10 Ways to Wreck Your Faith

A Warning for Students (and the Parents Who Love Them)

After twenty years of teaching and working with students on the front lines of faith and culture (everyday discipleship), I’ve seen firsthand what destroys belief. This isn’t something I set out to learn, but when you watch the same patterns repeated by students over the years, you stop being surprised and start sounding the alarm.

Pay attention to these things. Sometimes it’s a wreck (suddenly) or a drift (slowly). Whether it shows up all at once or it erodes over time, this is how students lose their faith.

What follows is an inverted survival guide. Sometimes the clearest path forward is knowing exactly which roads lead to dead ends so that you can find the path that leads to life.

This is what the Lord says:

So, in the spirit of God’s invitation and warning through the prophet Jeremiah…let’s begin.

#10 — Borrow Your Parents’ Faith (Never Own It)

Inherited beliefs don’t lead to a lasting faith. Practically speaking, the benefits of your parents’ faith have an expiration date. It’s usually around eighteen years old — right when the people holding your faith for you are 400 miles away and no longer setting the rules. A faith you’ve never personally wrestled with, claimed, or committed to is a faith that belongs to someone else. And when the first real challenge comes, what you really believe and value will become clear.

What this looks like:

• You can say what your family believes but not what you believe. And you’ve never noticed the difference. Until now.
• Your faith has never cost you anything or required a real decision.
• The college transition is the moment borrowed faith collapses because the scaffolding disappears.

Your mom and dad can’t believe for you. Your youth pastor or grandparents can’t believe for you either. What do you believe? (That’s what owning your faith looks like).

In Welcome to College, I spend an entire section on this transition because it’s the first domino to fall.

#9 — Replace Truth With Your Feelings

You have been raised in a culture that has taught you that how you feel determines what’s real. Whatever you feel becomes what you believe, and whatever you believe becomes your identity. Culture hands you the slogans: follow your heart, you do you, live your truth, that’s your truth. They sound like freedom. They’re actually a trap.

Jeremiah 17:9 calls the heart deceitful above all things. Making your feelings your highest authority is how you end up completely lost while feeling completely confident about your direction. That is a painful way to live. Emotions are real and they matter but they are not always reliable guides to truth.

What this looks like:

• You base what you believe on how you feel in any given moment.
• When Christianity stops “feeling” true, you assume it isn’t. “Follow your heart,” “you do you,” “that’s your truth” — these aren’t just slogans, they’re a competing worldview.

“Is Christianity true?” That’s a question only you can answer. But it’s the most important one you’ll ever face because Christianity rises to the level of being true or false.

Remember, just because you believe it doesn’t make it true. Sincerity is not enough. Truth is the only sure foundation upon which to build a life. Why? Because reality is involved.

#8 — Never Ask Why You Believe What You Believe

Intellectual shallowness is a faith killer. “I just believe” sounds spiritual until a philosophy professor or a persuasive roommate raises a question you’ve never considered. The good news: Christianity has intellectual depth that can withstand serious questions. There are good reasons why Christianity is true—that God exists, that Jesus was raised from the dead, that the Bible can be trusted. But you have to actually investigate it.

What this looks like:

• Neglect your doubts. Stuff them down, pretend the questions aren’t there. Unexamined doubts don’t disappear, they quietly steal your confidence and zeal.
• Rely on blind faith. Never look for reasons.
• Let other people do your thinking for you. Outsource your convictions to your professor, your feed, or your friend group.
• Relativize Christianity. Treat it as one option among many.
• Never read a book that challenges your faith so you can test your worldview.

If you relativize your faith, it will wilt and will be too fragile to withstand the pressure and challenges that are coming your way from friends and professors. You will simply discard your sentimental faith as useless in the grown up world.

#7 — Let Your Phone Disciple You

Whatever you watch, scroll, and absorb is forming you (whether you’re paying attention or not). The average teenager spends seven or more hours a day consuming content with a worldview baked into it, and almost none of it is Christian. Algorithms are shockingly good at shaping desires, rewiring attention, and delivering a vision of the good life that has nothing to do with Jesus. Attention is the currency of discipleship (who are you learning from?). If your screen has it, the things that matter most in life don’t.

What this looks like:

• Mindlessly let entertainment train your affections, emotions, and desires (you don’t have to agree with what you watch for it to form you.)
• Short-form content quietly destroys the attention span and capacity for silence that reflection requires.
• You can’t build a deep faith with a distracted mind.
• You can’t hear from God through His Word when you can’t sit in silence for five minutes.

Today, life is mediated by screens. You need to learn to live intentionally in a distracted world. You need Less Scroll. More Life.

Screens aren’t neutral tools, they’re discipleship engines pointed in a very specific direction—usually away from life with God.

#6 — Treat the Christian Life Like a To-Do List

View your relationship with God as transactional and reduce Christianity to behavior management. Check the boxes, miss the point, and burn out while “trying harder.” When Christianity becomes primarily about performance — doing the right things, avoiding the wrong ones — you’ve turned a relationship into a transaction. And transactional relationships are not life giving. They’re exhausting.

What this looks like:

• Stop talking to God in prayer and stop reading Scripture (this cuts the lines of communication).
• Skip spiritual disciplines entirely (and then wonder why your faith dried up).
• Think “doing enough” makes you spiritual.

Legalism, behavior modification and performance Christianity produces either pride or despair, never the real thing—a vibrant faith that lasts.

You can’t earn God’s love (Rom 5:8). Grace. Here’s the equation that matters most for the Christian life: because you’re forgiven, you’re free to obey. And growth, joy and life come through obedience.

