"How Can You Still Be a Christian?"
Why do people choose to leave Christianity? | Deconversion Series
Years ago, I was eating breakfast with a friend of mine, Jack, at one of those greasy-spoon diners that America is so good at producing when our conversation turned from just catching up to something more serious.
I remember looking up from my pancakes to see an expression on his face that made me think he was choking. “Are you OK?” I asked.
He didn’t respond right away. As the moments of silence stretched out I realized he’s angry. I waited.
“How can you still be a Christian?” he said.
The question caught me off guard. Jack and I had known each other a long time but we had lost touch in the years since we met in college. I had heard that he had “drifted away from his faith,” that gentle little phrase we use that often belies the turbulent, confusing, lonely process of the deconstruction of one’s previous beliefs about God and the world. But this wasn’t just “drifting away.” It wasn’t apathy or indifference or incredulity in his voice. It was rage. He bit the words off and spit them out.
I have thought about the conversation a lot in the years since that day, both his questions and my responses. I didn’t understand what he was asking then, but I think I do now.
He was asking if I had really read the Bible with all its violence, its angry God, its errors for myself. Or was I just parroting answers I’d heard in church? He was asking if I had read the news. Hadn’t I followed the stories of priests molesting boys and bishops covering it up? Hadn’t I heard church leaders caught embezzling tithes or riding on private jets to “better spread the gospel”? Did I still believe God sent people to Hell to burn there for eternity? Had I really met anyone who felt marginalized and excluded by the Christian message or had I just stayed in my Christian bubble? Did I still believe in angels and demons and miracles or had I grown up enough to face the hard facts of reality?
Jack was one of those people who could deliver a sentence with crystal clear thinking behind it. He liked to break systems of thought down into their constituent pieces and see what they were made of—and whether or not he could get them back together again. In college, he studied engineering with a minor in philosophy. His pattern of thinking served him well in both. Now it seemed he had turned the engines of his analytical mind on the faith of his childhood. I felt a bit intimidated.
Jack’s parents were Christians and he had grown up going to church camp. In university, he had told us stories of how intense faith felt at camp. It was his religious mountaintop experience each Summer that he spent the rest of the year trying to live up to. When we were in college, a sex scandal had come out about one of the camp’s directors. It happened at a time when it seemed like Christian leaders were toppling like dominoes as one scandal surfaced after another. It had shaken Jack up pretty bad. That had been just before we all graduated and parted ways.
Jack’s Deconstruction
As we ate our breakfast, Jack filled me in on the story of his faith since college.
He got a job at an engineering firm that paid him more than his young self had ever imagined receiving. He moved to Denver. He lived alone in an apartment near his work but spent a lot of his time in the office. It was a lonely year, but then he met a girl at work and they started dating. She introduced him to her friends. They were a different crowd than the people he was used to being around. His Christian beliefs made him stand out. They liked him, but every now and then one of them would go off on a rant against religion and then turn to him for the “Christian position.”
The answers Jack heard coming out of his mouth at those moments seemed paltry in the face of their questions. They were the answers he’d inherited from his parents and from his childhood church. Rather than convincing anyone, Jack felt the faith of his childhood was being exposed as childish and his answers seemed facile and fragile.
His new friends would inevitably recommend a book or a podcast for him to read or listen to and the conversation would move on to something else. Jack would go home with the sense that, rather than convincing anyone, he had said something embarrassing and out of touch.
Jack took them up on everything they gave him to read. He started bingeing “deconstruction podcasts,” as he called them. There were a couple of years that he devoured every new episode on 2x speed. He listened to them in the shower, in the car, as he cleaned his apartment. He started a Youtube channel on a whim and he vlogged his questions, his memories of his Christian upbringing, and his wrestling with the new answers he was finding. He gathered a small following. He joined a few groups on Facebook in which people helped one another through their deconversions, sharing links, sharing stories from their fundamentalist or evangelical upbringings.
He and his girlfriend were getting more serious. They could talk about anything. The analytical part of his mind had not felt this alive since his philosophy courses in college. They spent so much time talking late into the night that they were talking about moving in together. He remembered a time when the idea of living with a girl he wasn’t married to would have felt forbidden, but now, strangely, the taboo had lost its potency. It felt parochial. Jack’s hold-ups were mostly related to what his parents would think.
