychologist who coined the term “religious trauma syndrome” in 2011, has spent years arguing that mainstream mental health practitioners are underprepared to treat patients whose distress is rooted in religious loss, partly because they don’t recognize it as loss in the first place.
The secular world, when it notices deconstruction at all, tends to greet it as a happy ending. You got out. You’re free. What’s the problem? The assumption is that leaving religion is straightforwardly good, like leaving an abusive relationship, and that the appropriate response to someone who’s deconstructed is celebration. The framing isn’t always wrong. For some people, leaving was survival. But it can also short-circuit something important — the acknowledgment that even necessary losses are still losses, and that grief doesn’t care whether your decision was correct.
The Church, for its part, has its own version of the same failure — and DeGroat has named it plainly.
“The church that denies lament,” he said, “referring the wounded to clinical care only to be returned to the body healed, buries its head in the sand of false reality.”
The institutional response to deconstruction has largely been defensive — a scramble to identify what went wrong doctrinally, what apologetics failed, what program might have kept people in the pews. There are conferences about it now. Pastors read books about it. But the pastoral response to someone in the middle of deconstruction is frequently the one thing least likely to help: an argument. A resource. A gentle but firm suggestion that they haven’t really thought this through.
What grief actually requires is witness — the willingness to sit with someone in their loss without rushing them toward a resolution. DeGroat grounds this in the story of Job.
“Job needed friends to engage the pain,” he said, “not interpret the pain.”
Instead, deconstructors are handed a binary: reconstruct or deconstruct fully, return or leave. And if you leave, do it cleanly, because the mess is making everyone uncomfortable.
The mess is the point. Grief is always a mess.
There is a particular cruelty in the fact that the communities best equipped to walk people through loss — the ones with liturgies and rituals and communal practices built explicitly around death and mourning — are often the same ones that treat religious departure as a betrayal rather than a bereavement. The Church knows how to do funerals. It does not, by and large, know how to hold someone who is grieving the Church itself. DeGroat is direct about the cost.
“In denying the opportunity for an embrace of lament, we miss a Christ-formed life of pain-sharing, compassion, incarnation and Gospel-healing,” he said.
The loss belongs to the institution, not just to the person walking out the door.
Some therapists are beginning to specialize in religious trauma and transition, and there are online communities built around the shared experience of deconstruction — some of them surprisingly good at making space for ambivalence and grief rather than just anger. But these are self-selected spaces, found by people who already know to look for them. The person sitting alone in their apartment three months after they stopped going to church, trying to explain to themselves why they feel like someone died, usually isn’t there yet. They may not even have a word for what they’re experiencing.
What they often have instead is shame — the sense that they should either be further along or back where they started. The deconstruction conversation, as public and as prolific as it has become, has produced very little cultural permission to simply grieve without agenda — to miss your faith, or your church, or your certainty, without the missing reading as failure. For DeGroat, lament has a precise definition.
“Lament is, at its core, a search for God,” he said. “It is not a search for answers. It is not an invitation to fix an ailment.”
Neither the secular world nor the institutional Church has managed to make much space for a search that doesn’t already know where it’s going. The debates about deconstruction will keep happening — whether it’s faithful or faithless, necessary or dangerous, a crisis or a correction. But they keep answering questions that people in the middle of it aren’t asking. What those people need is simpler and harder: someone willing to sit with them in the grief, and to call it that.