My friend Abe was raised as a Christian, but abandoned his faith during college.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said with a shrug. “I just left it.”
When I heard about Abe’s deconversion, my mind jumped to the last time I’d seen him. It was at a Promise Keepers rally the year after we graduated from high school. I remember being surprised to seem him there. He nor I had been strong Christians in school, but watching him standing next to his father in the coliseum, it was clear something had clicked.
As the voices of 20,000 men lifted in unison, Abe squeezed his eyes shut and extended one slender arm skyward. He seemed solemn yet peaceful, totally absorbed in God’s presence…
Fast-forward six years from that Promise Keepers rally and Abe’s sitting in my studio apartment, slapping a cigarette from a pack of American Spirits. The intervening years had taken us each down very different paths.
I was married. He was single. I was headed to seminary. He was wrapping up law school. I was an active Christian. He’d rejected the faith. At the time of his visit, he was celebrating a last stint of student-life freedom by motorbiking across the United States. I offered him my futon when he rolled into town. It wasn’t much, but compared to the nights he’d been spending in his pop-up tent, it probably felt like a five-start hotel.
We talked late into the night. Since high school, he’d lived an exciting and eclectic life. I felt a twinge of jealousy as he described experiences that seemed lifted from a Jack Kerouac novel. He had lived in London and worked as a bartender. He backpacked through India. He spent summers tree planting in northern Alberta, a lucrative seasonal gig that funded his nomadic existence. Somewhere in Asia, he suspended his travels to meditate in a Buddhist monastery. He’d become a vegetarian.
“I can’t see how people can justify using animals as a resource,” he said as he fried up a delicious feast of falafel balls for my wife and me.
His experiences had changed him—most significantly in his views about God. When I broached the subject, his voice grew quiet.
“When I left the faith, I thought it would feel really bad. I assumed I’d come right back, but I didn’t feel bad. I felt nothing.”
Though he was philosophical about his departure, he didn’t regret it. In fact, he felt liberated, though he was slightly combative.
“Can you honestly say Christianity has been good for humanity?” he asked. His tone was equally critical when he talked about his parents, especially his father whom he described as a right-winger.
If I had been saddened by Abe’s decision, his father was devastated. When he heard of Abe’s decision, he rushed him a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, hoping it might bring him back.
It didn’t.
Abe read the book, even enjoyed it; but didn’t change his decision to bid his faith farewell.
“Growing up, I had an uncle who wasn’t a Christian; we prayed for him all the time,” Abe said wistfully. “They probably pray for me like that now.”
Behind the Exodus
Why do young people leave the faith? Whenever I ask people inside the church, I receive some variation of the same answer.
I’m told they leave because of moral compromise. A teenage girl goes off to college and starts to party. A young man moves in with his girlfriend. Soon the conflict between their beliefs and behavior becomes unbearable. Something has to give. Tired of dealing with a guilty conscience and unwilling to abandon their sinful lifestyles, they drop their Christian commitment.
They may cite intellectual skepticism or disappointments with the church, but don’t be fooled. These are just excuses, smoke screens designed to hide their real reason for going astray. “They change their creed to match their conduct,” as my parents would say.
There’s even an academic basis for this explanation. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. Basically the theory goes like this: Opposing beliefs or behaviors cause psychological distress. We seek to resolve the tension by dropping or modifying one of those contradictory beliefs or behaviors. Once we do, our psyche’s harmony is restored.
I think there’s a lot of truth to that hypothesis—more than most young leavers would care to admit. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” wrote G.K. Chesterton. “It’s been found difficult and left untried.” Even practicing Christians can attest to the truth encapsulated in that clever verbal twist. Living the Christian life is hard; and when you’re falling short, as we all do, it’s easy to forfeit relationship with an invisible deity in order to indulge sinful, real-world desires.
For Abe, I’m sure moral compromise played a role. Christian morality didn’t exactly jibe with his new lifestyle, which included relationships with the opposite sex that fell outside the biblical model. It would have been difficult for him to hold a Christian worldview while engaging in a pattern of behavior that opposed it. Yet the moral compromise explanation didn’t tell the whole story. He had other reasons for leaving, and they weren’t just smoke screens. The more we talked, the more I believed they were at the root of why he left.
He balked at Christian entanglement with conservative politics. He pointed out what he saw as a lack of compassion for the poor among Christians, and he wasn’t moved by the apologetics of yesteryear.
Ultimately, I saw that his parents’ attempts to call him back to God were futile because he inhabited a different universe, one populated with ideas and sensibilities that were completely alien to them. I’d soon begin to discover the laws of this new universe and find out just how many other young adults had followed Abe through the wormhole.
Drew Dyck is a manager in the Church Ministry Media Group at Christianity Today International. Article adapted from Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults are Leaving the Faith…and How to Bring Them Back by Drew Dyck, ©2010, used with permission of Moody Publishers, MoodyPublishers.com.
