So somebody posted that link, and I commented that I thought they missed a few reasons why people leave the church. I was of course asked to elaborate and it kind of turned into a monster thing. Sorry- Janell
10) The absolutism of modern dogma pushes it's own version of science, encourages ignorance, and so doing denies faith and relationship with God. We're so invested in the idea that everything in the bible must be ABSOLUTE PROVABLE FACT that we require unquestioning acceptance for fear it will crumble like a straw house when cross referenced with the generally accepted facts outside the bible belt. If your belief in the Bible is based around the idea that it is absolutely true, never contradictory, never mistranslated or misunderstood, and everything you were taught about it is also unassailable, then at some point reality will make you question, "do I believe what I was taught just because the bible/my parents/church/etc. said to, or do I look at the news/virtually every text book/science journal/etc. and decide I've been sold a bill of goods that gets me mocked by my peers and will cause me to flunk my science tests?" This wasn't a deal breaker for me, as my belief in God is not rooted in the need for absolutely everything in the Bible to be 100% provable. To my mind, if you need the bible proved to you then whatever religion you are practicing isn't one that really teaches faith, but instead teaches our God is worth believing because he's provable. There has to be at least some level of faith to have a personal relationship with God, and by being absolutist, by abandoning the mystery of God, we demonstrate a lack of faith in God and a desire to bend him to fit our will. This isn't a deal breaker for everyone, but I know it has been a contributing factor to at least a couple of my friends abandoning their faith. As Pat Robinson recently said, if you fight science you are going to lose your children. Sadly, this overcompensation for intellectual/scientific insecurity does have a cost in the faith of our children. ( http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2012/11/pat-robertson-if-you-fight-science-you-are-going-to-lose-your-children/)Personally, I don't believe it matters whether we evolved or were created, unless I'm getting a mutant power sometime soon, either way it happened a long time ago and has very little bearing on my day to day life. Neither belief changes the fact that when I look at the beauty, the wonder, complexity and the delightful quirkiness of the universe I am filled with a sense of awe and once again feel amazed that a God who is powerful and awesome enough to make this universe can also care enough to have infinite love for me, who makes up not even one billionth of his creation.
9) Another factor I've seen has similar roots, the Christian (particularly fundamentalist) tendency to preach the inherent superiority of individual decisions or convictions tends to instill a sense of superiority and elitism in the second generation. This tends to have two main troubling outcomes, 1) there is commonly an eventual inability to relate to peers, to make friends outside one's comfort zone or cultural demographic, largely due to a combination of the lack of shared experiences and the inability to just be comfortable with people who don't live up to all your expectations. 2) I can't tell you how many Christian young men I've known who were raised to 'be better' who complain that they always work hard to do the right thing and that it both gets them nothing and that people who don't ever seem to try to be good seem to get everything they want. I can't help but feel that in preaching the superiority of homeschooling/Christianity/fundamentalism/etc. that we have missed instilling some fundamental understanding in our youth. You are not better than anyone else. You are equal in value to all those people you look down on for not being pure enough. You're no better than any gay kid, atheist, hippie, Hispanic, or woman out there, and until you stop expecting the world to lay out the red carpet for being a decent guy you will never be better than decent. And most importantly of all, you do the right thing because it is the right thing to do. THAT'S IT. No one should need to thank you for doing the right thing and you shouldn't be angsting about it. Doing the right thing is part of being a man of honor, and either you are or you aren't one but you don't do it just to get the gold star.(this basic sense of entitlement is not limited to christian men, but somehow I expect better of them - see reason 5 http://www.cracked.com/article_19785_5-ways-modern-men-are-trained-to-hate-women.html )Anyhow, this is one of those situations where contact with the outside world tends to cause cracks in their fundamental world view. Interacting with the (actually really nice) hippie neighbor, making friends with the gay guy at work, really enjoying hanging out with the geek who happens to be an atheist tends to break that sense of superiority. When you see the secular world isn't your enemy, that people who aren't fundamentalist christian can be really nice, principled, decent people, something has to give. If you have a more flexible temperament it's a fairly easy transition away from that insular mindset. If your world view is that of an absolutist, if your understanding of God has no grace but only law, then there are only two choices - the first leads people break entirely from their religious beliefs, the second is to double down and chose to live a life that isolates you from the world and reinforces your belief in the superiority of your way of life. The law kills, and if your understanding of God is entirely law then something will die, be it yourself or your faith.
