Reading Time: 8 minutes One of the few remaining marketing claims Christians can (sometimes) use honestly involves the social and community-building functions of church affiliation. If someone was really intensely involved in their church, leaving it can feel like they’ve severed their entire sense of belonging and community! But even that claim is constantly being questioned and rejected. Recently, […]
Leaving Religion
Exploring the sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating process of leaving religion.
Posted inLeaving Religion
The Ones Who Walk Away from Ocabos: What #whySBC really means
Reading Time: 7 minutes With a clamor of church bells to set the blood pumping, the Annual Festival had come to Ocabos, that glorious city of gleaming gold and pristine white spires. The festival began with a clamor of car radios and headphones, the jovial fuss of parking, and rental vehicles and taxicabs ferrying their smiling passengers past restaurants […]
Posted inReligion
Why do believers cling to religion even after escaping it?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Whatever we’re doing now to ensure church-state separation clearly isn’t working as the Founding Fathers intended. The problem is that even former true believers still have religion on the brain—literally—as do continuing true believers. I’ll explain later. The upshot is that until we change the U.S. Constitution to explicitly, categorically separate all religious intrusion and […]
Posted inReligion
Interfaith work needs to include the nonreligious
Reading Time: 4 minutes New York mayor Eric Adams recently objected to the idea of the separation of church and state at an interfaith breakfast event at the New York Public Library. Library President and CEO Anthony Marx offered a welcome that celebrated libraries as places of inclusion, diversity, and freedom of thought. In his speech, the mayor acknowledged […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
A journey through chronic illness to freethought
Reading Time: 17 minutes Take yourself back to the mid-nineties, if you’re able to. We’re in a British Christian evangelical youth meeting, in a long white canvas tent on an agricultural showground a few miles North of the historic Cathedral city of Lincoln in the East of England. It smells of trampled grass and teen sweat. A sweet soaring […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
Why I am no longer a Jew
Reading Time: 5 minutes For many years, I was an integral member of a Reconstructionist synagogue in Pittsburgh—Dor Hadash, now known to all the world because of a gunman’s attack in 2018. My three children celebrated Bar and Bat Mitzvahs there. I was very happy at Dor Hadash. I still send a contribution every year. But a few years into […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
What the stickiness of nonbelief says about the ‘religious instinct’
Reading Time: 4 minutes “For people who say they were raised Christian,” says Dr. Linda Woodhead, “there is a 45% chance they will end up identifying as nones. But those raised with no religion have a 95% probability of staying that way. So ‘no religion’ is currently ‘sticky’ in a way Christianity is not.”
Posted inLeaving Religion
An evangelical tries to explain Christianity’s decline, fails completely
Reading Time: 14 minutes Every so often, I get a stunning reminder about exactly why evangelicals’ decline won’t end any time soon. This was one of those times. A recent opinion post by a pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Dave Miller, lays out what he thinks is “wrong with [them].” He says he’s only trying to get […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
Finding a way out: Recovering from religious trauma syndrome
Reading Time: 5 minutes Have you ever wondered how someone becomes radicalized—how an otherwise normal, intelligent person could become such a religious fanatic that they are willing to die for their faith? I don’t wonder, because I was that person. My life as a head-covering, homeschooling, antifeminist, Bible-believing, fundamentalist Christian was rigid but simple. I only had to do […]
Posted inCulture
Are my children missing out on ‘True Christmas’?
Reading Time: 3 minutes I am a fully-fledged secular atheist. I also love Christmas. It is probably a learned thing involving decades of cultural normalization following a childhood ensconced in an at least nominally Christian Christmas tradition. What I mean by this is that I, like many people of my era, spent Christmases at school singing carols and hymns, […]