People Leaving the Faith: Getting Closer to Understanding


I've covered commentary of pundits trying to explain why people are leaving Christianity. I have said here many times those who would gain the most by knowing why this is happening should not study it from the Christian point of view but study people who have left. That is, ask people going out the door what they think.

A person who has left the faith did just that. He asked an open-ended question, "Why did you leave?" rather than having people pick one from a variety of options offered by the survey. When options are offered, they come from those running the survey. This is a source of bias. While bias can also occur from open ended questions, it has the advantage of avoiding the boxing in from choice in the survey design. 

The link author coded the answers into various categories that made sense to him. In his coding the anti-gay position of much of Christianity was the most powerful force pushing people out of the faith. I don't recall any Christian pundit concluding, or even mentioning, this as a reason people are opting out of the faith. The traditional reason people in the faith have given is that those who leave want to live lives of sin. Also mentioned is that people "had a bad experience" in the faith and left. Neither of these are important variables.

Looking at the way the link author coded (generalized) reasons for leaving the faith, I concluded I would have done it a little differently. He had a category that was roughly "intellectual failures" with the faith. Then he listed several others, disagreement with scripture, belief in the afterlife, etc. which seem to me to fall under intellectual failure. Even the most common answer, condemning gays, falls in this category. Taken together, by far the most common reason people leave the faith is because they have heard the entire message and don't buy it. They don't believe it and conclude they never will. So goodbye.

The faith should hold a world-wide confab to address the reasons young people who were raised in the faith walk out its door. Attendees should agree on how to deal with the actual reason people leave, the condemnation of gays and fantasy notions of heaven and hell.  

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