Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

I left in my teens. Religion seemed, at that time and still does, appears to reinforce systems of power and conformity rather than do good.<p>Non-believers often ask themselves, &quot;what god would have the ability to eliminate suffering and choose not to?&quot; We should also ask, &quot;What religious institution and followers, having amassed the riches of the world, would choose not to eliminate suffering when they could?&quot;<p>The weight of these contradictions eventually breaks belief. There&#x27;s one way to win back believers and it&#x27;s to eliminate in-group&#x2F;out-group dynamics and replace it with material acts of benevolence - akin to large scale public works projects to eliminate suffering.

I think the trend of &quot;Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR)&quot; is the most interesting.<p>I suspect a large number of people leaving religions aren&#x27;t militant atheists convinced by the logic of Dawkins&#x2F;Hitchens&#x2F;Harris et al. Instead they are people who believe in some kind of higher power or spiritual unity in a way that is totally compatible with deism (or even light theism).<p>However, the traditional religions have left a lot of progressive minded individuals behind. Rigid dogmas and suspicious meta-physical commitments seem to turn people off.<p>This is an interesting space to explore. Many of these people would happily affiliate if there was some organization that met their needs.

One important detail in the article, but not the headline, is:<p>&gt; In short, these age patterns might be signs of secularization... However, it’s also possible that some of the age differences in religious affiliation revealed in a single survey could result from people becoming more religious as they grow older.<p>Here&#x27;s an article from the same research firm last month that examines a different measurement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;religion&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;religion&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;decline-of-c...</a>

Good, I&#x27;m strongly against supernatural beliefs and any trend towards greater secular thought is a welcome one.

For context, I&#x27;ve been a leader in various (American) Evangelical churches over the last decade.<p>The fundamental thing that I think many people need to understand is that many of these &quot;changes&quot; are merely an outward reflection of an inward problem. Meaning a large majority of these individuals were often pursuing Christianity due to some external factor. Take, for example, cultural Christianity. I&#x27;ve sat in rooms with people who have literally been in crisis because they don&#x27;t understand why people don&#x27;t stay for the potlucks anymore. The entire foundation of their faith was on the culture surrounding Christianity in America. With that now (as the article points out) fading quite rapidly, they are joining their peers in leaving (or, worse in my opinion, becoming Christian Nationalists).<p>Many of us have seen this coming for a long time. Heck, if you go back and read Francis Schaeffer&#x27;s writings, especially his later ones, it&#x27;s almost uncomfortable how accurate his predictions were.

I went to a Catholic grade school in the 1980s and early &#x27;90s, with a graduating class of about 50.<p>Some 30 years later, we had a class reunion. And I found out that there was only one other &quot;cradle Catholic&quot; besides me who had never stopped actively practicing Catholicism. There were about six or seven who had stopped at one point and then returned, often when they had kids.<p>But that still means about 80% of our class are no longer actively Catholic.<p>To what do I attribute this decline?<p>I actually think it started two generations before mine. Back then, parents sent their kids to Catholic school to reinforce the faith they were exposed to at home. In the following generation, many parents sent their kids to Catholic school to teach the faith because they weren&#x27;t exposed to it at home. But obviously, if that faith isn&#x27;t being practiced at home, it&#x27;s going to be unlikely to stick.<p>The horrible sex abuse scandals absolutely hastened this decline, but the ball was already rolling decades beforehand.

Note the article refuses to say it explicitly, you have to dig deeper into the footnotes, but the group that is gaining the most “switchers” (after athiesm&#x2F;agnosticism) is Islam.<p>&gt; The U.S. and Kenya have the highest levels of “accession,” or entrance, into Islam, with 20% of U.S. Muslims and 11% of Kenyan Muslims saying they were raised in another religion or with no religion. That said, overall, Muslims are a minority in both places: About 1% of U.S. adults and 11% of Kenyans currently identify as Muslim.

