What Makes People Deconvert?

In an interesting post, Kieran Bennett describes reviewing 114 stories of people who abandoned their faith (almost all of them former Christians). He could identify reasons in 94 of them. I am moderately surprised not at the reasons, but instead at the frequency of them. The leaders were:

Unsatisfactory answers to simple questions	14
Science objectively disproved claims of doctrine	14
Logical problems with dogma	12
Critical reading of Bible raised doubts about faith or morality	10
Hypocrisy or misdeeds of religious figures	8
Could not discern between competing claims for "truth" in various religions	8
God failed to answer prayers	8

What is interesting to me about this is that the plurality of reasons for leaving one's religion derive from religion's inability to explain the world, particularly in light of the discoveries and findings of modern science. This makes sense -- if the world obviously is a certain way, and religion insists that it is other than what can be seen and proven to be true, religion must therefore be false.

This also goes a long way to explain why the theory of evolution is seen as such a threat by religion -- it specifically refutes not only the text of the Bible but also its generalized message that God is the Creator of Man. Unless "God" = "roughly one billion years of accumulated, incremental mutations," the theory of evolution and the Book of Genesis cannot both be true, in even a metaphorical sense.

I'm also amazed at the relatively low number of people who cite unanswered prayers as their reason for doubt. Of course, it has never occurred to me, even once in my entire life, that praying for something would make that thing more likely to happen.

I know there are stories of people who testify that prayer has healed people with apparently incurable illnesses. I've never seen it happen; people with incurable illnesses that I have known, or known of, have all died. The strongest example from my own experience was a man of very great faith that I knew in my early adulthood, only a few years older than me. He and I had played cards together, discussed religion and politics together, and we liked one another's company just fine during the four or five times a year that we would see each other at social events. I considered him a friend, maybe not a particularly close friend, but someone I would have gone out of my way to help had I known it was needed. He'd just gotten married a year or two before a period of time when he felt a little bit under the weather for a few days. His wife ultimately persuaded him to go to the doctor. Like me, he probably needed to be prodded by his wife seven or eight times before he actually did it.

As it turns out, it wouldn't have made any difference at all. The doctor ran some blood tests and told him he had stage five leukemia, and that he had only a few days, a few weeks at the most, to live. This man (and his wife) were active and devout members of an evangelical Christian congregation, and his family and friends and co-congregants all gathered to pray for him as intensely as they could. He died seven days after he was diagnosed with cancer. Their prayers and faith had done him no good at all.

He had a very moving funeral; the huge megachurch he attended was packed and his pastor gave a powerful eulogy, during which the pastor called people in the audience to come down to the front of the church and accept Jesus into their hearts. No one took him up on the offer, and I can understand why -- you either had already done it, which was why you were going to that church in the first place -- or you weren't going to do it because the prayers and faith hadn't done this man (or his widow or the rest of his family) any good at all; he had been taken at far too young an age, and for no good reason at all.

Such an event seemed to me to be a cause for someone to lose faith, not to gain it. The randomness of the event demonstrated to me that if there was a God, either my friend wasn't doing the right thing to worship Him correctly, or the worship and faith didn't matter. And if the worship and faith didn't matter, then why have faith, why do worship at all? What would be the point of worshipping a God who would take a good man like that who was smart and worked hard to provide for his family and to contribute to his community; a faithful man like that who eagerly participated in his church and tirelessly witnessed his faith to anyone who would listen, even a skeptic like me; a friend to hundreds, a son and brother and uncle to a wonderful family, a husband to a loving wife who wanted to have his children? Surely those people needed him with them on the Earth more than God needed him in Heaven.

His death benefitted no one. If God took him, God was cruel, and I certainly didn't want to worship a God like that. I didn't even believe in God but I was still mad at Him for taking my friend. Deep down, I still am a little bit angry that he's gone, even though it's been many years since he died.

This, it seems to me, is an extreme case of an unanswered prayer. There have to be millions of unanswered prayers. Not just selfish prayers like "Jesus, I want to win the Lotto" or "God in Heaven, make my evil stepfather nice to me." Nor do I mean "test prayers" like "I defy thee, God! Strike me down with lightning this very second!"

No, I mean noble, touching, hearfelt, and selfless prayers like "Dear Lord, my son lost his arm fighting in Iraq. Please give him his arm back so he can have a normal life." God isn't going to grow that kid a new arm, no matter how much you pray. Even the most faithful of people know that this soldier is never going to have an arm again -- even if those people believe that God, and faith in God, can do literally anything.

Every person of faith, it seems to me, must have hundreds of examples of times they prayed for something and didn't get it. They might come up with elaborate reasons why they didn't get what they were praying for and now, looking back on it, they realize they were better-off the way things turned out. But they can't know that's actually true, even if they are happy now despite not getting their desires fulfilled in the past. That's really just a rationalization.

Bennett concludes his article by musing that for the most part, atheists can do nothing to "deconvert" the faithful. A person must arrive at the conclusion that his or her religion is not true on their own, or not; there is little that an atheist can say to change their mind. The "deconversion" must originate within the self; it cannot come from an external source. I basically agree with that.

But I am really surprised that more "deconverted" folks don't cite unanswered prayers as the reason for their loss of faith.