8 ) The black and white nature of our views on faith and the world is problematic. There's this idea that anything Christian is automatically good, that if a famous theologian gets in trouble for tax evasion or a pastor for sleeping with an underage girl that it's either people in the world looking to drag down a man of God or Satan trying to destroy their ministry. I'm sorry, but that is the wrong reaction. Yes, everybody makes mistakes, but actions have consequences. If you are raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars as your salary for being a pastor you have enough money to hire a decent accountant. No one made a person commit statutory rape or cheat on their wife, it was a choice which people must be held accountable for. God can forgive because he sees the true state of the heart, man however has to look at a person's record and make an informed decision about an individual's trustworthiness. A pastor who abuses his power should be expelled from leadership every time because he made his choice and broke the trust of the congregation and hurt those most vulnerable. Forgive him as an individual, but defending an abuser as a "good man who made a mistake" enables the man and dismisses the pain of the victims. Christians aren't automatically good or right, and people in the world aren't automatically evil or wrong. To fail to condemn Christian teachers and teachings that cause harm is to functionally endorse them to the impressionable. Homeschoolers particularly seem to raise children who read, listen to, and assimilate everything and some of the things we struggled most with were things our parents never said, maybe never even defended, but never condemned either.
7) On the flip side, condemning everything simply because it is secular can do just as much damage. Just because there's not always a biblical message doesn't mean it should be banned. The list of things I wasn't allowed to watch/read/do growing up was so all encompassing that I now find it hilarious to tell non fundamentalists all of the universal childhood experiences I wasn't allowed to participate in. Did it scar me? Not really, but all kids grow up and eventually they realize that Aladin's actually a pretty good movie and watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch isn't the first step to hell. If everything is forbidden, especially the harmless things, then the rule book gets thrown away. Don't get me wrong, I think at some point everyone starts living life according to their own rules, determining their own level of morality, but I also think the more rules you have the earlier that happens, and the less inclined a kid is to actually talk to their parents about the things they're struggling with. After all if your parents or your church preach that everything of the world is wrong you're going to hide watching Forrest Gump, you're going to hide starting to date, and when you're thinking about sleeping with your girlfriend/boyfriend it's certainly not something you can broach with parents who don't let you watch PG-13 movies because there's too much making out. Talking to kids, watching movies with them, spending a couple of hours playing video games together, learning how they think and trying to share in forming that is far more important than dictating constantly that everything is either absolutely right or absolutely wrong. Life is pretty full of grey areas, and kids are smart, they figure that out fast. If you're not careful the thing they'll figure out is that talking to you won't help them navigate that divide between ideals and reality. And you know what, kids see God as an extension of their parents - if they can't talk to you it's unlikely they know how to talk to God.
6) http://marc5solas.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/top-10-reasons-our-kids-leave-church/ This is a response to Point 5: Community - the author states young people see "their faith as something they “do” in community, they soon find that they can experience this “life change” and “life improvement” in “community” in many different contexts. Mix this with a subjective, pragmatic faith and the 100th pizza party at the local big-box church doesn’t compete against the easier, more naturally appealing choices in other “communities”"
I kind of think the opposite point is true. Today's churches DO very little. They raise money for missions, donate clothes to orphanages, serve meals to the homeless once or twice a year, run youth ministries, and very little else. That's not to say the pastors don't work hard seeing to the needs of their flock, counseling, etc, but the church itself does very little. Are we so afraid of the world that we prefer watching the suffering of our neighbors to risking dirtying our church clothes? Our communities are struggling with people who are homeless, assaulted, suffer domestic violence, addiction, debt, illness, poverty, and poor education and the church does nothing. One in three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime and we preach modesty rather than don't rape. We picket abortion clinics rather than bringing the desperate into our lives and helping to raise them up out of a cycle of misery. We stay in these insular little groups pretending our greatest problems are in struggling to be as spiritual as we think we ought to be. Churches need to corporately work to better their communities. ( http://barpublish.bits.baseview.com/story/321891231214751.php ) When people see that a church is doing something more worth while than simply warming pews and hypocritically judging their neighbors they want to be involved. Churches who want to keep people will 'do unto the least of these' regularly, corporately, like it's their main calling. Quite frankly it is more spiritually fulfilling to pray while helping out at the local homeless shelter than to warm most pews today. If the church dies it will be because of apathy and uselessness, not because the world lured all the young people away.
