Why Didn’t Your Grandparents Deconstruct?

Common Explanations for the Mass Exodus from Christianity Don’t Add Up.

Why have so many young people “deconstructed” and left Christianity in recent years?

This is a question that has provoked pastors, religious scholars, and sociologists alike. Given the long history of Christian identification in the West, the relatively sudden and precipitous decline among young people is one of the most perplexing and important developments in recent history.

28% of American adults claim to have no religious affiliation. That number jumps up to 40% if you’re Gen Z. If you had 100 Christian friends in your teenage years as a Millennial or Gen Z “Zoomer” made up of Evangelicals, Catholics, Black Protestants, and “Mainliners”, approximately 16 of them would have left the faith by the time you became an adult.

But why?

When you talk to people who have gone through a journey of deconstruction or you read essays and books that offer theories on the reasons why, you often find similar explanations. I’ve found that these explanations often revolve around four issues:

1. Church hurt – deep wounds from painful experiences within church communities (e.g. exclusion, gossip, spiritual abuse)

2. Moral failure of church leaders- closely associated with general church hurt, but this is more specifically focused on financial or sexual failures of pastors, priests, etc

3. Bad theology - poor teaching from the pulpit, Sunday school, youth group, etc

4. Unanswered questions- closely associated with bad theology, but this is less about harmful/untrue things directly stated from the pulpit and more about questions that weren’t adequately answered

While each of these answers is valid and represents genuine reasons for why people have deconstructed out of the Christian story and Christian community, we’re still left with a question that hints at the inadequacy of these reasons:

Didn’t these same problems exist for our grandparents and great-grandparents, too?

Why didn’t they deconstruct?

Church Hurt Isn’t New, but Leaving the Church Is.

If you go back to even just 1991 you’d find that only 6% of Americans claimed have no religious affiliation (aka, “nones”). Wasn’t there church hurt back then? Obviously, there was. How about for my grandparents and great-grandparents? Absolutely.

You can go all the way back to the first-century churches of the New Testament and find plenty of church hurt and moral failures happening (just read 1 & 2 Corinthians).

Bad theology has always been present in churches to varying degrees, and people have always wrestled with unanswered questions. There is no idealic, utopian past for Christians to point to when church experience was free of these issues.

These issues create real wounds. No one should deny the pain or the disillusionment that accompanies these experiences, but these experiences can’t, on their own, explain the scale of the shift. Church hurt and hypocrisy didn’t suddenly appear a few decades ago; yet we've gone from just 6% of Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated to 28% in a relatively short period of time.

So what changed?

There is never just a singular cause for issues as complex as this. Obviously, the expansion of mass media and the creation of the internet, along with social media, make for a different world than what my grandparents grew up in. But technological change alone doesn’t explain why people over the last few decades are far more likely to deconstruct their faith and become nones. The technological changes between my great-grandparents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation were also substantial in different ways; yet, very few people left the faith. In fact, the number of people attending Protestant churches in 1958 (44%) was actually 1 percentage point less than in 1985 (45%).

So what made the changes of my generation and younger different? Maybe it was something going on behind the screens that changed us.

New Cultural Inputs Changed Our Narrative Identity

Humans are storied creatures. We see the world through story and situate our own lives inside a story that psychologists call our “narrative identity.” Every culture creates guiding stories as a means of passing on to each generation what it believes are the values worth pursuing, what the good life looks like, and what should be of ultimate concern to our narrative identity.

This is why your parents told you stories at bedtime. It’s why Sunday school teachers pinned flannel graph Bible characters on scratchy felt boards and told stories about David and Goliath, Noah and the flood, and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

It’s also why going to the theater is so much more than entertainment. It’s a place that offers us guiding stories. It’s a ritual of narrative identity formation.

But by the 1990s, our guiding stories began to radically change in two ways, and with these changes came significant shifts to our narrative identity.

1. The method and volume of guiding stories that we consumed changed.

2. The message, values, and “spirit” of these guiding stories changed.

In 1980, fewer than 1% of U.S. households owned a VCR. By 1990, around 66% of U.S. households had one. This coincided with the rise of the home video store, as stores like Blockbuster Video spread to every major city and suburb in the U.S.

No longer was a viewing of Star Wars or Indiana Jones tied to theaters or TV schedules. You could go to Blockbuster, rent the tape, and watch at home any time. By the 1990s, a typical family living room had become a TV screen-dominated media room, where the guiding stories created in Hollywood became the dominant cultural inputs in most of our lives. How could the flannel graph Sunday school stories ever compete with that?

By 1990, children aged 2-17 were spending 22-25 hours in front of a TV screen each week. Today, the average household consumes 43.5 hours a week of digital video across all devices. Compared to your grandparents and great-grandparents, the sheer amount of time that we spend consuming guiding stories of all kinds is exponentially larger.

The cultural inputs that would have shaped my grandfather’s narrative identity were much fewer and far more local. It would have been his parents, extended family, school, and church that would have provided the core formational inputs. Sprinkle in the occasional radio program, the comic book or boys magazine, and some books from the library, and that would have been the extent of “mass media” influence outside of his local slice of life.