#5 — Privatize Your Faith

Keep it to yourself. Never share it, never talk about it. Don’t let it influence every area of your life. A faith you’re embarrassed to own in public is a faith that’s already fading away. As Chuck Colson once put it, Christianity is personal, but not private. Jesus said “you will be my witnesses.” A private faith misses out on the power of integration.

What this looks like:

• Sunday morning only mindset (a Christian for an hour or two a week).
• Stop going to church — cut yourself off from the community that is supposed to encourage and shape you.
• Don’t apply a biblical worldview to what you listen to, watch, or how you show up and view work.
• Just be a consumer and not a co-laborer and creator.

The drift from private faith to no faith at all rarely happens in one dramatic moment. It’s a slow fade.

#4 — Reject God’s Design for Sexuality

Nothing can neutralize a vibrant Christian life faster than falling into sexual sin. The enemy of your soul will come along and whisper guilt in one ear and shame in the other. What gets framed as freedom quietly becomes its own kind of bondage. God’s design and commands are for our good. It’s not just saying “no” to the things we want, but saying yes to what God has for us, which is so much better!

What this looks like:

• Sexual compromise and faith drift almost always go together.
• Confusion about identity rather than embracing God’s good design for male and female.
• Isolation once sin patterns take hold and you ignore those who could help you the most.
• You fail to set boundaries (I call them guardrails and rumble strips that keep you safe) and end up watching and doing things you never intended.
• Regret, guilt, and shame are a weight you carry alone.

#3 — Surround Yourself With Fools

You become like the people closest to you. Proverbs is relentless on this point . Your friends are quietly shaping the person you’re becoming, the questions you ask, the things you find embarrassing, and the beliefs you’re willing to defend in public. If everyone in your world treats faith as naive, faith will start to feel naive. Proverbs 13:20 says, “He who walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm.” We’ve all been fools, but you don’t have to live there! One of the fundamental questions you have to ask and answer during this season is, “Do I belong, and where do I belong?”

What this looks like:

• Surround yourself with people who want you to doubt
• Build your closest friendships with people who don’t share your worldview or take following Jesus seriously (especially dating relationships)
• Find your people before you need them (that’s one of the most practical things I tell every incoming college student).
• You become who you’re with.

Imagine the difference in your faith if where you belong overlaps with people who think that Christianity is really true and following Jesus is the best way to live.

#2 — Confuse God With the Church’s Failures

The most common deconstruction story sounds like this: Someone in the church hurt me. The church got something wrong. The church is full of hypocrites. Therefore, God isn’t real. That’s a significant logical leap — but it feels completely rational when you’re in pain. The church is full of broken people because broken people are exactly who Jesus came for.

What this looks like:

• You’ve placed your faith in the institution rather than in Jesus (so when the institution fails, everything goes with it).
• Church hurt speeds up whatever is already happening in your faith (it makes walking away feel justified).
• Students who’ve never been given a framework for suffering and disappointment before it hits are completely unprepared.

Don’t mistake human failure for God’s absence.

People can let you down, but Jesus never will.

#1 — Live for Yourself (Pursue Pleasure, Comfort, and Applause)

The Fatal Move…

Can I let you in on a little secret? Thirty years of sociological data has shown us that you are not big enough to give or devote your life to. If you aim at your own happiness and put yourself at the center, you will be miserable. When you are the center of your own story, everything else — including your faith — becomes a casualty. The self-directed life is the shortest path to spiritual ruin and shipwrecking your faith. It’s what the garden was about. It’s what every idol is about. And this lie never stops feeling reasonable because we all have the capacity to suppress the truth rather than listen to it.

“You are not your own; you were bought with a price.” — 1 Corinthians 6:19–20

What this looks like:

• Make bad things into ultimate things.
• Make good things into ultimate things (much more common, much harder to see, and far more dangerous)
• Let pride erode your need for God’s grace (self-sufficiency crowds out God)
• Misunderstand what happiness actually is — pursue pleasure, comfort, and applause as the definition of the good life.
• When you are your own god, you don’t need the real one.

The truth is, you have a mission to go and make disciples, to live out your calling, and to have influence wherever God has placed you.

10 Ways to Wreck Your Faith — A Summary

10. Borrow your parents’ faith — never own it

9. Replace truth with your feelings

8. Never ask why you believe what you believe

7. Let your phone disciple you

6. Treat the Christian life like a to-do list

5. Privatize your faith

4. Reject God’s design for sexuality

3. Surround yourself with fools

2. Confuse God with the church’s failures

1. Live for yourself  (pursue pleasure, comfort, and applause)

Choose A Different Path

But another path is available — where the good way is.

Every item on that list has an opposite. The wreck is not inevitable. The drift can be reversed. You can start preparing now for what you know is coming during the teenage years.

That’s exactly why I wrote Welcome to College. Now in its third edition, it’s a practical guide to the real challenges waiting for you on campus and as you grow into adulthood.

I wrote it because I believe you can build a faith that doesn’t just survive college — it deepens through it. A faith that lasts long after you walk across the graduation stage.

Don’t go through the motions. Don’t borrow someone else’s convictions. Don’t drift.

Get your copy at welcometocollege.org and build a faith that lasts.

Following Jesus is not the easiest way to live. But it is the best. Because it’s true.

About the Author

Jonathan Morrow is the author of Welcome to College (3rd edition) and Director of Cultural Engagement and Student Discipleship at Impact 360 Institute. He has worked with students and parents for two decades helping students own their faith.

Invite Jonathan to speak to or train your students and parents.