No Longer Christian

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No Longer Christian

In recent years, the chorus of people deconstructing their faith or leaving it altogether seems to have grown louder and more unified. The deconversions of well-known evangelical insiders like author and former pastor Joshua Harris have resulted in communal shock and dismay within the Christian community.  This trend in part led me to undertake a qualitative research project seeking to understand the experiences of former evangelical ministers and missionaries who have abandoned Christianity. This project, which included at its core 31 in-depth interviews and over 60 hours of interview time with such deconverts, was guided by certain questions: What sort of religious experiences and influences did participants have in their early childhood and adolescence?

How did they remember their significant Christian experiences, including ministerial ones, and how did they make sense of their religious world when they identified as Christian?

How did the process of leaving unfold, and what was it like?

What were the salient reasons for discarding the Christian faith, and what were the consequences?

I learned a lot through this project, the results of which I believe can help begin to sort out two main issues facing the church today: How do we make sense of the trend of people seemingly lining up to tell their deconversion and faith deconstruction stories?

And how should we respond to the reality that people are leaving not just the church but the Christian faith altogether?

To address these questions, we need to consider three societal shifts related to the growing chorus of leavers.

Demographic Shifts

Various national surveys related to the U.S. religious landscape have consistently pointed to an actual increase in the frequency of religious movements, both within and outside the Christian faith. Religious mobility has been and continues to be an important religious phenomenon in the U.S. According to a 2019 Pew Research national religious demographic survey, the share of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has declined to 65%, following a consistent trajectory downward that spans decades. In comparison, Gallup polls from the 1950s reported that more than 95% of Americans identified as Christians.  In the past few decades, the clear winners in the religious marketplace are the religious nones, or the religiously unaffiliated, having seen continual gains from 15.3% in 2007, to 17% in 2009, up to 26% in 2019. To what can we attribute the rise of the religiously unaffiliated?

A 2012 Pew Research report offered a summary of four theories: political backlash against the religious right, delays in marriage, broad social disengagement and secularization.  “Those who leave are not rejecting the God who is. They are rejecting a distorted projection of God.”

The report also noted that though the percentage of Americans who were raised without a religious upbringing has been rising gradually, the overwhelming majority of nones (74%) were brought up in a religious tradition. So, while an increasing percentage of members of the newest generation are growing up without much religious influence in the home compared to previous generations, the increase in nones also has much to do with changes in religious affiliation and people defecting altogether from religious communities. The 2009 Pew Forum’s Faith in Flux study affirmed that changes in religious affiliations occur frequently, with half of American adults reportedly changing religious affiliation at least once at some point in their life.

Socio-Religious Shifts

While the trend globally has been toward religious restriction with governmentally imposed barriers like anti-conversion laws movements in the U.S. occur in the context of a relatively free religious marketplace. And yet, even though in principle religious freedom is a bedrock commitment of our democracy, in practice, when the overwhelming majority of the population identifies with a particular religion, societal structures naturally privilege the commitments of the dominant group.  In the homogenous American religious landscape of the 1950s, broadcasting that you were anything but Christian would likely come at some social cost. Elections, jobs, business transactions, social relationships and more might be at stake. But the significant reconfiguration of the U.S. religious landscape seems to have made it increasingly socially acceptable to experiment or change religious affiliation.  Also, as reflected in Pew surveys on religious beliefs and attitudes toward other religious groups, we live in a society that widely views religious pluralism favorably. Americans commonly have neighbors, friends and co-workers who are adherents of other religions, which has helped give rise to the prevailing intuition that sincere, moral and intelligent people can legitimately find their religious fulfillment through multiple religious paths.

