Rhett & Link & Faith Left On Camera

In February 2020, Rhett McLaughlin sat down in front of a microphone and spent several hours explaining, methodically and with the precision of someone who had rehearsed every counterargument, why he no longer believed in God. His co-host and childhood best friend Link Neal did the same in the following episode. Together they had 16 million YouTube subscribers, a daily talk show, a production company with 120 employees, and a combined net worth estimated at $23 million. They’d been Christians, Campus Crusade for Christ staff members, and working missionaries before any of that. The episodes got over a million views each and became some of the most commented content they’d ever produced.

Rhett and Link (Variety)

What happened next is actually the more interesting story, and it’s the one that gets told the least.

The internet sorted itself into two predictable camps immediately. Secular fans flooded the comment sections with words like “brave” and “vulnerable” and shared their own versions of the same story. Christian commentators, apologists, and former acquaintances published responses ranging from sympathetic to furious, debating the intellectual validity of Rhett’s arguments and whether Link’s emotional discomfort with biblical sexual ethics constituted a real theological objection or just a preference. A Cru staffer named Shelby Abbott, who’d known them briefly during their ministry years, wrote a blog post calling their departure “old-fashioned rebellion” and suggesting it had become safe to leave Christianity only after they’d achieved financial immunity from the consequences of doing so. A Gospel Coalition writer named Alisa Childers argued that the real problem was a cult of personality, that Rhett’s YouTube authority had replaced the authority of Tim Keller and Ravi Zacharias in the minds of young Christian fans who’d never crack open a theology book now that their favorite creator had dismissed those sources as uncompelling. A Jesuit writing for America Magazine took a more generous view, arguing that deconstruction might be the midpoint rather than the endpoint of a longer spiritual journey, citing the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s framework of a “second naïveté” that emerges on the far side of critical consciousness.

Everyone had a theory about what Rhett and Link’s departure meant. Almost nobody sat with what they actually said.

What they actually said was complicated. Rhett described a methodical intellectual unraveling that began with questions about evolution and the age of the earth, moved through biblical reliability and the historicity of the resurrection, and arrived eventually at a position he called “hopeful agnostic,” meaning he had no certainty whether God existed but found himself hoping that the universe was purposeful and heading somewhere. He was careful to say he still thought belief in God was reasonable. He ended his story with: “I don’t have that,” referring to the community and meaning and purpose that Christianity had provided, and acknowledging plainly that he had yet to find a replacement. That’s the confession of someone describing a loss, a real one, rather than someone who has happily traded one worldview for a better one.

Link’s story was more emotional and less systematic. He’d led worship while feeling nothing. He’d experienced a God who seemed primarily to be a source of guilt rather than intimacy. He was troubled by the church’s treatment of LGBTQ people he knew and loved. When he finally walked away, he described it as liberation, but the liberation he described sounds less like freedom and more like relief, which is a different thing, and he seemed to know the difference.

The Christian responses mostly missed this. Childers argued that Rhett was simply trading Christianity for postmodernity and calling it intellectual honesty. Abbott argued that their departure was essentially rebellion against cultural Christianity rather than against the faith itself, which is a more interesting observation, though he buried it under five numbered grievances and a comparison to the Apostle Paul’s friend Demas. The America Magazine piece was closest to being useful, because it named something real: that critical consciousness, the stage where inherited beliefs collapse under scrutiny, is rarely the endpoint of a person’s spiritual development. Research in developmental psychology, specifically the work of James Fowler on stages of faith and Robert Kegan on adult psychological development, suggests that people who move through a crisis of belief and out the other side sometimes arrive at what Ricoeur called a second naïveté, a post-critical faith that holds religious meaning with open hands rather than clenched ones. That’s uncommon. But it happens, and Rhett’s description of himself as a hopeful agnostic who still finds the idea of a purposeful universe compelling is at least pointing in that direction.

What’s worth paying attention to in the Rhett and Link story has almost nothing to do with whether their arguments against Christianity were philosophically airtight. Childers is right that reasonable responses exist to most of the intellectual objections Rhett raised. Abbott is right that much of what both men were deconstructing looks more like Southern evangelical subculture than the actual theological content of Christianity. Those observations are correct and also largely beside the point, because Rhett and Link were primarily describing an experience, and the experience they described is one that enormous numbers of people immediately recognized as their own.

The comments on those episodes, more than a million of them, are full of people saying “this is exactly my story” and “step by step identical” and “I’ve never heard someone describe this the way I’ve felt it.” That recognition happens because the specific shape of their faith, inherited rather than chosen, maintained through social pressure rather than conviction, experienced as a source of guilt rather than grace, and finally abandoned with a mixture of relief and grief, is the shape of a lot of people’s faith. The question of whether Rhett and Link’s departure was intellectually justified is less interesting than the question of why so many people looked at their story and immediately saw themselves.

The Christian responses that were most honest about this acknowledged it. The America Magazine piece named it directly: if people find no hospitable space for their questions inside the church, they’ll find it outside, and many already have. The piece’s suggestion that Catholic communities need to become communities of “accompaniment” in the way Pope Francis described, walking with people through doubt rather than shielding them from it, is more practically useful than any point-by-point refutation of Rhett’s arguments, because the refutations arrive after the departure rather than before it.

Five years later, Rhett and Link are still away from Christianity, still running Mythical with 120 employees and over $35 million in annual revenue, still making Good Mythical Morning every weekday. They stopped trying to pitch projects to traditional Hollywood studios after a decade of being shown to conference rooms where Adam Sandler was always in the other room and meetings always ended with nothing, and they started making their own scripted content in-house and distributing it directly to their audience instead. That decision, like their faith deconstruction, was covered in the media primarily as a story about disruption, about two creators refusing the gatekeepers. But the way Rhett described it in a 2024 interview sounds less like disruption and more like exhaustion followed by acceptance: “Our entire lives, we’ve run up against the rules of the way things are supposed to go. We just can’t fit in now. We just don’t fit.”

That’s the same sentence, more or less, that he used to describe leaving Christianity. Whether that’s a meaningful parallel or just a coincidence of phrasing, I’ll leave to the reader.

What has stayed with me is how Rhett ended his deconstruction episode: “I still think that belief in God is very reasonable. I think that the idea that the universe is ultimately purposeful, is headed towards some ultimate purpose, not only is that comforting but it kind of feels right to me. So I would call myself a hopeful agnostic, meaning I don’t know, but I hope.”

That’s rebellion against something, but the something is probably worth examining more carefully than most of the responses managed. And that’s someone in the middle of something unfinished, saying so out loud to sixteen million people, which takes a kind of courage that’s easy to underestimate when you’re busy cataloguing the theological errors.

Sources and Further Reading

• What the church could learn from two YouTubers losing their faith — America Magazine
• Why Rhett and Link Made a TV Show (On Their Terms)
• Let’s Deconstruct a Deconversion Story: The Case of Rhett and Link
• Red Flags in the Spiritual Deconstruction of My Old Friends Rhett and Link: UPDATED — SHELBY ABBOTT