Are You in Touch with Many De-Converts?

Here's a response from Jeff from Missouri to the post a few days back about Joan Ball's blog and her conversation with the gang at de-conversion.com.

I checked out Joan's blog and WHOA! what a conversation! I have some friends in Houston that I visited (the first time in 10 years) with a couple of weeks ago. We originally met in a ministry and they were our "leaders" at the time. They have really begun to question their faith and what they believe is right. I found them slipping in comments that originated from the book "The Secret". I know they still "believe", but, they are struggling with even the idea of Jesus being the Son of God. This whole conversation has raised real questions that need real answers.

I do get in a fair amount of conversations with folks who have left faith behind--although the folks who talk with me are often open to trying to find a way back.  I often find myself in conversations about familiar topics on this blog of religion (bad) versus God (good) or other such things, and that often does help move the conversation forward.  How about you?  Does this sound familiar?  And, if so, how have your conversations gone?

Comments

[Matt]

Yes, actually, I've had a very significant de-conversion encounter. Significant because the person in question was the one who was largely responsible for me coming to faith initially. While he hasn't fully left the faith behind, the version of it he practices now hardly resembles what I would call real faith in Jesus.

It's hard for me to say what happened, but I do suspect that some really negative church experiences were contributing factors. The guy is quite bright and a leader type, too, so it was all very baffling to me.

Maybe it is a Stage 2/Stage 3 thing, since he was someone who grew up in a very Christianized context. But I also see some character issues (most notably, pride and an incessant need to be an "innovator") that could have played a part.

And no, the conversations (such as they were via email across the Atlantic) haven't gone particularly well--due to the emotionally loaded nature of it, I didn't even want to go too deep into it. Perhaps its worth revisiting some day.

[brian]

I know *tons* of de-converts, and I see myself as sort of a de- and then re-convert, though I never at any point stopped attending church for a very long period of time, so maybe that doesn't count. Anyway, I've had a lot of experiences with this, but I'll limit myself to the following comment:

I'm not sure that the religion = bad, God = good dichotomy is helpful for the de-converts I know, because they have had their respective experiences and have noticed the many ways in which it is impossible to talk about God without talking about 'God's people' and the way they're organized, or doctrines, or theology, or scripture, or a 'church' of some kind, i.e., some form of 'religion'. By all 'normal' definitions, all of the people of the Hebrew Bible and early Christian era practiced something that is recognizably a 'religion' (by both modern and ancient standards). To use an awful analogy, the attempt to divide these two concepts sometimes strikes me as something like Amway changing its name to Quixtar, but still offering the same products and whatnot--i.e., an attempt to get away from a tainted brand-name, but without a different method or product or message.

Anyway, the word 'religion' is notoriously difficult to define in a rigorous and consistent manner, and the term is sometimes bandied about by evangelicals to mean whatever we want it to mean in order to contrast our good thing with some bad thing called 'religion'. See, e.g., some comments by one prominent (albeit often controversial) theorist here: http://www.as.ua.edu/rel/pdf/rel237definitionofreligion.pdf

In the post-Kant world, it's increasingly difficult to make object/knower kinds of distinctions (among academic types, at least), and the God/religion dichotomy strikes me as a variety of this. So I feel a bit stuck in using that model.

But anyway, I'm not trying to be difficult, just relaying my experience; the de-converts I know aren't going for the God = good, religion = bad line. So I'll keep listening, praying, thinking?

[Brian O]

Hi All--I've been following this blog for a week now, and it seems like a good time to jump in.

I very much relate to the deconversion experience of Jeff's friends in Houston. My senior year of college (13 years ago), I "came out" to my campus Christian group as no longer being sure what I thought about Jesus. It felt very awkward to me, since I had played an important role for many people in the room in their conversions *to* faith. Everyone was gracious and evidently not so shaken by my confession, but it was a significant moment for me.

I kept trying to latch back on to faith over the next few years, but my attempts worked less and less well. Very similar to Matt's speculation above, Peck's stages of faith gives a nice framework for my experience. College had dumped me into Stage 3, but the only way I knew how to do faith was in Stage 2. Since I kept finding my life didn't work so well without Jesus, I desperately kept trying to get back to Stage 2. Maybe some people can pull of that backward manuever, but for me it never worked. If I hadn't soon thereafter found a community which was both unitimidated by my Stage 3 status and which had enough Stage 4 elements to call me forward, I think my life would be pointed in a completely different direction right now. I had a deconversion brewing, but it became a deconversion from Stage 2 rather than a conversion from Jesus.

[desertson]

Even having questions while you are distressed by a matter seems to be the unforgettable sin, let alone being so-called "weak" or "backslidden."