Technological Shifts

The rapid diffusion and mass adoption of technologies and digital mediums, like personal wireless devices and social media, have given rise to a highly interconnected, globalized world. For many, social media platforms have become the new public square.  Before, the process of leaving the faith was likely a solitary journey leading to a quiet exit. Today, the advent of online affinity groups for disaffected former Christians, like #Exvangelical and The Clergy Project, have encouraged and emboldened those who are considering leaving or have already left a place to share their stories and find support. Abraham Piper, the son of John Piper who left behind evangelicalism and the Christian faith, regularly airs his grievances to an audience of over 1 million TikTok followers. Rhett McLaughlin and Charles “Link” Neal III are former missionaries and Cru staffers who have leveraged the power of YouTube and podcasts to share their post-evangelical journey with millions of subscribers.  “We have been socialized into and live out some version of the Christian faith that is a mixture of truth and error, of biblical fidelity and idolatry.”

The previous generation of post-evangelicalism felt more like an intramural dispute; today’s post-evangelicalism seems more strident and out in the open for public consumption. 

Looking Inward

God has warned us that we, especially those who presume to be teachers (James 3:1), bear responsibility for the faith formation of others (Mark 9:42; Heb.10:23–25). We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. But rather than assuming the posture of humility and responsibility, my research indicates that Christians are much more likely to respond to leavers with contempt and accusations rather than empathy and a sincere desire to listen. Two quick judgments that the participants in my study commonly heard were that they were never Christians in the first place and that they left the faith in order to live a life of vice. Whether or not this is the case, I would suggest that rather than reactively blaming and shaming leavers, we should be quicker in lamenting and looking inward at ourselves and our faith community, and how we might have been complicit in their leave-taking.

Doubt Is Not the Enemy

According to a 2017 national Barna survey, doubting is commonplace among American Christians with 65% of American adults who self-identify as Christians (or have in the past) having questioned what they believe about religion or God. The same survey reports 12% lost their faith while 7% held on to a weakened version of their faith. The report also points to doubting being more commonly observed among millennials, males and those who have a higher education.  Evangelicalism, especially its more conservative incarnations, commonly fosters a rigidly constructed faith, with multiple layers of what each church considers essential beliefs and values. Certitude can be comforting and reassuring in a world filled with chaos and uncertainty. However, the danger of holding something to be essential to one’s faith particularly when that something is not essential is that when that supposedly essential belief is called into question, the whole edifice, not just that belief, begins to destabilize. Many of my research participants spoke of an environment that implicitly or explicitly encouraged the suppression of doubts and discouraged the multiplicity of understandings.  Surprisingly, only 18% of spiritual doubters turned to their pastor or spiritual leader for answers; 15% looked to books on God, spirituality or religion. The fact that so few would go to their spiritual leaders (or church, for that matter) may reflect the awkwardness of confiding in those who represent one’s questions, as well as the challenges that ministry leaders face to create safe spaces for doubt.  Christian traditions that celebrate and normalize certitude, rigid beliefs and unwavering faith tend to be inhospitable places for those struggling to make sense of how to negotiate dissenting questions and doubt. As some of the participants commented, after moving on from what they once considered essential (e.g., young-earth creationism), they were left wondering what else they were wrong about.  “Just as the guidance of wise parents does not guarantee that their children grow up to love God, we cannot build a church community that guarantees mature Christian faith.”

