Why do they leave?

Why do so many youngsters who are brought up as Christians and regularly worship with a local church turn away from their faith as they mature?  Why is it that their faith ofter does not survive their teenage years; and if it does why does it so often disappear at university?

We often read testimonies of those who have turned to Christ.  I've recently received a testimony of someone who has turned away from the church.  It is quite long (2,350 word); it makes a number of challenging points.  It is written to a long term friend who has remained in the church.  I have not edited the personal references but I have changed names of people and places.  I know the writer pretty well and can vouch for his honesty.

What do you think of the points he mades?  How does the letter make you feel? How would you respond if you had received it?




Hello Jim.

Here at last is the message you've been after. I gathered my thoughts in a note on my phone a while ago, and always meant to turn into this message, so here I am. Sorry for the wait, sorry also for what you will likely feel at reading it, but here goes.

Please know one thing before I start, regardless of our different beliefs, I will of course, always have huge respect for you, your wife and your family. If I ever bump into any of you again, you/they can expect one almighty hug. Ok so maybe not you’re Dad (lol) but Rachel, Annie, your good self and your mum Betty for sure!

Well everything I want to say can be split into two categories, with the first being far and away the most important. I consider my reasons for leaving Christianity to be

1) What I experienced as a person

2) My opinions and beliefs concerning Christianity in 2013

So part one then, my experience of Christianity. I don’t know where to start do I’ll get to the heart of the matter. By the summer of the year 2000 my relationship with God was a wreck. In fact there was effectively no relationship there. Several factors had led to this. If I roll back 2 years to summer 1998 I was a firm believer, but a rather neurotic one. For some reason I could never settle down comfortably in my relationship with God. I was always paranoid that I loved my worldly possessions too much and could only envision God and all my other loves being in conflict.

This was regardless of the fact that nothing I did was ‘sinful.’ We are not talking about spending £100 on coke and prossies here; we are talking about a trip to Oxford Street and blowing the same amount on models of the Starship Enterprise and some heavy metal albums. So why did I feel this way? Who knows? It may have been a reflection of anxieties within myself, but I certainly could never get away from the fact that God never seemed to give me a straight answer on this, so during Lent one year I lent the whole lot out. I stripped all posters from my walls and gave away all my music, sci-fi stuff, furthermore I didn’t eat any chocolate or sugary stuff, so I could totally put God first.

It didn’t resolve my issues however and eventually I sold all my sci-fi toys, and threw out various heavy metal records in case God found them offensive. Christianity soon became a very negative force in my life. I remember lamenting once that I felt emotionally exhausted and drained. Meetings with mature Christians didn’t help long term. I then had a relationship with a Christian girl, which ended in heartbreak. After that I resolved to give it my all. I prayed and fasted often. I threw out literally any album that could have offended God. Off they went into the bins of Sunnyside primary school, my complete Iron Maiden back catalogue, loads of records by Motley Crue and various bands that by all but the tallest stretch of the imagination were completely harmless. I read books by Charles Spurgeon and Tommy Tenney, which were really hard core; all about the death of the self and things. In efforts to find what God wanted for me, my version of Christianity ended up being a hybrid of strict Puritanism and passionate Pentecostalism.

Nothing was coherent however and Christianity became increasingly dysfunctional. In short, it was doing my head in. As you can imagine, many Christians fed me the same lines. “You are trying to get to God! Just do nothing and let him come to you.”  Do you remember Matt Jackson? He definitely fed me exactly this line. So, I had many still moments in prayer where I did exactly this and tried doing nothing, just allowing God to come into my heart. I still felt anxious and miserable, with no discernable relationship with God.

Truly Jim, even as I lay completely still and open, God with could not or would not make some sort of change in my heart to draw it towards him. In the end it was too much and I threw in the towel. I still believed it was totally true, I just couldn’t do it anymore so I stopped living a Christian life. It was fascinating looking back. Still believing, but refusing to live it in any way at all. I wrote a song about this time, called ‘Burning Sun’ and I must say I still love the lyrics, which explore the depths of this confused paradox.

Over time, I came to ask questions, but for the first time, it seemed that I wouldn’t rule anything out at the start, as I wasn’t working from the ideological base of gospel Christianity. I was allowing myself to think freely.

So now we reach the second part, the shift in my opinions now I am no longer a Christian. Having reached this point of distance from God, I began to ask fundamental questions, without already believing I knew the answers.

As an example, take a challenging thought such as: "How do we know Christianity is the true way and that Jesus was correct when he said; "No one shall get to the Father save through me?"" Formerly I would have answered towing the classic Christian line that reads something like: "We just know because we have faith." However, with no relationship with God to speak of, I answered for the first time with: "There is no reason to believe that Christianity is any more likely to be true than any other faith." So, to cut a long story short, opening my mind to all possibilities has ultimately led to the following convictions. 