I was a pretty intense believer in Christianity at an early age and also stopped believing pretty early. Looking at religion from middle age now, it strikes me that Christianity is not a good religion to not believe in. As soon as I stopped believing in the literal existence of God, I immediately felt uncomfortable with Christianity and had to distance myself from it, even though I was culturally and morally grounded in it. I had to get away, and I never saw any path to reengaging with it in a beneficial way.<p>I don&#x27;t think every religion is like that. I think there are approaches to Judaism and Buddhism that you can participate in that don&#x27;t demand true faith in the &quot;spooky side,&quot; as one of my friends puts it. And I don&#x27;t just mean being ethnically or culturally linked with a religion, I mean actively engaging with it in a regular and organized way. Christianity doesn&#x27;t offer that, and I don&#x27;t know if it could or ever will. (I tried the Unitarians.) If it did, I&#x27;d probably enjoy being &quot;Christian&quot; again, at least with quote marks. As it is, if I was forced to affiliate myself with an organized religion and participate in weekly ritual services, I&#x27;d probably choose my local Zen center or see if my Jewish friends thought it would make sense for me to join them. Going to a Christian church without believing in capital-G God would be unpleasant and unrewarding.

The big thing for us is we simply do not trust priests with our children. It seems ridiculous to go to a church where kids have been raped.

I&#x27;m switching back to religion. I used to not believe but after the pandemic and researching the immune system, I don&#x27;t believe that a complex system like simply the immune system can be not only created by chance but can be spread across an entire population. There are many components of the immune system and even the endocrine system that requires things to be designed together, not randomly across millions of years and I&#x27;ve decided that we were designed at some point because it&#x27;s too perfectly intertwined across different body parts.

Religion means very little to most people --- even those who say they believe. Their actions are the proof.

One thing I do appreciate about my Christian upbringing is having a church community, particularly as a parent. Has anyone found a good substitute?

Unfortunately, people will believe equally stupid and magical things that are just as bad as religions, so this isn’t the win you think it is if you’re hoping for a more rational, stable world.<p>Religions help keep destructive people in check. There are people who readily admit that the ONLY reason they haven’t gone on a shooting spree ending with blowing their brains out is their religious faith.

I was born atheist as I think we all are. But I rejected the kind of indoctrination that follows pretty early on. More or less when I found out Santa Clause was a social construct that everyone agreed to lie about I started to question everything really. But also asking myself, &quot;If this is bullshit, why would people lie about it?&quot; I was satisfied in my atheism.<p>Weirdly though, my mom took my sister and I to a Quaker meeting when we were 10, 11 years old and I thought it was kind of cool. Still didn&#x27;t believe in a god or whatever but I liked the people and the kind of lack of hierarchy of Quakerism (no priest, just people sitting in silence facing one another, etc.).<p>I was surprised to find myself seeking out a Quaker meeting again recently — here now 50 or so years since. Perhaps memories of that time came back when reflecting on the past after my mother&#x27;s death a couple years ago. Perhaps the times we are living in caused me to look for &quot;community&quot;.<p>And I have enjoyed finding the small group of Friends I could in Omaha. When I told one of the regulars that I was atheist, he was cool with it. &quot;Atheism is a necessary step on the way to enlightenment,&quot; he told me.<p>Still puzzling over that.

For many people in post-Soviet countries, it was the other way around: raised as atheists, many of them found religion when it became allowed.<p>I wonder if the same thing will happen with China.

Is this any different from leaving childhood beliefs in Santa Claus?

I was a hardcore Dawkins fan at 16. Insufferable edgelord sort, and thought I’d stay that way. Then again I grew up Mormon and their theological rigor is… extremely tenuous. My grandmother was Catholic but I wasn’t really exposed to it as a kid.<p>I’m 38 now and in the process of becoming Catholic. I’ve started going to mass every day. I’m not really sure why but I feel really great.<p>Our goal is to inoculate our children from atheism. We knew a lot of people who killed themselves over the years who were part of the “atheist church” we went to in our 20s. I’ve stopped caring about being right, and don’t really care to argue about religion with people. Instead care about living a life I find meaningful. I want the same for my children. After exploring the other options, I think a religious framework is what makes that possible.

&quot;Has man perhaps become less desirous of a transcendent solution to the riddle of his existence, now that this existence appears more arbitrary, beggarly, and dispensable in the visible order of things? Has the self-belittlement of man, his will to self-belittlement, not progressed irresistibly since Copernicus?&quot;