But once again, it's not only that the number of cultural inputs has increased exponentially with new technology; it is the radical change in the message, values, and “spirit” of the guiding stories that emerged in popular culture in the 1990s.

The Rise of the Postmodern Anti-Story

I trace the arc of this cultural shift in much greater detail in my forthcoming book Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning (coming from Nelson Books in 2026), but for the sake of brevity (and to give you something to look forward to), I will simply say that there are numerous signs throughout the pop culture of the 90s that the postmodern philosophy that was brewing in academia and “high culture” as far back as the 1960s eventually made its way to the masses during this time.

This postmodern influence tended to emphasize ideas like:

• Truth is socially constructed.

• Institutions and hierarchies are inherently corrupt.

• Every story hides a play for power. Be suspicious and cynical by default.

• Christianity has been a story used by the powerful to repress and colonize “the marginalized.”

• The path to authenticity and liberation is through deconstruction.

This is an intentional oversimplification (so, philosophy graduates can save their comments), but just look at the differences between some of the top movies of 1985 and those of 1999, after pop-level postmodernism began to spread through mainstream culture, and you’ll notice the increasing presence of these ideas.

In 1985, it was Back to the Future, Rocky IV, and The Goonies.

In 1999, it was Fight Club, The Matrix, American Beauty… and yes, still some non-cynical blockbusters like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Try going back and watching Rocky IV today. Some of you might find it hard to sit through it all without cracking an ironic joke or cynically shouting “'MURICA!!” when Rocky wins. You’ll notice, as you watch movies like that from 1985, a conspicuous absence of all the irony, cynicism, and deconstruction we’ve become accustomed to.

The guiding stories we consumed in a post-90s American culture taught us that deconstruction was a virtue. Rage against the machine, unplug from the Matrix, burn down the system–this is how you earn social status in a culture shaped by the Postmodern Anti-Story. This is how you show your authenticity.

Even in the Christian subculture, people adopted postmodern inclinations. The youth group hit of my generation was DC Talk’s “Jesus Freak,” which positioned teenage Christians as revolutionary outsiders bravely rebelling against the system. In my young adult years, Christian conferences created promotional videos that showed young adults, discontent with their mundane jobs, abruptly leaving and unplugging from society to attend the conference. The thematic connections to The Matrix were hard to ignore.

Even at church, we were learning to identify more with what were against than what we were for.

Fast forward to our age of social media, and values of the Postmodern Anti-Story are disseminated through the content of TikTok deconstructionists, church hurt stories that make for viral reels on Instagram, and even through Christian influencers and publications that prioritize exposing scandals among churches and Christian “celebrities” or decrying the latest theological enemy to be outraged against online.

All of this provoked author

Katelyn Beaty

to recently ask whether deconstruction had become a brand to sell content and products. David Foster Wallace would have given Beaty a resounding, “yes!” all the way back in the 90s when he lamented that even Burger King was trying to sell burgers with postmodern slogans like “You Gotta Break the Rules.”

Our Grandparents Didn’t Have Postmodern Inputs Shaping Their Soul

Unlike my grandparents’ generation, who were never shaped by the Postmodern Anti-Story (unless they were a coastal academic or starving artist in the 1960s), our cultural scripts have programmed us to see deconstruction as one of the chief markers of an authentic life. Our new cultural catechism taught us that if something feels painful or constraining, the answer isn’t reform, it’s exit. We were subtly programmed to believe that all overarching stories mask a play for power, especially religion. If an institution fails you, walk away or burn it down in your Che Guevara, Heath Ledger Joker, or Rick & Morty t-shirt.

The hurts and pains in a journey of faith from one generation to the next are not that different, but what has changed is how we have been culturally programmed to respond to them.

My grandfather fought in World War II, where his generation learned to place duty and service to others over personal preferance. Why would I assume that he had a more naive view of the world? He lived through the Great Depression and fought in the worst war the world had ever seen. It took shared institutions and a shared guiding story for his generation to rebuild after that devastation. They learned by necessity that the problems within those institutions had to be worked out from within or that everyone would be worse off.

I’m not suggesting that my grandparents’ generation got it all right, but what I’m asking you to consider–using a healthy dose of postmodern skepticism back on itself– is that maybe deconstruction itself deserves to be deconstructed.

What if walking away from church wasn’t a rebellious act of self-definition, but the most predictable outcome of our programming?

What if we’ve mistaken cynicism for critical thinking, and have been remarkably uncritical about what deconstruction was giving us in exchange for all our rage?

What if you have to live in some story? What if religion was the pursuit of the highest guiding story that best directed us toward what should be of ultimate concern in our lives? Maybe you can’t be “non-religious.”

The good news is that a massive post-deconstruction “vibe shift” is emerging in the zeitgeist where people increasingly ready to move beyond cynicism and are even open to religious renewal. For the last couple of years, I’ve been pointing to the signs of this shift all around us.

Check out this conversation with author

Ian Harber

as one helpful discussion on the subject, and keep following along for more on why this post-cynical pivot might be leading us to reorient our lives inside a better story than the anti-story.

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