Walking Faithfully Through Deconstruction: Interview with Ian Harber

In the conclusion to his new book, Walking Faithfully Through Deconstruction: How to Be a Companion in a Crisis of Faith (IVP, 2025), Ian Harber powerfully and beautifully reflects: “No matter what doubts, sins, and sufferings come our way, Jesus is inviting us to come to him. God is renewing the world, reconstructing the world that Satan, sin, and death deconstructed, rescuing us from the crisis that is our lives, and giving us everlasting peace.” 

He was not always able to make this declaration, and that is the story behind the making of this book: Ian himself went through a crisis of faith. Now that he is on the other side of it, he has written this book as a resource for pastors, family members, and friends of those going through such a crisis.  

Ian is the Director of Communications and Marketing for Mere Orthodoxy. 

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Nadya Williams: This is a very personal book, and I appreciated your willingness to let your readers into your story—I’ll leave the details for readers to discover for themselves, but suffice it to say that the first two decades of your life were deeply traumatic both at home and at church. So it was (statistically speaking) no wonder that deconstruction appealed to you for a season!

Now, the term itself has significant "baggage" associated with it, especially in our age of The Great Dechurching. As you note in your introduction: "Forty million Americans have left the church over the last twenty-five years. It’s the largest religious shift in American history—and it’s away from the church." So, I have two related questions for you to start with. First, how do you define deconstruction? And second, for whom did you write this book, and what do you hope your readers will gain from it? 

Ian Harber: The difficult thing with talking about deconstruction is that everyone has a different idea of what it is. I wrote a definition in the book, not as the end-all-be-all academic definition of deconstruction, but to help name a personal and complicated process, and to give common language both for people who are going through this process and for those around them. My goal is to help build relational bridges that might be strained.

So I start out by talking about what deconstruction isn't before I explain how I think about it. My definition of deconstruction is "a crisis of faith that leads to the questioning of core doctrines and untangling of cultural ideologies that settles in a faith that is different than before."

Then I help people understand what the experience of deconstruction is like. I'm making a conscious effort to move deconstruction out of a purely intellectual register and into a spiritual and existential register. The intellectual aspect really only makes sense in that context.

Next I help people understand the things that catalyze deconstruction—both things external to the individual and internal to them. And then I look at different places people who deconstruct can land.

The second half of the book is really a series of paradigm shifts to aid in conversation. It's a lot of "have you thought about it this way?" I want parents, pastors, and friends to be equipped for a whole range of different conversations. Not in an argumentative apologetic way, but in an attempt to be a relationally non-anxious presence, helpfully and thoughtfully reframing some things in order to bring clarity where there might be confusion and love where there might be strife.

Nadya Williams: In defining your terms early in the book, you note that writing about deconstruction means you are writing about "the dechurched casualties," who are sometimes called exvangelicals. Yet your book is quite different, to be clear, from the myriad explosive exvangelical memoirs that have emerged over the past few years—I'm thinking, for instance, of Sarah McCammon's The Exvangelicals (which I reviewed at Current). Miles Smith did a public service here at Mere Orthodoxy when he reviewed several of these memoirs as a group. Can you explain briefly the differences that readers should expect to see between your book and these others? 

Ian Harber: It was really important to me to not write a memoir. The book is deeply personal because it does come out of my personal experience. I do include bits of my story and other anecdotes, because I don't know how I would've written the book without helping people understand where I was coming from and drawing on experiences that I've had. But I didn't want to write a book about myself. I wanted to write a book to the church to serve the church.

As far as I can tell, there are two dominant genres of deconstruction books and then a smaller third one. The first, like you mention, involves books written by exvangelicals to other exvangelicals about how bad the church is or how unreliable our faith is. Some of these take the form of memoir, sort of like The Exvangelicals, others are more issue-by-issue. Certainly, the stories told in those books are horrible and deserve our compassion.

The second genre of book involves Christians writing to people deconstructing about how they should deconstruct. Some of these are better than others, and I more or less agree with a lot of the stuff written in them. But the problem, it seems to me, is that when you're in the throes of a crisis of faith, being told how you should go through it is about the last thing you want to hear. It's not that the advice in those books isn’t helpful; it's that I'm afraid it will fall on ears that aren't ready to hear it.

The third and smaller genre involves books written about deconstruction to the church. My book falls into this category. Except, the other books I've read in this genre seem to strike a more cynical tone in one way or another, whether in warning people of the dangers of deconstruction or issuing a blanket condemnation of the church as solely responsible for people's deconstruction. That is not the tone I wanted my book to have.