I agree that there is a problematic culture commonly manifested in communities that seek and expect an unwarranted level of confidence in their theological constructs, constructs that are more a reflection of their tradition and current context than the faith once delivered to the saints. The reality of intra-Christian theological disagreements has led some to conclude that something is inherently wrong with Christianity itself. Within evangelicalism there is an undercurrent of misplaced optimism in our ability to objectively understand truth in an unfiltered way that needs to be challenged. It is what we choose to place our confidence in that is the issue. I do not think the solution is to downplay the place of confidence or even certainty in faith. The key is the judicious placement of confidence and trust.  We should be confident that God exists, just more tentative in our incomplete and inevitably distorted claims of what God is like. We should have the highest confidence that God will accomplish what he has set out to do in the course of history, just more tentative in how this will unfold. We should be certain that God has spoken to us through the prophets, apostles and ultimately through Jesus, and that the Scriptures capture these divine revelations, but while we can be confident in the Bible’s authority, we must be more tentative when dealing with interpretations of the Bible open to divergent meanings (like the age of the earth, egalitarianism vs. complementarianism, etc.).   An all-or-nothing mentality has to do with a common misunderstanding among some Christians about the place of doubts in the life of a believer. Doubt is not necessarily the enemy of faith but can in fact be a helpful companion in a growing faith. According to respondents of the Barna survey, more than half (53%) reported that their time of spiritual doubt made their faith stronger, while only 7% said weaker.  Christian communities and their leaders should seek to provide a climate in which believers and skeptics are given room to honestly explore their doubts. Rather than avoiding difficult questions that inevitably arise in the messiness of life, we ought to promote and honor a culture of constructive dialogue and truth seeking, even if it takes us to uncomfortable places. There is a level of insecurity among too many evangelicals which leads to a defensiveness and a clinging to views that are secondary as if they were primary. Our faith is not a house of cards.  “Rather than reactively blaming and shaming leavers, we should be quicker in lamenting and looking inward at how we might have been complicit in their leave-taking.”

A positive example is Redeemer Church in New York City, which prominently announces on their website that skeptics are welcome, conveying that they are a community that does not stigmatize doubt but rather is committed to helping people work through hard questions. My hope is that more churches will recover a modest and holistic form of Christian apologetics (e.g., see Paul Gould’s Cultural Apologetics).  I realize that for too many Christians, apologetics, like evangelism, has become a scary word because it is misunderstood and associated with undesirable imagery like that of a pushy salesperson or an argumentative debater. Apologetics is not just defending the truth and rationality of the Christian faith to unbelievers; apologetics seeks to remove various obstacles to faith or deepen maturity in Christ the intellectual, the intuitive, the emotive, the experiential level so that we can commend the truth and beauty of the Christian faith to seekers and help believers deepen the roots of their faith. Apologetics is for everyone and a necessary companion to the ministry of gospel proclamation (1 Peter 3:15).

Get the Message Across

The departures of high-profile Christian leaders not only leave a trail of spiritual devastation in their wake, they also fuel and perpetuate the pervasive mistrust and disdain that many outside the church harbor toward Christians. As such, our evangelistic and apologetic encounters must be attentive to the reality of trust and credibility issues. Christians should be judicious about what they choose to stake their credibility on (and by association, that of Christ) because people, rightly or wrongly, may conflate our opinions as the representative Christian view.  “We ought to promote and honor a culture of constructive dialogue and truth seeking, even if it takes us to uncomfortable places.”

People may judge the appeal and truth of the Christian faith based on the Christians they know and observe, because like it or not, the messenger has bearing on the message’s appeal and plausibility. The Bible uses terms like “witness” (marturein) and “messenger” to describe our role in evangelism. We are representatives of the King, so it’s not just our credibility at stake; for many, they will form their opinions of the Christian faith based on their perception of Christians and Christian communities. I urge pastors and Christian leaders to show restraint in using their platforms to air their opinions on contested matters, especially those that are outside their area of expertise. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t form opinions, but instead exercise greater wisdom and discernment in where we choose to plant our flag, lest we harm our witness, cause others to stumble and bring disrepute on the One we represent.  In many cases, it seems to me that those who leave are not rejecting the God who is, as revealed to us in Jesus and in the Scriptures. Rather, they are rejecting a distorted projection of God and what he has revealed about himself, us and his activities in the world. As ambassadors of the King, we represent the honor and interests of the Sovereign, not our own. To the extent that we are peddling our own pet agendas and opinions, at the expense of bringing disrepute to God and his people, we are failing as God’s ambassadors.  Let’s remember whom we serve. Let’s be vigilant, remain in Jesus and be attentive not only to our growth and well-being but also to that of our brothers, sisters and the seekers among us.