People who deconstruct have described destabilizing feelings of anxiety, guilt, anger, confusion, and fear, as well as curiosity, awe, and liberation.
[5] John Stonestreet and Timothy Padgett note that it is used both descriptively (covering everything from the deconversion of Kevin Max, through the soul searching of Derek Webb, to the theological revisions of Jen Hatmaker and Rob Bell), or prescriptively ("recommended, especially to those questioning what they’ve grown up with, as a courageous thing to do").
The important aspect of this process is that each component of their faith is critiqued on the basis of whether the individual will appropriate it as part of their own personal belief or value system.There is broad agreement that the term is derived from Jacques Derrida's philosophical concept of deconstruction.
[5][8] David Hayward, also known as "nakedpastor", says that he "co-opted the term" from Derrida, whose work he was reading at the time his beliefs started to erode.
"[5][19] On the other hand, Tyler Huckabee argues that it can result in "deconversion", or "in your faith looking more or less the same it always did" but "most often, it's somewhere in between—rethinking the things you’ve always believed and coming to a new, different understanding of parts of it".
Huckabee goes on to suggest that Martin Luther's own theological revolution "fits into the paradigm of what researchers would call deconstruction today".
[5] Carl Trueman argues that the "(mis)use of the Derridean d-word gives the whole a specious veneer of intellectualism and a certain superannuated postmodern chic".