In the meantime, his parent’s faith was also undergoing changes. In his words, they were becoming “radicalized.” They had never been very political, but suddenly they were talking about the evils of socialism. Fox News was playing in the background when he visited on holidays. It seemed like their faith and their politics had become all of one piece; when he brought up one, the other quickly followed. All of their conversations with Jack seemed to turn into arguments as it became clear that they were standing on entirely different foundations. He not only disagreed with the things they posted on Facebook, but he found, to his great discomfort, that he was ashamed of them. “When they voted for Trump,” Jack said, “It was like they had moved to a different planet. I lost respect for their thinking.”
It was during this time that Jack felt something change. He started to relate to his friend’s rants against religion. Their questions began to surface inside himself and become his own. His deconversion didn’t happen with a bang or a sudden epiphany like most conversion testimonies he has heard his whole life. One day he just realized the whole thing didn’t feel as real anymore. The exciting questions and the compelling answers lay elsewhere. Christianity seemed like a thing of his past, a vestigial set of ideas and restrictions that he was learning to shake off.
Jack finished his narrative by saying, “If I am honest, that time of deconstruction was confusing and hard. It felt like everything I’d always taken for granted was coming undone and that I was losing connection with my life up to that point. But now I am in a better place. I used to think that if I let go of Christianity, I would have nothing left. But now I feel happier and freer. I feel like I finally believe something I can live with.”
And now he was asking me why I hadn’t followed a similar path? How could I still be a Christian?
The Great Un-Awakening
I have been having lots of conversations like that one lately. (Or conspicuously not having them with friends whom I know have gone through a season of deconstructing their Christian beliefs.) Something is happening.
It isn’t the fulfillment of that centuries-old secular prophecy that as the age of reason dawns and the star of science climbs into the sky, the primitive religious impulse that has manifested in humanity for so long will finally vanish into memory like a dream does upon waking.
And it isn’t the end of the church or the death of Christianity. But still, it is something. There is a Great Un-Awakening happening.
Gallup released a poll recently that church membership in America has dropped below 50%, the first time that has happened since Gallup started asking the question in 1937. So, according to Gallup at least, church membership is at an all-time low.
At the same time, religious disaffiliation is at an all-time high. In 1972, the General Social Survey found that only 1 in 20 had no religious affiliation. Today, that number has climbed to 1 in 4, just under 25 percent and showing no signs of slowing. If you plot the trend of the so-called “Rise of the Nones” (the religiously disaffiliated), the line on the graph is just trending up and to the right as time goes on.
Doubt is not an invention of the 21st-century but it is taking a shape that is unique to our cultural moment. The movement of the church through the centuries has always been the back and forth of decline-and-advance, but these days it does seem like there is a groundswell of the same kinds of experiences, the same kinds of stories, the same kinds of deconstruction.
Is the church reaping what it sowed? Are the reductions and evasions and misrepresentations of previous generations coming to call in the present one? Or does the fault lay within the Millennials and Gen-Zers, as if the fast-paced, digitized, TikTok world they are building is simply proving too much for the gospel of Jesus to keep up with?
Is this the End Times? Or just another decade in the church’s swaybacked mission to hold out the unchanging gospel to an ever-changing, ever-broken world? Is there still a way to communicate or have we passed too far into the wake of Babel where all our attempts at communication produce only nonsense, frustration, and separation?
What do we do in the Age of Deconstruction? Or, as A. J. Swoboda put it in After Doubt, “Is there a way to question faith today without losing it?”
How Can You Still Be a Christian?
What is the difference between Jack and me?
Was his faith too weak to survive outside the greenhouse of Christian community? Did he lack the spiritual courage to take a stand for the truth? Was he seduced by the world’s ways?
Or am I the one who lacked courage? Was I not honest enough to face the harsh facts of a Godless reality and preferred instead to wrap up in a comforting fable?
When I was younger, Jack’s question would have triggered a flurry of rational answers. The reasons for my Christianity then seemed a simple equation: Belief = The Rational Reasons for Belief. B=R²B. Why am I a Christian? Because I am intellectually convinced it is the truth.
Had Jack caught me a few years earlier, I may have quoted the Bible and employed apologetic arguments. I would have laid out my theological platform. And yet the answer to Jack’s question is more complicated than only rational answers can account for. I am a whole person, not just a brain on a stick, so when I embrace a belief more than just my rationality is involved.