I write in the introduction that I want to be "brutally honest but defiantly hopeful." I want to help the church understand just how scary the process of deconstruction is, and I want to have honest and difficult conversations about the things that catalyze deconstruction. But I don't want people to be afraid of deconstruction or to give up on the church. I want them to turn the last few pages of the book and feel an immense sense of hope that despite the darkness of deconstruction, it doesn't have to be something to be afraid of, but that it has the potential to be a powerful means of God working in someone's life and forming them more and more into his image.

Nadya Williams: One theme that comes up repeatedly in your book is the challenge of asking questions about faith—sometimes simply asking questions in church might get someone (whether a kid or an adult) labeled as a troublemaker. Why do you think this is the case? How might churches (and individual Christians) get past this fear of questions?

Ian Harber: I'm sure there's not one answer to this, but there are different dynamics going on depending on the pocket of evangelicalism you find yourself in. Some pockets, like the one I grew up in, value a kind of intellectualism that wants to have certainty around particular beliefs. They focus on secondary and tertiary doctrines, emphasizing what makes them different than other Christians and, therefore, more true and faithful than those other Christians. If you don't believe all the "right" things, you may not actually be saved.

Another pocket, in which I sort of found myself later on, was the complete opposite. There is no intellectualism. It's vibes all the way down. Faith isn't really defined by what you believe as much as by how intensely you feel. And if you don't feel enough, then you may not actually be saved.

Having been in both of these environments at different times in my life, I've seen more people than I can count deconstruct and leave the faith from both of these pockets.

It's hard to give a comprehensive answer here, but if I were to say two things to churches, I would say the words relational and sacramental. We need our pastors and leaders to stop performing and start shepherding. Foster a relational staff that is in people's lives and cares for them. As for being sacramental, what I mean is fostering encounters with the Lord through the ordinary means of grace. The faithful preaching of the word, regular participation in the Lord's Supper, a thick Sunday liturgy that includes prayer, confession, and the public reading of the Gospels. Create the space for the Spirit to minister to people in service and then get out of the way. 

Nadya Williams: Another theme that threads through your book is the significance of relationships—just as every other aspect of our lives is not as individual as modernity tells us, this is true also of our faith. As a parent, I found this point you made particularly striking: "Fourteen percent of people who dechurched cited that a parent’s inability to listen contributed to their dechurching." What advice would you give to parents in particular? 

Ian Harber: There's a line from the old Scottish preacher Andrew Murray, "What I am to make my child, I must first be myself." Obviously, we can never make our children anything in our own power and the older they get, the truer that is. But the chief takeaway here, I think, is that we need to model for our children the kind of people—and in this context, the kind of faith—that we want them to have. 

Now, that's no guarantee of anything. I know incredibly faithful saints who have done this and their children have still left the faith. But my fear is that many parents never showed their children that they have a serious devotion to Jesus, whether that was through putting church involvement in the backseat, not knowing their Bibles, not having a prayer life, not being in meaningful community, and so on—and then they wonder why their children don't think any of it is real. 

In the middle of their children's deconstruction, I think some of this could take the shape of parents finding a rededicated devotion to Jesus themselves. And part of that includes moving toward their children in love with patient hearts, trusting God and asking him to move in their lives. The historical example here is St. Augustine's mother, Monica, who prayed for him for years and devoted herself to God, waiting for God to move in her son's life. Obviously, he did. But it took about a decade.

Nadya Williams: We write books to change the world (or a small aspect of it), but invariably, the process of writing a book changes the writer too. In what ways do you think you have changed or grown through the process of writing this book? 

Ian Harber: Well, on a pretty surface level, I'd like to think I went from being an okay writer to a pretty good writer, but I guess I can't exactly be the judge of that. I do love the craft, though, and I feel like the process of writing the book made me better.

But as every writer will tell you, writing is thinking. And I think writing the book really sharpened my ability to think. It forced me to structure and clarify my thoughts in ways that I don't normally have to, and that just built some good habits in terms of critical thinking.

And in that same vein, it made me even more confident in my faith. I already was (obviously, or I wouldn't have written the book), but the process of distilling where God had brought me over the course of my life was one of the most faith-building things I've ever done. I'm full of gratitude, and the book really is sort of a monument for my thankfulness to God for his faithfulness in my life. If that's the only book I get to write and that's about all it ever amounts to, just one big "Thank You" to God, I'm entirely satisfied with that.

Nadya Williams: What are the big questions that interest you in your thinking, reading and writing?

Ian Harber: Two things I'm always thinking about are parenting and technology. Obviously, those go hand-in-hand in our day and age. 

The other thing I'm thinking about a lot right now is the classical virtues of faith, hope, love, courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. The train of thought I'm chasing is that I think you might be able to map those onto the greatest commandment to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. I might be wrong about this. I don't know. But I'm thinking about it a lot. Even if my hypothesis on this is wrong, what I am more confident in is that the next stop on the liturgical train is the virtues, and that they might be the next thing we need to recover in order to live faithfully in our time.