1.   As I said previously, I believe Christianity is no more likely to be true than any other faith. The classic fundamentalist view is that only Christians are saved and therefore Christianity has a monopoly on salvation, something I find rude and offensive to those of other faiths/religions. The sincerity of many Muslims, Hindu's, Sikhs etc. is equal to that of Christians, also their sacred texts are every bit as sacred to them.

This monopoly on Salvation is an unpleasant and cruel idea. Are millions upon millions of faithful truth seekers throughout history condemned? As a belief it’s abhorrent, as a possible reality it’s a nightmare whether you’re a Christian or not. I would of course hold the same view of such fundamentalism within Islam, Judaism, Jehovah‘s Witnesses, or any other faith that excludes all outside of that faith. This idea goes totally against natural justice and is morally wrong. Even if this turned out to be the truth, for myself to be sat in hell with Hitler as well as the Jewish children he exterminated is morally wrong.

Scenarios such as this are a truth that any faith that holds a monopoly on salvation has to answer to. I used the same scenario in a question back when I was a Christian; during a Q and A session on a Christian CYFA camp back when I was a firm believer, probably around 1995. It was something along the lines of “How can it be right for Hitler to share hell with the 6million Jews he murdered?” I didn’t get a convincing answer from anyone on the panel at the time. “I just think we should worry about ourselves.” Said someone called Wendy.

2.   If God is the eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Lord of all things, then he should be unchanging should he not? Can a perfect holy being change its mind or change its character? I would say not, and I imagine most Christians would agree. However, there have, throughout history been many changes in the perception of God as there has also been in the Bible.

You don't have to go back far to find times when it was perfectly ok to do something intolerable today: to kill in the name of God. Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the Tudors' burning of Catholics to name but a few. This is both a moral problems and an intellectual one. It doesn’t make rational sense for human perceptions of God to change throughout history, when God is supposed to be perfect and unchanging. It makes far more sense to state that perceptions of him have changed as ideas and societies have.

Some theologians talk about God as being ‘omnibenevolent’. This characteristic of God is a relatively new one. In the Bible God was downright horrid at times. Think about the Great flood? If a human did that in 2013 you'd lump them in with history's most notorious fascist dictators, yet when it was written it must have been perfectly ok for a God to behave in that way.

Leviticus 26 v 27-29 is an outstanding further example. If a God wanted to torture someone in the cruellest most evil, possible way. What could it be? Torture their family? Make them watch their children die perhaps? Well the God of the Bible threatens one step further there, he says he would be quite prepared to starve you so much that you have to eat your children yourself to stay alive. Lets see what the exact words of an online bible are... NIV: 27 “‘If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, 28 then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. The Good news version agrees: 27 “If after all of this you still continue to defy me and refuse to obey me, 28 then in my anger I will turn on you and again make your punishment seven times worse than before. 29 Your hunger will be so great that you will eat your own children.

When I used to read these verses as a Christian, I used to justify these lines in all sorts of ways “That’s just one half of the covenant, the other half is salvation through Jesus Christ,” or I’d say that what God is really trying to say is: "Misfortune will befall you, if you make me powerless to help you and you'll end up having to eats your kids just to stay alive." Oooh I’ve just remembered, I asked the vicar of St. John’s about this verse back in the day, and he replied with something like “Well that’s difficult, it certainly shows God is not to be messed with.” However reading verses like these when free to question Christianity, I would say the word punish (used in both translations) says it all - its a direct threat and an utterly horrific one. So go back to whenever it was written, and clearly it was ok for a God to be like this.

Such a thing couldn't be published nowadays. If anyone directly condoned the vision of God in this passage in 2013, it would not be accepted as a true reflection of God by mainstream Christians. I would contend that these changes tend to undermine the credibility of Christianity and its God somewhat. Besides, even if Christianity is true, why on Earth would I want to come back to a God capable of this (Even if later on he showed his good side and sent his own son to die for us)?

3.   For me, it makes little sense to formulate a worldview based around Christianity. The people of this world cannot be cleanly split into those who have been born again, and those who have not. I watched The God channel for 15 minutes or so a few months ago. Their propaganda maintained that Christianity was one glorious movement; a mighty army which God was about to use to evangelise the world. It just isn’t like this. Christianity is no more unified than any political movement; the world is dominated by economics, poverty, power and so on. It is a world of complete chaos, of ideas of all kinds, of war, of trade, of politics, of money, of love and laughter and of cruelty and exploitation. Our world is nuts, and can hardly be understood with any model at all. That for me includes the Christian worldview.

