For the past eight years, Nate Hanson served as the host of a podcast called Almost Heretical. The show generated millions of downloads and rose to become one of the most successful “deconstructionist” podcasts on the market. On Wikipedia, it’s listed among the top three podcasts of the “Exvangelical” movement.
According to a 2024 Barna survey, a surprising 37 percent of today’s Christians have to some extent “deconstructed the faith of their youth,” but this process of reassessment doesn’t always translate into a total break from the faith. In Hanson’s case, however, it did.
Before his involvement with the program, Hanson spent several years in ministry, working closely with Francis Chan to plant churches throughout the San Francisco Bay area. But somewhere along the way, something changed. Burned out, he began having doubts about many of the things he’d grown up believing. He wrestled with the “problem of evil,” how God is presented in the Old Testament, and, with the help of liberal scholars like Bart Ehrman, he eventually lost faith in Jesus’ resurrection.
“I reached a point,” Hanson told me in an email, “where I simply could not make myself believe anymore, and it felt like losing my identity.”
While in ministry, Hanson assumed that serving God full-time would cause him to feel closer to God and more grounded in his faith. His experience, however, was almost the opposite. He felt tired, confused, and unsure of what he even believed.
“I still admired Jesus,” he said. “I still valued the ethics and the community. But I no longer believed the central claim that Jesus had actually risen from the dead.”
Though Hanson notes that deconstruction is often framed as “rebellion, bitterness, or a desire to just tear everything down,” this was never his story. “For me, deconstruction was an honest process driven by a desire to understand. It’s what happens when inherited answers stop working for you.” In some ways, Almost Heretical became a vehicle for Hanson to publicly process his own experience of deconstruction. But as he later discovered, replacing Christianity with a more secular outlook didn’t end up resolving all his questions. In fact, over time, it only generated more.
A little over a year ago, however, something unexpected happened. Though Ehrman had radically transformed his view of the origins of Christianity, Hanson recently revealed that “his explanations started to feel less compelling.” So he decided to dive headfirst into the best scholarship on the other side of the fence. And when he encountered the work of scholars such as Richard Bauckham, Peter J. Williams, Lydia McGrew, John Lennox, and others, he was shocked by what he discovered. Read more»
Shane Rosenthal | “How To ‘Deconstruct’ And Rebuild Your Christianity Without Losing It” | The Federalist | April 28, 2026
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Shane Rosenthal
Shane Rosenthal is the founder and host of The Humble Skeptic podcast. He was one of the creators of the White Horse Inn, which he also hosted from 2019–2021, and he has written articles for various sites and publications, including Modern Reformation, TableTalk, Core Christianity, and others. Shane received an MA in Historical Theology from Westminster Seminary California, and he lives with his family in the greater St. Louis area. Read more about The Humble Skeptic podcast: shanerose.substack.com
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