5) Along the lines of dealing with people where they are, the church tends to be bad at dealing with messy things like emotions. I've seen youth pastors tell a thirteen year old girl who asked for prayer because she was struggling with suicidal thoughts that it was her own fault because she allowed herself to think that. I knew a bi-polar kid who had the pastor and a group of men in the church show up at the house and try to perform an exorcism (that kid, by the way, NEVER attended church again). A friend who was molested by an old family friend and pastor, and was trying to deal with the aftermath growing up in a house with an emotionally and spiritually abusive father, was told she needed to stop being angry and then the pastors she had turned to for help prayed that she would read less (because being intellectually inclined was apparently a bad thing) and be delivered from the Harry Potter books. People aren't formed to fit the same cookie cutter mold, they will not all be the way you think they ought to be. If you treat anger at being abused as a sin rather than an important step in recovery, if you treat mental illness as demonic rather than chemical or physical, if you treat depression as a child's own fault, or tell a child that God sends them panic attacks because they're doing something wrong and need to confess, and then pray what essentially is a prayer of condemnation over them then there are serious issues with your ministry. These attitudes are terribly damaging to people who really need help and understanding rather than judgment and ignorance. Jesus loved the hurt, the abused, the poor and downtrodden - why doesn't the church?
4) On a related note, I have never seen single mothers, gay people, or anyone who was just a little bit different treated so badly as I have seen them treated in church. Judgmentalism is the besetting sin of the church, it is the main reason most people abandon Christianity entirely. This point I am absolutely passionate about because I've known too many people who didn't fit the mold, geeks who were judged and condemned for playing D&D (which I'm sorry, if you can separate fantasy from reality is generally harmless), friends who were told they were going to hell for being gay, girls treated like pariahs for getting pregnant in their teens, or worse, blamed for being raped because they weren't home where they should have been, and I get so mad because I know them now and they're wonderful people who completely abandoned their faith because of the way Christians treated them. I talk about my faith with them, and they're fine with my faith, but for their own part they want nothing to do with Christianity. They're atheist, agnostic, or Buddhist, because we have turned Christianity into something that is incompatible with those who don't measure up 100% of the time. I talk to these amazing people and all I can think about is the millstone reserved for those who turned the seeking children away. I don't care if a person is gay, pregnant out of wedlock, or geeky about things you don't get, Christianity is not incompatible with their lives and Christians need to stop treating these things like an affliction. At the very least remember we are called to love the unlovable, and trust me, there is really a lot to love in the people we've driven from the church.
3) Thinking for oneself is not encouraged in general, but particularly if you're a woman. I have literally sat in sermons where the pastor said that the trouble with women working outside the home is they start talking to other women and thinking for themselves. At fourteen I challenged my youth pastor when he said that baptism was basically pointless. I was respectful and gave theological background for my disagreement - I treated him like a fellow thinking person and for some reason assumed he would respond in kind. He generally ignored me, and the next week when I wasn't there told the rest of the youth group I was an uppity girl in rebellion and that they should have nothing to do with me. I can't tell you how many of my friends, people who question, not out of any divisive desires, but in good faith who have been mistreated - and generally they're women. Women are condescended to, manipulated, and behind their backs it is passed around that they are in rebellion or some other malicious untruth simply because they are dissatisfied with the pat answer or disagree with a theological point. Beyond this, in quite a few churches I've been to there is a low level but continuous demeaning of women. If you're not a girl, or are among the privileged few who are considered beyond reproach, so I don't expect you to understand, but if you're sensitive to it you begin to pick up on the undertones in sermons, that we shouldn't be listened to, in marriage or anywhere else, that having a body is effectively a sin, that we exist to be property. Even as teens, people listen to a serious sounding guy, they patronize girls, pat them on the head and send them on their way. And once you've been hurt, once someone has been blatant enough that you can't help but see their bias, you start to see it all around, deliberate or not.