So in short my position nowadays is as follows:

• I am agnostic. I believe there is probably more to this Earth than matter and energy, but I do not believe

• Regarding hard core fundamentalist Christians, despite my heavy disagreement with their beliefs, I respect them and their beliefs as pretty much everyone is entitled to respect. I can barely imagine speaking to even the most militant of Christians with proper distain, or becoming at all angry when debating this.

• Regarding liberal Christians – they are my kind of people. People who accept that other faiths not only are worthy of respect, but that they may also be communing with the divine in a different way. Christians who support gay marriage; people who emphasise the kindness and love within Christianity above all.

Well I'm sure I could keep on going with various other points but I'll stop there. You will, of course, not agree with any of my points above but that is because faith is not a matter of the mind but of the heart. That’s why I opened with the part that I did, my broken, non-existent relationship with God. Ultimately you and I have completely different beliefs not because of our different opinions on the Bible etc., but because we have had very different experiences of God.

Your relationship with him worked, mine didn’t and on one level at least it really is that simple! Well I am sorry for sending something you will surely find so sad, but for reasons I think neither of us can fully explain, we have ultimately had very different experiences of Christianity. Well, I'm off Jim, take care matey, and give my best to dear Annie!

With total respect, your good friend

Rob

Celebrating 40 years

On 6th May 1972 Helen and I were married in the East Barnet Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses.  Many of those in attendance then would not be happy to meet with us now to celebrate this special anniversary. 

But our friends, family and any who want to celebrate with us are welcome to come to St Martin's Church, Goresbrook Road, Dagenham - This is not more than a couple of hundred yards from where I was born - but 4,500 miles from Helen's birthplace in Barbados. 

The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective: Is Everything Paul Says in his Epistles the Inspir...

The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective: Is Everything Paul Says in his Epistles the Inspir...: It occurs to me (based on comments on my last post) that it's been a while since I've posted anything directly addressing the fundamentalist...

The Devil is in the Detail

I've been discussing the subject of exorcism on the Reachout Trust forum.  My view, that demon possession was simply the 1st century way of speaking of mental illness is obviously not the majority view in that setting.  I think that it deserves closer examination (though agreement is not going to be achieved)


A lot of such theological discussion is at a distressingly low level.  Folk toss scriptures around but seldom look at the relative contexts in which the scriptural text developed.  The need for cultural transposition so clearly argued for by John Stott is almost totally ignored.  To assist theological thinking in this area I suggested three contextualising questions to enable us to situate the discussion in its ancient diverse settings before attempting the necessary cultural transposition:

1. Why are there no examples of individuals being exorcised in the OT?  
2. There seem to be no examples of mental illness being healed in the Gospels - Why is this?
3. How do we account for the almost total lack of exorcisms in the NT after the cross?

So far these questions have not been addressed.

A paper I found interesting looking at the rise of the practice of exorcism in the charismatic scene in the 70's and 80's was written by Stephen Parson in the Church Times following the broadcast of a Channel 4 programme on exorcism.  I don't agree with his final conclusion; it's far too weak but as an insight into the development of demon paranoia in charismatic circles this article is really quite helpful.

The Devil is in the detail


THE EXORCISM on Channel 4 caused a stir in church and other circles before its broadcast on 24 February. Press coverage about the attempt to measure the brain patterns of an individual undergoing an exorcism attracted words like "irresponsible" and "dangerous".

In the event, the actual exorcism on screen was a mild affair, and many who watched it were probably fairly bored (and tired) by the time the programme finished, well after midnight.

The material extracted from the brainwaves of the subject, Colin ( pictured right), was inconclusive, and neither he nor the minister, Trevor Newport (pictured below), practising the deliverance, had any interesting things to say about the procedure. It was hardly riveting television.

The mild furore beforehand and the subsequent anti-climactic silence after the broadcast are perhaps indicative about the way in which the practice and perception of exorcism are changing in the Church and society today.
Why was there such a fuss made about the programme beforehand? Until now, there have been many in the Church whose deliverance ministries have been alarming and dangerous both to the individuals concerned and to the church communities within which they occur.

Apart from high-profile cases like the Barnsley case of 1975, when an "exorcised" man went home and murdered his wife in a particularly horrible fashion, there have been numerous other stories emerging from Charismatic churches where enthusiasm for this ministry has caused damage and abuse.

I investigated some of these cases when I was doing research for my book Ungodly Fear at the end of the 1990s. What I found, apart from individuals whose lives had been traumatised by a diagnosis of demonic possession, were churches that were functioning in what Professor Andrew Walker calls a "paranoid universe". This paranoia had been inculcated by listening to numerous sermons on the pervasiveness of evil in the world, where Satan, it seemed, had free rein and was held back only by the prayer of faithful Bible-believing Christians.

