Why do People Lose Their Faith

A research shows that people who lose their faith tend to have certain personality traits, and underlying beliefs and values (the ingredients). These include having an above-average intelligence, and low tolerance for submitting to authority and for right-wing political ideas; valuing self-determination and being in control; and being open to experience.

All of these kind of combine and set somebody up statistically to be more likely to have a crisis of faith and to eventually leave their faith.

But it is the way in which these ingredients are prepared which contributes significantly to whether a person will leave the faith — that is, the way that individuals are socialized into the faith.

The more stories that you read online of people who once were religious and no longer are, you start to see themes develop in how they were raised, how they were discipled, what they were told faith was, how they were told they needed to live out their religion. And that plays a huge role in their loss of faith.

Once the ingredients have been prepared, they are cooked somewhere. All of us who are socialized into faith are kind of getting processed or baked in an environment that’s increasingly — at least in the West much more secular and skeptical to religious faith than it historically has been.

So when you combine those three things: the ingredients of someone who is maybe a little bit more inclined to be analytical and questioning and skeptical; you prepare them improperly in discipleship and socialization; and then you send them out into a world that is not friendly to perspectives of faith — that is the recipe for disaster.

The literature on deconversion suggests that deconversion involves a very gradual change, which tends to happen during adolescence and early adulthood. In an examination of autobiographical accounts by several writers and intellectuals who experienced deconversion, John Barbour, a Scottish author, argues that there are four dimensions involved in the process: intellectual doubt regarding the system of beliefs; moral criticism towards a way of life; emotional stress and suffering; and the repudiation of the individual’s former community. These four aspects of deconversion are commonly driven by discrepancies between a) what one would expect from the world if religious tenets and beliefs were true and b) what one sees and experiences in life.

Furthermore, Barbour indicates that the abandonment of religious belief is also linked to striving for personal independence and identity in the immediate context of a religious family.

In search for an explanation as to why deconverts seem to be so compelled to find answers to their concerns, authors Altemeyer and Hunsberger present an unexpected idea: this “commitment to truth and integrity” stems from religious training itself. This means that successful religious training would instill students with a drive to seek truth and integrity to such an extent that they would also assess the truthfulness of their own religion, should they detect any issues within their belief system. 

In addition, research shows that deconverts were influenced by experiencing conflicts between religious views and how they felt towards issues related to abortion, sex, gender inequality, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and the questionable behavior of some religious figures.

As a part of an examination that was conducted by the mentioned authors, Brewster, reflecting on her research participants’ troubled relationship with religion, states that none of them left their faith because of being angry at God or as a rebellious act; rather, these deconverts abandoned a belief system that was never personally chosen but handed down from their parents during childhood.