2) I've sat in a lot of pews listening to pastors manipulate the bible to preach their agenda rather than Gods' and I've been down that road too many times. Because we're trying to learn we assume that our pastors have learned more, understand more, have more revealed to them an so we second guess our own judgment. I know better now, I've been hurt, misled too many times. I attend the Episcopal church sporadically. I'm a charismatic at heart so I find the services boring, but the only charismatic church in town has theology I disagree with enough that I've walked out so mad I was crying more than once. The Episcopal church tends to require at least a masters in theology for it's priests, which means the theology is sound enough I can relax. Because that's the thing, every time I sit in a new church I am tense, on guard, constantly listening for skewed theology or a misused bible verse because I don't trust Christians anymore. I don't trust them not to use the bible to manipulate, judge, or hurt me. I go to the Episcopal church, participate in the service, enjoy the message, but I get there a little late and leave a little early - I can't tell you the name of a single one of my fellow parishioners. I'm sure they're perfectly nice people, but I don't want to do the dance. I don't want to shake hands with a bunch of people who all pretend to be or think they are perfect, hoping to meet one who unbends enough to let me see they're human too. So I go to church occasionally, read whatever theological article or book pings my interest, and I talk about my faith with anyone who will listen. I tell them what I've learned about God, I tell them I'm so sorry that Christians have hurt them in the past but that God's not like that. I love God, I enjoy theology, I LOVE a good worship service, but I don't really enjoy church, and I no longer like or trust people just because they're christian. Most the time that doesn't bother me, but sometimes it makes me so upset because I know that the church should be my refuge, and instead it feels like a torture chamber.
1) Your God vs. mine: I'm not a resentful person by nature. Despite the fact that I have many problems with aspects of my religious upbringing there is only one thing that I genuinely resent. See through my teen years I struggled with God, with the inflexibility of the law and the concept of God that I had grown up knowing - the one who demanded unquestioning obedience, complete sacrifice of self (which often translates to loss of individuality), and the knowledge that my own inability to unquestioningly agree with what my spiritual elders told me meant that I would never really fit in with the 'good christian' ideal - in my own mental idiom, I would never be a good 'Grace girl'. I struggled with the concepts of predestination, omnipotence, and the generally accepted idea that a God who was 'willing that none should perish,' who in his omnipotence could see the length and breath of existence, would still create a world in which he knew the vast majority of his creation was already doomed to hell. I went to church, I prayed, and in my heart of hearts I wished that God wasn't real. I wished there wasn't a part of me filled with the absolute knowledge of my creator, because every thought hurt but I could no more stop thinking than stop being. I had to get away from the constant battering of dogma, to step away from fundamentalism before I could regain my footing. For two years after leaving home I attended church only sporadically - generally only worship services and the occasional prayer or special service at various charismatic churches in San Diego. I remember asking my best friend one time how she, the most insightful person I've ever known, never seemed to struggle with faith or the nature of God. Crystal told me that she remembered her mother crying out to God, struggling with feelings of inadequacy and worrying that God could never love her. She remembered just knowing absolutely that as much as Crystal loved her mother God loved her more and that what he wanted more than anything was for her to be happy. That was a revelation, and it is the one thing that I resent. I may have had bad experiences in church, but I generally recognize that despite how injured I might feel the people themselves are good people trying the best they can, and I can't be upset about that. What I resent is that it took until my twenties to truly hear the most fundamental message of all - that God loves me, wants what's best for me because he wants me to be happy. Twenty years of church, years and years of struggle because "God so loved the world" is always under emphasized in favor of telling people that they're wrong, they're not good enough, that God is waiting to punish them. Even now, years later this understanding blows my mind, it moves me to tears just writing about it. This concept opened my eyes, because it's easy to love a God who loves you for who you are. Even the terrible things in the world are evidence of his love, that he loved us as individuals enough to give us complete free will, the free will to screw up, to hurt ourselves and others, because God in his infinite understanding knows that without choice everything else is bondage and slavery and true love can never tolerate either. The shackles of law fell off and I was left with a doctrine of love, and I refuse to attend any church that preaches otherwise - which sadly limits my choices. The way I view God is so changed from the way I was brought up that I mentally consider them almost different entities. My God is not the God of my parents, and I wouldn't change that for the world, because my God brings me joy, comfort, and the unconditional love I need to truly have a personal relationship with my creator. I always confessed with my mouth and believed in my heart, but this is the way that God really saved me not only from sin but from religion as well.
