Leaving Church, pt. 2
September 10, 2008
©2008 Ben Heys, sifu.deviantart.com
Back in May, I did a post quoting Bishop Robert Vasa’s comment that rationalism is the primary reason for why people leave the Church. Vasa ends his observations with, “Modern man finds faith unreasonable and therefore unbelievable. In America there is a very strong notion that what we believe must make perfect sense to us, and that we are somehow automatically absolved from believing that which does not seem to be rational.” I think this is spot on. While postmodernism has certainly captured certain segments of academia, even the most Foucauldian of my professors would cite standard (modernist) rationalist and historical-critical arguments against the Christian faith. Doug Chaplin disagreed with me (and Bishop Vasa), citing the fact that many people simply slip away from the Church due to social circumstances and not any real rejection of Christian tenets. As I said in response to Doug, while this is true for many, most of those I’ve encountered who leave the Church “do put forward arguments from reason, whether moral, existential, logical, historical, or a mixture….[They] cite rational obstacles. They will cite the immoral God of the Old Testament, the contradictions in the gospel witness to the Resurrection, or, if they do not know the historical arguments, they will cite the problem of evil or the simple fact that all we see in the universe is the blind mechanical forces of nature.”
Why am I repeating all this? Over at Parchment and Pen, C. Michael Patton has been posting emails that he has received by young adults who have rejected their Christian beliefs. Obviously, the type of person who would email a lay catechetical apostolate is the type of person who is intellectually-engaged to some degree in the Christian claims. Regardless, I am convinced that these reasons are standard fare for ex-Christians. Michael’s latest email is from a guy who cites, among other things, the following:
Two more aspects encouraged me to truly shed my faith.
First. I read the bible. Contrary to fundamentalist beliefs, the bible promotes many hideous acts: genocide, sacrificing children, raping women, slavery, incest, etc. Indeed these ideas are mixed with many wonderful morals. Yet, they reveal the bible as just another book authored by humans.
Second: Science. The same empirical method that allows modern technology (laptops, medicine, spaceships, etc) shows the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old. The evidence also shows all life evolved from a common ancestor. This is not philosophy, culture, or modern opinion. These are scientific facts supported by libraries, museums, and universities overflowing with evidence!
So, there you go. The immoral God of the OT and the blind mechanical forces of nature. No surprise. And what baffles me is that Church leaders, especially evangelical pastors, ignore this. They don’t take it seriously. They think you can entertain instead of educate, or “educate” in as entertaining a medium as possible. What even more baffles me is that pastors will say that they do not know why so many, especially young adults, are leaving the Church. So, here’ s the point of me writing this post: We know. We know why people leave the faith. It’s not a big secret. It’s not some elusive, deep personal or social force. Ex-Christians all cite the same damn things when they explain why they are not a Christian. So, listen to them. Don’t get me wrong: Personal and social forces are in play; especially sin (pride) is always in play. But, our pride does not need unnecessary alibis, and (to use an obvious example) showing Ken Ham videos to your youth creates an unnecessary alibi when they grow-up and realize that the scientific community is not conspiring against Creationist “evidence.”
Amen!
Several months ago I talked with a co-worker who is a former Catholic, and he said that one of the things that he cannot bring himself to believe was that bread and wine literally become the Body and Blood of Jesus. In contrast to this, the social aspect was a plus for the Church, in his eyes.
On another occasion I spoke with another co-worker who is a non-practicing Jew, and he told me that one of the problems he had with Judaism and Christianity was why God would allow evil.
On yet another occasion, I was speaking with another co-worker and his friend, and they both insisted that science disproved Christianity, specifically that God was the author of life. Clearly, they said, it was the chromosomes!
In my experience I also see that things like the Gospel of Judas, The Da Vinci Code, and movies like Stigmata make people begin to actually wonder about these issues, i.e., where did we get the Bible, why were some books excluded, etc.?
Thanks for the anecdotes. More evidence. I should have noted in the post that these sort of intellectual hurdles are fairly new to the Church. Rationalism and historicism have long been objections to our faith, but their adherents were almost entirely found in the “intelligentsia,” the “elites,” and only rarely in the middle and lower classes. But, now, thanks to both the spread of higher education to all classes and the spread of information through media outlets, especially the internet, we have a whole society subject to intellectual doubts. The Church cannot continue under the delusion that we’re in the 18th century or even the 1950’s. Our catechesis need not be reduced to apologetics (heaven forbid!), but it must address these issues.
The problems you cite are one of the reasons why I am led to think the church fathers are as relevant today as ever. They lived in a world in which there were major challenges to Christianity that the church could not easily ignore or sweep under the rug. e.g. as gets pointed out often in debates on creation, St. Augustine sounds rather modern in the The Literal Meaning of Genesis I.19.39.
Yep. But Augustine didn’t understand that we must go with the “plain meaning of the text” and ignore mythological/literary elements.
About that quote, I think it’s interesting (and kind of ironic) how that person makes a point of saying that the fundamentalists are factually wrong, but evidently still accepts fundamentalist biblicism and creationism, not as their own personal beliefs obviously, but as the only alternative to unbelief – no wonder they don’t want to be Christians. I see this quite a lot and it makes me sad. Not that people don’t defect from more liberal theologies as well, but it seems like the either/or way of fundamentalism sets people up for a fall, literally.