@jammycakes, I agree with you completely regarding the term “deconstruction.” It really is a technical term refering to analytical techniques applied to the logic of texts.
However it has found its way into common use and will stay there until colloquial English evolves a bit more, when it’s replaced by common users by some other term. We’re stuck with it for now.
Regarding the OP and article, this is good advice for anyone confronted by a person dealing with the disolution of their faith.
I have watched the end of the process in a college friend, decades ago. As @jammycakes said, it was not Bill deliberately dismantling his faith, but his work in literature and postmodern literary criticism, particularly in the areas of deconstruction, doing the work for him.
Bill, a pastor’s son, was looking for answers to questions no person of faith that he knew was able to process or was prepared to help him answer. His work in literature gave him answers he didn’t want, but that were truer than anything anyone else had to offer. The dear young man was completely unprepared for the suffering that accompanied the disolution of his faith as well as the continuing suffering that was probably the seed in the beginning of the process.
My husband and I were honored, yet baffled, when Bill showed up at our apartment and talked for hours and wept, while we packed boxes for the next move as grad students. We recognized then that Bill needed to pour his heart out, which he did while we made appropriate, mostly wordless responses. The best thing we had to offer him that night was the empathy/sympathy/compassion to listen and an invitation to join us and another couple in our plan s to eat at the local Chinese restaurant, which he did. That night friendship and dumplings were what he needed. None of it solved his problems, but it kept him alive to try again the next day.