September 8, 2013 at 9:55pm
http://marc5solas.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/top-10-reasons-our-kids-leave-church/
So somebody posted that link, and I commented that I thought they missed a few reasons why people leave the church. I was of course asked to elaborate and it kind of turned into a monster thing. Sorry- Janell
10) The absolutism of modern dogma pushes it's own version of science, encourages ignorance, and so doing denies faith and relationship with God. We're so invested in the idea that everything in the bible must be ABSOLUTE PROVABLE FACT that we require unquestioning acceptance for fear it will crumble like a straw house when cross referenced with the generally accepted facts outside the bible belt. If your belief in the Bible is based around the idea that it is absolutely true, never contradictory, never mistranslated or misunderstood, and everything you were taught about it is also unassailable, then at some point reality will make you question, "do I believe what I was taught just because the bible/my parents/church/etc. said to, or do I look at the news/virtually every text book/science journal/etc. and decide I've been sold a bill of goods that gets me mocked by my peers and will cause me to flunk my science tests?" This wasn't a deal breaker for me, as my belief in God is not rooted in the need for absolutely everything in the Bible to be 100% provable. To my mind, if you need the bible proved to you then whatever religion you are practicing isn't one that really teaches faith, but instead teaches our God is worth believing because he's provable. There has to be at least some level of faith to have a personal relationship with God, and by being absolutist, by abandoning the mystery of God, we demonstrate a lack of faith in God and a desire to bend him to fit our will. This isn't a deal breaker for everyone, but I know it has been a contributing factor to at least a couple of my friends abandoning their faith. As Pat Robinson recently said, if you fight science you are going to lose your children. Sadly, this overcompensation for intellectual/scientific insecurity does have a cost in the faith of our children. ( http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2012/11/pat-robertson-if-you-fight-science-you-are-going-to-lose-your-children/)Personally, I don't believe it matters whether we evolved or were created, unless I'm getting a mutant power sometime soon, either way it happened a long time ago and has very little bearing on my day to day life. Neither belief changes the fact that when I look at the beauty, the wonder, complexity and the delightful quirkiness of the universe I am filled with a sense of awe and once again feel amazed that a God who is powerful and awesome enough to make this universe can also care enough to have infinite love for me, who makes up not even one billionth of his creation.
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7) On the flip side, condemning everything simply because it is secular can do just as much damage. Just because there's not always a biblical message doesn't mean it should be banned. The list of things I wasn't allowed to watch/read/do growing up was so all encompassing that I now find it hilarious to tell non fundamentalists all of the universal childhood experiences I wasn't allowed to participate in. Did it scar me? Not really, but all kids grow up and eventually they realize that Aladin's actually a pretty good movie and watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch isn't the first step to hell. If everything is forbidden, especially the harmless things, then the rule book gets thrown away. Don't get me wrong, I think at some point everyone starts living life according to their own rules, determining their own level of morality, but I also think the more rules you have the earlier that happens, and the less inclined a kid is to actually talk to their parents about the things they're struggling with. After all if your parents or your church preach that everything of the world is wrong you're going to hide watching Forrest Gump, you're going to hide starting to date, and when you're thinking about sleeping with your girlfriend/boyfriend it's certainly not something you can broach with parents who don't let you watch PG-13 movies because there's too much making out. Talking to kids, watching movies with them, spending a couple of hours playing video games together, learning how they think and trying to share in forming that is far more important than dictating constantly that everything is either absolutely right or absolutely wrong. Life is pretty full of grey areas, and kids are smart, they figure that out fast. If you're not careful the thing they'll figure out is that talking to you won't help them navigate that divide between ideals and reality. And you know what, kids see God as an extension of their parents - if they can't talk to you it's unlikely they know how to talk to God.
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I kind of think the opposite point is true. Today's churches DO very little. They raise money for missions, donate clothes to orphanages, serve meals to the homeless once or twice a year, run youth ministries, and very little else. That's not to say the pastors don't work hard seeing to the needs of their flock, counseling, etc, but the church itself does very little. Are we so afraid of the world that we prefer watching the suffering of our neighbors to risking dirtying our church clothes? Our communities are struggling with people who are homeless, assaulted, suffer domestic violence, addiction, debt, illness, poverty, and poor education and the church does nothing. One in three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime and we preach modesty rather than don't rape. We picket abortion clinics rather than bringing the desperate into our lives and helping to raise them up out of a cycle of misery. We stay in these insular little groups pretending our greatest problems are in struggling to be as spiritual as we think we ought to be. Churches need to corporately work to better their communities. ( http://barpublish.bits.baseview.com/story/321891231214751.php ) When people see that a church is doing something more worth while than simply warming pews and hypocritically judging their neighbors they want to be involved. Churches who want to keep people will 'do unto the least of these' regularly, corporately, like it's their main calling. Quite frankly it is more spiritually fulfilling to pray while helping out at the local homeless shelter than to warm most pews today. If the church dies it will be because of apathy and uselessness, not because the world lured all the young people away.
5) Along the lines of dealing with people where they are, the church tends to be bad at dealing with messy things like emotions. I've seen youth pastors tell a thirteen year old girl who asked for prayer because she was struggling with suicidal thoughts that it was her own fault because she allowed herself to think that. I knew a bi-polar kid who had the pastor and a group of men in the church show up at the house and try to perform an exorcism (that kid, by the way, NEVER attended church again). A friend who was molested by an old family friend and pastor, and was trying to deal with the aftermath growing up in a house with an emotionally and spiritually abusive father, was told she needed to stop being angry and then the pastors she had turned to for help prayed that she would read less (because being intellectually inclined was apparently a bad thing) and be delivered from the Harry Potter books. People aren't formed to fit the same cookie cutter mold, they will not all be the way you think they ought to be. If you treat anger at being abused as a sin rather than an important step in recovery, if you treat mental illness as demonic rather than chemical or physical, if you treat depression as a child's own fault, or tell a child that God sends them panic attacks because they're doing something wrong and need to confess, and then pray what essentially is a prayer of condemnation over them then there are serious issues with your ministry. These attitudes are terribly damaging to people who really need help and understanding rather than judgment and ignorance. Jesus loved the hurt, the abused, the poor and downtrodden - why doesn't the church?
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3) Thinking for oneself is not encouraged in general, but particularly if you're a woman. I have literally sat in sermons where the pastor said that the trouble with women working outside the home is they start talking to other women and thinking for themselves. At fourteen I challenged my youth pastor when he said that baptism was basically pointless. I was respectful and gave theological background for my disagreement - I treated him like a fellow thinking person and for some reason assumed he would respond in kind. He generally ignored me, and the next week when I wasn't there told the rest of the youth group I was an uppity girl in rebellion and that they should have nothing to do with me. I can't tell you how many of my friends, people who question, not out of any divisive desires, but in good faith who have been mistreated - and generally they're women. Women are condescended to, manipulated, and behind their backs it is passed around that they are in rebellion or some other malicious untruth simply because they are dissatisfied with the pat answer or disagree with a theological point. Beyond this, in quite a few churches I've been to there is a low level but continuous demeaning of women. If you're not a girl, or are among the privileged few who are considered beyond reproach, so I don't expect you to understand, but if you're sensitive to it you begin to pick up on the undertones in sermons, that we shouldn't be listened to, in marriage or anywhere else, that having a body is effectively a sin, that we exist to be property. Even as teens, people listen to a serious sounding guy, they patronize girls, pat them on the head and send them on their way. And once you've been hurt, once someone has been blatant enough that you can't help but see their bias, you start to see it all around, deliberate or not.
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