The real answer to Jack’s question is more nuanced and more humbling.
I am a Christian because I was born in Iowa in 1984 to my exact parents in my exact family. I plopped down into a white, middle-class, Midwestern plausibility net and it carried me.
I am a Christian because my mother told me that the book of Revelation was about the end of the world and I—an inveterate fantasy fan even then—took the Bible off the shelf one day and started reading. There was a dragon in there, moons that turned red, sky that turned black, water that turned into wine, and people who walked on water and rose from the dead. On top of that, even at a young age, the Bible smacked of a quality I would later call “literary richness” but what then just seemed like a thick and inviting mystery that promised grand questions and grander answers. And there was the startling possibility that, unlike the fantasy novels I read late into the night, this one was true. It was intoxicating.
Christianity’s answers took root in me at a young age and, for some reason, the challenges to the Christian framework that I have experienced since then have only rendered it more plausible.
I am also Christian because I have suffered and found deep solace in the idea that at the center of the universe is a God who has also suffered in order to put an end to all suffering.
On top of that, many of my friends are Christians and they have treated me kindly. I have had the wildly unlikely privilege of loving and being loved by older men and women whose lives have inspired me and whose examples have shaped me. My memories of these people and the moral beauty I have seen in their lives stack against the scandals in the lives of Christian leaders I see on the news. The former has rendered the plausibility of Christianity more resilient against the latter.
I am a Christian because I have experienced the Christian framework to be powerfully sensemaking. The Christian story says that every human person is incurvatus in se, bent inward on oneself, and my life has offered me example after example of my own self-centered brokenness. My faith has been a shelter in my grief over my own wrongdoing, has explained the guilt and shame I have felt at the evil I have produced, and has shown me the consolation and transformation that is possible for those who walk in the way of Jesus.
And the sensemaking power of the Christian framework also provides a solid ground for the profound beauty of creation, which is the product of a God who is profoundly beautiful. When I see and celebrate the beauty of a tree, or a child, or a home, I am participating in the fullness of God himself. I not only experience my richest moments, but I have someone to thank for them. This has an incredibly confirming effect on the confidence I place in the framework that helped me make sense of these experiences.
Each one of these factors reinforces the other until they all coalesce into a paradigm, the word for the things you think before you know you are thinking. To walk away from such stacked convictions and experiences would require quite a plausibility shift. Unlike Jack, my story hasn’t included the factors that might make such a shift more likely.
A Longer Kind of Answer
I’m not sure what I said to Jack that day.
I think I tried to pick one of the objections he raised and apply some answers to it. At some point, the anger that had surfaced when he asked his question faded again into the background. He was polite, but I remember having the sense that he had anticipated my answers, had heard them before and was unmoved. There was a momentum to his movement away from Christianity, like a landslide. Anything I had to say that day was just scooping at the edges of the slide with a shovel while the bulk of it followed its own gravity inexorably onward.
As we parted ways, I had the sense that Jack wasn’t asking for answers, even though he asked a question. He wasn’t really inviting me to persuade him. He was inviting me to know him. As I now represented a life he had walked away from, our relationship needed to cross the territory of our new differences if it was to continue.
And he was testing me. He wanted to know if I fit the pattern of Christianity that he remembered and that he now renounced. In that sense, the best response wasn’t ever going to be any number of answered questions. The best response was rather the way that I treated him in all of our interactions from that point onward. My job—at least on that day—wasn’t to stop the landslide. My job was to not contribute to it.
As he got in his car and drove away that morning, that responsibility continued—and expanded. I could continue to answer him by living a good life in which God’s beauty might perhaps be glimpsed. I could pray for him and draw him closer to myself, rather than allowing him to drift away now that he no longer thought of himself as a member of my tribe.
Jack and I continue to get together for breakfast every now and then. Religion comes up, but mostly we have fallen back into the easy friendship we had in college. He gives me podcasts to listen to and books to read and I read them. We have rebuilt a rapport around our differences. We can take them seriously and laugh about them. Sometimes I ignore his digs at Christians, sometimes I press him about them.
When we are together, I think about how kind God is to us and how patient. Mostly, I pray for him and for myself.
Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)