When Your Kid Deconstructs

On Thanksgiving morning, as our oldest daughter and I were huddled over the kitchen island peeling potatoes for dinner, she suddenly popped a pretty big question.

“How would you react if I told you I might be becoming an atheist?”

Ten years ago, I probably would have thrown a Bible at her and screamed, “Get behind me Satan!” But now? I paused a bit, looked up from my paring knife and said, “It wouldn’t bother me. You have to find your own way. I’m far less interested in what you think about God and much more interested in how you choose to show up in this world with kindness and compassion.”

I wasn’t surprised by her question. She’s always been an independent, introspective thinker. Plus, she’s seen my wife and I painfully work to free ourselves from evangelicalism, so she understands the necessary inner work required for spiritual growth.

However, as the weekend has gone along, her question lingered as we decorated the Christmas tree. Am I really OK with one of my children growing out of Christianity I pondered, as I put the star on the highest bow? Yes, yes I am. If I started in evangelicalism, graduated to the Episcopal Church, and now find myself dabbling in Taoism and Buddhism, why wouldn’t she evolve beyond the Anglican tradition to something altogether different?

After all, I don’t believe in Christian exclusivism. Are we really arrogant enough to believe the God of the universe is only found in one religious tradition, and that religion just happens to be ours? Just think about how ridiculous that sounds. The Creator, the Sustainer, and the Redeemer of all life supposedly decided to play favorites—picking one people, one land, one religion, and one book as the only way to reveal the Divine.

Christian exclusivism reduces the vast, diverse human experience of the sacred to a single channel, creating a tribal deity rather than an ineffable mystery. God is not locked inside Christian walls. God is the living presence found wherever people open themselves up to love and the interconnection of all things. As Father Richard Rohr once wrote:

“The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine—that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they’re talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.”

My daughter figured out by twenty‑one what took me more than forty years to learn. That’s progress.

When you stop and think about it, we should all be on a similar spiritual progression—moving from coerced conformity to unending spaciousness. Outside the Abrahamic religions, many spiritual traditions recognize this necessary journey from knowing to unknowing, belief to being, and from correct thought to compassionate neutrality. This work can only happen when you slow down long enough to cultivate what is already planted deep within your soul.

To the contrary, growing up in evangelicalism meant spirituality was a sprint to the finish line, not a winding road you walked at your own pace. The message was clear: hurry up, get saved, lock it down, be certain, because the clock is ticking and eternal damnation is waiting. I was rarely encouraged to explore for myself, much less trained to do the inner work required for my transformation. Worse yet, evangelical Christianity trained me to distrust myself because I was born evil. Truth was found in externals like the Bible, not at the core of my being. My inner life wasn’t the source of my transformation; it was a danger to be suppressed.

I now understand American evangelicalism to be the remedial stage of Christianity. It’s a needed and safe starting point, but a horrendous place to end up. My former priest described evangelicalism as a kind of religious kindergarten. “We shouldn’t shame or blame them for being who we are. We don’t blame kindergarteners for being in kindergarten. But we sure as hell shouldn’t take spiritual direction from them.”

In the larger arc of spiritual advancement, fundamentalism is the first rung of the ladder. It is both a beginning and a barrier: necessary for grounding, but insufficient for growth. Without the experience of certainty, the later embrace of mystery would be overwhelming.

This beginner stage of spirituality is easy to spot once you’ve lived it. You probably have your stories. See if this sounds familiar: certainty is applauded, conformity is required, boundaries are maintained, purity is monitored, outsiders are demonized, moralism is the ultimatum, men are in charge, and a literal reading of your perfect sacred text is commanded.

As painful as it is for me to admit it, evangelicalism is not without her gifts. For many of us, evangelical fundamentalism provided community, security, a moral compass, and the assurance of divine favor in an uncertain world. In this way, our former faith tradition functioned as a developmental foundation upon which to start our spiritual progression, and it’s OK to thank her for the initial role she played in our lives. Likewise, I’ve witnessed friends in recovery express gratitude to the very substance that once enslaved them, acknowledging the lessons it imparted even as they vow never to fall back into its grip.

There comes a time when certainty must give way to deeper waters of wisdom—not as a repudiation of past faith, but as its natural evolution into what lies ahead. If you are here in this space, that process has probably already begun. What pushed you out of the evangelical nest? What made you pause long enough to question hand-me-down religion? Like my daughter, you might be entering a stage of disillusion or questioning. Embrace the ambiguity and awkwardness. This stage of unlearning and relearning is also necessary as you take your next step up the spiritual ladder.

I’d like to take the next few weeks and talk more about the spiritual quest. What follows deconstruction? Where are you going and how are you going to get there? In this second stage of the journey, I’m realizing that what was once feared and taboo—voices and paths outside my inherited faith—are now a source of nourishment. By incorporated teachings and practices from Taoism and Buddhism, something surprising has happened: instead of diluting my faith, I’ve encountered a deep resonance. The prayers, poems, practices, and vernacular of these mystical traditions echo my deepest convictions, even though they might at first sound strange.

This resonance isn’t accidental, it’s what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy, or the idea that beneath the surface differences of doctrine and praxis, there is a shared stream of wisdom throughout all the great spiritual traditions.

I look forward to walking this path with you in the next installment of this series. In the interim, I’d love to know where you are on the journey. What have you learned along the way? I hope you will join me in the comments below!

Gary Alan Taylor