This paranoia was also being fed by the popularity of the novels of Frank Peretti, the evangelism of John Wimber, and the ideas of Peter Wagner about territorial spirits. It is no coincidence that the height of the Satanic, ritual-abuse scare occurred at the same time as the most grotesque preaching about the power of Satan to possess and attack faithful Christians in many churches.

When I was a student in the 1960s, exorcism and a deliverance ministry were always associated with Roman Catholic or select Anglo-Catholic clergy. The Evangelicals and Pentecostals might have spoken about demons in a metaphorical sense, but dealing with them was left to others.

The early days of the Charismatic movement, which positively affected my early ministry at the beginning of the 1970s, likewise had almost no rhetoric about demonic possession nor advocated warfare against evil in a tangible form.
An attempt to discern when the "demonic" dimension entered into parts of the Charismatic and Evangelical world leads one back to the influence of the "Fort Lauderdale five" in the early 1970s. This was a Charismatic group of prominent American leaders, such as Derek Prince and Bob Mumford, whose ideas on shepherding had a decisive and often baneful effect on much of what transpired within the movement in the US and the UK.

The ideas of possession seem to have been taught from the same source and passed on through the same networks, most notably the Dales Bible Weeks of the 1970s and 1980s. The pace increased with the American publication of a book in 1980, Michelle Remembers - a work of "religious pornography" that purported to contain the memories of a girl who had been Satanically and ritually abused. The book was later found to have been a fabrication.

The effect of this and other books published in the early to mid-1980s could have begun what one American writer called a "moral panic" among many Evangelical and Charismatic Christians. Many conferences were teaching the idea that Satan was alive and well, and that the only protection from his depredations was to be found in the safety of a biblically sound church.

Eventually, the paranoia and fear engendered by these beliefs spilled out from the churches into wider Britain, and social workers and police were being lectured by "experts" on Satanic abuse from the US.

A string of television programmes also fed these ideas to a wider public. The stage was set for the terrifying events of Cleveland and Orkney, and the belief that children everywhere were being targeted by hundreds of black-cloaked Satanists.
Eventually, the Government stepped in and commissioned a report from the anthropologist Jean La Fontaine. Her 1994 report and the subsequent book Speak of the Devil: Tales of satanic abuse in contemporary England stopped the paranoia beyond the churches.

Within the Charismatic churches themselves, the demonic beliefs of the 1980s and 1990s have been slower to disperse for several reasons.

First, the notion that everything we loathe and detest in other people and in society can be attributed to Satan performs the psychological function described as "projection". When evil is pushed "outwards" beyond the group, it leaves those left "inside" feeling pure and good. Projection also has the effect of binding the projecting group closer together. Such closeness strengthens the leadership of the group or church.

Second, demonic belief can be attributed to the attractiveness of the body of beliefs we call "dualism". Dualism has always been popular because it has an attractive simplicity about it. Everything is good or bad, and moral dilemmas are much simpler because there is no ambiguity, only moral certainty.

Certainty will always have an attraction about it, and will draw those who want others to do their thinking for them. Sadly, churches often appear to be havens for individuals who neither want to think for themselves nor accept responsibility for a thought-out belief system of their own.

THE programme on Thursday of last week saw much evidence of a Christian worldview that could only negotiate within the certainties of the dualistic outlook. But a change could be observed from what would have been offered ten years ago, in that there was a non-combative approach to evil in the programme. Mr Newport, a deliverance minister from the church of Life Changing Ministries, offered a gentle healing prayer for Colin without any of the high drama of Charismatic exorcisms that have been described to me from the 1980s and 1990s.

When "deliverance" is offered as a gentle prayer ministry, and not as some path to power on behalf of an ambitious Christian leader, there is little danger of damaging its clients. Conversely, it may actually do some good in bringing peace and wholeness to sad and vulnerable individuals.

The Church Times 4 March 2005

The Revd Stephen Parsons, formerly Officer for Spiritual Deliverance for the diocese of Gloucester, is now Rector of St Cuthbert's, Edinburgh. He was a participant in the Channel 4 programme, The Exorcism, in February.

The practice of exorcism continues in many charismatic churches, though in many it no longer exhibits the wilder manifestation of the 80's and 90's. It is concerning that such exorcists are often untrained and unregulated and unaccountable.  There is still a massive potential for emotional and spiritual abuse of children and vulnerable adults.  This is a disaster waiting to happen (again).

Learning from each other

Ok, at last I have decided to start posting some of my thoughts to as large or small an audience as stumbles across this blog.

Passion for truth describes my longing to know the nature of reality as well as I can. I believe that this is found most beautifully in the person of Jesus Christ. However as limited humans our grasp of that truth is always limited, provisional and open to revision. There is always so much more to learn; I can learn from you , and perhaps you can learn a little from me.