These paragraphs are from a SubStack podcast by The Faithful Citizen entitled The Radicals You Riased: A Manifesto for the Generation Raised by VeggieTales and Rage Against The Machine. I resonate with it very much, and expresses my own desire to follow Jesus, not the church.
“To the gatekeepers of American evangelicalism, deconstruction is a dirty word. It’s a synonym for backsliding, a polite way of saying someone’s decided to stop worshiping God and start sinning. They speak of it with a mix of pity and panic, as if we’ve all been infected by a secular virus that’s eating our souls.
But they’re mistaking the destruction of the building for the demolition of the foundation. For our generation, deconstruction isn’t an act of vandalism. It’s an act of renovation. We’re not burning down the house because we hate it. We’re stripping the toxic paint off the walls because we realized it was poisoning our children and us. We’re scraping away Christian nationalism to find the kingdom of God. We’re chipping away at patriarchy to find the egalitarian gospel. We’re sand blasting white supremacy to find the image of God in every human being.
Why now? Why did the generation raised on Veggie Tales suddenly pick up the scraper? Because we saw the receipts. We watched the very people who taught us that character counts in the ’90s throw their unreserved support behind men who embodied the antithesis of the fruit of the spirit simply to secure a Supreme Court seat. We watched our churches stay silent when black bodies were lying dead in the street. but get loud when a coffee cup wasn’t Christmasy enough. We watched the pro-life movement defend the death penalty, the war machine, and the cuts to social safety nets that keep actual babies alive.
The dissonance became deafening. We couldn’t reconcile the Jesus we met in the Gospels with the Jesus we saw in the news. One was a brown-skinned refugee who had no place to lay his head. The other was a mascot for a political party that would have deported him and portrayed him as a white man.
So we started stripping the paint. The resulting believer, the deconstructed disciple, confuses the census-takers. We might not go to the mega church with the laser light show or feel at home in socially sanitized Sunday services anymore. We might swear when we talk about injustice. We might have a drink on a Friday night. We’re as deeply suspicious of pastors who fly in private jets and claim celebrity status as we are of the ones who’ve made every attempt to sanctify the empire and trade the gospel for power, control, cultural dominance, and a seat at Caesar’s table.
But ask us about the beatitudes, and we’re obsessively, painfully committed. Ask us about the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant, and you’ll see a fire in our eyes that looks a lot like the Old Testament prophets. Ask us about Jesus and you’ll find that we love him enough to rescue his reputation from the institutions that have hijacked it.
We’re homeless in the current religious landscape. Not because we’ve abandoned God, but because we’re too Jesus-centered for the evangelicals and too religious for the secular left. We’re standing in the rubble of American civil religion, holding the red letters of the gospels and saying, “I believe this part’s actually true, and I’m going to build my life on it, even if I have to do it outside the walls.”
In the chaos of this renovation, we’ve made a critical discovery. Christian and Christ follower are no longer synonyms in the West. They’re rapidly becoming antonyms. The term Christian has been hijacked. It’s been hollowed out and stuffed with a political agenda until it’s no longer a description of a disciple, but a demographic category.
In 2026, to be a Christian in the public square often signifies a voting block. It signifies a group that demands cultural dominance, protects its own tax exempt status, and fights to keep the wrong people out of the bathroom in the country. It’s a label of power. We’re not interested in that label anymore.
We’re interested in the man from Nazareth. We’re making an onlogical shift, a fundamental change in our state of being, from being members of a religion to being followers of a way.”