Faith-loss -a few questions and observations.

The book which publishes the research underlying this article is now on my 'to read' list. Part of my interest is from having been vicar at a church where I was told, when I was interviewed for the post, that the church had a big front door but a large back door too (ie it was good at welcoming people to the church but also had a good few leaving). Since then I've been interested in the issues that flow from that.

One of the things that the article does is give an overview of some of the 'risk factors':

 people who lose their faith tend to have certain personality traits, and underlying beliefs and values (the ingredients). These include having an above-average intelligence, and low tolerance for submitting to authority and for right-wing political ideas; valuing self-determination and being in control; and being open to experience.

As I read that I realised that I'm in the risk category on every count. So I wonder, then, what keeps me, and others like me, in Christian faith and whether there is something to be learned from that.

In fact, it leads me to ask whether there are a lot of people in this hanging on in there sort of category and what our collective experience might tell us. My suspicion is that it tells us something about Christian formation in the long-haul and the way that churches need to collaborate in long-term discipleship.
This goes to one of the other things the article mentions as a probably pathway to faithloss: "when parents or churches mistakenly equate their unique take on Christianity with the essentials of Christianity itself"
I could characterise that as 'our way or the highway' -and certainly I do come across people for whom that seems to have been the way out. The sadness is knowing that there are expressions of faith and church 'out there' that would have been able to support and hold that person but they had been demonised and that route for faith development had been closed off psychologically. That's why I'm interested in the way that we can collaborate across different expressions of church to make it possible for people to be 'blessed out' of one expression of Christian faith into another. Of course this requires a certain degree of maturity and restraint -but it has happened and does still in various parts of the church universal. Evangelicals will collaborate even while disagreeing vehemently about some things. They will put evangelism and 'by all means win some' as a higher priority and in doing so recognise that a common basis of faith is enough even if it doesn't clear up well-founded disagreements; there's a recognition of bona fides. More recent Anglican conservative Evangelical and Anglican Catholic collaborations have demonstrated something similar. So it is possible if the stakes are understood and high enough.

I do have another question about this, though. I generally take a perspective that everyone has faith: we all, as humans, seek meaning, live by values and have beliefs about how and why such things do or don't reflect reality. It's not radical -the declarations of human rights recognise that atheism is a form of belief, for example, and so cannot be used to deny someone their human rights and is protected in terms of its manifestation.

From this perspective, it's not that people lose their faith, it's that they change it. And I wonder whether that's a more fruitful way to think about the matter. In fact towards the end of the piece we almost get to that:

Marriott reports that “the vast majority of deconverts” whom he has interviewed “felt that a weight had been lifted off them and that they were now free”. They spoke of being “set free” and “liberated” — language that is usually associated with conversion stories, not their reverse.

Which story I have also heard from people shifting from, say, narrow fundamentalism to a more liberal or sacramental version of Christian faith. Or in some cases from a 'tired' or stultifying sort of church life to something with more vibrancy which felt confident about having something worthwhile to share. The difficulty is that some versions of Christian faith make it seems that their way is all-or-nothing or that it is better to drop out altogether than go over to the within-faith enemy. That's what we need to get past and perhaps help churches to recognise other churches in such a way as to bless people on the next stage of their journey with another kind of church polity or style. At different stages in our Christian development we may find in helpful to have a different approach in various ways, and to embrace that positively rather than to discourage it and risk losing some altogether might be a better way forward. In the past in this country that has happened through church splits and churn. Maybe now it's time to be more intentional. Also, it might help address this:

maybe some values and assumptions and expectations that this person holds that are a result of living in a 21st-century, modern world that aren’t necessarily indicative of just some sort of pure rationality. They are also part of a construct. . . And maybe they should ask themselves some questions about some of their underlying assumptions and some of the values that they think are very important

In other words there are elements of faith in whatever approach to life we adopt, it's the plausibility that is at issue. But if we conceive of it not so much as losing faith as changing faith, we may begin to have better conceptual tools to respond -as the article indicates that the book gives us.


What causes people to lose their faith?: