Why do people leave their religions? It’s easy to come up with a number of hypotheses:
- like to sleep in on Sundays
- hard to believe that a “benevolent” god would let FOX cancel “Firefly”
- tastiness of bacon
- wanted to try this “dancing” thing everyone is talking about
- “Thou shalt not kill” cramping social life
- tired of being reincarnated as a bald man
- church services “too preachy”
- to pursue career as abortionist
- difficult to find flattering burqa
- falseness
And yet the Pew Forum seems to have included almost none of these as options in their Faith in Flux survey, instead providing less useful choices like “Spiritual needs not being met” and “Clergy sexual abuse scandal” and “Moved to a new community” and “Someone they were close to passed away.”
Although none of these choices make much sense, the last probably makes the least sense. Who leaves a religion because someone close to them dies?
I mean, maybe if you’re a Snake Handler, and your husband actually dies as part of the religious services, or if you’re a Scientologist, and your daughter dies as part of an Introspection Rundown, or if you’re a Kinshasan Revivalist, and your brother drowns during his baptism. Then I can sort of understand.
But very few religions promise that they’ll stop you from dying. That would be absurd! The most they typically offer is that you’ll get to spend an eternity after you die in the loving embrace of the invisible sky-man, while your less-pious friends and neighbors are being dunked in a lake of fire and eternally tormented by Asmodeus, Overlord of the Dukes of Hell, whose symbols include a clawed fist gripping a skull and a ruby-tipped rod, and who survived the Reckoning of Hell to become undisputed leader of the Nine Hells. I’m sorry, but if you’d give all that up just because of some “sex abuse scandal,” then you’ve got bigger problems than “spirituality.”
As a child raised in a religious household, my reason for leaving was simply because once I moved out, I was no longer a part of their religion.
And they weren’t just your normal non-denominational Christians either. No church was good enough for them, so we found ourselves shuttled to increasingly bizarre groupings of people meeting in homes and rented office space.
It soon became apparent I had nothing in common with anyone at any of these places and that their view on God and His will meant that I would never be able to do anything I enjoyed (listen to music, read anything but religious books, have a subscription to Sports Illustrated, get laid) but would instead be able to do several things I don’t enjoy (give my life to the Lord, ramp up my hypocrisy, develop early morning cheerfulness, drop all my cynicism).
That, and football season. Sunday’s for football.
I think if people drop their religion because somebody died, it’s not just that someone close to them died, but that religion’s answer to that was unsatisfying.
If someone important to you dies, religion often answers your sadness with things like “Well, God needed him,” or “It was part of God’s plan.” And though this might make the death of your friend seem less pointless, it still doesn’t change the fact that you’ve lost your friend forever. It hurts, and a clergy-person being a smartass about it can really make a person feel that if “God” is like that, well then “fuck God.” This is a stone’s throw away from investigating alternatives, and an abrupt change in religious position is likely, if not inevitable.
My own belief of atheism isn’t the only possible outcome, though. I can easily see a person in this situation discarding their current religion in favor of picking up a very different one. A catholic becoming a buddhist. A hindu turning new age. If a person has a need for religion, they’re not going to permanently forgo it, no matter how angry or disappointed they are. But changing flavors, definitely.
And here I thought it was more like “My mom died, so no one was around to force me to go to church.”
[...] 15, 2009 by Joel As we’ve discussed before, many religions are struggling to keep their flocks. However, all is not gloom and [...]